Orality and the cretinization of Japanese learners

‘‘The popularity of Japan’s pop culture, such as comics and animation, is contributing to increases in the number of Japanese-language learners.’‘

Is it irreverent to ask whether this tendency is cause for an advanced cretinization of Japanese language learners? I hope it is irreverent.

The other day at my course on French for science and technology, we had a discussion on the pathetically thin volume of free content in Japanese, in the form of podcast, etc. outside the realm of bootleged comics and animation. My students who are on average older than my students of interpretation have had no idea about that fact. After all, when 96% at least of a population is hooked on TV as the major source of content, showing mostly no critical sense, unawareness comes as a natural result. I complained several times in the past about the lack of audio visual resources of "serious" Japanese. You can listen or watch full courses on medicine, IT, mathematics, physics, philosophy for free, thanks to a large choice of podcasts, in English, Fench and some other languages. In Japanese? Nothing. Yes, Tokyo University has videopodcasts, but they are a shame to that institution.

This piece of news, and the attached comments, tell a story of blatant stupidity that is just starting to ooze out. That a majority of learners of Japanese are brought toward Japan for the love of Kittychan & Co. That's where AJATT starts and ends with. It is a well known story that Japanese content available outside Japan has always been massively the result of a pull dynamic, that of fans and marketers looking to develop a market outside Japan. The Japanese government starting with pathetic past PM Aso has been keen to pretend it has applied a push (outside) strategy, but it has mainly played clueless catch-up. The primary receivers of serious Japanese content should be ... the Japanese themselves. After years of following Japanese podcast offering evolution, there are no noticeable changes I can point at. The choice is as before dominated by junk and crap.

French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has been pointing the endemic, nay, pandemic cretinization devised and brought forward by marketing. That massively, only cretinizing content reaches the surface of free acquisition tells the level of advancement of marketing action in the core tissue of contemporary Japan. It also shows that cretinization doesn't result in the drying out of intelligent content production. Under the cretinization visible crust lays a deep vein of "serious" content that simply doesn't reach the surface. Academia, universities, associations, federations, organizations of any kind accumulate the production of audiovisual content, recordings of conferences, speeches, debates, courses, etc. Only, they are not dispatched. Even the Japanese association of professional interpreters participate to the cretinization by shutting the blinders close of what oralized content it produces. Passive cretinization is as perverse as active cretinization.

Not a single Japanese university listed in iTunes U tells a tale of ultimate cretinization. That NHK news in Japanese are not available for download in mp3 tells - behind the stale copyright justification - a tale of cretinization. I would prefer to listen to stuttering stultified university professors professing in Japanese than nothing. That even these are nowhere to be found tells a tale of ultimate cretinization. We may need to wait for Chinese universities to invest iTunes U and start see something moving in cretinized Japan. I am not counting on it though.