Origins Of My Otaku: A Search For Culture- Part 2

Over the last 10 years or so I have been forming a growing distaste for African American [AA] culture; that’s as bluntly as I can put it. When I say African American culture, I’m not talking about hip hop or the history of the AA. I’m talking about the accepted means of social communication, interaction, expression, attitudes, and beliefs widely had by African Americans; though this does include hip hop as well.

What’s my problem? Well I assure you, it has nothing to do with being black. That’s something to be proud of. There is a great legacy that was built by the generations of blacks that came before us. America owes a great deal of its own mainstream culture and history to African Americans. This fact can hardly be debated by anyone.

My problem is with the current state of African American culture which is embracing baseness and calling it blackness; the culture shouting foul at the “white man” and leaning on “Jesus” to save them; the emotionally insecure and intellectually scarce society riddled with an amazing inferiority complex. But these issues are not ours alone, they just happen to affect a disproportionate amount of our populace.

However, consider the more expressive cultural examples in the areas of language, arts, music, dance, and so on. Outside of language, African Americans thrive in these arenas. Unfortunately, at the moment, the lights of music, dance, and media arts are shone primarily on “commercialized” hip-hop, which has in turn, transformed the perception of African American youth and culture (as well as many other cultures world-wide) and has gotten them to value material wealth and guns, fast woman, and easy money, thereby cannibalizing any merit that might exist in the sea of glamour and ignorance.

This will always be the case with media though; it’s not an excuse. Every culture has entertainment of this type in some form. The difference is, American youth, being the liberal bunch that we are, actually act it out. Another issue is that American youth, especially AA youth, don’t receive a balanced ‘diet’ of media. Their senses are put under siege by ad after ad encouraging the decrepit lifestyle of a thug, gangster, or hoe.

Thirty Year Old Thugs

I remember being surprised when I discovered nudity, sexual content, and graphic violence were all acceptable to show on public TV in Japan. My first though was, “What about the kids? Won’t that mess them up?” After becoming more familiar with their culture and their media however, I discovered that because the Japanese have such a large range of genres and media outlets, Japanese youth are not likely to be brainwashed in the same way that American youth are. Instead there is a strong educational and business slant that is promoted in the Japanese culture.

Because of this focus on their scholastic/professional life, there is really no time for Japanese Youth to be overly influenced by media on TV. Instead, their parents and their communities demand that they to do their best in these areas. (This does lead to other problems in their society however, such as a significant amount of stress, health disparities, and death from overwork; they actually have a common word used for someone who works themselves to death- karoshi).

Contrast this with the typical American youth who spends the majority of their days plopped on the couch in front of the tube, listening to music, or playing games (computers and the internet now allow them to do all three at once). It’s the idle hands theory and corporate marketing campaigns depend on it.

This blitz strategy works exceptionally well if the target audience has insecurities about themselves (such as their race), is predominantly ignorant (as in illiterate and looking for an excuse to cover up such a weakness), and is poor (feeling as if they have less than others and need to act out to cover these insecurities or embrace them, in the “I don’t give a F&@K!” sense).

But so what, it’s a teen thing right? I mean, we all go through those times at some point in life, right? Sure. It’s just that African American youth tend not to grow out of it; hence the thirty year old thug phenomenon. The image and culture of the AA is further degraded by the fact that AA teens are having children, most of who end up fatherless and get sucked into the same mayhem at an even younger age. The cycle just continues.

I Had A Dream: Black Power In The 20^th Century

Imagine being driven into a wall at full force by a fire hose blasting you at 200 psi, disintegrating your clothes and gradually eroding your body to lifelessness. Now imagine if that was your grandmother being subjected to that same crowd control for simply standing on a sidewalk demanding the basic human rights that you enjoy now; you know, simple things like not being forced to work without pay, or the right to prosecute the persons who hung your pregnant wife from a tree, you know, simple things.

If you can imagine that, then it wouldn’t be far fetched to imagine that the child of your grandmother might hold certain reservations about the group of people who did that to her. Furthermore, it’s not too far out there to think that you and your children and you’re children’s children will hold these same views in the back of your minds for as long as there is a remembrance of it.

If you dramatize my little example and multiply it by a factor of 100,000, this should give you a clear indication of where the root of the animosity between the black and white races in America originates. Slavery; oppression; genocide… These things sound harsh and they were in fact harsher than we can imagine. We’re spoiled today by comparison.

Due to the long history of slavery and inequality, the AA community began in a wounded and inferior state and has since then been lagging behind the rest of America, trying to catch up. It should be no surprise then that the voices for issues concerning the AA advancement in society are being drowned out in a system originally designed on top of their backbreaking labor. It will take much more time and energy to change that fact.

In that process for change though, there exists another segment of the AA population, one that originated from the era following the love and peace, Vietnam, Nixon-Kissinger days— the Pro-Black.

Feeling the need to reshape the image of Black America, the many pro black groups, including but not limited to: The Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, began an underground movement in AA communities to educate and lead their members towards the betterment of their people. There are many instances where this has been the case. African American communities found in cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and so on, are much more developed and you are sure to find the pro-black groups established and thriving in those productive areas.

I’m all for these positive aspects. There is nothing wrong with helping those who need to be helped, especially in your own communities. However, even in these productive movements towards change, the animosity against the “white race” remains a central point of reference used to bind the parties together; the rancorous and bitter feelings that the children of each race inherit from their ancestors endlessly propels the conflict.

The empowerment of people is my goal as well and I can respect anyone for working towards that. However, I think the focus on who is at fault is one that needs to be pushed aside. It really doesn’t matter who is at fault at this point. It’s much more about what needs to be done in order to fix the problem. Finger pointing is something that the weak and insecure rely on; acceptance is a virtue.

Just as corporations externalize their problems, AAs view their current state in the light of the offenses that took place in the past, hoping the government, God, or “somebody else” will take care of it all for them. They are not looking inside for strength, as their ancestors once did to take a stand; they are looking to place blame and reap the rewards without doing the work. And doing the work requires focusing on the issues at hand, not the issue from another era; though those issues should never be forgotten and always taken into consideration so that we don’t make the same mistakes.

It should also be noted, that if you are not part of this blame game, there is obviously something wrong with you, at least that’s what I am told…

With this segment making up the other predominant AA culture, there is little room left for the peace loving, intellectual, race-fraternizing, non-Christian, honestly expressive Blacks like me; we don’t act “black” enough.

This brings me to my main point. If African American culture is currently one predominantly based around this idolized “nigga” (their word, not mine), the thug savage, or the angry, political subversive seeking to reprove white society for slavery, what happens to the other members of this pseudo-culture who fall outside of these overwhelming segments? We get swept away by other cultures, of course.

FUUUUSION!!

The easiest culture for AA’s to get abducted by is Anglo-Saxon culture. For the most part, African American culture, in any form, is still largely based on Anglo-Saxon tradition. This might have been a strange and surreal contrast at one point in time, but as we have all seen, westernization is real and many-a-countries have conformed. Yet, countries like China and Japan still haven’t lost their sense of culture; where as when African Americans assimilate they become completely detached from their origins all together.

Division, assimilation, reformation, or integration. With globalization on the up and up, I think the AA culture will head into one of these four directions, if not a few.

Division- A large enough segment of the AA community will develop a coherent and self-reinforced culture allowing it to stand on its own outside current American standards or traditions. It would be interesting if it included the development of culture specific language. The Tibetans come to mind.

Note that this is already the case to some extent. The only thing is, most of the AA communities are spread out and confided to relatively small communities or ghettos. They tend to be more bound by the media of AAs (including newspapers, magazines, TV, music etc.) than by any sincerely developed cultural traditions.

Assimilation- American culture conforms to current AA culture standards or vice-versa. It’s unlikely this will ever happen, but it’s interesting to note that assimilation is active amongst all cultures during this era of globalization. Hip hop has also been a large part of that assimilating force. The basic idea behind assimilation is standardization, which can be scary or harmonious depending on how you look at it.

Reformation- Similar to the concept in division, except a new culture is not developed; the culture itself is reformed from the inside out. I think there is a higher possibility of this happening, given the proper economic and social conditions; when the majority of AA’s are at least shoulder above the poverty line and they get off the race train to focus on the real issues.

Integration- The most likely scenario. As globalization occurs, nothing of particular cultural significance will develop within the AA community. They will just become another market on the ven diagram to have the trends they set fed back to them or hi-jacked by other cultures completely.

This is the current state of things and the reasons for it are many and varied. That’s another rant for a future post though. My main point is to highlight the state of AA culture and to pinpoint my distastes with it in contrast to the abundance of culture I find in the Japanese society. This helps me understand why I may be so attracted to Japanese culture.

That being said, there are things in current AA culture I do enjoy including the idea of “soul” or rhythm; to be smooth and confident in body and form. That’s a valid cultural development I think (and one that the Japanese definitely seem to lack overall). There are many more and when I can find them I hold them up as shining examples. Alas, they are too few and far between for me.

What Culture Does For Me

The interaction amongst and between groups of people is marked by elements of culture. The Japanese bow, the French kiss, and African Americans slap hands and bump shoulders. The roots of such established cultural trends run deep through the community and give them an accepted social interface to deal with everyday human activities.

Initially I was one with the AA community for lack of exposure to anything else. Although I am proud to be what I am, my nature is a curious one and I am attracted to the strange, exotic, and different; not for lack of love for self, but for a deeper love of life and all it has to offer. When I crossed cultural boundaries though, I began to compare and contrast and discover different things in each culture that I have a personal preference for. Thus I began to assimilate the cultural features of the Japanese that interested me and replace the AA cultural features that I did not value.

This is where I started to see the disproportionate shift of AA cultural traditions to Japanese ones and thus why I have performed this examination. After going through these cultural elements, I found that the AA versions of them were either underdeveloped, contrived, or un-meaningful (i.e. sagging pants, use of self-derogatory terms, disrespect for women, compulsive need to stand out or otherwise be “hard” etc. etc.).

Because I am consciously aware of this issue, it makes it hard to interact with the AA culture in the way they currently want to interact with me and I become an “other”. So my question from there was should I put in the work to try and change the culture or simply keep developing my “own” culture based on the principles of the many cultures that exist. As usual, I decided to stride the middle line and do both.

It All Comes Back To Me

I have ideas about how I can help effect a change in the AA community as well as the global community through education (which is one of the major sources of the problem in AA society). Education will help develop the AA culture and perhaps can bring a significant value to it, which I have yet to see. But the work that will hold those answers and methods will be all inclusive (Seda) and for the time being I must continue to expand my own horizons and perspectives to establish the principles I want to teach. So I’m off to take the next step. Kanarazu! [Without Fail!]

-~-

Origins Of My Otaku: A Search For Culture- Part 1

Recently I’ve been going through another one of my self-explorations, trying to understand more and more about myself by asking questions about why I do or enjoy certain things. After watching Densha Otoko (a fun and original Japanese drama series), I started to wonder… Why exactly DO I like Japanese culture so much?

Throughout my life, I had given myself lots of reasons to appreciate Japanese culture and they all had to do with my living in Japan at an age where I was too young to remember what it was really like. For instance, my childhood was filled with the re-telling of stories from my mother about how the Japanese “saved my life”.

As the story goes, when I was younger, I came down with Meningitis and I needed surgery in order to be saved. However, the American military base in Okinawa where my parents lived did not have the resources to perform the surgery, so I was taken to a Japanese hospital that did. In addition to needing surgery, being that I was less than a year old, I also needed a blood donor. Unfortunately my parents had recently come down with the flu and decided it was best not to give me blood in their condition, so the Japanese had to find a semi-rare AB+ blood donor from the population, and fast!

In the end, the operation was a success (obviously) and at my most vulnerable and impressionable moments of life, I had been rescued by and blood sealed with the Japanese people.

For most, this might be reason enough to appreciate them. I admit it is one of the factors, but it is not the major one.

As I grew up and continued to hear more about my seminal life in Japan, I became more interested in the idea of growing up in a far away place. Our house was garnished with relics and portraits, dragons and kanji, statues, katanas, and straw furniture. Its influence was everywhere around me and if these objects had an origin in Japan, then that origin must be like my second home.

The Allure of Anime

During my early school years, I didn’t think much about it. I was too young to understand culture and to compare my own with that of anyone else, so people in general just kind of blurred together; as kids we would be more biased against outstanding oddities, such as overweight classmates, cooties, and the sort of playground drama that forever scars fragile minds. It wasn’t until late middle school/early high school that I would come face-to-face with Japanese culture again, in the form of anime.

I remember the day exactly. My friend Kevon and I were board and wanted to rent something from the Video World down the street. At the shop, we tried to sneak over to the X-rated section as we had always done, just to sneak-a-peek. However, on our back route there, we came across an isle we had never seen before. Stopping to take a glance, I picked up a box with a blue-green, power-ranger-monster looking character on the front. The title was “Genocyber”.

My friends and I had just come out of that power ranger, Fox TV phase, but the art on the box looked so cool we just had to check it out.

After taking it home and watching it, our jaws were officially one with the floor. What, what, what? There’s cursing, and blood, and sex, and violence! OMG! This is AWESOME!!! Our hormone heavy, teenage minds were engaged to anime from that moment onwards. (I should note that this anime was unmarked when we rented it in the store, but later, I found that it was suppose to be in a section for NC-17, oh well ^^”).

As with most habits developed at a teen age, our indulgence of anime became second nature (obsessive compulsion if you will); we rented anime almost daily. After a year or two, all my friends and I had seen just about every anime of every type that was out in the U.S. at the time. We couldn’t get enough.

It would be less than a year before anime would start making waves in America, mainly with the introduction of Dragon Ball Z. It was now an integral part of our little culture and even Wu-Tang and other rap groups were making references to anime like Ninja Scrolls and the well known western releases. It was hard not to find someone from our local community who wasn’t interested or didn’t know about anime (and games).

Formalizing the Fad

In high school, anime and games became my pastime and the past time of the people around me. It wasn’t something we even thought about and it didn’t interfere with other perceived “social necessities” of the time, such as sex, parties, and drag racing. Just as one would wake up, eat, and carry on with daily activities, it was just as natural to come home, flip the switch on the Playstation or pop in a new anime to relax.

For most people, the buck stops there. They either go off to college/get married /get a job and don’t have time for as many leisurely activities or they remain in the same mediocre cycle carried over from their high school days. I, on the other hand, was about to experience a renaissance in my consumption and appreciation of media that would revolutionize my perspective of it.

Being who I am, I decided to pursue game design as secondary education. I have heard many horror stories about people who made the same choice and winded up getting shafted by sorry school curriculums just looking to make money off of a new fad. Fortunately, that was not my experience at all. I had amazing teachers, friends, and an exceptionally dream like adventure while I was in college (the details of which you can find here).

One of the major changes that took place for me however, was the cross over from Occidental culture to Oriental culture. By the time I returned from Canada I was an Otaku in the sing-along, pose and dance, Japanese-everything kind of way; not just of anime, but of everything; lifestyle; mannerisms; and all the features of the society and what it was projecting.

The ‘Hyper’ Thesis

What happened? Well, too much to tell, but in short, I had been exposed to a large amount of Asian culture and media while in college, to such a great degree that I began to predominantly empathize with that culture. This makes sense; the more you expose yourself to something, the more it influences you and becomes a part of you. It’s subconscious really.

This is all well and good. However, what I truly didn’t understand was why it added to my happiness and sense of peace. Why did sushi make me feel all warm and cozy inside? A year or so earlier and I would have barked at the idea of eating raw fish. I hated learning Spanish and found foreign languages all together cumbersome and alien. Why then was I plowing on the Pimsleur and performing karaoke in a language so marked with innuendo and allusion? Why!? Why!? Why!?

The answer is not simple and there are many factors that influenced me, but there is one major factor that recently came to mind. It is one that I haven’t fully touched upon yet and might explain why I have grasped Asian culture the way I have.

I think I have an exceptionally strong interest in Japanese culture due to the lack of any perceived, equivalent value in my own culture— the “African American Culture”.

Purpose of Seda

Seda is my means of expression. It is my tempered creative, cognitive, and philosophical “Essentia” [essence]; a work uncensored and bold, in the sense that it is honest and un-commercialized, a rare virtue in today’s consumer oriented culture. I have many things to accomplish with Seda, but one of particular importance is to use it to effect a change in the world.

If I am to live and die without influence, that is fine with me. However, while I am here, I find it more productive to live for something. I want to live to empower people through my talents and skills. So my initial question was, how can I empower people and why do I feel they need to be empowered.

In short, I feel educating people can empower them; with information and perspective, they are better able to cope with the various aspects of their life, including topics of deep personal importance such as spirituality, health, etc. With a true education, they can become students of their own lives and find the means to develop their own talents and skills to reach maximum (honest) expression.

If I had to name the root cause of human suffering, it would be ignorance; ignorance of themselves and of their lives.

Most people do not understand their own motivations and have no sense of purpose; they are just going through the motions without really thinking about it. They use general terms like “spirituality”, “god”, and so on to cover up their ignorance and re-enforce their illusionary life based on sensory experiences. However, when a person obtains a greater understanding of him or her self, they also gain a greater understanding of life. This change or evolution in perspective fills them with energy and motivates them to “do” and to “live”, thus they are empowered.

Ignorance exists in its strongest form as “fear”. The fear of doing, of living, and of becoming is a barrier to entry and inhibits their personal empowerment. However with a greater and greater understanding of oneself (strengths, weaknesses, origins, and reasoning behind one’s perspectives), fears and insecurities, worries, and problems all begin to fade.

So by eliminating fear and educating people I feel I can empower them and thereby effect change in the world at large, which I believe coalesces with “some greater cosmic force” for “some purpose”. The force and the purpose will remain outside of my scope for now.

I would like to expand on a few points with clear and concise definitions.

Education. By educating someone I mean finding out what they know, what they don’t know, how much they know about what they know, and filling the gaps in between. By feeling the gaps, I don’t mean inserting information or perspective, rather I am talking about stimulating those areas of uncertainty and unknowns so that they can consider and fill them in for themselves. Furthermore, teaching them how to learn from life using the “science of teaching” will allow them to understand and explore their personal issues and challenges on their own to further their development. These are principle based and can apply to all sorts of people across the board.

The Science of Teaching. I define the science of teaching as the effective means of transferring information between one who knows (who has a practical, applicable understanding or awareness of a given subject) and one who doesn’t know.

It is currently understood that different people learn differently. To teach two different people in the same way would be a waste. Due to these multiple intelligences that exist, research and development of teaching methods that actually work is of critical importance to my goal. Interestingly, interactive video games/the computer could be the tool used to address the visual, audio, tactile, and special learners all at once; a powerful medium indeed. My research into the cognitive sciences and multiple intelligences has already begun for this step.