Exoticizing

This was written as a mini essay for my class. It refers to parts of “Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan” by Lafcadio Hearn, “Lost Japan” by Alex Kerr, and “In Praise of Shadows” by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. I think it’s still more or less understandable even if you’ve never read any of these, I apologize if it isn’t.

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A lot of people don’t understand that exoticizing is a problem. It’s saying positive things (on the surface) about a thing, so how could it be bad? However, exoticizing a culture, religion, group of people, or anything else, generally involves othering it. By talking about how the experience in Japan is so indescribable is to also say that it’s so different from the experience where he lived before that. It could even mean that Japanese is completely different from any English speaking country, that the words only don’t exist in English because Japan is that different a culture. It fetishizes the Japanese, and possibly all of “the East” into something mystical that can never fully be understood by people of “the West”, rather than just people in a culture that is different to his own the same way that his culture is different to all others.

Now, it’s important to acknowledge cultural differences. Expecting all cultures to be a carbon copy of your own is unrealistic, and it is possible to acknowledge the beauty in other cultures without exoticizing them. However, treating any culture that’s “too” different to your own as exotic and foreign to such a degree also leads to treating the people as that. Hearn says (emphasis added) “everything as well as everybody is small, and queer and mysterious”. He doesn’t just see the physical place of Japan as this, but all its people as well.

The way he treats artists is a very good indication of why this is so problematic. He says that artists achieve their skill “[n]ot by years of groping and sacrifice” but “his art is an inheritance”. Japanese artists don’t work to be good. They’re just naturally talented. The same could be said for occidental artists- even Michelangelo’s craft was heavily shaped by the millennia of species and cultural development that predated the Italian Rennaissance, yet no one says that Michelangelo was an artist “without sacrifice”. The work of occidental artists is acknowledged and respected, saying that Japanese artists don’t work but have inherited their skill is to completely erase all of the work that goes into Japanese craftsmanship and to discount the effort of Japanese artists. It also groups all Japanese artists together, rather than recognizing the individuality of each.

This is exactly what exoticizing does. It sounds very nice and complementary, but underneath it discounts the value and individuality of the people in the group being exoticized, reinforcing the otherness of the group which reinforces the superiority of the speaker. The people who exoticize are also prone to trying to force the group or culture to stay the way they see it (even if they aren’t seeing the whole picture in the first place), trying to stop individual people and even whole cultures from developing the way people and cultures naturally do, regardless of whether the change is beneficial to the people it effects.

As I said before, you can appreciate a different culture without exoticizing it. It can be a difficult to mark a line as to which is which, though, because there’s no definite line. Alex Kerr’s writing is considerably better, particularly in that he talks about the way he, personally, feels rather than using language to imply all westerners would feel the same way, and acknowledges the history and present of Japan. But he still talks about how Japan was the most beautiful place in the world because of its forests, probably without ever visiting the other tropical rainforests in the world to compare them. He talks about why Japan is developing even though many Westerners would like it to maintain its traditions so they can be tourists there in a positive light, but also refers to the effects of this development as creating a “cultural Frankenstein’s monster”.

Tanizaki Jun’ichi does talk about the difficulty of trying to balance traditional Japanese houses with Western convenience, noting that a lot of aesthetic and comfort is lost for that convenience. He shows annoyance at the way Western utilities are designed, wishing that they could “be designed with a bit more consideration for our own habits and tastes”. This is a fair thing to ask, it’s not uncommon for things- ideas, religions, styles, or furniture- to adapt to the culture around them when they’re brought to a new one. But with as much as Japan had to adapt to, it didn’t have time to adapt these new ideas to itself the way that happens when things move from culture to culture naturally.

There is also a difference in the way that Tanizaki mourns the Westernization of Japan. First, he doesn’t curse progress the way that the Westerners did, he often acknowledges why it happened and that it’s good, he instead wishes that it could have progressed to benefit the Japanese more. While the Western writers wish that they could lock Japan in the time they find “best” and not develop at all, Tanizaki wants Japan to have had the chance to develop in its own direction, he recognizes that Japan has been developing and wasn’t stagnant, that even if the West hadn’t forced itself on Japan, Japan would not remain the way it had been.

The Westerners actually don’t seem overly bothered with the welfare of the Japanese compared to their personal preferences, which is another reason why what they wrote is so problematic- they aren’t writing with regard for those they write about, they write only concerning themselves and how these changes effect Westerners, ignoring that they only had a chance to see that Japan because of those changes that forced Japan to westernize.