About My Research

I've been studying and writing about Japan for around ten years at this point; it flew in!

I was driven to explore Japanese culture through a variety of different ways, some tragically predictable, some less so. A childhood obsession with Pokémon and the desire to become a Pokémon master sowed the seeds initially. But it wouldn't be until much later, when I started noticing how people approached Japan and how the culture was presented, that I became fascinated with what life in the country was really like.

Orientalism is nothing new, particularly as far as Japan is concerned! And my exposure to less than politically correct, mid-00s "magazine" TV shows and the early internet was just the modern retelling of a long-running trend. But as I moved more into the Japanosphere, first through anime and later through a deep love of Japanese variety shows and comedy, I realised there was a lot more nuance to Japan than a lot of people thought. I remember doing a small presentation in 4th year of secondary school (I was 15 years old), where I listed off a bunch of amazing aspects of Japanese culture and society. Despite that, I obviously still got asked about hentai! It just seemed to me, even back then, people were more content to rehash this imagined version of the country, in spite of being presented with the actual realities of the place!

Going to Japan was where it all came together for me. I didn't have a huge amount of closely held preconceptions about the place. I knew it was going to be imperfect and complex, and I was well aware of how the cycle of culture shock worked. Even after allowing myself to indulge in a small bit of touristing, I was pretty surprised at how well I managed to settle into a comfortable life! I knew Tokyo wouldn't be Shibuya and Akihabara everywhere; some of my fondest memories were being in offbeat residential areas, wandering, exploring, and just taking in how people lived their lives. This was in contrast to some of the people I studied abroad with, people who'd maybe had a more firm image in their minds of what the country was, which was now being completely turned on its head. It made sense that people with tangential exposure to Japan, through media or otherwise, would have certain expectations of the country, but I could never understand how someone who'd spent years of their life laboriously studying Japanese would still have those notions.

After returning home, I was flooded with questions, though; people seemed far more interested in the quirky aspects than my experiences or the places I'd visited! They'd rather hear about the maid cafes and sex shops of Akihabara, not the weekend homestay I'd had in the hills of Ibaraki. Again, I started to wonder why Japan had this mystique around it. There was clearly some deeply engrained desire to not just view the country as this quirky Disneyland of smut and oddity but to continue believing it even after being disproven. It also seemed like a lot of people's ideas of Japan were oddly frozen in time? I know they've not exactly caught up in a lot of technical (and sometimes social...) ways, but it felt so weird that nearly everyone's idea of Japan came out of a travel documentary from the 90s!

I was in a privileged position to have spent more than the typical touristy amount of time in the country, to have a tangible link to Japan through its language, and to have a deeper appreciation for some of its less widely popular media. So it felt only natural that the "Japan guy" would have to go a bit further with the research! With my master's, I became determined to dive deeper into exploring the processes behind why the country is viewed through the lens it is and maybe figure out why it had this allure that so many people (myself included!) had gotten wrapped up in. Research for my thesis led me down rabbit holes of nation branding, semantics, rabid nationalism, pop culture, orientalism, and how perspectives are formed. It brought me back to Japan to meet people and chat about what made Japan so appealing to them and why the other more obsessive types had chosen to bail. It was a deeply introspective, yet thoroughly satisfying (albeit occasionally terrifying) process!

Even now, after the thesis has long been submitted and my time in Lund is well behind me, the research never ends! The recent explosion of interest in and tourism to Japan has reignited a lot of those old observations. With the world seemingly getting more and more divided, and with people sending me reels about some outlandishly tourist-centric or overly misrepresented Japan-related thing, asking, "Is this true?" it seems like the best time to once again use that knowledge and relationship to chip away at the misinformation, bring some clarity back into the mix, and maybe even a bit of realism to the conversation. It's not all bright lights and kawaii in Japan, not even close!

Through the blog, I hope to highlight some of my older research, along with some interesting stuff that maybe hasn't been published in English before either! It's a cathartic, though scary, process, but that's what the world of research and academia is all about! Laying yourself bare, being open to criticism, and learning from the past.