#6, you have some reasonable arguments and I’ll try to address them.
I am not arguing solely from the basis of the students I encountered in my university classes, I encounter otaku everywhere I go in Japanese-speaking circles, they pester me endlessly since I have the one thing they can never hope to achieve: Japanese language fluency. If anything, I tended to find the LESS fanatical types in my student circles, I avoid the really intense otaku groups, conventions, etc. where you’ll find high concentrations of the really outrageous nutballs. But I have found that even the less fanatical people are still nutballs, they’re all fanatical to some insane degree or other.
Secondly, I don’t have a general problem with people using comics for instruction, and generally I agree with the use of multisensory input for learning environments. However, Japanese language is an entirely different story. I could give (and have in the past) given lengthy explanations of why manga/anime are extremely unsuitable for Japanese lang studies, but I think I can summarize. Spoken and written Japanese are entirely different in nature. Representing speech patterns in text requires some unconventional techniques that are never used in normal written texts, and will lead students to incorrect conclusions about both the spoken and written forms. Anime, which does not use ANY written forms, tends to use exaggerated accents and unusual voices which are confounding to comprehension. Both anime and manga use a variety of levels of politeness (keigo) which is one unique feature of Japanese not found in English, without proper formal studies the average otaku will use these forms of language inappropriately. In short, there is a huge amount of background material, both cultural and linguistic, that the authors assume the reader knows, and blundering through this material will only lead to incorrect assumptions.
I will give a classic example of cultural difficulties in comic comprehension, stripping away the linguistic issues entirely.
In my 4th year studies, near the end of a unit on women’s rights in Japan, the teacher gave us a small 4panel comic that was seen in the Asahi Shimbun. The subject was fuufubessei, which means “married couples where the women keeps her maiden name.” The scene takes place in a bar. The bartender asks two customers “hey, what do you think of fuufubessei?” One man, we can tell he’s a lower class laborer from his speech patterns and that he’s dressed in workmen’s clothing, he says “I LOVE it!!” and the other man dressed in a suit and tie is shocked. As the workman departs, the bartender says to the businessman “he’s a stonemason.” The final panel shows two tombs in a graveyard.
Now what the HELL was so funny about that? First of all, fuufubessei is a huge issue with women in Japan, women, particularly businesswomen are fighting for the right to keep their maiden names. Most businesswomen are expected to quit their jobs once they get married, and changing one’s last name is considered a signal that you will soon be leaving the company. Fuufubessei is not legal at this time, although some companies do allow it on an informal basis for their permanent female workers.
From this, you can see that it’s a cultural reversal, businessmen are generally more accepting of women keeping their maiden names than blue-collar workers. But this is not why the comic is funny. To understand the comic, you have to know about the “Family Register” system of registering family geneology with the government, the history of Buddhism and Japanese government, stonemasons and funerary practices.
Japanese funerary practices are based around the Family Register system. Hundreds of years ago, each family was required to register with a buddhist temple, and keep a family tree on record. Usually this was done at a temple where a family had their tomb, where every family member’s ashes were entombed. The Register, and the tomb were always under the father’s lineage. Families that had no male heir to continue the family name would sometimes arrange marriages where the man would adopt the women’s family name. This is all a highly compressed version of about 6 weeks of intensive studies, I’m only hitting the highlights here.
So anyway, why is the comic funny? Because the stonemason is looking forward to making TWO tombs for each family, one under the man’s name, one under the women’s name, and he’d make twice as much money. Which is flat out ridiculous, since the women would still be entombed in the regular family tomb under the man’s name. It took our class about 6 weeks of intense studies of all this stuff before the teacher thought we knew enough background to understand this comic.
So perhaps you can start to see why I think comics are counterproductive to language studies. And I find it even MORE ridiculous when I hear crap like “I’m studying japanese language and culture in order to understand anime!” Perhaps these sorts of otaku should read one of my favorite books, “Lost Japan” by Alex Kerr. He asserts that Japanese people have extremely deep cultural knowledge, it is even encoded in their language, where every single kanji character evokes a huge background of literary and cultural associations going back to ancient China, and every Japanese student goes through years of cultural background training to understand this material intuitively, they study to a level that no westerner could ever understand. He says that Japanese have shallow personalities but a deep culture, while Americans have deep personalities and a shallow culture. This is not a cultural insult, Japanese people place primary importance on group identity and not individuality as Americans do, an individualistic Japanese person is usually described as selfish (wagamama). Japanese people must suppress their individualistic tendencies in order to be part of the deep pool of Japanese culture. For an American to do so would be ridiculous, we have no uniform cultural identity like Japanese do, so we have nothing to align ourselves with except ourselves. We must be individuals or nothing. Americans seeking to associate themselves with the deep culture of Japan by becoming otaku are Orientalists of the worst sort, they have no hopes of becoming a deep personality in a deep culture, they will only end up becoming a fish out of water. Is it any wonder that they are perceived as utter nutcases by both Japanese and Americans?
