Opinion

Back to the Orient

By Roger Pulvers

I often travel between Australia and Japan, and just as often find myself in the excellent bookstore at Sydney Airport. Not long ago, I stopped in front of a special section in the store. Above it was a sign that read, "Oriental Interest."

Works of fiction and fictionalized history set in Asia, particularly in Japan and China, are once again in vogue. Unlike novels set in Western countries, however, they fall into the realm of misty exotica. The Western reader requires hard-nosed reality for stories that take place on the streets of Rome, Moscow or Los Angeles. But tales from the East, it seems, must be lacking in present-day reality. The more they emphasize strange traditions, bizarre customs and seemingly inscrutable behavior, the greater the western delight.

In other words, we have come full circle, back to the days of Lafcadio Hearn, who went a long way toward convincing us that the vanishing Japan was somehow more real than the Japan that was emerging.

As for the colorful section in the bookstore at Sydney Airport, all of the books - and I mean ALL - featured characters who were caught in the grips of antiquated tradition. All of them extricated themselves, through personal courage and stick-to-it-iveness, to come out "modernized," or, in other words, just like Westerners. Poor Chinese women whose grandmothers had had their feet bound, poor Japanese women who were geisha, spending their life as painted servants to the whims of profligate males ...

These books sell big in the West. We seem to hunger for this kind of misery. Perhaps it feeds our sense of cultural superiority that our own traditions were kinder and gentler, leading us to the very gates of great art and universal culture. Perhaps, subconsciously, we in the West wish to deny that the stories of people on the streets of Shanghai or Kyoto today are just as telling as our own, that by reading them we would be forced to recognize that our contemporaries in what we used to call "the Orient" are fumbling with the same dilemmas as we are.

When Japan began emerging as a modern power a little over 100 years ago, virtually all people in the West went to great lengths to refute its aspirations. "Stay humble," they told the Japanese, "Be quaint. Don't produce iron. Weave baskets, instead. Do what you do best and we will do what we do better." Japan was seen as a mistress of the Western master: coddled, yes, even cherished, but never loved on its own terms.

The economic ascendance of postwar Japan dampened this tendency. By the 1980s the Japanese were seen as ultra-contemporary in industry, design and fashion. But with the shriveling of the bubble, the air went out of this notion, and again we are back to the Orient. The geisha, however irrelevant today, has become a symbol of Japan again. And as for the Chinese, our view of them harks back to our view of the Japanese that we entertained a century ago.

I boarded my plane from Sydney to Tokyo wondering: When will we learn to view people from different cultures as we do ourselves? And what are the consequences if we don't?

Shukan ST: March 7, 2003

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