Benjamin Hourigan

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.

James Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A history of philosophy in Australia (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003), 465pp. ★★★ (3 stars)

This lively and opinionated history of philosophy in Australia is a good read, but lacks overall structure.

This book has more of a personal intellectual story to it than most, for me. In late 2004 I was decisively turning my back on the academic post’isms and looking for an alternative intellectual framework that I could base meaningful, readable research on. I’d been reading Keith Windschuttle’s The Killing of History, one of the Australian books written against post-ist nonsense, and decided to write to Windschuttle asking for some advice and reading recommendations. That it was taken as implicit in my department that one should revile Windschuttle was among the reasons I sought him out: if such misguided minds as those found in my department hated him, he probably had something worthwhile to say. Windschuttle passed my inquiry on to a friend of his, and somehow, in all this I found out about Jim Franklin, another of Windschuttle’s friends.

On Franklin’s webpage, I saw he’d written a book about philosophy in Australia. It was something I knew practically nothing about, and I was interested to pursue the intellectual connection, so I ordered it online. As with many books, it’s taken me months upon months to finish, but I’m glad I have.

What will forever stick in my mind about this book was that when I mentioned it, and Jim, in the postgraduate common room, Alex Murray (whose list of influences is a veritable shopping cart of obnoxious continental theory) picked up on the conversation from the other side of the room and chimed in, “that man is evil!” Upon asking why, I received an answer that I think had something to do with him being a Catholic. My further revelation that I’d heard about the book by writing to Keith Windschuttle probably earned me permanent suspicion from several people in the room.

But that’s by the by. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a scholarly work of this kind was in fact written as a rather good story, packed with scandal and incident. Franklin is full of opinions on philosophy, and his prejudices are very evident in the way he makes fun of particular figures and positions. While this tarnishes the credibility of the book in the deadly serious, scholarly sense, it’s a pleasure to see someone writing with a personal voice for a change, and taking a stand against or for particular thinkers while letting all speak through extensive quotations, such as this one:

Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe. (388, quote from David Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies)

As with most such surveys of ideas, the chief value of Corrupting the Youth is that it may serve to acquaint one with great and beautiful writing and thinking. Stand-outs here are the moral sensibility of Raimond Gaita (405-408), the wit and wisdom of David Stove (i.e. 388), and the prose of Donald Horne (277). Franklin’s history is also valuable in chronicling some of the unsavory dealings and motivations that contributed to the rise of Marxism and the various post’isms in Australia’s academic humanities from the 1970s onwards.

Though an enjoyable read, Corrupting the Youth ends on a weak note, trailing off with a discussion of the euthanasia debate. It would have benefited from a conclusion that tied up the story into a cohesive whole, and guessed at future directions for Australian philosophy or issued some final judgement on it.

Sue Brooks (dir.) Japanese Story. 2003.
2/10

I was determined not to like this film, and so, unsurprisingly, I didn’t.

On one level, this is a film about a woman’s being forced to face and accept the reality of death. That part of it, which occupies the last twenty minutes or so, is mildly emotionally affecting. It is not, however, a particularly original theme, and nor is it exceptionally well-executed here.

The rest of the film, which is about an encounter between an East Asian man and an Australian woman, has little to recommend it. My first grievance, which I commonly hold against Australian films, is that it indulges in a view of Australia that is dominated by the outback. Since the majority of our population lives in state capital cities and their suburbs, this prevents such films from accurately representing Australian life even as they use farms or ‘the red centre’ to visually signify their Australian-ness.

Japanese Story also manifestly misrepresents East Asia and the Australian relationship with it. Why, for instance, does this encounter occur between a Japanese man and a white Australian woman? It’s not the 1980s anymore, and Japan is no longer the world-fascinating economic miracle that it once was. China and Southeast Asia are stronger presences in our cities, our culture, and our international political and economic contexts.

Accepting, though, that for whatever reason, scriptwriter Alison Tilson decided to focus on Japan (I would have done the same, Japanophile that I am), the representation of Japanese culture is stereotyped and outdated. Hiromitsu, and later in the film, his wife, are completely alien presences, whom the female protagonist, Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette), evidently struggles to understand or communicate with on all levels but those of primal emotion and desire. The Japanese characters appear, also, to have come out of the distant past, adhering assiduously to the idea prevalent in the West of the 1970s and 1980s that Japan is an unfailingly rule-bound, reserved, formal and traditional culture. To make this impression even clearer, scenes that are meant to be emotional, such as the sex-scene between Hiromitsu and Sandy, are overlaid with traditional Japanese music, rather than the J-Pop that would be more familiar to most Japanese ears (and also to many Australian ones). I get a stronger sense of Japanese contemporaneity from some historical films, such as The Last Samurai (set directly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868) than from Japanese Story.

In addition, this is a story about a gauche, uncosmopolitan Australian’s relatively neat encounter with Asia. Hiromitsu arrives on a business trip, sees some of our iconic landscape, has sex with Sandy twice, dies, and then is taken back in a coffin by his Japanese wife. Hello Asia. Goodbye Asia. This is not the Asia that Australians engaged with it know. This is not the Asia where some of my good friends, who I have known for several years, were born. This is not the Asia whose daughters I have dated. It is not the Asia some of whose values I have learned and adopted, by learning about Zen and about classical Chinese philosophy. It is not the Asia that I buy $6 meals from in the Melbourne CBD. It is not the Asia where I intend to teach English after I finish my PhD.

The director, Brooks, and scriptwriter, Tilson, seem to have no real knowledge about the realities of Asian (in this case, Japanese) life or culture, or about the ‘Australian’ relationship with Asia. For them, Japan is just a novelty, a disposable piece of the exotic.

In conclusion, here’s a list of other things that I found noteworthy about Japanese Story:

• Before Sandy has sex with Hiromitsu for the first time, she gets naked, then puts on Hiromitsu’s pants. She then rides him, cowgirl style, without us seeing her taking off the pants. Why she puts the pants on is unclear. It is also unclear how they were able to have sex, since the pants would have made it difficult, if not impossible.
• There are far too many shots of cars driving down roads, and of other things which do not advance the story or develop the characters. There is also not enough dialogue. This makes the film unneccessarily boring.
• The film was funded by numerous government agencies. This is a disgrace. Even if it had been a good film, it would still be a luxury, and the government has no business taking our money only to give it back as luxuries we did not choose. I propose an immediate end to all government funding for the arts.
• The most valuable lesson Japanese Story has to teach us is this: never dive into a body of water before you check that it is safe to do so.

Richard Bartle, QBlog. “Fact Checking.” 16 February 2005.

Since I just started playing World of Warcraft, I had a look today at Richard Bartle’s typography of online players, which Espen Aarseth refers to in his great paper Playing Research. From there I went on to Bartle’s blog. For those who don’t know, Bartle was involved, with Roy Trubshaw, in creating the first Multi User Dungeon (MUD), a text-based online role-playing environment, in 1978. [I could be wrong, and maybe he’ll correct me if I am.]

In the referenced post, Bartle is complaining about a book about virtuality that he started reading. Now, being a pioneer of imaginary online worlds, he quickly identified a host of factual errors in the book, and wondered how he could trust the author on anything if she’d got such basic things wrong.

I write about this kind of thing in the second chapter of my thesis, and I’m not the first to. People writing about technology from a humanities perspective often aren’t expertly familiar with the subject matter: they just jumped on the bandwagon because their subject is new and cool. Nick Montfort, one of my favourite writers on the subject of videogames, complains about errors in writing about text adventures in his history of the genre, Twisty Little Passages.

Sometimes these errors can be really ridiculous. For instance, in Joystick Nation, J.C. Herz claims that George Lucas worked on the Wing Commander series, which was set in the Star Wars universe. In fact, George Lucas had no input and the games are not set in the Star Wars universe at all. She also makes mistakes about non-gaming things, falsely reporting that pop group a-ha (of “Take on Me” fame) were Swedish, when they were in fact Norwegian.

“How am I going to be able to trust anything else factual in the book, knowing that this one sentence contains so many errors?” Bartle asks. The answer is that you can’t.

In my thesis, I mercilessly attack people who make factual mistakes. And I’m terrified that I’ll make some myself. I’m also certain that I will, not because I don’t know what I’m talking about, unlike Herz and the other writers about games who’ve probably played less than a hundred (and probably less than ten) of them themselves. I’ve probably played over 1000 videogames, but that’s just a fraction of the total, and there are so many things to know that I couldn’t get everything right myself, and there’s very other works that record facts on which I can rely for aid.

So in a few years, it’s likely that someone better informed than me will view me as an untrustworthy source. It’s unfortunate, but probably unavoidable.

On a more triumphant note, thanks to a link from Bartle’s post, I also discovered that singular they, which I have used intuitively for a long time, is relatively widespread. Now if my supervisors object when I use it, I’ll tell them to f*** off (politely, of course).

Philip Pullman. 1997. The Subtle Knife. London: Point. 341pp.

This is the second of three volumes in Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and continues the story from Northern Lights (known in the US as The Golden Compass, of which I wrote, in my own notes, on 13 November 2005:

It took me a little while to read this, because my interest in it waxed and waned. It is, to me, at its best when meditating on the nature of the soul, or of animal intuition (as in the scene where Iorek Byrnison asks Lyra to try and trick her), or on innocence and sin. But the intervals between these meditations were too long to sustain my unbroken interest in the middle of a life filled with many distractions. The adventure story parts of the book, while well told and well paced, interested me the least, and formed its bulk. The end speaks of myseries to come and entices me to read on, but I may wait a while. At its best this book is excellent, at its worst it is merely good. It compares favourably to the Harry Potter books in stylistic terms, but is seldom quite as gripping. Its subject matter, however, is more mature, and its philosophy more considered. 6.5/10

The adventure elements of The Subtle Knife manage to avoid the lack of momentum sometimes felt when reading its predecessor. Where Northern Lights focussed solely on Lyra’s quest to rescue her friend Roger from the Oblation Board, its sequel switches between multiple protagonists as they pursue their goals through the parallel worlds opened to them by Lord Asriel at Northern Lights’ end. While some readers may find it irritating to be forcibly wrenched away from one engrossing plotline to another one whose appeal is yet unproven, the shifts prevent any one character’s story from becoming boring.

The Subtle Knife is also heavier on the philosophical and theological discursions that were so satisfying in Northern Lights, benefiting from having the framework for those discursions already laid down. It also reveals the main goal of the heroes’ activities: to aid Lord Asriel in his attempt to destroy God. Fully understanding how Dust, angels, and even the basic concepts of good and evil fit together in this context probably requires at least some knowledge of (at least) the Bible, Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, and Paradise Lost, but those without such a grounding might get away with having played the Japanese RPGs Xenogears and Dragon Quest/Warrior VII, both of which involve battles against God.

Near the end of the book, Stanislaus Grumman says:

There are two great powers …and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn from one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit. (335)

He and all of the books’ other protagonists are on the side of knowledge and wisdom, against God (referred to as the Authority) and the Church (the Magisterium). Pullman is evidently believes that theistic religions have a solely negative influence on human society, and as a committed anti-theist myself, I approve heartily. When we consider how an earlier classic of children’s literature, The Chronicles of Narnia, was, like the rest of C.S. Lewis’ output, an (in this case veiled) exercise in Catholic apologetics, it’s clear that we’ve come a long way forward.

It’s surprising that given all the Christian complaints about Harry Potter driving children to witchcraft, that the blatantly anti-Christian message in His Dark Materials hasn’t received some public criticism. It’s a shame, because Pullman’s books could do with a little of that kind of backhanded promotion.

Though the evangelical nutcases who criticise Harry Potter evidently haven’t noticed (well, actually, there are some Christian-themed reviews of Pullman’s series on Amazon), the later books in that series are cut from the same thematic cloth as His Dark Materials, given that both series include the message that it is good and right to rebel against corrupt authorities, be they governments, schoolteachers, or tyrannical gods. Given that many parents and teachers are among “those who want us to obey and be humble and submit” (355), they may not be keen on recommending that children read this book, but every child should (and adults would be well advised to, as well). It will help readers to learn to live their lives for themselves, and comfort those who already have. 9/10