Comment by komali2
14 days ago
Japanese people are just people. They have a unique culture... Like literally every other identifiable culture on earth.
I love Cryptonomicon but it engaged in that distinctly American brand of orientalism when it got into Japanese soldiers killing themselves and whatnot.
I don't watch anime or really follow anything specifically Japanese, but I read Shogun as a teenager and then decades later (lately) I read about the Mishima Incident which attempted to restore the Emperor to power in 1970. Quite frankly the way the article was written and the events that transpired were extremely reminiscent of Shogun. The latter was written in 1975 but I am skeptical how much non-Japanese information was available about it leading up to 1975 when Shogun was published, considering this Wikipedia article has an obviously rough translation. Just the way the people involved relate to each other is quite unexpected from a Western perspective.
My tentative conclusion is that there is something really unique about Japanese culture and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mishima_Incident