Figuring out what ails a country other than one’s own often comes to feel like a self-diagnosis of sorts. You notice this societal trend, or observe that odd pop cultural phenomenon, and just when you think that you’ve finally sorted out why-it’s-happening-right-now-in-the-precise-manner-in-which-it-appears, you see something that seems to contradict everything you’d finally assumed to be sacrosanct, leading you back to the inside of your own psyche. Perhaps you don’t know everything you thought you did about this place. Maybe it’s all in your own head.
The 2023 book ニッポンの闇 (”Japan’s Darkness’) remains, despite its rather dire and portentous title, an ultimately entertaining conversation between two people who know a hell of a lot about Japan, casually covering a wide range of topics, from linguistics to culture, scandal to religion, in such a way that Japanese readers will be able to think about their society in ways that will probably both confirm and confront their own sacred cows, while also allowing foreign readers and residents to get a little more insight into a country that seems to get more difficult for outsiders to comprehend with each passing year.
(Unless that, too, is simply a trope that resides only in our individual skulls?)
Japanese publishing has a long history of putting out 対談 (‘taidan’, or ‘conversation’ ) books at fairly regular intervals, of which is this is one.
The format:
Usually two prominent people in Japanese society, each from different fields of interest, are thrown together in a room to chat about a topic that is not specifically related to their own professional purview.
Here we have Nobuko Nakano, a Japanese neuroscientist and author, and Dave Spector, an American television タレント (‘talent’).
In this book-length, chat, not all that much personal or professional information is provided about Nakano, other than the fact that she specializes in neuroscience, and has written a previous book dealing with the psychology behind, and ethics surrounding, infidelity. She provides the ‘intellectual’ or ‘academic’ side of the conversational equation here; Spector is the media-face that almost every Japanese viewer instantly recognizes, as he has dominated the morning talk show circuit for a good forty years, in addition to running his own production company.
I used to think that Spector’s main talent was simply that he spoke phenomenal Japanese. (When he first came to prominence, in the early 1980s, such a communicative, telegenic skill for a foreigner was still relatively rare in the Japanese media market.) Check out his Twitter page to see the onslaught of genuinely clever Japanese-language puns he jots down on a continuous basis and you’ll quickly understand how agile he is with his second-tongue. However, language-ability aside, he also always has, in between goofy hi-jinks, some interesting (to me, anyways) takes on whatever is happening in Japan or the world.
(A minor linguistic factoid: Throughout the book, when Nakano speaks, they identify her by her last name; when Spector gives his two takes, he’s given the first-name heading デーブ (‘Dave’). I don’t think this is meant to be disrespectful (although I think it sort of is), but rather an indication of how foreigners in Japan in the media are often, almost unthinkingly, placed in sort a safe, friendly, familiar pocket; Patrick Harlan, another notable American commentator with excellent Japanese, is usually introduced as パックン (‘Pakkun’), making him sound oh-so-cuddly and unthreatening.)
In his introduction, Spector admits that the title is a rather a grim one, albeit suitable, he believes, for the conversation to follow, as the book will get into such topics as タブー (‘taboos’) and コンプライアンス (‘compliance’) –the former referencing those tricky things that the Japanese public are not supposed to talk about, and the latter referring to the manner in which many citizens automatically obey what they are told to obey.
These are much weightier topics, Spector admits, than his previous book from a decade ago, which was a collection of his humorous tweets. Since the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear meltdown of 2011, he’s felt the need for a more substantial book in which he might explore more enlightening topics than a good pun will allow. People now are not as 元気 (‘genki’, or ‘energetic’), he feels. Such widespread malaise needs some intellectual massage.
One such topic of concern has to do with the scandal behind the mammoth Japanese entertainment company known as ‘Johnny’s’, in which it was revealed that the president of the organization, Johnny Kitagawa, had been forcing his clients — all of them males, and many of them underage — to engage in sexual favors in order to ‘help’ their music careers stay afloat.
Nakano and Spector discuss how these recent ‘revelations’, which came to light in a BBC documentary, were not exactly new; specific accusations and lawsuits had been brewing for over two decades, but the mainstream press would never report about it to any great depth. (Investigative reporting itself is almost non-existent in Japan, at least compared to western journalism.) However, the BBC expose, widely viewed on YouTube, forced the Japanese media to finally confront the issue, head-on, but the whole sordid situation is an example of how Japan tends to sweep controversial situations under the proverbial rug if they coincide and conflict with the financially powerful; in Japan, entertainment companies have far more power than their clients, unlike in Hollywood, where the inverse is true, and no wants to cross them — not even news organizations.
This sort of passive ‘compliance’ is indicative of how much broader meaning the world itself wields in the Japanese language, how much more wide-ranging the nuance. In discussing the Japanese language, our two conversationalists both note how the Japanese public tend to take for granted the words that they use, but Spector, as a foreigner learner of Japanese, and Nakano, as a female researcher into the brain’s inner workings, are both, in a sense, outsiders in Japanese society; they are not part of the everyday, ‘salaryman’ norm. They are willing, and required, to gaze deeper.
So it’s no surprise that so much of their conversation is simply about language itself.
Spector explains how he learned Japanese from his Japanese childhood friend while growing up in Chicago as they both pored over manga ever day, the Japanese child teaching the American lad what every word mean. As a boy, Spector visited Japan with his friend’s family; in 1973, he would live there for a year on a student exchange. In the early 1980s, after marrying a Japanese woman and working as a television producer in Los Angeles, Spector, by then fluent in Japanese, often travelled to Japan to report on their gonzo variety shows for American news programs, eventually realizing that he could make his own space in that very same market.
An unabashed lover of the Japanese language, Spector states that he used to memorize thirty new words a day; now he’s down to three. He reads around fifty books a year, and can always spot fellow commentators who don’t read much at all. They are not as quick-on-the-fly as Spector is, one assumes.
(Indeed, in her afterward, Nakano remarks how pleasant their conversation was, but also how challenging it was, given that Spector is such a fast speaker, over such wide-ranging topics — all the more remarkable, Nakano marvels, given that Japanese is his second language! Of course, one has to take this high praise with more than a few grains of salt, as the Japanese are notorious for praising any foreigner who speaks even one of Japanese as being better speakers than they themselves are.)
The two of them discuss the roots of the word 馬鹿 (‘bakka, or ‘idiot’), and precisely why the characters for ‘horse’ and ‘deer’ came together to represent ‘moron’; Spector explains why he so loves the word ‘love’ (恋愛, or ‘renai’); they analyze how common it’s become for katakana words to replace their original kanji-compositions, citing in the media how often ホームレス (‘homeless’) is used, but rarely 浮浪者 (‘furousha’), though both mean the same thing; and they also delve into how some individual words (and, by extension, concepts) are so culturally specific, bringing up 社会人 (‘shakaijin’, or ‘member of society’) as an example of a word that has no strict counterpart in English.
I might add that this kind of conversation does not come across as merely another minor intellectual offshoot of the sort of Japanese non-fiction devoted to extolling the ‘specialness’ of Japan, its language, and its people — often referred to, somewhat mockingly by western Japanologists, as 日本人論 (‘nihonjinron’) — but rather a way of, almost nonchalantly, pointing out how how language is used to classify concepts in western countries that often have no one-to-one counterpart in Japan. (And vice-versa, of course.)
It’s (obviously) not only the language that’s different, though.
Circling back to the notion of ‘compliance’, the two of them talk about the lack of any widespread, meaningful protest culture in Japan. It hasn’t been non-existent, they admit, but the last time it had any societal oomph was during the student protests of the Vietnam War, over fifty years ago. There’s no equivalent, they say, of the emphatic Stonewall activism for gay rights that occurred in the U.S. in the Seventies, or even of the ongoing manner in which the French seem perfectly willing to protest any injustice (and industry) that they see fit for upheaval.
Perhaps, our authors think, this lack of civic engagement has to do with an overall reticence in Japan to speak out, stand out.
Spector states how Americans have no trouble asking each other which political party they support — and they have no hesitation in answering. (Unheard of, in Japan!)
In discussing the lack of bona fide religious belief in Japan (which Spector, as a non-believer, finds quite amenable), Nakano states that, in a country with multiple gods, nobody feels comfortable talking about their own beliefs in religion, especially entertainers. (I’m reminded of a former of a student of mine, a retired executive in his seventies, who told me that it was only when attending the funeral of his co-worker of fifty years and seeing the style of the ceremony did he realize that the man had been a Christian.) In the west, Spector says, a commitment to organized religion has traditionally been something that requires what I guess you could call ‘proof-of-spiritual-purchase’ — weekly attendance, observance, etc. In Japan, as Nakano reminds him, any ongoing religious feelings have been integrated into daily life, via ritual, customs, ceremonies.
Their strongest feelings in this entire discussion have to do with the interconnectedness of Japanese life itself, or rather the disconnect that seems to be pretty much the norm.
Spector (half-jokingly, I think) blames Steve Jobs and his creation of the iPhone. They both lament the fact that everybody now finds eternal refuge, not in religion or family, but in their own electronic cocoon.
Nobody wants to date, let alone have a relationship; given the ubiquity of apps for any desire one might possibly possess, a sex-partner-for-the-night is much easier to arrange. There is now no longer any kind of communal place where people can get together, assemble, speak freely to another. (Spector says he’ll talk to anybody on the elevator, but that’s not a skill that most people, in Japan or elsewhere, readily wield!) People just want to, by and large, be by themselves, just ‘Nextflix and chill’.
No wonder the birthrate is dropping, they lament; it’s not that nobody wants to have kids — it’s that everybody wants to be alone.
Still, I can’t help but think that free-flowing, wide-ranging conversations like these are, at the very least, some kind of a start. The format here resembles what a podcast has become, you could say (although podcasts as a whole are still not all that popular in Japan). Just two people talking, getting sidelined.
(I especially liked the rather grim, offroad-subject of Spector speculating on how he’ll be cremated, and where he’ll be interred — in the famous Yokohama Foreigners’ Cemetery, perhaps, or maybe nicely sprinkled in the ocean, as he did with his mother’s remains in the Florida sea a few years back. Will anyone come to my funeral, Spector wonders, and Nakano quickly asserts that for sure she will go. Bring potato chips, he tells her, in lieu of flowers. This joke is a call-back to an earlier point in the conversation where they talked about how religion defers satisfaction until some immeasurably distant afterlife, whereas they both feel it’s better to find joy wherever, and whenever can, right in front of one. Hence the potato chips.)
By the end of the book, we’ve eavesdropped on all kinds of anxieties and affirmations regarding language and media and religion and society. Sometimes the book zigs when you think it’ll zag, but Japanese conversation (not to mention non-fiction books) often makes room for a little more leeway; you can roam around a fair bit.
I’ve often said that English requires us to narrow all of our thoughts down into a bullet-point style of this-is-what-I-think-now form of intellectual address, whereas Japanese instead seeks to extract all of the free-ranging thoughts swirling around in her head and present them out into the world willy-nilly, letting the ideas land where they may.
That’s an overstatement, of course, and even though I’m sure this conversation has been edited for clarity and overall entertainment-value, it still has an elastic, organic feel. Some of the ideas I’d heard before, and many were quite new, but I’m satisfied to discover that some of my own long-held opinions on Japan are no longer merely in my head alone. Other people think them, say them. Refute them, even.
It’s all good.
There may, indeed, be a kind of deep darkness that Japan finds itself steadily etching to eradicate, but words passed from one to the other can’t help give off their own light. If we would simply in engage with one another on a semi-regular basis, occasionally throwing into the conversation our own two cents (or yen) on the topic, we might even discover that, at least for now, the visible human aura around all of us is a little less dim.
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