This is an attempt to answer a question that I seem to be getting a lot, recently. It is best summarized as “Japan? Why?” or, even more prosaically “Japan? What the fuck?” This is also an attempt to answer some general questions about life in post-modernity and the burden of the human beast and its human condition.
I can still recall the great sense of pride and achievement I got when I finished an academical year with success for the first time. It seemed like I finally belonged somewhere. After a troublesome adolescent era and an incredibly dull but frustrating childhood in a small provincial commune I had finally found my goal. I was to become a philosopher. “Cogito, ergo sum” was to be my motto and the world of the conceptual and the eternal were to be the realm in which I dwelled. To be a philosopher, in my opinion at the time, was to be a distinguished member of an endangered elite. So I worked hard to excel, and excel I did.
Of course, things quickly turned sour. The expected high-spirited elite, my fellow student philosophers, were much more interested in booze than in Plato, Aristotle or even Nietzsche. The professors often seemed to lack goal and zest. They were purposeless, just like the common guy in the street and the subjects of the lessons often seemed redundant or even petty. Still, I held on to my ideals and became what I wanted to become, an intellectual of sorts, and a thinker, even if my own intellectualism was limited and my thinking was quite often fundamentally flawed. Some of the professors even found the time to really teach me something.( After my studies I have never met a thinker that touched my heart and stimulated my brain as professor Paul Gimeno did, however short his time with his students and on this earth was to be, may he rest in peace.)
My university years as a philosophy major ended quickly and I graduated after a mere four years of studying. Finally, I had become a “master” in philosophy, as the paper said, and I was contented, at least for a short while. The bliss I felt when I quickly received my diploma ceded for another feeling. I went through a stage of great personal crisis and turned back from a master into an apprentice. To put it trivially, I became a body on the dole, an unemployed and unusable person, in every sense of these words. In a way, I had become a part of an anonymous mass, no more human, I suddenly was a dot on a statistical curve that was called ‘The chronically workless’. It’s not that I didn’t try to get accepted by normal society, as some of my philosophical brethren did. I wrote over one hundred letters of application, and got over one hundred refusals. It was pretty obvious they didn’t want me and I felt like an elitist member of that doomed group that Nietzsche called the ‘Viel-zu-vielen’.
I wondered “what is to happen next?” This question quickly became the focal point of my life and it interfered with all its other spheres. It became an obsession. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse I found two part-time jobs, all at once. I became a teacher, even though I had sworn never to swing that way, and a journalist for a news show aimed at children. I worked and worked, and all was fine again. For a while.
This too, however, quickly changed. I found myself faced with new forms of the good old question, “why am I doing all of this? And for whom?”
Whenever the questions came to mind I felt an overwhelming numbness and I experienced it all to be senselessness. I kept hitting myself over the head for abandoning my ideals, for working these jobs I didn’t really like, but still I had to eat. So I ate and I tortured myself and I found that once again I was stuck with an obsession to change everything.
After some deliberation I decided to become a fulltime student once again. I enrolled in a bachelor program, studying Japanese and Classical Chinese, while still working as a teacher in some schools and doing the occasional odd job as a journalist to earn myself a meager but livable allowance. Bliss, happiness and smileys on my social networks ensued.
This concludes the more romantic and prosaic part of this “essay”, so if you’re not interested in a lot of philosophical mumbo jumbo you might want to skip to the last paragraph. Let’s try to get into some theory.
When you look at it, in a quite general way, human beings are desiring machines. Okay, we have our rationality and morality, which can’t be equal to our desires all of the time, if you doubt this I would recommend reading something by any utilitarianistic philosopher, doesn’t really matter who, or the work of good old David Hume. But if you look at the gargantuesque amount of energy and time that people all over the world spend to satisfy their basic needs and desires you will have to agree with me on the fact that desire and the satisfaction of it is what drives the world. We, all of us, are hungry, thirsty, cold, overheated and sex driven and we can only continue making sense of our lives when we take care of these basic needs, first. Once the basic needs have disappeared, new needs arise, for our mind is so dispositioned that always needs something to occupy itself with. This was, in an evolutionary way, probably a good thing, for it kept us from starving to death, if it still is a good thing in the highly developed commodities society of the west and some peripheral parts of it (mind, I’m using “peripheral” to provoke), I am not so sure. So where were we? Oh yes, I am not thirsty and cold anymore, but I am still drinking water and wearing the hide of some ghastly jungle beast. “Well this won’t do!”, man says and he starts to desire a more luxurious life. But he is faced with a problem. How can he enjoy a luxurious life and at the same time work his ass of to make the objects that he needs to make a luxurious life?
The solution is found in the shape of the division of labor, and more recently in our evolutionary history or historical evolution, in the creation of a category of symbolical labor. The division of labor is, I do believe, a good thing in itself. It’s basically the agreement that I will make sweaters, because that’s what I do best, but that you will raise livestock, because that’s what you do best, and that we will try to share the fruits of our labor so as both to reap the benefits. A laborer in a system of divided labor is a more successful, albeit less universally useful one, than one in a system without divided labor. This is a pretty, pretty, … pretty simplified schematic of divided labor, but it will do for the here and now of this blog. Next: symbolical labor.
The symbolical laborer is a worker that doesn’t handle physical substances anymore. He handles the values and actions of other people and makes it into something he can use for his own profit. With this, a process had started in which both labor and human beings became commodities.
The long process to make a commodity out of labor was completed somewhere at the end of the nineteenth century and is still an important part of the economical system today. Salesmen, lawyers, politicians and factory owners, they all are symbolical laborers. All of this you can also hear in a Marxism 101 course.
In the twentieth century a new form of symbolical labor arose. This form of labor thrives on the exploitation of the traditional group of physical laborers in favor of the elite of symbolical laborers. I am, of course, talking about advertising. The purpose of advertising is creating new needs or reestablishing the old ones in order to be able to keep selling products that symbolical laborers need to sell. To put it in a way advertisers could relate to: “If they don’t need it, make them want it!”
So the young individual, freshly trained in science, humanities or art finds himself in a quite precarious situation once he ventures out to find a job. He can choose between a meager life as a marginal figure in society or participate in the game of creating the newest thing, either as a manual or as a symbolical laborer. I think every professional has to make this simple but harsh choice, and not even the so-called creative professions are spared of this. A writer, to take one example, is under enormous pressure to make his work valuable to a certain subgroup of readers. In big countries a writer can still have some freedom, because he can write for a smaller, but still large enough subgroup. In that way, an intellectualist novelist can write an intellectualist book for a small but still considerably large enough audience. There a lot of possible situations in which an individual can have a relatively large freedom of thinking and movement. The rule of thumb to remember is: as long as symbolical labor makes enough profit, everything is a-okay.
In some countries however, like the Flemish part of Belgium, which I happen to be a part of, hooray for that, the market is so small that the people that, to use the example given above, read are considered by the class of symbolical laborers to be one big undividable group. To use the given example, an intellectual who writes a book in Dutch will often not get published, bacause there’s simply no market for the symbolical laborer to get rich enough of. Because of this, the literary scene in Flanders has been dead for the past twenty or thirty years. You could argue for state intervention in this case, but governmental initiatives are rare, and they only affect those that already have had some degree of success. Frustration amongst intelligent young people is bound to arise.
Where’s does all this leave me in my story as to why I choose to study Japanese culture? How can this help to explain my, seemingly, strange choice?
First of all, I think the sketched situation is inevitable and, in a way, eternal. I don’t believe in a big revolution, or in a reversal of the values of the free market that have been thriving in the west for some time now. To put it bluntly for those who already know of this discussion, I am not and will never be a believer in a systemic revolution. People are, taken as a group, not as individuals, stupid and will always fall for the same pitfalls of commercialism and advertising. To take away their freedom means to be inhuman and I think that nobody ever proved that slavery, be it in the name of religion or humanity, can make things better.
I also don’t believe in a counterculture that could radically change things by means of symbolical actions. It would take violence to really change things, but I’m not a violent man, and I can’t abstrahate the suffering of even one person if it would save thousands.
An artist, an academic, a thinker or a writer doesn’t change the world. 99 Percent of the time he is powerless to make people act differently. But he might force a deeper understanding on what I, with a metaphor I borrowed from former Us president Bush junior, would call the alliance of the willing. You have to be modest, you can not not be modest. You won’t change anything, but you have to try to increase understanding. It is a futile but inevitable quest, for giving up on it means falling into the abyss of unreflected, uncritical Macdonaldism. That’s the way I feel it, I really can’t help it. I know it’s terribly Epicurean, and small in scale and proportion, but I think it’s all we have.
Secondly, an original creator, if he is a truly original creator, doesn’t try to be original. We live in a world that is permeated and soaked to the bone by information. Thinking you can create a new style, make something that hasn’t been done before is an illusion that can only end in disappointment or intellectual solitude. The elements are finite, but the combinations are limitless. We are surrounded by all kinds of meanings and rearranging them into pallets of provoking and challenging new combinations is the challenge for any true creator in the postmodernist world. By getting in touch with Japanese culture I am simply expanding my set of rules for combining things. To sever oneself from obviousness and take some distance from your own identity is a great adventure albeit a perilous one. Losing yourself, losing your mind is not unthinkable, and at times I don’t know who I am, if I ever did know. Probably this is because I am nobody if not the construction that others and me assembled and continue to reassemble.
Thirdly, there is also a personal and more trivial reason why I became obsessed with Japan and all things Japanese. It seems to me that the Japanese as a people have an interesting dynamic of assimilation of other countries. I believe the reasons for this are not in any way genetical or biological, as they rather foolishly like to believe, but it’s just that they were from their early Yamato beginning in an underdog position. They were on an island, which is socio-geologically spoken a disadvantage for development, and they were also on the edge of the giant and strong Chinese empire for almost their entire history. But for some reason they created a knack for assimilating and for making the best out of a bad situation, so they always knew how to excel in a way, even if they fell in the pitfalls of fascism, isolation and absolutism at a couple of crucial times. For me, the Japanese as a people have often illustrated what it’s like to be original in a world that’s soaked in profit and utilitarianism.
There are two possible roads for original persons: they can lose their grip on reality, become absolutists or solitarians, or they can maintain themselves in a way that’s enigmatic or even problematic to most people, alienating almost everybody but forcing admiration by pure determination.
This second choice is, in no way, easy and frustration roars its ugly head every which way we look. I think the wannabe originals are all stuck with only one true choice: to kill ourselves or to be brave and to struggle in a heroic fashion. These are the options that Albert Camus gives the reader in “La mythe de Sisyphe” , a book that hasn’t lost one ounce of relevance in the almost seventy years since its publication. The necessity of courage or suicide is a sad but unavoidable conclusion in these modern times, and I think that the people of Japan are vitally aware of all this. They have a very high suicide rate.
This third point is less universal than the other two, and I think it is the least important one. The main points are, as we recall, the inability for individuals to change something in a systematic way and the imperative of originality to dislodge yourself from your fixed state of mind. In the end I would say the only possible way out of the modern dilemma between being stuck in nothingness or creating something and throwing it into a vaccuum is to go out and to venture. Japan is an arbitrary choice of culture, and I honestly don’t give a fuck about the Japanese or Japanese society persé, and I might as well have chosen Thailand or South-Africa, but the main thing is that the confrontation with another cultural frame dislodges you out of your fixed frame of mind, gets you out of the couch of thoughts you were embedded in and puts some vital questions to the test.
