Seeing Japan Through One's Media of Choice
When I came to Japan in 1991, I brought with me a large body of knowledge of Japan's popular culture, from anime to manga to Ultraman. While it was nice to have this information handy, the reality was that the "true" Japan I encountered was -- of course -- not the same as the stylized world I'd seen. Many things I encountered here, like narrow streets or bankrupt pachinko parlors or shouting deranged men on trains were nowhere to be seen in the anime or manga that I'd consumed while learning Japanese. It's analogous to Japanese who learn English by watching Hollywood movies then wonder why Bruce Willis isn't hanging out on every street corner waiting to bust some bad guys. While there's probably no way to avoid this tendency to see Japan through your media of choice, my advice is to mix things up as much as you can by sampling different kinds of popular culture. Japan's dramas, while still presenting a stylized subset of the "real" Japan, might be a good place to start.
I'll bet you've never seen one of these babies in your favorite moe anime.
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:26 PM
4 Comments:
Of course someone will have an example of a bankrupt pachinko parlor in anime, just to shut me up ^_^
9:34 PM
There's an abandoned pachinko parlor in Ghost Hound that looks similar to your picture. Not posting to shut you up, it's just funny that I've seen one pretty recently considering I'm hardly watching any anime anymore. Then again, GH was a fairly realistic work (locality-depiction-wise, at least), I'm sure what you say holds true for your typical moe/fanservice animes so prevalent these days.
11:38 PM
Heh, I knew it ^_^ Actually there's been a lot of angsty backgrounds in anime these days, rusty old buildings and what not. Power transformers too, although that's not so new.
1:01 AM
Why do you advertise on your site you have an item, a person purchases an iten, a person sends the money, and then is told they had miscounted the items they had and your item was given to someone else. I can understand this happening once, but twice, when you have long time customers who spend a lot of money on your site, and then you treat them very poorly lke this. its very bad business, my item which was sold to someone else, was going to cost me 19.98 with shipping. Now i am going to have to pay 75.00 for the same item on ebay used. I problaly will not be doing any more business with your site, not knowing if you will get your item or not. I give your site a 0 for service
11:50 PM
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