I'm starting to grapple with my own (previous) fixation with Japan, and as I look out the window of the Tokyu express train to Shibuya, considering the grey sky and tightly packed buildings, I realize that I have always looked at Japan as a particularly vivid expression of human dignity/desperation. These moments come to me especially when I've got my music with me, when the shifting cityscape in front of me serendipitously harmonizes with the beat. Those are special moments to me . . . :P
At a risk of sounding obscure, I worry if I am somehow decorporealizing my Japan to a set of hazy metaphors. But at the same time, I also realize that Japan can not possibly be 'meaningful' without some romantic notions on my part. Japan used to be a fantasy-land for me, but now less and less so. And in the process, the metaphor loses meaning as well.
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But then again, I'm no worse than Roland Barthes:
"If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromose no real country by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the signs of literature). I can also -- though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) -- isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed by linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan."
Yeah, it's called "Empire of Signs."
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