Differet attitudes in Criticizing the government between America and Japan: Part2

In the last blog post, I pointed out that Japanese media makes less parody on politicians than American media does, based on the observation of television shows in the two countries. I also noted that while this is the case, Japanese people do criticize the government or politicians just like American people, if not as intensely.
Surely, there are parodies and cartoons found on the media, but there are definitely less compared to America. For example, if I go to google.com and search for pictures with “Obama cartoon,” 24 out of 1st 30 results are President Obama’s cartoon. However, if I go to google.co.jp and search for “菅直人　漫画,” which means “Naoto Kan cartoon,” only 10 out of 1st 30 results is the actual cartoon of Prime Minister Naoto Kan. This huge difference in number shows how American media makes more cartoons of politicians.
Probably the only logical explanation that can be given for these difference is that the Japanese people do criticize the government or politicians, but not necessarily by using cartoons or parodies. What’s the possible reason for this?
First reason is that Japanese people want to separate and distinguish serious topic and funny theme. Serious themes such as politics are often discouraged to be brought up in a funny conversations. For example on TV, the serious topics are only discussed in news programs, while funny topics are only on entertainment programs. People do not mix serious and funny matter in the same discourse.
This separation is probably due to a particular aspect of Japanese culture, which is the sacred-profane dichotomy(Hare and Ke). From the past, Japanese people have considered it important to clearly separate special occasions and daily life. This separation must have prevented Japanese people from having the news parody like the Daily Show and Colbert Report.
I wonder if there would be Japanese Daily Show 50 years from now.

Differet attitudes in Criticizing the government between America and Japan: Part1

At Yale, I live in a suite of 7 people. My suitemates and I often hang out in the common room. One time, one of my suitemates from Texas, who claims that he watches the Daily Show and Colbert Report every night, (although I think he is usually asleep taking a nap during the show) and I watched the two shows together in the common room.
Before I came to Yale, I had never seen either the Daily Show or Colbert Report. Naturally, When I first saw them, I didn’t fully understand what these shows were about. But I gradually figured out the content of these programs is basically parody, comedy and satire regarding recent news and political or authoritative figures. The episode I saw with my suitemates contained a parody of speeches by Sarah Palin, McCain, and Obama, and the topic ranged from the healthcare bill to Iraq War. When I watched it, I just laughed at the hilarious parody performance, but after some time, I came to a striking realization. I had never seen such a direct satirical depiction of political figures. Or at least, I do not remember any TV programs or newspapers parodying political figures so explicitly and in such an obvious manner. Japanese media in general seems very shy and reserved in making parodies.
Does this mean that Japanese people do not criticize the government, then? Surely no. As can be seen in every kind of mass media -- in newspapers, TV programs and online, Japanese people today are very cynical about what the government does, especially in this economic downturn and decrease in political initiative in solving the problem. People seem more distrustful than ever about what the Prime Minister or other Cabinet members announce, and (try to) implement. Japanese people do, in my opinion, criticize government.
Then what does this difference in attitudes of TV programs criticizing political figures indicate? Let’s consider this question further in the next post.

Wordplay thought over deeply in the context of language.

In the last blog post I talked about the play on words in America and Japan and concluded that people in Japan considered play on words to be lower-level compared to other “sophisticated” form of laughter. But I did not provide any reasoning behind it. I’d been wondering about it for a while, until I read something on the way back from Tokyo to Toronto when I went back to Japan over the Thanksgiving break. I picked up a Japanese newspaper and found an article about wordplay, written by a professor at a national university in Tokyo. He showed several examples where everyday conversation gets confusing because of heterographs, or two different words with two different meaning having the same sound. He gives an example as follows:

A housewife went to see a doctor and described her health problem. Right after her explanation, the doctor says, “That must because of KARE-.” The housewife likes KARE-, a kind of fish, and KARE- food, but wondered how the doctor knew about her preference. Her family laughed at her, saying, “That’s KARE-, as in getting old. ”

Japanese words “getting old,””Limanda yokohamae fish,” and “curry” are all pronounced the same. They are written differntly using chinese characters, which represent meaning, but their pronunciation is the same. This is nothing peculiar to the Japanese language. A good equivalent in English would be the words “write” and “right” having different meanings but sharing the same sound.

What’s so special about the heterographs in Japanese language then? The professor claims that the Japanese language has so many more heterographs than other tongues and thus has variety humor or wordplay using heterographs.

Getting hint from this article, I thought again about the tendency of Japanese people to consider wordplay as inferior. Because Japanese language has so many heterographs, which is caused by the limitation of the sound of Chinese characters, Japanese people considers wordplay to be lower-level, because they are so used to it in their daily lives. In other words, the word-play has to be pretty good to make people laugh. This seems to be a very good example of the influence that language has over the style of laughter.

Play on Words

It seems like regardless of the language, people play on words all over the world.

Of course, America is no exception. One of the jokes that includes word play is:

"A group of international students at a university in New York held a party in a house. In the kitchen, there were American people. In the living room, there were Asian people. What kind of people were in the bathroom? European."

I remember when I first heard this joke vividly, because this was one of the few jokes that I understood when I was an exchange student in Texas. The reason why I caught this joke unlike other jokes is probably that you do not need to have certain background information about American culture to understand this joke, but rather you simply have to know English well. The key to finding this joke funny basically comes down to whether you know a)bathroom is a euphemism for toilet, b)"euro" sounds like "uro," which is the combining form for urine, c)"pean" contains "pee" sound, which means, again, urine and finally d)toilet is related to urine.


Let's take a look at how word play is viewed in Japan.
I remember when I was little, I admired my father for his ability to come up with so many word plays. But from some point-- probably around when I was in the 4th grade-- I often ignored and laughed cruelly when he makes that kind of word play. As you might see in this example, word play is considered to be lower level humor except some cases. In fact, the word Japanese people often use to describe word play is dajare, whose first part da means lower-level, trivial and last part jare means humor or joke.

Although I know that my observation is not perfect, I would like to note that this is one of the big differences in American and Japanese attitudes toward this play on words. American people seem more tolerant towards word play in general.