At Home with John and Debbie

Peter Carey’s Wrong About Japan has been in my Amazon wishlist since it came out in hardback (wouldn’t it be nice if it could automatically update hardback items to paperback editions when they become available, if you choose that?). I spotted it in Fopp yesterday for £3 and grabbed it.

The first surprise was that I bought it at 3:50pm and had read it in its entirety by 6pm — it’s not that short, but it’s very readable in that you never feel you need to re-examine passages to get the most out of them.

It’s a travelogue, in which Carey and his 12 year old son visit Tokyo in search of not the “Real Japan” of temples and museums, but the other “real Japan” — the culture of modern Japanese people, allowing themselves clutter, watching giant robots on TV.

Some cover blurb promises a father and son learning about each other along the journey (a paltry week in one city, let’s not forget) but I never learned much about the son other than that he was a typically surly pre-teen who’s better at txting than communicating face to face.

Carey pulls publishing world strings and gets to meet various anime geniuses, including Miyazaki-san of Studio Ghibli (swoon!), to whom he puts forward his theories about how the Japanese psyche was shaped, and how their creations reflect this. The anime geniuses, the master sword maker, the otaku he interviews, all reject his theories, but neither come up with anything to fill that void.

Possibly the best part is his visit with the creator of Mobile Suit Gundam, who takes Carey completely by surprise with his prosaic answers: Mobile Suit Gundam is the way it is because the toy makers who commissioned it wanted it that way. It is carefully designed to have no cultural bias whatsoever, so that the show and the toys would sell worldwide.

But of course, you can’t avoid cultural bias, and apparently the general Japanese response to the question of why animation is so popular is that it was too expensive to make giant robots in live action. The question “why giant robots?” is too facile and the answer too axiomatic to bother with.

In the end, the moral of the story is that it’s “just a bunch of stuff that happened”, which leaves you feeling a bit empty.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 15:49 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.