Zen and the art of cliche
Of all the countries and cultures encountered by the West over the past few hundred years, Japan has remained the most persistently bewildering.
Using a plethora of sources, from 16th-century Jesuits to contemporary novels, newspaper articles and films, Ian Littlewood seeks to show that the West's view of Japan and its prejudices have not changed much over the years.
In a book that from start to finish is a diatribe, Littlewood takes one idea, Western intolerance, and hammers it home any way he can.
That is not to say he is wrong. In particular, he is accurate in his arguments about the simplistic paradoxes used by so many writers.
When Japan re-opened its doors to the outside world in the 19th century, the first European travellers and traders in almost two centuries remarked on the contrasts they observed in everyday life. On the one hand, they saw fastidious cleanliness, an appreciation of the beauty of nature and art. On the other, they witnessed widespread promiscuity and acts of barbaric cruelty.
Littlewood argues that Western perceptions of Japan change depending on the threat posed militarily and commercially.
In the 19th century, the geisha became the tragic Madame Butterfly and no Victorian middle-class mantlepiece was complete without Japanese lacquerware.
However, with Tsar Nicholas' comprehensive defeat in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, the idea of the yellow peril raised its ugly head.
After defeat in World War II, that threat receded and the charm of the geisha returned. But from the ashes rose an industrial phoenix and with it the fear of the yellow peril returned.
Littlewood has a point. Journalists with shoddy thinking and early deadlines reach for the easiest cliches and they are repeated so often that, rather than looking for the real Japan, we gladly embrace them. But his blanket condemnation of Western prejudice does not ring true.
He makes sweeping statements about why Europeans are attracted to Japanese women: 'She is the exotic damsel whose submission confirms the man's sense of mastery; she is the perfect wife whose loyalty outfaces death.' And, in a Freudian twist little more than one of the cliches he so abhors, Littlewood states the women are an enticing pre-pubescent mixture of the woman and the child.
The author could have said all he wanted to say in a series of newspaper articles. Perhaps, should he write again about Japan, he will tell us something of his idea of the country. Sadly, that is missing from this book.
The Idea of Japan: Western Images Western Myths by Ian Littlewood Secker & Warburg $170
