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Every Sunday, leather-clad teen-agers spill out of Harajuku Station and head to- ward Yoyogi Park, there to dance until dark. The passion for such distractions has its critics: A recent government white paper asserted that today's Japanese youth are "devoid of perseverance, dependent upon others, and self-centered."
The Wilson QuarterlyISummer 1985
46
Japan's New
Popular Culture
On any given day, Americans encounter something from Japan. To Detroit's dismay, roughly 1....
ry Sunday, leather-clad teen-agers spill out of Harajuku Station and head to- ward Yoyogi Park, there to dance until dark. The passion for such distractions has its critics: A recent government white paper asserted that today's Japanese youth are "devoid of perseverance, dependent upon others, and self-centered."
The Wilson QuarterlyISummer 1985
46
Japan's New
Popular Culture
On any given day, Americans encounter something from Japan. To Detroit's dismay, roughly 1.9million U.S. c...
by Frederik L. Schodt
In his travel book The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Paul The- roux recalls his encounter with a comic book left behind by a young woman seated next to him on a train in northern Japan: "The comic strips showed decapitations, cannibalism, people bris- tling with mws like Saint Sebastian .. . and, in general, may- hem. ...I dropped the comic. The girl returned to her seat and, so help me God, serenely returned to this distressing [magazine]."
Japanese manga, or c...
The average American knows two kinds of Japanese movies, if he knows any at all. In the first, grunting samurai slash at each other with swords. In the second, a prehistoric monster stomps through downtown Tokyo like King Kong, derailing trains, swatting down aircraft, and smashing buildings.
Today, such scenes seldom appear on the Japanese screen. Like the Western in the United States, samurai and monster films moved to TV (see box, pp. 72-73). Indeed, in Japan as in the United States, the advent...
Despite the proliferation of Japanese television, video games, and video cassette recorders, most Western works on Japanese culture still sketch a society of dedicated aesthetes, vari- ously arranging flowers, sipping green tea, plucking the three-stringed samisen. A few books indicate, how- ever, that popular pastimes are more contemporary and less refined.
Kuwabara Takeo, a scholar of French literature, analyzes his coun- try's cultural shifts during the last 150 years in Japan and Western...
He was not what today we would call a charismatic leader; for strength of personality, it is his wife) Dolley, who comes to mind. He was only five feet, six inches tall and in his early years was often in poor health. He lacked the majestic presence and martial prowess of George Washington. His prose, while copious and competent, had none of the bite of Thomas Paine's pam- phlets or the elegance of Thomas Jefferson's letters. In an age when public speaking was a prized political asset, his voice...
Benjamin Disraeli or Mark Twain is still disputed), the industrializing nations were just beginning to become addicted to statistics-figures on popula- tion, the economy, and other matters of concern to the state. As scholars note, even accurate numbers can obfuscate as well as illu- minate. "I still think that a familiarity with the best that has been thought and said men of letters," critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in 1963, "is more helpful than all the sociologists' statistics."...
began when early civilizations learned to count their populations. The Romans, who for a time held a census every 5% years on aver- age, revered numbers. This marble frieze of about 100B.C. shows a gathering for a post-count Ceremony of the Census, which included the sacrifice of animals to the gods.
The Wilson Quarterly/Summer 1985
92
Statistics
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics." During the 19th century, when that denunciation was first uttered (whether by Benjamin Disraeli or M...
TISTICS
WHO'S WHAT:
I
DEFINING 'AMERICANS'
Even two centuries ago, this was no easy task. Though largely of English stock, the people of the young country lacked the characteristics of a "nation." They had a varied ancestry and spoke different languages. Many had come to the New World to practice freely their own religions. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782)) J. H. S. de Crevecoeur, an immigrant to New York State from France, wryly observed that an American is "a Europ...