Hi everyone,

Not to beat the culture thread further, but a conversation with my wife this morning about Mitt Romney's trip to the UK got me thinking a bit about what might have happened had his visit been to Tokyo.

For those of you who haven't seen the news, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, is on a three-day overseas tour to meet with American allies, and some of his comments about the upcoming London Olympics rankled his hosts and virtually everyone in the British media. You can see coverage at the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/26/mitt-romne
y-london-olympics-gaffe-live?newsfeed=true
) and the other UK papers.

Let me start by saying that I'm a bit surprised and disappointed with London's response. As an American, I find it surprising and even a bit troubling that the UK felt it could host and plan the Olympics without first checking in with us. It's bad enough that we weren't consulted about the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and look at how that turned out.
I'm not saying that having Chris Brown perform a sexier version of "God Save the Queen" or the cast of "Glee"
sing a plucky "Anarchy in the UK" would solve all of the problems of the London Olympics. For that, one would need Blackwater to handle the security arrangements and the National Health Service to be privatized and management to be turned over to Bain Capital. But certainly it would be a start. And I think that Mitt Romney -- who successfully led the Salt Lake City Olympics and who has a very busy schedule -- did something really generous to fly over to London and explain sonorously why theirs will be the worst Olympics ever. One would think a little gratitude would be in order.

That said, the UK's response has largely been mockery, extending not just through the papers and television news reports, but also through the comments first of Prime Minister Cameron and then of London Mayor Boris Johnson, who referred to "this guy called Mitt Romney"
in front of 60,000 people at a pre-opening rally in London.

And this got us wondering whether this would have been possible in Tokyo. That is, when an American official says something provocative about Japan, the response is usually anger rather than mockery. And there's no shortage of available anger against the US in Japan, from the rightists who might applaud a stinging comment from Governor Ishihara or the thousands who cheered the critical references to the United States by left-leaning speakers and artists at last week's anti- nuclear protest in Tokyo. Furthermore, there's no shortage of mockery in the Japanese press, vividly seen in the recent shukanshi reports about Ozawa's embarrassing divorce. Particularly in newspaper cartoons, that mockery does extend to American candidates.

But there's something more clearly even-handed about the way in which Romney's British critics could mock him as, in essence, a boorish dunce, and I'm not sure it's entirely easy to imagine in the case of a Japanese critique of a spectacularly ill-mannered American candidate.
Or is it? I mean, after George Bush vomited on Miyazawa Kiichi, the Japanese press had some fun with the absurdity of that, and maybe this is the same thing.
But my gut is telling me that if an American presidential candidate were to come to Tokyo and express concerns about Japan's preparedness for a major international event, the debate would largely revolve around the possibility that he's right; there would be anger from those defending the preparations, but most of that would likely be described in a sober manner, not in the enthusiastic "go back to the US" language and manner of this case. My gut has notoriously bad instincts, as anyone who has ever looked at one of my NCAA tournament brackets or watched me at a Shakey's Pizza all-u-can- eat buffet can attest, so I might be completely wrong about this.

But if I'm right, I think this is an interesting issue here for culture and politics. If one were to try to explain the UK-Japan difference, one of the first place one might turn would be to an all- encompassing national culture explanation ("Brits love to take the piss out of a critical snob," "Japanese are deferential and/or don't have satire"). And yet a political scientist might instead refer to the different power relations in the two alliances, with Japan basically having an inferior role and needing the US more than the UK does (with some combination of references to NATO, China, and Article IX). That is, the "cultural"
explanation would be something about the national culture of a country, and the "political" explanation would be something narrower and more institutional.

One point I tried -- ineptly -- to make about culture in my last post was that part of what it means to explain something as a result of national culture is to take something -- an event, a practice, a decision -- out of the vast morass of Stuff That Happens In Japan (or
whatever) and depict that as meaningfully and characteristically Japanese, and in so doing, to help to construct or at least further reproduce what we mean by Japanese Culture. But the choice of what we explain or notice isn't entirely innocent; it's shaped by cultural blinders, including ones that emanate from our disciplinary concerns, from the fabric of our everyday lives, and so forth. At least in my sense, a cultural analysis has to be in part an interrogation of what we decide to consider worthy of analysis in the first place.

Again, we don't find it terribly surprising for the most part that US- Japan relations aren't marked by the kind of mockery we see in the recent Romney visit to London. My guess is that this is because of longer-term consequences of the alliance, including the ways in which the United States is represented within Japan.
But I suspect that explanations for the difference would usually revolve around something about the way Brits are or the way Japanese are, rather than the way that the US-UK and US-Japan alliances have structured appropriate and legitimate behavior for Americans, British, and Japanese alike.
Indeed, it's the normalization of certain practices -- London's ridicule of Romney, Japan's solemn if sometimes querulous responses to the United States, not to mention American responses to both, probably more respectful toward London than Tokyo -- that seems to me to be worthy of attention in a cultural analysis.

Anyway, my main point is that I would like people to show Candidate Romney a little gratitude. As president, he would, I assume and hope, also be willing to travel to other countries to explain what they are doing wrong.

Best wishes,

Dave

David Leheny
Henry Wendt III '55 Professor of East Asian Studies Department of East Asian Studies