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rodoOT: lian, how did you survive the last week? Translating OTW texts can be so exhausting. And after two hours, German kind of stops making sense in the same way a newspaper picture breaks down into pixels if you stare at it for too long.
At least it distracted me from all the profic fail that's going around for a while. Victorientalism. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Out of curiosity, I read the first article, because it's my area of expertise. Sort of. I should just stop reading what people who haven't taken Japanese Studies write about Japan. It never ends well.
It also proves that you shouldn't write about samurai if you learned everything you know about them from The Last Samurai.
The article has basically nothing at all to do with Japan and all to do with the West's idea of Japan. It's about how Japanese culture enriched the West with its otherness (as if that's all there is to it). It completely ignores the fact that these Japanese cultural exports were shaped by the West, to a degree. It's all about an exoticised idea of Japan's past, how we repeat these tropes again and again and how this is a good idea! Japonism at its finest.
Oh so wrong (btw, wasn't it more like 650 years? I seem to remember a Kamakura shogunate around 1200). Not only were Western ideas imported to Japan during the Tokugawa era, many of these scholars were samurai and they definitely thought there was something to Western ideas (believe me, I had to read some of their stuff - the original Japanese). The people who were responsible for the Meiji restoration? To a large part samurai from Satsuma and Chōshū. They were also responsible for all the reforms that stripped the samurai of their privileges, which was what the Satsuma rebellion was mostly about.
I realise that this picture of the noble warrior is really popular, in Japan as well as the West, but I just hate it when people think that perpetuating the stereotype is the best idea ever. It's othering (in the case of the West), distorting and romanticizing. It glorifies a past, and that, in my experience, always has a political dimension. It's about how horrible it is to live in the now (and the West), how bad it is that the past was stolen and it negates other things: samurai had the right to kill commoners that offended them. During the Tokugawa period they were mostly bureaucrats. A certain type of ritual suicide was abolished because it wasn't actually considered a good thing back then that the vassals went with their daimyō when he died. The four classes didn't include the eta and hinin, whose descendants are still discriminated against today.
I haven't read any steampunk yet (that I know of), even though I am interested in theory, but attitudes like this are really off-putting for me:
Can somebody please point out something that is not wrong with this? All I'm seeing is "I want to be a racist without feeling guilty" (and I'm vaguely reminded of Avatar - the same thing in blue, literally). Am I the only one who would like to read steampunk that doesn't glorify the past?
I think I really have to write this steampunky (or would it be dieselpunk or plain old Alternate History?) plot bunny I have. It's a) about women, b) Wilhelminian, not Victorian, c) one of the women is black and everyone else is at least a little bit racist, including the other sympathetic main characters, d) one of the women is a communist. Unfortunately it would mean a crazy amount of research about Wilhelminian Germany, the First World War, women in the early 20th century, communism, the German colonies, lock picking and so many other things.
And this post doesn't even touch upon the sci fi writer who thinks that stories only exist if they're in a language he can read (= English) and published in a format he has access to.
lian, how did you survive the last week? Translating OTW texts can be so exhausting. And after two hours, German kind of stops making sense in the same way a newspaper picture breaks down into pixels if you stare at it for too long.At least it distracted me from all the profic fail that's going around for a while. Victorientalism. Who the hell thought this was a good idea? Out of curiosity, I read the first article, because it's my area of expertise. Sort of. I should just stop reading what people who haven't taken Japanese Studies write about Japan. It never ends well.
It also proves that you shouldn't write about samurai if you learned everything you know about them from The Last Samurai.
The article has basically nothing at all to do with Japan and all to do with the West's idea of Japan. It's about how Japanese culture enriched the West with its otherness (as if that's all there is to it). It completely ignores the fact that these Japanese cultural exports were shaped by the West, to a degree. It's all about an exoticised idea of Japan's past, how we repeat these tropes again and again and how this is a good idea! Japonism at its finest.
The samurai had been masters of Japan for more than three-and-a-half centuries. They had evolved their own unique culture, fighting style and weaponry. Everything the modern world had to offer must have been anathema to them.
Oh so wrong (btw, wasn't it more like 650 years? I seem to remember a Kamakura shogunate around 1200). Not only were Western ideas imported to Japan during the Tokugawa era, many of these scholars were samurai and they definitely thought there was something to Western ideas (believe me, I had to read some of their stuff - the original Japanese). The people who were responsible for the Meiji restoration? To a large part samurai from Satsuma and Chōshū. They were also responsible for all the reforms that stripped the samurai of their privileges, which was what the Satsuma rebellion was mostly about.
I realise that this picture of the noble warrior is really popular, in Japan as well as the West, but I just hate it when people think that perpetuating the stereotype is the best idea ever. It's othering (in the case of the West), distorting and romanticizing. It glorifies a past, and that, in my experience, always has a political dimension. It's about how horrible it is to live in the now (and the West), how bad it is that the past was stolen and it negates other things: samurai had the right to kill commoners that offended them. During the Tokugawa period they were mostly bureaucrats. A certain type of ritual suicide was abolished because it wasn't actually considered a good thing back then that the vassals went with their daimyō when he died. The four classes didn't include the eta and hinin, whose descendants are still discriminated against today.
I haven't read any steampunk yet (that I know of), even though I am interested in theory, but attitudes like this are really off-putting for me:
[S]teampunk allows us to reject the chains of reality and all the racism and guilt associated with it, to explore anew this imagined world of sultans and saberrattling Islamic conquerors; harems and white slavery; samurai, dragons and dark, bustling bazaars frequented by the strangest sort of folk. Isn't this, after all, steampunk's very premise?
Can somebody please point out something that is not wrong with this? All I'm seeing is "I want to be a racist without feeling guilty" (and I'm vaguely reminded of Avatar - the same thing in blue, literally). Am I the only one who would like to read steampunk that doesn't glorify the past?
I think I really have to write this steampunky (or would it be dieselpunk or plain old Alternate History?) plot bunny I have. It's a) about women, b) Wilhelminian, not Victorian, c) one of the women is black and everyone else is at least a little bit racist, including the other sympathetic main characters, d) one of the women is a communist. Unfortunately it would mean a crazy amount of research about Wilhelminian Germany, the First World War, women in the early 20th century, communism, the German colonies, lock picking and so many other things.
And this post doesn't even touch upon the sci fi writer who thinks that stories only exist if they're in a language he can read (= English) and published in a format he has access to.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 07:55 pm (UTC)It's about using Victoriana to make statements about our current time and place.
Yeah, I suspected as much, because I always thought that this was what science fiction and fantasy are both about. I like to use this argument to explain to non-fantasy-fans why I like the genre.