Customer Reviews

Wrong About Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son

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I should say first that I'm not what you'd call a devotee of Carey's work. But the man has scored two Booker Prizes for himself, and he's writing on a subject that I am deeply fascinated by. So I thought I'd give him another chance.

Pulling it off the shelf at my local bookstore, I was surprised by the physical lack of substance. At 120 easily-digestible pages, I had it read in less than two hours. Granted, 120 pages doesn't give you much room to manoeuvre. I would have liked to have seen what Carey could've done with this book had there been an extra hundred, or even fifty pages.

But as it stands, 'Wrong About Japan' is a surface account of anime and manga culture in Japan, that goes into no specific detail, except in giving synopses of the opening scene of 'Blood: The Last Vampire' and the first half hour of 'My Neighbour Totoro'. It does contain the occasional laugh and genuinely funny culture shock. but for the most part I felt as if Carey was just giving me excuse after excuse as to why he's not delving past the surface of this world that is always talked up as being so different to the West.

As the book progressed, and as Carey's own 'misreadings' of anime and manga are turned aside by a series of Japanese industry folk (who might as well have all been played by one actor in different costumes, for all the individuality the narrative accords them), I was left with the slightly sour impression that Carey himself, whilst faithfully recording these put downs, wasn't all that open to considering them.

I felt his growing frustration with being told no, his analysis was not correct (and why on earth he never asks 'why not?' is beyond me; as far as i'm aware, Barthes' declaration that the author is dead still holds some weight). I can sympathise with that, as can anyone who has been to another country and felt the culture shock. But I could not warm to Carey as either narrator or author - my problem with his work, and this book proved no different, is his sheer arrogance. Nowhere did Carey show us as readers that he was seriously attempting to engage with Japanese culture - the sense I got was that he just wanted his questions answered so he could get the hell out of there, back to New York and his ivory tower, where everything's "normal".

Honestly, I'm not even sure why Carey decided to write this book. I never felt in the book that he was all that interested in anime and manga, either as legitimate branches of literature, or as anything other than strange novelties. My impression remains that Carey has taken a very high-brow attitude toward anime and manga - he's even quoting Tanizaki, the man who bemoaned all forms of modernisation in Japan as a death blow to traditional culture - and the novel suffers for it.

Several times, Carey speaks about finding the 'Real Japan', which he typically equates with swords and kabuki and communal bathing. I think he need only look to page 17, where his son's friend Takashi puts a more accurate spin on things:

"You saw pictures of temples? Yes, rocks, gravel, nice Japanese room, so simple. Houses with rough timber? Real Japanese people not like that."

It's odd indeed to read a non-fiction book (well, except that one essential character is actually a conflated invention of the author...a fact he neglects to share anywhere in the text) and find it unconvincing. But that is precisely the impression Carey's book gives.

I have lived and worked in Tokyo, where this specious memoir takes place, for two years now, and while I hardly fancy myself an expert on Japanese traditional or popular culture, I was noticing inaccuracies and flat-out mistakes from the first chapter on (if you can't even parse "gaijin" properly, I'm not likely to trust your insights elsewhere).

Peter Carey is excited about Japan. Great. Learning about Japanese pop culture is a way for him to connect to his son. Also great. He's read all the requisite authors (writers much better than he himself) -- Kennedy, Kerr, et alles. Still great.

Slapdash and shoddy research padded out with dull anecdotes to fill a scant 158 pages (and the volume is physically small, to boot!)? Not great at all.

Carey may be a fine novelist -- I take nothing away from his other books -- but this is hackwork. He puffs as though he's discovered a topic far more articulately and provocatively explored by literally dozens of other authors. And he lies, and flubs up, throughout. (Parenthetically, I hope he's a better dad than a journalist.)

Skip it. I got mine from the English-language section of my town's Japanese library, so it was a free if unfulfilling read. But I really wouldn't spend my money if I were you.

This book seemed interesting to me, since I recently went to Japan to indulge my taste for Japanese pop culture. Much like the author's son, I didn't have much interest in going to temples or musuems(unless it was the Bandai or Ghibli Musuem) when I could go see a Godzilla movie or lose myself for a day at Nakano Broadway.

The author mentions visitng the Ghibli Musuem, but fails describe this wonderful place it at all! When interviewing the creator of Gundam, he is so narrowly focused on finding assumed hidden Japaneseness, he blows what could have been an entertaining interview. He knows nothing of these subjects. It's unfortunate that since Mr. Carey is a respected author he can get interviews with top shelf talent and waste everyones' time who is involved, including the reader's.

You will not gain much insight into anime, manga, or Japan from this book. If you are interested in these subjects buy "Cruising the Anime City" by Patrick Macias and Tomohiro Machiyama. It's a wonderful book that does a wonderful job of explaining the pop culture aspects of Tokyo.

"Wrong about Japan" is an embarrassing book, and Peter Carey should be ashamed of himself. The basic premise is a father finds himself with an anime-obsessed son. Looking to bond a little, he suggests a trip to Japan for the two of them. Not wanting the foot the bill, and being a writer by trade, he cons his publisher into paying for the trip promising a book in return.

But Carey knows nothing of Japan, has no insight, discovers nothing. He seems well aware of this deficiency, padding out the book by quoting long passages from other, better books on Japan including Alex Kerr's "Lost Japan" and recapping, in detail, the first half hour of ""My Neighbor Totoro." He even invents a fictional character, Takashi, as a playmate for his son, but Carey's complete lack of knowledge into Japanese anime fans, or anything Japanese for that matter, renders him lifeless and untrue.

Worse still, in an attempt to justify the trip, Carey has whipped through a few books on Japanese culture and cobbled together a few pet theories that "explain it all." In an ultimate show of hubris, he refuses to relinquish these theories even when the actual people, such as master swordsmith Yoshindo Yoshihara or Gundam-creator Yoshiyuki Tomino, tell him how mistaken he is. He wants Gundam to be a metaphor for the atomic bomb. He wants swordsmithing to be a window into the military past. He wants everything to mean something, but refuses to listen to the actual explanations when offered him. (His interview with Yoshiyuki Tomino is especially painful. One imagines a Japanese scholar confronting the creator of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe," demanding that he admit how Skeletor reflects on past fears of the bubonic plague ravaging Europe...)

It is too bad, because Carey's reputation gives him access that a more-qualified writer could have really done something with. A rare interview with Miyazaki Hayao, crumpled into a few paragraphs, could have been so much more. The trip to otaku-paradise Akihabara discusses toilet seats. It is all just wasted.

If you are looking for a quick travelogue, humorist Dave Barry's "Dave Barry Does Japan" does a much better job of an uninformed tourist being overwhelmed by it all. If you want actual insight into Japanese pop-culture, anime, swordsmithing, or anything else Japanese, there are dozens of better titles out there. If you want to pay for Carey's trip with his son, and come away disgusted with your purchase, by all means buy "Wrong About Japan." Just remember, he isn't going to be so kind to you when you want to hop on a plane.

Many of the book's reviewers seem almost hyperbolically disappointed in what Carey accomplishes in "Wrong About Japan." They accuse him of superficiality in his approach to manga and anime. Pow! They accuse him of being unable to see past his own cultural assumptions. Bam! However, the book isn't primarily about any of that. It's about perception and mis-perception, about the divide between a father who loves books (and high culture) and a son who loves manga (and pop culture). It's about the mysteries of taste and how it's formed. It's about the difficulties almost everyone in the book, Japanese and non-Japanese, has in understanding what someone else is trying to express, whether the barrier is language or ideas or culture. In Carey's book, manga represents this distance between two people about what is worth knowing about and what is not. The subject could as easily be music or some other art where there's little communication between high and pop culture. By its conclusion, Carey understands his son's interests better (although he doesn't come to really share them) and his son reluctantly absorbs something of what his father is trying to tell him. This fragile little island of shared appreciation is what the book's all about.

"My first thought was, he lied in every word ... with malicious eye askance to watch the working of his lie on mine..." -- "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", Robert Browning.

I read in the press that Carey's teenage guide Takashi Ko, the Gundam impersonator who literally "shone" was a fabrication. And knowing this was a spoiler for the book. It made me sceptical of other people he vaguely describes like a Yakuza mobster, or the writer Mr. Yazaki. Yazaki, supposedly a schoolboy during the Allied invasion of Japan, seems by bad luck to have been at several major atrocities. He pointedly compares the 3,000 killed on September 11 at the World Trade Center to the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians gruesomely annihilated or strafed at point-blank range in Tokyo and other cities. Carey claims to not know this narrator's full name despite his being a contact of his literary agent in Japan.

When you read Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" you expect whoppers, tall tales, humorous embellishments and filler boilerplate. Especially when you realize he wrote the story as a "reporter" for American newspapers as a putdown of Europe to appeal to "Main Street" readers back home. But that's Mark Twain. You smile as he describes meetings and hilarious escapades which you know never happened.

Peter Carey, our reporter from "Oz" (born in Australia, but now resident in New York City) seems to hint that this is all a yarn in fun, a two week junket paid for by his publishers. Who for all their support didn't seem do much editing or fact-checking. "Wrong in Japan" has the feeling of tunnel-vision laptop editing. Twice in only a few pages he uses the expression "edge of death" to poetically describe traditional Japanese swords. Twice he refers to Japanese nerd otakus obsessing over pop star's bra size.

Maybe he's a diva like Mark Twain, who famously undid all his publisher's edits. Carey shouldn't have though. Or maybe he should have first published this very short book in the Atlantic Monthly. He might have had better editors then, and been less "Wrong About Japan."

Several things: I'm not familiar with Carey's other work, though I am familiar with his reputation. I'm not a big fan of anime, and beyond a favorite handful of token works, it's a great mystery to me. I am a great aficionado of other aspects of Japanese culture, though I haven't spent any time there. I don't have a teenaged son, or a novelist father. So I'm probably as objective as it will get when it comes to this slender misfire from Carey.

The book does have points of intrigue, which I wish Carey had the presence of mind to delve a bit deeper into - on pages 10 and 11, Carey recounts an earlier trip to Tokyo, travelling with a Western Buddhist poet, who was dejected that he couldn't see 'the real Japan' from the freeway - a coffeetable-book Japan formulated somewhere in the imagination of the poet. Carey's son rightly objects to any sort of search for this, insisting instead upon seeing Japan for whatever Japan might be now.

One would think Carey had learned his lesson in the earlier exchange, but apparently not, as he projects his own imaginings upon varied craftsmen, writers and animators, subjecting his son rather involuntarily to 4 hours of kabuki along the way. And time and time again, Carey is told by varied Japanese that he is wrong. And so the next day, he does it all again.

This could have been a great book had something else happened - had Carey recognized that his son's eyes were glazing over; that he'd hijacked a trip undertaken on behalf of his son, and that he would try to set things a bit more right. No such luck, though his son does get to meet an anime idol or two, so all is not lost.

The fictional sidekick was perhaps the cheapest trick here; he (along with the son) was about the only humanity to be found here. If I were Carey's son, I'd be a bit irritated - when I was an adolescent, my dad had a similar knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and trust me - people remember this kind of stuff, especially family members.

And - along with all of the other complaints, I'm envious of this wasted trip. I'd love to find someone to fly me to Japan for a week or two - I'd try my best to get something smarter than a string of 'no''s out of it. Oh well - some guys are just luckier than they'll ever know.

-David Alston

I found this book uninspiring and misrepresentative of Japan. The plot, such as it is, does not invite the reader to read on. The characters (real and fictional) are drawn superficially. The dialogue between Carey and his son is not realistic. The situations (such as finding themselves in the pleasure quarters) are contrived.

How did the author and his son communicate with the people they visited (e.g. the sword maker)? Apparently in English. Or was there a translator present? Why doesn't Carey tell us what really happened?

Worst, for this reader, is the characterization of the Japanese. The language of the Japanese hotel staff, for example, ("So sorry!") is stereotyped. The fictional Japanese boy is incomplete and unrealistic. His language in no way reflects Japanese speakers' use of English.

It is very hard to believe that this unskillful book was written by the winner of two Booker prizes. I don't recommend it.

I'd just returned from my third Japan vacation when I found Carey's little book, Wrong About Japan. As an avid fan of Japanese traditional and popular culture, I was interested to read about someone else's experiences. I plowed through the book in an afternoon, and came away melancholy and dissatisfied. Here was another Westerner who was just missing the point. It's silly to think a person can divine serious cultural or philosophical ideas about a 1000's of years old nation from its popular entertainment. Presenting those halfbaked notions to the show's creators is hubris, too. I felt sorry for all the people he interviewed, and I'm sure they all wished they were elsewhere. He comes off as the typical know-nothing Western tourist who thinks Japan and its culture can be boiled down to samurai, geisha, and ninja. I felt sorry for his long suffering son, who just wanted an otaku odyssey, not a ponderous "Learning Experience".

So, instead of wasting your precious time with this book, try Antonia Levi's book Samurai from Outer Space for cultural roots and references in anime and manga, and Macias & Machiyama's book Cruising the Anime City for insightful articles and useful shopping guides and tour maps of Tokyo.

This book is a travelogue of a father and son's visit to Japan. Their trip came about when the father starts taking an interest in the Japanese videos and manga that his son enjoys and decides to go directly to the source to learn more. He asks his son if he wants to go to Japan and his son doesn't respond enthusiastically at first because he isn't interested in visiting temples or museums or anything like that but when his father suggests they interview some anime directors and manga artists his son gets excited. The father notes that his son is shy and becomes more talkative when discussing his interest in manga and anime and the father even suggests that maybe his son can take part in the interviews and ask some questions too. The boy makes a list of people he'd like his father to interview and father and son go off to Japan where the father uses his connections in the book world to pull a few strings to meet various people, mostly anime directors and manga artists. At one point the author mentions he is a terrible reporter and I'd have to agree with him. His interviews are uninteresting and poorly planned. Large segments of the book aren't interviews but are about what the father and son are up to in between interviews such as their interaction with a Japanese boy that his son made contact with over the Internet. There's an embarrassing part where the author goes on and on about how his son didn't want to see Kabuki but he made him go and his son really hated it. I'm not clear about what sort of ideas the author had about Japan that he was wrong about but I didn't find his perception of things very interesting. If you look at the picture of the father and son on the back flap of the book the son looks like a kid with attitude who is bored and doesn't want his picture taken with his Dad. In conclusion, this book feels like the author's whim to do something pleasing for his son so that they can bond and he could get his son to talk to him more.