Sunday Duvet Reading - Wrong About Japan By Peter Carey
Dive under the covers with me this weekend and find out what I've been reading this week.
August 18th 2024
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What a whirlwind of a week it’s been, full of good news from lovely friends to celebrating birthdays, laying the garden patio and booking activities for my upcoming trip to Japan this fall - Ghibli Park here I come!
Whilst wandering the vast emporium of books that are housed in London’s Gower Street Waterstones. I decided to climb into the eaves to browse their travel writing section. After locating the shelves carefully labelled ‘Japan’ I was greeted by a tidy selection of novels devoted to the Land of the Rising Sun.
There’s some beautiful books available, but I found myself drawn to Peter Carey’s - Wrong About Japan.
Wrong About Japan By Peter Carey
In a stunning memoir-cum-travelogue Peter Carey charts this journey, inspired by Charley's passion for Japanese Manga and anime, and explores his own resulting re-evaluation of Japan. In 2002 Peter Carey travelled to Japan, accompanied by his twelve-year-old son, Charley, who stipulated no temples or museums - just manga, anime and cool stuff. What follows is the funny, honest and moving story of a father and son thousands of miles away from home, and a unique exploration of two very different cultures.
Led by their adolescent guide Takashi, an uncanny mix of generosity and derision, father and son look for the hidden puzzles and meanings, searching, often with comic results, for a greater understanding of these art forms, and for what they come to refer to as their own 'real Japan'. From Manhattan to Tokyo, Commodore Perry to Godzilla, kabuki theatre to the post-war robot craze, Wrong about Japan is a fascinatingly personal, witty and moving exploration of two very different cultures.
My Thoughts
I wanted a heartfelt book, where father and son connect over a shared experience and love of Japan - but I was throughly disappointed.
This novel felt like one narcissistic mans boast of all the famous people he met within the anime and manga world. He was rude and had some very problematic views which left me cringing on his behalf more than once throughout this short (150 page) book. The more I read the less I liked Peter Carey - I only hope his son Charley has managed to revisit Japan and actually get the experience he deserves.
There were, however, some compelling think pieces on the impact of World War II on Japanese society, including insightful interviews. One standout was with a man named Mr. Yazaki, a friend of the novelist behind the heart-wrenching book Grave of the Fireflies - which was later adapted into an anime by Studio Ghibli. Mr. Yazaki's accounts of his personal experiences during the war and its far-reaching effects were particularly moving.
‘We were living in a Buddhist temple. And perhaps you don’t know this Carey-san, but in Japanese culture, a temple or a shrine is considered a sanctuary for children. No one bothered with air raid drills. Why would we have needed them?
It was one of those perfect summer days right at the end of rainy season. We swam in the river and chased dragonflies. Back at the temple, we had our dinner and then a bath and we were just getting down to our homework when the first bomb dropped. It wasn’t like you’d think - no whistle, no big bang, just a noise like very heavy rain. You were talking about Grave Of The Fireflies. Well, it was like that. These were incendiary bombs, and suddenly the whole world caught on fire.’
Despite my dislike of Carey, I found these personal accounts very compelling and poetic, it could be a hard read in some parts, as to be expected when discussing the impact and atrocities of war. But it was an insightful read that left me with a deep curiosity to understand more.
I also found the cultural gap between Japan and the West particularly intriguing. Despite being a seasoned traveler to Japan—this will be my fourth trip this fall—I still find myself occasionally taken aback by the differences, and, to my embarrassment, making silly mistakes - like forgetting to take off my shoes in a public changing room—I cringe just thinking about it now!.
It was fascinating to read about someone else's experience and how they navigated these challenges. In Carey's case, he seemed to barrel through them with the kind of blunt, rudeness that many older Western men seem to have been born with.
Carey's interviews in this book seem one-sided, that when he's being told he's wrong about Japanese culture and rationales for aesthetic design, he responds that his subject is wrong and that his understanding is right. This was wildly annoying and left my eyes rolling to the back of my head consistently.
The best part was when miraculously Carey meets the animation legend, Hayao Miyazaki aka Japanese Walt Disney. Even the hairs on my arms went up, as I thought: my god, what an honour, how incredibly fortunate - but oh how it wasted on this awful man!
It's a mostly silent scene that perhaps produces the most interesting conclusion when Miyazaki mic drops this comment:
‘One of the most important of man's abilities is the imagination, so that the purpose of his creative abilities is to develop the imagination of children, the coming generations. Imagination can create a totally different world, depending on its use. It can give birth to virtue, or destructive weapons which threaten the whole world.'
Overall, it was an interesting read, but one that I found profoundly out of date. Maybe it’s because it was written in the early 2000s and the world and Japan has opened up a little more now. Maybe it’s because of my own personal experiences traveling to Japan - I’m not sure.
I find it hard to recommend this book as I think it does a disservice to such a rich, dynamic culture, and it’s people. I find Carey’s treatment of his son’s friend, Takashi totally appalling and the comment about the ‘fuck-me-heels’ urgh - such an ick.
If you would like to read the few and far between interviews of some of Japan’s pop-culture and anime heroes this might be an interesting read for you. However, if you want to immerse yourself in travel writing that takes you on a unfiltered journey to contemporary Tokyo, I’d skip this one.
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