Rugby Culture

I think like most sports fanatics, I perversely tend to take more pleasure in seeing the teams I hate lose rather than the teams I love win. That's probably why, when England beat Australia on Saturday, my elation at the final whistle (after the most pulsating, ridiculously tense game of rugby you'd ever see) was more in seeing the utter dejectedness of the arrogant Wallabies than in the joy of the English. Australian attitudes towards the English in sport often approach, I think, a kind of reverse-snobbery, where the English are always portrayed as snooty, prissy aristocrats strutting around looking down on everybody, while the humble Australian swagmen with their Waltzin' Matilda and cans of Castlemaine XXXX bravely and cheekily try to knock them off their perches. This paradigm is trotted out every single time an Australian sporting team face the English, despite the fact that, for years, their cricket and rugby teams have been light years better than the English. But no - the Australians are always the plucky underdogs and unfailingly on the side of the angels, and the English are the evil colonialist blue-blooded poms who deserve to lose.

So suck it up, Australia. We beat you, so there.




Even better was seeing France beat the All Blacks later that day. God, do I hate the New Zealand rugby team. Like Brazil in football, it's now reached the stage where the world's media have hyped their mystique so high that the players themselves have come to believe it, and turn up to every game and do their daft Haka and expect the opposition to just roll over and lament their own temerity for even bothering to turn up. Like Brazil, they usually spend the group stages of a World Cup thoroughly battering complete minnows like Romania, before meeting a team like France who have some guts and steel, whereupon they collapse like the arrogant bullies they are.

The Haka is the stupidest spectacle in sport, in any case. It comes from that same tradition that all the old British colonies seem to have, whereby an ancient culture that has been more or less totally stamped on and eradicated is then humiliated by having its heritage robbed by the same people who perpitrated the stamping. Like the boomerang, the didjeridoo, the head-dress and the totem pole, it's the product of a sort of colonial cultural ransacking; the final insult to the natives, whose once-treasured traditions are taken out of their hands to become a spectacle for tourists and TV cameras, and, in the case of the Haka, an Adidas commerical.

It makes me sick, and nothing made me love the French more for standing right up under the All Blacks' noses during the Haka in a co-ordinated tricolore, as if to say - "No, this is culture, you idiots."

Culture

An interesting episode of Tribe last night. I was initially suspicious of the series, because it sounded like it was going to be either a set of lurid depictions of hunting and weird drug visions, or else a sort of elegaic look at disappearing noble savages who live a life of peace and harmony amongst the birds and the butterflies in the forest. Actually it's neither of those things - it's just a glimpse into communities of people who happen to live very different lives to us, but constantly surprise us as to how similar we all are. In that, I find it one of the few generally life-affirming programmes on TV.

It was fashionable at one stage for anthropologists such as Margaret Mead to proclaim that cultural patterns vary so much from culture to culture that in some societies it is the women who hunt and fight while the men stay at home and cook, in others sexual promiscuity is encouraged, and in others everybody is pacifist. In fact, even were it not for the masses of evidence to disprove those ideas, documentaries like Tribe give the lie to them; the people in those obscure, isolated societies are unusual only in one aspect - that they do not conform to any of the preconcieved notions of 'strangeness' that we might expect. In fact, we wouldn't find them any different in attitude or character to the people we meet from day to day in highly developed Western societies.

I recently came across reference to Donald Brown's list of Human Universals, a set of qualities found in all human societies, and that range from "abstractions in speech and thought" to "gossip" to "males more prone to lethal violence" to "hairstyles" to "disapproval of stinginess" to "thumb sucking" and "husband older than wife on average". The list is a huge one, and its contents really should be banal but are in fact fascinating because they essentially disprove the still-fashionable concepts of cultural relativism and societal moulding.

I remember when I went to stay with my friend Daisuke's family in Shikoku, the least developed of Japan's main islands: a place of craggy mountains and deep forests where exiles used to set up home in feudal times. As we sat around eating yaki-niku one night, Daisuke's dad suddenly blurted out that "everywhere you go, the culture is different, but the people are the same". True, and something that should be more commonly acknowledged.

I Blame Kill Bill

It's funny. In the time since I first arrived in Japan (March 2003), Japanese culture has really undergone something of a transformation. Before I left there were some upper-middle-class types in London who ate sushi for lunch, and there were some teenagers who read manga - mostly boys who liked looking at demons having sex with nubile high-school students - and of course, Pikachu was always lurking in the backwaters of our cultural byways like a sinister rumour. But Japanese fiction, art, cinema, comics and music remained very much a fringe interest.

Now it's no exaggeration to say Japaneseness is so popular that literally anything Japanese has become the watchword for coolness. Men - ordinary men, who shop at Top Man and drink lots of beer - strut around in old baseball shirts with Hanshin Tigers and Seibu Lions logos. Teenagers - and not just the geeky ones - read manga and think it's actually good. J-pop starlets like Hamasaki Ayumi and Koda Kumi are listened to. Miyazaki Hayao's films are hailed as masterpieces. Hollywood remakes Japanese horror films and considers it de rigeur to write Japanese characters into scripts. Films about Westerners struggling to make sense of how "baffling" Tokyo supposedly is win Academy Awards for Best Screenplay, even though they're really boring. Watanabe Ken is now an A-lister. Mamiko works in "The Japanese shop" and sells origami cranes for 60p a pop even though it takes her about three seconds to make one. The world has gone Japanese-mad.

Thinking back, the thing which either lit the touchpaper, or perhaps was just the first thing to signify the trend, was Kill Bill vol. 1. I remember coming back to the UK in around October 2003 for a visit and that film was everywhere, and the vast majority of the comment on it was of the nature of "I don't know about the story, but boy is Japan a cool place!" I think it rather skewed perceptions of what Japan is really like, with the way it seemlessly interwove bloodthirsty anime, female rock 'n' roll three-pieces, mafioso-style yakuza and Okinawan swordmakers into its plot. Even I, who knew that none of those things are remotely indicative of what life in Japan is like, watched that film and thought to myself "Japan is really damn cool."

The most interesting thing for me is that ordinary Japanese people are usually bemused when they hear about their country's newfound popularity. See, most Japanese people don't read much manga now but did when they were in junior high school, dislike Beat Takeshi films, think novels by Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana are generally kind of silly and depressing, don't know anything about origami and tea ceremonies, and vaguely recall Pikachu as some character who was popular ages ago and now think of in the same way that British people look back on Bananaman or Thundercats. If you tell them that now, for example, it wouldn't be considered unusual if an average British teenager plucked off the street could tell you what Cowboy BeBop is, they'd probably look at you askance and say "What's Cowboy BeBop?"

Anyway, over the next few days, I thought I'd post a few Top-5 lists of Japanese things which I think are worth investigating if, like me, you aren't particularly into samurai, ninja, manga, androgyny, slasher pics, suicidal novelists, pop stars who sing gibberish, pink things, girls who make 'peace' signs all the time in photographs, and cartoon characters with grotesquely large eyes.

First up tomorrow: music.