Reddit Reddit reviews Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan

We found 14 Reddit comments about Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan
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14 Reddit comments about Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan:

u/amaxen · 38 pointsr/AskSocialScience

Alex Kerr wrote a book critical of Japanese Culture and Government called Dogs and Demons: The Dark Side of Japan which is fascinating.

One of the things he goes into is how and why Japanese culture has become nearly completely infantalized over the last 30 years - Kurowsawa being replaced by Pokemon and Hello Kitty. Put simply, he posits that Japanese society has become so intensely bad that the only time of life that the Japanese are happy is early childhood, and so they turn to symbols of that childhood as comfort from 'real life'. It's deeper than that, but that's the tl;dr: Kawaii Culture

NYT Review:
https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15samuelt.html

>Alex Kerr, in his fascinating 2001 essay Dogs and Demons, after describing how the Japanese society infantilizes its own people because of an old obsession with control over everything (think about bonsai as the extreme control of nature, for example), quotes the writer Fukuda Kiichiro:

>> « One could say that social control in Japan has come to invade the private realm to an extreme degree. Of course "control" does not take place if we have only people who want to control. It's a necessary condition to also have a majority of people who wish to be controlled. It's the same mechanism that sociologists call "voluntary subjugation." That is, people who wish to be controlled struggle to bring about control over themselves. It's related to the fact that children in high schools and students in universities never tire of having their teachers advise them what to do. Japanese college students are not adults who bear rights and responsibilities - they should all be called "children." »

....

>The idealization of childhood creates a context in which its eroticization can take place. The term erokawaii describes something which is at the same time cute and sexy, but this usually applies to grown-up women or girls in their late teens and therefore can be interpreted as a Japanese version of Western «sexyness» (there is a common idea among Japanese girls that their beauty is of a different kind than the Western one, that they are 'cute' rather than 'beautiful'). However, another term refers to the eroticization of children: lolita complex (commonly lolicon) and its variant with little boys shotacon. Lolicon is a sexual deviance but also a subculture that flourishes legally, mainly through underground comic books with explicit sexual depictions involving characters who are visibly underage. This tendency is marginal but such products are nevertheless easily accessible as many Akihabara shops, for example, sell them in their adult sections (and by adult sections, I mean 5-story shops). It's a real market, and even in mainstream cultural products (video games, animés), including children in the cast (for example in dating simulation games) has become usual.

Japanese Culture has a large influence on other Asian countries. I don't know if Japan is the only reason for this infantalizing, but it's definitely a force in it.




u/nukumi · 8 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I suppose there were two times when I debated whether or not to continue studying Japanese.

1-Grandma who was paying for my college basically told me I was a traitor to my country for wanting to learn about a culture/people that we had gone to war with in the past. It took many sessions of me explaining to her that people are people no matter where you go, and you can't blame a whole country for the actions of a few individuals. She eventually came around, and even started to show an interest in Japanese things (she actually went to acupuncture session). It really disheartened me to have my family tell me to stop dreaming and study something "real" though.

2-My friend recommended this book to me, and after I was only half way though I'm fairly certain I started to cry and actually gave up Japanese for a time. I suppose I was (rather) sheltered and didn't realize how dirty and ugly the world can really be behind the golden veil of news and media. It took me awhile to recover, but I did pull through.

Every time something came along to trip me up, I always remember the first time I tried to translate something from Japanese. I sat down at the kitchen table and didn't look up until almost 7 hours later. That's when I knew nothing would stand in my way. (Don't be impressed, I maybe made it like 10 pages and didn't understand a word of it.)

tldr; Haters gonna hate. Do what you want and don't worry about 'em.

u/taro-topor · 8 pointsr/japan

>pride in cleanliness?

Huh?

  • Trashed beaches

  • Sacred Mount Sewage (Mt. Fuji)

  • Concreted rivers and coasts (government sponsored littering)

  • Gray vistas of an endless urban fractal of grimy concrete

    Read Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons
u/xnoybis · 5 pointsr/AskAnthropology

Dogs and Demons: The Rise and Fall of Modern Japan by Alex Kerr.

This is an important read that bypasses a lot of the Japanophiles' microscopic worldview.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0809039435

u/phreakymonkey · 3 pointsr/environment

Japan's numbers might be low because Japanese bureaucrats and companies historically lie through their teeth and don't even test for certain pollutants. So unless there's a reliable way of measuring CO2 output by satellite or similar, I'd take those figures with a grain of salt.

(I just happen to be reading a book about it at the moment.)

u/wolframite · 3 pointsr/japan
u/Longes · 2 pointsr/worldnews

> That's how Germany and Japan works.

Japan? Really? Japan's economy is in depression, corruption in government is atrocious (there's a modern book about it - Dogs and Demons). Japanese work culture leads to people constantly being overworked, and japanese appartments are much smaller than anything you can find in Russia.

u/mesosorry · 2 pointsr/VillagePorn

His other book, Dogs and Demons is really good. Looking for the Lost is an excellent read that's somewhat related to Dogs and Demons by the author Alan Booth. He walked the length of Japan in 1977 and wrote a book about his travels called Roads to Sata, which I highly recommend, especially if you liked Looking for the Lost (In fact you may want to read this one first).

And if you find you enjoyed Roads to Sata, then read Hitching Rides with Buddha by Will Ferguson, who hitchhiked the length of Japan.

u/jamesinjapan · 1 pointr/sociology

I really recommend looking up David Leheny's Think Global, Fear Local http://amzn.com/0801475341 and Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons http://amzn.com/0809039435 - both books are a little more on the political side of culture, but both are extremely interesting with regards to social norms.

u/orientpear · 1 pointr/China

> Ya, the thing is, they have too damn much steel and cement stockpiled up. So if they don't spend it on big projects aasap, they will expire and the economy will simply go downhill

This is exactly what Japan did post-war which is detailed in Alex Kerr's 'Dogs and Demons'. Japan rebuilt after WW2 but the institutions that benefitted from the rebuilding, construction companies, Japan Rail, etc. kept on building after no more was needed. So Japan has too much infrastructure it doesn't need, debt at absurdly high levels, and no natural rivers anymore (they are all lined in concrete).

u/Zen1 · 1 pointr/funny

Wait, change in Japan? You must not know very much about how things work here. I'll just point you this way

u/ShinshinRenma · 1 pointr/japan

There are many great reasons for loving Japan. I love Japan, despite all of its flaws (and there are many). However, in regard to environmental awareness specifically, I recommend reading Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr. It may disabuse you of the notion that Japan is truly environmentally aware.