Joking aside, I did enjoy the book, I have quite an obsession with all things Japanese, culture, language, all of it. So I enjoyed getting a look at a part of Japanese culture that I had previously never heard of. Prior to this book being added to the list I didn't even know what a geisha was, now I have gotten a good view of how that whole system works.
I'd like to point out now that, contrary to the popular perception of geisha, they are NOT prostitutes. The funny thing about this is that when I asked what exactly a geisha was and the job was described to me, my first reaction was "so they're really fancy prostitutes... okaaaaay why am I going to be reading about this?" Those were probably not my exact words, but that's basically it. After that was cleared up I read the book and was amused to find that the author, when she talks to people about her profession, always comes across the same misconception.
As for the book itself, I can't think of many things that I learned that would really fit here, my personal interest in Japanese things isn't exactly a academic level topic. I did notice (not for the first time, but probably one of the more striking ones) that women are a lot more convoluted then men. The relationship between Chiyo and Hatsumoto is quite effective at illustrating this. When a guy hates someone we try to avoid said person, failing that we make our dislike clear in some simple and straightforward way or we put up with it and then avoid the person in the future. Women, on the other hand, are a lot more spiteful. As a guy, I can say with certainty that I would never go through the process of formulating and executing plans as extreme as the ones Hatsumoto and Chiyo (with the aid of others) used on each other. Honestly I couldn't really comprehend how anyone could be so malicious to another person, I can't really describe my reaction except with a picture.
Well I suppose all of the guy vs girl jokes had to come from somewhere...
So admittedly that wasn't exactly academic level material either, so now for something that is.
Towards the end of the book Gion, the city where all the geisha worked, was closed due to the Japan vs America war going poorly. The author makes a comment at one point when she sees American troops driving down the streets of Japan that goes something like "these Americans blew up two of our cities a few weeks ago and now they're driving down the street tossing candy to children?"
I found this comment interesting, it is true that we dropped our first nuclear nukes on Japan, then subsequently helped them to rebuild. It strikes me as odd that we would even bother trying to atone for something like that, we turned two major cities into craters, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and then we go and say "oh, sorry about that, please accept our apologies and let us help you fix those cities of yours and we can put all of this behind us."
Please refer to the previous picture for how I feel about that. Many people respond with anger, but the Japanese did decide to launch a surprise attack on us when we were trying to stay neutral, and during that attack they even went so far as to bomb our hospitals, which was an unforgivable offense on their part. So I can't really get mad that we retaliated with extreme measures after they set the bar that high, so I can only shake my head at the attempts to compensate for our actions and wonder what drugs our government was on back then.
To make things clear, I don't approve of our nuking two cities filled with people. However costly it would have been to invade via ordinary means, there were other options. For one we could have nuked an uninhabited area to demonstrate the power of our bombs, the Japanese would still have had to surrender to our unstoppable power, and a lot of lives would be spared. Or we could have decided to only bomb ONE city, why we had to bomb TWO cities within a few hours of each other is beyond me, blowing up the second city was simply overkill, that fact can't be argued even if you believe the first bomb wasn't already overkill. I don't approve of our actions, but I don't feel angry about it because the Japanese did pretty much start the war with a disclaimer that said "rule number 1, there are no rules, this is a no holds barred death match, so we're going to bomb your hospitals of sick and elderly people, have a nice day!" When you do something like that you have to own the consequences, no matter how extreme.
So, long story short, this book was quite enjoyable, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn a bit more about Japanese culture, or to anyone who wants an inside look at what they've got coming to them after making a young woman very angry, but that's about it.
I'd also like to call for a celebration, I am now officially caught up on my blogs! Now I have blogged on every book I have read, and so long as I don't fall behind again it shall remain that way. So hip-hip-hooray for that, and I'll see you all in a week or so once I've finished my next book and am ready to blog again.
No comments:
Post a Comment