Forum - View topicDoes anime make Japan look more progressive than it is?
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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Yep Japan is a very traditionalistic and socially conservative society. It is expected that the creative community of young people, artists, writers and designers that create all this make up a subset of society that is outside the social norms of the country as a whole.
But for us that are anime/manga fans, that is the primary lens in which we get a glimpse of the life and culture of Japan. Its a distorted image and because of such a low birth rate and a large population of elderly that still make up a majority of Japan's social identity, it's not difficult to take off the anime-colored spectacles and see a completely different Japan. This is even apparent when actually reading manga or watching anime. I just recently finished a manga about a boy who wanted to go to school as a girl. When he was discovered and being lectured by the Vice-Principal of the school it is apparent that this very totalitarian, unaccepting, strict notion that behavior such as this will go severely punished and all notions of non-conformance must be subdued. So even hidden within stories expressing social progressive causes is this deep-rooted psyche of maintaining order and normalcy. |
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Sea Lion
 Posts: 307 |
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In that way, Japan is actually very much like America.
I've been saying to anyone who has an open mind that even the "liberals" in America are actually quite conservative in nature. Most don't really want to rock the boat, they want to make small, incremental changes over long periods of time. If a real American conservative ever came face-to-face with a true radical liberal, they'd have a heart attack and die on the spot. I read an article on IMDB's front page asking why young people aren't going to the movies anymore, and I honestly think it's because the ratio of younger to older Americans has shifted, much like Japan. Can't get blood from a turnip, as they say. |
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Mushi-Man
 Posts: 1537 Location: KCMO |
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I think that some American anime fans do feel that Japan is more "progressive" than it actually is. But this isn't because anime and manga try to make it seem that way, but rather fans will project their own desires onto it. I think we see anime and manga, which is often seen as a radically different art form than what westerners have come to expect from animation, and just assume that the nation that it comes from must be very progressive and artistic. Really Japan has just as many social standards and taboos as any other nation.
Really what we have is a case of letting one segment of the Japanese population speak for the whole nation. Yes there are many artistic and very progressive people in Japan, but ther are just as many conservative businessmen. Some times we forget that, just like America, Japan (and other nations) have people with differing views. Lots of people develop this idea that internal struggles between left and right ideals is unique to just their nation, but in reality this cultural and social battles exist across the globe. Also I think that people often mistaken simply having different cultural backgrounds as being "progressive". They look at general Japanese culture and see that many aspects are different and unique and then assume that it means Japan is progressive. |
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Mairi
 Posts: 15 Location: Hull |
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I think it is easy to extrapolate impressions received from one art form onto the whole country, but it is really important to realise that the anime is only one fractured viewpoint. You wouldn't take american cartoons to fully represent the modern America, so why do the same with Japan?
A lot of people know that Japan has one of the highest rates of suicide among young people, and although some anime does represent this, I think it more represents the paradox of Japanese culture- very modern, perhaps progressive in some ways but equally very old fashioned in others. |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 24097 |
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It's an interesting question and one that I'm not particularly well-suited to discuss since I have very little real world experience with Japanese society. Ironically, just this weekend, I got another reminder of how conservative some Japanese can be. I was visiting friends and Karen told me how a few years ago, she and a woman who is a friend of hers (and who is Japanese) went to Halifax for about 5 days. It was a "wives only" trip and the husbands were back home looking after the kids. The Japanese woman said that she didn't dare tell her mother about the trip because she would be appalled that a wife and mother would have her husband do what is so clearly a woman's job. Wow.
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PetrifiedJello
Posts: 3782 |
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I'm going to say this with the expectation anyone reading it feels no insult, but one would have to be incredibly foolish to take the offerings of a fictional work and apply a real-world application unless they're experienced in the relationship between the two.
Anime is very diverse, just as the country of Japan is. I can't imagine the progressive state of Tokyo can be compared on the same level of any one of the outskirt cities. By the very definition, the people alone would be very different. While cars bustle on the highways of Tokyo, animals may grace the small roads of the town. It would be like trying to compare New York City with Gardner, Kansas while stating both are progressive because CSI is a top-rated show. Clearly not, which is the answer I will supply to the thread's question. |
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Mairi
Posts: 15 Location: Hull |
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Yeah i agree, it is crazy to make direct comparisons!
I was talking to a Japanese woman I met, and her life was also so governed by what her parents thought, she was telling me she would never date someone her parents didn't approve of! It was quite crazy to see the differences in our attitudes. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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Perhaps it would be more accurate assessment to say anime is fairly reflective of Tokyo life but a poor representation of rural Japan. But still I think a lot of these unchanged mindsets about what is acceptable in society (the whole conformist attitude) permeates the psyche of even lifelong heart of Tokyo residents.
For example many foreigners I've met find it odd that males and females can live together and not be lovers. I've had several roommates who were the opposite sex. In the past I've had that living arrangement out of necessity and really never thought that much of it. In Japan, according to manga I've read it is very discouraged for students, who typically live away from home, to have an opposite-sex room mate. Well, coming to think about it more, in my early college days it would have been nearly impossible to share a dorm room with a female student. But there were never any stipulations in place for off-campus housing. |
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TitanXL
 Posts: 4036 |
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In some ways, Japan is more progressive (depending on how you use the world). Schooling, for example, it's much more serious and intense in Japan, which leads to a lot more... intelligence, I'll say, compared to America. I've dealt with a few Japanese companies before, and it's always amazing to see their stance on business; they like to invest in long-term deals. In America, it's 'How much can I make NOW? How much will this cost to do NOW?'. The companies I dealt with in Japan, though, it's usually "So, in five/ten years, what would this be worth...?" it's quite refreshing, to say the least, to see long-term investments being more common over there.. makes setting up telecommunications rooms and networks all that more enjoyable. But I guess involving animation and comics, yeah, there's a lot more progression there, but that should be obvious enough
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wcsinn
 Posts: 186 |
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I think the obvious response would be why would some one judge a culture based solely on any type of entertainment, let alone anime. I have spent some time in Japan and worked for a Japanese company - it is a very complex culture which is very different in many ways - not better or worse, but very different. I don't think it would be fair to judge them simply through any medium - let alone an entertainment based medium.
From what I can see the Japanese culture is undergoing changes, young people dress and act very differently (and to some degree appear to have different values) than members of the older generation. I think that is probably true for most cultures, but in my opinion it seemed to be more noticeable in Japan. Despite being no youngster, I found it was often easier for me to connect with younger Japanese. The appeared to be more comfortable with western culture and habits. |
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egoist
 Posts: 7762 |
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Perhaps.
To discern the difference is as easy as discerning between reality and fantasy. In other words, for people like me it's probably indescribable. Japan is Japan. There's indeed a factual Japan, but I don't care. I'm able to describe the difference pretty clearly if I wanted to, but I generally don't care. I'd rather keep a fine line between the real Japan and the fictional Japan because that ultimately improves my anime experience, but that line could be disrupted if I started organizing my reasoning. In other words, Japanese's breast size have progressively improved thanks to anime. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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I think in many ways Japan is both more conservative and more liberal than Western nations in N.A. and Europe (aside from the universal sense of traditions that the U.S. seems particularly separated from). In Japan there isn't as much prevalence of this overbearing social engineering component known as Abrahamic Religion. So that puts traditionalism and adherence to rituals in a different context: Japan's social order permits an adequate balance between individuality and conformity, but in the West - particularly the U.S. - the conservative identity is frequently at odds with human desire for absolute freedom and individuality.
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John Casey
 Posts: 1853 Location: In My Angry Center |
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Depends on what it's progressing, really. Animation itself? Nope. Video games? Hell no. Technology? Most definitely. Social acceptance? ...Eeeeeeh. Education system? ...If the number of student suicides per year is any indication... then nope.
Some things, yes, most things? ...Not really. |
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Toucanbird
Posts: 126 Location: Winona, Minnesota |
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I think you might need to thank the economy for that (for two different reasons). For one, the younger generation is finding it difficult to find a job, therefore unable to find a means to support a family. If people aren't having kids, they aren't taking those kids to the movies. Hell, they can probably barely afford to take a date to the movies considering how much it costs to go to the movies anymore. Secondly, the younger generation just can't afford it. They aren't making money if they aren't getting jobs, so they aren't going to the movies. I remember when I was still in college I went to the movies all-the-time. I've been out of college for a few years now and I can't remember the last movie I saw in theaters was. Probably Sherlock Holmes back in early 2010. I guess as a third point, people aren't going to the movies because it's cheaper to watch movies on Internet sites like Netflix and Hulu. Sure, they might need to wait a few more months but in the long run, they are saving money. I know this is a little away from the "Japan" view of things but I'm sure it's much the same over in Japan. |
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wanderlustking
 Posts: 449 Location: Bozeman, Montana |
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I don't want to sound like a cultural elitist, but I'm going to ask the question that will immediately have me pegged as one anyway, because it does need to be asked; have any of you actually been to Japan? I have (I was stationed there for three years and chose to remain for another two) and this is just me talking, but I don't think you can judge "progressiveness" of any country-including, shit, especially Japan in a yes or no fashion. Rather, there are two groups that can be judged thus; the young people and the older generation. Japan, like almost any country since the 1800s (earlier for all I know, I'm no historian) has a very conservative, and very well entrenched population of old people; that's just how old people are, slow to change and even slower to admit that change was for the best. That being said, there is a reason why most Japanese media that makes it to western shores is considered "progressive;" and that's because the vast majority of young people in Japan, the ones creating (and more importantly consuming) said media, are very progressive.
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