BIG AS THE SKY

As a lover of good information and manifest intelligence I abhor Japanese television, which perhaps like most television around the world is a chronically retarded mind polluter and serial mass murderer of time. In Japan (and perhaps everywhere), its deep lack of creativity and of what the ancients knew as "inspiration" is the sad reflection of a yawning lack of intelligent demand amid the vast boredom of civilized life.

As a tool, television offers great potential, viz. the internet, and info dissemination. Sadly, however, 99% of it here (and perhaps everywhere) is not watchable by anyone in quest of intelligence. To watch something worthwhile I generally just turn it off altogether. And the other media aren't any better.

The cover of a recent issue of Time magazine was "Japan's Blues." The feature story dealt with Japan as though it were alone on a bleak other planet somewhere, and as though all Japan and the Japanese have done that was worth doing is now at an end, and there is nothing ahead for them. All written by someone from a neoculture with a history of barely 200 years, regarding a culture of millennia.

I would say right off that Japan as a culture is much more in touch with spirit and place, and knows far more about time, deep time, than anyone in America, let alone some New York journalist who's been posted here pro tem on his way to somewhere else. Of course there are unhappy teenagers here. There have always been unhappy teenagers everywhere, though the condition was worsened immeasurably by mandatory educational confinement.

Back in the fifties, when I was an unhappy American teenager, I had no future to speak of. One makes one's own future, as those who are actually alive have always done regardless of their situation, choosing from among the paths that have always been. The fast lane has always taken a toll on perception, and the price will have to be paid. By EVERYONE IN THE WORLD. Simple as that. But Japan even at its lowest ebb will never be as gratuitously violent as everyday America.

The Time article shows an image of some Japanese people presumably on a train platform (one older woman in a kimono!) above a caption including the words "the grim commute to work is getting lonelier"; none of this is new or different, except that older women in kimono do not commute. Commuting, I should add, being the completely unnatural daily severance from home and family to non-home and non-family, has always been grim and lonely in whatever country in which the barbaric ritual is practiced, as in the march of Eliot's hollow men. This is not unique to Japan.

Japan thus apparently remains inscrutable to the western journalist, who lives in a hotel in Roppongi for a few months after maybe a year in the Middle East, and comments in English or French or whatever on the strange local customs here, eats at the press club, hangs out at embassy events and talks to the people he's assigned to, then writes an in-depth novel about the "real" Japan before being posted to Petrovsk.

That's typical of the news we get from the media: a third-hand subjective slant on an interpretation of a glimpse of a surface flash as seen by a career persona. But journalists have to say something, or they're out of a job, just as in Thoreau's day. Still, what Time says is happening is not at all what's happening; what's happening in Japan in one second would fill all the magazines that could ever be written, with infinity left over. News is nowhere near the truth. The grim and filthy morphine shooting galleries in New York City of a century ago, though very true, were never much in the news. One of the big drawbacks of "the news" as she is writ is that people think that's what's happening, when it's only one pixel out of a picture big as the sky.