You're saying that choosing your own death is freedom?

[thistlechaser]

I'm paused in the middle of ep #63 (Naruto) because... Ever get that feeling that there's a massively important thought, some connection you've never made before, just out of your mental reach? You can brush it with the tips of your fingers, but you can only feel the shape of this new idea, you can't get a hold of it. Something like that is happening.

Throughout this series I kept saying "this is just so messed up!" about various social, familial, and inter-personal interactions. Characters' deaths, choices, decisions, actions, while they weren't unrealistic, were so foreign. Not just "foreign" as in from another culture, almost as foreign as if they were from some other species.

But it all fits, really. I can't get a firm hold on this image/thought, but I can sense how modern day Japanese culture evolved from these things -- and in some cases, I can see these same exact sort of choices still being made today.

Anime offers lots of things (utterly new and unique stories, characterization you'd never find in our everyday TV and movies, etc), but it's these glimpses into another culture which I think I enjoy the most. Japanese people aren't foreign to Americans in the same way Germans or French or British people are, and so it's especially wonderful and interesting to get these glimpses of how deep the differences are.

Imagine, watching a "cartoon" with an anthropological eye...

(Ep 63: Neji's defeat and backstory. His sad homelife.)

Comments

[evilgrayson.livejournal.com]

Every nation has its own mindset. The American mindset is very different from the Arabian mindset, which is very different from the Indian mindset and so on. One of the things I really enjoy doing is finding out how people from another part of the world think - reading older literature and watching their films definitely helps with that.

I'm not yet up to scratch on the Japanese mindset, but I found the mental shift needed to read translated manga running right-to-left was yet another piece of the puzzle.

Until you can understand that another people doesn't think the way yours does, they're going to be alien and communications are destined at some point to fail because of it. The tragedy is how few people actually *realise* this. Even the English and the Americans, while their mindsets are similar, are still just that little bit alien to each other.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yep, makes sense.

[countrymouse.livejournal.com]

You're saying that choosing your own death is freedom?

Not that I think I could or would do this...but isn't this what happened at Masada?

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Not for the same reason as in the ep, but the basic idea is the same. (Choosing death over enslavement/capture/being killed.)

And agreed, I don't think I could/would either. After all, you don't know how the situation might change in the future, and if you're dead you can't take advantage of anything that might happen to later free you...