Monday 26 May 2014

Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink




The football World Cup is almost upon us. I care less about this as I get older, but it’s still a pleasantly diverting way of killing time over the summer months. I think not living in the UK makes it a bit easier as I don’t have to deal with all the hubristic triumphalism that invariably attends the England team’s entry to the tournament, nor the weak-assed post-imperial wailing and self-abuse which accompanies their inevitable exit on penalties in the second round.

Instead I get to view it all from within Japan, and while the Japanese media are just as parochial and jingoistic as their British counterparts, my Japanese is still blessedly weak enough that it’s relatively easy to tune it all out. I can pick and choose which national neuroses I get to be exposed to, and that’s nice, y’know? I can wake up in the morning and decide whether it feels like a ‘faded yet overweening arrogance’ kind of a day, or if there’s more of a ‘pathetically inaccurate inferiority complex’ bounce in my step I can go with that instead. Who said there were no benefits to multiculturalism, eh?

Unfortunately, however, The Japanese FA seem hell bent on screwing with the pleasant state of affairs induced by my willful linguistic ignorance. They were more than happy to nickname the women’s team the Nadeshiko – a nice traditional Japanese word referencing the nice traditional values of Japanese womanhood. And while you can and should argue about the applicability of ‘traditional Japanese values’ for a group of women who continue to make their male counterparts look like a bunch of underperforming pricks (figuratively and literally) it was at least in a language where I could pick and choose my level of engagement. Not so for the men’s team. No. Their official nickname is Samurai Blue, which sounds like nothing so much as vaguely racist gay porn.

Presented here without comment


Not The Samurai Blue, you’ll note. Not even The Blue Samurai (which would have been the coolest Smurfs episode ever). Nope, just plain old Samurai Blue, which must now join the long and inglorious list of occasions when someone at some point really should have thought to consult a native English speaker or two. It is though, as ever, a question of target audience. Despite the team being about to depart for an international tournament (‘World Cup’ you see; the clue’s in the name) the real audience are the fans back home. Even the most dedicated football hipster is unlikely to choose Japan as their second team, not when there’s Chile or Belgium, so the only people who are really going to get exposed to this nickname are Japanese punters on whom the unfortunate overtones of cosplay smut are likely to be entirely lost (but who would find the Onion’s AV Club hilarious, for exactly the same reasons). Samurai Blue is, as far as they are concerned, not really a linguistic feature at all; it’s just another design element meant to signify a vague sense of international engagement and sophistication by association even if in practice it quite explicitly fails to engage on the international stage. It’s the sociolinguistic equivalent of pictures of showbiz reporters palling around with celebrities: the intended audience is meant to understand that these hacks are part of the in-group, even as the very act of signaling this supposed belonging actively excludes them from it.

There is though, however slowly and belatedly, a growing appreciation within Japan that maybe just pretending to engage for the benefit of the folks back home isn’t really going to cut it now people have access to most of the world’s knowledge sitting in the palms of their hands. Maybe, at some point in the not so distant future, it’s going to be necessary to move beyond merely appearing to engage and actually, y’know, engage with the world at large. I’m referring, of course, to the decision of Kinki University to rebrand themselves as Kindai University, thus simultaneously flying in the face of decades of ‘naughty co-ed’ porn convention and destroying the higher education ambitions of literally some American weeabo otaku-wannabe teenage boys.

Way to shit on their dreams, guys


I’m inclined to view this as a generally positive decision. Of course tertiary education in Japan is generally a joke, and merely changing a slightly ribald, mirth-inducing name isn’t going to fix the deep-seated structural problems that riddle the entire system, but the reasons given for that change at least suggest an awareness of the bigger picture that’s sorely lacking in much of the rest of the national discourse. The lack of young people in Japan; the subsequent need to attract kids from overseas and reach out; the need to slough off parochial pride if ‘tradition’ stands in the way of making tangible progress; the realization that internationalization is a two-way street (and indeed a double-edged sword) and that if you want to invite people in it can’t be entirely on your terms: all these factor into the decision to rebrand and all these are, I think, very welcome attitudes.

Of course, there’s a completely reasonable counterargument that the university shouldn’t have to rebrand, that if people – meaning English speakers – want to live and study overseas they should be willing to adapt to local customs and traditions, faintly amusing names and all, because that’s the whole point of going abroad. And there’s an even stronger case to be made that this is just another instance of linguistic imperialism, the painful homogenizing pressure exerted by English to which all other languages and cultures must inevitably yield, or face the consequences.

Well, yes. But here’s the thing – language is a means to communication, not the end itself. It’s a perfectly reasonable decision if Kindai want to change their name to appeal to a wider base. And while there are more problems with labeling a group chosen explicitly to represent your country on the international stage purely for the folks back home, Samurai Blue operates with a similar view to its target audience. It’s the (all too predictable) leakage of meaning to other audiences which is the problem. So while I will obviously mourn the passing of opportunity for innuendo in one instance, and revel in it in the other, both these branding exercises are are uses of language with clear (if not particularly strong) underlying communicative logics. And both are instances where if you have a problem with the language then you’re probably not the person it’s aimed at anyway.

Besides, we’ll always have Fucking.



13 comments:

  1. Nothing to add, except I always contradict that.

    Arististhnes to a G5 student: "You have a very lovely Japanese name, but you do realize that you must always spell it F-U-U-K-O abroad, right? Never, never forget the second 'u'."

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    1. I normally hold little truck with extra vowels when transliterating, or those bars that indicate long vowel sounds, whatever they're called, but I must admit that on this occasion you make a very valid point.

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  2. The Samurai Blue name really shits me... If you're really proud of your history, don't hang it on a bunch of guys who are barely up to playing at the international level...

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    1. What to do when your best is barely adequate? Can't blame them from trying to work with what they've got. You more than anyone should know that you can only play the hand that you've been dealt, eh? ;)

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  3. Having read Hobspawm and Ranger on football, the unsophisticated nationalism (Nippon! Nippon!) that surrounds Samurai Blue is such a tedious bore for me. The Japanese don't even seem to have the self-depreciating aspect that England fans have ('We played shit'), and every time hype themselves up about how they're going to go 'all the way', only to be let down by 'bad reffing decisions' by gaijin refs. I'm surprised that Abe hasn't jumped on the Samurai Blue nationalism bandwagon to take attention off his failing Abenomics (Abenomics- you don't hear that very often any more, do you?).

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    1. I remember Ultra Nippon by Jonathan Birchall being a pretty good book on Japanese football, but it was a fair while ago now and I imagine it'll be pretty dated by now.

      As for the hype, well, I'll just say that this is the first time since 1990 that I can remember the English mood (in the press at least) as not being at least mostly convinced we're going to win the thing. Do you really think that Japanese fans think they can win the thing? I'm not so sure.

      That said, my impression is that a lot of the more tribal idiocies that UK fans express through supporting their clubs get shifted to the national team over here. The club supporters seem to be far less one-eyed than back home, but the reverse is kinda true at the national level. Dunno what that means, and I'll be the first to admit I'm not drawing from a exhaustive sample.

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    2. Sorry, meant to reply to this weeks ago.
      I think the reason why Japanese fans display at the international level many of the tribal idiocies that UK fans show on a local level, is because the Japanese narrative of 'one people, language, blood, ethnicity, culture= ware ware nihonjin', whether real or not (and I believe not) serves to eliminate these tribal tendencies at the national level of the sport, but by the same token, actually magnify them when the national team is playing international matches against 'the other' (i.e. 'gaijin'). It is very easy for ware ware nihonjin to get tribal in the face of the gaijin barbarians.

      As an aside, I don't think they really believe they can go 'all the way', but those plucky little Japanese players are just going to 'ganbare' thier little socks off until over come by 'bigger, stronger, cheating' gaijin (or maybe bad gaijin reffing decisions) so that they can all bask in their 'Nobility of Failure' rationalizations.

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    3. To be fair, it's very easy for 'ware ware nihonjin' to get tribal in the face of breakfast :)

      'The Nobility of Faliure' is a nice line. Yours? I may well steal it ;) Either way, it's certainly a prevalent narrative though given how the opening match went I think 'bad gaijin refereeing decisions' might now represent some fairly shaky ground...

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    4. Ah, sorry, I pilfered it from Ivan Morris, who wrote a book about the Japanese romanticization of their failures as proof that they are 'special'.

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  4. My experiences with Japanese fans have always been good. (Note: "The Media" and "normal people who cheer for their team" are completely unrelated.) I personally cheer for the Japanese NT first, Holland second, and my native USA some distant time after that.

    Of course, I'm now six years removed from being on the scene there, so who knows if it's awful now.

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    1. Yeah, gotta be very careful with conflating the media with everyone else. Lord knows I'd be appalled if people thought most of the British press was entirely representative of the rest of the country. So as you may imagine, I'm appalled quite often...

      There was that business with the 'Japanese Only' banner couple of months back. It took longer than it should have, but the right noises were made eventually, so maybe not 'awful', but not particularly rosy either, is my impression.

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    2. That was Urawa, right? I have no idea why that particular team/fan set feels the privilege it does. One title does not the Japanese Man U make. The only other group that would pull a similar xenophobic trick would be Jubilo Iwata.....
      I wish I was more connected to Japanese football, but the separation pretty much kills it. On the other hand, trying to work the day after Australia beat down Zico Japan back in 2006 was pretty grim.

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    3. The train provided an odd commute on Friday morning, for many, many reasons :(

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