The Grand Narrative

 ( “Ignite Your Beauty” by yangkuo)

Introduction

As requested (and no, that wasn’t really me), here is the second part of my examination of Keiko Tanaka’s chapter entitled ”Japanese Women’s Magazines: the language of aspiration” in the book The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, edited by D.P. Martinez (1998).

I’ll take up pretty much where part one left off, again underlining examples Tanaka gives to distinguish them from her commentary, but before I do, let me second the photographer’s suggestion that the above photo is much better viewed large (just click on it). I’m not really interested in Misaki Ito (安斉 智子), but it really is a very aesthetically pleasing shot. I was especially thrilled to find this news article via the notes to the photo too, especially after I wrote this, but unfortunately it’s no longer available.

The Prescriptive Character of Contemporary Women’s Magazines (Continued)

( “Kawaii” by yangkuo)

I think that part one’s examples of the authoritative, teacher-like language used in Japanese women’s magazines speak for themselves, but in hindsight Tanaka’s next point about how unique they are is much more important than I first thought. This is because Japan is well known as an authoritarian, rank and status-conscious, patriarchal society….yada yada yada…and so it would be natural to attribute the examples to that, and to think that all Japanese magazines use similar styles of language too. But actually, and very significantly, it’s only women’s magazines that do so. Like Tanaka says:

In their attempt to nurture young women readers, these magazines use imperatives and other prescriptive expressions in a way which is unusual in Japanese society. Even in situations where imperatives are commonly used in English, Japanese equivalents are not:

Whip the cream until it just holds its shape, then fold into the cheese with the caster sugar.

One thinly slices two onions. One chops two rashers of bacon into pieces approximately 1 centimeter long.

Or, again, as in a bilingual computer manual, in which the instructions “Expand the phrase…Press Return” become:

One expands the phrase…One presses the return key (p. 122, emphasis added)

I can’t speak any Japanese at all, but I do know that what Tanaka says of the use of imperatives in Japanese, that they are usually confined to family, close friends or, indeed, teachers, is true of Korean, as is the contrast between this “authoritarian and intimate” language of women’s magazines and that normally used in advertisements too:

[Whereas] the use of imperatives is frequent in English advertisements, notably seen in verbs such as “buy”, “choose”, and “get”….Japanese equivalents are hardly ever in the imperative, though imperative expressions crop up here and there; however, they tend to be vague when it comes to what the audience is urged to do, as in:

Those who are walking, stop for a while.

Oh, come and play.

It is September. Please find something good. (pp. 122-123)

It’s still tempting not to read this much into the prescriptive language used; it’s hardly surprising that young Japanese women, after being treated like children for most of their lives (just like in Korea) would gravitate towards magazines that used the authoritative, reassuring language that they were used to. Hence, in a kind of demand and supply snowball effect:

Japanese women’s magazines…seem to have developed a style which their audience takes to, or at least accepts, just as [it has been argued] that the American tabloid press has. While the latter achieves this “largely through its departures from official (correct) language” and has “a tone of disrespect running through it”, Japanese women’s magazines manage it by appropriating the language of the classroom and a prescriptive tone. (p. 123)

Does This Mean That Japanese Women Are Merely Weak, Passive Consumers?

( “Photo Technic” by yangquo. Also best viewed large)

Tanaka admits that the common thread of all the examples she gives is the way in which the magazines seem to “stand in for authority figures vis-a-vis their readers.” They also, to judge from the language used:

…treat their readers as pupils who aspire to achieve standards defined by the editors. Considering the popularity of these magazines, there appears to be no shortage of pupils who have failed to outgrow their school days. (p. 127)

I’m not sure if that is intended to be sarcastic or not, but it’s certainly true that doing nothing but studying for their entire adolescence leaves suddenly ostensibly “adult” Koreans with little knowledge of how to meet the opposite sex and/or even how to dress, and with virtually the same education system then I can’t imagine that young Japanese adults would be any different. With still living at home thrown into the mix too, then “failing to outgrow their school days” is only natural behaviour, if immature by Western standards. But more serious is the charge that Tanaka is:

…going along with the tendency to treat women as the weak, passive, and subordinate party, as opposed to the powerful, manipulative, and dominant publishing industry.

In response, she quotes Dominic Strinati from page 217 of his book An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, who says:

…the view of women as passive consumers manipulated into desiring commodities and the luxuries of consumption by the culture industries has begun to be challenged by feminist theory and research. Within the context of the emergence of what has been termed “cultural populism”, it has been argued that this notion of the passive consumer undervalues the active role of they play, the way their appreciation and interpretation of cultural consumption may diverge from that intended by the culture industries, as well as the fact that consumption cannot simply be understood as a process of subordination.

( Photo by plynoi )

 Strinati concludes that:

…consumption does not simply represent “the power of hegemonic forces in the definition of women’s role as consumer”, but rather “is the site of negotiated meanings, of resistance of appropriation as well as of subjection and exploitation”…(p. 218)

Strinati wrote that in 1995, and if anything, I imagine that the internet especially has made all consumers much savvier and more assertive since, which I give examples of here. Writing in 1998, Tanaka does say that it is important to keep in mind the strength the growing influence of young Japanese women as their disposable income rises, and with the benefit of ten years distance I can personally say that their spending habits did prove crucial to Japan’s ultimate economic recovery too. But ultimately Tanaka is still relatively dismissive of this:

While these caveats are all worthy of attention, it remains the case that these powerful consumers seem to be highly insecure in some respects. (p. 218)

And because of their lack of life-experience like I mentioned, then it is little wonder that young Japanese women:

…crave authority figures to instruct them as to how they should cope with this new unsettling new world of choice. Further research might concentrate both on the roots of this insecurity and on the multiple ways in which [magazine] writers attempt to maintain the loyalty of their target audience through the use of a tone of authority.

I too think that, so long as the practice of sending sleepy teenagers to study for long hours after school continues, then young Japanese and Korean women too will continue to prefer magazines like this. Like I said, it’s only natural that they would, and I want to re-emphasize that, lest I’ve ever inadvertently implied that I consider them stupid and/or immature for doing so. Moreover, as Michael Hurt says, not coincidentally the source of the photo underneath, there’s plenty of evidence that Korean women at least are beginning to reject the dictates of fashion magazines and be much more assertive and individualist in their fashion choices, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find the same of Japan too.

( Photo by feetmanseoul)

And the implications of this change? Hell, they make studying Korean society fascinating just by themselves!

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( Image by ultravid)

The news is very sad of course, but bizarrely, I’ve just realised that I actually felt the earthquake in China.

I wasn’t too thrilled about working on a public holiday, but it did mean that I was actually sitting down at my desk at 3:28pm, unlike the rest of you who were out having fun. Not only that, but when I felt some ever-so-slight shaking I really was immediately reminded of the the earthquake that hit Busan in 2005, probably because I was sitting in an office chair at a desk back then too (no, not blogging!). Everybody else in the institute was up and about and didn’t seem to notice a thing though, so although I did enjoy thinking for a time that I had a psychic ability to detect earthquakes that ordinary mortals lacked, like in a science-fiction book I read once, in the end I just attributed it to a passing truck or all the students running around or something. I didn’t put two and two together until 5 minutes ago.

If you look at this map, it’s not so difficult to believe really:

(Source)

News reports mention that buildings swayed in Taipei, 2000 km away, so me feeling slight vibrations while sitting down 2400 km away doesn’t sound all that implausible, eh?

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 ( “Entering Hyperspace” by Mister Wind)

Sorry for the blog being unavailable for most of Sunday, but WordPress has been having technical issues again. Fortunately, most websites lose a lot of visitors on weekends anyway, although I confess I’ll never understand why that would also apply to this particular blog…I mean, who wouldn’t want to be at home reading it on a sunny three-day weekend like this?

In other news, I’ve been in Korea exactly eight years today, and it’s put me in a bit of a contemplative mood (hence the cool photo). I quite clearly remember landing in Jinju on Thursday May 11th 2000, which happened to be Buddha’s birthday, and especially that after 17 hours of travelling, and clearly having a raging flu, the first thing my institute director did was…take me to the institute and lecture me at great length about the textbooks. Considering that that was the least of the indignities about to be inflicted upon me for much of the next year, then yes, I do regret not proceeding to grab one of the books at that point and bashing him across the head with it. But in my defence, passing out made that a tad difficult, and he did indeed turn off the overhead projector and take me to my new home pretty soon after that.

You all think I’m kidding don’t you? I wish. That was nothing compared with what he got up to later, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I lost all my hair that first year in Korea, at the ripe old age of…twenty-four. Buy me a drink sometime, and, amongst other things, I promise to tell you about him breaking into our house while we were sleeping and stealing all my Canadian colleague’s lingerie…

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(Source)

History or art? Most people would probably say the former, but then the mountain ranges and valleys in the map above have little relation to reality. Still, I think it’s an…ahem…simply beautiful piece of work myself, but unfortunately don’t know where it’s from. Can any museum-visiting readers help out?

As you can probably guess, I’m quite a fan of maps (I’m not alone!), and have about 20 or so just of various parts of Korea. I used to have two laminated, detailed maps of my local area hanging up in my kitchen, but I took them down once I discovered a nice, secluded park 10 minutes from my apartment, which the maps had deprived me of visiting for three years because the park isn’t on either (places to get some quiet and seclusion are very rare and precious here!). In their place, I’ve been combining my interest in Korea, history in general, geography and near-future science-fiction by looking at maps of how what Northeast Asia will look like in the near future as the sea-level rises, what it looked like 20,000, 19,000, 18,000…(and so on) years ago, and how the whole world will look like with a 100m sea-level rise. And don’t get me started on the supercontinent of Pangaea Ultima due to appear in 250-400 million years time!

(Update: A big thanks to Jer, who tells me where he got the original shot from here)

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( “Gravity” by nickwheeleroz)

Korea and the World

At the end of Part One, I mentioned that the Korean education system is routinely held up as a model for the West by foreign observers, and gave an example from The Economist magazine here. Here is a more recent example from The New York Times too. 

Now before I came to Korea, I had a great deal of respect for both news sources, but the longer I’m here and the more articles about Korea I read in them, I realise that I can’t trust the accuracy of either.  Anyone with just a few months of teaching experience in either a Korean university, public-school, or after-school institute knows that the system as a whole possesses numerous and systematic flaws, and that Korean parents themselves are simply desperate to have their children taught overseas. So what gives? Why do reporters that supposedly “read between the lines,” always “question everything,” and are paid to do the research that I do for free routinely produce such complete crap about Korea? If I lived in, say, Syria, would I find the same of English-language articles produced about that country? Or is this something…surely not unique, but more pronounced in Korea than elsewhere?

Scott Burgeson, introduced in Part 1, makes a convincing case for the latter. To finish my discussion of his thoughts on the decline of Korean Studies programs overseas:

…the fact of the matter is that it is almost impossible for a non-Korean critic to make a decent living writing about Korean culture for English-speaking readers. Thus, the lack of public or private grant assistance for Western critics covering Korean culture means that it is difficult to find commenters on Korean culture in the popular English-language press who actually know what they’re talking about (or who are not simply hacks).

I remember when I interviewed the Japanese director Suzuki Seijun in Tokyo nearly ten years ago, the staff at the Japan Foundation were extremely happy to hear about my work and went out of their way to provide stills from his films to print in my magazine at no cost to myself. They did not care whether I had a degree behind my name or not, but were simply pleased that I was helping to promote Japanese culture to an English-speaking readership — and I might note that an extremely transgressive director Suzuki is hardly a “respectable” standard-bearer of Japanese culture. My interactions with the Korea Foundation have been, well, in the interests of being diplomatic, quite the opposite. Perhaps I am burning bridges by posting this kind of message to the List, but since I gave up applying for grants here many years ago, I know that it will not affect me one way or the other so I really don’t care anymore.

There are many reasons why Korean culture is and shall continue to remain relatively obscure on the world stage, and my experiences as an independent critic here are just one more example of why this is so.

As explained in Part One, much of the problem is most Koreans thinking that only those affiliated to a university are “qualified” to write about Korea. Sure, there would be no direct link between that and those reporters mentioned above, but it reduces the already limited pool of people “engaged” with Korea, and like I explain here, their connections with Korea and Koreans have an impact far greater than they may at first appear. Hence, for one, the ultimately unsustainable nature of the Korean Wave compared to its Japanese counterpart, which I’ve discussed in many posts here.

(Image by gyoul)

This reminds me of what GordSellar has described as:

…the standard, near-universal conviction among Koreans that a positive image of Korea must be presented to the world. It goes without saying that, in this sense, the image can only really be positive if it’s presented in terms that will appear positive on the world’s terms, rather than on Korea’s terms.

And the fact that, in Korea:

…on some level, for many Koreans, a discussion is also a promo-op, a chance to represent the nation in a positive light, to make people think well of their nation; or, if it is not that, it devolves into a more basic “defense” of the nation, which is hardly any more useful for finding out people’s real opinions.

Previously I’d thought that the monstrosities in the English-language media presenting news of the “success” of the Korean Wave overseas were as bad as they were because they primarily for a domestic audience; over 95% of the readers of the English-language Korea Herald, for instance, are Koreans. And for sure, that still plays a large role, as too does the fact that most Korean authors on the Korean Wave are well aware that they’re writing propaganda rather than actual news. But seeing as how most Koreans think that Korea must always be presented positively to non-Koreans, but positive in their terms rather than Koreans’, then I’m increasingly convinced many of those authors are genuinely convinced that what they’re writing is what non-Koreans want and will respond positively to. That the results are usually anything but is, I think, a reflection of the self-imposed relative isolation of Korea that I’ve described in these two posts.

It’s a long shot, and for sure there is bad English all over the world, but nothing symbolizes this to me more than the signage at stadiums for the 2002 World Cup here. Billions spent on what in many cases have become little more than white elephants 6 years later, but the designers of things specifically designed for non-Koreans didn’t feel the need to consult even a dictionary, let alone the opinions of an actual non-Korean:

(Source)

(Update: There wasn’t really any appropriate place for it in this post, but I did want to mention this factoid often uncritically accepted overseas too. See this article on that too, and thanks to GordSellar for passing it on)

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(Update: It was amusing watching this after midnight, when all the girls were asleep! But however much I like the music, I’m beginning to see how it could be annoying having it come up every time someone visits the blog in the next two weeks, so I’ve wisely made it come up on mute now!)

Something for you to enjoy as I type up the next week’s posts. Sorry about the automatic music as you visit the blog, but it’s easy to turn off, and I think that it makes the screensaver (and blog) much perkier, yes? If you like it, you can download it for yourself by clicking on the menu here.

Found here, which has 12 more interesting screensavers to choose from.

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( “Abandoned” by lydurg)

Sorry to the dozens of people who’ve written comments and/or sent emails in the last few days, but I’ve been struck down with a terrible flu that confines me to bed when I’m not at work, and gives me pounding headaches whenever I so much as think about moving.

Please keep writing and/or sending them though, and I’ll answer them all as soon as I’m able. And keep visiting the blog too, because I’ve already got four posts scheduled to appear this week, wisely written back while I was still coherent.

Sigh. Back to trying not to pass out at my desk. On the plus side though, I’m very grateful that there’s no restrictions on medicines with weak speed pseudoephidrine hydrochloride in Korea…munch munch munch… 

Well, you already knew that Alice was a girl, but then if she doesn’t get you smiling this Sunday morning, then nothing will.

But here’s an ultrasound of her 16 week-old sibling, which the doctor has just told us he’s 90% sure is a girl. Click on the picture for a much bigger image.

At the moment we’re thinking of calling her “Elizabeth Jeong Turnbull”, after my sister’s middle name. What do people think? As I explain here, her first name has to be English ( “Jeong” is my wife’s family name), and I’m a big fan of long, elegant and/or dignified Christian names that can’t be shortened easily. Of course, Elizabeth can easily be shortened to “Liz”, but I’m gambling that she’ll still prefer Elizabeth herself.

Still, my wife and I are still very open to other suggestions. Having said that, anyone that comes up with “Hannah” will be severely punished for their lack of originality…!

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