fireleaptfromhousetohouse:

(Epistemic status: over-simplifying a culture that is not my own for the sake of an elaborate analogy)

Supposedly, Japan remains so hell-bent on slaughtering whales as a fairly direct result of the West’s own hubris.

From the day those Portuguese landed in Nagasaki, Japan found itself on a short and brutal crash course with the Occident. There was an overbearing and one-way cultural influence even before America hit Japan with two weapons of unimaginable destructive power and made them do everything they said. 

(One wonders if they’ve become wary about any new development coming from the city of Nagasaki.)

What must really sting about this is that most of our hilarious cultural stereotypes of them wacky Japanese stem directly from Western influence. The used-panty vending machines? A product of importing European lingerie, which having come to Japan was initially only really worn by prostitutes, creating an indelible link between underwear and sexuality (beyond even the obvious). Those famously long working hours? An economic system foisted wholesale upon them by their American conquerors. Even the famously pixellated genitals of Japanese pornography only came about following the Japanese legal system’s own wrangles with the translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And whaling itself? While Japan had practiced it for centuries, it kicked into overdrive in the twentieth century because of a helpful suggestion put forward with the best of intentions to help feed post-war Japan, put forward by military governor Douglas ‘Big Mac’ MacArthur.

Eventually, Greenpeace happened, and in most of the West, slaughtering whales went out of fashion. And obviously we appealed to our Japanese allies to give it up as well - but after years of saying yes to all our weirdo demands and requests, however uncomfortably sexual in nature they might be, this time the Japanese said no.

Awkwardly, this was a time the West’s casual, blithe demands for cultural hegemony might have actually mattered, since many of the hunted whales are endangered species - and, endangered or not, are being killed in a profoundly cruel way. But did that matter in the face of getting to tell the West where they can stick their run-dry reservoir of goodwill? Did it trousers.

(More pointedly, pro-whaling Japanese have made the point that Norway and Iceland, also avid whaling nations but European, never seem to get singled out in the same way.)

Some tradcon with a Latin username has doubtless already made the comparison between the West’s not-quite-colonial influence on Japan, and the Western liberal media’s not-quite-colonial influence on the wider population of the West, better than I could (and they probably shoehorned in a reference to used-panty vending machines too). And the most obvious parallel is that, after many years of outsize influence, the well of goodwill has finally run dry at an inopportune time.

The liberal media, bluntly, has made a series of demands which many Westerners may not have liked, but found themselves obliged to go along with. Some were good ideas (racial equality), some less so (go into thousands of dollars of credit card debt). Some were received well (the war on terror), some poorly (gay wedding cakes). Swap those sentences around according to your own opinions, obviously. The point is, there is a very long list of examples of what you might call top-down governance by the back door.

Eventually, though, the massive, building, groundswell of ‘no, fuck you, we’ve done what you told us and it’s been dreadful, time for something different, time for a change, time to defy you no matter what issue it’s on or what the consequences are’ was bound to burst. And it happened over the issue of wearing face masks during a pandemic. You know, one of the times these endless blithe demands for cultural hegemony might have actually mattered.

(The Trump presidency and the broader populist right are clearly drawing on the same groundswell, but how much they actually represent it is far more debatable - particularly given how easily they’ll flip-flop on wearing masks when they predictably contract Covid themselves, or otherwise flip-flop on any issue the second it affects them.)

Looking at any anti-masker rhetoric for five minutes gives the game away - despite some tenuous efforts to seem scientific (like the popular analogy ‘if you’re wearing trousers, farts can still get out, hur hur hur’), it always, always, comes down to a slightly wheezy version of the rebel yell. They posit wearing a mask as a sign of supplication to the world government or whoever, and conversely, see the act of not wearing a mask as something like raising the Gadsden flag or launching a broadside against the HMS Royal Oak.

The liberal media, for its part, reacts as it always does: claiming that the defiance of its will is an act of objective evil that any fool could see is flatly wrong - but, most importantly, ignoring the aspect of this being a defiance of its will. Why would anyone ever want to do that, after all? Don’t they know we’re always right?