What Japan knows that the Western world doesn’t

It’s 2 AM and it’s been less than a week since the last time that I crossed an ocean, so I’m jet-lagged and sitting on the back porch having a cigarette.  There’s a full moon.  It’s warning me.

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I’ve written about man-eating rabbits before.  Le lapin anthropophage in French, el conejo antropófago in Spanish–we’re not talking about the adorable little Monty Python killer rabbit here.  We’re talking about rabbits with sharp, bloody fangs who eat people.  Yeah, I know–you’ve never seen a man-eating rabbit.  How do I know?  Because you’re still alive–if you ever see a man-eating rabbit, that’s the last thing you see.  You know how I know that the adorable little Monty Python killer rabbit is not a real, actual man-eating rabbit?  Because he let some of the humans get away.

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Look up at the night sky and what do you see?  If you were born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, like I was, you see the Man in the Moon.  The Pacific Northwest, Russia, Germany, France–it’s all of a piece.  It’s an optical delusion that pervades Western artistic expression.  From music…

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon

Little Boy Blue and the Man in the Moon

When you comin’ home, Dad?  I don’t know when,

But we’ll get together then, yeah–you know we’ll have a good time then.

—Harry Chapin

…to the graphic arts…

…to the cinema…

…the Western world looks at the moon and sees…the face of a man.  In fact, the idea of the Man in the Moon is so embedded in Western culture that the moon is portrayed with a man’s face even when the moon is not full:

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It’s 2 AM and it’s been less than a week since the last time that I crossed an ocean, so I’m jet-lagged and sitting on the back porch having a cigarette.  There’s a full moon.  I look around the yard: any telltale long ears sticking up out of the grass?  Is there the gleam of moonlight off of pointy white little fangs?

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Japan: I think of it as the France of Asia.  France: I think of it as the Japan of Europe.  Culturally, the two countries share a lot: an obsession with aesthetics, with presentation, with formality and with formalism; and food…  Generalizing about individuals is usually a losing proposition, but cultures–yeah, you can generalize about cultures.  (That’s sorta their point, right?)  And if there is one thing that Japanese culture and French culture share, it is an obsession with food.

The great Japanese food movie: Tampopo.  If you’ve only watched one Japanese movie, it’s probably the one.  Cinephiles have Ran, of course, and The Seven Samurai; teenagers have (or once had) The Ring; but poll your friends and you’ll find that if they’ve only seen one Japanese movie, it was Tampopo.  It’s about food, and sex, and food, and heroism, and food, and love, and food, and America (yes, in a minute you’re going to see a Japanese truck-driving Western movie hero), and food, and work, and… well, food.  Everyone has seen Tampopo, or should, and if you’ve seen it–when you’ve seen it–you’ll have a favorite scene.

For many people, that scene is this comedic skit.  YouTube auto-completes it as tampopo choking scene: 

The glutinous substance upon which the old man chokes is mochi.  You making it by pounding glutinous rice.  I especially love it when used to make o-manju–when in Japan, I conduct research on how long you can live on a diet consisting solely of its daifuku form, and coffee.

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It’s 2 AM and it’s been less than a week since the last time that I crossed an ocean, so I’m jet-lagged and sitting on the back porch having a cigarette.  There’s a full moon.  I look at the rabbit in it.

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In Western culture, you look at the moon and you see the Man in the Moon.  In Japan and China, you look at the moon and you see what’s really there.  In China, I understand that he’s pounding herbs.  In Japan: he’s pounding mochi.  As I said: mochi starts with sticky rice.  You pound it.  It becomes mochi.  Somebody makes o-manju out of it, and I eat it.  Artisanal manju in a fancy department store, 7-11 daifuku at midnight–it’s all good.  Great, even.  (Yes, there are 7-11s in Japan.  If it weren’t for 7-11 and their competitor Lawson’s, I would not survive.)

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Yeah, I know that you’ve never seen a man-eating rabbit.  I mean, neither have I–if I had, I wouldn’t be alive and sitting on the back porch smoking a cigarette, would I?  But, the man-eating rabbits leave traces, like everything else.  Crossing the boulevard St-Michel the other day, I saw this sticker:

Here’s the thing: no, you’ve never seen a man-eating rabbit.  But, like everything else, they leave traces, and sometimes they do so deliberately.  Propaganda.  Man-eating rabbit propaganda.  Why suspect us, indeed.  (Fun, and little-known, fact: inter-annotator agreement, a fundamental measure of corpus linguistics, has its roots in the pre-WWII study of propaganda.  Check out Krippendorff’s book Content Analysis: An introduction to its methodology for the story.)  Why English-language man-eating rabbit propaganda in Paris?  I don’t know–possibly because the man-eating rabbits know that the boulevard St-Michel is infested with non-French-speaking tourists.  Possibly man-eating rabbits just have so much disdain for les valeurs républicains that they can’t be bothered to pick up a fucking dictionary.  Who can understand the thought processes of a man-eating rabbit (beyond their obvious nastiness)?

What Japan knows that the Western world doesn’t: it’s not a man in the moon–it’s a rabbit.  It’s a rabbit that is pounding mochi.  

Japan has given the world some wonderful things.  Judo, the “gentle way,” with its philosophy of mutual benefit between humans as the best way forward.  (Yes, it is the opposite of stupid “America First” isolationism.)  Ramen, the noodle dish that surpasses any other known human food for its comfortingness, yumminess, and general ability to make the world feel like a good place.  (Yes: aligot is a strong competitor.)  And something that people are, in general, less aware of: the rabbit in the moon, that constant reminder that we must always, always, always be vigilant.  Vigilant of the man-eating rabbits.  Vigilant of zombies.  Vigilant of petulant man-babies who would sacrifice America on the altar of their own narcissism, pathetically weak ego, and financial profit.

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It’s 2 AM and it’s been less than a week since the last time that I crossed an ocean, so I’m jet-lagged and sitting on the back porch having a cigarette.  There’s a full moon.  It’s warning me.  It’s warning you.  It’s warning all of us.

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English notes: bare relative clauses

It is an unfortunate fact that in English, relative clauses can–and it sounds perfectly natural–appear without their relativizer.  What that means: a week since the last time that I crossed the ocean can also be said a week since the last time I crossed the ocean.  In the second case, the last time I crossed the ocean is known as a “bare” (basically, “unclothed”) relative clause.

Leaving out the relativizer (in this case, that) is totally natural in the spoken language, and as far as I know, it’s totally fine in the written language, too.  Not all thats can be omitted.  I think it has something to do with whether the relative is “restrictive” or “non-restrictive;” unfortunately, despite having a doctoral degree in linguistics, I’ve never quite grasped the difference between them, so I can’t say anything more on the subject.  Try this web page, and explain it to me if you can.

Bare relative clauses are totally English, but I suspect that they must be very difficult for non-native speakers who don’t yet have an excellent command of the language, so I try to avoid them in this blog.  Here I’ll give you bare and non-bare examples of relative clauses from this blog post, just to familiarize you with the issue:

Bare: It’s 2 AM and it’s been less than a week since the last time I crossed an ocean, so I’m jet-lagged and sitting on the back porch having a cigarette.  There’s a full moon.  It’s warning me.

Not bare (there must be a term for that): It’s 2 AM and it’s been less than a week since the last time that I crossed an ocean, so I’m jet-lagged and sitting on the back porch having a cigarette.  There’s a full moon.  It’s warning me.

Bare: You know how I know the adorable little Monty Python killer rabbit is not a real, actual man-eating rabbit?  Because he let some of the humans get away.

Not bare: You know how I know that the adorable little Monty Python killer rabbit is not a real, actual man-eating rabbit?  Because he let some of the humans get away.  (Note that this one is almost certainly not a restrictive/non-restrictive issue–the relative clause is not modifying a nominal group.)

Bare: And if there is one thing Japanese culture and French culture share, it is an obsession with food.

Not bare: And if there is one thing that Japanese culture and French culture share, it is an obsession with food.