'many Japanese'

[drainer at mpinet.net]

Although my message is not relevant to your questions, I think that everyone 
on this list would do themselves a service by reading your last few 
sentences and checking those links...

I hope that the aforementioned essays do not belong to anyone here without 
consent, so I write this as a caveat;

These "academic paper" sites (not custom paper sites, but database sites as 
Roger linked, many which seem based in the UK) charge a hefty price for 
students or researchers for what they claim to be essays or research 
submitted by the original authors. I am not sure how their submission 
process works, or if it works at all, as I have found some of my early 
undergraduate work featured in these sites without my consent. Obviously my 
work had been posted online, thus exposing it to this hijacked submission: 
on one occasion it was merely on display, while on the other, it had been 
published electronically (for example, how some of you may write a piece for 
an online magazine such as Midnight Eye). Although my name was attributed to 
these pieces I find it a questionable practice, particularly because one of 
the essays, I later found out, was translated and used as reference in 
serious scholarship and printed material.

Essentially, be sure to google your names and your work, as just about 
everyone in this list is a much more prolific writer than I have ever been 
or will be. Especially if you make substantial wages from writing...or even 
if you publish a blog or informal online journal...


-daniel



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roger Macy" <macyroger at yahoo.co.uk>
To: "KineJapan" <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 5:34 AM
Subject: 'many Japanese'


Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu.

Last week, I went to the final screening at the NFT of the BFI's season: 
'Wild Japan: Sex in Japanese Cinema in the 60s and 70s', where they showed 
Imamura's "Erogotoshitachi" yori: Jinruigaku nyumon (The Pornographers).
I was irritated by this passage from the notes: "Incest and paedophilia 
would be almost universally accepted disturbing pornographic concepts, and 
yet Imamura turns both conventions on their head by making mother/son, 
father/daughter trysts at any age seem a normal, if unspoken, rite of 
passage for many Japanese."
The notes were all taken from one site, dvdverdict.com, and credited to Bill 
Gibron.
Clearly, Imamura does address incest in this film and is making a commentary 
on the society he sees, but to put into his mouth the observation that 
incest is a national activity is unjustified and, in my view, plain wrong. 
What is it about much popular writing on Japanese that allows 
non-specialists to write generalisations about 'The Japanese' that they 
wouldn't dream of writing about fiction from closer to hand?  (And I think 
that putting the racial categorisation into the mouth of Imamura makes it 
worse, not better.)  Was Euripides, and his many followers, in Medea, 
writing that child murder was normal for many Georgians? etc. etc.  It 
recalls, to my mind, some of the war-time propaganda for which some of the 
writers at least, made amends afterwards.

I should add that most of the season's notes have been very good, as the 
notes' editors have relied on Jasper Sharp's new book.  In its many tens of 
thousands of words, although there is the material for several debates, I 
don't think you'll find a remark like that.   But The Pornographers is not 
directly reviewed there, so the editors had to cast elsewhere.  Far better 
sources would have been David Desser's Eros plus Massacre, where 
Pornographers and incest is dealt with very carefully, or in Audie Bock.

I can see that the list has looked at western takes on the Japanese before, 
but I hope you will indulge my getting this off my chest?

Incidentally, whilst casting around the internet for reviews, I noticed I 
could buy a term paper on The Pornographers for $55, so I'm guessing that at 
least one list-member has set such paper?
http://www.academon.com/lib/paper/103002.html
or, if 'you want your essay to have an added edge', it's still ?30,
http://cssa-shef.org.uk/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=82139&extra=page%3D2
so you might as well have the reading done as well ...

Roger