The Japanese Fear of the Internet
neojaponisme.com
neojaponisme.com
That was a fun morning. I have a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card: "Everyone knows Americans are weird."
Some friends of mine:
+ Works for the national tax office. Has to be the very model of Appropriate Japanese Male Professional. Raps on the weekends and goes snowboarding in the winter. Japanese male professionals do not dress in bling or like gangsta rap. Skiing is a borderline appropriate hobby for people in our social class -- snowboarding is not.
+ Teacher at an elementary school. Dating an American. What would the parents think, right?
+ Is really Korean. She swore me to secrecy about that because she has the sincere fear that if her best friends since childhood found out about it she would never get her old life back.
+ Does not want to be a salaryman forever.
+ Belongs to a weird religious cult. Like, really weird. They all get together on Sundays and drink the blood of this dead Middle Eastern-looking guy.
+ Has spent seven years in Australia.
+ Drop-dead fluent at English. Too good. Pretends to be less good around her coworkers but if they ever found out how good she actually was she'd be ribbed for it. One genre of that ribbing would be that she's angling to get an American husband, which -- as we've established -- is not generally something a proper Japanese woman wants said about her.
This is very true. I had noticed there were a number of performers with masks, but it didn't really sink in until I saw an entire masked orchestra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1KgDz_An2s
(The newspaper thing is true as well. I once got burned by the Mainichi Shimbun taking down its entire site; no problem, right, I'd just check the Internet Archive? Blocked in the IA. And no robots.txt on either domain, which implies they were so paranoid that they privately contacted the Archive to block all access!)