Conversations with The Translator: Japanese News and Conspiracy Theories

Kate: Several manga that I read have characters who work for gossip rags. There's no stigma attached to this career beyond the problematic lifestyle of having to stalk people and compete for the best pics. (In American entertainment, paparazzi are always sleazebags; of course, Hollywood has its reasons for being anti-paparazzi.)

So does Japan have more gossip magazines than us free-wheeling Americans? Are their gossip magazines more like European/British paparazzi-fed productions? Or are they more like People?

Eugene: The tabloid newspaper culture is alive and well in metropolitan Japan. The population size and density of greater Tokyo, together with mass transportation, makes the newsstand economy very viable. The comparison to the British press is spot on. Maybe there's an inverse relationship between how reserved a population is on an individual basis and how much sensationalism it tolerates in the press.

However, the Japanese press does catch (deserved) criticism for moderating its fire when it comes to powerful and popular political figures and institutions on their side of the ideological aisle. In this respect, they're more like the FDR-through-JFK era press. As the Christian Science Monitor states:

The most secretive agency in Japan is not its intelligence organization. It is the Imperial Household Agency . . . . The agency tightly controls the flow of information about Japan's monarchy, not only to the public but to the rest of the government.

At the same time, the press doesn't pretend it's standing on some high ground of impartiality. As you've noticed, there's not the same stigma attached to such professions. The same goes for "gravure idols," who rarely have difficulty transitioning into more "respectable" occupations. The past president of the Democratic Party of Japan is a former model. (Just don't get caught in the company of yakuza, doing illegal drugs, cheating on your taxes, or taking illegal campaign contributions.)

Kate: I admit to being thrown when I found out the leader of World Order also went into politics! Americans are incredibly snide about Reagan and Sonny Bono's pasts as entertainers, but in Japan, moving between entertainment and civic duty almost seems to be expected!

The respect-for-institutions element might explain something I've noticed with the manga news reporting scenarios. It is not unusual for an article/set of pictures to not get published because it would offend somebody "higher up." The reporters and photographers complain, but they rarely (as in never) say stuff like, "Man, freedom of speech is under attack!" or "The editor is so corrupt; he lets anyone pay him off!" Sometimes they ask each other, "Hey, why did that particular set of pictures not run? Who's behind it?" And the hero may suffer personal, individual ethical qualms, especially if he knows who squelched the pictures.

But the event almost never turns into a theme about the culture at large. It's just this thing that happens in that industry. Oh, well.

Which made me wonder—how do the Japanese treat conspiracy theories? It seems to me that conspiracy theories rather depend on people getting riled up as a group when it comes to a particular unethical action, no matter how innocuous or unrelated to anything else. If the entire population has decided that an unethical action isn't really all that important CAN a conspiracy theory even get off the ground!?

Or maybe the whole population IS the conspiracy!

Eugene: That's a good way of putting it: being Japanese is the conspiracy. A whole philosophy evolved to rationalize it called Nihonjinron. Or as Leslie Pincus puts it, "One might say that Japanese travelers reappropriated Japan from Europe as an exoticized object." In other words, the biggest Orientalists are Orientals, just as the biggest Occidentalists are Occidentals.

Unless and until a fringe element goes nuts (and when a fringe element goes nuts, it really goes off-the-wall serial killer nuts), most Japanese treat the whole thing with a shrug and get on with their lives. Repeat after me: Shikata ga nai.

This attitude is not without historical validity. The Edo period could be described as a web of interlocking conspiracies by the powers that be. The Meiji Restoration was merely the new conspirators fighting against the old bunch. It wasn't a populist revolt. WWII is commonly cast in those terms too.

One creative reaction of the urban masses during the mid-19th century was to throw up their hands and go full hippie.

Even today, the concentration of power and money in Tokyo means that national politics is treated as a stage play performed for the news. It does make good material for fiction.

If The X-Files collided with Star Wars (while confining the setting to this solar system), and then giant robots showed up in battles spawned by insanely intricate political conflicts, you'd get Mobile Suit Gundam. Like Star Wars, Gundam has a supernatural element in the "Newtypes," genetically advanced humans with psychic abilities who are or aren't part of the conspiracy depending on what side you're on.

The Gundam universe created by Yoshiyuki Tomino is so complex that I lose track of who is conspiring with whom and why after about two episodes of any series. There are a minimum of three sides to every conflict and everybody has issues. My recourse is to just follow the protagonist and go where he's going for whatever reasons he comes up with.

Mobile Suit Gundam debuted in 1979 and the franchise is still going strong. Having spun off dozens of movies, novels, manga, and television series, and a huge model toy business, Gundam is deeply embedded in Japanese popular culture. A Japanese remake of Big Bang Theory would retool most of the Star Wars and Star Trek references to Gundam. (Netflix has the original series and several recent iterations.)

More to come...!