Christopher Carr over at The Inductive reports about Japanese corporate hazing, which is basically a form of bullying. It’s quite common in Japan, and what makes it so problematic is that adult bullying is often sanctioned by the organizations within which it takes place. Because it is so culturally normalized that they cannot see that it’s actually bullying.

Akira Kurosawa's "Ikiru"

My theory on why this happens in Japan is that it comes from the common misunderstanding of the methods used in achieving enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. Just as the teaching of Christ is misinterpreted by White Supremacists, many Japanese see the rituals and the customs of Zen Buddhism, and mindlessly imitate them without understanding what motivates those rituals and customs. A Zen master often treats his disciples in a manner that comes across as abusive, so the popular culture of Japan interprets this as a sign that abuse leads to enlightenment. This in turn encourages people in power to behave as though they are Zen masters. They abuse those who are below them while rationalizing in their heads that they are doing something noble or even altruistic.

Carl Jung describes this phenomenon eloquently in his book “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.” He tells a story of a sorcerer and his disciples. One day, the sorcerer attained enlightenment. His disciples asked him how he did it, but the sorcerer made no reply. They discovered peculiar diagrams in the cave where the sorcerer attained enlightenment. They said to themselves, “That’s it!” and began copying the diagrams. The point of this story is that by repeating the diagrams, they have reversed the entire process. The diagrams to the sorcerer were effects, not the cause of his enlightenment.

What is particularly insidious about bullying in Japan is that it even manifests in a father-to-son relationship. “Gaman”, which means somewhere between “discipline” and “patience”, is lauded as the most important quality a man should have, and is pounded into children’s heads. What is entirely lacking in this lesson is the purpose: For what should they develop this quality?

Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” provides a great example of how this manifests in Japanese organizations. The main character of the film, Watanabe, is a middle-aged salary-man who worked all his life in a government office just passing time, thinking that he is being virtuous because he is sacrificing himself for his kids. Meanwhile, his kids don’t even appreciate what he does for them. What Watanabe does not realize, until he learns that he has terminal stomach cancer, is that using someone else other than himself as his reason to live is in fact an excuse not to face the meaning of life for himself. By using his kids as a justification for his own existence, he can avoid asking himself why he should be living. Facing the reality of death, he realizes that, if he were to live, he needs to have his own reason. He needs to know or feel inside why he wants to live.

This realization is utterly lacking in the vast majority of Japanese who abuse their underlings and children. They use their positions of power to make themselves feel superior, and to give themselves justifications for why they are living. Because they are only copying the ritualistic facade of Zen Buddhism, their abuse causes nothing but misery for both the abusers and the abused.

When you know why you want to live, when the reason for living is self-evident, you live a life full of passion. You do not feel that you “have to” live (for someone else), but you want to. Everything you do is driven by what you want to do, which includes having and raising children. In such a state of mind, there is no “sacrifice” whatsoever. You would never use your own children as an excuse for you to live.

When your life is full of passion, “discipline” or “patience” comes naturally. There is no need for you to be trained for it. The strength of your passion will allow you to tolerate most anything. If you cannot, then what you should question is not your capacity for discipline and patience, but the strength of your passion. This is precisely what Zen masters are testing when they treat their disciples in a manner that appears abusive to outsiders. They are not training them to be patient; they want to know how strong their passion is to achieve enlightenment. Where there is no passion, there is no point in being patient whatsoever.

I myself suffered the effects of this common misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism while growing up in Japan. Ultimately it was the main reason why I decided to leave Japan. When properly understood, Zen and the Japanese culture are beautiful, but the misunderstanding of their own culture is rampant in Japan. But I now see that people are the same everywhere. The misunderstanding of Christianity is rampant in the West too. So, now I accept it as human nature, and that’s why, I believe, Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” has such a universal appeal.

This video of Taiwanese singer, Lin Yu-chun, seems to be going viral on the Internet now, some calling him “The next Susan Boyle“. If this is the sort of attention these singers want, then I’m happy for them, but I’m not sure whether they are aware that much of their attention comes from people seeing them as essentially freak shows. For the average audience, it’s strange or even freakish to see this type of voice come out of people who look the way they do. It’s the unusual discrepancy that they are responding to, much like seeing a woman with ape-like body hair. In the case of Lin Yu-chun, being Asian adds to this freak show quality (at least from the Western point of view).

In Japan, there are opposite examples. For instance, Jero is a black Enka singer. Enka is a traditional form of singing in Japan. He is apparently quite popular in Japan. I’m sure he is good and deserves some attention, but I’m pretty sure most of the attention comes from the freak-show aspect of his situation. It’s the color of his skin, more than his talent. It’s basically reverse racism.

Although we commonly say “There is no such thing as bad publicity”, there are consequences to getting too much attention for the wrong reasons. These people are essentially being exploited for cheap, disposable entertainment for 15 minutes. It feels rather dehumanizing to see this type of phenomenon.

This is an interesting video about Japan. The most interesting part of it is that the author took down the English version of it. I’d like to know more about his decision to do so, because I suspect that there is a deeper story in it than the story of the video itself.

When we first watch this, we assume that the author is being self-critical, but he says this video represents a “foreigner’s point of view”. This is rather confusing. What he ends up telling is what he thinks is a foreigner’s point of view, so we are not sure who is telling the story. If this is indeed a foreigner’s point of view, it’s not being self-critical. It would be a foreigner pointing his finger at another nation. If we were to view it that way, the story is highly skewed and biased, verging on racism, because it does not put all the issues in a proper International perspective. So, we can accept his arguments only as self-criticism. If the video is being self-critical, stating that this is a “foreigner’s point of view” is a cop out. As one commenter pointed out on Vimeo; he is trying to avoid taking responsibility for his own opinions (which is typically Japanese).

This is why it would be interesting to know why he took down the English version. If the video is meant to be self-critical, then the only people he needs to reach are the Japanese. The idea would be to change their own ways through being self-critical. Foreigners wouldn’t need to see it, so taking down the English version would make sense.

This type of video comes across to me as insincere or even dishonest, because the author puts himself above the target of his criticism. The assumption here is that he is somehow above all the blame and guilt. By pointing fingers at everyone around him, he makes himself feel superior to them. I believe this is why he sees himself as a “foreigner” so that he is absolved of all the crimes he accuses of others. In essence, he is telling everyone else to be self-critical, but he thinks he does not have to be self-critical himself.

The Cove winners at the Academy Awards

This post is a response to Laurel Angelica, the content editor for TakePart.com (owned by Participant Media which produced “The Cove”), who kindly responded to my original post about the documentary film “The Cove”. Before you read this post, you might want to read her response. This response is co-authored with my friend Frank Luo, but we decided to use “I” to express our opinions because we did not want the readers to get confused that our opinions represent the opinions of the Japanese people in general. We’ll begin with the “most important point” Laurel raised:

The most important point we want to respond to – and it’s the heart of your entire piece – is that this film is NOT meant to be an indictment of the Japanese people. Completely the opposite. We’ve tried to make that clear in the film and in all of our marketing materials. It is very specifically exposing a small group of people – we maintain throughout the film that the greater population is unaware.

This argument is entirely indefensible. The signs to the contrary are everywhere. The film squarely attacks Japan as a nation, their policies, customs, and values, which is particularly apparent in its coverage of Japan’s whaling policies. The attack is not just directed against a small group of people while paying no attention to their nationality. Far from it. The Internet is now rife with hostile comments like “I hate Japs” in direct response to the film. My wife, who is an American, was told by her friends that if she watched “The Cove”, she wouldn’t want to be married to me. This cannot be unique to my wife, as the very reason why Richard O’Barry would find it necessary to write an article telling people that “boycotting Japan doesn’t make sense” must be because many audience members came out of the theater wanting to boycott Japan. So the effect of the film has been to incite anger and punitive actions against Japan. If this is “completely the opposite” of what the filmmakers intended, then they must be incredibly incompetent, because they have achieved an effect that is “completely the opposite” of what they intended, and their Academy Awards should be stripped from them.

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The Cove

The following is a response I received from Laurel Angelica, Content Editor for TakePart.com (owned by Participant Media which produced “The Cove”), who sent me a free copy of “The Cove” to review. (Thank you, Laurel.) This is in response to my criticism of the film last week.

Hi Dyske,

I apologize for being so late in responding. We kindly ask that if you are going to use this, that you reprint it in its entirety. Thank you for taking the time to provide thoughtful analysis of the film, even if you didn’t agree with the subject matter.

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The Cove

So I finally watched The Cove, the Academy Award winning documentary about the slaughtering of dolphins in Japan. It was certainly painful for me to watch it. Even though I don’t think of myself as Japanese (nor American), other people certainly do, so there is no escaping of the impact this film has on my identity and how people perceive me. Because Japan is essentially the only nation that kills and consumes dolphins, this issue is clearly seen as a national issue, and the film certainly angles it as such also. When I saw the faces of the angry Japanese fishermen in the film, I could see how the Westerners see those faces and how the Japanese see them. Unfamiliar faces are easy to project negative feelings to, and the opposite is true of familiar faces. I can see both ways. The divide is so huge that I don’t have much hope for reconciliation. It’s like getting involved in a war where the people on both sides are actually your friends. A no-win situation.

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The Donger and Me by Adrian Tomine

When I first saw this cartoon by Adrian Tomine, I laughed really hard, but at the same time it reminded me of the pain I felt when I saw this movie for the first time. I was never angry at the actor (although I’ve jokingly pretended to be, from time to time). In fact, I’ve never expressed my anger publicly. If anyone should be blamed, it’s the director who should take the blame, not the actor. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone criticizing the director, John Hughes.

There was a similar portrayal of an Asian man in Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Mickey Rooney, but who would blame him for that? He is just an actor doing his job. He didn’t create the character.

When I first saw Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles, I was living with an American family in California as an exchange student, like Dong was. I felt like I was stabbed in my heart because I was watching it with my foster brother and his friends who were all White. They laughed really hard, so I had to put on a smile like I too found it funny, which made the experience doubly painful.

For Tomine, the experience was probably a bit different because he is an Asian American. Asian Americans have to constantly fight the perception that Asians are foreign. As some people think Judge Ito has a Japanese accent, some Americans still see all Asians as foreign, even if they are born here in the USA. So, I would imagine that Long Duk Dong was the last thing they wanted to see on a major Hollywood movie, especially since Asian men were virtually non-existent in American films. Anger, in Tomine’s case, was the appropriate feeling.

But for those Asians who were indeed foreign like me, the situation was a bit different. We were reinforcing the perception that Asians are foreign. We gave the Americans a justification for creating the stereotype. In this sense, we are an enemy of Asian Americans. When I was attending high school in California, most Asian Americans stayed away from me. I had one Asian American friend, but even he didn’t treat me so nicely. So the few friends I had were all White, themselves outcasts.

To some degree, this still continues today. I don’t get along all that well with Asian Americans, even though I have almost an instant rapport with others who crossed the Pacific Ocean themselves. I often cannot relate to the sentiments Asian Americans share with me. Strange as it may sound, I think this is the way I should feel. After all, Asian Americans are Americans. The first A-word is rather irrelevant and superficial. I should not expect to get along with them any more than I expect to get along with White or Black Americans. And, I would imagine that Asian Americans too would prefer that I see them that way. What lies behind the similar facades is a distance as great as the Pacific Ocean.