I've written three diaries so far on the Japanese mind, and have learned a lot from your reaction in the comments. Last time, I used the movie “The Graduate” as a comparison point and that made a very interesting discussion. Today, I'd like to talk about “The Graduate” from a Japanese point of view. Whether this gives you an insight into Japanese thinking is for you to decide.
The movie “The Graduate” was made before I was born. I watched it on TV a long time ago. I didn’t remember much. But when we went back States few years ago, I happened to watch the movie with my in-laws. Recently I found the book in English in used book store. Then I wrote about the movie in Daily Kos in my last diary, and many people had strong feeling about it.
Until people commented on my diary, I hardly remembered the movie except for the plot points I used. Because of the Daily Kos reaction I dug up the book and finish reading it. I was hoping I would not end up hating Benjamin, as some people suggest, and have to take everything back I wrote. Luckily, (?) my impression hasn’t changed. Benjamin was sure emo, but I'm still rooting for him.
More below the exploding orange.
The Graduate was a very iconic film for us Japanese also. “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel is a common song played for graduation day in Japan. Many Americans asked me, why did we use that music, so they must heard at other schools also. I confirmed on the net, for our generation at least, this is the most popular graduation song.
It’s interesting because we love American pop music but we hardly ever know what the lyrics mean. I guess it's same as the strange T-shirt English you can see online, the words don’t mean anything to us, it's only a design. But on the unconscious level, we must had understood.
After I finished the book, I really think that Japanese can sympathize with Benjamin (secretly) more than many Americans can. Why do I say this?
Benjamin was a trophy kid, he did everything that his parents wanted him to do. He was a perfect kid until the movie started. We all sympathized with him for his denial of his education and his rebellion against the authority, even if probably he didn’t know why. We all want to be free to reject things if we want to.
I was a child in the 70s and a high school student in the 80s Japan. We didn’t know the word Emo or Hikikomori (these are the people you might have heard of, who never leave their house and reject all social contact. If you are interested I can write the diary about them). We still had a bright future ahead of us. We had a strange balance of inferiority and superiority complex. Japan was a world economic power and we had the money to buy anything. Van Gogh paintings, buildings in New York, etc. But we did these things because we felt a need to prove we belong. See? Japan are real players in the world, and deserve respect of the West. See, America? We are just like you, so please praise us.
But on the personal level, we were all suffocated. We were all confused. We were all buried under layers of expectation- what our parents want us to be, what society expect us to be. This is also true in the West, but in Japan it is much much harder to go against expectation. Individual is not respected, individual is supposed to be the good piece of the big machine. In the West, strong individual with good ideas can make their own way. In Japan, if you go against the society, it's almost impossible to find the support, because everyone is connected in a network and no one want to piss off anyone else in the network, or else they suffer too.
In The Graduate, Benjamin was promised to go to any elite graduate school. And he even got an award to pay for it. Then he totally wasted it away. That is the worst you can possible do in your life in Japan. Go against the family wishes, go against society's rules. And yet here we are in Japan, listening to this movie's theme song for graduation, and feeling the nostalgia.
When I was a kid, physical abuse was very common, every student got beat up by the teachers for no reason- only for character building maybe. And worst of all, we did nothing but study, repeat, repeat repeat. We studied so hard. We had a saying:
“四当五落” meaning, if you only sleep 4 hours we may pass the test, but if you sleep 5 hours you are sure to fail.
We had a test every single hour, we never got out from our chair unless we had to use the bathroom. I don’t think Benjamin studied that hard, but he too, obviously didn’t do that for himself. In the book, he said that he studied hard for his parents, not himself. This happened to many people in America. It happened to almost everyone without exception in Japan. As a girl, I also had the problem that I was not expect to have my own life, but rather get married, especially because I am eldest daughter and must marry first so my younger sisters can find husbands too.
What I had trouble with most was, every adult told us, the high school would be the hardest time of our life. After we graduated, we never had to suffer no more. The college kids sometime visited our school and told us, they never need to study at college, all they do was partying. The obvious question no one ask aloud was,
“Then what are we supposed to do with all the crap we study now? What is it good for?”
So, in Japan, we sympathized with Benjamin and maybe we envied him. He did what we all wanted to do, but never had a gut to do it. Probably on the unconscious level, we enjoyed the ending. and we really wanted him to make it, even if we said to anyone who listened what a terrible person he is and how he is doom to fail. I’ve never thought about that way, but this must be the reason why many of my generation loved that movie.
Now we all feel cheated… since our future was not what we were all promised. My generation, I guess they are still confused, and had no idea what happened. Like the Graduate, we still face an uncertain and troubling future, and nothing is what it was supposed to be. We still look to this old movie about an American boy and play the song at graduation to remind us of what we don't have courage to try ourselves.