Recently, the Mainichi Daily News cancelled a column called Waiwai, whose concept was more or less “republish Japanese tabloids in English with additional, heretofore undiscovered levels of entendre”. I read it off and on myself, oddly without a single instance of disillusionment since I live here and know already that, for example, a lot of anime is less an expression of yearning for childlike innocence but an expression of the desire to have sex with childlike innocents. I like to think I don’t harbor enough residual Orientalism for such stories as this one to register as either worldview-threateningly scandalous or another example of Those Wacky Japanese And Their Wackiness.

Unfortunately, a lot of people in the Great Wild West (by which I mean Americans, the only people I feel remotely qualified to comment on) don’t seem capable of feeling normal about Japan - it’s either got to be completely misunderstood victim, mischaracterized by mispeople unable to think outside their mistaken Western misparadigms, which as a political stance is the worldly camouflage of ignorant people; or it’s just a sea of soiled panty-vending machines dotted with occasional Imperial cults and long-haired ghosts - all exceptions with no rules. In the end, all these things exist, but among millions of people going to quite understandable-at-face-value jobs, buying possibly different but not exotic groceries, and having unscandalous sex with their spouses. In my opinion, Waiwai’s not dressing itself up as legitimate news - and its tone immediately made apparent what it was “all about” - probably humanized Japan a lot more than it pigeonholed it as sick. After all, most Americans are more familiar with tabloid-style writing than the tea ceremony. It’s something they can see in their own backyards and feel they share, although that’s probably not what the right-wingers who threatened the newspaper and its writers want people to feel. In certain people’s minds, in America and in Japan, green tea is the opposite of Lipton, rice is the opposite of bread, and the stoic, noble Japanese are the opposite of the free-wheeling and lackadaisical West. Challenging this raison d’etre of the nation Japan is akin to suggesting in the US that the military be disbanded.