What makes a man a man?

(image from "七人の侍" 1954)

The Mainichi has an article on "reki-jo" (歴-女?), This seems to be a new boom and I've never heard the term before. The very end brings up an interesting commentary on what is going on with genders roles in Japan.

Tetsuaki Higashida from the Dentsu Communication Institute suggests that women are attracted to the masculinity of these warlords, compared to the more passive modern men that they know. "Gender role reversals have been taking place, with men cooking and women playing golf," he says. "It's not unacceptable nowadays for women to take an interest in warlords, which used to be an area of interest reserved for men."

The Dentsu Communication Institute is the think tank wing of The Dentsu Group who probably provided the data for this study. Most of the research I've seen them do usually concerns studies of social networking in Japan.

This idea of "gender role reversals" reflects this article from The Slate on "Grass Eating Boys" (草食女子) Personally in my experience, Japanese men tend to be rather stuck in 1970's America's idea of masculinity. Although it doesn't surprise me that the younger generation has rejected this idea of masculinity and is starting to prefer the opposite.

How are we to understand masculinity? I don't think there is such a strict bi-polar system of Samurai vs. "grass eating boys", or even a sliding scale in between. I wonder what forces are coercing these rigid forms of identity. Before I get too deep into gender, I'll just leave it off with a video about the modern Samurai.

East vs. West

Japan is a very "brand conscious" country. I know more women in the US who have never heard of Vera Wang and Hermes than in Japan by far; and you'd never see a man walk around town in a $800 Yves Saint Laurent bag.

Japundit, has a link to an article on the new Sanrio brand tartan being released. Yamanashi, the prefecture where I lived for awhile was the birthplace of the Yamanashi Silk Center, which was the company the later became Sanrio in the 1970's when the company figured out that printing cute pictures on their clothes sold better. Now that the silk industry of Yamanashi has completely bottemed out in recent years, this connection has long been forgotten.

What I find interesting here from a transnational standpoint was this comment here by Yuko Yamaguchi

Yuko Yamaguchi, the Hello Kitty designer since 1980, said the British capital was chosen as the feline's home because "London was the place Japanese girls admired in the 1970s."

Britain was a nation of fairy tales for Japanese girls who read "Alice in Wonderland" and the "Tale of Peter Rabbit," she said.

The ways in which certain cultures and our association with how we perceive certain nations is a fascinating thing to study. As Ai Yazawa has shown us, many Japanese folks today still admire western fetishes as a mark of cool and trendy things. In her work "Paradise Kiss" many of the main characters take on "western" nicknames in an interest to sound exotic and otherworldly. Many people thought it was really cool that a guy that looked in many ways like a Japanese person, had a cool name like "Charles". On the other side of the pond, many people in the US and the UK see anything Japanese as the height of fashion and culture. Japanese things permeate almost everything in the US to give it "added value" or a flair of the exotic. At the same time in both cases this admiration of a national culture has nothing to do with the nation itself, but our association with being something other than we are. These associations reestablish global bounderies that places like the UK, the US and Japan remain as the other, and keep them as exotic distant lands. Despite cheaper transportation and communication between such nations, the distance between them is still far far away in the minds of its people.

gifts and violence

Yesterday I was in an antiques store in Leesburg, VA with some friends and I saw a beautiful Obi draped over a bench near the register. I could tell from the fact that the embroidery ran all along the length of the obi on both sides, it was pre World War II. There was hardly any discoloration and it was in excellent condition in which the colors were still very bold and pronounced.

The owner of the store said that it was once a gift to a Four Star General who had served in Japan during World War II and was brought back here to Virginia. After the man died, the properties of his estate was sold and this store had acquired quite a few of his items.

Obviously I could be falling for the oldest trick in selling. Tell an interesting story about the thing and suddenly customers will want it. Not to far away in the store were some brass bowls from China which were obviously made in China for tourist to buy. Separated merely by time and space the same occurrence could be happening to me.

But regardless, if it was true, it's an interesting thought on the travels of this piece of garment. The exchanging of hands from Japan to the US, the history of the cloth and it's symbolism as a gift to a US General. There are layers of meaning which cuts across different cross sections of class, nations, gender and race. Is there a significance to the giving of a woman's clothes as a gift to a General to mark the end of a war?

The collection of souvenirs of war service reminds me of a story my aunt once said of a man who was in service in Vietnam for a number of years. This man was struck by the beauty of the Vietnamese "áo dài" and wanted to take one home for his wife to wear. Now there are two parts to an áo dài, the top dress-like part which is similar to a Cheongsam has a slit which will typically go to about an inch above the hips. The man not knowing much about how an áo dài is worn only bought this part and forgot the crucial set of pants which go with it. When the man brought the dress home his wife was quite shocked about how revealing it was and was suspicious of her husbands endless praise on how beautiful it looked on the local women in Vietnam (and their sense of modesty.) So here we have an interesting scenario of the formulation of an intellectual intersection in concepts of gender between the husband, the wife and the women of Vietnam.

What meaning did the giver attribute to such a gift and what meaning did either military person take with him on receiving the gift. Did the gift have meaning for himself, or was it thought of only as a gift for a woman? The weight of these things hang on my head as I think of this obi now draped over a bench in some sleepy antiques store in Leesburg and I wonder who will pay the 450 to buy it and what meaning that buyer will give it.

Japanese Cultural Revolution

I have always felt that "Razor Ramon Hard Gay" was a champion for social change. This is especially true with his encouragement that even yankī aren't too cool to honor their father. Although he seemed like another crazy comedian stereotyping "homosexual behavior", I've felt that there was more going on under that pleather biker cap.

One of the toughest parts of being an English teacher in Japan is seeing a lot of really sweet kids run their lives into the ground. It's half their own doing, but society has some of the blame too. I've found myself on occasion arguing with teachers that we can't just give up on these kids now and label them as hopeless at 12. I know enough about child development to know that giving up on such kids at this age is the worst anyone can do to harm a whole life. But there is a culturally encouraged tradition in Japan to cast off people who are deemed "unworthy".

This is why it makes me really happy to see men like Yu Waki try to make an effort to turn things around for Japan. The Mainichi has a fairly good article on his work, and his book can be found here. The Japanese have a strange comfortable attitude about their organized crime popularly known as the "Yakuza". Someone once told me that they are the modern day representation of the Samurai clans. Although for the few more powerful families this may be factually true, I think it's a dangerous and manipulative myth in which the gangs put out. If you want to know more about the Yakuza, I'd suggest Tendo Shoko's book Yakuza Moon: Memiors of a Gangster's Daughter, and Robert Whiting's book Tokyo Underground: the Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan. I actually sat in on a presentation by Hiroyuki Suzuki on his efforts of rehabilitation of members of the Yakuza. It's more of a chirstian based effort, but his movie "Jesus is my Boss" is pretty interesting to watch despite the low production values. I think small movements like this will inch Japan towards real social change that is rooted in the community and culture of Japan and not merely an acquisition of western ideas of social progress.

morality

Over the weekend, I was in my hometown with my brother which has put me in my high school mentality. I spent the weekend playing games with my brother on his X-Box 360 on our ridiculously huge HDTV.

I played "Mirror's Edge" for the first time, and found it to be a very fun game despite various criticisms. Although that being said, it is a very challenging game. If you don't like games that have a great deal of trial and error, then you might not like the game. I like to think of myself as a gamer who is not as frustrated with impossibly hard games. The game has a great visual feel and the controls feel very natural once you get used to it. I really like the use of color in the game the layout of various levels.

For those unfamiliar with the game, "Mirror's Edge" is about an underground courier service which has become the last remaining unmonitored form of communication in a Orwellian future police state. You play the character Faith who has to run, jump and climb like Jackie Chan to get from point to point to complete various missions. The game also allows you to steal people's guns and turn around and shoot them, however, with a gun in your hand you run slower, and inhibits your ability to climb. In an entire jungle of games in which the only strategy are different means of killing people, "Mirror's Edge" offers a refreshing solution which doesn't envolve killing.

This is where I find there is a great example of moral choice. Shooting people is not required to complete the game, nor are you blatantly rewarded for being a goody-two-shoes other than getting an out of story based achievement award. This is quite different from the other morality driven decisions in games in which there are active consequences in your actions. For me, this attempt to consider moral choices merely operates on the preconventional level of Kohlberg's moral stages. A gamer will do a morally upright action within the game for the purpose of some direct reward. There is no moral education, and people tend to do different actions just to see what would happen. However, in games like "Metal Gear Solid", or "Mirror's Edge" the gamer must chose whether or not to kill someone. They don't have to, and they won't be rewarded directly for not doing so. In fact the game doesn't seem to care either way, the choice is ultimately on you. This for me reaches a Postconvential level of moral reasoning because it is only up to the judgement of how the player feels is morally correct. In the end Postconventional moral reasoning for me relies on the idea of what one does when there is no one there to judge you.

Social litmus

I've always felt the most interesting part of the Star Trek universe was its ability to be a constantly evolving world to match the way we see our own world. Gene Roddenberry did not just want to make a "wagon train to the stars", but take the social issues of our time and transpose them to theirs. For the sixties, it was a phenomenally delicate approach to understanding issues of race, nation states, the cold war, and the human psyche. Subsequently, the movies and the later shows of "Star Trek the Next Generation", "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager" added newer layers which consistently matched many of the social issues topical to the time. I have often used the Cardassian/Bajoran strife to explain the Balkan wars or the other way around depending on the audience. Deep Space Nine's Producer himself said that "The Kurds, the Palestinians, the Jews in the 1940s, or the boat people from Haiti; unfortunately, the homeless and terrorism are problems in every age." As the means in which the public understood thier own world changed, Star Trek changed with it.

So what does this new movie have to say about our times now? I noticed an interesting theme emerging in this movie. This was a movie which developed and molded the characters of Spock and Kirk in fascinating ways. Again and again I saw the theme of men set apart from their family and their home. These were two men confused by the conflict of their past and adrift in a world of rituals. I find it interesting that this message would speak so powerfully to our generation. We live in a world of odd preconceived notions of normality and patterns. Many of us has convinced ourselves that there are only a few avenues towards success in life, and if we had missed out on those tracks, then we deserve no better than to be kicked to the curb by those who found the course. Excellence has become a standard, which was never meant to be for all, so a majority of people who find themselves "sub-excellent" feel lost and confused. What I think the story of this new Star Trek movie has shown us, is that these roads of predestination are completely artificial and carry as much authority as people give it. The roads to our future are uncharted, and the rules and models created by the sages of the past don't work anymore. In short, "to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Masculinity

Now that I'm working in a military office, I'm getting more and more tired of the alpha male attitude with problems. I once walked in on an army Sergent banging at the copying machine, threatening to bring in explosives to "fix it". The conversation went like this (Names changed to protect the innocent.)

SGT Turgidson: What this copier needs is some C4 to clear this jam.
Nesuphyn: I think this may be the rare cases in which explosives may not solve the problem.
SGT Turgidson: Son, in my experience explosives can solve any problem.
Nesuphyn: I don't see how that could be the case.
SGT Turgidson: If the copier gets blown up, Xerox will replace it, that's how it worked in the Sandbox.
Nesuphyn: I think I'm going to get some coffee.
(Nesuphyn exit stage left goes to cry into coffee.)

But in all fairness it seems that nerds have their fair share of aggression against technology. Gizmodo led me to this wonderful video on YouTube of a guy stabbing a Mac Air. I'll take a moment to be a racist and point out that this is an affluent white man destroying an $1800 product to prove how much of a sucker he was like his 6 other friends who also bought an $1800 computer.

Whew, OK, I'm better now.

So what's with the rage? (and not just white folks) We are often bombarded with staggeringly oppressive images of violence which is often open linked to being masculine. Yet our day to day lives are mostly quiet and heavily controlled by social norms and civilized affluence. I wonder what that does to the psyche and if that cognitive dissonance causes problems to our ability to be civilized people.
What I find disturbing, is that this use of violence is an excellent marketing tool. Manly men are rough with our toys so we "are forced" to buy better and bigger toys. I use the Sumsung Juke as my cellphone. One of my "manlier" friends sneered at me and said "Wait until the spring breaks". I don't think it need a phone that is piece of solid metal for it to last a few years. I've been using this phone for over a year, and still works fine. I take care of my things, use it for its purpose, and treat it with respect. I know a cellphone is considered a throw away product these days, but I still treat mine as something I shouldn't take for granted. I worry about how we men are convinced what it means to be a man, and at the same time this culture of masculinity just happens to make us better consumers.