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My Own Private Tokyo
Tuesday, September 18, 2001 11:52 a.m.

The Japanese, you see, have been repeatedly drop-kicked, ever further down the timeline, by serial national traumata of quite unthinkable weirdness, by 150 years of deep, almost constant, change. The 20th century, for Japan, was like a ride on a rocket sled, with successive bundles of fuel igniting spontaneously, one after another.

They have had one strange ride, the Japanese, and we tend to forget that.

This brief history lesson from William Gibson was published in last month's Wired, in an article which has just become available on the magazine's website [there's a one-month gap between material appearing in the magazine and appearing on the website, for obvious reasons].

It's Gibson's second article about Japan in the last six months [the other, published in the [UK] Observer's "Japan issue", is available here].

I'm still, regrettably, less than halfway through marking the small mountain of essays I mentioned a few days ago, but there's an interesting parallel between those essays and this article. Both Gibson, writing about Japan's technological future, and several of my students, in essays discussing Western influences on Japan, emphasise the fact that the country's passage through the past one-and-a-half centuries has been accelerated by two specific events: Perry's landing in the mid-1850s, and the American occupation of the country after the end of the Second World War. As one of my students proudly writes: "Japan caught up a 220-year time lag in only 130 years."

Gibson's take is that "Japan is still the future", and that the Japanese have "made it out of the tunnel of prematurely accelerated change". My students are more concerned with whether their country will be able to maintain its individual character in the face of globalisation. As ever, I find myself caught between Western representations of Japan as a fetishised future, and Japanese perceptions of a culture under seige.

[By the way, I see that Tokyo Tales, another [but rather better] J-blog written by a UK national, has linked to the Gibson article before me. Still, who cares, since it gives me an excuse to link to an interesting weblog written by someone whose taste in music [prominently displayed in a sidebar on the main page] overlaps significantly with mine. Next time I update the site, I'll add a link to my own, less informative, sidebar.]