Greetings, all! I’m here to offer you the latest news and my thoughts on J-Pop, and to a lesser extent, anime. I thought I’d introduce myself with a brief speculation on what it means to be a Japanophile (or, in the vernacular, “Weaboo” or “Wapanese”). Now, not all of you may consider yourselves such, outright; but for some crazy reason, I suspect I’m not the only one.

The alert-looking chap above is the nineteenth-century journalist Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first, and perhaps still the best-known self-professed Japanophile. Of Greek origin, Hearn moved to the states, married a Creole woman in a rather conservative time, got divorced, went blind in one eye, and chanced to be sent on assignment to Japan. The rest is history. Through his “Kwaidan” (a collection of horror stories) and other essays, Hearn provided some of the first popular scholarship on Japan to the West, and largely without the patronizing tone of his contemporaries.

As a collector of stories, Hearn was interested in more than the surface of Japan. All the same, in spite of marrying a Japanese woman and living there until his death, he never bothered to learn much Japanese. Donald Richie (the film critic, and another well-known Japanophile) observes, taking into account his partial blindness, that he was accordingly “blind as well as deaf, and this assured his happiness.”

There are, to be sure, unfortunate phrases in Hearn about the “charm” of quaint old Japan; but generally speaking, Hearn seemed to know that no matter how “strange” he found Japan, it couldn’t possibly be objectively stranger than he was himself.

I studied abroad in Japan at Tokyo’s Sophia University, where an American classmate confided to me: “I’ve noticed that most people who like Japan tend to be really weird.” To which he added, after a significant pause: “Me too. Probably.”

My favorite story from my own time in Japan is as follows: I visited another American who was teaching with the JET Program in Hita, a miniscule town outside of Fukuoka (of Excel Saga fame). We went down to the local watering hole and seated ourselves at the bar next to three men, from whose conversation it became immediately obvious were yakuza. But they were friendly; we bought each other drinks and began to sing karaoke. The older man with the suit and crew-cut whom I took for the boss addressed my friend (who, being older and speaking better Japanese, he took for the “boss” of us), imploring him to sing that “cool American song, you know the one…” It turned out, after some interpretation, the song he meant was “I Want It (That Way)” by the Backstreet Boys.

Of course, I tell this story to get a laugh; but what means did that provincial mob boss have for knowing the Backstreet Boys aren’t, by American standards, anything like “cool?” These sort of cultural infatuations are something to laugh about, certainly; and we should laugh at ourselves; but I contend it isn’t anything to be ashamed of. If anyone were to call that yakuza a cultural analogue of “Weaboo,” I suspect he’d soon be residing at the bottom of Fukuoka bay.

Hence, I propose a new term by which “people like us” should self-identify: Hearnoid.

Think it will catch on?

In closing, a popular phrase in the discourse of Japanophilia is attributed to Oscar Wilde: “There is no such country as Japan. There are no such people.” The source of this line is the philosophical dialogue The Decay of Lying, the upshot of which is that, roughly, art should not be concerned with “realism,” shouldn’t take itself so seriously; and that, ultimately, only by giving itself over to fantasy and “lying,” can it truly approximate reality.