{"product_id":"wrong-about-japan-isbn-9781400078363","title":"Wrong About Japan","description":"When Peter Carey offered to take his son to Japan, 12-year-old Charley stipulated no temples or museums. He wanted to see \u003ci\u003emanga\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eanime\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand cool, weird stuff. His father said yes. Out of that bargain comes this enchanting tour of the mansion of Japanese culture, as entered through its garish, brightly lit back door. Guided–and at times judged–by an ineffably strange boy named Takashi, the Careys meet manga artists and anime directors, the meticulous impersonators called “visualists,” and solitary, nerdish \u003ci\u003eotaku\u003c\/i\u003e. Throughout, the Booker Prize-winning novelist makes observations that are intriguing even when–as his hosts keep politely reminding him–they turn out to be wrong. Funny, surprising, distinguished by its wonderfully nuanced portrait of a father and son thousands of miles from home, \u003ci\u003eWrong About Japan\u003c\/i\u003e is a delight.\"Manga and anime . . . become not only a key for unlocking Japanese culture, but a bridge over the generational divide between the author and his son. . . . Moving.\"\u003ci\u003e –The New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The mysteries of Japan and father-son relationships prove to be rich subjects, especially for a writer at the peak of his powers. . . . An entertaining and uplifting book.\" \u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Curious and affecting . . . physically diminutive but emotionally huge.\" \u003ci\u003e–The Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A pleasure to read.\" –\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003ePeter Carey is the author of eight novels, including the Booker Prize–winning \u003cb\u003eOscar and Lucinda\u003c\/b\u003e and \u003cb\u003eTrue History of the Kelly Gang\u003c\/b\u003e, and, most recently, \u003cb\u003eMy Life as a Fake\u003c\/b\u003e. Born in Australia in 1943, Carey now lives in New York City.I was at the video shop with my twelve-year-old son when he rented Kikujiro, a tough-guy\/little-boy Japanese film whose  charming, twitching hoodlum is played by an actor named Beat Takeshi.  How could I have known where this would lead?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOver the next few weeks Charley rented Kikujiro a number of times, and  although I was with him when he did so I had no idea how powerfully  he’d been affected, not until he said, quietly, en passant, “When I  grow up I’m going to live in Tokyo.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharley is a shy boy, and later I wondered if he had glimpsed a country  where his own character might be seen as admirable. Whether this was  true or not, his silent passion for Japan soon broadened, inflamed not  only by Kikujiro but a whole range of other stimuli. I don’t mean that he lay in bed at night reading Tanizaki or Basho. That would finally be my fate. He was twelve years old. It was the year before Iraq,  before he discovered punk rock, NoFX, and Anti-Flag. He and his friends  skateboarded. They had Xboxes and GameCubes and PlayStation 2s, and  although he read for half an hour a night, he set the timer for exactly thirty minutes and closed the book the instant that it rang. What he then picked up were English translations of Japanese comic books.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese came from stores inhabited by pimply youths sporting green hair and staples in their heads. Forbidden Planet is on lower Broadway, walking distance from our house, and I would accompany him there on Saturday mornings.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlthough I knew that Japanese comics were called manga, I would have said that a comic was a comic no matter what you named it. At Forbidden Planet I slowly began to understand that I was wrong. The first and most obvious difference in Japanese comics is the broadness of subject  matter, from saccharine stories featuring little big-eyed girls to the dense and serious works of Osamu Tezuka, although this is not something  one discovers in a single Saturday morning. What was immediately obvious was the startlingly graphic nature of manga which, in its clarity of line and dramatic blocky forms, echoed the Japanese wood-block prints of the nineteenth century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharley and I were soon drifting uptown where, around Grand Central, we found places where the entire English language had been vaporised.  Here, in stores catering to Japanese exiles, the graphic nature of  manga was more dramatically apparent. Gone were the wordier English  translations. Instead, we saw bold hieroglyphics stamped with two or three characters that could be read, although not by us, as unthinkingly as a traffic light.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharley soon became interested in a comic-book series called Akira—although a comic book is a skinny little thing, whereas a manga  has an altogether different heft. Akira would finally run to six  volumes with one-inch spines, and I remember how we walked for mile after weary mile in search of a store where the punk-faced slackers might have finally unpacked what we both knew was in their basement:  freshly delivered cartons of Akira #6.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSometimes I was the censor but more often was delighted by artists I never would have discovered if not for my preternaturally tall, crew-cut son. While I never read Akira as attentively as he did, I  looked closely enough to understand that it dealt with motorcycle gangs  in Neo-Tokyo many years after an atomic devastation. Akira was the name  of an immense, malevolent apocalyptic device or person—both,  actually—that still lay dormant at the centre of the city. On Akira’s  graphic pages I found images so artful that I could imagine hanging them on my wall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAkira, born as manga, had also been made into an animated film which,  being Japanese, is not called a cartoon but an anime. It is easy to see  why this form should deserve its own label, although less easy to  explain why the name is French. Certainly it differs from American animation, which has usually been—with some spectacular exceptions—a dumbed-down form. In  America, cartoons are thought to be for kids. In Japan, anime is as  much respected as live-action films, and not at all limited to a  specific age group. The first anime I saw was based on Akira, and I was immediately struck by the artistry of the frames, their combination of  realism, exaggeration, something ineffably and inarguably “Japanese.”  Once I got hold of a subtitled version and was therefore able to escape  the cute Hollywood dubbing, I was at home in a strange, intriguing land. I was as hooked as Charley. I wanted more.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf course some anime are original, some are shallow, and many are  downright silly, but even the really silly ones soon began to seem like artifacts worthy of cultural investigation. For instance, a Japanese  clog is called a geta and it usually sports two of those devices, which  I can only call a “heel”—one at the place its name would lead you to  expect, the other at the toe. Why then was that warrior in the anime  wearing a clog with just one crazy little stilt, neither at the heel or  toe, but at the balance point of the clog? This must mean something,  even in a silly doodle. I found a reference to the strange clog in  Basho¯. It didn’t solve the mystery, but I began to develop the first  of my many misunderstandings, imagining that Basho¯’s ascetic rural  Buddhists wore these clogs because it made walking more difficult. So  as my son read manga and glued himself to anime, I began to wonder if  we might enter the mansion of Japanese culture through its garish,  brightly lit back door.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater I solved the “heel” puzzle when we talked to a venerable clog  maker in Tokyo. “Ah,” he said, “you mean a ‘one tooth.’ ” He then  explained that a “one tooth” was easier and safer to use in uneven  mountain terrain; it was easier, not harder, to walk on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn any case, I began encouraging Charley to puzzle at the information  hidden within manga and anime, and particularly to wonder about what  all those foreign characters were doing there. I already knew that the  Japanese word gaijin, politely translated as “foreigner,” literally  meant “barbarian.” So what did those plentiful foreign characters sound  like to a Japanese ear? What sort of accents might these barbarians  have? What might their voices signify?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach night Charley had his thirty minutes of reading literature, but when the timer rang he instantly put down To Kill a Mockingbird and  picked up Akira. By the time he was into Akira #6, I was reading  William Heine’s With Perry to Japan, Commodore Perry being, of course,  the most famous gaijin of them all, the American who “opened up” Japan  to trade in 1854.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI interrupted my son’s readings to show him the illustrations in my  book: nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts of Perry’s big-nosed foreign  face. I did not tell him that this nose, in Japanese, meant the gaijin had a very large penis. My point was that these illustrations—given  their line, their exaggeration—would have been right at home in a  manga. In other words, the high and the low, the historic and the  modern, were built on the banks of the same river. As we continued to find these connections, it was only natural that we were soon chatting  about the impact of foreigners on Japan, from Perry to MacArthur, not excluding Hiroshima and Nagasaki.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCharley brought home the famous manga about Hiroshima, Barefoot Gen.  Not to be outdone, I unearthed Studio Ghibli’s masterly anime about the  firebombing of Tokyo, Grave of the Fireflies. If this was pop culture,  it was also art and history, and our conversations took an interesting  swerve. Coming back from Brooklyn after school one day, my son wondered  if I thought the A-bombs would have been dropped had Commodore Perry just stayed at home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho knows? Maybe not.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn that case, Charley concluded, there would be no Godzilla.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe wasn’t being heartless or trivial. Godzilla had always been a  self-conscious Japanese response to the horror of Hiroshima. The  monster was the bomb.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe kid who would never talk in class was now brimming with new ideas  he wasn’t shy to discuss. I was excited by him and for him; and for  myself too, because I’d already visited Japan twice and now realised I  had a perfect pedagogic rationale for indulging my interests further.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Would you like to go to Japan?” I asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If you like,” he said, so dry I couldn’t believe it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I thought you’d be excited.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis lips flickered and he lowered his eyes. “Not if I have to see the Real Japan.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis alluded to a story I thought he had long forgotten, about an  earlier trip I made to Tokyo with my friend Fremantle Jack. While  neither of us had been to Japan before, if one of us was going to  drive, it definitely should not have been Fremantle Jack, a fine poet  but the jitteriest Buddhist I ever met.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs for me, I could recognise only a handful of Japanese characters, and  my sense of direction was terrible. I should never have been the  navigator. But as we approached the city, I was the one who shouted the  directions and Jack who jerked the wheel in response, and that was how—miraculously—we found ourselves on the  road to Ginza. I was elated by this serendipity but Fremantle Jack was  tugging at his earlobe, not a good sign if you knew him well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What’s the matter, mate?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What’s the matter?” he cried. “Are you bloody blind? Look at it!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Ikebukurosen, or #5 expressway, was a concrete ribbon winding—very  beautifully, I thought—above the flat roofs of Tokyo which was like nothing I had ever seen: low and chalky white and almost treeless,  distinguished by water towers on every building. Even before I got down  into the little lanes of Shinjuku, before I walked amongst the perfect Japanese Elvises in Harajuku, before I met Hisao-the-left-handed, who  made the most extraordinary chisels on the planet, it was here, on the Ikebukurosen,  that I decided to write a science-fiction screenplay, just so we could  shoot it in Tokyo.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s so American,” said Jack. “I didn’t come all this way for this.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well, what do you want?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I want to see the Real Japan.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI knew what he meant, of course—temples, tea ceremony, Kabuki—but I  teased him for it and was doubtless a very irritating companion for the  next two weeks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No Real Japan,” said Charley. “You’ve got to promise. No temples. No  museums.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What would we do?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We could buy cool manga.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There’ll be no English translations.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I don’t care. I’d eat raw fish.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What else?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“And slimy things. I’d eat everything.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What if we interviewed some anime directors?” I asked, trying to  figure out how to pay the\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eairfares.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Could we talk to Tomino?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Who’s he?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Only the director of Mobile Suit Gundam.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“We could talk to people about what all the weird stuff really means.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Could we meet the guy who did Godzilla?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Maybe, I don’t know.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the weeks passed, the fantasy hardened into a plan and Charley spent  a lot of time eating raw fish and revising the lists of anime directors  and manga artists he required me to interview.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Maybe,” I suggested, “you can ask them questions, too.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Can I have an ice cream?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was not without contacts in Japan. I wrote first to Paul Hulbert, who  was then working for my Tokyo agents. Given their distinguished list of  literary authors, I expected he would have little knowledge of cartoons  and comic books, so I told him what Mobile Suit Gundam was and why I  was interested in such a lowly subject.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Perhaps,” he replied, “I should explain a little about myself.” Yes,  he was a literary agent, of course, but he had previously worked at  Kodansha, a large Japanese publishing house that produced many  best-selling manga, including most of the Mobile Suit Gundam series.  “During my time there, I worked with manga and anime creators, and in  my final year was involved in the production of an  eight-hundred-twenty-five-page authorized encyclopedia of the Gundam  saga called Gundam Officials.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo I began to understand that the fringe cult in New York City was a  huge business in Japan, where 1.9 billion manga were sold in 1995—a  staggering forty percent of all magazine sales. Everybody in Japan read  manga, except those just born or about to die.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePaul said he would certainly arrange an interview with Mr. Tomino, the  originator of the Gundam series.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Could I have my photograph taken with him?” Charley asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sure.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe bought a map of Tokyo and marked “weird” things with purple stars  and “cool” things with silver circles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis teachers were impressed, and hoped he might give a talk on his  return. However, while this new obsession seemed to have briefly  transformed him into someone almost garrulous, he had not really  changed his character, so when we finally took off from JFK on the  first day of his summer vacation, there were important words he had not  yet spoken. Only as we landed in Narita did he confess that he’d made a  Japanese friend on the Internet and this friend would soon come to  visit us at the hotel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“How can he find our hotel?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dad! It’s only on the itinerary. I attached it as a Windows document.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGetting more information was like drawing teeth. The friend’s name was Takashi. He apparently had no other name. He wanted to practise his English. Yes, he was interested in anime, was that all right?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“How old is Takashi?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Obviously, he’s a kid.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Is he a teenager?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A kid. That’s all I know.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI would watch this damn Takashi like a hawk. If he showed the slightest  hint of creepiness, he was gone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eArriving by train in Tokyo, I lost the Japanese- language map  specifically drawn to get us from the station to our hotel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be fine.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater Charley said, “You didn’t think it would be fine at all. You did  that thing with your hand like when you’re really stressed out.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What thing?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“That thing. You know.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNaturally the taxi driver had no English, and yet when he saw our  crumpled English map, he didn’t sneer like a Manhattan cabbie; he  studied it, once at the start of the journey and then three more times en route. We were on our way to a ryokan, a traditional inn with tatami  floors, beds that were rolled away each morning, and a little tokonoma,  the alcove in which the artful Japanese will display a single precious  object. One might assume Tokyo was full of these hotels, but this one,  which was also moderately priced, had been very hard to track down, and  now seemed impossible to find. The best our driver could do was deposit  us at the wrong end of a one-way lane and point with his Mickey Mouse  white gloves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLooking down the lane, I could see mostly parked bicycles and garbage  cans, a foreign country where I could not read or speak the simplest  phrase. Understanding my hesitation, the driver personally escorted us,  running ahead and waving for us to follow, the idling engine of his  unlocked cab inviting auto theft.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTouched by his kindness and his poor-man’s shoes, I shook his gloved  hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe, in turn, shook hands with Charley.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Good-bye,” he said. 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