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Serving As Your Voice of the Nikkei Community Since 1902
Vol. 63, Issue 17 / April 16, 2008
Young Americans Gazing West
By David K. Yamaguchi
The North American Post
Photo by David K. Yamaguchi
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EVERYONE KNOWS that there are a variety of annual Japanese and Japanese-themed cultural events to attend in Seattle if one is so inclined. Most such venues provide windows into the lives of expatriates and Japanese Americans, the latter now one to three generations removed from Japan.
Over the Mar. 28-30 weekend, at the encouragement of the day staff of this paper, I dropped in for a few hours at the one event that is strikingly different from the others: Sakura-Con, the annual anime [Japanese animation] convention, where I had not previously been. I found attending this unusual event well worth the three-day $40 admission (or, more candidly, freelancing for this paper for a press pass). For the crowd at Sakura-Con will rock your world view a bit, as it did mine.
A flowing mass of thousands that was dense enough to fill some floors of the Washington Convention Center to "overcapacity" at times, the throng largely consisted of Caucasian kids who secretly want to be Japanese. After one gets over the visual shock of seeing white kids wearing black wigs or dyed hair in imitation of the wild and plentiful hair of Japanese youth, the second feeling that takes over is that of pleasant surprise. For as transplants and descendents of a small country heavily influenced by the U.S., most of us are well aware of the tremendous cultural impact that the U.S. has had on Japan. Yet we seldom think about Japanese influences going the other way.
Behind the kids' eye-catching outfits, I could see at least three influences. First, there is the exquisitely drawn art of manga--Japanese comic books-from which animated video has evolved. These "low art" publications have thus successfully traversed the Pacific in translation, to the extent that they fill aisles of bookstores as diverse as Kinokuniya and Barnes and Noble. Second, there is the photographic book, "Fruits," in the Asian section of any bookstore, which documents the outlandish fashions of Tokyo teens who frequent the park and streets of the neighborhood known as Harajuku. Third, I could see the impact of the blockbuster cult movie, "Kamikaze Girls," which further introduced Lolita fashion to American teenage girls.
Behind the popularity of manga lies a longstanding difference in art ability in Japan and the U.S. An ordinary Japanese can draw circles around a typical American. This difference in talent was commented on a century ago by Lafcadio Hearn, a freelance writer who arrived in Japan on assignment from Harper's Magazine in 1890, and ended up teaching school there:
"I love Eddie" from sweetyumiko.com. The site highlights the Seattle-influenced art of Yumiko Kayukawa. Her 2005 book, The Wild Kingdom of Yumiko Kayukawa, is locally available.
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"The average capacity of the Japanese student in drawing is, I think, at least fifty per cent higher than that of European students. The soul of the race is essentially artistic; and the extremely difficult art of learning to write the Chinese characters, in which all are trained from early childhood, has already disciplined the hand and the eye to a marvelous degree--a degree undreamed of in the Occident--long before the drawing-master begins his lessons of perspective" (Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 1894).
Moreover, I believe that the difference in art ability between the two countries is far older. I see it extending to Japanese antiquity--to Jomon time (the Stone Age)--and I do not use these terms merely for effect. Disbelievers should check out the national museum at Ueno Park, Tokyo, where the most exquisitely carved arrowheads you will ever see glisten under glass.* The strong Japanese interest in design, art, and fashion flows forward from then, through elegant farm tools of the bronze age, the exquisite terra cotta haniwa figurines of proto-historic Japan, through and beyond Meiji-era ukiyoe-the cheap wood-block prints or the masses that first captured the attention of American and European art collectors 130 years ago, and comprise a historical precedent for the anime craze of today.
REGARDING THE PRESENT anime craze, I see it as a good thing. First, the kids at Sakura-Con are just having fun. Lord knows there are many other dark endeavors to which they could be devoting their time.
More deeply, however, just seeing those kids made me feel good, for their sheer numbers ensure that from them will spring many who will build on their interests through studying Japanese language and culture in high school and college. From those in turn will come many who will work on the U.S.-Japan interface, and join the thousands of bilingual professionals on which the U.S.-Japan relationship will continue to rest in these China-centered days.
*Armchair travelers can do the same through perusing books like Ancient Japan (Pearson, Richard, Smithsonian Institution, 1992)
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