From: johan@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Johan van Zanten)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.japan
Subject: Re: Opinions on the book, "The Hollow Doll"
Date: 5 Jan 1993 12:37:13 GMT
Organization: UT Austin Computation Center, Unix Services
NNTP-Posting-Host: sleepy.cc.utexas.edu

In article <1993Jan5.023054.11119@tcsi.com> miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.) writes:
>
>Well, maybe you *wouldn't* be interested in my opinion.  I thought it
>was hilarious.  My friends and I were saying "You c'n jes call me 'God
>Jesus'" and breaking into hysterical laughter for weeks afterward.
>(Yes, you HAVE to read the book to get that one.)

 No, i'm interested in just about everyone's opinion.  Actually, that
was right where i put the book down.  I read the description of the
God-Jesus doll, and then very clearly saw what he was doing.  You see, i
am not Christian, and didn't really get was was so "gauche" about the
Japanese having a God-Jesus divination doll.  I also can't find a
non-racist way of intrepreting this sentence from that section:

"He [ the God-Jesus robot] does have white skin -- preternaturally white
-- and blue trim, if that's any consolation."

  I am assuming here that the consolation to the gentle [Christian]
reader here is that at *least* God-Jesus is white, i mean (God) forbid
that the Christian God (and Jesus) would be of um, well *you* know, a
different race.  That would be, well, just wrong.  What Bohnaker is
really relying on here is a rather retarded and self-centered (as
self-centered as he accusses the Japanese of being) perspective in the
reader.  In effect, he's saying, "Can you *believe* these Japanese
people?  Are they crazy or what?  A "God-Jesus" doll?  Isn't that
strange? Aren't THEY strange?" 
  For some reason, Christians don't seem to think there is anything
inequitable with dismissing or even insulting other people's religious
and metaphysical beliefs as silly or misguided while theirs' are beyond 
question or even analysis.  To me, this is what is at the heart of the
"God-Jesus" piece.  Bohnaker is encouraging the reader to think of the
Japanese as weirdos who just don't get the Christian "thing", and
expects the reader to believe that Christianity is the one "true"
religion.
>
>So what if he wrote about everything that drove him crazy about Japan?
>Lots of things drive lots of gaijin crazy in Japan -- Bohnaker just
>managed to record a significant mass of them.  I read somewhere that
>most gaijin develop a "love-hate" relationship with the place if they
>stay any time at all -- passing from delight at all the fascinating
>strangeness at first, to contempt for all the repulsive strangeness that
>they missed at first, and finally into an acceptance of the place for
>what it is.  Surely the post-honeymoon phase has been grossly under-
>documented.  Bohnaker remedies this deficit masterfully.

This may be true, but what about the thousands of people who will read
his book and base their opinion of the Japanese people on it?  Wouldn't
you find that a little shallow?  I think after reading this book, most
people without an unusually strong interest in Nihon would be inclined
to unfairly write the Japanese off as a pack of weirdos.  Bohnaker's book
is the equivalent of a Japanese author finding all the bizarre news
stories in the U.S. that he can (and there are many) and writing a book
based on these stories and what they imply about American society. 
 There's nothing wrong with him writing about what drove him crazy in
Japan; what bothers me is that he acts as if he was the only sane person
in the country.  But to be perfectly honest, our two cultures have not
made enough progress along the lines of understanding and mutual respect
to begin the rather blunt and dehumanizing joke phase.  I don't think
that we have that kind of lee-way.
>
>Flip to the last few pages if you think that Bohnaker left Japan in
>some kind of paranoid huff.  Any interpretation of this book as being
>essentially mean-spirited is left to the hopelessly humor-impaired.
>The rest of us (gaijin, anyway) are still laughing too hard.

 I understand what you are trying to say here but as someone who has
devoted a substantially amount of my life to writing, i think writers
have a responsibility for the ideas and thoughts they encourage.  I
don't think that everyone (especially people who are largely unfamiliar
with Japanese society and culture) will take this book as a 
don't-take-this-too-seriously joke, and i don't think that Bohnaker wants us
to take it as a joke, either.  It's definitely suppose to be
entertaining but he has some very serious conclusions about Japanese
society.  Namely, regardless of the number of ways as he tries to pad this,
he really seems to think that there is no morality in Japanese society,
just correctness.  I don't think this is true.  I also think that the
book is very dehumanizing, which does not do anything good for
cultural relations between Americans and Japanese.

-- 
Johan van Zanten   				johan@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Unix Services - The Computation Center - The University of Texas at Austin
Thought for the day:
 /usr/games/fortune: command not found.