This seemed relevant
Mar. 18th, 2010 19:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Ohtsuka Eiji, an editor, critic, and writer, poses the question bluntly: why do so many Americans see Miyazaki's films as distinctively Japanese, as receptacles of Japanese values, when they are so clearly globally targeted entertainments? The answer is Orientalist habits of thought whereby the identity of the subject is formed by projecting unitary difference onto the Other, which Ueno Toshiya has referred to as techno-orientalism in the context of anime reception.
--Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation
I'm particularly appreciating Lamarre's insistence that manga and anime studies stop investigating works for what they say about Japan, which quickly becomes tautological, but instead look at how they say it, look at what they say about living in the world, period. It's definitely something I know that I need to bear in mind.
Also, I like that that one sentence gets at what's wrong, period, with Orientalism in general and "Victorientalism" in particular--flattening differences that a) exist and b) ought not be flattened so as to, essentially, puff up the ego of the orientalist by furnishing them an entirely false sense of the world's simplicity and their superiority. At the same time it renders people and cultures into things, objects to be consumed, which is equally wrong, wrong, wrong.
Hi, new people! Welcome! おいでやす!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 00:24 (UTC)When I was working in my college's library, the purchasing department decided they were going to buy anime. What did they buy? Every Ghibli film out in English, and nothing else. Seriously. They didn't even get Akira or Ghost in the Shell, which are the usual candidates for Only Anime In The Library. I asked why they'd made this decision, but never really got an answer. I mean, there are probably a whole bunch of reasons: because Ghibli films are critically well-received, because most of them are fairly cute and unlikely to offend anyone, because most of them are very good.
But I'm sure part of it was that ambiguously-useless purchasing-department word "representative" - when you're dipping your toe into buying a kind of media you don't have much of, you're supposed go for the stuff that's most "representative" first. And because Miyazaki's stories tend to have a lot of environmentalist imagery, they fit into this froofy Orientalist belief that East Asian culture is totally all about living in harmony with nature and all that good stuff. So people think Ghibli's corpus is very Japanese, and so, I assume, kind of extend this to the idea that it's probably representative of the genre as a whole.
Also, it was a college library, and you can totally use like, half of all Ghibli films to phone in papers about shinto. "Totoro is a shinto deity. So is No-Face. So is the Spirit of the Forest! So are the Ohmu. Oh hey MAYBE NAUSICAA IS AMATERASU how about that one you like it." (I may have written this paper once or twice.)
Highly relevant anecdote: A couple months ago a friend of mine who'd just seen Avatar was describing it to me as being "thematically similar to anime." I asked him what anime he'd seen - he didn't remember any titles, but from his descriptions I determined that they'd been Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Spirited Away, and Kiki's Delivery Service. You may notice a pattern here.
(I later showed him Mushishi, which probably didn't help the situation.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 02:38 (UTC)Oh man, that's a good one. The collapse in the distinction between the medium (anime) and the genres within it is so frustrating.
And because Miyazaki's stories tend to have a lot of environmentalist imagery, they fit into this froofy Orientalist belief that East Asian culture is totally all about living in harmony with nature and all that good stuff. So people think Ghibli's corpus is very Japanese, and so, I assume, kind of extend this to the idea that it's probably representative of the genre as a whole.
Yes! Whereas Ghibli is in so many ways an outlier, starting with production methods and ending with its reasonable expectations of global success for its movies. One of the things Lamarre harps on in his book is that Miyazaki treats technology not as a discrete tool, to be set down or picked up, but as an ontological condition, which I think is so right and so much more congruent with the experience of modernity in the developed world than fatuous dichotomies. And really so much more "Japanese" as actual people live in Japan now than otherwise.
So the question I'd ask your friend is whether technology in Avatar is presented as a condition to be saved from or a tool to be used. If it's the former, than I'd grant the similarity. But given what I know of James Cameron, I have my doubts.
Nausicäa = Amaterasu? That's...interesting. ^^
(Irrelevant digression: I was basically the anime buyer for my college library for a while, because the librarian in charge of spending our Freeman grant just took my suggestions verbatim. We got the Eva Platinum set, FLCL, and a lot of Oshii and Kon Satoshi, iirc.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 01:56 (UTC)I think this statement is pretty much the entirety of the Nausicaa manga, where it's repeatedly said, in a number of different ways, that a rejection of technology is a rejection of reality.
I would suspect that Avatar does not feel that way about the situation.
DO NOT MOCK MY TOTALLY AWESOME CRAPPY PAPER
(Re: digression: Someone from the purchasing department later asked me for advice on what to buy when we got in a conversation about... I think all the manga I was requesting for senior research? And I got excited and sent her a detailed list with rationales, which she ignored.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 02:01 (UTC)I think this statement is pretty much the entirety of the Nausicaa manga, where it's repeatedly said, in a number of different ways, that a rejection of technology is a rejection of reality.
I am not surprised, since Miyazaki started the manga before the movie and didn't finish it until after Laputa (amirite?), which is the apotheosis of the entire idea in his movies in some ways. And really it's more interesting that way.
I really need a Miyazaki icon. Your Bleach posts are making me angry with the entire manga.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 02:07 (UTC)I'm trying to quit the Bleach thing. I'm working on a happy post about Divine Melody to get my adrenaline back down to acceptable levels.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 02:10 (UTC)And Gedo Senki, but we don't talk about that.I think after that I'll have seen all of them.Laputa's amazing, though, even without Lamarre's analysis to make me like it twice as much.
I sold 9 volumes of Bleach back at Book-Off in New York the other week and got $9! That is an amazing rate of return. I'm totally going to sell most of the rest, or just all of the rest, of what I still have.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 07:46 (UTC)Ive been looking all over for raws of xxxholic chapter 203, but all I found were these photos:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Z9YA6I6R
Do you think you could still translate them?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 19:03 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 09:30 (UTC)I think I still have half-finished meta about that lying around somewhere.
Plus Chihiro is totally like Krabat.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 19:33 (UTC)I go back and forth on the translation thing--I tend to leave the suffixes as-is but translate everything else, even though most of the suffixes map pretty easily onto English or just about any other language. When I started I was keen to preserve what some people refer to as the cultural "odor" (usually when making the argument that anime and manga are globally popular because they're culturally "odorless", which I think is both right and not-right), in contrast to, say, VIZ and the late 90s, early 00s style of licensed English manga translation, which usually just dropped them entirely, and they really do encode important information about relationships between characters. I think if I were to start now I might translate the suffixes too, even though I think most people here out on the cutting edge of internet fandom prefer to be reminded that the stuff they're watching/reading is Japanese in origin. I don't know; there's the reductive exoticized reading of themes, like
I always think ちゃんと is ridiculously difficult to translate conversationally.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 20:12 (UTC)*cringes*
(when really I think a much better reading is that Miyazaki is continuously reacting against the unstopping urbanization of the developed world, urbanization being a notable feature of modernity)
That's how I always saw it too. But to some degree the Japanese = in tune with nature thing seems to be rather universal. I'm always reminded of the Japanese pavillion at the 2000 World Fair, which was all about environmentalism, according to the material. It was built almost entirely out of recycled paper. But image =/= truth.
I don't actually mind the suffixes all that much, after years of being exposed to them, you sort of get used to it, but there's nothing wrong with translating them either, no matter what some fans might say. Plus I always find it ridiculous when English native speaker do this with my native language (and "Fräulein" is insulting now anyway).
Yeah, ちゃんと is difficult too, but since I haven't translated many dialogues yet, they don't annoy me as much as "natsukashii", which was one of the most common words in the tanka I had to translate.
anime and manga are globally popular because they're culturally "odorless"
I find that statement problematic for a variety of reasons. Not all anime and manga are globally popular, for one. And many Hollywood movies manage to be globally popular while still being anything but culturally neutral.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-19 20:36 (UTC)Yeah, exactly. The term comes from a book by Kouichi Iwabuchi called Recentering Globalization. His argument is that Japanese cultural products like anime and manga erase their Japaneseness in order to be transnationally popular. I haven't read the entire book and am probably not getting the full gist of it across. It's also worth noting that the book is actually about Japanese pop cultural products in Asia, but the idea was quickly brought across into Asia to extra-Asia cultural flows, which may or may not be a valid move. I do get the impression that most people think he makes good points but doesn't tell the whole story, Hollywood being a perfect counterexample; manga and anime too.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 08:48 (UTC)From an Asian perspective, Japan probably has a lot of cultural prestige (just like Europe has for African immigrants and the USA for pretty much everyone, for example) and that should not be underestimated either when one writes about cultural exports to other Asian countries. (Well, and then there's all the WWII baggage, but there were still quite a lot of Chinese students who took Japanese lessons with me. In Germany, of all places.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 16:25 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 21:16 (UTC)they tend to go about saying "Anime was never intended for export, and watching it is like a peek into the unique cultural unconscious of Japan." Which is not totally true
And which also reinscribes a sort of voyeuristic relation of the non-Japanese viewer to Japan, I think? which, quite frankly, smacks to me of Orientalism past and present.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 22:38 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-20 22:43 (UTC)