Voiceless Japan

I had a look today at the DVD that comes with the manual Living Japanese 生きた日本語. The simplicity, the banality of the video interviews come as a welcome surprise. Daily life is the last frontier, knowing the daily life and thoughts and moods of the other is the virgin forest for so many places in the world. It makes for good footage to work on dialogue/interview interpreting and I hope I can make use of it in the classroom. It is not limited to Japan, but this place, unless you don't speak and understand the language (and even if ... ), is incredibly voiceless. I mean by this that what diffuses out of Japan is terribly voiced but devoid of any clearly hammered propaganda. It is as if the USA was limited to Disney, the movies and the music and no one would care or have access to Obama's voice and most US books were not translated into other languages. Ideas of Japan expressed by Japanese are voiced inwardly, not outwardly. What oozes out of this place may make sense in the outside, create a fantasy world in the mind of who doesn't live here, but the noise is totally different when heard from the inside. That's why I believe Japan, as media noisy as any other advanced country, is voiceless, and as what sounds out is devoid of clearly articulated meta-message, the interpretation of it is open up to the fantasy of anyone. I just read a piece of article about a currently famous French standing comedian who says she is victim of the Tokyo syndrome. She's been here a dozen time and is always amazed at things, those many objects that are useless and do not make sense besides generating giggles. Tokyo is the country of giggles, the senselessness with the safety that allows those foreign grownups to come back in the dreamland, the urban fantasy where no one intrudes into their limits, no one engages into a conversation besides banalities. It is a place that doesn't tell, which makes it a blank canvas to paint her own fantasies onto it. That voicelessness is the cause of these video clips one would never see on Youtube to feel so strange by revealing the true banality of life in this place. Many more of these kinds of interviews of nobodies should be made available. They are telling a story untold elsewhere.