The Japan Times has a fairly dry article on why non-Japanese, especially in the U.S., study Japan. For most of us, these paragraphs are the only part of interest:
The fourth trend is the widening gap between academic works and the public’s knowledge of Japan. Traditionally, there has been a certain intellectual link between academic studies on Japan and the promotion of understanding of Japan in general.
Recently, however, interest in and understanding of Japan has been increasingly divorced from some academic works on Japan. Young people’s fascination with manga and anime has weakened, or at least blurred, the established link between some traditional types of Japanese studies and young intellectuals’ interest in Japan.
This garnered an interesting response on Japundit. Here’s the opening salvo:
If you spend enough time in Japan, then you know that anime and manga (and video games for that matter) are not necessarily mainstream cultural activities; my favorite travel book even warns travelers against the assumption that all Japanese will share an enthusiasm for these forms of entertainment. Most Japanese people I know consider shared events like matsuri to be a truer representation of Japanese culture. I once had a long talk with a Shinto priest who told me that he believes his job is essentially “to celebrate and preserve the essence of Japanese culture.”
On the other hand, it’s not the Edo period anymore:
I remember, for example, some JET friends who came back from Japan disappointed that they did not find the land of Lady Murasaki; Japan turned out to be much more chaotic than the country our classes on Japanese aesthetics had portrayed (these same professors did not want to discuss Japan post 1930, by the way, because by then the war was looming on the horizon and war is ugly). Yes, you can find practitioners of old arts like lacquer making and kimono embroidery, but these things aren’t the focus of the majority of the population.
This point of view is heavily critiqued in the comments, which are definitely worth reading. Many commenters become interested in different aspects of Japanese life through manga. And I thought this was spot-on:
The problem I see is that people like that Shinto priest have an outdated and romantic view of the “Japanese essence,” as if there is such a thing. Shinto is just as much an invented tradition as the ninja. Foreigners can be just as guilty in this romanticism (see: The Last Samurai, for example. By which I mean, DON’T see it, it sucks.) People who persist in their interest in Japan, and who advance even a little in academia, get their rose-colored glasses torn off pretty damn quick.
In other words, one era’s pop culture is the next era’s classical tradition, so relax and enjoy. Someday, people will be writing PhD theses and holding seminars on Mink and One Piece.
