Presentation at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, 13/06/2023 (Edited and updated version, January 2026)

 

The concept for this book on Japan was a tough sell to publishers. Stephen Mansfield, an accomplished author on Japan, described it in a Nikkei Asia review as "a book that was quite different from anything I had seen before. A work that did not try to please people or delude them by perpetuating comforting stereotypes."

Indeed, it bounced between reputable publishers before returning to the original one. I exasperated editors and publishing personnel who had never set foot in the country. The ingrained intellectual hurdles to avoid or correct clichés, platitudes, and stereotypes about Japan were so deeply cemented that a revision seemed impossible, or at least wholly undesirable. For decades, I had conformed to editorial expectations, or at least provided enough material to lay it out as editors saw fit. But for this one book, I was determined to realize my personal vision of Japan, shaped by experience of living in the country for almost half a century.

The book's production history began in Germany in 2015, so my experience recounted here is primarily from that environment. While I find the German sphere astonishingly insular and insistent on maintaining a Japan image that has changed little since my arrival in 1972, I suspect my exposure to gatekeepers elsewhere would not be much different.

Unlike most Westerners there, Japan was never my intended destination. It was a stopover on my way to Australia in December 1972. I was 21, had a one-way ticket to Tokyo, ran out of money, and fell in love. The allure of passion sealed my fate.

In the words of poet and musician Nick Cave, I was "...young, and like many young people, mostly demented..."

My attraction to shrines, temples, and gardens—what is commonly perceived as traditional Japanese culture—was rather dispassionate.

Consequently, my first photographic subjects in Japan were not the endlessly photographed sights of Kyoto, even though I lived in that city for eight years. Instead, my initial project focused on the chindon-ya, traditional street performers and social misfits in their whimsical guises promoting neighborhood businesses. After that, I photographed Japanese long-distance drivers and, most notably, pachinko, the then ubiquitous, garishly lit gambling halls found all over Japan.

But foreign editors and publishers, both with and without experience in Japan, persistently demand imaginary exotic vistas. Peter Tasker, in his introduction to my book, calls this the perpetuation of a fiction, a trend he traces back to the late 19th century. At that time, the early, influential Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn romanticized this mythical country, describing his arrival "in a world where land, life and sky are different from anything known from elsewhere," similar to the immersion in "the old dream of a world of elves."

This image, which equates Japan with a dream of a world of elves, is consistently maintained to this day. It continues to dominate the media and numerous personal accounts of experiences in the German-speaking world and beyond.

Japan remains the land of geisha, tea ceremony, Zen, and polite smiles—an exotic, mythical empire in the Far East; enigmatic and incomprehensible. Without the clear signals of Mount Fuji, geisha, and kimono, one does not know where one is. This is because, in the Western gaze, everyone in the Far East looks the same. The stranger people are to us, the less we are able to distinguish them.

In his 2006 book, The East-West Goethe, Professor Naoji Kimura, one of the most renowned researchers on German culture in Japan, attributes this relentless adherence to common thought patterns to individual prejudices, collective national conceit, and cultural-political manipulations: "Despite globalization, people seem to prefer to hold on to their familiar image of the world or of mankind or to their habitual intellectual standpoint in order to judge or condemn others, out of laziness of thought."

British author and journalist Alan Booth (1946-1993), who wrote some of the most insightful books and essays on Japan, noted in the 1980s that "More thorough nonsense must be spoken and written about Japan than any other comparably developed nation." That statement still rings true today.

This distorted image of Japan seems so deeply ingrained and relentlessly repeated that correction is impossible. Deviations or even new perspectives remain undesirable.

Why does it seem impossible to purge this stereotypical fallacy?

The idea that we see what we want to see, and its influence on our perception, has been studied in modern psychology for quite some time. If a certain idea is preferred, it unconsciously steers the thought process in that desired direction. This so-termed "motivated perception" becomes "motivated thinking," which in a top-down process ensures that perception is guided according to one's own expectations, hopes, and wishes, and that the formation of judgments is shaped accordingly.

Perception and reality, especially of foreign cultures, do not align; instead, they are influenced by the zeitgeist, one's own condition, and one's social and cultural environment.

Motivated perception and reality in photography was already a theme in Michelangelo Antonioni's classic 1966 film Blow-Up. Photography is, and always has been, the perfect illusory medium. The photographer sees what he wants to see, directing his glass eye to what he selects and frames accordingly.

And the gatekeepers in the media—the editors and curators—permeated by the current zeitgeist, select what they believe the audience needs to see, what might sell best, and in these times, what gets the most clicks.

The cliché image of Japan seems to be maintained by dogma, especially in illustrated books.

A look at the history of reporting about Japan in the German-speaking world reveals an endless loop of platitudes and preconceptions. There is hardly any article or book title that does not address the supposedly unique contrast between tradition and modernity in Japan.

On German Amazon, I once counted more than 50 titles for diverse subjects on Japan subtitled "Tradition and Modernity"—which reveals more about the gatekeepers and curators than about Japan itself.

 

One of the reasons why these platitudes so stubbornly persist is clearly the fact that, in the case of Germany, most media houses do not employ their own correspondents in Japan. The majority of articles about Japan are written by journalists who have neither extensive experience in Japan nor pertinent language skills. A few short trips to the country suffice to make a "Japan specialist": Been there, know it all.

This "virtual" journalism—reports from afar about unfamiliar places—leads to perceptions that differ markedly from the experiences of people on the ground. Conversely, journalists actually working on the ground are expected to provide the "correct" material to corroborate common prejudices. News is written in editorial offices according to predetermined editorial guidelines.

But not only journalists forge the image of a country's image. Professor Mark Hollstein, in his course Geisha, Gangsters, and Samurai: Japan in Western Film at Kansai Gaidai University, pointed out how Western images of Japan have been constructed in response to specific historical situations. It is truly unfortunate that Hollstein passed away in January 2023.

Here is his course description: "Since the earliest days of cinema, Western filmmakers have used Japan as a mirror in which to reflect upon their own cultures. At times they have portrayed Japan as the model society that lays bare Western failures. At other times they have imagined the country as a corrupt world whose degenerate nature reinforces the superiority of Western values. Through it all has been a highly gendered narrative—Japan as the paradoxical land of ultra-feminine geisha (soft, gentle and nurturing) and extremely masculine samurai and gangsters (cold, unyielding and dangerous).

This course looks at how and why these contradictory images so easily coexist within the Western cinematic imagination. Of central concern is the way in which filmmakers have emphasized, exaggerated, distorted or ignored various aspects of Japanese culture to meet the expectations of their audiences, and the ways in which images of Japan, constructed in response to specific historical situations are recycled to justify or explain later situations. We will also consider how changes in class, gender and race relations in the West have influenced media images of the Japanese Other."

I would like to quote Peter Tasker again, from the introduction to this book:

"Many different Japans have been conjured up by the needs of the Western psyche, from the quaint lotus land of Madame Butterfly to the weird, alienating neon playground of Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation; from the sinister aggressor of the "yellow peril" journalism of the early twentieth century to the ruthless industrial competitor of the 1980s as depicted in the novel and film Rising Sun.

For most of its history, modern Japan has been an object of fear, admiration, delight, lust, amusement, curiosity, flattery, condescension and ignorance. But always an object of the Western gaze, examining the scenery from the outside, with an implicit agenda of comparing and contrasting rather than seeing things in their own terms."

In these modern times, just as the public craves reality, its authenticity is often dubious, repackaged by gatekeepers and social media algorithms, presenting us with an orchestrated reality.