Via Slashdot, I came across The Puzzle of Japanese Web Design.

With respect to clarity, simplicity, and boldness of line, the Japanese have been a thousand years ahead of us in fine art and graphic design. Our best painters learned minimalism, cartooning, and much else from the Japanese during the “Orientalism” period of the late 19th century. Before that, western fine art was judged in part on its complexity and detail. And our posters and advertisements! Don’t ask.

Following that simplistic, stereotyping, jingoistic "us vs them" nonsense, there's a bizarre bit about chopsticks that somehow mistakes cheap, ugly, scrap-wood waribashi disposable chopsticks as the only form of chopsticks in Japan. It's really unrelated, but I can't resist:    

Even the way the Japanese design chopsticks reveals this genius for simplicity coupled with a reverence for the natural world. Your Chinese chopstick is all lathe work. It’s about the gloriously smooth finish of the stick. Chinese chopsticks are miniature masterpieces that we tragically toss away after a single use. But they are masterpieces of human skill.

In contrast, the Japanese don’t change the shape of the wood. They simply put a small crack in one side—just enough that you can snap it like a wishbone when you’re ready to use the chopsticks. The Chinese chopstick is about Man and His Craft. The Japanese chopstick is about the sacred, ephemeral beauty of the revealed world.

This guy's a hoot; it reads like a parody of culturologists, but I think he's serious!

Anyway, that's just a wacky tangent. The gist is this:

Given Japan’s world-leading preference for the boldly simple in the applied and graphic arts, it’s puzzling that so many Japanese website designs prize clutter over clarity. 

All right. Yes, many Japanese websites are cluttered. I've certainly noticed it myself. And... so?

As I'd expect, the comments below the article are rife with chipped-in inanities about “Western” vs “Eastern” ways of thinking and “zen perspectives” and “contradictions” and "more is more" vs "less is more" and on and on... 

Give me a break, people! There is no "contradiction", no "paradox", no "puzzle" here. The two-second answer to the whole "puzzle" raised by the article is this:

People making austere, elegant pieces of traditional artwork… and people making gaudy, cluttered web sites… are generally not the same people.

Boom. Solved. Aren't simple answers lovely?

A “puzzle” or "paradox" appears only when one adopts the silly delusion that a shared affiliation with a political entity (“country”) among multiple individuals should mystically create a shared sense of (among other things) aesthetics. But that delusion simply doesn’t mesh with reality. 

Here's the truth in a nutshell: When reality conflicts with your preconceptions (like "aesthetics is a property of countries, not people!"), that doesn't mean you've found a "paradox". It means your preconceptions were wrong. That's all.

Yet as the linked page demonstrates, there's no doubt that the converse – "OMG everything's a paradox, at least if there's the name of a foreign nation attached to it!" – is so damned beloved out there. Why? That's the "paradox" paradox that always puzzles me.

When you see the words "technology" and "Japan" appear together in the media, it's usually in the context of "Wow, Japan is a high-tech wonderland so many years ahead of us!"

Those of us living in Japan see a much more varied and complex picture. Thus, it was nice to come across the BBC's Revealing Japan's low-tech belly, a look at the computer-clumsy, Internet-inexperienced potion of the country that will never use the living room VCR as a clock (because it's been blinking "12:00" for the past nine years). Read more

You know what's so annoying – very mildly annoying, yes, but persistently so – about "cultural contrast" discussions? It's really not so much the more elaborate made-up claims backed by laughably imaginary evidence (the "special relationship with robots" is a good example). Rather, it's the non-stop rain of little claims, the ones that paint everything in site as a "difference" or a "unique twist" – but then just leave those assertions hanging, without any attempt at support.

Below is a fine example: a piece on the impressive uptake of mini-blogging service Twitter in Japan from the Mainichi Daily in June. (I've been told that it first ran in the Japanese version of the paper, though I haven't been able to locate a Japanese original). It was picked up by news services everywhere; here's the full article, which you may have already seen: Read more

Hey, how'd I let this one go untouched for so long? Of all the misconceptions about the Japanese language, "three writing systems" has got to be the most widespread, even among people who really should know better. Lately the meme has been working overtime on this Slashdot thread – which is so all-round packed with misconceptions about Japanese that my head gets all asplodey just trying to keep track.

I'll stick to addressing just one mistake here. The question to be answered is: How many writing systems does Japanese use?

And the answer is: ONE. 

Yes, whatever you may have heard, Japanese does not use "three writing systems". It uses precisely one. No more, no fewer.

"Huh? There are three: Kanji, then hiragana, then katakana.. That's three writing syst..."

No. ONE. Read more

The goofiness of culturology doesn't always stop at fuzzy fantasies about cherry blossom appreciation and negative-space discernment and robot chumminess. Sometimes it gets down and physical, as seen in mightily suspicious claims of magical ethnic hearing powers and super-long Japanese intestines.

But wait – hold those bowels! Maybe there is something special going on in Japanese guts! Or so says a researcher in France, who claims to have found evidence of enhanced nori-digesting ability inside those insides. Uh-oh! I've long joked that I'd have a heart attack if any of the common and loopy "uniquely Japanese" claims ever turned out to be true; is this my end in sight?

Well, not quite, but there still seems to be something interesting going on. As reported in perfectly respectable journals including Nature, Mirjam Czjzek, a chemist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, found bacteria in the gut of some Japanese that excrete enzymes able to efficiently break down the nori seaweed found in sushi and other dishes. Why would bacteria that live in human intestines have this ability? The researchers suggest that it may have come from marine bacteria that make seaweed part of their normal diet, which were ingested by nori-eating people, and then genetically transferred their enzyme-producing ability to the normal intestinal bacteria they met. (Bacteria can do crazy things like that.) 

See the link for more details; it's rather interesting. You'll probably see summaries in many other news outlets too. But science news like this doesn't always get reported and re-reported accurately, so take care to note what the researchers aren't claiming. There's no claim of special enzyme production or anything else different in the Japanese gut itself. There's special nothing in the Japanese human DNA itself that's being passed down. It's the bacteria found in the gut, at least in some individuals, that have the unusual genes and the unexpected ability. The basic idea – that eating a given food may introduce you to bacteria that are good at digesting that food – isn't itself the least surprising. The newsworthy part is the possibility that the ingested nori-eating bacteria may have transferred their ability to other gut-dwelling bacteria, and (the big picture item) that similar transfers involving other foods may have shaped all humans' internal flora immensely over our history. 

There are a lot of questions still hanging. Many people have pointed out that the study's sample size of subjects was very small, and thus the results are quite tentative, especially on whether non-Japanese who eat sushi might have the bacteria. Also, I'm left scratching my head over how things work at the individual level; after reading several articles on the findings, I don't yet see whether there's a claim that the transfer of genes from marine bacteria to gut bacteria happens anew within each individual who eats plenty of nori, or whether such modified intestinal bacteria are passed from person to person. (If the latter: How?)

But in any case, it all points to an actual Japanese difference. Of sorts. Not in "the Japanese" themselves, but rather in the hitchhiker bacteria they carry. Or some of them carry. And it's all quite tentative and need of further study. Still, what with all the completely unsupported "uniquely Japanese" nonsense out there, this may be at least something!

Back in 2005, Japan Times science writer Rowan Hooper noted US-based medical studies which, although inconclusive, suggested that aging-related conditions could be ameliorated through transcendental meditation (TM) techniques such as mindfulness and progressive muscle relaxation. Hooper went on to suggest that Japanese lifespans may be long due to similar effects brought about by two factors: Buddhism and "shikata ga nai mentality".

If you have any contact with "Japanology" musings, you've no doubt heard of shikata ga nai, or its other common form shou ga nai, as yet another entry on a loooong list of "uniquely Japanese" concepts. The phrase, as normally used, is a simple expression of resignation, of giving in or going along when things are beyond one's control – as in, "Oh well, what are you gonna do." Read more

Those who insist that food in Japan is all about dainty, lightweight portions must not know the Mega Mac, a four-patty Big Mac introduced by McDonald's to Japan as a short-lived gimmick, then given a permanent home in the menu when hungry gourmets demanded more. Well, Burger King Japan has outdone the Mega Mac: for a few days, it's offering a seven-patty Whopper.  Read more

A single word for "death from overwork" – imagine that! You've probably seen the astonishment over that fact in contexts like this WIRED article: "And in a nation that actually has a word for 'death from overwork,'...", the gist of which is that the existence of a single word for the concept reveals its unusual severity or significance in Japan. 

In fact, there is a single word for "death from overwork" in Japanese: karoushi (過労死); there's no argument about that (well, except maybe from those claiming that Japanese has no words). The word exists.

What I'm debunking here is the overworked meme that the phenomenon's single-word status has any significance whatsoever. It doesn't. Read more

Ah, April in the Northern Hemisphere! If you're in a location with sakura cherry trees – whether Washington D.C., Seattle, Seoul, or any number of locales – you're in for a treat as entire trees erupt in fluffy pink blossoms.

In Japan, the blooming of the cherry blossoms is eagerly awaited every year. It's a time for relaxation and fun: walking under pink canopies along the river, taking photos in the park, and – best of all – enjoying all-day (or all-night!) hanami picnics under the blossoms with friends, food, and drink.

Unless you're Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, that is, in which case sakura season adds an extra activity to your calendar: a spring-fresh burst of the racist blathering for which you're infamous. Read more

One of the most beloved Japanology memes overseas involves the word kaizen (or Kaizen to some). Here's the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary:

kaizen |ˈkaɪzən|
noun: a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc.

That sometimes gets further embellished by eager writers who extend kaizen to carry continuous improvement out of the business realm, and "throughout all aspects of life", per one definition I've seen. Whatever the specifics, what you'll find in common across all definitions is that kaizen is a Japanese word for "a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement".

Unfortunately, that's wrong. Read more