Comments on: Lost Japan

By: Pizzamancer

Pizzamancer — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:38:32 +0000

I took a road trip through Shikoku on my Honda last May, and stayed at Chiiori for a night. Spent part of the next day re-reading Lost Japan. That is easily one of my favorite books on the culture. Dogs and Demons was also right on. Seeing tetras all over hames me want to start a tetra batsumetsu campaign.

Do you really think there are positive results from all that construction? Just a few Km from my house they are building a 1.8km ling bridge to an island that has no parking. Aside from the fact that the ferry takes 20 minutes from down town, while the bridge entrance is 45 minutes away down a country road…

By: MJG

MJG — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:42:48 +0000

K- Recently finished and reviewed here Booth’s ‘Looking for the Lost’, just bought ‘Roads to Sata’ and will get stuck in soon. I find myself liking Booth considerably more than Kerr- he’s just a down to earth guy, while retaining a high level of knowledge and culture. Kerr seems to have the ‘high culture’ but has lost touch with reality.

James- You make an excellent point- seeking an identity in another culture’s past, wrapping yourself up in it like a blanket- is ridiculous. Kerr may live a certain kind of ‘Japanese life’, but it’s not a real world Japanese life, nor is it grounded even in the past reality of the masses.

About the construction industry, in the months since reading the book I’ve softened on my outrage against it, for reasons very much as you describe. This is just what happens when you have to industrialize quickly, to catch up to other nations who got there first. It’s not uniquely Japanese, it’s also happening in other developing countries reaching for global competitiveness. That’s not an excuse, nor does it mean it should be allowed to continue just as it’s going, but outright decrying its evils without any consideration for both its necessity and its positive results is surely over-reacting.

By: jamesmallon

jamesmallon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:58:40 +0000

Sorry, last thought. Japan’s construction industry is as pathological as Kerr describes, but he also has to realise that there are over 120 million people in a space the size of California who are just a few generations out of feudalism. I should think an intelligent person would realise Japan, for all its fualts, has done more for its population with less destruction far faster than our European culture did in its Industrial Revolution.

By: jamesmallon

jamesmallon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:53:55 +0000

I essentially agree with you. Kerr is entertaining, and knows the culture better than I do, though even if I knew it quite as well I am certain I would not draw all the same conclusions. He exaggerates too far in both directions in each book.

I am with you on the aesthete thing, and I too found Kabuki excrutiating. However, we are too spoiled in English with Shakespeare. There is a reason that everyone from Kurosawa (Ran=King Lear) to Verdi (Macbetto, Othello, Falstaff…) loves it too: the density and humanity of the Tragedies are unparallelled.

I distrust any gaijin obsessed with ‘ancient’ Japan. How idiotic would it be for people to come to my country and run off into the woods in birchbark canoes to trade pelts with the natives? The fact about the ‘ancient’ traditions of any culture is that they are worth saving, and worth having knowledge of to give deeper understanding of the present culture, but they are not how most people live now, or lived then. The martial arts, tea ceremonies, ikebana, kabuki etc of ‘ancient’ Japan were the amusements of a tiny parasitic class, and those arts are now moribund besides. You’ll learn more about Japan by getting drunk with your friends on New Years or at a Matsuri, or even just by getting drunk

By: k

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:02:26 +0000

Compare Kerr’s two nooks with Alan Booth’s two books, if you’ve not already read them – Looking for the Lost and The Roads to Sata. Booth chronicled some of the despair. (e.g. deforestation, concreting riverbeds) well before Kerr.