Focus; Wrong About Japan: A Fathers Journey With His Son

In this part of focus, we'll be talking with novelist Peter Carey. He has authored a number of books, they have been popular successes and critical successes as well. He's gotten a lot of awards for his work. He is in fact one of only two writers to have won the Booker Prize twice, first in 1998 for Oscar and Lucinda and then again in 2001 for his novel True History of the Kelly Gang. His new book is a work of nonfiction, that is an exploration of the worlds of Japanese animation and graphic art, and it all started with the interest of his son, Charlie, who was 12 years old at the time, who was fascinated by Japanese comic books and movies. And it was an interest that both father and son came to share and the two of them went off together to Japan. For Charlie, what he was hoping to do was meet some of his heroes, but for Peter, he no doubt was hoping to come away with maybe a better understanding of the Japanese and Japanese culture.

And as you read the book that Peter Carey has produced, the title of the book is Wrong About Japan, A Father's Journey with His Son. Well, the son gets his wish, it's much less certain that the father gets his. The book is out now, been out a little while, it's published by Knopp, and it's in the bookstores if you want to read it. Fans are certainly welcome here on the show, 3-3-3-9-4-5-5. We do also have a toll free line, that one's good anywhere that you can hear us, and that is 800-222-9-4-5-5. So 3-3-3-9-4-5-5 for Champagne or Benefokes, and we do also have a toll free line, 800-222-9-4-5-5. And at any point here, if people want to join in the conversation, you can certainly do that. Mr. Carey. Hello. Hey. How are you? Great. Thanks for talking with us. We appreciate it. When you were growing up in Australia, what did you know about Japan? Were you at all interested in Japan? Was it on your radar screen? Oh, well, I'm 61.

So I was born in 1943, and then my country and your country too were at war with Japan. And so I guess, you know, I grew up with my mother telling me that the Japanese were coming to invade Australia, but the Americans stopped them at the Battle of the Coral Seas. And I grew up playing with Japanese occupation money that had been brought back by kids' fathers who had fought with the Japanese and New Guinea, and I grew up also. And in a time where there was really quite violent, anti-Japanese feelings in Australia. And also at a time when something being made in Japan, I guess, would be thought off to be substandard, you know, that there were cheap toys and so on and so on. And in fact, I think it was not until about 1970 that, you know, advertisers say in Australia would start to use the word Japanese as something being synonymous with quality and something

that was well made. That's a really different time. Did Charlie's interest, was this something that he came on independently himself? Did it have anything to do with you? No, it didn't really. He, there was a movie that he found at the video rental place, which was not an animated film at all. There was a live-action film with this rather wonderful Japanese actor called Beat the Kashi. It beat the Kashi always. It has a sort of little twitching eye and a sort of a funny walk and you always plays these sort of thuggy characters. And this was a story about this thuggy guy, played by Beat the Kashi, there's little kid. And the pair of them set off together. The thug not being very interested in having the kid along and I think the idea is to find the little boy's mother and in the end, of course, they bond and that. But the boys rather quiet in the shy and, anyway, it's a charming movie.

But what I started out, Charlie rented it once and then he rented it again and then he rented it at the third time and I thought this is really interesting. He loves this movie and why does he love it? And at that time, unless Charlie was very shy and the boy in the film, I think, was sort of quiet and polite. And I thought, well, maybe Charlie's seen some country in New York City where it's fine to be a little shy, to be a little quiet. And he turned to me about the third viewing and he said, that could we get a Tokyo one day to Japan? And I said, sure. And I said, sure, thinking, well, one day. And but Charlie also said, sure, thinking that I'd like to do it because I'd been to Japan twice before. Each time we've been quite different visits, but it's been hugely enjoyable. And so I said, sure, but I didn't really think we were going to go as quickly as we did. He, what did you, how did you think about this sudden fascination, his sudden fascination

with Japan? Well, I don't know. I think you always like to see your kids almost getting interested in anything and particularly in things that they want to talk about with you. You know, interest that don't involve going to class a bit, but to play every other games by themselves seem to be a good idea. So I was pleased by it and as his interest brought into, so he discovered Japanese animated films, anime, and he discovered Japanese comic strips, I was also really interested to look at them, look at them with him because, you know, I think graphically, framed by frame in the movies and in the comic strips, I think that I thought they always looked really, really good.

And sometimes even if the subject matter was not wildly intelligent, still, you know, the graphic style of them was very appealing to me too. So I wasn't exhibiting a sort of a false or interest in looking at them with him. You know, it was a genuine interest and the questions that I started to ask, weren't even necessarily driven by some desire to sort of teach him. But just curious to think, here am I an Australian father with American son, and we're watching this Japanese work on television, and what are we understanding about it, and how different is that from each other, and how different is our understanding from people in Japan watching it? Well, all through the book there is this contrast between the way that you view this and the way that he does, and that it looks as if you're being, you know, being the grown up writer, dad, are being a little bit more analytical about it than he.

It makes it look like he just thinks it's cool, and of course it is, and you do too, and at the same time you're also thinking about it saying, well, no, this is really interesting, and it's a window into somebody else's culture, and what can we learn by looking at it is, although I guess when I'm interested in it is over time whether you felt that he indeed on his level, it was more than just isn't this cool. I mean, it was he also thinking about what it was all about besides just being cool. Yeah, I think so. I mean, the thing that you've got to be aware of here is that you're talking to a novelist, and really we can't lie straight in bed. So that's our job. That's Daddy's job darling, I have to tell you. So there are ways in which you know, you've got to look at this and say, well, the character of Charlie is put on the page, is my characterization of Charlie, and the characterization of myself put on the page is my characterization, and I'll push things a little bit, and I'll exaggerate

things a little bit, and there's something else which I have to come to about this because I have a character in the book that I made up, and I have to confess. I'm glad you're near a microphone, I have to confess. I'm glad you did because it was something I wanted to talk about, and yet I didn't want to blow the secret. Now that you've outed yourself good, we can do that. Sorry, so that might be to get totally what the question was. Well, I guess I was interested in, well, in the kind of the characters that you present of yourself and him and of the dad and the father and of the cool guy and of the analytic guy, and you're sort of saying, well, in a sense, I'm a writer, these are characters, but they do reflect the approach, the kind of way that both you and he approached it. But I am interested in what sort of levels he was really appreciating this stuff, too. I think the thing that Charlie most wanted was just to go to Japan, and he would do anything

to do. I mean, he would eat raw fish and squishy things, and whatever he had to do to get there, he was up for it. If we had to go to meetings, which he knew we were going to do, that he might find boring, that was fine with him. And what the book represents is that really, he did really want to go and just get cool stuff. And I really, well, if I was going to write a book, that had to be more about more than just collecting cool stuff. And so in my pursuit of it, I was thinking of what would make this an interesting account to think about where all these little things in Japanese popular culture came from, in Japanese history. And to think about that, to ask ourselves, and to question, now, so that's true of us. And we really were like that. But then there were times when Charlie really would enter into this. And sometimes he was just a elected lazy little boy, and sometimes he was truly engaged.

And there's a thing I talk about early in the book, which always sounds a little shocking, but we used to go backwards and forwards from Manhattan where we lived to Brooklyn, where Charlie goes to school. And so plenty of time, honestly, on the subway, and we talk about this. And I'd drawn to his attention that Commodore Perry was the American who opened up Japan for trade with the world, and so on. And one morning, Charlie said to me, Dad, do you think if Commodore Perry had not gone to Japan, well, do you think they would have dropped the atomic bomb, or would have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And I'm sitting there thinking, God, this is crazy. I'm thinking smart kids. Like the idiot father that I am, but you know what I mean? I'm thinking, wow, this is great. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'm like, how would I know? I don't know. But, well, maybe not. And so that he turned to me, and he said, well, no, Godzilla. So, because, you know, and that was something that we'd both learned during this thing.

I gotzilla, which we, you know, think of as just, you know, Japanese monster movie, really was a very self-conscious response to the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And, but it can also, the comment can sound rather callous, but it does come from sort of him engaging with the notion of where things in popular culture comes from. So, he's a long answer, I'm sorry, but he did start to think about a lot of these things. Our guest in this part of Focus 580 is Peter Carey. He's novelist. He has the author of eight novels, whose most recent is My Life as a Fake. And a new book that is nonfiction sort of, and it's titled Wrong About Japan, A Father's Journey with His Son, it's published by Knaf. But it is, as we have explained, this sort of the story of his son and his son's fascination with Japanese animation and graphic novels, and about how Peter as a result kind of got interested in them too, not about how that gave the two dad and son something to share,

and about how they went to Japan together so that Charlie could pick up some cool stuff, and that Peter could also do some investigating and thinking about Japan too, and spend some time with his son. A lovely little book, it's out now in a bookstore if you'd like to read it, and questions are welcome. 3, 3, 3, 3, 9, 4, 5, 12, 3, 800, 2, 2, 9, 4, 5, 5. One of the things that really struck him was very early on in the book when you are talking with Charlie about going, and Charlie says to you, no real Japan, you've got to promise, no temples, no museums. He didn't so, he did not want to do that kind of touristy thing where you would go to all the sort of traditional places, and you did pretty well, although you did drag him to the Kabuki. Yeah, well I had to, I had to, I mean he's not going to get a pain-free ride, but I took him to the Kabuki because yeah, Kabuki had been, even though now you go and you see all of these very proper Japanese grandmothers and their Kamonos out for their afternoon

at the theatre, yeah, the Kabuki really was almost at the level, it was sort of an out, actually Kabuki itself, I think, means deviant, or, you know, it's got some sort of rather outsider thing to it, and Kabuki was a little bit like anime and manga, not quite proper, and the other, Kabuki was often relegated to, you know, its own areas outside of where polite and proper society took place, and my memory of having gone to Kabuki wasn't it was loud, lively, and full of action, but sitting, sitting beside my son in the Kabuki theatre, you know, for what was to be a four-hour show, I suddenly realized that my previous notions of, you know, fast, funny, entertaining were not his, and he squirmed and complained, and generally thought he was in kid hell, but anyway, that's already the main only bit of real suffering he really had to endure.

Well it sounds like he hung in pretty well, it sounds like he was pretty good sport about the whole thing, I mean given the fact that the whole rest of the trip was kind of about what he wanted to do, and he said, he said, I mean anybody who's got a 12-year-old kid just listen to this, I think, when we're jet lagged, you know, so we wake up in the middle of the night, and he says, Dad, you awake, I said yes, he said, Dad, I'm really happy. I can't think I've got two boys, one day he was, this Charlie's now 14, I don't think I've seen none of them have ever said I'm really happy, and then he had this other response, which I do remember one day walking along the street with him in Tokyo, and he said to me, Dad, when my band fails, I'm going to come and live here, and I said, Charlie, you don't have a band, and he said, I know that, I know, but it's a right of passage. Now when you think about this trip, or what the effects of this trip, well, you know, Charlie's got a band, he's got a gig in Railroad, next weekend, and he's been studying Chinese

for two years, and he's ready to study Japanese next year, so I think there probably have been some bigger consequences of the trip that I had imagined at the time. Well, we can make that into a mastercard commercial where I said, you know, the cost of going to Japan, XXS, value of having your 12-year-old boy tell you, I'm really happy, priceless, and maybe that really is any, any dad who's got a teenage boy probably would appreciate that. Well, I think we were lucky. One of the things, in one of the reviews that I read about the book, the reviewer says that apparently you're, you are, have talked about, or are working on a new novel and that it's said to be set in Japan? See, this is the trouble with, this is the trouble with all these plastications of fiction and non-fiction, because that appeared in newspaper, right? Well, in the New York Times, and I don't know what do you want to say about the veracity of what you read in the Times anymore.

Complete fiction. It's not true. Oh, it's actually not, it's not at all true. Somebody told me about this review, I've not read, but I do know that the reviewer was particularly concerned with what was true and what was not true, and it's a shame that I guess he went to a newspaper for the truth, because he's not well informed. Well, in the reviewer is another, it's Marcel Theroux, and I assume that he's one of the Theroux's, or maybe not, he's Paul Theroux's, that was my assumption, and indeed in this review, he does make reference to the fact, as you talked a little bit earlier, in our conversation, that there is this character that you introduce in the book that turns out to be, that you have made him up, and so, yeah, Marcel, I guess he was kind of, overall, I think his review was positive, but he was, it seemed to be kind of concerned about, well, okay, is this a work of nonfiction? Is it fiction? Can a nonfiction work have a fictional character in there? Yeah, well, I think they're interesting questions.

I think that probably that the book should say, you know, makes a fiction and nonfiction, it's pretty should say that on the flaps that doesn't. I would never reveal that the person, I will reveal it today, but who the invented character is, and I feel all sorts of different things about this. I mean, I think, you know, I don't want to trick read, it's not what I'm doing, things. I invent the character because it's, I'm a novelist, it's, this character, and his name is Takashi, is like, if you like the clothes line on which I hang my washing, so all of the really, very real things that happened in all the interviews we did, are organized in a sense to do with our relationship with this invented kid Takashi. I think that, so I think I'd rather read as no, that that's what they're getting into, but I would say at the same time that anybody who reads a, reads a memoir, who thinks that

they're not getting a story told to them, and that the, the telling of stories, or even our memories always involve distortion and invention, you know, I think, I think it's an issue that's worth thinking about. Yeah. Well, the, as the way this character is, is described in the book, it's, you, you set it up that, that Charlie has been corresponding with him by email, and he says to you, well, dad, we, we're going to meet this guy, and he's going to sort of help us and, and show us around. And, and I have to admit that, that I did read this review before starting to read the book, so I had, the cat was already out of the prevail bag, but somehow the way this character is described, I would think maybe should be a tip off to the reader, but something something fishy is going on here, because, because it sounds like a character out of a manga or anime, come to life. Exactly. Well, that's what he's attempted to be, and in fact, when I went, when I first started to write Takashi, who, by the way, Charlie named, I was writing him as a comic strip character,

you know, and then I decided in the end to not make, not, not make him a comic strip character, but he's still, he, he glows with light, he's like somebody that's, you know, that's stepped out of a television screen, and all of his clothes, and his way of dressing is really, is one of the characters in the Gundam, Mobile Suit Gundam, so you, you, you read it very, very well, and I thank you. This, this gives me an opportunity to talk about this, this particular, anime that, that, this animated cartoon feature, that is, at the time of the book is a, a favorite of Charlie's, the Mobile Suit Gundam, and maybe people have seen, it has actually, some of these have run, you're in the United States, a lot, yeah, a lot. So people may have seen them, and, and also people may have seen some other Japanese animated cartoons, and they may indeed their question is, what is the deal with the giant

robots? Because that, there seem to be an awful lot of, of animated cartoons that are somehow one another, when we're another involved, people inside these enormous machines, and that is indeed what Mobile Suit Gundam is basically, also aside from the fact that it has this incredibly Byzantine political theme going on, which you could spend years and years just trying to figure out, because it's all this twist and turns and alliances and different, you know, it's this, this intergalactic war going on with these, these kids, essentially, fighting battles in these giant robot suits, and I'm sure a lot of people would come to it and say, what is this about? And, of course, that's one of the questions you'd ask, you know, like, what is this about? Well, I know it's, I know you don't have the answer, but I know also that it was something that you, you asked yourself to, what is this about? Well, I'm sorry, I mean, there are so many different issues that are raised, I mean, the whole, just, you know, like Japanese people say, Japanese people like robots, why?

I mean, I have no idea why they like robots. I mean, just recently, I read a story about somebody talking to Japanese people about the whole issue of foreign workers in Japan, and I shouldn't know, you know, there is a, you know, distinctly, let's say, xenophobic aspect of Japanese culture, and very hard to become a citizen of Japan if you are not born there. And sometimes our interpretation, I'm looking at Japanese society, the way it equits itself to say whether it's relationship with Korean people and so on, we would easily call racism. So it was with some interest that I saw in this interview that the Japanese person asked about the need for foreign workers said, ah, yes, but we will have robots soon who do all of this. So, but I just, I'll just throw that in, not because it's an answer. But because there is generally in all sorts of different ways, this obsession with robots,

and I, looking at, looking at this, started to wonder about why it was. One of the things I thought was, well, here's Mr. Tamino, the, the, the inventor of this series, and I'll check his age, and to tell you, I can't remember what it was now, but I saw he'd be a, a, a child at the time before, just after the war. And so I thought of the traumatic effect of war on, you know, young people in Japan. And I thought about, you know, this is a, this basically is a war movie. And so within this, the kids are powerful and not victims of war, you know, that there, and so I thought that was an interesting thing to think about. But I also thought that it sort of echoed other things I'd seen in Japanese art where individuals are isolated from society, armoured from society, like, you know, they're sitting inside these steel machines. And then a little bit of a way that, that will also fit it together with these people who are called otaku who sit in their rooms with their computers and

don't really have any human contact with anybody, just with their obsessive little things with comic scripts or whatever. So I went to Mr. Tamino with all of these thoughts. Mr. Tamino said to me, he said many different things. One is, of course, he presents himself very much as an artist. But at the same time, he said, the only reason there are robots there is because the series was designed to sell toy robots. And so he then went on to link the explanations about their, his conflicts with the makers of the toys and the size they wanted the robots and so on. And so here you have this thing which appears to be one thing, that is there to sell toy robots. But then you have to ask yourself, why do people want toy robots in the first place? Well, there's got to, I don't know if I'm being overly analytic, but it's still, to me, it still has, there has to be something going on that says, well, all right, if we had decided to invent a comic strip to sell toy robots,

it would be different. And that difference should tell us something about the difference between us and, you know, in the Japanese, or who else, whoever else was doing it. Well, I think one of the things that, in my, in my long conversation with Mr. Tamino and, you know, about six of these assistants and five tape recorders and Charlie, one of the things that Mr. Tamino kept on insisting that there was nothing particularly Japanese about what he'd done. And he'd gone out of his way, I was saying, well, surely, you know, the way that people speak must indicate class or education or background. He said, no, no, in Japanese, we don't have that. That's, that's you. It's not me. And I said, okay. And, and he said, he specifically made it so that, you know, there wouldn't have any national thing. And so there was nothing Japanese about it at all. And then, and then we started to get into this thing about children and war. And, and he started, he launched

into this thing about children and war and how should there have always been child warriors. And that, it's sort of basically, I think he was saying that's unhealthy just to be a victim or in war that the child has a, has a duty as a citizen. And this is a heavy weight of responsibility. And so something I find myself talking, having this conversation about something that, from my perspective, was really weird. Really, well, different, not weird, different. So, so someone seriously is telling me that children should fight in war. And if they don't fight in war, then it's basically it's bad for them. And at that moment, I said, well, well, thank you, Mr. Tamino. You really have demonstrated that there is something culturally very different about, you know, this, about what you, about your work. And for all of us, it has to be true. That where we come from is going to affect our art. And however we make our art, he's going to, in some way, the soil we've grown up in is going to affect what we do.

Our guest in this part of Focus 580 is Peter Kerry. We're a little bit past our midpoint. We're talking about some of what you will find in his new book, Wrong About Japan, a father's journey with his son. It's published by Knopf. And it is an account of a trip that he took with his son, Charlie, who was 12 at the time, who was now 14, that was inspired by Charlie's fascinating with the fascination with Japanese comic art manga is the word in Japanese for the graphic novel, which is really a lot more than a comic book. And also Japanese animation. Some of this, we're starting to see more and more here in the United States. Peter Kerry is the author of Eight Novels. He won the Booker Prize twice and his most recent novel, which is, which was, I enjoyed very much, by the way, my life is fake. You can read it. I'm just dying to ask you about my life is a fake, but I'm not going to do that. 333-9455 is our champagne or ban a number, toll free 800-222-9455. To go a little further, I really liked the story about you're talking with the man who came

up with the mobiles who had gunned him. And about how ultimately you did get to a place that maybe provided an answer to that question, what is this all about and how different are we really and where to, from where do those differences come? You did title the book wrong about Japan. Did you feel that ultimately you went there with a certain set of ideas that turned out not to be correct? Did you come home with a little bit better understanding or did you feel that when you left, your lack of understanding was about where it was when you started? Yeah, well, I think a number of different things. I think that it's the nature of life that we're all going to be wrong about each other anyway. And if I can think of so many of my novels in the way that they're told and have people misunderstand each other, that inevitably that's going to happen. And I think if you're going to go

to another country, and let's say you read about it for five years, and I read about it probably for six months and spent, you know, two different trips there. How could I possibly be really right about anything? But what's more interesting is our struggle to understand, and that can be very interesting, and it is after all a very common thing that we have in travel continually, and our experiences of trying to understand, not quite understanding, understanding a little bit, giving off fence, misunderstanding. So all of that was really, I think I can write about that because that's sort of where that's within my range. Being truly right and having any big insights, I don't think it's going to be really within my range. But I'd say that the thing that I felt at the end of it, when I'd finished it, I had thought, and I think about this particularly in relationship to the book's publication or

lack of publication in Japan, that if somebody, I thought if somebody was going to come to the United States, some Japanese person, and completely get it wrong, but with some humor and wonder, but I think we would not be uninterested. I think the Japanese sort of seemed to, the Japanese publishing seemed to fall out of love with me. Firstly, with my novel, My Life Is A Fake, where which happened to deal with the Japanese, partially with the Japanese occupation of Penang, and suddenly where there was some, you know, there were war atrocities committed in Penangue, and of course atrocities happen on all sides at all times or last. But this was about Japan. I couldn't get that book published at Japan. And this book, no one, no one wants to publish it, which I, it might be just for the reason they say, which is that the things that I'm fascinated by are really ordinary for Japanese people, or it may be that there's things in there that are sort of offensive

to Japanese people, or things that they don't want to think about. And so I think the thing that I came back with, and when it was all over, was a certain, a, what would I say, a sort of, I thought of it as a country that was more sensitive and vulnerable to criticism, which is something I would expect of Australia, we hugely, hugely touchy about what people think about us. But I wouldn't have really expected that so much to be true of Japan. And I think that the, and a, and a, and a really, really deliberately or deeply rather opaque nature to the culture, so that when, for instance, afterwards, I'm trying to find, I don't mind, they're not going to publish my book. I mean, maybe it's just, I've no use to them, but to try and find out why, no matter how, how drunk my agent got various publishes, was impossible. So they get totally, totally drunk. You see, I'm going

to take him out and get him drunk. We'll find out what all this is about. And all that would happen at the end while they're staggering, staggering to the company, would be to say, Japanese people, not like this book. So that's what I learned. Right. Well, let's talk with, we have somebody who'd like to talk with you. We'll do that in champagne. Line one. Hello. I'm very interested in your book. I haven't read it. I actually study Japanese studies and I teach a university course on Japanese culture. For the person who should have written the book. No, no, no, no. But I study historical Japan. So it's a very different story, but very interested in Japan, my wife's Japanese, and so on. And, but it's very interesting, though, this interest of your son in Japan. And this is something I've noticed that sort of historical curve over the years that in my youth, there was this sort of mystique of Japan with regard to some extent martial arts, it's still the association of martial arts. And then, of course, you have this

interest in the zan and meditation and this sort of association with some mysterious quality to Japan. But something I really wonder is, though, that fell, by the way, side of the 80s and the sort of, you know, the automobile Japan image that was, you know, very strong. But with the 90s, you know, and up to the present, I'm not sure your listeners realize, I think you do, but the extent to which or someone like your son and someone like my students have an utter fascination with Japan. And I really wonder whether there is a kind of orientalizing aspect in so far as Japan is like this sort of ideal postmodern, very, very different other that is very different from George Bush's America. I mean, yeah, utterly different, right? And it's not a liberal place. There's no liberal about Japan, but it's something utterly other and I just have an interesting story for you. I was talking to a student about four years ago and he's an Asian American student. A lot of Asian Americans have fascination, of course,

with Japan. But also, you know, students across the board, they're probably, you know, I know there were several hundred students in the Anime Animation Club here at the University. But the student told me, he said, you know, I'm not like this, he said, but the majority of students are studying Japanese now, you know, why they're studying. He said the reason they're studying is they want to be in Japan when a new game software comes out. I think I speak in order, yeah. Yeah, completely. And it was mind-bargling, right? But I mean, I'm, of course, I have to be shocked, I guess, but I'm not surprised. And I think that would be not a million miles from my 12-year-old. I mean, I hope, I hope to hear something better from him, right, a couple of years time. But and now he doesn't even want to talk about it. So, but yes, I know, it's incredible. I mean, that's Charlie's, Charlie's notion was what we were going to do is look at cool stuff. And so he's lost the bug then? No, a lot of, never lose the bug. The good thing, I think the

wonderful thing from, he is, he's no longer quite as interested in anime, he reads manga occasionally. But he's been, having come back, he studied, he couldn't study Japanese, he studied Chinese for two years, and he's going to do Japanese next year. So, something sort of, something quite substantial could. Yeah, and well, I mean, I, I don't know what it is, really. Yeah, on the one hand, I mean, I see there's this Orientalizing aspect of this, on the other hand, it's a wonderful thing. It feels very interested in Asia. It doesn't have to be Japan. And so I find it very, very interesting. One thing I note though about gadgets and so on, you know, this interest in robots, and I think it's a very complex problem, but that, you know, you were talking about the post-war, you know, era. And on the one hand, I mean, Japanese people were associated with an interest in detail and smallness and, you know, very, you know, handy objects. And so there is this general, you know, at least association, not always true, but with the very great interest in gadgets and so on. But at the same time, there is, I think, a kind of real fascination among them, speaking

apart from your son and a lot of Americans, that there are, there is, in Japanese culture, very commonly, a fascination with, well, actually not to be fascination, but actually a respect for something like anime, manga, and aside from this issue of gadgets and so forth, just a fascination with sort of creating another graphic world. And I think there's a whole history behind that. I'm not really a scholar. That sort of study bit. But it is a real fascination with that. And people not realize that you will typically see it. I've seen, you know, 50, 55-year-old men sitting reading jump, which is a magazine, manga magazine for 14, 15-year-olds. And they're not embarrassed, you know. And of course, then they'll have historical novels like The Tale of Genji, you know, in multiple volume series in manga. And people will buy these in the droves, you know, in various historical and other series. So there's no embarrassment, no association only with kids.

So I think that's something that, you know, a lot of Americans don't realize that. Well, it's very, you know, we tend to think of comic strips as being something that are read by adolescent males pretty much. You know, it's not quite true, but certainly, young girls have traditionally not bought many comics. And there's very little comic mark at left for American girls, I think. And then, and the adults certainly didn't read comics. But in Japan, of course, as you know, you know, the comics for manga for everybody. And for all sorts of young girls and girls read them and women and men. And this, you know, as you said, you see, they're very conservative. Gentlemen in suits, celery men coming home at the end of the day, you know, reading big thick comic books. And of course, I mean, this may be related issues of, you know, creating fantasy in every day life. And I do the Japanese society as a series of

social, socially complex, you know, problems just as we do, but very different. And so, you know, finding a sort of out beyond simply becoming. Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of one of one of the things that I was talking about out in that way was, you know, in a way that Japan may be more than any way that you are what you wear. And like other countries, the Japanese have very strict rules about what anybody could wear, depending on their rank and so on. And these days, there are these people who really love to dress up big time. And one of the, and, you know, Harajuku, you see all these kids, when they're fastidiously detailed, perfect punk, you know, sit vicious look. And you also find people, I didn't meet this guy. I only heard about this guy, but he was a friend of a friend who dressed on Friday. He really was a, he was a, he was a celery man. But on Friday nights, he dressed in the clothes of a traditional Japanese carpenter. And he had a carpenter's van. And then he would go off and pick up girls. That's not at all surprising. Yeah, it has this sort of

kind of, that's how many, right? The fantasy life he could create is very, very common. And of course, it's related to metropolitan character and wealth of Japanese society that they can, they can get away with this in a sense, you know, creating these lives with themselves. At the time they can't create. So this is only on Friday nights. That's probably a big problem. But anyway, thank you very much. Well, thank you. Thanks for the call. Let's go to line number two for someone here on a cell phone. Hello. Hi, I just wanted to ask if you might discuss the, the pornographic manga. Yeah. One sees everywhere. And they read it openly, um, men on the subways and, um, with no embarrassment whatsoever. And also I remember from when I was in Tokyo, when you would see these adult women and they would all dress in sort of the, school girl style and giggle and things like that. And if you might mention that whole aspect of the Japanese attitude towards, um, sexuality, I guess that would be. Well, you know, I'm, I'm

firstly, I don't know what lines you were traveling on. But, um, we, we certainly, we certainly had some, the, the, the otaku, the, the person who was the huge, the, is the greatest expert on Gundam Wing in the world, um, is a transsexual. And, uh, we, we had very serious meetings with her in the publishing house. I'm in, uh, clicking across the four year in her high heels. And, um, well, all the Japanese men continued to call her, or he and so on. Um, and she said, she said to me in an answer to a question relating to some of these things, you know, the, the Europeans are so frightened that if they take the clothes off, they'll turn into werewolves. So they have a, sort of a notion of us has been particularly uptight. Um, but I said, I'm not an expert on this, but this is, was, was my experience. The thing about the, uh, I didn't really, somebody else said to me the other day that they, you know, they're traveling on some ways and

seeing all this pornography being read in front of them. It was not my experience. I'm not saying it's not true, but it just, I just didn't see that. Well, and I also thought that when I first started doing this, uh, in the United States, particularly, there was, uh, that manga in, in, in, in some quarters was almost synonymous with, with, with pornography. And what I thought, correctly or not, in Japan, was that, you know, the pornography, uh, the pornographic aspect of manga was in proportion, you know, eight, eight, eight, eight percentage of, you know, or manga. And I don't know what that was, but, you know, I saw plenty of much of the manga I saw in trance and whatever wasn't pornographic. Uh, which is not to argue with your experience of course, I'm, I'm going back, I'm thinking back to the, to the first caller and I guess I was also thinking about myself and my childhood, uh, I think as a 12 year old boy, I also was fascinated by Japan. And, and maybe

Maybe that was because, being a little bit younger than that, like a lot of little boys I was fascinated by, medieval Europe, and it's not that much of a leap, you know, from medieval Europe to medieval Japan. And I guess I do wonder what over time, you know, what sort of continuity there is in the fascination with Japan for 12-year-old boys, or those of us who still have a little bit of 12-year-old boy left, and is there some sort of continuity in that. That kind of fascination. Then it's good to continue to happen. Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to sort of slide off the question just a little bit to one side, you bring me back. And it just suddenly occurred to me, and actually things you have said, and the other call is that when you're thinking about Japan now, which, and this is not about the medieval aspect of it, but to think about the highly developed and sophisticated use of graphic visual language, which you really, you know, do see there.

And if you think of the degree to which our children, our children now, are really way more interested in this sort of information than they are with reading novels, for instance, you can see a very good reason for them doing it to respond to this particular world where the graphic novel is so highly developed and well done. So if that's the case, then one can see that going for a long time. We have another caller. Let's do that. Talk with Emma. Someone here on our line number one, someone in Urbana. Hello. Yes. Hello. I was, I got familiar with the word manga when I was interested in Hokusai's 15 volumes of drawing. Yeah. Yeah. From 1830 to 1840. Yeah. And it sounds like you're using the word manga the way people use the word Kodak. You're referring to every small book that has pictures in it.

Well, manga, manga means actually doesn't mean something like a silly doodle in the beginning. Well, it means drawings, yeah. Little drawings. Yeah. And I, well aware, yeah, the word, the word was used in the 19th century, maybe was used in the 18th, for a long time, and it was, wasn't it, it has a sort of a slightly self-protective irony about it. I mean, the call it a silly doodle. Well, in those days they also had many pornographic books of the same size, but for instance, in the 15 volumes of Hokusai, it's not one single erotic design. Yeah. But it's interesting, it's interesting you should talk about that particular work because don't you think that often that, you know, looking at contemporary Japanese graphic novels or manga or whatever you want to call them, that you do see the heritage of that

sort of line, you know, of those woodblock prints. Yes, yes, I'm sure, I'm sure there is, yes, of course, yes. Well, thank you. All right. Well, thank you for the call. Others listening? If you'd like to call in, we do have just a couple minutes left. I'd like to give us a call, 3, 3, 3, 9, 4, 5, 5, toll, 3, 800, 2, 2, 2, 9, 4, 5, 5. You talk a little bit about the fact that maybe Charlie's interest in manga and anime have cooled a little bit, although he still continues to be interested, apparently, in East Asia, to the extent that he's studying Chinese and would like to go on and study Japanese. So for him, this may indeed be some kind of enduring interest, you never know, when you're that age. But I guess I wonder whether you think this, in the larger scheme of your relationship with him, this is a chapter that's going to remain to be, going to remain being very important?

Well, I think we were just damn lucky, you know, that I think it's, this is always, this, I think I'm blessed for myself to have been able to write this book and take that trip. And that really was, in my recollection, a magical moment, and we'll remember it, I mean, I think it's, we mostly forget everything that happens to us, or forget many things. And I know he won't forget this, I won't forget this. And it just happened when he was 12, see, by now at 4D, he wouldn't want to do it, probably. He's now in the age where he's, if you're walking down the street, he'd prefer that you were walking several paces behind. And his brother was a little like that, Charlie's not quite like that. But I mean, Charlie's now working on his band, he's working on looking cool. He's busy, he's got stuff to do. He's got stuff to do, so, you know, and any, any token, I club that he might want to go to, he's going to have to wait a few years, and then I'm not going to be ladding with him anyway.

I talked a little bit earlier, I asked you about the fact that there was this reference in a, in a review of the book, to your writing novel set in Japan, and you said, no, it's not true. But I'm sure that every, for a writer, every experience he or she has, is potential for coming back somehow. Oh, you know what? There's the characters, it's not set in Japan, they're the characters that do pass through it. I think it's about two small chapters. Oh, okay. Well, there are other ways that you think that this, in one way or another, will end up, and direct you into thinking about certain things, or maybe to, to want to explore certain things further. It's hard to say, you know, I, my idea is the novels mostly come out of an idea that leads me in somewhere, so I figure if that's so, then this must be so, and then I should do this and invent that. And in the case of the novel I'm working on right now, it involves, once again, sort of fraud and theft, it's called a theft, a love story, and I discovered some things about how people sort of, different ways when you have stolen paintings or suspect paintings

and ways in which they can sort of be laundered by moving them through Japan. And so I was interested in the art world and the art market and these things. And then, you know, there's a way to, that I can, you know, do something, and it said in Tokyo, well, you know, I've been to Tokyo now, three or four times. I feel not unconfident with a bit of research in doing that, so it isn't Tokyo that leads me there. It's a story that, that's a story about something else where I see an opportunity to use something I know. Yeah. Well, we'll have to stop. I want to, again, recommend to folks. You might look at the book we've mentioned. It's titled Wrong About Japan, a Father's Journey with His Son by our guest, Peter Kerry. Also, he has authored several novels. His most recent is My Life as a Fake. And something new coming out soon, you can look forward to, Mr. Kerry, we want to say thank you very much. Oh, thank you. It's nice talking to everybody.