My cab driver uptown last night was South Korean. He moved to the city more than five years ago, but only started driving a cab in the past three months. ("Hard times," he said. "All my money tied up in stocks.") I had to guide him, street by street, to the fastest route to my apartment.
"You some kind of professor?" he asked, nodding at the book I carried (Motoyuki Shibata's excellent 9 Interviews).
"No ? I mean, not here," I said. "In Tokyo. The university over there."
This was followed by the typical run of questions and comments: Was I part Japanese? Did I like living there? Was I from New York? And: Did I know that the Japanese occupied Korea for "more than 30 years? Can you believe it? Crazy."
Turns out his grandfather had attended Waseda University, my Japanese poet grandfather's alma mater, in the 1930s ? in the thick of Japan's colonial rule, when all Koreans, he reminded me, were forced to learn Japanese and adopt Japanese names. There was no rancor in his voice. It was just a flat retelling of shared knowledge, a reaching out across the headrest dividing driver from passenger as I patiently pointed out street signs.
"We Orientals have a hard time in America, you know? Because we come from polite culture. This country is a hard place, a tough place."
I nodded in the semi-dark as we rolled to a stop, confiding that I had just published a book about the convergence of Japanese and American sensibilities.
"Ah, you're a writer. Great, great. I pray your book becomes a bestseller. There is a phrase I like ? 'try to beat the odds.' You are trying to beat the odds, and you are all alone."
I nodded again as I paid.
*
One of the ironies Americans encounter when they first view anime titles is the degree to which graphic violence and sexuality predominate ? not every title or genre, but quite a few. Japan is one of the safest developed nations in the world, and its inhabitants are, comparatively at least, known for their outward reserve and… well, politeness.
But all that emotional angst arising from the historical traumas of two World Wars, a legacy of brutal imperialism and two atomic bombs, let alone the pressures of life in a highly urbanized society still defined by rigid societal expectations has to go somewhere, doesn't it?
I'm reminded of this as the online reviews of Afro Samurai, the first big-budget Japanese and American anime TV collaboration, start to leak out. The folks at Spike have wisely decided to debut episode 1 on the Internet, a medium Japanese producers on their own have been woefully slow to comprehend. (In fact, Spike, Funimation and Japan's GDH/Gonzo have gone the extra step of running Afro banner ads on video file-sharing sites like You Tube, where the younger generation gets its anime fixes for free.)
From what I and others have seen, Afro possesses the stylistic play of shadow and light, the sinuous kinetic energy and arresting silences of what many define as Japanese anime cool ? with Samuel L. Jackson's gravelly, half-muttered baritone and the RZA's infectious beats driving home a kind of bad-ass American ghetto chic. It is also graphically, and unreservedly, violent.
Japanamerica is partly the story of how Afro and other cross-cultural collaborations have come to be. I encourage you to check Afro out (and I am not being paid to do so), either online or on TV this Thursday evening, preferably in the context of past anime titles such as Jin Roh, Evangelion, Akira and Ghost in the Shell ? all of which have become consecrated classics among the faithful on this side of the Pacific. While you're at it, and in the interest of exploring Hip Hop's convergence with anime and Japan, take a look at Samurai Champloo and Jim Jarmusch's live-action Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which the RZA also scored.
My cab driver from JFK to Manhattan before Christmas was Haitian. He hasn't been able to return to his country, he said, since the U.S.-backed military coup effectively kidnapped President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and sent him into exile in Africa. "If I do go back," he said, "I will be kidnapped on my way from the airport, and they will take all my U.S. dollars. If I don't give them my money, or if I don't have any, they will kill me. It's my own country. Can you believe it?"
Crazy.
* * *
Roland Kelts is a Lecturer at the University of Tokyo and a co-editor of the New York-based literary journal, A Public Space. His articles, essays, and stories have been published in Zoetrope, Playboy, Doubletake, Salon, the Village Voice, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and the Japan Times, among others. He currently splits his time between New York and Tokyo. Visit the Japanamerica web site to learn more.