Word: geishas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bill Clinton, of course, was Niagara itself. He drenched the American people with an incredible flow of questions/dilemmas/soap operas about himself, his wife, his intern-geisha, his midnight pardons. The Music Man managed to turn even something as banal as the cost of his postpresidential office space into an outraged debate. The narcissist in the information age: "Enough about me. What do YOU think...
...that is to say, about once a year, the Japanese press gets excited about Western school textbooks. More specifically, the press gets excited about the way Japan and the Japanese are depicted in Western school textbooks. A collective howl goes up over the fact that pictures of samurai and geisha still prevail in textbooks from Louisiana or Bavaria or Scotland or wherever. Such images might suggest to ignorant foreigners that modern Japanese still go around brandishing swords. These findings are often followed by instant soundings taken in Paris or Chicago to find out what Westerners really think of Japan...
...What do you think of Japan?" is also how ritual exchanges between less celebrated Westerners and Japanese taxi drivers begin. The required answer is as bound by ritual as the question. Certain stock phrases are to be avoided. Admiration of samurai, kimono, Mount Fuji or geisha is, on the whole, not well received. For, like those wrong-headed textbooks, this might suggest that modern, international, metropolitan Japan is not sufficiently appreciated...
Given the overwhelming success of Western books with "geisha" in the title, it is understandable that contemporary Japanese are a little touchy about what some call "the Fujiyama-geisha view of Japan." It is indeed patronizing to admire a country only for stereotypical images of the past. To be sure, anyone who tells a Japanese taxi driver that he is from Chicago will be subjected to remarks about gangsters, and Dutch visitors will hear more about tulips and windmills than they might wish, but that is different. They are not Japanese...
...Japanese have been seen as proud warriors and shy bureaucrats, courtesans and devoted daughters, a most cultured people and the most barbaric. Western directors like Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour) and Steven Spielberg (who will achieve a Japanese trilogy if he ever adds the long-deferred Memoirs of a Geisha to 1941 and Empire of the Sun) have joined such local masters as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu and Nagisa Oshima in trying to define the bold, elusive Japanese psyche...