Green IslandVampire Culture in Japan
July 21st 2010 15:49
There must be something unique about the molecular structure of Japanese plastic that mimics midi-chlorian because Japan has the highest per capita number of Jedi of any country I have encountered. Lonely and dedicated guardians can be seen all hours of the day and night waving their mini red light sabers protecting road side repairs and car parks from the dark side.
Which makes me think about the fact that we manage in the UK to park our cars without these wielders of the force. Is it that there are no Sith in the British Isles? And that in Japan the agents of evil team in the shadows ready to bend a fender or smash into a work hut by the side of the road? It must surely be so.
I live in a city which the Japanese bizarrely refer to as the countryside. There is some countryside to be seen if you look in the right direction, but in the other direction it is uninterrupted concrete, drinks machines, convenience stores and culture centers bereft of culture all the way to the bigger city where I used to live. One thing I have noticed since moving to the ‘countryside’ is that despite the masses of concrete and huge public buildings it is deadly quiet at night. As soon as the sun dips below the horizon it seems that all the good citizens flee to their little houses and prepare to get their habitual early night. If it was Brazil I could understand why nobody lingered on the streets; but mugging and armed robbery seem unlikely here. That is not to say, however, that the place is without its dangers. I have a gnawing and sickening feeling in the base of my stomach that the city is actually over-run with vampires. Two things make me think so. I have spotted a dingy gothic bar by the station and there is an uncanny preponderance of over-sized and pointed molars amongst the gobs of my students.
The vampire theory would also explain the unbelievable and irritating wholesomeness that I encounter every day. To be so wholesome is to hide a dark and evil secret. That secret is that they drink the blood of humans caught straying in the darkened ways of the city. No wonder the Jedi have drafted in some of their finest big bellied old warriors to protect those among the populace that carry untainted blood.
My vampire paranoia might not be so ill placed when you also consider the face mask, or the courtesy mask as they like to call it, which 20% of the Japanese population wear at any given time. Is it really that they crave the anonymity of a mask? Or is it that they are hiding their bloodied fangs because they only got back from their night feastings literally minutes before they had to throw on their day uniforms and go and prove the maxim that the more successful you are at erasing thinking from the work place the more money you will make. The Japanese spend their entire lives working in order to buy the goods that their efforts miraculously produce. And these consumer goods have become false idols that have clouded clear thinking. Thus, the brand of the wallet is more important than the amount of money it contains. And thus rows of cheap housing have balconies where the sun cannot penetrate inside for the number of satellite dishes on display. And thus ultimately money and entertainment and advertising rule the mind. This is exemplified by the utter waste of time that the ubiquitously enjoyed habit of window shopping represents.
Is this surely not the perspective of the vampire? If yours is a fate of an eternity of lonely nights watching the centuries slip by would you not start to find money meaningless as a symbol of value? For the vampire money is to be wasted just as blood is there to be spilled. And is not a fascination with surface not symptomatic of an ennui with content? Doesn’t a dislike for substance represent a boredom that only the perspective of eternal life can engender? The vampire psychology is a virus that has made Japan number two in the world. The makers of Hello Shitty know that the twilight mind prefers a facsimile cat to a real one.
I only half jest. People do seem to live forever here. And the moronic answer that people in the media talk about to the problem of an aging population is to bring thousands of poor Asians to Japan’s vampire infested shores. As if these poor Thais and Filipinos won’t themselves become vampires and live forever. Luckily, the media just talk about it without much mass action occurring. That’s for two reasons. One reason is that governing political parties in Japan don’t actually have that much power to govern and the other reason is that Japanese vampires are closet racists who only want to drink the pure blood of the land of the rising sun (the flag reminds all good vampires when it is time to assume their Clarke Kent personas).
Nukekubi
Japanese have their own version of a vampire called Nukekubi which are creatures that look like people except for a line of red markings around the neck. At night the Nukekubi detach their heads from their bodies. The body becomes inanimate and the head flies abroad seeking victims to bite. The best way to kill a Nukekubi is to find its body when it is detached from the head and hide it so the monster cannot re-join itself before daylight.
Could not the Nukekubi be a metaphor for the evil of separating the mind from the body? When the two are severed there is no longer the discrimination of logic and reason to counter the insatiable wants of the body. If you break the connection between desire and thought you are left with the perfect consumer driven by urges that can never be sated, only senses blunted by over-consumption.
The analysis of the metaphor could be expanded to describe the Japanese economy. In vampiric capitalism the body must surely be the automobile industry which supplies 1 in 5 jobs either directly in production and sales or indirectly through parts, housing, accounting and the whole panoply of wearisome jobs funded by making and selling pollution. Cut that away and the economic beast withers. As the 2008 economic crash has adequately demonstrated. China pay attention. Here is your chance for revenge – a Chinese Toyota will kill Japan.
To return to the Japanese vampire: it is a head that cannot stay on a body. The ill-fitting body and head is a dichotomy mirrored in manga porn whose central motif is a child’s head on a slut’s body. Other noteworthy disassociations or unnatural juxtapositions commonly seen in Japan is Orange hair on an Asian head and artificial nails that render digits un-useable. The Japanese vampire is about rendering nature unnatural. The apotheosis of this is turning Mount Fuji into a plastic bin and suicide ghetto. The distortion of nature is the sign of the vampire and the result of a vampiric mind set that seeks to suck truthful representation from the body and replace it with dissociated elements that only the propaganda of the cute and cool can make stick. This is reflected in the shortage of commonly used adjectives that cast an aesthetic judgment – something is either interesting or uninteresting, cool or not cool, cute or not cute, exciting or not exciting, strange or not strange and creepy or not creepy. Blunting the binary oppositions of judgment is the linguistic equivalent of covering nature with concrete. It hides the diversity of nature and replaces it with a sterile and convenient lie. This is vampirism of reality and this is the goal of modern Japan – to make a nation of vampires that feed off superficiality and plastic and in turn are the victims to an economic system that drains the life of the masses for the notion of economic growth which is itself a vampiric metaphor.
Japan really does need all those Jedi out there. Only it needs to re-deploy them. Let car parks and manholes take their chances with chaos and let those guardians of right-seeing gather and combine their strength and then attempt the last and great battle: the battle to free the hearts and minds of the post war generations from the dominant vampiric credo of Japan. Kill the body of the Nukekubi and slay the beast and let words and ideas and freedom yet again roam the islands.
| 146 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
Comment by Will12584
I think you hit the nail right on the head about Japan's "vampiric economy". Decapitating this vampire and getting these people back to agriculture and community-building would be a welcome change, but not one that Japan seems to be headed for. No, not in a country whose government openly admits that its plan for caring for the aging population is to invest in robots. Not in a country that has the highest population density and the largest public transportation sector and yet the citizens of which still demand minivans and concrete plastered cities with expansive parking lots.
Maybe I'm wrong and the Honda Asimo will be wiping Obachan's ass and the Electric Car will replace the sickening fossil fuel addiction that has sadly infected this island nation. But probably I'm not.