Reflections on a Japanese Anime Series: Introduction: How Should We View Japanese Culture and Eastern Character?

My leisure and recreation since college have mainly consisted in watching Japanese animation. I have seen many animated works, long and short, of all sorts and kinds, and I often want to write down some reflections on certain classics or typical examples—I watch anime purely for entertainment, but I do still think about it. On the one hand, excellent animated works themselves contain many elements that invite deep reflection; on the other hand, I myself must also take the initiative to reflect, otherwise, after years of immersion, I will certainly be permeated by Japanese culture. Of course, from the very beginning I have not been anti-Japan. Japanese culture has many hateful and frightening aspects, but in my understanding, many of the aspects of Japanese culture that seem alien are in fact distortions and extremizations of traditional Chinese culture. However, in any case, Japan is a close relative of traditional Chinese culture, and compared with China, the Japanese, under the erosion of Western cultural currents, have preserved to a greater extent their distinctive character as an Eastern culture. Japan has proved by facts that one need not smash the Confucian shop, need not negate history, need not sever tradition, and can still become prosperous and strong and rise up. Japan has not only provided China with a model for how to exploit the advantages of being a later mover and of population scale, it has also served as a model for how to hold fast to the individuality of Eastern culture. If the Chinese cannot learn from Japan with a humble and seeking-to-be-taught attitude, then even if China can still rise rapidly in the economy and industry, it is very likely to fall into difficulty in science and technology and in culture.

Nowadays, most Chinese people have already forgotten what “the Chinese” are. If you ask people to talk about what special character Chinese people generally have, they will usually only think of bad things such as “the Chinese people’s inferiority,” “the ugly Chinese,” “numbness and callousness,” “bureaucratism,” and so on. And what about the virtues of the Chinese? At most they can think of words like “hardworking and frugal,” “industrious and enduring hardship.” Is that all there is to Chinese character? In fact, so-called “character” is, in many cases, not a matter of praise or blame: introverted or extroverted, lively or steady, outspoken or reserved, quiet or bold… Can we say that some temperaments are necessarily superior to others? Yet when we talk about national character, our line of thought often becomes: let’s see what traditional virtues and what inferiority complexes there are in the Chinese national character, what strengths and weaknesses Westerners have, what advantages and disadvantages the Japanese have… Our thinking is always confined to distinguishing the good from the bad, and then we devote ourselves to giving our own traditional culture a “remove the dross, keep the essence” treatment. This is very naïve, simplistic monism!

The age we live in is very different from Lu Xun’s age; our self-negation has already been carried out enough! Perhaps someone will say: in contemporary Chinese society, haven’t those “inferior traits” of the Chinese nation all remained? Indeed they have! What is called “root nature” is precisely that which is rooted at the very base, the part of “one’s nature is hard to change.” But those “inferior traits” often appear precisely because character has been suppressed and distorted—for example, we say that Chinese people value human feeling and relationships, while Westerners value theory and law. Is this Chinese trait utterly awful? Indeed, perhaps the Western idea that reason outweighs feeling, and law outweighs blood ties, is the foundation of modern science and capitalism, but is valuing human feeling and kinship necessarily a bad thing? In fact, only when this character develops to an extreme is it bad; if the Western character of valuing law and reason is extremized, it too will be very bad—perhaps even worse! What we need to reflect on and negate is the extremization of these traits in our tradition, not the traits themselves. If we negate the traits themselves as well, then we are bound to lose ourselves. To take a more typical example—China has long claimed to be a “land of rites and civility,” placing the greatest emphasis on ritual propriety, but modern people say: the Chinese are too deeply bound by ritual and law; we must break with traditional ritual teachings and learn from the free West! Well then, traditional ritual teachings have been broken, so what is the situation now? China has become the most “ill-mannered” place in the world—we often hear about how Chinese people behave crudely and discourteously when they go to the West, and we can also easily feel the confusion of etiquette in daily life (for instance, how do you greet a strange woman who is neither quite young nor quite old? Calling her “auntie” sounds too old, calling her “miss” is ambiguous, calling her “comrade” sounds old-fashioned, calling her “madam” sounds affected… Chinese is originally almost the language with the greatest number of forms of address; how is it that today we cannot even find a word for saying hello?) So much so that from time to time I hear some people now making grand comparisons between East and West, saying how polite Westerners are and how lacking in manners Chinese people are, and at the end they do not forget to conclude: “This is the Chinese people’s inferiority!” I want to say, friend, you have got it wrong: how has discourtesy instead become the inferiority of a land of rites and civility? This is clearly the twisted and deformed result of our having totally negated the original “inferiority” of being too bound by ritual and convention!

If we are to rebuild national character (which monists of course cannot accept as an ideal), then first of all we must break this fixed mindset that “traditional culture has a good side and a bad side.” We should not merely pay attention to those national traits that have been extremized; we need even more to pay attention to those “characters” that truly express the distinctive features of a national culture.

Perhaps Japanese culture itself has a tendency to repress or extremize its own character, but that does not prevent us from experiencing Japanese individuality with a state of mind that goes beyond praise and blame—Japanese culture is a close relative of traditional Chinese culture, and to observe Japan is also precisely to observe ourselves in a mirror. This is my basic attitude when watching Japanese animation, and also my basic attitude toward Japanese culture. I will not fawn upon Japan, nor will I be anti-Japan. I may perhaps be “anti-America,” that is, I may deliberately resist the encroachment of American culture, because the expansion of American culture is destructive to the world’s cultural diversity, whereas appropriately accepting some influence from Japanese culture may perhaps do Chinese people some good in terms of cultural self-awareness.

2007-03-16 23:14

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