A Beginner's Guide to Japan

What Hacker News says

1. jhanschooSep 2019
   > In Japan, I never forget that a great conversationalist is one who listens.

   This is true everywhere, and not exceptionally more true in Japan than anywhere else. Perhaps Japanese are raised in a way that they have more good listeners.

   > A couple that got married in Nagasaki soon after the bomb was dropped on the city, Susan Southard reports, would mention the transfiguring event once, and then never again.

   I think this refers to a specific couple from this book? (https://www.amazon.com/Nagasaki-Life-After-Nuclear-War/dp/01...) It's a stretch to say that this is indicative of a general attitude toward silence.

   > “If you think, ‘I breathe,’ ” said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, “the ‘I’ is extra.”

   Zen is just about as reflective of Japan in general as the Amish are of the US.

   > Perhaps the most celebrated poem in Japan is Basho’s gasp of delight at seeing the island of Matsushima.

   The author overstates its high-brow-ness. It's just fun to quote. There are a lot of haiku that are primarily funny.

   ====

   I can go on, but it's more of the same. All these observations are isolated from various contexts and loosely tied together into a theme of Japanese silence. It's fun and doing something like this helps organize things into something readable, but for the theme to reflect something innately Japanese and more than an ad-hoc organization of prima facie similar thoughts would require a proper argument.

   ====

   > One sign that Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a Japanese movie is the fact that the audience never hears its last, and presumably most important, sentence.

   Surely this is satire?

   ====

   > A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer is now available from Knopf. Featured with permission of the publisher, Knopf. Copyright © 2019 by Pico Iyer.

   Presumably this article consists of excerpts from the book. In terms of literary form, it's very fun, reminding of epigrams and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. But the person who picks up this book based on its title expecting some nuanced reflection on Japan would find the author's dogmatic ignorance most discernible in it, and nothing remotely hinting at the wisdom behind Meditations. Note that I find that Meditations suffers similarly; the observations do not exhibit blinding ignorance as some do here, but they are terribly lacking in context for many to be more universally useful than just "notes to oneself".

   Show morethread
2. sdrothrockSep 2019
   > However, my reaction to 9nGQluzmnq3M's coment is mainly this: Why judge an article or opinion on what it's not instead of what it is?

   To me, I'm judging the article based on what it's claiming to be.

   He starts it with a faux linguistic analysis including numbers, faux cultural comparisons, and an analysis of the Japanese language -- which he professes not to know.

   > I read the original article as an attempt to share some similar kind of feeling.

   The way he opened his article and continued trying to pick at linguistics is what kept me from feeling that kind of thing. His own credentials and the location of the article also contributed to that.

   If it were a personal blog and he were talking about subjective feelings, that's one thing -- but when he is writing an article on lithub and starting with numbers and apparently scholarly linguistic analysis, that's a completely different thing to me.

   Edit to add: And one other point is that this is all to publicize a book of his called "A Beginner's Guide to Japan," which sounds very authoritative.

   Show morethread