Presentation at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, 13/06/2023 (Edited and updated version, January 2026)

 

The concept for this book on Japan was not an easy sell to publishers. In a Nikkei Asia review, accomplished author on Japan Stephen Mansfield termed it “a book that was quite different from anything I had seen before. A work that did not try to please people or delude them by perpetuating comforting stereotypes.”

In fact, it went from one reputable publisher to another and back to the original one. I exasperated editors and publishing personnel who had never set foot in the country, and the hurdles to avoid or correct clichés, platitudes, and stereotypes about Japan were so intellectually cemented that a revision seemed impossible or at least totally undesirable. I had conformed to the expectations of editors for decades or at least delivered enough material to lay it out as they saw fit, but for once, for this one book I wanted to realize my personal vision of Japan, grown from the experience of living in the country for almost half a century.

The history of this book production originated in 2015 in Germany, so my experience retold here is mainly from that environment. While I find the German sphere astonishingly insular and insistent to maintain a Japan image which has changed little since I arrived here in 1972, I suspect that my exposure to gatekeepers elsewhere wouldn’t be that much different.

Unlike most Westerners here, Japan was never my destination, but rather a stopover on the way to Australia in December 1972. I was 21 years old, I had a one-way ticket to Tokyo, I ran out of money, and fell in love. The allure of passion sealed my fate.

I was, in the words of poet and musician Nick Cave, “… young, and like many young people, mostly demented...”

And my attraction to shrines, temples, and gardens, or what is commonly perceived as traditional Japanese culture, was rather dispassionate.

As a result, my first photographic subjects in Japan were not the endlessly photographed sights of Kyoto — even though I lived in this city for eight years. Instead, my first project was the chindon-ya, traditional street performers and social misfits in their whimsical guise promoting neighborhood businesses — and then, after that, Japanese long-distance drivers, and most notably pachinko, the then-ubiquitous garishly lit gambling halls all over Japan.

But foreign editors and publishers without, and even with, experience in Japan persistently demand imaginary exotic vistas. What Peter Tasker calls in his introduction to my book the perpetuation of a fiction, he finds already in the late 19th century. At that time, the early, influential Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn fabled about this mythical country and describes his arrival “in a world where land, life and sky are different from anything known from elsewhere”, similar to the immersion in “the old dream of a world of elves”.

This image, which equates Japan with a dream of a world of elves, is consistently maintained to this day. It continues to dominate the media and numerous personal accounts of experiences in the German-speaking world and elsewhere.

Japan remains the land of geisha, tea ceremony, Zen, and polite smiles. An exotic, mythical empire in the Far East; enigmatic and incomprehensible. Without the clear signals of Mount Fuji, geisha, and kimono, one does not know where one is. Because in the Western gaze everyone in the Far East looks the same. The stranger people are to us, the less we are able to distinguish them.

In his 2006 book, The East-West Goethe, Professor Naoji Kimura, one of the most renowned researchers on German culture in Japan, blames individual prejudices, collective national conceit, and cultural-political manipulations for this relentless adherence to common patterns of thought: “Despite globalization, people seem to prefer to hold on to their familiar image of the world or of mankind or to their habitual intellectual standpoint in order to judge or condemn others, out of laziness of thought.”

British author and journalist Alan Booth (1946-1993), who wrote some of the most insightful books and essays on Japan, noted in the 1980s that “More thorough nonsense must be spoken and written about Japan than any other comparably developed nation.” That statement still rings true today.

This distorted Japan image seems so deeply engraved and repeated so relentlessly that correction is impossible. Deviations or even new points of view remain undesirable.

Why does it seem impossible to purge this stereotypical fallacy?

The idea that we see what we want to see and the influence on our perception has been studied in modern psychology for quite some time. If a certain idea is preferred, then it unconsciously steers the thought process in that desired direction. This so-termed motivated perception becomes motivated thinking, which in a top-down process ensures that perception is guided according to one’s own expectations, hopes, and wishes, and that the formation of judgments is shaped accordingly.

Perception and reality, especially of foreign cultures, do not match, but are influenced by the zeitgeist, one’s own condition and one’s own social and cultural environment.

Motivated perception and reality in photography was already a theme in the classic 1966 Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up. Photography is and always has been the perfect illusory medium. Because the photographer also sees what he wants to see and directs his glass eye to what he selects and frames accordingly.

And the gatekeepers in the media, the editors and curators, enthralled by the current zeitgeist, select what they think the audience needs to see, what may sell best, and in these times, gets the most clicks.

The cliché image of Japan seems to be maintained by dogma, especially in illustrated books.

A look at the history of reporting about Japan in the German-speaking domain reveals an endless loop of platitudes and preconceptions. There is hardly any article or book title that does not address the supposedly unique contrast between tradition and modernity in Japan.

On German amazon I once counted more than 50 titles for any subject on Japan, subtitled “Tradition and Modernity” — which reveals more about the gatekeepers and curators than about Japan.

 

One of the reasons why these platitudes so stubbornly persist is obviously the fact that in the case of Germany most media houses do not employ their own correspondents in Japan. The majority of articles about Japan are written by journalists who have neither extensive experience in Japan nor pertinent language skills. A few short trips to the country makes a Japan specialist: Been there, know it all.

This “virtual” journalism — reports from afar about unfamiliar places—leads to perceptions that differ markedly from the experiences of people on the ground. Conversely, journalists actually working on the ground are expected to provide the “correct” material to corroborate common prejudices. The news is written in the editorial offices according to predetermined editorial guidelines.

But not only journalists forge the image of a country. Professor Mark Hollstein in his course Geisha, Gangsters, and Samurai: Japan in Western Film at Kansai Gaidai University pointed out, how Western images of Japan have been constructed in response to specific historical situations. It is truly unfortunate that Hollstein passed away in January 2023.

Here is his course description: “Since the earliest days of cinema, Western filmmakers have used Japan as a mirror in which to reflect upon their own cultures. At times they have portrayed Japan as the model society that lays bare Western failures. At other times they have imagined the country as a corrupt world whose degenerate nature reinforces the superiority of Western values. Through it all has been a highly gendered narrative—Japan as the paradoxical land of ultra-feminine geisha (soft, gentle and nurturing) and extremely masculine samurai and gangsters (cold, unyielding and dangerous).

This course looks at how and why these contradictory images so easily coexist within the Western cinematic imagination. Of central concern is the way in which filmmakers have emphasized, exaggerated, distorted or ignored various aspects of Japanese culture to meet the expectations of their audiences, and the ways in which images of Japan, constructed in response to specific historical situations are recycled to justify or explain later situations. We will also consider how changes in class, gender and race relations in the West have influenced media images of the Japanese Other.”

I would like to quote Peter Tasker again, from the introduction for this book:

“Many different Japans have been conjured up by the needs of the Western psyche, from the quaint lotus land of Madame Butterfly to the weird, alienating neon playground of Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation; from the sinister aggressor of the “yellow peril” journalism of the early twentieth century to the ruthless industrial competitor of the 1980s as depicted in the novel and film Rising Sun.

For most of its history, modern Japan has been an object of fear, admiration, delight, lust, amusement, curiosity, flattery, condescension and ignorance. But always an object of the Western gaze, examining the scenery from the outside, with an implicit agenda of comparing and contrasting rather than seeing things in their own terms.“

In these modern times, just as the public craves reality, its authenticity is often dubious, repackaged by gatekeepers and social media algorithms, presenting us with an orchestrated reality.