Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Let's Talk About Weird Japan" video.

  1. Love the nuanced tone you used on this topic Greg... I often talk about this but in a way more sharp tone. xD Put simply, the stuff you usually see on international news coverage, specially for countries like Japan on a western publication, is often times sensationalized, exaggerated, or made to look weird/unique on purpose. There is a secondary intention there, and it's often not a great one. It changes at times, but sometimes it's demeaning (as in, our culture is superior to theirs), sometimes it's fetishization, sometimes it's targetting specific subcultures to make it look like it's a mainstream thing, sometimes it's for the clicks or for the views... And it's also often in a judgemental tone, not to provoke discussion or to make people think, but rather superficial and one sided. Which is quite unfortunate. I often say that if your own culture was seen through the lenses often applied by international news about Japan, or other foreign countries, it'd look as "weird" if not weirder. You don't even have to go that far I guess... tabloids will usually give a sense of how that goes. But still, tabloid news is not the same as international news because at least on tabloid news you have the full expectation that it's purposedly made that way for the clicks. International news often portray themselves as serious, composed, when they often actually are not. It gets to a point where a whole ton of these weird things that are often covered in international news are there mostly for tourists instead of japanese people. The weirdest thing most tourists will think about Japan when they visit there will probably be how not weird Japan actually is. It's a really good exercise to go through all these supposedly weird and unique things that are often talked about Japan, and see if there isn't something there in your own culture that looks or sounds extremely similar. Look hard enough, you'll often find that there actually is. I'll just talk about one thing that came up recently that is not an example of weird thing, but how international news tend to distort things, in this case by shallow coverage: the "Fukushima disaster". Fukushima is actually the 3rd biggest prefecture in Japan, the Daiichi power plant tsunami flooding and subsequent meltdown was bad, but the plant is located on the west coast of the prefecture, and the area that is still dealing with problems around ionizing radiation is a radius of a few miles around the plant, not much more than that. It was catastrophic, I'm not trying to diminish how severe the whole thing was, but it affected an area much smaller than most people imagine. The vast majority of the prefecture was not affected all that much, and it's a prefecture that almost reaches all the way to the east coast of Japan... it has lots of mountains, lots of onsens, lots of interesting stuff to see, different terrains, lots of cities and culture, lots of stuff that even most tourists don't see (because most tourists only go to Tokyo and Kyoto)... because it's a huge prefecture, not only a power plant. And yet, as it was labeled "Fukushima disaster", people specially from outside Japan thinks the entire prefecture is condemned or something, when not even the capital city of Fukushima which is located more towards the north of the prefecture didn't change much. :P I don't think many people realize this, but the capital of Fukushima, that has the same name, never saw anything related to ionizing radiation out of the Tohoku 2011 disaster. They had problems in infrastructure and public transportation because of the earthquake, but that's mostly it. So I think it's awesome that Greg often makes videos de-mystifing Japan... I think it's needed, because it's something you don't see a lot on traditional media.
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