A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture

Ian Buruma’s older but still fascinating look into Japanese popular culture is just the right kind of book for its purpose. At about 225 pages or so, it’s long enough to develop several related themes, e.g. the roles of women in Japanese culture as mothers and whores (and often both), the appeal of androgynous teen ‘stars’, the plight of the pitiable salaryman, and so on.

But although erudite and sophisticated, it’s free from the dreary ‘theorizing’ and ‘problematizing’ and other ‘cultural studies’ cant that bloats and usually makes unreadable most ‘scholarly’ works.

The conclusion Buruma reaches, though, is quite negative: he sees Japanese culture as ultimately torn between a lack of overarching moral standards show more (i.e. it’s historically, deeply relativistic) and a gross surplus of socially-constructed taboos and mores governing individual behavior. It’s not a happy mix, and it goes a long way to explaining much of what is so enigmatic about Japan and the Japanese: they feel compelled to be normal rather than good.

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Buruma writes an interesting book about Japanese culture and its heroes. I'm not sure I always accept where he wants to take me, but it is still fascinating.