Why I Care More About Japanese Culture Than Manga
An Essay On Cultural Homelessness
For those who don’t know, I used to be a really big fan of Manga. However, as I mentioned in a previous essay, slowly I started becoming increasingly frusterated by the lack of job opprotunities in the manga business. Slowly, I found myself beginning to grow a fascination for Japanese culture itself, while my interest in Manga as a graphical medium slowly moving into the background. This is why I also focused the last ten years on writing short stories and novellas, rather than trying to write script for a graphic novel. And yet now, as look more into the Japanese circle, even the good aspects are slowly becoming, just as I had feared, and as others have noted, more of a facade. Although this is consistent with Japan being more generally right-wing than the US on certain issues.
It’s not so much that I don’t have an interest in manga anymore. Absolutely, I do. It wasn’t even a language barrier. Although I am currently more focused on learning French than I am learning Japanese, although I do see this changing as I develop a constructed language that is somewhat of a hybrid of both. But even though I consider myself more of a Market Anarchist now, I went through a period where I toyed with the idea of being Anarcho-Communist. So just with that alone I probably would not have been a great fit for Japanese society.
Currently as I develop my own graphical narrative form, I’m finding my work culturally going in a more left-wing direction ( in the classical sense ), and also the fictional language is already not 100% mutually intelligle with Japanese. But I still find myself holding onto various aspects of Japanese culture, that relate to more than American culture. In general I would say it’s the politeness, which hasn’t been the case in America for the last decade or so. Not, at least, sense the election of Donald Trump. However you feel abut the man, I feel like whatever attachment I did have with the US is pretty much gone at this point. I have considered moving to Quebec. Although that would be more, as non Japanese, trying to get to know the Japanese diaspora there. Although in that respect it might arguably inspire me sense I am working on a Scifi setting that is a fusion of French and Japanese culture.
But nowadays I’m finding myself looking more and more into the Bande Dessinnee market rather than Manga, even though generally my work would probably classified as weirdly somewhere in between, especially with the four panel grid I’ve been working with latelly, that is designed more to fit with the comics album type of formatting. I’m also growing an appreciation for non Japanese comic creators like Gregory Gallant, a.k.a. Seth despite us probably being politically different in a lot of a ways, given his “man out of time” tendencies. Although there was a point in time I felt a similar way before I was introduced to the radical left, although mine tended to manifest as feeling more like a genuine outsider, rather than the “faux outsider” status that seem prevalent today in modern discourse. And the modern left ( in the US ) does quite a bit of harm trying to invalidate my feelings more than anything.
That’s not to say that I don’t think I’ll ever move to Japan, but if I moved there at this point, in many ways I would be much further left than even say the Japanese left, even if I’m closer to Left-Market anarchist. And so it would already put me somewhat at cultural odds in a way. I’m stuck in the middle between radical centrist in the US, and radical left in Japan, and who knows what in Quebec. In a sense, I feel like Seth in concentrate.
But more like a person without a cultural country. I suppose that’s why I started this conlang.