Wrong About Japan : A Father's Journey with His Son

Rating:
Summary: beautiful, touching: required reading for all parents
Review: Everything about this exquisite work strikes a chord. I love the awkward affection and tug-of-war Peter Carey and his son share as they move through Manhattan comic shops and then through the alleys and byways of Tokyo. Leave it to Dad to weave nineteenth-century woodcut prints and Commodore Perry's "Opening of Japan" into Gundam Wing and Akira. And leave it to twelve-year-old Charley seek out "weird fish" and Sega World as the representative set pieces of Japan. Thanks to Peter Carey, I now have an inkling of why manga and anime are rocking the world of my teenage son, not to mention a companionable book to return to the next time his father tells me we've had an alien for a child.

Rating:
Summary: Wrong About Japan
Review: I have to say that as an Australian and an ex-Japan hand I cringed when I saw Peter Carey's shameless 'Oh look at my book about Japan!!' slim-liine travelogue on the shelves at my local. Why did I feel like this? Well for one it seems to me that when an acclaimed author, who knows absolutely nothing about a subject, doesn't pretend to know anything about the subject, and then lazily engages with the subject just for the sake of turning a quick buck ... well, it's the cheapest and oldest trick in the game to stick the salesman's hook of 'Japan' and a pastiche of bright Japanese images on the cover just to suck a few summer readers in. Let's just say that my expectations were not particularly high, though I forced myself to purchase nonetheless.

Indeed I was not very far into the page flipping when my low expectations were met. The first time I went to Japan I was nineteen years old. I went there to work during my university's summer holidays as a golf caddy at a luxurious resort on Kyushu. It was during this time that I first encountered the extreme lavatory luxury of Japanese toilets. At the time I was excited and amazed - I was 19 afterall. I remember writing letters home to my parents recounting in detail the complexities of Japanese computer-like toilets. That was in 1989. Since then so many articles, jokes and TV shows have dealt with this topic. This raw fact does not seem to deter Carey when writing his indulgent sliver on his 'real' Japan. He does the now oh-so tired Japanese toilet gag, and also references the word 'gaijin' (yaaawn), wrongly refers to the Rockabillies in Yoyogi Park as 'Elvises' and 'Japanese Michael Jacksons'.

The biggest mystery for me though, in terms of his chosen topics, is why Carey gets so turned on by 'otaku'. His discussion of 'otaku' becomes the centerplank of his entire book, and alas it's not even an interesting or original take. I guess otaku can easily translate to the world of manga (what his trip to Japan with his son is all about), but it's hardly enlightening stuff.

Wrong About Japan does not even tackle its title's namesake. It is a brief flicker of time spent in Japan through the distracted eyes of Peter Carey. It will not enlighten, inspire or challenge. That said, in typical Carey style, at least it is honest. By that I mean, as an earlier reviewer has pointed out, Carey does not attempt to hide his sloppy (non)preparation interviews with Japanese manga luminaries. For the doting father Carey, meeting such people is only about one thing - satisfying his son's selfish desire (I guess it's OK to be selfish when you're still a teen) to have his photo taken with manga creators so he can show it off to his mate's back in New York. Doesn't get any deeper than this.

I hear that Carey is considering another more in-depth book that deals with Japan. For all our sake's I hope he scuttles the idea. He's at his best when he's writing about Australia and our warped state of being. Japan, as Carey himself has now shown us, should be left to those who are capable of engaging with the subject as though it were an equal and not a place of exotica and cutesy oddities for New Yorkers to pick up trophy trinkets.

Rating:
Summary: a disappointment
Review: I should say first that I'm not what you'd call a devotee of Carey's work. But the man has scored two Booker Prizes for himself, and he's writing on a subject that I am deeply fascinated by. So I thought I'd give him another chance.

Pulling it off the shelf at my local bookstore, I was surprised by the physical lack of substance. At 120 easily-digestible pages, I had it read in less than two hours. Granted, 120 pages doesn't give you much room to manoeuvre. I would have liked to have seen what Carey could've done with this book had there been an extra hundred, or even fifty pages.

But as it stands, 'Wrong About Japan' is a surface account of anime and manga culture in Japan, that goes into no specific detail, except in giving synopses of the opening scene of 'Blood: The Last Vampire' and the first half hour of 'My Neighbour Totoro'. It does contain the occasional laugh and genuinely funny culture shock. but for the most part I felt as if Carey was just giving me excuse after excuse as to why he's not delving past the surface of this world that is always talked up as being so different to the West.

As the book progressed, and as Carey's own 'misreadings' of anime and manga are turned aside by a series of Japanese industry folk (who might as well have all been played by one actor in different costumes, for all the individuality the narrative accords them), I was left with the slightly sour impression that Carey himself, whilst faithfully recording these put downs, wasn't all that open to considering them.

I felt his growing frustration with being told no, his analysis was not correct (and why on earth he never asks 'why not?' is beyond me; as far as i'm aware, Barthes' declaration that the author is dead still holds some weight). I can sympathise with that, as can anyone who has been to another country and felt the culture shock. But I could not warm to Carey as either narrator or author - my problem with his work, and this book proved no different, is his sheer arrogance. Nowhere did Carey show us as readers that he was seriously attempting to engage with Japanese culture - the sense I got was that he just wanted his questions answered so he could get the hell out of there, back to New York and his ivory tower, where everything's "normal".

Honestly, I'm not even sure why Carey decided to write this book. I never felt in the book that he was all that interested in anime and manga, either as legitimate branches of literature, or as anything other than strange novelties. My impression remains that Carey has taken a very high-brow attitude toward anime and manga - he's even quoting Tanizaki, the man who bemoaned all forms of modernisation in Japan as a death blow to traditional culture - and the novel suffers for it.

Several times, Carey speaks about finding the 'Real Japan', which he typically equates with swords and kabuki and communal bathing. I think he need only look to page 17, where his son's friend Takashi puts a more accurate spin on things:

"You saw pictures of temples? Yes, rocks, gravel, nice Japanese room, so simple. Houses with rough timber? Real Japanese people not like that."

Rating:
Summary: Weak exploration on anime, manga and misc. things Japanese
Review: This book is a travelogue of a father and son's visit to Japan. Their trip came about when the father starts taking an interest in the Japanese videos and manga that his son enjoys and decides to go directly to the source to learn more. He asks his son if he wants to go to Japan and his son doesn't respond enthusiastically at first because he isn't interested in visiting temples or museums or anything like that but when his father suggests they interview some anime directors and manga artists his son gets excited. The father notes that his son is shy and becomes more talkative when discussing his interest in manga and anime and the father even suggests that maybe his son can take part in the interviews and ask some questions too. The boy makes a list of people he'd like his father to interview and father and son go off to Japan where the father uses his connections in the book world to pull a few strings to meet various people, mostly anime directors and manga artists. At one point the author mentions he is a terrible reporter and I'd have to agree with him. His interviews are uninteresting and poorly planned. Large segments of the book aren't interviews but are about what the father and son are up to in between interviews such as their interaction with a Japanese boy that his son made contact with over the Internet. There's an embarrassing part where the author goes on and on about how his son didn't want to see Kabuki but he made him go and his son really hated it. I'm not clear about what sort of ideas the author had about Japan that he was wrong about but I didn't find his perception of things very interesting. If you look at the picture of the father and son on the back flap of the book the son looks like a kid with attitude who is bored and doesn't want his picture taken with his Dad. In conclusion, this book feels like the author's whim to do something pleasing for his son so that they can bond and he could get his son to talk to him more.

Rating:
Summary: Good Idea, boring, non-informed results
Review: This book seemed interesting to me, since I recently went to Japan to indulge my taste for Japanese pop culture. Much like the author's son, I didn't have much interest in going to temples or musuems(unless it was the Bandai or Ghibli Musuem) when I could go see a Godzilla movie or lose myself for a day at Nakano Broadway.

The author mentions visitng the Ghibli Musuem, but fails describe this wonderful place it at all! When interviewing the creator of Gundam, he is so narrowly focused on finding assumed hidden Japaneseness, he blows what could have been an entertaining interview. He knows nothing of these subjects. It's unfortunate that since Mr. Carey is a respected author he can get interviews with top shelf talent and waste everyones' time who is involved, including the reader's.

You will not gain much insight into anime, manga, or Japan from this book. If you are interested in these subjects buy "Cruising the Anime City" by Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama. It's a wonderful book that does a wonderful job of explaining the pop culture aspects of Tokyo.