Benjamin Hourigan

Yesterday Nintendo announced that its new console, previously developed under the Revolution codename, will be called the “Wii”.

I propose that the console’s followup be called the “Puu”, that Will Wright develop this game for the console, and also that the person who made the final decision to approve the name be publicly humiliated by being put in the stocks and urinated on for several hours.

It’s laudable that Nintendo has tried to come up with a name that can be pronounced across the world, stating that “Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii.” But it’s lunacy to choose a name that evokes urine to the largest videogame market in the developed world, of well over 300 million English speakers in the USA (not to mention the others in Australia, the UK, Canada, South Africa, Singapore, the EU and so on).

See also Joystiq’s Wii comic, A Wii logo video from Nintendo, Forbes’ article on response to the name, Vox pops on Joystiq, comments on Japanese response to the name, Joystiq’s reader poll on the name, and Joystiq’s commentary on Nintendo’s defense of the name.

Looking around modern Japan, I don’t know why, but invisible rules have grown up everywhere. Lifestyle, human relations, clothing, deportment—each of these is enclosed in a framework. Just as the audience at a wedding stands up, sits down, and points their camera at the MC, so people are bound up in rules. (Nakano Kiyotsugu, quoted in Alex Kerr, Dogs and Demons: The fall of modern Japan, 307)

At the Citibank branch in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, I just deposited 5168¥ in loose change. That’s 8 months worth of living in Japan, plus the contents of a moneybox someone left behind in my old apartment in Gunma-ken. At today’s exchange rate, that’s A$60.37 in individually nigh-worthless pieces of metal, including exactly 1268 individual one-yen pieces. It took maybe 15 minutes for the tellers to count, with the aid of a machine, and at the end of it I had to fill in the amount on a deposit slip I’d already written my name, the date, and my account number on. It was then I made my mistake.

I’d been marking up my copy of Dogs and Demons with a pencil, on the page bearing the quote above. Jung would have been impressed by the synchronicity. I used the pencil to write the first digit of the amount. Realizing what I’d done, I carefully wrote over that 5 with the biro on the counter, and continued on to the 1, the 7, and the 0.

I’d heard about having to fill out forms again if you made a mistake and a correction. This is apparently a common thing in Japan, but it’s never happened to me before. I certainly never expected it to happen in a North American bank, with a mistake that was completely invisible. Completely invisible, except that the teller had seen me use a pencil on the 5.

She reached up to get a new deposit slip from a high shelf in the cupboard behind her, gave it to me, and asked: “Can you fill it out again?” No need for explanation, I knew what had just happened. Fortunately, this was just a deposit slip. I can imagine wasting hours rewriting multi-page forms for the sake of a single mistake. It reminds me of how, at 7 or 8, I used to cross out any word I’d written with a malformed letter, fearful that I’d inadvertently write a secret sign that would summon the devil to steal my soul. I kid you not. It’s obsessive behaviour.

“This is insane,” I raged at the teller. The wait for the counting hadn’t worked me up; no, it was 8 months in Japan that had done that.

“What is ‘insine’?” she asked sweetly.

“It’s crazy!” I explained. “Look at this…” And I showed her the carbon paper behind the form. “Fifty-one seventy, clear as day.”

“Yes, it’s clear, but you have to fill out a new form.”

“Why?”

“It’s the rule.”

“That’s crazy.”

“But still you have to do it.”

And so it continued. I told her, “I don’t have to do this in my country,” which surprised her, and—oh, the eloquence!—I told her: “this is the stupidest thing ever.”

And so it is. And so I filled out a new form.

Still not satisfied, the teller asked me: “Could you write the yen sign here, in front of the amount, please.” And I raged again.

“Why don’t you write it then, since I’m incapable of filling out a form correctly? Why don’t you get a machine to do it, or a robot?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t fill it in.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not allowed to.” More rules.

And so I wrote it, and I got my receipt, and I walked away.

I ought to have got some attitude from the teller, but sadly in Japan people won’t even tell you to go fuck yourself.

I hate this country with unholy passion.

Last night I went “clubbing” for the first time in my life. Sure, I’d been to bars that play loud music before, and places with a dancefloor, and places where you can’t hear your friends when you try to talk to them. But I’d always tried to avoid places that are those things so relentlessly as to be called a club.

3000¥ at Club Pure Osaka will get a guy a plastic cup that entitles you to all the mixed spirits you can drink. Girls get the same for 2000¥. The rule is that if you don’t have an empty plastic cup, you can’t get the drinks you paid for, so you have to carry it with you everwhere you go. Most people dance with a cup in their hand, and going to the bathroom means setting it down on a free surface. I actually saw a guy drinking out of his cup while taking a piss, which was a great image of the absurd, and the instigator of a bleakly humorous moment of existential dread.

So, I drank, and I danced, and I watched poledancing Japanese girls, exchanged a few brief words with my friend Erika and a few people I hadn’t met before. I didn’t try to pick anyone up, because Japanese girls don’t interest me, and moreover because I don’t know how to act in those situations. The loud music, drowning out conversation, seems calculated to reduce the crowd to as close to mere animality as it can. The courtship rituals, the display of bodies and movement, become like those of birds. And I don’t like it much. I like being a human. It’s where my advantages are, in my intellect, in my speech, in my knowledge and my accomplishments. Those, too, are the things in others that most easily give me pleasure in their company, and the things that solidify my attraction to a woman.

Dancing is fun. Drinking seems fun, but is tiresome to recover from (and I ought to steer clear of situations with unlimited amounts of alcohol). But the idea and the fact of a room that strips away the human in us displeases me, much as it may be, for many, a welcome temporary escape from the burdens of being sentient.

Japan was a bust. The slap-the-country-in-the-face-post can wait until I return to Melbourne in 27 days.

I’m looking forward to clean air, trees, beautiful buildings, great food, jobs that don’t take 14 hours out of every day, and women who speak English.

I also have a new header image featuring the Melbourne skyline (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons). Until I leave for Montréal, Melbourne is where I’ll be looking for home.

There’s been some interesting anti-post*ism articles in The Australian recently. Today, Giles Auty suggests Top Marx for Our Educators, and Steve Lewis and Imre Salusinszky report that the PM canes ‘rubbish’ postmodern teaching. Auty’s article is a cranky and sometimes ill-informed invective, so i’ll pass over it, but Lewis and Salusinzsky’s report leads down an interesting path…

Now, I’m not in Australia at the moment, so I haven’t been following this story, but Lewis and Salusinszky report that Australian PM, John Howard, has been criticising high-school English curricula that focus not on literacy and literature, but on ‘critical literacy’: critiques of effects of power supposedly embedded within texts. Lewis and Salusinszky write:

The criticism of teaching standards followed revelations in The Weekend Australian that a prestigious Sydney school, SCEGGS Darlinghurst, had asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives.

“I think there’s evidence of that (dumbing down) in different parts of the country … when the, what I might call the traditional texts, are treated no differently from pop cultural commentary, as appears to be the case in some syllabuses,” Mr Howard told the ABC. (link added)

There’s nothing inherently objectionable about asking students to interpret Shakespeare from Marxist, feminist, and what I presume are meant to be not racial, but postcolonial, or racially-aware, perspectives, so long as the students are only told to do it because it’s a valuable intellectual exercise. However, the wording of the assessment task in question, reprinted in The Australian, goes a little further:

“In your answer, refer closely to the prescribed text and explain how dramatic techniques might be used to communicate each reading. You must consider two of the following readings: Marxist, feminist, race,”

Like many essay questions, it’s lamentably unclear, and appears to anachronistically suggest that Shakespeare may have used dramatic techniques to communicate Marxist or feminist perspectives. It’s also difficult to imagine how, forced to think themselves inside two of the left-wing readings mentioned, a student might have enough scope left to mount a sustained criticism of even one of those readings, should they choose to.

Reporter Justine Ferrari gathers some fine comments condemning the approach to literature that the assessment task suggests. Les Murray “said literature should be removed from school curriculums, which, in the words of US poet Billy Collins, teach students to strap poetry to a chair and beat meaning out of it with a hose”. I heartily agreee with him. Murray continues: “Students are being taught to translate (poetry and literature) into some kind of dreary, rebarbative, reductive prose for the purpose of getting high marks.”

Rolling out the big guns, Ferrari even gets a quote from Harold Bloom, who says: “I find the question sublimely stupid … It is another indication that literary study has died in Australia.” This may not be especially significant, though, since as far as I’m aware Bloom thinks literary study has died in general.

Back to Lewis and Salusinszky’s article, and we find Peter Morgan, convenor of the European Studies program at the University of Western Australia, weighing in sagely:

Professor Morgan said the English literature syllabus in Western Australia was being replaced by a course called “Texts, traditions and cultures”, which had led to a large degree of dissatisfaction and low morale among teachers.

“Literary theory covers a broad range of cultural and social theory from Marxism to post-structuralism, feminism and queer theory,” he said. “It’s very obscure. It encourages students to use buzzwords and jargon to cover up that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

“Teachers are disappointed they are not teaching literature any more. They feel the subject has been hijacked by those who want to teach about race, gender and Marxism, rather than about literature.

And it’s here that Morgan pinpoints the problem. Literary studies still includes literature, but it’s not always easy to say that literature is what it’s about, any longer. The omnipresence of the various kinds of theory described here, in most courses of literary study, draws attention away from texts, their aesthetics, and the concrete facts of their creation (such as their place in their authors’ lives), It makes literary studies into a study of labour issues, race-relations, queer issues, and often as not a shrill and incessant whining about the deleterious effects capitalism and neo-liberal governments have on artistic expression. Rather than appreciating literature, students are encouraged to treat it as a ground in which to go on a treasure-hunt for sinister motives underlying all of modern life and culture.

Such study might be necessary, in the sense that a well-rounded society ought to have it secreted in some forgotten academic niche, but it is indeed dreary. It works against a love of literature, though literature is a loveable thing, both sublime and beautiful. Universities, I suppose, might be permitted to massacre literary studies as they like. But in high-school English courses, where encouraging literacy ought still be one of the goals, driving students to think of reading as dreary is destructive in the extreme.

Update: Sorrow at Sills Bend has a different take on the Literary Studies Argy-Bargy, and her post is a goldmine of links (a linkmine?).

Here’s a great television commercial for a Final Fantasy-branded energy drink on sale in Japan at the moment. Two white collar workers fight for the last bottle left in a convenience store, Final Fantasy-style!