Japan is like if you combined 1950s white America with one of Ted's nightmares :a-guy:
it feels reductive to say that appreciating a country's history and culture is weird because they have a shitty government tbh. i like the architecture, the woodcuts and traditional paintings, a lot of the movies, etc, doesn't mean i endore the LDP or the whole ethnostate thing
nah not just a shitty government. a pretty fucked up culture that people in most countries would see as fascistic if they were forced to live under it and didn't grow up with it.
its obviously true that there are a ton of shitty things about japan. that doesnt mean that high and low is a bad movie, or that hokusai was a bad artist, or whatever. if you find a culture out there that doesnt have shitty elements please let me know because as far as im aware they don't exist and i am going to continue to enjoy art produced by those cultures because i don't want my life to be dour and joyless.
enjoy it by all means! i enjoyed avatar, doesn't mean i still don't say Death To America every day of my life.
doesn’t mean i still don’t say Death To America every day of my life
are you https://hexbear.net/u/2Password2Remember haha
they internally subjugated the indigenous people there i think... the okinowans, the ainu, etc...
Alot of Japanese art aestetic is based on old Jomon art. Which is the equalivant of white people wearing turquoise rings and feather caps
Do you mean the Jomon period, comprising almost the entirety of paleolithic Japanese history?
Yes, the autocorrext simply knows me well enough to autocorrect anything I type into a form of ham.
The people the yayoai displaced.
The Jomon were a diverse group of paleolithic peoples in Japan named for their use of corded pottery. I don't know of any evidence they were displaced in a fashion similar to modern colonialism - or even the conquests or mass migrations of antiquity.
Yes but that’s a thing most nations do.
Just to name one random example, the Swedes, Norwegians and Finns have historically been pretty awful to the indigenous Sami people of Lapland, suppressing their religion, language and culture
not my holesum chungus amerika! we solved racism and sexism in the 60s silly! and then homophobia in the 90s! okay, maybe those are still around a bit. dont let a few bad apples spoil the bunch! but also dont throw out those bad apples! but also stop talking about it! wait, trans ppl exist?
Yuri on Ice unlocked something in me that I didn't know I was missing.
Like I never got soap operas like my mom watches. I'm gay. It didn't appeal to me. I never had romance stories of gay men growing up because America is prudish AF. 35 years of not having stories that reflected me. Yuri on Ice filled a gap in my life and I suddenly understood why my mom watches soap dramas and lifetime.
I think of this every time there is an LGBTQ book ban.
My favorite music is from Uematsu and Mitsdua.
FF7 brought me in touch with the planet and concepts that we are all connnected. It is a very philsophical and spirtual story. It cracked that conservative shell I was raised in and helped me grow as a person.
Japan may be prudish and have a hellish work culture, but they get art and music and stories. Far better than colorless, lifeless, joyless USA.
You should check out Aggretsuko on Netflix where her boss is a literal shovanistic pig. That show is a commentary on Japan's work and prudish culture in hopes to address it.
Aggretsuko
I loved Aggretsuko until the season where
spoiler
the writing decided to character assassinate Haida and suddenly make him a well-off failson and le genius coder out of nowhere and introduced a New Original Boss Don't Steal and made Tadano into an absurd Mary Sue character up to and including winning at arm wrestling effortlessly without the slightest sign of ever doing strength training and in fact being known for being lazy and THEN said he was going to do a little space tourism as a treat because that same writer probably wanted a donkey version of :my-hero: . Also the (attempted?) murder with the scream laser at the end broke the setting's delicate balance of surreal and plausible.
Yes I'm pissed at that season and worried about the premise of the upcoming and final season. :sadness:
fetishizing le exotic fascism as a treat after enjoying my ebic homegrown fascism
You know how the structure of Japanese society was created by Jim Crow America by formalizing the Bourgeois into a liberal government then paying the yakuza to suppressed any left energy in a pre-liberal nominally Marxist country? Yeah, so people sometimes channel the mix of alienated emotions into nearly abstract art reminiscing about childhood and simultaneously expressing their sexual frustration through those same abstract children. That kinda sucks.
and literal slave-state amerika """opening up""" Japan in the 1850s
Japan is a big bummer in almost every way, but some of the anime is good. :shinji-screm: :mob-pissed: :jotaro-walk:
i too enjoy cartoons from a hell-country: the simpsons, etc...
It's funny to me that the majority of hexbear users in this thread can't just say this. There's some defensiveness in here that you wouldn't typically see about other topics and it's 100% bc anime lmao.
it's always the things closest to your heart that are hardest to analyze honestly. i didn't grow up on anime other than pokemon, which i was into for the games, so my general introduction to the medium was having a very neurodivergent friend infodumping the plots of like fma. my first actual journey into anime started with watching eva before moving on to aot and then jojo's. i'm still pretty picky about what i watch, and even in some of the better shows (aot in particular) there's a lot to analyze in terms of political content that is genuinely fash leaning. i think the quality of the best anime story arcs is that the character development and material interaction with the world are usually much more in depth than you tend to get in western entertainment mediums. representation of trauma is often explored incredibly deeply, which is an obvious byproduct of japan's longstanding internal contradictions and relatively recent titanic shifts in its cultural and social structures. weebs that grow up on anime have a mostly idealized mental conception of japanese society built off of the society depicted in anime (which washes away most of the problematics in much the same way that western media does, but not being a japanese native appears to make a difference here for people) that does not stand up to material scrutiny.
It's very depressing
There are absurd amounts of Indians coming here for undergraduate only to fail to find any good job after graduating and having to work a minimum wage life of retail, fast food, Uber, and Doordash while being saddled with dozens of thousands of student debt
Also, I'm not exaggerating when I say literally more than 50% of the Ubers I've ridden in were driven by said Indian international students or adult immigrants who used to be engineers, doctors, nurses, accountants, etc. from all over Asia (Middle East, South, South East) who can't find any job because Canada is infamous for not recognizing foreign certifications/education/credentials
importing cheap labor from around the globe, hmmm where have i heard of that concept before?
It's disgusting how ready people are to exploit their vulnerability too. Colleges and universities make most of their money by
trickingpromising international families a degree for only triple the amount they charge domestically and there's a cottage industry of slum lords and business tyrants ready to prey on the students because they don't speak english and don't know their rights. There was a house in a suburb of Toronto where they found 25 students living!
This map is totally fake, it says "according to Google search data". Google searches are not a replacement for an actual poll. They're literally worthless.
I think it's somewhat accurate
Why would anybody Google "how to move to <X> if they're not interested in moving to <X>?
Do they always google it in English? Did the person who made this consider other languages? Or other phrasings? Or how Google search stats are calculated? Or reasons why someone wouldn't Google that? Or access to the internet based on location, class, etc? Or whether someone would even type that in if they knew they will never be able to leave where they're at or never able to get a visa? I want to know if the Google searches from any given country are representative of the population, or if it's the most labor aristocratic demographics of every country, people who are inculcated with western propaganda and want to be able to make more money by moving to a western country, for example.
As we all know, Google is the only search engine, used around the world, always in English
Cringe Norwegians actually wanting to move to the USA.
It's funny how US Americans think everyone wants to move here but with so many countries saying "Canada" and not "USA", it's pretty clear to me everyone knows the US sucks and is racist af; and while Canada might be much better at least folks know it's more welcoming.
From my experience growing up in Canada and talking to foreigners, we're not more welcoming or less racist but there are definitely less hate crimes and shootings
Right, maybe there's the perception that Canada is more welcoming, while in fact that may not be reality?
It’s actually funny how US Americans think everyone wants to move here but with so many countries saying “Canada” and not “USA”,
If the answers to the survey skew more educated, it might be that Canada is a much easier immigration target for people with degrees. There's a long processing period, but if you have training in certain fields Canada gives an automatic permenant residency with a 5 year path to citizenship, the best you can do with the US is get an employer to sponsor a temporary visa, lol. I dont think we can seperate a much gentler immigration system from the responses. Honestly for people the points system applies to, they'd probably make double the wage in the US, and the employer would provide healthcare, but good luck finding an employer willing to sponsor a visa.
And what's up with Icelanders wanting to go to Denmark? I thought they kinda disliked Danes?
It's also much harder to get a US visa. Especially as an Indian
Eh. It's got fucked up laws, an intolerant general attitude, high suicide rates, perverse societal incentives and an entrenched bourgoisie class that constantly fuck everything up.
But I mean, welcome to most modern countries? I see little difference to where I live now except it has some different, neat parts too.
I might be orientalism-poisoned by shitty Guardian op-eds and Vice domunetaries but aren't they a bit more weird with their corporatism and traditionalism than most western countries? Like the whole staying at work 12 hours a day thing?
Both Japan and South Korea are American puppets whose taxes go to support the American empire. This is one major reason why the people in these countries and many others have such fascist work cultures.
Japan has the same standard of 8 hr days, 40 hr weeks. and just like western countries, many people work well over that (including 12 hr days). the prominence of toxic work culture in Japan compared to western countries is mostly a product of colonialism (Japan is a junior partner to western imperialism, but still subject to its destructive hunger). lets take an example from a country that isnt fascist-- China. many ppl deride them for 996 culture (12 hr days, 6 days a week), but this kind of work schedule is mostly present in tech and other highly competitive fields. and even those people working 996 typically take a long nap in the middle of the work day, arent working the entire time ("slacking off"), and are compensated very well compared to the average worker
That's not that weird in Asia. South Korea also works a ton
And it's maybe not as extreme as South Korea and Japan, but India has some pretty cursed working culture as well. Due to long hours and heirarchies and stuff
Not really that weird. Japan has very popular popculture music/anime,games. Plus a lot of people that are really into it are younger and a have a romanticised view of it. For better or worse a lot of people think the USA is pretty cool for various reasons (overlooking the bad stuff) same goes for Japan just on a smaller scale. Mind you people are more critical of the US these days.
people should be more critical of japan too.
you can't even live together before marriage without being shamed.
there are "no foreigners allowed" signs at tons of businesses.
people are expected to work themselves to death.
loneliness is more of an epidemic there than anywhere else on earth.
suicide is sky high.
not enough people have kids to replace the population because life is so terrible.
the culture is extremely sexist and misogynist, similar to 1950s America.
major historical denialism about past atrocities.
it's just an extremely collectively-damaged mass psychology going on there.
Japan has tons of problems. Im very well aware of that. Its basically a conservative one party state and lets not even talk about work culture. With that said I dont think we will see people be more critical of Japan as long as it stays "mostly" peaceful/non interventionist and as long as the Nation stays stable. (There might very well be instability in Japans future) Simply put as long as Japan doesnt cause problems for other people outside their borders most people wont care how fucked up Japan really is.
I'd argue most modern countries/cultures exhibit most of these traits, and/or equivalently awful traits. It is the done thing.
Same with South Korea, the UK, Italy, etc. Any country with solid entertainment media will have this effect. China is sort of on a good path with TikTok and Genshin Impact.
my unhinged zizek take would be that japan allows other first world-ers to project their supremacist beliefs onto a target that denies them the outlet of shame. the way dorks from the third world look at the US is the way that dorks from the first world look at japan. also they based their culture off the br*tish what the fuck :visible-disgust:
I agree.
They make good treats sometimes and when those treats are made by the few left leaning people there (Miyazaki, etc) the treats can be very, very good. Final Fantasy 7 is pretty anticapitalist, for example. Or hell, Persona 5 had a pretty leftist message for the most part, you can't tell me it didn't make a few Japanese teens question the system.
It's a shame the non-fash creators are becoming less and less common tho. I mean look what happened to FF7... An anti-capitalist environmental story turned into an NFT, very sad.
I mean look what happened to FF7… An anti-capitalist environmental story turned into an NFT, very sad.
This seems like an execs thing more than anything else, which is hardly attributable to the country itself. Bobby Kotick and every single other publisher would do exactly the same.
It’s a shame the non-fash creators are becoming less and less common tho.
I think what you have to understand here is that the very obviously marxist content we saw in the past was a result of an entire generation of creators growing up during labour clashes, riots and battles with the state led by organised communists.
That generation grew up and created content with class consciousness.
A new generation of creators has filtered into the industry and they don't have the same background, they are creating content informed by the lives they have lived. What they're making is either feel-good content to cope with their existing society because it sells well (because people are miserable) or they're writing content about what their primary concerns have been in society -- loneliness, wanting relationships, etc. The neet problem in japan is the same as the incel problem in the west.
There is still a large quantity of explicitly left wing content being produced though. I don't think there's just a few left leaning people in Japan, voter turnout is just 55% because people don't see a point in participating, and almost 10% of that turnout votes communist party despite the party having softened to survive.
Not really writing all of this for you Owl I assume you've probably seen most of this said before.
there was also a bit where if you were queer and wanted media that spoke to you, you literally had no other option but anime. Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena cracked a lot of eggs.
The Heian period has the best art, literature, and culture IMO and it’s also when the ruling class was so incompetent they could barely collect taxes, let alone dream of enslaving Korea, China, and the rest of the world, as in later centuries.
how dare you bring up anything from before 100 years ago! as you can see from the comprehensive knowledge of this thread, Japan did not even exist until 1926, when it sprang into existence from the bottom of the ocean, fully populated by evil people.
Sometimes I feel like ppl straight up just are getting upset that ppl are talking about media that's not set in The West/in English on some subconscious level and have to find a reason to make it "woke" or whatever. Like do ppl ITT only consume media from "AES" countries or do you say this weird shit about Japan and then go and watch American, Italian, Spanish, and German media?
It's better to just be
Place, any place :soypoint-2:
Wait is seeing beauty in all things cringe or not?
