I have quite a lot of experience with liking Japanese things, but also with liking British and American things, both of which are also foreign to me. However, it is undeniable that my relationship with American and British media is different from my relationship with Japanese media. Partially it is just that American media is so over-represented in Denmark. In this way it feels less like engaging with a specific foreign culture. In some ways engaging with Danish media these days (not when I was a kid mind you, at that time I made less of a distinction) feels more like engaging with a specific set of media, in this case that of my own culture. This is probably partially related to having lived in Japan for a long time, but to some extent it is also related to the hegemonic presence of American stuff. That being said there are certain things I appreciate about specifically danish things and which I connect with in a different way than I do foreign media. This is both due to the language and the common shared cultural background/lived experience of growing up in Denmark.
I am a big fan of Terry Pratchett and his books feels very “British” in some sense, mostly in the writing style/humor. I read a few translated to Danish when I was young and didn’t care too much about them, but ended up loving them when I read them in English. Despite this, they do not make me feel any particular affinity for Britain as such. With most British and American media in general, I guess this is how I feel, these are just works I happen to like same as any Danish book I read growing up.
With Japanese media this is mostly true as well. But because it is so much more clearly a different culture to a young European person, which I was at the time, I did latch onto “liking anime” and from there “Japanese media” in a way that was more conscious of it specifically being Japanese. Like, I did believe that Japan just made cartoons better (although I never thought that say Japanese movies were overal better, it was pretty specifically an animation thing) and that they were different enough that something being anime in and of itself was helpful towards me liking it. Of course it didn’t mean that I liked every anime just because it was anime, it still had to be interesting. Overall there was a period where I consumed a lot of Japanese stuff, but at the end of the day I probably didn’t actually consume that much more of it compared to stuff from other places.
Nowadays I think that I am pretty much over this, but I still like a lot of Japanese things because I enjoy the specific style of presentation, which I guess can be a reasonable substitution of “because they are japanese”. There are certain common or at least often used Japanese aesthetic choices, storytelling choices etc. that I like.
Gaagaagiins
Not really directed at anything you wrote in particular, but sort of tangentially related.
Much of the world is flooded with American media and it obviously doesn’t make all of us experts on America and in the same way watching a lot of Japanese media alone will not make you an expert on Japan. That being said I think that in a bit of an over-correction there is sometimes too much push-back to the idea that the popular culture exports of a country is in any way reflective of the real place. This happens a lot with Japanese videogames and anime in particular, probably as a knee-jerk response to the weaboo stereotype, i.e. someone who believes that they are Japanese culture experts because they watch anime or defends some questionable element of an anime by claiming that it is just Japanese culture or whatever.
I guess a simple example is that a lot of of manga, anime and even live-action Japanese TV contains exaggerated gestures, speech patterns etc. and people definitely do not behave like that in real life in Japan. However, these exaggerations are sometimes based on mannerisms that I do observe in real life and the suggestion they have absolutely nothing to do with real Japanese people is often overstating the case a little, in my opinion.
Sometimes the push-back to the very silly and wrong “weird late night anime=all of japan” can be almost equally as silly. Sentiments along the lines of “actually real Japanese culture is Shinto temples, Yasujirō Ozu movies and Natsume Souseki novels, how dare you suggest that this pop culture trash is in any way reflective of Japan”. This identification of Japan with some broadly understood definition of “traditional Japanese culture” or “approved great pieces of art” is itself pretty silly and seems to be based on identifying countries with a set of traditions and important cultural products rather than as actual living cultures that exists in the here and now. Of course these elements can be important aspects of the living culture (Souseki is still read in most Japanese schools as far as I am aware), but so is popular culture. While a lot of anime and manga is certainly niche, things like Dragonball, Sailor Moon, One Piece etc. have or had a huge presence in Japan. If I talk to a random Japanese person (especially younger than 50) they are much more likely to at least know and potentially like One Piece than they are to have any idea who Ozu is.
This is of course no different from any other country, there is a reason popular culture is called popular.
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with preferring the canonized great novels or movies or that these give no insight into the culture that produced them. One can even argue that less popular stuff can give a better insight into aspects of a country, but it will also often be an insight that strongly reflects the views of the specific creators. To bring it back to anime, I love Satoshi Kon’s work and believe that e.g. Paranoia Agent has some interesting and broadly cogent critiques of some specific Japanese societal problems. However, I also roll my eyes a bit when some western anime fan brings up Paranoia Agent as some objective expression of why Japan is bad actually, in order to school some “weeb” on the internet, rather than situate it within a broader discussion.
There are other countries where my only major point of contact are a few of the canonized famous pieces of art. For example I have read quite a few Dostoevsky novels and liked them a lot. These books are certainly influenced by the Russian milieu at the time of writing and are often internationally presented as giving an insight into Russia. And I am sure they do, but at the same time I certainly wouldn’t claim that having read a few pieces of literature written over a hundred years ago gives me much insight into modern Russia.
Of course if the goal is to have an extended analytical understanding of contemporary japan or any other country, knowledge of the classics is very useful, but so is knowledge of more modern pop culture. Most of the time we don’t engage with the media of a country in order to gain this kind of understanding, however. Indeed, I doubt most of the people who watch American movies all the time are trying to obtain this kind of knowledge about America, they just watch them because they are popular and fun. It is totally fine to do the same for Japanese or other stuff. And while it will be imperfect, you will learn some stuff about the country in question and at least experience subsets of its culture.
