Anime HanabiA Mini Taste of Japan!
A couple times I’ve used a picture of my room, or at least the great big manga book shelf in my room, in my blog posts. Usually it’s on posts talking about the little anime treasures I collect, or about my obsession with manga/manhwa. But there’s so much more on that shelf too. So today I’m going to introduce you to some of my mini books I have stashed on that shelf too. Mostly, because I honestly couldn’t think of anything else to write about, and I just happened to be poking around my bookshelf, picked up one of those mini books, thumbed through and and remembered why I liked it so much.
Why Do I Even Have These?
For any of my long time readers, it’s probably no surprise to hear that I’m not just an Otaku, over the years I’ve transcended to the lofty heights of obsessive fandom to the great and mighty title of Japan-o-phile! Watching anime is just not enough for me, I need to know and understand the culture that created it. Why be limited while trying to gaze at the stories I so love, by the blurry and often distorting lens of Western culture, when I could see my beloved anime as it was intended, through the cultural lens of a Japanese perspective. Understand the jokes, and why they are funny. Get the historical references and know when an anime writer is taking some artistic liberties. Groan when when a character isn’t following proper Japanese social etiquette. Instantly recognize when a character is speaking in a rural, urban, yankee, ect. accent. The list just goes on and on! There are just so many reasons understanding the Japanese culture makes anime much more enjoyable!
And so, in my quest to be ever more informed about the culture of Japan, I watch NHK (a Japanese news agency) I study Japanese language/history/art, and I collect social artifact books and items. What do I mean by social artifact sources? I mean anything that demonstrates the social environment of Japan. For example, adorable little books like these!
Though these two books are visually very different, and have two different goals, both are an example of Japan’s “Soft Influence”. A passive sharing of culture in a gentle and easy to process way that almost anyone could understand and get into.
The first book is a kind of passive Japanese language learning book. Manga Moods, shows a variety of faces with different expressions commonly seen in manga, and it has a little passage in Japanese, with translation and important kanji highlighted and explained. It really is a charming book to browse in between Japanese language studying. It’s also a really nice book to nudge people into learning a little Japanese language without feeling like a text book.
The second book is just filled with photographs of interesting signs, logos, and mascots found around urban Japan. There’s really no lesson to be learned here, other than what the urban environment in Japan looks like, what they find visually appealing, and how they convey information. Okay, so maybe it’s actually teaching a lot. But again, it’s a kind of passive learning. It’s an easy book to flip through, see in interesting sign, or display, or mascot, tucking that information into your brain as more useless trivia, and slowly broadening your mind on what the world looks like.
I think that’s why I like these books so much. They are easy and pleasing to browse through, and they gently softly nudge the horizon of my intellectual world just a little bigger with each flip of a page. I might not live in a city that is bespangled with colorful signs and mascots, I might not work in a language filled with words that have meaning not just with their letters but with their very shape, but that doesn’t mean that this kind of world couldn’t exist. That’s why I love being not just a Japan-o-phile but a xenophile. When I see what the world outside my own little bubble of life is and could be, it makes me hopeful for a better future, because it already is reality somewhere.
#anime #blogging #Japan #JapaneseCulture #japanophile #languageLearning #otakuCulture #otakuLife #softInfluence #xenophile
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