Off-topic : Japan despite it

The opinion article by Robert Dujarric of Temple University in Tokyo published in the Japan Times of yesterday starts with :

"More than 20 years have passed since the Berlin Wall fell, yet Japan remains shut out from the rest of humanity by its own wall. Though it is a shapeless partition that we cannot touch, it nevertheless cuts off the country from the world beyond its shores. What are the characteristics of this invisible barrier?"

And it reads just like that, an article published 20 years ago. Yet, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Not that the opinions of the author are wrong, but the role and value of the Japan Times are to be perceived at face value first. The Japan Times is the gaijin (that means "foreigner" and more precisely white westerner) soapbox you hate to read, and you hate yourself to read after so many years here. It is an irreplaceable useless newspaper. A soapbox in the middle of Sahara that doesn't count, yet that will not disappear. Nowadays at least, you can hide behind your computer screen and read it, know about the fairs at international hotel, read some poorly paid bump journalist writing about a trip in Okinawa, listing out the "okinawan villages" he visited without a blink and irreverence to the meaning of what an X- village (replace X by whatever place name you like) means it terms of authenticity.

The JT has a role, a function, that of make believe that people like Robert Dujarric's opinion has any value. By value, I mean, impact. The least read newspaper in Japan (or is the Daily Yomiuri) has alternatively flipped op'ed between westerners living in Japan - flipping that neverendingly chanting "I hate it here, I love it here" mantra - and the visiting guest personality spreading the patronizing good words at the American Chamber of Commerce with the standard bag of suggestions reading "Japan should do this, Japan should do that". The Japan Times is massively a westerner concern, a westerner malaise, a westernized soapbox for "invited"Japanese, a westerner's syndrom. A Petri dish (this sounds "petty") you peruse with the feeling that it peruses back at you and your emptiness. Why on earth are you still reading it, you tell yourself. Why not the world number local newspapers like the Asahi, Yomiuri or Nikkei?

Japan has not changed, the story tells. But what about you after all these years?

Thanks to the Internet, you have almost quit feeling bad about starting your day reading a newspaper published 10 000 km away from Tokyo (the rest of Japan doesn't matter). The only Japanese thing you will allow yourself to read early in the morning is the weather forecast. The rest can wait.

It has been "despite it" for a long time between you and it, because things are moving between you and it despite things that are not moving, the foreignness of it all to start with.

The JT is the itching powder you can't leave alone, you can't live without. Its op`ed writers can confidently flip back in times to equivalent articles published years ago, and copy paste the arguments, spreading a few "as usual" along the trail.

I have yet to find any op'ed article that moves beyond the lamenting, that analyses things beyond the standard moaning. The JT, Japan, may have not changed much, but the autopsy of it all doesn't seem to have changed in any way. And this is the mystery : how and why are the analysis tools stuck in time?

As far as communication is concerned from a point of view of objective based strategy, this blog has allowed its author to somewhat move beyond the clueless moaning personae to dry understanding at how the clock works. It is not a pretty sight, but it clarifies things at least. Op'ed articles at the JT deceive the clear headed readers, and fool their authors at the same time.