rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] Becoming Japanese (Reply)

imomus has an interesting essay on what he identifies as a new Japanese trend towards collective introversion.

I entered Japan, and Japanese culture, thanks to 'Trojan horse' Kahimi Karie, in the globalist 90s. It seemed easier then to be both a foreigner and a good object for the Japanese. Shibuya-kei was globalist, pluralist, post-modern, open, eclectic. The young Japanese I met in the 90s--kids now aged between 25 and 35--were open to foreign travel, to collaborations with foreigners on equal terms. The Japanese I'm closest to are still these people, widely-travelled, formed in the 90s, cosmopolitan, outward-looking.

But this year I've been very aware of a surprising new mood in Japan, an intensely inward-looking mood akin to narcissism. Japan, increasingly, performs itself to itself as 'the other', as an exotic tourist destination primped for internal consumption. TV here in Hokkaido is an endless advertorial presentation of winter resorts where Japanese families go to marvel at intensely, even stereotypically, Japanese wonders; to bathe in hot springs, to sit on tatami mats in ryokan hotels, to sample inevitably delicious food. It's what deconstructionists would call "the staging of difference against the scenery of standardisation and globalisation".

He links this to the breakdown of globalization worldwide, as people retreat from the xenophilia of the 1990s towards greater concern with their own national cultures and traditions. I'm too aware of the constructedness of tradition to be able to really like this trend, but perhaps this sort of shift forms an inevitable part of a cyclic trend in the history of a culture.

I wonder how long Canadian xenophilia--if xenophilia there is, as opposed to non-xenophobia--will remain present.