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Comment by Bayart | Hacker News Reader

Why does everything related to Japan has to be framed as exotic, ancient and mystical ? I've got a forest of beech trees behind the house with trees that have been shaped into poles for five or six hundred years. We don't call it the 600-year old French technique of growing sticks.

The Japanese aren't some Elves out of The Lord of the Rings with wisdom forgotten by the mortal races of the Earth and a bone-deep sense of aesthetics. They're just people.

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I have thought the same many times before. One part of the reason why is that Japan, since the Meiji administration, has been actively creating myths about the "unique uniqueness" of Japanese culture, i.e. that Japan is not just unique like all countries and cultures are unique, but "uniquely unique" - beating all other cultures at being unique. Which of course is just an attempt to disguise the idea that Japanese culture is superior to all others to make it more easily digestible. The effort of the Japanese government to project soft power through the "cool Japan" initiative (Anime, Manga, J-Pop, games, etc.) seems to work wonders on Americans, but a little less so on Europeans. There's a great book that puts the hype around "everything Japan" in perspective: "Japan - A Reinterpretation" (ISBN 97806797451120)

The obvious problem with nationalism is that everyone is supposed to have their own nation that uniquely suits them, including the people that you are excluding from your own nation. This gets exceptionally contradictory when taken to the extreme.

E.g. Nazis trying to build an Aryan state, while simultaneously acquiring "Lebensraum", knowing that they are also acquiring people from other nationalities, which then have to be deported into another nation state whose nationalist people become angry. Of course this came with the twist that Jews are a nationless race and therefore should be incinerated.

It's the same thing with the refugee crisis. Nationalists in Lybia deport non-Lybians to Europe who end up as refugees there and then the local nationalists become angry and deport them somewhere else. It's a never ending shell game.

I think it's the Cool Japan strategy at work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Japan

To be fair just a few weeks back there was an article on the front page about clothes dyeing techniques of the middle ages.

Everyone seemed pretty interested and curious about European middle age colourful clothing techniques and dye materials from plants etc. It all goes back to the HN guidelines 'the primary use of the site should be for curiosity'.

edit: The submission I mentioned above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26690182

I don't dispute the point of trivia posts, I actually quite like them. What I have a problem with is the framing. I find cultural fetishism generally despicable, regardless of the culture that's being talked about. I get a minor aneurysm every time I see someone praising the "eternal robustness" of Roman roads, for example.

I agree with you 100%. HN usually has better quality discussions than reddit (for example), but any discussion about Japan seems to have /r/anime level comments.

To be fair, the Japanese do the same with Western culture. You named France, here in Japan every cake shop is a "patisserie" or "boulangerie" covered in ridiculous amounts of French text. Heck, they even have this concept of the Paris syndrome for poeple who travel to France and experience extreme culture shock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome

Because it's distant enough from our own stuff that we're just used to. It's a sense of wonder we don't get from "our own" stuff because we're used to it, or we take it for granted, or it's not done by a retiree in his hundreds year old workshop.

But it's a matter of perspective, and of course what content farm sites will highlight.

Sounds like you also have a really cool forest but are too jaded to write an article about it.

It's orientalism and settler colonialism. A bunch of weebs jerking off about Japan.

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