Kahunaburger said:
Therumancer said:
Remember for example that the Japanese pretty much slaughtered the entire Samurai aristocricy for being a bunch of oppressive douchebags, all of thise "we worship our honorable Samurai forefathers" stuff is kind of insane when you look at the actual facts.
See also: most fantasies in a pseudo medieval setting anywhere. Hardly unique to Japan.
Therumancer said:
I was reading some stuff through the years about how Western pop culture pretty much defined Japan, and how for example Westerns the westerns of John Ford pretty much birthed inspired the entire Samurai film genere Yojimbo and even changed perceptions of the Samurai and how they were presented in history. which in turn was highly influential in the Western and Samurai genres, alongside Akira Kurosawa's other films.
Fixed.
Not really fixed, I stand behind the original statements as I wrote them.
In general most people are willing to get into the deep shame Japan felt after their defeat in World War II (as much for losing as admitting anything they did wrong) and attempts to forget a lot of their culture because they couldn't reconcile it with being so totally defeated. It's a point people will bring up in "screw America" discussions in a somewhat dressed up fashion to say blame the US for Japan's national depression and suicide rate for dropping the bombs. On the other hand when it can't be turned around somehow and tossed at the US for "destroying the culture", mentioning it and making judgements of Japanese creations and it's current culture/popular culture are not popular.
See, Japan has a wierd love/hate relationship with the US, and for a very long time they were into aping American pop culture, very badly. This is the reason for the whole "they're really big in Japan" joke that was popular in the late 70s and through the 80s was invented. It wasn't so much ONE director or style that was internationally influential that also effected Japan, but the simple fact that they would take everything American, and try and duplicate it, with absolutly absurd results at times when they missed the point.
Now, Japan HAS gotten better over the years, and produced a lot of things that are decent in of themselves, but the inspiration in many cases goes back towards that period. A lot of what teenagers and American fiction writers during the 1980s thought about Samurai and Ninjas wound up being what defined them as they exist now throughout Japanese pop culture, and even to an extent how they are portrayed historically.
The point with the Samurai is that while the western world DID have a number of revolutions against aristocricy, yesterday's dominant power (now the UK), that birthed the current dominant power (the US, for the moment) and other world powers, was able to more or less peacefully transition from a system of royalty and aristocricy to something more progressive. As a result the media (which is western dominated) doesn't portray things like knights, kings, or whatever else as being inherantly bad. Indeed it's a big deal when someone gets knighted, despite England's royal family having little in the way of power and a dwindling fortune. Thus it's not really "the same thing" when we do "heroic knights" in fantasy as it is for say a Samurai hero in Japan... and there have been some close looks at that.
It might not be a popular thing to point out, but just about everything you see coming from Japan as far as pop culture has western origins or inspiration, everything from literal "westerns" to inspiration from games like D&D and fantasy writers like Moorcock (more influential than most give him credit for), Howard, Tolkien, and others.
There are some good reasons why people will generally dismiss the entirety of Asia as not innovating anything anymore, although that is not literally true.
The point here though isn't so much to knock Japanese culture, but to make points as to why Anime hasn't been better received and gets dismissed so easily by so many people. Right or wrong, there ARE some good reasons for it, fans who wind up liking soemthing tend not to carefully look at the object of their adoration and consider it's flaws and how they are going to strike a lot of people. Anime has mostly "hit" for geek culture but failed to fully make it into the mainstream (though it looked like it was coming cloe for a while) for a reason.
When it comes to games, you have to understand that JRPGs have not innovated much, and suffer from a lot of the same other problems as Anime. A lot of the basic ideas having come from Western games to begin with. This is NOT a bad thing because they are perfect at what they set out to be, and carry a lot of fans with them, it's just that what they are doesn't strike a chord with the mainstream. Appealing to the mainstream is not inherantly a good thing other than in a financial sense.
I've noticed for example that the JRPGs more or less hit their biggest period of "stagnation" combined with growing criticisms of the Japanese gaming industry and it's place in the world, around the time you saw Western game companies aiming for AAA titles and spending a lot of time on their voice work, cinematics, and FX. While JRPGs were at one time famous for their cut scenes, Japan has never been big about hiring multiple voice casts to localize into differant languages (but it does happen), dubbing and it's quality being a big issue, and a lot of their releases having a high reliance on subtitles. Comparing a JRPG to say "Mass Effect 3" winds up with the JRPG showing poorly due to how it was ground out on a limited budget. It takes a real geek nowadays to really focus on the gameplay (many people say so, but few do), and even then it comes down to gameplay that is only great if you happen to be part of a niche audience (if a large one)
