1.11 when Japan is your "exotic but first-world" destination
when will the "exotic" thing finally go away?
It has taken me months to write this essay. I’ve rewritten it perhaps a dozen times. I tabled it and abandoned it many more times, only to come back and try again. I know that the only way to the other side is to go through the hard part, so I finally decided to put it out into the world as is, even if it’s sounding like a frustrated rant. Here goes.
I’m so tired of the word “exotic” as used to describe Japan, China, and anywhere in the world where people have different customs, different ways of interacting, different value systems.
Someone sent me the following quote:
When people ask what I love about Japan, my quick and simple answer is, Japan is the most foreign, most exotic place you can go with first-world telecommunications, first-world health care, and first-world hygiene. (emphasis mine)
This was on a website under the profile picture of a professor of Japanese history, promoting a course he is teaching on Japanese culture. I’m not into naming and shaming so I won’t mention his name, his institution, or which website it was on. Let’s just say that this professor has a gold-plated background (institutions attended, publications, work experience) and is someone we would automatically trust as an expert on Japan.
It’s entirely possible that he had nothing to do with that quote. Maybe an assistant wrote it. Maybe the webmaster wrote it. I can even accept it as an offhand recommendation aimed at a casual traveler.
But his name is on it, so I'm forced to assume that he okayed it. I’m dismayed by both the “exotic” and the “first-world” terminology coming from a respected professor of Japan studies. This person studied at top universities, knocked himself out to learn a difficult language, and is in the position of passing the torch on to future generations of scholars. Exotic but first-world? Is that really the reason to learn about Japan? Because it’s weird, but not too weird?
It reminds me that I’ve been called weird in the past. I also know that I can blend into my surroundings reasonably well. So I’m “exotic but first-world” myself. It’s not a nice feeling.
As a kid I venerated the old guard of Japan studies: Reischauer, Seidensticker, Keene, etc. My dad had their books, and I assumed that anything in those books was absolutely inviolable. Japan was, by and large, “explained” to me by non-Japanese. Those original scholars did not look like my mom, and they definitely did not look like me. But I was raised to view that cadre of Japan scholars with respect, because they knew things and wrote things. Even when their views diverged from my lived experience, these men (mostly) read and wrote about subjects that I couldn’t, and to some extent, that even my mother, a native Japanese, couldn’t.
When I was much older, it occurred to me that their thoughts about Japan were paternalistic and sometimes orientalist, but that didn’t seem like such a crime. Again, these were people who had done the hard work. They could read the historical documents. They’d lived in Japan. They were the only ones giving us material from which the rest of us could learn. They had chosen to study Japan when it was much less easy to go there, live there, work there.
But the continued notion of Japan as “exotic” grated on me. It felt like a fetish, as if “Japan explained” is an alternate universe in a fantasy created for non-Japanese. Since I grew up in a semi-Japanese bubble, I felt that I was part of the fantasy being explained, and for lack of a better word, it’s “icky” to be someone’s fantasy. However, I assumed that over time this perspective would vanish, as the old guard passed the torch. Not only that, I thought that there would be more people like me, people in the middle, people who experience Japanese culture in multiple different ways, able to talk about it from more than one viewpoint, and especially, able to talk about it from inside and outside.
Alas, it seems that things haven’t changed. According to the professor above (who was probably in graduate school just slightly ahead of me in the 90s), Japan is still “exotic,” just less inconvenient. We’ve added “first-world” to the list of Japanese attractions. Shouldn’t that mean that there’s even less reason to think of Japan as “exotic?” Why won’t this word die?
If you are interested in studying Japan, I hope you do it because it’s fascinating, not because it’s “exotic.” It’s a cool culture, just like American/British/Canadian/etc. culture is vast and fascinating, full of rabbit holes that will take you in every possible direction. And you’ll encounter lots of absolutely boring, normal people and practices—red tape at the post office, interfering/judgmental neighbors, interminable orange traffic cones on the road where no road work is happening—that will remind you of home, wherever that is. There’s a reason for everything, and people have much more in common than may be immediately apparent.
Thanks for reading! This newsletter is my effort to step up and out. It’s hard work, to show up on the page like this. Every time a write a sentence, I automatically think of eight different rebuttals. And because this isn’t academia, I can’t just footnote everything. I find it much easier to write novels (my “real” job), except that I’ve discovered that they, too, “out” me in surprising ways. If my novels expose me anyway, I need to reckon with that. And that’s why I’m here. Thanks again for your patience.
That trope about Japan has been around a long time, hasn't it? I think that in general in the world, modernization tends to be accompanied with a loss of traditional values, so I guess that is what is being said. That countries can modernize or develop technologically but retain their way of life and not become Americanized. One of the many reasons I love Hawaii so much is that there is not this white-culture default. Did you read Chen's the School for Good Mothers? I thought it was great the way there was no default for characters in terms of race. If the character was white, she called them white, just like she did for her Asian American characters. I always liked books that don't specify so readers can imagine however they want, but Chen's was refreshing too. In my last workshop, one of my characters is named Larry and everyone assumed he is white, but why? I was surprised and so just added a last name but I kind of hated to do that.