I interned at Sony in Tokyo one summer. I was hugely surprised that nobody had heard of all the animes and cultural icons that I thought were household names — Cowboy Bebop, FLCL, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, etc etc.
There’s a huge bias in the US towards taking niche cultural phenomena in Japan and putting them on a pedestal.
Anime is not the dominant form of media in Japan, and is largely targeted at a relatively narrow age band. Outside of the main target demographic, you're not going to get a lot of familiarity with anything but the very largest show.
In the US, how many current animated shows can you name? I can name a decent fraction of cartoons from the late 90s, but am completely unable to name anything since then--at least until I got a nephew and am now getting acquainted with the relevant demographic shows. That's a 20 year gap in shows.
Compare other media. How many classical composers can you name? I doubt many people, even erudite people, could push well beyond the basic frontier of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Recognition of well-known tunes (such as Pachelbel's Canon, whose name my spellchecker doesn't appear to recognize) is going to far exceed their name, let alone the composer's name.
The most recognizable anime to a layperson in Japan is likely to be the big mega-blockbusters of various eras. I'd be more shocked if you said that no one had heard of Mobile Suit Gundam, Dragonball, Naruto, or Attack on Titan [which one they'd pick up on depends on their age] than any of the shows you've mentioned. Hell, the only thing you listed that I'd think people in the US with a passing familiarity with anime might know would be Cowboy Bebop.
I'd be somewhat surprised if literally nobody knew about Ghost in the Shell, but I bet you didn't use the Japanese title (攻殻機動隊, Koukaku Kidoutai). However, only big anime fans around here would have heard of that title (of which you're likely to find a bunch at Sony, though, but certainly not everyone).
The US puts late night anime on a pedestal, stuff that fans focus on. That's a big market in Japan, but not ubiquitous by any stretch if the imagination - and the names that become popular in the US are often very different to the names popular here, and often only after they've fallen out in Japan. Takeda-san doesn't know about FLCL.
Anime is part of daily culture in Japan and everyone knows about it, but for household names you need to go to long-running, popular shows that run in kid-friendly slots. Stuff like Pokemon, Precure, Detective Conan, etc. It is those long-running shows that become part of the collective consciousness, because everyone watched some of that when they were kids. Same with Ghibli movies and anything by Shinkai Makoto (Your Name, Weathering with You, etc). That, and truly impactful stuff like Evangelion, the Gundam franchise, Naruto, etc.
Then there's the fads. Everyone in Japan knows about Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) right now because they're doing tie-ups with seemingly every shop and business under the sun. Walk into any convenience store and they'll have branded snacks. Whether that series will survive to become something that people remember or not, time will tell.
Well US tv anime viewer sees the (arguably) top 1% of anime from 10-20 years ago and there are huge followings for all of those in Japan but for the most part its drowned out by the constant deluge of mediocre content. Japanese anime fans tend to follow what is currently popular, it is a kind of disposable pop culture for the most part. You see this also with youtube vaporwave artists bringing back Japanese 80s city pop that no one remembers in Japan or if they do they just say “wow that song is so old”. I think the US in recent times has much bigger culture of curating classic pop culture.
When talking to Japanese people I sometimes surprise them by mentioning or recommending Japanese media or things about Japan I love that they didn't know about.
Likewise, when they talk about my country they sometimes mention stuff that I barely know!
This is usually good. It shows us what qualities about us are the most visible to other people, to build upon them or fix them.
This is akin to how Starcraft used to be portrayed as the national sport of South Korea. As to how popular it actually is, I've heard a good analogy: It's similar to pro wrestling in the US, in that most people are aware that it exists, but only a niche group actually follows it.
People often apply what they learn from anime as if it were the reality of life in Japan too. You would think Japan were still fuedal with the amount people attribute honor to the cultural norms of Japan. It is far more intentional and curated than a penchant for honor. I think perhaps we can miss some lessons in community values by seeing it so narrowly.
I don't watch anime but I do love visiting Japan, and that has often stuck out to me with friends.
There's plenty of people here in the US who don't know about those either. While Anime is much more widely popular now in the US than it was even 10 years ago it's still a niche for sure and within that I still have to tell people what FLCL is, not so much the others though.
My point being is it is still a subculture idolizing another subculture. I don't think you can say that is a US wide issue.
May be oversimplification but I reason that this stems from the two cultures having opposed attitudes towards the "weird":
USA: focus on, make fun of, pretend niche is bigger than it is
Japan: pretend it doesn't exist, ignore
That may allow some Japanese to indulge in weirder stuff that would not be tolerated in the US, but what Americans may not understand is that this stuff is still seen as weird/non-conforming/shameful by most Japanese.
EDIT: Genuinely interested as to the reason for the downvotes. Plain wrong? Just stupid?
> The people telling these tales aren’t interested in complexities or, really, in China. They’re making domestic arguments and expressing parochial fears. Their China isn’t a real place but a rhetorical trope, less a genuine rival than a fairy-tale bogeyman.
> [But] when we treat China as a fantasyland of instruction for ourselves, we end up ignoring the Chinese. Like Voltaire’s mandarins or the happy peasants of Maoist propaganda, they cease to be real people and become perfect puppets deployed for rhetorical ends.
I read it having just arrived in China after many years away and it helped contextualized just how vastly different the China was that appeared in even sophisticated English language publications and the raw truth on the ground.
It gave me a powerful lens to critically analyze media from, about how people are reduced to symbols to feed a story that the audience wants to believe rather than the data driven complexity of real ground truth.
The same is true for the rest of the world too. Americans seem to know two things about Germany: the war and the wall, and they don't know that much about either. It really shows when reddit discusses Germany, because they see everything through that pinhole. Reporters are hardly better.
Hell, I live in Germany, and I can't pretend to know much about rural life there, despite leaving the city more often than the average Berliner. I was stunned by the NPD's slogans, because they never reached Berlin.
I could also say the same about America. I only know reddit's America, and perhaps a few things from living just north of the border. The Internet gave me false confidence in my understanding of America.
Bottom line is you shouldn't use a few headlines convince you that you understand how things run in another country. You also can't judge their actions based on your culture and your legal system.
> Barrett was a known plagiarist before The Atlantic granted her the assignment
This here is the problem. Back in my days being caught plagiarizing or faking facts basically expelled you from publishing for life. Journalists will only start caring about facts ones the consequences for getting caught are high enough.
This surprises me too. Particularly since traditional media seem to be struggling and have endured decades of falling profits and belt-tightening. You'd imagine that competition for journalist positions would be tight and one of the easiest "filters" would be "Did this person leave a recent job because of plagiarism?"
I've lived in Japan going on six years and was initially surprised by how ordinary things were - and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, there's an element of truth to some of these articles but you have to go looking hard to find it.
> I've lived in Japan going on six years and was initially surprised by how ordinary things were
I've visited Japan many times over the years, during my first time I was amazed by it all. Even though I spend many years in Asia at that point, and had gotten used to the culture, Tokyo was different. After a few days that feeling wore off, and the things that were different compared to other cities just became normal. I went back last year, and I'm still amazed by the city, but there's not really many things that stand out anymore.
But one thing I've learned after almost 10 years in Asia, things that look "weird" to Westerners, are often completely normal to people living in Asia. And things that are "normal" in the West might be weird to people in Asia. (That really goes for any kind of cultural difference)
I think journalism is falling into a death spiral of “publish-popular-clickable-articles” or perish. Journalists no longer have the time to truly dig into a story, to fact check it, and to make sure it’s written accurately. They get behind, they get desperate, and they fall into these traps - self-made or otherwise.
It also seems that there is generally a shorter collective memory about veracity in news stories. The prime example to me is Bloomberg's seemingly baseless story alleging Chinese hardware-level hacking of US computing equipment. More than two years later, and Bloomberg still has not retracted the story [1]. It doesn't seem to me that Bloomberg has been discounted as a reliable source of news in the general discourse due to their reluctance to admit to their mistakes in their reporting of this story. At least in this case there is an apology.
Frankly, I think this view is incredibly popular, and misinformed about the state of journalism. There was a time, about a little over a decade ago where ad-supported journalism was considered the future, and companies like Buzzfeed started to emerge. Companies started optimizing for page views to boost their revenue and the explosion in clickbait happened.
However, even by 2011 Buzzfeed had started to try to pivot to more long-form content hiring the former editor in cheif of Politico.
By 2015 we saw the "Pivot to video" where outlets had identified that this clickbait stuff had really run it's course and were now moving to video as a way to bring in viewers and revenue. Of course that notoriously failed - having cut editorial staff to focus on video production, it was only about 24 months before they were cutting video production too because it produced no revenue. Vox Media cut 5% of their staff at the beginning of 2018.
So let's look at what actually is happening in the news media today: The Atlantic, TNR, NYT, WashPo. All of them are marketing themselves as high value premium products that are funded almost exclusively by subscription revenue. The new media companies that are still persisting with an advertising strategy are bringing their ad-networks in house and attempting to hit scale in a way that let's them compete with Facebook. The jury is still very much out on whether that's viable of whether they end up being forced to merge or being bought out by a large player like Spotify.
We aren't in the death spiral of chasing views anymore, we're very much back in a stable area where high quality content is available if you're willing to pay for it. The problem is that people are still judging the NYT by what they see on Buzzfeed - because they don't pay for the NYT and assume it's like Buzzfeed. It's going to take a while for the reputations to recover but we do need to actually understand the business as it is today.
There are too many myths peddled about Japan, internally and externally, to list here, and the article provides just one more example. It's not just the media's desire to draw wide ranging conclusions from specific, interesting stories, but also due to Japanese culture itself, a culture of putting appearances before truth, conveniently wrapped up in the (ironically) anodyne phrase "don't disturb the wa". One dangerous example being the distortion of the truth about COVID-19 spread in the run up to the Olympics. I expect the same over the next few months.
As to the larger picture though, I'm not sure why anyone trusts journalists nowadays. In an age of greater access to information their previous stranglehold on "the truth" has repeatedly been shown to be a sham and trusting factcheckers seems to be repeating exactly the same mistake over again but with added naïveté - "Oh, they're factcheckers, that must be true! Giving them that title immediately renders these humans incapable of bias…". The article even wants us to continue to swallow the blatant lie that some reasonably large proportion of stories go through a "rigorous fact-checking process" and even then couldn't withstand lies from sources. Please, you may as well tell me Santa is really going to drop off my presents this year, which would nice given the chaos at ports (thanks again, COVID-19 and lies about contagion).
The "age of big data" and democratised access to data and communication (something that governments and media companies, old and new, have been seeking to reverse) has inadvertently created an "age of epistemology" for which most seem unprepared, journalists being among the least prepared.
>As to the larger picture though, I'm not sure why anyone trusts journalists nowadays.
I see HN has imported the cynicism of the 2020 slashdot crowd. I'm sick and tired of this viewpoint.
Your false dichotomy is eyerolling - either we have total faith in all stories we read, with zero attention to detail and context, or we condemn all journalists as hacks, bad faith actors, and relics of the past: That knowledge is either meaningless, or easily compiled and comprehended in its raw format to the layman.
We need journalism. And in the new century where we will have stronger disinformation campaigns, better deepfakes, and the potential collapse of local news as we know it, "trust" in institutions and particular sources, based on their track record and credibility, will be all we have. Not everything is verifiable, and we as humans need to act on information we can't verify all the time.
So instead of going on about how all journalists suck, let's call out errors and bad work when we see it, and continue to push for better journalism and new ways of researching, citing, and reporting facts.
Agreed but it's not just Japan but pretty much every country in the world. And all countries do the same to each other. Projecting their own fears and insecurities into others.
I have always been thinking what the role fact-checkers act in our way of consuming information. Every time I see "fact-checkers" exist it is to reiterate the view of the readers, or even worse, to assert bias.
It's like critical thinking is never taught to or discovered by them.
> One dangerous example being the distortion of the truth about COVID-19 spread in the run up to the Olympics. I expect the same over the next few months.
Can you give an example? I read a lot of speculation on the internet that there was some conspiracy by the Japanese government to conceal the extent of covid infections prior to the Olympics, but have yet to see any concrete evidence.
In fact, I would give Japan pretty high marks for their handling of pandemic thus far. They rank 140 in world currently in deaths per 1M population [1] (meaning 139 countries have suffered more deaths), despite taking a fairly soft stance toward lock downs. And in my opinion the government has done a good job delivering clear and consistent messaging about the number of new infections, what actions they are taking to prevent the spread of the virus, what types of things residents should avoid doing, etc. [2]
The Atlantic and The New Yorker are both first class magazines and I would expect nothing less of them to deal with their mistakes in a public and accountable fashion. Contrast their response that of many mainstream magazines that never post a correction, much less a retraction.
I started to read only good “quality” news and magazines recently. Here’s my list so far: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New Republic.
Anything similar to those genres that I’m missing that you or anyone else would recommend?
I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan. I never observed the weird stereotypes, but I did experience obsessions. No niche was too big or small for Japanese fanatics: French wine, MMA, video games, etc.
If anyone is interested in how Japan was viewed by American and British visitors more than a century ago, I have put together an anthology called "Japan As They Saw It" at http://gally.net/jatsi/
When I visited Japan over 10 years ago much of what I thought strange has since become normal. The exaggerated fear of criminals, even though Japan is very safe. Very low interest rates and lots of public debt. In the wealthier parts of Japan newspapers featured articles on flu, with maps and graphs charting its activity. Many people wore masks and if I coughed in public people would take a wide path around me and look at me as if I were a barbarian. Exactly like it is in Europe now.
In terms of having an old population Japan was more than 10 years ahead of Europe. So it makes sense Japan was the future Europe.
If we set aside superficial differences such as language and mannerisms, I never thought we're all that different from Americans, Germans, etc. — we're just humans living in the same modern, capitalistic world. Maybe we were different in the feudal era, but not anymore.
But very few people have the ability to overcome those superficial differences.
I find an interesting rural/urban divide in non-fiction portrayals of Japan. I only knew/spent time in rural Japan, which in my own "essentializing" imagination is indeed the Japan of Miyazaki and some of the great 20th century novelists. The romance of bumping along a mountain road in a little truck! But the Japan of these "high-brow" magazines is always extremely urban.
I think that the perception runs both ways - many Japanese people here enjoy being recognized as "polite", "super clean" and "obsessively precise", etc throughout the globe.
And for some weird things - eating raw squid or raw egg for example - people are secretly relieved as Westerners never understand the "true Japanese delicacy". It gives people a sense of superiority.
I'm cutting through with Hanlon's Razor: the journalist herself is a foreigner living in US, which is a pretty weird country if you weren't born there. This makes the necessary additional logical jump way smaller to believe Japan also has different weird things going on.
Anglocentric chauvinism has always had a gross habit of looking at other cultures in a patronizing way. Though to be fair other cultures are guilty of this too when viewing those different than them.
Ever since antiquated Orientalism, it's rarely been an honest curiosity but more of a high-nosed "what's wrong with them" or seen as an exotic escape from the West's own mundanity.
The latter of course often ends in disillusionment, prompting generalized complaints about the object of fetish (if you lurk on any expat forums you may know what I'm talking about).
It can be really annoying to other people, specially when they have to either live up to some stupid assumption or defend against it.
Surly noone in the orient ever expressed such opinions, least of which the japanese --known throughout asia and the world for their love and admiration of other races -- which is why the west is in desperate need to turn the lookingglass around and cleanse itself from all forms of racism, which it is uniquely capable of doing. Other races needn't play in this game.
One could say that this is merely the continuation of chauvinistic anglocentrism by other means, but to do so would embarass self-professed "anti-racists", hence white supermacy gets a new lease on life deep within the liberal mindset that nominally opposes it.
[+] [-] aabhay|5 years ago|reply
There’s a huge bias in the US towards taking niche cultural phenomena in Japan and putting them on a pedestal.
[+] [-] jcranmer|5 years ago|reply
In the US, how many current animated shows can you name? I can name a decent fraction of cartoons from the late 90s, but am completely unable to name anything since then--at least until I got a nephew and am now getting acquainted with the relevant demographic shows. That's a 20 year gap in shows.
Compare other media. How many classical composers can you name? I doubt many people, even erudite people, could push well beyond the basic frontier of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Recognition of well-known tunes (such as Pachelbel's Canon, whose name my spellchecker doesn't appear to recognize) is going to far exceed their name, let alone the composer's name.
The most recognizable anime to a layperson in Japan is likely to be the big mega-blockbusters of various eras. I'd be more shocked if you said that no one had heard of Mobile Suit Gundam, Dragonball, Naruto, or Attack on Titan [which one they'd pick up on depends on their age] than any of the shows you've mentioned. Hell, the only thing you listed that I'd think people in the US with a passing familiarity with anime might know would be Cowboy Bebop.
[+] [-] marcan_42|5 years ago|reply
The US puts late night anime on a pedestal, stuff that fans focus on. That's a big market in Japan, but not ubiquitous by any stretch if the imagination - and the names that become popular in the US are often very different to the names popular here, and often only after they've fallen out in Japan. Takeda-san doesn't know about FLCL.
Anime is part of daily culture in Japan and everyone knows about it, but for household names you need to go to long-running, popular shows that run in kid-friendly slots. Stuff like Pokemon, Precure, Detective Conan, etc. It is those long-running shows that become part of the collective consciousness, because everyone watched some of that when they were kids. Same with Ghibli movies and anything by Shinkai Makoto (Your Name, Weathering with You, etc). That, and truly impactful stuff like Evangelion, the Gundam franchise, Naruto, etc.
Then there's the fads. Everyone in Japan knows about Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) right now because they're doing tie-ups with seemingly every shop and business under the sun. Walk into any convenience store and they'll have branded snacks. Whether that series will survive to become something that people remember or not, time will tell.
[+] [-] porknubbins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scapeghost|5 years ago|reply
Likewise, when they talk about my country they sometimes mention stuff that I barely know!
This is usually good. It shows us what qualities about us are the most visible to other people, to build upon them or fix them.
[+] [-] gibolt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EE84M3i|5 years ago|reply
Old anime, only active fans will know.
[+] [-] busfahrer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehnto|5 years ago|reply
I don't watch anime but I do love visiting Japan, and that has often stuck out to me with friends.
[+] [-] Grimm1|5 years ago|reply
My point being is it is still a subculture idolizing another subculture. I don't think you can say that is a US wide issue.
[+] [-] markus_zhang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selimthegrim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hshshs2|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] leppr|5 years ago|reply
USA: focus on, make fun of, pretend niche is bigger than it is
Japan: pretend it doesn't exist, ignore
That may allow some Japanese to indulge in weirder stuff that would not be tolerated in the US, but what Americans may not understand is that this stuff is still seen as weird/non-conforming/shameful by most Japanese.
EDIT: Genuinely interested as to the reason for the downvotes. Plain wrong? Just stupid?
[+] [-] shalmanese|5 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-american-pundits...
> The people telling these tales aren’t interested in complexities or, really, in China. They’re making domestic arguments and expressing parochial fears. Their China isn’t a real place but a rhetorical trope, less a genuine rival than a fairy-tale bogeyman.
> [But] when we treat China as a fantasyland of instruction for ourselves, we end up ignoring the Chinese. Like Voltaire’s mandarins or the happy peasants of Maoist propaganda, they cease to be real people and become perfect puppets deployed for rhetorical ends.
I read it having just arrived in China after many years away and it helped contextualized just how vastly different the China was that appeared in even sophisticated English language publications and the raw truth on the ground.
It gave me a powerful lens to critically analyze media from, about how people are reduced to symbols to feed a story that the audience wants to believe rather than the data driven complexity of real ground truth.
[+] [-] nicbou|5 years ago|reply
Hell, I live in Germany, and I can't pretend to know much about rural life there, despite leaving the city more often than the average Berliner. I was stunned by the NPD's slogans, because they never reached Berlin.
I could also say the same about America. I only know reddit's America, and perhaps a few things from living just north of the border. The Internet gave me false confidence in my understanding of America.
Bottom line is you shouldn't use a few headlines convince you that you understand how things run in another country. You also can't judge their actions based on your culture and your legal system.
[+] [-] crowf|5 years ago|reply
This here is the problem. Back in my days being caught plagiarizing or faking facts basically expelled you from publishing for life. Journalists will only start caring about facts ones the consequences for getting caught are high enough.
[+] [-] smcl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashtonkem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woutr_be|5 years ago|reply
I've visited Japan many times over the years, during my first time I was amazed by it all. Even though I spend many years in Asia at that point, and had gotten used to the culture, Tokyo was different. After a few days that feeling wore off, and the things that were different compared to other cities just became normal. I went back last year, and I'm still amazed by the city, but there's not really many things that stand out anymore.
But one thing I've learned after almost 10 years in Asia, things that look "weird" to Westerners, are often completely normal to people living in Asia. And things that are "normal" in the West might be weird to people in Asia. (That really goes for any kind of cultural difference)
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
Even the game shows?
Edit: quickly found this gem on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fend1-nnNKk
[+] [-] sunstone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] underseacables|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal6|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/07/bloombergs-big-...
[+] [-] Traster|5 years ago|reply
However, even by 2011 Buzzfeed had started to try to pivot to more long-form content hiring the former editor in cheif of Politico.
By 2015 we saw the "Pivot to video" where outlets had identified that this clickbait stuff had really run it's course and were now moving to video as a way to bring in viewers and revenue. Of course that notoriously failed - having cut editorial staff to focus on video production, it was only about 24 months before they were cutting video production too because it produced no revenue. Vox Media cut 5% of their staff at the beginning of 2018.
So let's look at what actually is happening in the news media today: The Atlantic, TNR, NYT, WashPo. All of them are marketing themselves as high value premium products that are funded almost exclusively by subscription revenue. The new media companies that are still persisting with an advertising strategy are bringing their ad-networks in house and attempting to hit scale in a way that let's them compete with Facebook. The jury is still very much out on whether that's viable of whether they end up being forced to merge or being bought out by a large player like Spotify.
We aren't in the death spiral of chasing views anymore, we're very much back in a stable area where high quality content is available if you're willing to pay for it. The problem is that people are still judging the NYT by what they see on Buzzfeed - because they don't pay for the NYT and assume it's like Buzzfeed. It's going to take a while for the reputations to recover but we do need to actually understand the business as it is today.
[+] [-] markus_zhang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scapeghost|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVcU6i2k9-M
(Highly recommended if you are in need of a smile on your face)
[+] [-] brigandish|5 years ago|reply
As to the larger picture though, I'm not sure why anyone trusts journalists nowadays. In an age of greater access to information their previous stranglehold on "the truth" has repeatedly been shown to be a sham and trusting factcheckers seems to be repeating exactly the same mistake over again but with added naïveté - "Oh, they're factcheckers, that must be true! Giving them that title immediately renders these humans incapable of bias…". The article even wants us to continue to swallow the blatant lie that some reasonably large proportion of stories go through a "rigorous fact-checking process" and even then couldn't withstand lies from sources. Please, you may as well tell me Santa is really going to drop off my presents this year, which would nice given the chaos at ports (thanks again, COVID-19 and lies about contagion).
The "age of big data" and democratised access to data and communication (something that governments and media companies, old and new, have been seeking to reverse) has inadvertently created an "age of epistemology" for which most seem unprepared, journalists being among the least prepared.
I have precisely zero sympathy.
[+] [-] unethical_ban|5 years ago|reply
I see HN has imported the cynicism of the 2020 slashdot crowd. I'm sick and tired of this viewpoint.
Your false dichotomy is eyerolling - either we have total faith in all stories we read, with zero attention to detail and context, or we condemn all journalists as hacks, bad faith actors, and relics of the past: That knowledge is either meaningless, or easily compiled and comprehended in its raw format to the layman.
We need journalism. And in the new century where we will have stronger disinformation campaigns, better deepfakes, and the potential collapse of local news as we know it, "trust" in institutions and particular sources, based on their track record and credibility, will be all we have. Not everything is verifiable, and we as humans need to act on information we can't verify all the time.
So instead of going on about how all journalists suck, let's call out errors and bad work when we see it, and continue to push for better journalism and new ways of researching, citing, and reporting facts.
[+] [-] howlgarnish|5 years ago|reply
Are you suggesting that this culture is somehow uniquely Japanese? Because I've yet to work at a company that didn't do to the same.
[+] [-] nilsleep|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaudat|5 years ago|reply
It's like critical thinking is never taught to or discovered by them.
[+] [-] freetime2|5 years ago|reply
Can you give an example? I read a lot of speculation on the internet that there was some conspiracy by the Japanese government to conceal the extent of covid infections prior to the Olympics, but have yet to see any concrete evidence.
In fact, I would give Japan pretty high marks for their handling of pandemic thus far. They rank 140 in world currently in deaths per 1M population [1] (meaning 139 countries have suffered more deaths), despite taking a fairly soft stance toward lock downs. And in my opinion the government has done a good job delivering clear and consistent messaging about the number of new infections, what actions they are taking to prevent the spread of the virus, what types of things residents should avoid doing, etc. [2]
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[2] NHK Covid page (in Japanese, but translates reasonably well in Chrome) https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/special/coronavirus/
[+] [-] markdown|5 years ago|reply
What the alternative? To get our information from places like informationclearinghouse?
[+] [-] boxmonster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raunakdag|5 years ago|reply
Anything similar to those genres that I’m missing that you or anyone else would recommend?
[+] [-] mathattack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaboy|5 years ago|reply
It’s almost 2021. Really?
[+] [-] tkgally|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andomar|5 years ago|reply
In terms of having an old population Japan was more than 10 years ahead of Europe. So it makes sense Japan was the future Europe.
[+] [-] yutopia|5 years ago|reply
But very few people have the ability to overcome those superficial differences.
[+] [-] samirillian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euske|5 years ago|reply
And for some weird things - eating raw squid or raw egg for example - people are secretly relieved as Westerners never understand the "true Japanese delicacy". It gives people a sense of superiority.
[+] [-] _v7gu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yew|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scapeghost|5 years ago|reply
Ever since antiquated Orientalism, it's rarely been an honest curiosity but more of a high-nosed "what's wrong with them" or seen as an exotic escape from the West's own mundanity.
The latter of course often ends in disillusionment, prompting generalized complaints about the object of fetish (if you lurk on any expat forums you may know what I'm talking about).
It can be really annoying to other people, specially when they have to either live up to some stupid assumption or defend against it.
[+] [-] parsimoniousplb|5 years ago|reply
One could say that this is merely the continuation of chauvinistic anglocentrism by other means, but to do so would embarass self-professed "anti-racists", hence white supermacy gets a new lease on life deep within the liberal mindset that nominally opposes it.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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