I interned at Sony in Tokyo one summer. I was hugely surprised that nobody had heard of all the animes and cultural icons that I thought were household names — Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, etc etc.
There’s a huge bias in the US towards taking niche cultural phenomena in Japan and putting them on a pedestal.
Anime is not the dominant form of media in Japan, and is largely targeted at a relatively narrow age band. Outside of the main target demographic, you're not going to get a lot of familiarity with anything but the very largest show.
In the US, how many current animated shows can you name? I can name a decent fraction of cartoons from the late 90s, but am completely unable to name anything since then--at least until I got a nephew and am now getting acquainted with the relevant demographic shows. That's a 20 year gap in shows.
Compare other media. How many classical composers can you name? I doubt many people, even erudite people, could push well beyond the basic frontier of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Recognition of well-known tunes (such as Pachelbel's Canon, whose name my spellchecker doesn't appear to recognize) is going to far exceed their name, let alone the composer's name.
The most recognizable anime to a layperson in Japan is likely to be the big mega-blockbusters of various eras. I'd be more shocked if you said that no one had heard of Mobile Suit Gundam, Dragonball, Naruto, or Attack on Titan [which one they'd pick up on depends on their age] than any of the shows you've mentioned. Hell, the only thing you listed that I'd think people in the US with a passing familiarity with anime might know would be Cowboy Bebop.
> Anime is not the dominant form of media in Japan, and is largely targeted at a relatively narrow age band. Outside of the main target demographic, you're not going to get a lot of familiarity with anything but the very largest show.
The top two highest grossing films in Japan are both anime; Spirited Away and Demon Slayer. Titanic follows at a distant third. Forth is Frozen, which you could argue is basically anime.
I live in Japan, and most anime is not really my thing, but its huge and definitely mainstream here.
Studio Ghibli (maker of Spirited Away) is in a league of its own though.
That specific outlier aside; I get the impression that cartoons in Europe and the US picked up quite a bit of slack in the adult demographic with shows like Archer and Rick & Morty in the past decade, building on what Adult Swim prepared in the US. In Japan this niche was already much more explored, although it is not a pass-time most adults flaunt. While I never got the impression that adult viewers of anime were anything more than a (sizeable) minority, they are certainly a target demographic, and manga (comics) even more so. One example that always stuck out to me was former prime minister Asō Tarō who openly admitted to being quite well-read in manga.
I watched "10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki" [1] recently, besides knowing his stubborn character and artist life, and the work they do at Studio Ghibli is pretty outstanding, as terms of time, effort and dedication. There is also an indie movie, "Never Ending Man" [2] they shot after he suddenly announced his retirement at the age of 72, but later came back with his first CGI project. Years of hand-drawing, an old man through his digital transformation
Studio Ghibli also released all their posters and stills [3] from its animations.
Oh what a treat that was, thank you for the link to "10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki". Looking forward to "Never Ending Man".
I'm not a fan of manga or "anime" per se, there's a ton of mediocre and mass-produced stuff. But as someone of Japanese heritage, I feel fortunate to have experienced some of the history and culture of manga books and animated films, as they blossomed after WWII - on occasions they achieve sublime expression as visual story telling.
Mangas are a massive mainstream phenomenon in Japan since before animation was even a thing. Japanese long commuter-train journeys were normalized earlier than elsewhere, packed carriages didn’t suit newspapers, and reading literature is harder than average with all those kanjis (most people only know a relatively small subset of them), so mangas fit that niche better than anything else. This said, I wouldn’t be surprised to read that the sector is declining due to competition from phones and other devices - my personal feeling is that the material targeted at adults has significantly declined in both quality and quantity in recent years.
> reading literature is harder than average with all those kanjis
Do you have a source for this claim? I have a hard time believing the average Japanese person has that much difficulty reading literature in their own language.
Japanese folks lag behind in education simply because their language requires them to spend far longer mastering reading. This significantly delays their progress.
That is not exactly an academic source and it's from someone living in Japan that doesn't read Japanese very well (check the comment section where they admit that themselves) so this is far from authoritative as a source.
I heard that after WWII the US occupation administered a national literacy test to see if Japanese people were as literate as their US counterparts, as it was becoming a serious idea to replace the existing writing system with the US alphabet. It was found that their literacy level was comparable so they didn't change anything so drastically.
Consider that learning to read kanji is much different from (easier than) learning to write them. There are a ton of contextual clues when reading, and furigana inserted by the publisher if the kanji would be hard to read for the target demographic. There is also the option of just substituting kana for hard-to-read kanji. Publishers and writers will obviously add furigana to any kanji that are hard to read as they have a monetary motivation to make their content as accessible as possible.
So you tend to pick up a lot of kanji based on these contextual clues and furigana over the years if you read anything, similar to how English speakers learn spellings of words when they read a word they've only "heard" before.
Writing is harder because when writing you will sometimes struggle to remember the correct kanji to use, or sometimes forget a small portion of the kanji. This is the why schools need to spend so much time teaching kanji as a subject of itself.
That makes sense. On the other hand, what made me side with the author here is this.
About a year ago, I read a study (which I wish to hell I could locate again) that made the case that children raised with more phonetic languages, such as Spanish and Finnish, had a notable advantage over children whose native language is English, because they learned to read and write much earlier. While American, British, and Australian children puzzle over words like “plough,” “epitome,” and “Worcestershire,” children in Spain are steadily progressing through more and higher-level books, enabling them earlier access to advanced skills such as reasoning, synthesis, and discussion. They simply read at a higher level than English speakers of the same age.
this highly resonates with my experience as Spanish is my first language and started learning English since first grade.
Spanish speakers are expected to read arbitrary words and write (albeit with lots of spelling mistakes) by (optimistically) kindergarten or early first grade. The written-spoken language is very regular so it's very easy so "sound out" words.
This is in contrast to what I hear is like to teach English speaking children. So yes, the author's hypothesis seems plausible to me.
I'm not one to get offended easily, so that aspect of your post isn't an issue for me. However you don't seem to have a real foundation for your belief, just an assumption. I can believe that the average Japanese person doesn't know every single kanji, just like the average english-speaking person doesn't know every word in the dictionary, but I think it's a big stretch to assume that Japanese people can't even read books on the train because their literacy is so low.
I think it's a big stretch to assume that Japanese people can't even read books on the train because their literacy is so low.
That's also an uncharitable interpretation of the article, or anything I pointed.
The best way I could put it is, "the Japanese writing system is pretty cumbersome and in turn the people on average are less drawn to literal mediums and more drawn towards visual media".
And that's just the opinion of an english teacher in japan after all.
> The written-spoken language is very regular so it's very easy so "sound out" words.
I don't know where I stand on your thesis (I was mostly arguing against the idea that Japanese people are demotivated to read more than English speakers because of kanji), but the main reservation I have about this is that it's pretty easy to fake knowledge of words this way. The pronunciation of something is secondary to its definition. But with a phonetic language, it's easy to fool yourself as well as others of an understanding that is not very deep.
I remember once in middle school I elicited a laugh from my classmates when during group reading, I mispronounced "awry" (I had put the stress on the wrong syllable as well as pronounced the "y" as "ee"). However, I had a very good idea of what it meant at that time. OTOH, in that same class, it was a very unusual occurence for the teacher to interrupt group reading and confirm everyone knew what a word meant, so I believe many misunderstood words were glossed over routinely.
I'm not saying being phonetic is a net loss, of course, just that "understanding" is a tricky thing to gauge, and may be harder as a side effect of some language being phonetic.
The pronunciation of something is secondary to its definition. But with a phonetic language, it's easy to fool yourself as well as others of an understanding that is not very deep.
well, children are introduced to "reading" as in mapping written symbols to phonemes. Yes, there's more to reading than that, as in you can side-step the mapping to phonemes and map straight to "meaning", but nobody is doing that with children. Phonetic languages just make the (indispensable) step of text to sound easier and gives you a head start.
> Hell, the only thing you listed that I'd think people in the US with a passing familiarity with anime might know would be Cowboy Bebop.
Really? He listed Akira!
From Wikipedia:
> The film had a production budget of ¥700 million ($5.5 million), making it the most expensive anime film at the time
> The film had a significant impact on popular culture worldwide, paving the way for the growth of anime and Japanese popular culture in the Western world
It uses "gestures and sounds which are taken from both natural and popular media sources, Pirici renders disparate forms of heritage and cultural memory, conceiving Aggregate as a time capsule in which fragments of vernacular culture, art history, and everyday life are given new, living embodiments."
I was surprised when out of a diverse selection of materials from world culture, the choreographer also chose to include the theme song from Ghost in the shell.
Donna Harraway's A Cyborg Manifesto is/was a widly read text in media studies. it could be one way many crative types are sure to have heard of Ghost in shell.
Thanks a lot for this reference. I am a professional dancer and phd student in machine learning and starting to combine these fields for an art project, but I wasn’t aware of Donna Harraway, this could actually be really helpful to me.
>Anime is not the dominant form of media in Japan, and is largely targeted at a relatively narrow age band
But it seems very popular, out of the top ten highest grossing films in Japan, 5 are anime (Spirited Away, Demon Slayer, Your Name, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle), and the top two are Spirited Away and Demon Slayer.
In North America's top ten you will only find one animated feature, Incredibles 2, and it is at position ten.
>> How many classical composers can you name? I doubt many people, even erudite
people, could push well beyond the basic frontier of Bach, Beethoven, and
Mozart.
Let me see- without asking the internet, off the top of my head:
Tchaikovsy
Wagner
Verdi
Vivaldi
Brahms
Schubert
Musorgsky
Skalkotas
Soshtakovich (spelling?)
Satie (sp?)
Rostropovich (sp.?)
The guy who wrote Hungarian Dances?
The guy who wrote Per Gynt?
The guy who wrote the opera Amleto?
Well I guess you're right. That's how many names I can conjure off the top of my
head after scratching it for five minutes. I would recognise another dozen names
or two though, with a bit more scratching.
Edit: OK, after looking up stuff, Brahms wrote Hungarian Dances but I was
thinking of Béla Bartók; Grieg wrote the _Peer_ Gynt suite (not Per Gynt); and
Franco Faccio wrote Amleto. Correct spellings: Shostakovich; Satie is correct;
and Rostropovich was a musician, but not a composer X)
Oh, crap- I forgot Dvorák. How could I fogret Dvorák?
I think the above is more evidence of my memory needing more coffee, than my
knowledge of classical composers.
... but I think you'd be surprised how many classical composers people who don't
consider themselves particularly erudite will know. I don't think you're right.
I have many friends who play classical music instruments and who listen to
classical and love it and know the composers' names almost as well as I know the
names of obscure black metal bands :)
Skipping the ones on your list: Ohkegem, Josquin Des Prez, Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Schutz, Rameau, Haydn, Telemann, Bachs who weren't J.S. or P.D.Q. (C.P.E. for example), Liszt, Chopin, a Johann and Richard Strauss, Mahler.
I am no musician, but my parents knew a fair bit about it, my wife does, and friend is into early music.
Aye, I should have remembered Haydn, Lizst, Chopin, the Strausses and Mahler, maybe Byrd, Telemann and Palestrina. I think you're cheating with the multiple Bachs though :P
Anime for kids is always mainstream content. Anime for non-kids is not mainstream but not very niche, it getting very popular for around 10-30s age people compared to around 2000. Pachinko and mobile games (both makes $$, publish ads) also contributes for otaku contents' popularity.
I can confirm this - back in 2017 we asked the owner of a guesthouse in Toyama we stayed in about his favorite anime/manga and what he said was Slamdunk, an older manga series about basketball - not even one of the blockbusters such as One Piece.
My theory is that most in Japan people get exposed to manga and anime at their school period but not many have time for it afterwards, resulting in them only knowing older series and possibly quite a bit of nostalgia.
Actually reminds me a bit of the current resurgence of retro gaming here in the West a bit.
Anime, yes. Manga, not so much. It's fairly common to see adult Japanese reading manga on the train, for instance.
The manga adult readers consume is not like the stuff we enjoy, like One Piece. Adult manga appears to fulfill the same role for Japanese that "airport fiction" does for us, and is broadly similar in genre: spy thrillers, workplace dramas, romance, etc. The art style is also way different, more mature and realistic with less broad caricature and more emphasis on adult rather than young/teenage characters.
> The most recognizable anime to a layperson in Japan is likely to be the big mega-blockbusters of various eras. I'd be more shocked if you said that no one had heard of Mobile Suit Gundam, Dragonball, Naruto, or Attack on Titan [which one they'd pick up on depends on their age]
Just think, somewhere in Japan there might've been a "Weird America" article in the late 90s about American male and female college students' fascination with Sailor Moon, which was clearly intended for little girls.
Two decades later, a followup might compare the Sailor Moon phenomenon with the fascination among adult American men for the Western series My Little Pony.
The Miyazaki films from Studio Ghibli would absolutely be well-recognized; Spirited Away remains the highest-grossing film in Japan. (I was sort of ignoring films in my analysis.)
I'd be somewhat surprised if literally nobody knew about Ghost in the Shell, but I bet you didn't use the Japanese title (攻殻機動隊, Koukaku Kidoutai). However, only big anime fans around here would have heard of that title (of which you're likely to find a bunch at Sony, though, but certainly not everyone).
The US puts late night anime on a pedestal, stuff that fans focus on. That's a big market in Japan, but not ubiquitous by any stretch if the imagination - and the names that become popular in the US are often very different to the names popular here, and often only after they've fallen out in Japan. Takeda-san doesn't know about FLCL.
Anime is part of daily culture in Japan and everyone knows about it, but for household names you need to go to long-running, popular shows that run in kid-friendly slots. Stuff like Pokemon, Precure, Detective Conan, etc. It is those long-running shows that become part of the collective consciousness, because everyone watched some of that when they were kids. Same with Ghibli movies and anything by Shinkai Makoto (Your Name, Weathering with You, etc). That, and truly impactful stuff like Evangelion, the Gundam franchise, Naruto, etc.
Then there's the fads. Everyone in Japan knows about Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) right now because they're doing tie-ups with seemingly every shop and business under the sun. Walk into any convenience store and they'll have branded snacks. Whether that series will survive to become something that people remember or not, time will tell.
Maybe to GP. The generic Japanese names in Japan are Yamada Tarō (male) and Yamada Hanako (female).
My Japanese textbook always had a Suzuki-san conversing with a Tanaka-san, who I guess were the equivalent of the stock characters "Marc" and "Sylvie" I kept meeting when learning French.
Well US tv anime viewer sees the (arguably) top 1% of anime from 10-20 years ago and there are huge followings for all of those in Japan but for the most part its drowned out by the constant deluge of mediocre content. Japanese anime fans tend to follow what is currently popular, it is a kind of disposable pop culture for the most part. You see this also with youtube vaporwave artists bringing back Japanese 80s city pop that no one remembers in Japan or if they do they just say “wow that song is so old”. I think the US in recent times has much bigger culture of curating classic pop culture.
When talking to Japanese people I sometimes surprise them by mentioning or recommending Japanese media or things about Japan I love that they didn't know about.
Likewise, when they talk about my country they sometimes mention stuff that I barely know!
This is usually good. It shows us what qualities about us are the most visible to other people, to build upon them or fix them.
Do you know Beautiful Sunday by Daniel Boone or Welcome to the Edge by Billie Hughes? I certainly don't.
Most of the others are played relentlessly in corner shops, malls and radio stations. I've heard so many Carpenters songs now I may as well be trapped in the 70s.
Ha! I showed up in Beijing in 2001 at the age of 22 or something, and was met with frank disbelief when I not only failed to sing along with "Yesterday Once More", but failed to recognize The Carpenters at all.
Maybe not the best example, but The Carpenters may be better known in Japan at this point than in the US. I think the first song by them that I ever heard was in Japan.
> As recently as 2009, another Carpenters retro album (40/40) reached No. 3 on Japan’s overall charts [1]
Polnareff was huge in native France. French artists from the 60s and 70s tended to be big all over Europe and some places in the Middle East and Asia, but completely ignored in the English-speaking world.
don't know if OP is referring specifically to some anime or anime in general but the 3 of the top 5 grossing films in japan are animes and animation is a fully developed medium for story telling of all ages.
if native japanese don't know about kimetsu i guess it's the same way my parents have definitely not watched a single marvel film, and i'm not sure if they are even aware of their existence.
Doraemon is a "cultural icon" and has been for decades.
Evangelion is debatable but the 25th anniversary has been present all year with a plethora of tie-ins.
At the very least, people not interested in Anime will recognize these as "oh that thing from [the konbini/I saw the voice actress on a game show/billboard/my child likes/the picture on my candy wrapper/etc]".
Possibly off topic but speaking of Evangelion tie-ins, here's a video about whether or not one one could live entirely off of Evangelion branded merchandise[0].
As far as I can tell Char refueks only at Eneos, Gundams use only a one well known blue antiperspirant and all Gundam pilots only eat ramen in that one place in Akiba.
But I'm sure I missed many more adds, tie ins and colabs. :)
This is akin to how Starcraft used to be portrayed as the national sport of South Korea. As to how popular it actually is, I've heard a good analogy: It's similar to pro wrestling in the US, in that most people are aware that it exists, but only a niche group actually follows it.
People often apply what they learn from anime as if it were the reality of life in Japan too. You would think Japan were still fuedal with the amount people attribute honor to the cultural norms of Japan. It is far more intentional and curated than a penchant for honor. I think perhaps we can miss some lessons in community values by seeing it so narrowly.
I don't watch anime but I do love visiting Japan, and that has often stuck out to me with friends.
We were actually very surprised many times how certain stuff we encountered in Japan was 100% as seen in anime - for example matsuri, maid cafes, onsen towns, shrines, small countryside seaside towns, arcades or Hanabi.
There's plenty of people here in the US who don't know about those either. While Anime is much more widely popular now in the US than it was even 10 years ago it's still a niche for sure and within that I still have to tell people what FLCL is, not so much the others though.
My point being is it is still a subculture idolizing another subculture. I don't think you can say that is a US wide issue.
If you came to Japan you'd also need to tell people here what FLCL is - really, the only ones your typical mainstream Japanese person would know if prompted are the most famous, classic ones they might have seen as children like Doraemon, One Piece, Conan, Anpanman. It really is a niche.
Reading light novels - of which manga is a respected category - is proportionately more popular in Japan. Rurouni Kenshin selling something like 70 million copies of the manga by some old record I saw.
Anime programming on TV is a fact of life and not something people need to be "into". But that is to say that there is a lot more dramas and mundane animated programming that wouldn't have an economic rationale outside of Japan. A lot of it falls by the way side and then later turns out to appeal to Western audiences, even more rarely circling back to Japan for a closer look.
The anime subculture is niche in Japan. ie. The niche where people collect merchandise and have whole shelfs on display as a point of pride. That garners the same discomfort from the general population and potential dates as it would in the West.
That being said, the western market is MASSIVE as it is just a larger market and vibrant economy. Something doing "okay" in the US would be the same as shattering records in a Japan-only release. So enterprisers can resyndicate all the crap over to here and see what sticks.
So it sounds like a lot of anime popular in the West is the equivalent of a low budget made-for-tv movie in the US hitting paydirt with a foreign audience. I guess that makes sense, I'm sure that happens too.
I wouldn't quite say that. The US imports virtually no live-action series or films from foreign language countries, and relatively little even from other English-speaking countries. So we extrapolate the tastes of the entire country from what is a relatively small market share.
Imagine trying to judge US culture solely on the basis of shows like The Simpsons, Futurama, and South Park. These aren't low-quality shows, but they're also nowhere near fully reflective of the entertainment that people consume in the US.
US sees most of the highest budget anime and from the largest studios. US entrepreneurs that started as enthusiasts are basically financing a lot of it directly and through syndication agreements.
But there are tons of IP that is ignored and not syndicated abroad and there are tons more in the manga and book form.
Although many western anime fans are curious about Japanese customs, the west likes the style more and resonates with things that have broader appeal to western interests. Essentially, not-Japan, or resonating with anime-style works from western studios and directors. I’m sure we can think of an exception here or there but anime about mundane life in Japan is not popular outside of a Japan.
Wow, I had no idea who Kenshin was, and having looked him up it seems crazy that his penalty for child porn was only a few thousand dollars, production of child porn was legal in Japan until 1999, and possession remained legal for another 15 years.
May be oversimplification but I reason that this stems from the two cultures having opposed attitudes towards the "weird":
USA: focus on, make fun of, pretend niche is bigger than it is
Japan: pretend it doesn't exist, ignore
That may allow some Japanese to indulge in weirder stuff that would not be tolerated in the US, but what Americans may not understand is that this stuff is still seen as weird/non-conforming/shameful by most Japanese.
EDIT: Genuinely interested as to the reason for the downvotes. Plain wrong? Just stupid?
> The people telling these tales aren’t interested in complexities or, really, in China. They’re making domestic arguments and expressing parochial fears. Their China isn’t a real place but a rhetorical trope, less a genuine rival than a fairy-tale bogeyman.
> [But] when we treat China as a fantasyland of instruction for ourselves, we end up ignoring the Chinese. Like Voltaire’s mandarins or the happy peasants of Maoist propaganda, they cease to be real people and become perfect puppets deployed for rhetorical ends.
I read it having just arrived in China after many years away and it helped contextualized just how vastly different the China was that appeared in even sophisticated English language publications and the raw truth on the ground.
It gave me a powerful lens to critically analyze media from, about how people are reduced to symbols to feed a story that the audience wants to believe rather than the data driven complexity of real ground truth.
The same is true for the rest of the world too. Americans seem to know two things about Germany: the war and the wall, and they don't know that much about either. It really shows when reddit discusses Germany, because they see everything through that pinhole. Reporters are hardly better.
Hell, I live in Germany, and I can't pretend to know much about rural life there, despite leaving the city more often than the average Berliner. I was stunned by the NPD's slogans, because they never reached Berlin.
I could also say the same about America. I only know reddit's America, and perhaps a few things from living just north of the border. The Internet gave me false confidence in my understanding of America.
Bottom line is you shouldn't use a few headlines convince you that you understand how things run in another country. You also can't judge their actions based on your culture and your legal system.
> Barrett was a known plagiarist before The Atlantic granted her the assignment
This here is the problem. Back in my days being caught plagiarizing or faking facts basically expelled you from publishing for life. Journalists will only start caring about facts ones the consequences for getting caught are high enough.
This surprises me too. Particularly since traditional media seem to be struggling and have endured decades of falling profits and belt-tightening. You'd imagine that competition for journalist positions would be tight and one of the easiest "filters" would be "Did this person leave a recent job because of plagiarism?"
I've lived in Japan going on six years and was initially surprised by how ordinary things were - and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, there's an element of truth to some of these articles but you have to go looking hard to find it.
Only visited Tokyo briefly, but I found everything remotely odd the result of (1) history, or (2) having to find a way to live harmoniously around that many other people (and they with you).
"Odd" implies that the familiar is "normal", which tends towards there being a right and wrong way to do mundane things. If I came over to your house and said "that's an odd way to clean your house" you would reasonably assume that I think you're doing it wrong but am being polite.
If they'd said "surprising", "confusing", or "unfamiliar", those are all statements that are relative to the speaker's experience.
I was running around japan for a while with a group of americans and japanese college students. Never felt anything like culture shock.
Until one day two of the young male japanese students asked in hushed tones if it was true that the extremely flamboyant guy in our group was gay. Kinda weird, but ok, maybe that's just not something that's culturally normal to acknowledge in Japan. They then continued, saying they were concerned that, since they were unable to get dates, they would become gay.
> I've lived in Japan going on six years and was initially surprised by how ordinary things were
I've visited Japan many times over the years, during my first time I was amazed by it all. Even though I spend many years in Asia at that point, and had gotten used to the culture, Tokyo was different. After a few days that feeling wore off, and the things that were different compared to other cities just became normal. I went back last year, and I'm still amazed by the city, but there's not really many things that stand out anymore.
But one thing I've learned after almost 10 years in Asia, things that look "weird" to Westerners, are often completely normal to people living in Asia. And things that are "normal" in the West might be weird to people in Asia. (That really goes for any kind of cultural difference)
Not trying start an off topic thread but game shows seem to push for bizarre. I recall german game shows being on par with the clips I've seen from Japanese game shows.
I think journalism is falling into a death spiral of “publish-popular-clickable-articles” or perish. Journalists no longer have the time to truly dig into a story, to fact check it, and to make sure it’s written accurately. They get behind, they get desperate, and they fall into these traps - self-made or otherwise.
It also seems that there is generally a shorter collective memory about veracity in news stories. The prime example to me is Bloomberg's seemingly baseless story alleging Chinese hardware-level hacking of US computing equipment. More than two years later, and Bloomberg still has not retracted the story [1]. It doesn't seem to me that Bloomberg has been discounted as a reliable source of news in the general discourse due to their reluctance to admit to their mistakes in their reporting of this story. At least in this case there is an apology.
Frankly, I think this view is incredibly popular, and misinformed about the state of journalism. There was a time, about a little over a decade ago where ad-supported journalism was considered the future, and companies like Buzzfeed started to emerge. Companies started optimizing for page views to boost their revenue and the explosion in clickbait happened.
However, even by 2011 Buzzfeed had started to try to pivot to more long-form content hiring the former editor in cheif of Politico.
By 2015 we saw the "Pivot to video" where outlets had identified that this clickbait stuff had really run it's course and were now moving to video as a way to bring in viewers and revenue. Of course that notoriously failed - having cut editorial staff to focus on video production, it was only about 24 months before they were cutting video production too because it produced no revenue. Vox Media cut 5% of their staff at the beginning of 2018.
So let's look at what actually is happening in the news media today: The Atlantic, TNR, NYT, WashPo. All of them are marketing themselves as high value premium products that are funded almost exclusively by subscription revenue. The new media companies that are still persisting with an advertising strategy are bringing their ad-networks in house and attempting to hit scale in a way that let's them compete with Facebook. The jury is still very much out on whether that's viable of whether they end up being forced to merge or being bought out by a large player like Spotify.
We aren't in the death spiral of chasing views anymore, we're very much back in a stable area where high quality content is available if you're willing to pay for it. The problem is that people are still judging the NYT by what they see on Buzzfeed - because they don't pay for the NYT and assume it's like Buzzfeed. It's going to take a while for the reputations to recover but we do need to actually understand the business as it is today.
There are too many myths peddled about Japan, internally and externally, to list here, and the article provides just one more example. It's not just the media's desire to draw wide ranging conclusions from specific, interesting stories, but also due to Japanese culture itself, a culture of putting appearances before truth, conveniently wrapped up in the (ironically) anodyne phrase "don't disturb the wa". One dangerous example being the distortion of the truth about COVID-19 spread in the run up to the Olympics. I expect the same over the next few months.
As to the larger picture though, I'm not sure why anyone trusts journalists nowadays. In an age of greater access to information their previous stranglehold on "the truth" has repeatedly been shown to be a sham and trusting factcheckers seems to be repeating exactly the same mistake over again but with added naïveté - "Oh, they're factcheckers, that must be true! Giving them that title immediately renders these humans incapable of bias…". The article even wants us to continue to swallow the blatant lie that some reasonably large proportion of stories go through a "rigorous fact-checking process" and even then couldn't withstand lies from sources. Please, you may as well tell me Santa is really going to drop off my presents this year, which would nice given the chaos at ports (thanks again, COVID-19 and lies about contagion).
The "age of big data" and democratised access to data and communication (something that governments and media companies, old and new, have been seeking to reverse) has inadvertently created an "age of epistemology" for which most seem unprepared, journalists being among the least prepared.
>As to the larger picture though, I'm not sure why anyone trusts journalists nowadays.
I see HN has imported the cynicism of the 2020 slashdot crowd. I'm sick and tired of this viewpoint.
Your false dichotomy is eyerolling - either we have total faith in all stories we read, with zero attention to detail and context, or we condemn all journalists as hacks, bad faith actors, and relics of the past: That knowledge is either meaningless, or easily compiled and comprehended in its raw format to the layman.
We need journalism. And in the new century where we will have stronger disinformation campaigns, better deepfakes, and the potential collapse of local news as we know it, "trust" in institutions and particular sources, based on their track record and credibility, will be all we have. Not everything is verifiable, and we as humans need to act on information we can't verify all the time.
So instead of going on about how all journalists suck, let's call out errors and bad work when we see it, and continue to push for better journalism and new ways of researching, citing, and reporting facts.
I didn't claim that all journalists suck. Please try not to fall prey to black and white thinking when you're accusing someone of it.
> We need journalism.
I agree.
> let's call out errors
I agree.
> and bad work when we see it
I do and am.
> and continue to push for better journalism and new ways of researching, citing, and reporting facts
I agree again. I didn't write "all journalists suck" but since you seem to think I did, how would it be mutually exclusive with needing journalism, calling out errors etc and pushing for better journalism? That would interest me.
Essentially, when I read someone say "I don't know why anyone trusts journalists anymore", I triage the comment into the alt-right and/or nihilist folder.
I know why we trust journalists. Because a number of them, though imperfect, do fantastic work reporting on the events of the world. Anyway. No big deal. I tend to see this sentiment bubbling up here, and it concerns me.
Agreed but it's not just Japan but pretty much every country in the world. And all countries do the same to each other. Projecting their own fears and insecurities into others.
I have always been thinking what the role fact-checkers act in our way of consuming information. Every time I see "fact-checkers" exist it is to reiterate the view of the readers, or even worse, to assert bias.
It's like critical thinking is never taught to or discovered by them.
> One dangerous example being the distortion of the truth about COVID-19 spread in the run up to the Olympics. I expect the same over the next few months.
Can you give an example? I read a lot of speculation on the internet that there was some conspiracy by the Japanese government to conceal the extent of covid infections prior to the Olympics, but have yet to see any concrete evidence.
In fact, I would give Japan pretty high marks for their handling of pandemic thus far. They rank 140 in world currently in deaths per 1M population [1] (meaning 139 countries have suffered more deaths), despite taking a fairly soft stance toward lock downs. And in my opinion the government has done a good job delivering clear and consistent messaging about the number of new infections, what actions they are taking to prevent the spread of the virus, what types of things residents should avoid doing, etc. [2]
Living here I find their messaging contradictory and confusing. You should social distance—but we'll give you discounts on eating out, the more people the bigger the discount (Go To Eat Campaign)! But actually you should stay home... but hey if you travel around the country we'll give you steep discounts on your hotels and local expenses (Go To Travel Campaign)!!
Coupled with the articles earlier on in the pandemic talking about doctors being unable to give their patients COVID tests (which may have had more to do with limited supplies or the lack of treatment capability, to be fair) [1][2][3]; as well as the pretty high cost of getting a negative PCR test result here (I got a test, tested positive (minor case), and it was covered by national insurance for around $15; but my friends who tested negative after coming in contact with me, paid about $300 each for their tests) leads me to think the published numbers are probably pretty inaccurate.
I'm not really complaining as society seems to be functioning fine, but if the numbers were worse I would be.
If Japan were not doing enough testing, you would expect to see a high positivity rate on PCR tests. But positivity rates have been relatively low. Well under 10% since April, and even under 5% for much of the year [1].
A 5% positivity rate or lower is the WHO’s recommendation for when countries can begin to loosen restrictions [2]. Currently the rate is above 5% in Japan which is a concern. We are starting to see the government take measures to curb the spread, by suspending “Go To Travel” subsidies over New Years for example. And they have said they will do more if necessary. And fortunately growth seems to at least have leveled off a bit in recent weeks.
I can[1], it reached the HN frontpage a while ago. As to concrete evidence, I obviously don't have it but it might be hard to acquire:
> The ministry has admitted tampering with paperwork to make it tally with testimony given in parliament, and on Wednesday admitted orders were given to destroy documents for the same reason, according to a document distributed to reporters by opposition lawmaker Osaka.
And it's not as if I would believe the figures anyway, from [3]:
> According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, there were some 3,700 “unaccompanied deaths” in Japan in 2013. However, other experts estimate the number is nearer 30,000 a year.
Why is there such a disparity between the figures academics are claiming which would embarass the government and those that the government are claiming? How are we supposed to measure the impact of COVID-19 with such low testing and no idea what the expected death tally to have been?
It's not as if things like that are isolated cases of government numbers going awry. I ask myself, would the Japan government go ahead with something even if it endangered large numbers of people but brought money or prestige? The answer appears to be yes[4].
> They based their claim on a 2002 report in which government experts estimated there was a one in five chance of a magnitude-8 earthquake occurring and triggering a powerful tsunami within the next 30 years.
> At the time of the disaster, Japan’s nuclear regulator was severely criticised for its collusive ties with the nuclear industry, resulting in the formation of a new watchdog that has imposed stricter criteria for the restart of nuclear reactors that were shut down in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.
So, in the face of all that (and more) I'm of the opinion that they were doing their best not to scupper the Olympics. I'm willing to be proven wrong but I'm not going to wait for absolute proof to fall in my lap, I'm not sentencing anyone to prison.
Your first citation complains about incompetence in the presentation of data, but does not suggest any sort of attempt at a coverup.
Your last three citations have nothing to do with covid. They are about a real-estate scandal involving Prime Minister Abe, an article from 2015 about people dying alone, and an article from 2017 about the Fukushima nuclear disaster. There is nothing remotely convincing here to back up your assertions that the government is hiding something.
Furthermore, if there were more people dying from covid than official records suggest, you would see it show up as excess mortality. But Japan has seen very little excess mortality in 2020. [1]
> Your last three citations have nothing to do with covid.
They wouldn't. The subject of my comment is the government's competence and trustworthiness with respect to COVID-19.
> Furthermore, if there were more people dying from covid than official records suggest, you would see it show up as excess mortality. But Japan has seen very little excess mortality in 2020
Strange, because one of my “last 3 citations that have nothing to do with covid” addresses that point.
Number 3.
> How are we supposed to measure the impact of COVID-19 with such low testing and no idea what the expected death tally to have been?
Now to the part you definitely read:
> Your first citation complains about incompetence in the presentation of data, but does not suggest any sort of attempt at a coverup.
That incompetence is part of a pattern of behaviour (which was the point of those "nothing to do with covid" citations) that, if I were a cynical man, would almost appear designed to make it difficult to hold the government to account, of which there is also a pattern of behaviour[1]:
> Not in dispute is Abe’s aggressive campaign against press freedom.
> Japan plunged from 22nd to 66th in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index over the course of [Abe's] second premiership
This in particular may account for the lack of a smoking gun:
> The 2014 Protection of Specially Designated Secrets Act weakened freedom of information rights and criminalized whistleblowing. Government bureaucrats could face up to 10 years imprisonment for leaking state secrets, while journalists who published such secrets could face five years in jail.
The article is a long and damning indictment of the way Abe's government (and Suga is included too) has restricted press freedom.
So we have a government that is:
- ostensibly incompetent in the way it supplies data and information
- aggressively and illegally restricts information leaks
- openly bullies the media into silence
- has ignored huge dangers to the public before, in pursuit of money or prestige
But you say we should ignore all of this because it's got "nothing to do with covid"? No, I'm not going to do that as I share the mayor of Futuba's[2] impression, "I strongly mistrust the government".
As I wrote previously, I'm not sending anyone to prison so I don't need to meet a ridiculous standard of proof. If Abe and his minions were on trial then I would, and they probably should be for several things if not this.
Alternatives are difficult, I agree, though I believe they exist. It's possible to distrust, or at the least, be sceptical of information or the intentions of those providing information while also consuming and acting upon that information.
To push for greater freedom of speech, and hence privacy protections, while also pushing for greater transparency from powerful entities would be my political recipe for helping the general state of things.
The Atlantic and The New Yorker are both first class magazines and I would expect nothing less of them to deal with their mistakes in a public and accountable fashion. Contrast their response that of many mainstream magazines that never post a correction, much less a retraction.
I started to read only good “quality” news and magazines recently. Here’s my list so far: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New Republic.
Anything similar to those genres that I’m missing that you or anyone else would recommend?
BBC for news, and if you like longform articles, California Sunday Magazine and Texas Monthly both have fantastic long form articles. This one about the "Pom" juice pomegranate farming family is incredible: https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-du...
my absolute personal favorites are the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Less magazines, more papers - of long form literary and cultural essays on eclectic topics.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan. I never observed the weird stereotypes, but I did experience obsessions. No niche was too big or small for Japanese fanatics: French wine, MMA, video games, etc.
Did you find these obsessions to be more common than e.g. in the US or Europe? It seems we have a lot of people who are weirdly obsessive about their niche hobbies / interests as well...
From my few years of experience here in Tokyo, what I feel is that an obsession about something here (being an otaku) doesn't have a negative connotation in most cases, whereas in the US, being a "fanatic" is generally not usually a positive term.
It seems like it would be easier now than ever before! A source who wants to get their lies published can create entire networks of fake web pages that appear to back up their claims.
If anyone is interested in how Japan was viewed by American and British visitors more than a century ago, I have put together an anthology called "Japan As They Saw It" at http://gally.net/jatsi/
When I visited Japan over 10 years ago much of what I thought strange has since become normal. The exaggerated fear of criminals, even though Japan is very safe. Very low interest rates and lots of public debt. In the wealthier parts of Japan newspapers featured articles on flu, with maps and graphs charting its activity. Many people wore masks and if I coughed in public people would take a wide path around me and look at me as if I were a barbarian. Exactly like it is in Europe now.
In terms of having an old population Japan was more than 10 years ahead of Europe. So it makes sense Japan was the future Europe.
If we set aside superficial differences such as language and mannerisms, I never thought we're all that different from Americans, Germans, etc. — we're just humans living in the same modern, capitalistic world. Maybe we were different in the feudal era, but not anymore.
But very few people have the ability to overcome those superficial differences.
Oh, really. Like, for instance, the Japanese polytheism is a "superficial difference" with the European monotheism?
I don't think so. If it was all superficial, it wouldn't be called "culture" and we would not a make such a big deal out of it. I will certainly disagree with you on some things because our cultures are different.
You yourself fall into "forests are just trees" trap, and it doesn't matters if some kind of mushroom can grow in my forest and some other in your forest. Worse, you seem to give up to the idea that "modern capitalistic world" will make all the forests the same anyway - hopefully you don't believe it is for the better (or rather, hopefully you do!).
I think you underestimate the role of culture because you misunderstand the culture of others. Perhaps because a culture is made of thousands of big and little differences, and its difficult to see how they affects people's daily choices or behavior.
Not quite sure what you’re getting at, I never said there were no differences between cultures.
However the differences are often overstated, and with regards to Japanese culture some people seem to harbor strange preconceptions that make them blind to rather obvious falsehoods, leading to debacles like the New Yorker article described in OP. It goes both ways of course; a lot of Japanese people seem to have bizarre ideas about the US for example, perhaps I would too if I hadn’t lived there for a decade. It’s easy to form a skewed image of Americans if your knowledge only came from Hollywood films.
I’d say that in general, the more years you spend immersed in cultures outside of your own, the more you’ll be able to see beneath the surface and appreciate how similar we all are — for better or worse. Just look at the number of comments in this thread from (presumably) Western expats pointing out how "ordinary" Japan is in reality. That realization comes from actually living here and being directly exposed to the culture. Not from watching anime.
I have this book written by a sociologist in 2019 that has been living over thirty years in Japan. The title is (translated) "Chronicle of an ordinary Japan".
With this book you understand better how NYT could fall for the "weird Japan" thing, because she reports that a company offers indeed weird services, like hiring people for marriages (as guests, not staff).
Maybe she independently fell for the same scam (unlike the rest of the book, this particular anecdote has no source, it might be just a short-lived company), but the rest of the book is actually quite depressing.
And more to the point, it seems to me that the combination of an unfavorable economic context and certain conservative ways of thinking is what is driving Japan into aging (at least faster than the other rich countries).
How can you distinguish a superficial difference from a significant difference?
I find an interesting rural/urban divide in non-fiction portrayals of Japan. I only knew/spent time in rural Japan, which in my own "essentializing" imagination is indeed the Japan of Miyazaki and some of the great 20th century novelists. The romance of bumping along a mountain road in a little truck! But the Japan of these "high-brow" magazines is always extremely urban.
I think that the perception runs both ways - many Japanese people here enjoy being recognized as "polite", "super clean" and "obsessively precise", etc throughout the globe.
And for some weird things - eating raw squid or raw egg for example - people are secretly relieved as Westerners never understand the "true Japanese delicacy". It gives people a sense of superiority.
I'm cutting through with Hanlon's Razor: the journalist herself is a foreigner living in US, which is a pretty weird country if you weren't born there. This makes the necessary additional logical jump way smaller to believe Japan also has different weird things going on.
Anglocentric chauvinism has always had a gross habit of looking at other cultures in a patronizing way. Though to be fair other cultures are guilty of this too when viewing those different than them.
Ever since antiquated Orientalism, it's rarely been an honest curiosity but more of a high-nosed "what's wrong with them" or seen as an exotic escape from the West's own mundanity.
The latter of course often ends in disillusionment, prompting generalized complaints about the object of fetish (if you lurk on any expat forums you may know what I'm talking about).
It can be really annoying to other people, specially when they have to either live up to some stupid assumption or defend against it.
Surly noone in the orient ever expressed such opinions, least of which the japanese --known throughout asia and the world for their love and admiration of other races -- which is why the west is in desperate need to turn the lookingglass around and cleanse itself from all forms of racism, which it is uniquely capable of doing. Other races needn't play in this game.
One could say that this is merely the continuation of chauvinistic anglocentrism by other means, but to do so would embarass self-professed "anti-racists", hence white supermacy gets a new lease on life deep within the liberal mindset that nominally opposes it.
“japanese--known throughout asia and the world for their love and admiration of other races”
Tell that to anyone actually living in Asia and most will absolutely scoff at you. There is too much historical baggage about what horrifying things the Japanese did to other Asians during its colonial era (early to mid 20th century), especially with regards to Korea and China. Japanese resentment is still highly noticeable in countries where they colonized and raped them.
To be fair, wasn't Japan invaded first? A few times.
The "West" has had the longest record of invading other nations, forcibly "opening ports", or just generally intruding into and screwing up countries in other ways besides war.
The Opium Wars are one of the more appalling examples. Literally invading a country because they don't want to buy your narcotics? What the fuck.
How tiresome. Every time a conversation regarding this topic is discussed, we always have someone arrive to graciously remind us how Asian People Are The Real Racists.
Im no expert, but from what Ive read, some of the imperialistic ideas and hiarchy of races ideas in Japan do have their roots in a historical period where Japan's Eliets were looking to Europe for a model of how to be a part of the world.
I tend to see chauvinism as either aware or self-aware. The French would be an example of self-aware arrogance, whereas the anglosphere tends to be completely unaware and this leads to patronizing attitudes. It's interesting to see the effects of this difference.
There’s a huge bias in the US towards taking niche cultural phenomena in Japan and putting them on a pedestal.