SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS / How verbal humor can hurt in visual world

Roland Kelts / Special to The Daily Yomiuri

I was supposed to be on a plane to Tokyo a few weeks ago to shoot a segment for a BBC documentary on language and visual culture, both of which I write and care about deeply. Aside from being half-Japanese, raised in the United States and living in both countries, I have come to appreciate the uniquely visual nature of expression in Japan, from its ideographic language to its digitally animated landscape, and what it might tell us about the future we are all rapidly inhabiting.

I have also long been startled by the degree to which Americans, especially the young, have been drawn to cultural artifacts like manga, anime and fashion from an archipelago so far from their own shores, and so fundamentally different in nature and history. I wrote about these unexpected convergences in my book, Japanamerica.

The BBC show was to be hosted by Stephen Fry, the British celebrity and author. Fry is ubiquitous in England, as I learned when I lived in London, and I was immediately attracted by the opportunity to meet him and stroll around Tokyo game parlors and maid cafes, jousting with his wit and engaging his curiosity. It also seemed like a unique soft power alliance: Britain's keen allegiance to language and verbal expression tied to Japan's animated visual icons, wrapped into a neat little package by producers who were clearly keen on getting it right.

In early January, someone kindly sent me a link through Twitter about a potentially explosive story. A satirical BBC quiz show called QI ran a segment called "the world's unluckiest man," featuring the late Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the most well-known survivor of both atomic bombs dropped thus far, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In typical British fashion, the show asked whether Yamaguchi might be the unluckiest man, or the luckiest, given that he survived both bombs and lived to be 93, though he lost a wife and son to radiation-instilled cancers.

In video footage, one can easily see, if one speaks and understands English fluently, that the hosts are tiptoeing around the obvious visual offense, trying to strike a balance between humor and respect. How could one man even catch a train to Nagasaki from Hiroshima after the first bombing, the hosts ask, when in Britain, trains are stopped for leaves falling across the track?

Problem is: They ask the question below a provocative visual backdrop. The visual juxtaposition of Yamaguchi's earnest face sandwiched between two mushroom clouds above three jovial white men in Hawaiian shirts and leis is immediately antagonistic, whatever the script.

Unsurprisingly, the footage didn't play well in Japan, especially when interspersed with scenes of Yamaguchi recounting his horrors in contemporary Hiroshima and of his surviving daughter voicing her outrage at transcultural insensitivity. In our age of instantaneous visual language, all subtlety was lost.

In response to a formal complaint from the Japanese Embassy, the BBC issued a formal apology.

Two weeks ago, after being informed of where I would meet the crew, host and director for lunch, I was told the entire shoot would need to be canceled. Threats against Fry's welfare were dutifully recorded and conveyed by the embassies: This was not a good time for him to visit Japan.

Naturally, I have personal reasons behind my disappointment. I was hoping to meet Fry, hoping to get exposure for my work, and most important, hoping to have another outlet for explaining Japan's unique visual culture to a broader audience.

But the event also reminds me of how illiterate visual culture can become. We like to celebrate our many facile contacts via digital media, whether through Facebook, Twitter, Mixi, YouTube or others. But how well do we actually know one another?

A simple verbal explanation of the BBC's wry asides about Yamaguchi might have gone a long way toward rescuing Fry's reputation in Japan. He had no intention of offending or insulting Yamaguchi or other Japanese--and he poked much more harshly at British Rail. While it was risky to raise the name of the best-known survivor of both atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a more patient understanding of the tone, context and language could have gone a long way toward making the BBC's apology acceptable and their error comprehensible in Japan. Now Fry is seen in Japan as a villain, when mere entertainment was clearly his goal.

The sad irony is that a BBC program conveying and celebrating the global reach of Japan's soft power was aborted by soft power turned hard.

Humor rarely travels well, which is why counterexamples are so special. When I hosted an evening with Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami at University of California, Berkeley, a few years ago, I was struck by how well he understood his American audience, making successful jokes about missing a World Series playoff game and a meeting with Radiohead's Thom Yorke in Tokyo just to be on stage, and how Californians in the audience should consider themselves lucky that he'd showed up. As globalization renders our borders less rigid, we're all going to need such wits to stay sane. And a bit of forgiveness can go a long way toward understanding, respect and appreciation.

Kelts is a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He is the author of "Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S." (www.japanamericabook.com), now updated and out in paperback. His column appears twice a month.