...I think I'm turning Japanese, I
really think so.
We still seem to live in the perceived
fallacy that the United States is a 10 year glance into
the crystal ball. That whatever inane activities are amusing
our American cousins will be promptly despatched to every
home in Britain for us to meddle with as soon as a decade
ends.
But there is a theory that this is a huge vat of cack.
US culture ran out of ideas back
in the 1990s and
has plastered over this fact by claiming ownership of the
internet and therefore taking credit for everyone else's
culture as it appears on the web.
But looking at the reality of the situation, the biggest
culture exporter on the globe today is Japan.
This has been widely missed due
to the fact that the Western film industry still present
Japanese culture in its
pre-world war era. Japan is shown as the world of emperors
and geishas and presented as the cultural version of an
NHS hospital -- all clean, quiet and sterile but seemingly
dark and messy behind the scenes.
But the Japanese culture being
overlooked by Hollywood is far more sinister and scary
than the whispered goings
on inside the emperors quarters. First of all we had Tamagotchi
inflicted upon us, teaching kids to feed fish fingers to
their calculators. And one wonders how many vets had to
remove batteries from cats after the naïve owners
decided Tiddles was looking sluggish.
Then we had Pokemon. In my day it was called top trumps,
it was easy, you simply called out a category and compared
the stats. The only thing you had to watch was someone
calling out top speed from a formula one pack when you
were football players (Unless of course they pulled Damon
Hill form the pack, in which case anything would be faster.)
But Pokemon seem to involve a myriad
different techniques and rules that seem to switch and change
based on untold combinations of things. It seems more likely
that it is designed to train youngsters up on how to deal
on the Nikai index rather than triumph in the playground
swaps.
So, can we maybe put western ignorance of Japan down to
embarrassment. Are we simply horrified at the tacky, mass-produced
neon and plastic lifestyle offered to us from the east?
Maybe it has more to do with the embarrassing
guilt we feel when we realise that this kitsch culture is
a result or western influence. We are completely to blame
for it, it is the West from the 1980s being regurgitated
into pink plastic and thrown back into our faces. Maybe
it is more comfortable for us to remember dropping the bomb
on Hiroshima than it is to face up to giving Tokyo its army
of Elvis impersonators.
The sight of an army of quiff-endowed
Japanese interrupting the morning Tai Chi with a bad rendition
of 'you ain't nothing but a hound dog' is perhaps a haunting
indictment of Westernised poison. Though we can take comfort
in the fact that as the cheeseburger is one of the West's
biggest exports, at least the Elvis problem comes provided
with a ready made cure.
