Big In Japan, Column One: Fuck You / Do Me

By BeRightBack

It is with the precious, ever-so-mannered “reluctance” of the self-appointed expert that I find myself approaching the writing of my inaugural column on Japan here at Wordsmoker.  But as I thought about it, my apparent conundrum began to seem hardly unique to my situation as “Japan scholar” and “translator,” but indeed was something everyone faced, all the time, at all levels.  The hyper-articulated “difference” between the U.S. and Japan (or, put in more vague and therefore pernicious terms, between the “West” and the “East”) performs a kind of exaggerated  drag show mimicking the ways in which we are all always constantly translating between languages, traditions, worldviews, cultures, every day, without even thinking about it.   And this drag is heightened even further by the histories of atrocity and global power-brokering that haunt even the most innocuous instance of “Japan” meeting “America.” Yet to insist that every point of contact must relive these histories is itself distorting – the images of each other we contemplate are both closer and more distant than they appear.

Take the wonderfully droll image Wordsmoker’s Own Kora In Hell devised to brand this column, with its coy geisha and ironic boast.  It is at once an image of seduction and its undercutting, not just in the sense that to be Big In Japan puts you on the same level as Alyssa Milano’s singing career, but also in the queasy sense that to be American in Japan is to be treated as if you expect to be treated as Big.  The corollary, though, is a sense that this performance is for you, that it is not real, that it is neither the real Japan nor an accurate assessment of your Big-ness.  And this becomes a sadistic desire, at times, in the name of the real, to rip away the fan and slap the smile off that face; it becomes the underlying violence that can make translation into a type of violation performed in the name of a real that is no less illusory in the end than the fan and the smile it supposedly opposes.  This is indeed the undercurrent of what Walter Benjamin calls, in “The Task of the Translator,” a “bad” translation: one done in the name of a fidelity that can never be attained and only leads to distortion and the death of whatever is supposed to be translated.

My musings also made me remember a Chicago Reader article I read that lamented the boisterously indecorous welcome offered by the Bleacher Bums at Wrigley to new Cubs player Fukudome Kôsuke.  “It’s not as if I’d expected some sort of Zen garden….,” the author says, elegantly using disavowal as a mode of confession, since he appears to expect just that. His serene vision of contemplative fandom is inspired, apparently, by the brute fact of this new player’s Japaneseness, augmented by the demure trot Fukudome essays across the field that avoids treading on the infield: was this “to honor some superstition?”  The author shares proof of the uncouth nature of Cubs fans with an anecdote calculated to throw into even more flattering light his comparative cultural sensitivity: “A beefy guy to my left, his brushy crew cut spiked with product, was soon heard explaining that his Fukudome jersey could as easily be read, ‘Fuck you, do me.’”

This, to me, is the riddle of translation, of interpreting across linguistic and cultural divides, in one easy formula, itself an inspired mistranslation, a mispronunciation that speaks nonetheless with a brute eloquence: “Fuck you / Do me,” says the text, the phenomenon, the puzzle, the person, the aggregate, the composite, the real that waits so patiently, so coyly for you to prove your Big capacity to interpret it correctly. Benjamin, in his essay, goes on to valorize the necessary indirectness of the translator’s act as the key to its power and ethical heft:

Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.

At the end of the Reader article, the author describes himself at the newly Japanized Wrigley Field, “wavering contentedly between the brats smothered in grilled onions and peppers available in the stands and the spicy salmon rolls laid out for the scribes.” “So much for the middle path,” he concludes.

But isn’t that where he actually is standing, right then, at that moment?  And isn’t that where we all are, all the time?  For Benjamin, the only fully translatable text is the language of the divine, and it thus follows that the only part of a text that lends itself to translation is the “pure language” that speaks, in the end, only to the divine – we mortals, as translators, can only “touch” this language but briefly.  But it also follows that it is only in translation that the divine within the all-too-worldly art we mere mortals create can finally be voiced – the task of a translator, then becomes that of a medium, a medium that’s a message, a message of the divine.  How Big can you get?

Though it’s worth remembering, of course, that Benjamin’s words as I am “quoting” them here are themselves the product of translation.

Oh, and: next time, the topic will be tentacle porn, I promise.

It's safe for work because it's by Hokusai, the same guy who did that famous print with the big wave and Mt. Fuji your boss has in his office!