I am not a fan of introductions

 

Introduction

I am not a fan of introductions.

Indeed, now that I am sitting here and feeling like writing something, I experience this awkward situation of hearing an inner voice telling me, “You need to introduce yourself first!” It is a new blog, after all. (I wonder about its lifetime expectancy already.)

But what might be a worthwhile introduction, or a worthwhile first blog post?

Perhaps I can try the biographical approach. I read multiple times that for historians—and at least partly I still do consider myself one (hence the punny blog title: who gets the reference?)—the art of autobiographical writing is an enlightening exercise. And biography, theory of biography, that is one of the things I developed an interest into. (Expect me to write about this in the future. Also, puns are an interesting thing: they are supposed to be funny, but we all know they are not.)

What is interesting about biography in this day and age is that it is perceived as so anachronistic: once, there was the idea of the linear human narrative, but that has long since become an anachronistic form. In our accelerated society, or so I thought last weekend while reading social philosopher’s Hartmut Rosa’s Beschleunigung und Entfremdung (published in English as Acceleration and Alienation), the fragmentation of the self in light of our all-to-quickly changing late modern capitalist society, and thus the end of the popularity (or, better: relevance?) of the linear story of a life in biographical writing, are so obviously related. But simultaneously, the already-anachronistic linear narrative brimming with purpose feels so much more attractive, because it provides the safety of a congruent worldview, of a meaning in a world that seems to be increasingly stripped of all meaningfulness, assimilated into an ever-growing stream of hyper-personalized data.

This is precisely what makes it difficult for me to introduce myself in the form of a linear, congruent fashion, an approach that raises the expectations of a self brimming with the self-confidence of a populist wannabe-dictator—or a professional youtuber. And of course, the ideas that I digested (and way more often, not-yet-digested) over the years are desperately trying to tell me the same: if, like so much contemporary biographic writing insists, the objective of a (late?) modern biography is to tell the story of a life in its dialectical relationship with society, then this precise society makes it increasingly difficult to tell a life that makes sense.

It may be my age—at least I am starting to feel my age, having spent my youth in a world without the mass phenomenon known as internet, but some things out there do appear increasingly puzzling.

Motivation

But either way, history. I have no conclusive idea how I ended up doing history, and I do not know if it is the right place to call home anymore. At least I do know why it is Japanese history, of all things, at least: I blame videogames. I blame that I played Donkey Kong Jr. when I was what must have been four years old, and spent many of the following years with consoles by Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. Anime eventually came, as well, as did fantasy: Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons. I have not played the latter, or any of its kind, in years now. There was a short attempt at getting into Shadowrun a couple years back. Cyberpunk always seemed to be the other fascinating “thing” next to fantasy (and Shadowrun, at the time, was the fusion of both), but a contemporaneous “cyberpunk”—one stripped of the passé futurism characteristic of the 1980s, that replaces everything with wireless connections, augmented reality, that went with the times, that is something else entirely. In many ways, our accelerated world has made cyberpunk, the aesthetics of cyberpunk, a strange anachronism, an object of nostalgia. An imagined future from the past being an object of nostalgia is a strange idea.

Videogames seem to have changed a lot, as well. Mostly towards a faux-nostalgia enshrined in an idea of “retro” that lost its meaning, and on the other hand, towards what feels like sameyness. Not like games have ever not been samey to some extent. Any cultural tradition requires shared forms to be intelligible, to carry meaning (such as music). But in light of the reluctance of standing out by being different, the economic virtue of risk assessment appears to reign supreme in this day and age, taking precedent over the aesthetic qualities that are claimed to be so central to the distinction between art and mere entertainment. Experimentation used to be mainstream. At least my memory seems convinced that it used to be.

Anime certainly has changed, too, but for some reason, it doesn’t irk me as much: the production has changed, the OVA-format is all but vanished and the TV-format has become the dominant form. We have different fads now. There are rarely mecha anime anymore, and the grand space opera is all but forgotten, but portal fantasy and the like seem ubiquitous. For some reason I quite enjoy the latter. (Expect me to write something on these things.) And perhaps, oh, likely, also on music. Guitar, I always tell to myself, I started late, perhaps too late. But still, it means something to me, even now. Of course, I have gotten worse than I used to be, and I feel dissatisfied with this state. Of course, I am infatuated with the 90s, with Seattle grunge, and with the old visual kei of bands like Luna Sea and L’arc en Ciel. (I just need to put on Luna Sea’s No Pain now.) Again, (popular) music is a part of our world where it seems to have become difficult to find something that moves me in the same way as old things did.

Education

All of these interests somehow made me drop my initial plan—it wasn’t a plan, really, just a “rational choice” to not inconvenience my parents—of studying bio-informatics (it was a new thing at the time, I believe), and enroll in Japanology instead. This was a long time ago.

History, despite having been under-represented in the curriculum is something I ended up with through a series of coincidences. My first seminar paper ever was on the three unifiers: Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu. It probably was horrible, I honestly lost it. I also intentionally lost my second paper because I was appalled at its quality when I found it many years later. That one was on the idea of mujō in the Heike monogatari. In neither case I had any say about the topic.

After that, nothing historical until my undergrad thesis. I had no idea on what to write, and back then writing on videogames or anime was still kind-of-uncool (at least there was not that much literature you could have used easily). This, too, has changed. But anyway, I wanted to do something on samurai, but not on Sengoku. Everyone seemed to only care about Sengoku. Mainstream is boring, you know? And so, I wrote on the emergence of the warrior class. Farris and Friday were my main references. Mass was another. Years later, my master was on Hōjō rule in the late Kamakura period. I only used Japanese sources for that one. (Not like there would be many alternatives.)

And now? I wanted to—even was supposed to—continue the subject into the doctorate, as is typically the case, but I ended up with the conviction that one cannot possibly adequately understand, and certainly not satisfactorily (re-)present later developments without understanding what came before; and research outside of Japan seems so behind the times (as does research in Japan, but for so very different reasons). I don’t really even know why the subject matter fell out of grace, was buried with the late Jeffrey P. Mass, but evidently, it was. As if all had been said. As if history could ever reach the state of "all being said"! History, as I see it, is about meaning, and how can meaning ever be final? And so now my struggle has become the “Era of Masako,” but in the end, in my mind, even this is just a prelude. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to write more than the overture. And perhaps I’ll write more about what I mean, what I thought when writing these lines. I doubt anyone can understand them sufficiently enough without explanation. Maybe it is noticeable somewhere in these paragraphs that after history, philosophy roared its mighty head, and is ever becoming more enticing. Perhaps not everyone doing history eventually starts asking “Why am I even doing this?” and then embarks on a journey for serious answers. I certainly did. Indeed, why are we doing what we are doing, anyway? (No Pain is still playing. It may be my favorite song of this band.)

And now, I do not know why, I finally am learning to care about—no, perhaps I should say: be concerned with—the present again. Looking back, perhaps the interest in games, fantasy, and history—and in history of times long gone—was a means to escape from a present that seems to be oppressive, increasingly intrusive, and genuinely alien.

But alas. This may be it for introductions. When I was younger, I tried to write, fiction. Fantasy, of course. And now, many years later, I think that I have not written anything in a long time without being overly conscious. Without being restrained by an academic straight-jacked, constrained, struggling for air, imagining the audience, the purpose. Always caring about construction, and arguments, and careful order. Leaving this sensation behind, what is left is “real,” some would claim. “Authentic,” others. I’m not sure what real even is, and being authentic increasingly feels like a mistake in our age (just take a look at job advertisements). But it is free, in a sense, as free as one can be when seeing no way to escape from the semiotic spiderweb of a language they didn’t grow up with.

Someone recommended me writing as therapy. Maybe it helps.