This seemed relevant

[starlady]

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.

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Hi, new people! Welcome! おいでやす！

Comments

[rodo]

From what you tell me, it seems as if things are simplified a bit. And now I'm wondering if anyone ever considered that maybe Japanese cultural products are popular to some degree because of their Japanese odor, not because they lack it altogether. Sure, they have to be partly universal to become popular, but I wouldn't say that dealing with universal topics entirely negates cultural odor.

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.)