Sully Sullivan’s Neighborhood

     What self-respecting middle class Westerner can deny that they have chuckled at the expense of the Japanese tourist? For decades now this beloved and despised cultural stereotype has boldly visited artistic masterpieces, grandiose palaces, breathtaking landscapes, and ancient ruins…and taken pictures of them. But now, a new

sensation has gripped the baseball hat and khaki clad throngs as they suck back their seemingly inexhaustible supply of gold tipped cigarettes: videotaping everything. Everything.
    Now videotaping is not new for the Japanese, but recent breakthroughs in digital recording technology and miniaturization have provided them with equipment that, after years of frustration, finally allows for perpetual filming. Much as the digital camera craze caused Eastern and Western tourists alike to pronounce their newfound love for taking a multitude of low quality pictures without fear of wasting film, the new wave of video cameras has inspired the Japanese to tape entire vacations.
    I recently witnessed this phenomenon on a trip to the throbbing Mecca of Japanese tourism abroad: the Musée du Louvre. The Japanese love the French; they love the uncooked proteins, the opulent architecture, the smoking and most importantly, the art. Nowhere, is this more evident than in the fifty or so square metres in front of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. It was here that I first began to notice that instead of turning their cameras off after capturing 30 seconds of shaky footage, the swarms of forty something Honda executives were turning away from the painting without closing their viewfinders.
    A change, a shift, a horrible swing had occurred: they had evolved. The logic was inescapable. If one thousand photos of Baroque facades and peace sign poses is better than one hundred, then sixty three hours of vomit inducing footage must be better than a meagre three. The alteration occurred with shocking, almost Orwellian, subtlety. Like a transfer of aggression from Eurasia to Eastasia, or a moonlight adjustment from “all animals are equal” to “some animals are more equal,” the change in philosophy occurred with the almost invisible shift of a single word. Centuries of living the Zen ethos of “be here now” ended with the unconscious decision to “be here later.”
    As the day progressed I noticed, in abject terror, that others were learning from the Japanese. For years now I have wondered about whether the difference between Western and Japanese tourists extends much beyond basic fashion sense, but now I was forced to confront the possibility that the entire world is slowly but surely turning Japanese. It seemed that all around me women from a hundred nations were directing their boyfriends or spouses in the careful art of capturing every angle and crevice of the Venus de Milo. I saw people aim their cameras at crown mouldings, museum maps and even at the floor. The object was not to capture what was interesting, but to follow the example set by the Japanese and create a copy of the entire day.
    It was like travelling to 1500 and seeing a band of natives learn how to make fire with flint instead of sticks and then watching them burn down the entire village. Was this behaviour, after so many famines, wars and pandemics, the harbinger that will signal the beginning of the end for Western civilization? Are the four horseman really just Hiro, Baku, Jin and Kaito in on business from Osaka?
    All of my fear really got me thinking about where this mania for collecting experiences like you might collect butterfly corpses really comes from. The conclusion I’ve arrived at is that capitalism, as usual, is entirely to blame. Ever since Commodore Matthew Perry and his four U.S. warships steamed into the Bay of Edo, Japan has been learning how to out westernize the West. Whether perfecting the assembly line or refining culture into commodity, Japan has embraced Western capitalism with such vigour and variety that we often lose track of the link between East and West.
    It can be difficult to see the bond between the Japanese kid with shoulder length pink hair who just scored one million points in Dance Dance Revolution and the white kid in his freshly pressed Abercrombie golf shirt firing a plastic gun at imaginary thugs, but it’s there. The two seemingly dissimilar youths occupy different positions on the same spectrum. Both of them pick their personas like products, illustrating that in today’s world we feel the need to add our own personalities to the long list of things we’ve bought and own.
    And ultimately, it’s all about owning things. It’s about trading your envy of the possessions and experiences of others into anxiety about your own. It’s about raging against the immutable property of the universe to destroy everything it has ever created.
    It’s the same urge to control the uncontrollable that you see in your pack rat neighbour who is so choked with possessions that he can barely walk through his own home. You can see the compulsion as you watch the guy in the cubicle next to you try and buff out the scratch on his brand new iPhone, cursing himself that he didn’t shell out the extra fifty bucks for the ergonomic case that would protect his baby until the sun runs out of hydrogen and gasps its last breath. This is the drive that compels us to leave that little red light on in order to try and turn our experiences into possessions. The question, as always, is how long before the possessions you own start owning you?