Japanese used to be

Japanese used to be a rare language like you say a "rare metal". You would enter learning it as an assumed choice of religion, a membership ticket to a secret society. Manga was not part of the picture, anime (animation movie) were unknown. You would read relations of intellectual freaks, a famous (read, "unknown outside the secret society" already departed) scholar so in love with the place and people he would stroll the still heavily provincial landscape of most of Tokyo with a big dictionary in hand. It was a way to distance yourself from the mass. Blurting you were learning Japanese at parties was weirder than reckoning you were into quantum physics. It made you an instant expatriate. You wouldn't have to go to Japan. You were already gone and lost to your country. There was that pseudo Japanese restaurant somewhere in the Quartier Latin with the Polish waitress. It couldn't be compared to the "real thing" because the single real Japanese restaurant in town tucked in an upscale Hotel Nikko now under a different name was too expansive to get in, unless you were invited there. I happened to be invited and pretend I loved sushi at first bite, which was not true. The breaded deep fried pork loins were the ultimate of high end Japanese culinary art. It would take your first visit to the holy land to discover that "tonkatsu" was a banal, daily fare.

Something happened in the middle of the 80s that would tremendously modify the interface between Western countries and Japan. I recently read in a serious blog that Japan was successful at disseminating what is referred to nowadays as "soft Japan", that is the mostly lenient, cute cool illustration and cheap stuff designed in Japan but made in China that is now the massive feature of how overall Japan has been perceived in the younger generations now in their 30s and more : a cool place to be, first in dreams, until Mar. 11. In that blog, the author wrote about the success of cool Japan export by Japan. It is wrong. That export was actually an import where Japan was not active in anything. It mostly happened despite Japan like the first wave of Japonisme in the late end of the 19th century.  "The Hare with amber Eyes" is an excellent read on this although not strictly about Japonisme.

Japonisme has been a (to some extent) massive appropriation of the descriptive discourse by the West about what is Japan. Japanese voices are mostly absent, but this applies to other countries as well.  Although more interaction has been taking place over time between Japan and the West, and now the global society (which excludes so large chunks of the planet), Japan is still a story massively told and invented by the West. The best selling recent books churned out about Tokyo all read like "My first visit in Tokyo" or "How much I love-me-being-here". These soon-to-be Japan hands discovering and starting explaining Japan each time they land at Narita have a stronger power of fuelling the dream and imagination back in their country. France must be a major infected country in that sense, thanks to the mute Japanologists creed and the lack of competitive interactions between the Japan hands who would not risk criticizing their pairs. In that sense, you are safe writing the definitive biased crap about Japan as long as you are published in France (name ofthe countries too please).

These people talk about wonders of the world they are treading into. That they usually don't speak the language, just like the journalists dispatched in Japan in March, doesn't matter. They can't interact verbally and in details with locals around but their impressionistic views are enough. The West has the power of the verb even when it doesn't speak the verbs of the country it imagines. Japan is endemically struggling with a national incompetence at learning English to effective usage level, and it has on top of that a nurtured culture of staying put, keeping quiet and rehashing what is told on TV, believing most of it, except for news about TEPCO. So the verb is as usual in the Western hand.

Japanese language, the learning of it, has been turned mundane. It has been facilitated by the churning of many books, methods in your native language. In the 80s, learning Japanese was learning English in parallel, because the manual and the thick dictionaries were in English. Many things have changed, but the exegesis of things Japanese hasn't changed. It has turned way much more verbose but still in the hands of the West. Japanese has turned accessible and lost part of the mystery. The secret society is an open supermarket. Most Westerners do not stay in Japan in the long run, but many weaves from day one and even before a love for the country that is deep, sincere, and mostly self navel oriented. The romance and satisfaction of being here until last March has been massively expressed in Western illustrators for instance by self-satisfied description of "me in Japan" to a point where even the Japanese props or heroes around the flipped pages are Westernized, not the big teary eyes, but the attitude, the body touching so visible which is still not a local feature.

This contemporary Japonisme that started sometimes in the middle of the Eighties has transformed the perception of dreamed Japan into a mix of self-satisfied blindness with a growing display of more thoughtful reality description and analyses. But overall, the love factor that fuels writers to write, photographers to shoot and illustrators to draw is stronger than ever. The romance (international marriages, and seemingly a high level of divorces) is still here and compensate for the mundane feature that is now more than ever reaching of a working level of language mastery. Mastery is no mystery anymore. This story of extended contemporary Japonisme has yet to be written.