Form and Content
Not all chalices are poisoned
I am constantly bothered by people confusing form with content.
Last night’s post was about such confusion.
Manga and anime are forms; hentai is content.
Manga and anime are like cups; hentai is poison.
Some manga and anime are hentai.
Some cups contain poison.
But not all.
Hentai fans upset by my assessment can substitute a neutral or benign substance for “poison”. The point is that the contained is not the container.
Today I realized people struggle with the form/content distinction because form can be more easily perceived than content. Analyzing content can take an extra cognitive step. Simpler to skip that step and stop at the form level: Manga, anime - BAD!
I’m old enough to have seen the premiere of the “Bad” music video on CBS in 1987. It was neither bad nor good - just meh - a word that didn’t exist at the time.
Sazae-san? BAD!
Doesn’t this sample set off alarms in your head?
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! WAKE UP!
But wait! It gets worse!
Sazae-san may be the twenty-fifth most popular manga ever, with 86 million copies in print as of 1999. The total might be over a hundred million by now.
Sazae-san was also the basis of the longest-running anime of all time with 2,771 episodes and counting since 1969:
[A] survey conducted by NIPPON RESEARCH CENTER, LTD. (NRC) in 2020 recorded a high recognition rate of 97% for this anime in Japan. For this reason, it is often described as a "national anime" in Japan and is regarded as a symbol of "universality" and "permanence".
If there is one anime almost every single Japanese person has seen, it is Sazae-san1, not some hentai with underage-‘presenting’ girls. I can’t even name such a hentai. Nor can 9X% of Japanese.
But let’s not let reality get in the way of our moral fury! Sazae-san corrupted an entire country!
Just like Miyazaki Hayao’s movies? BAD!
Of course he got an Oscar! Woke Hollyweird is supporting a drug dealer! Howl’s Moving Castle today, hentai addiction tomorrow!
Imagine the sick things that happen in there!
Or in this (shudder) “slave traders’ vehicle”2 in Miyazaki’s Shuna’s Journey (1983; English translation 2022). Yes, Miyazaki also works in the devil’s other medium! What a horrible man.
What horrors he creates! If you play Totoro’s dialogue backwards … DO NOT LISTEN TO HIM! I fear for these girls.
Seriously, I actually don’t like Miyazaki’s work. It’s technically dazzling yet somehow leaves me cold (like so many other Critically Acclaimed Things). He is a true artist, even though his work doesn’t speak to me. His comics and films are fine wines - and I don’t drink. But they are not poison - regardless of my opinion of his oeuvre.
Which most hentai consumers probably have consumed at some point of their lives. Along with Sazae-san. But correlation … causation … you know. (If you’re like me, you know that in spite of school.)
If you’ve made it this far without freaking out over EEEEVIL Japanese media corrupting the West, you also know how this logic fails:
Sazae-san is manga and anime.
Miyazaki makes both manga and anime.
Hentai is manga and anime.
Sazae-san and Miyazaki are one-way signs to hentai.
Or in terms of drinks:
Coffee is in a cup.
Tea is in a cup.
Poison is in a cup.
Drinking coffee or tea leads to poisoning.
BEWARE ALL CUPS!
THEY’RE ALL POISON!
Of course, not all cups and cartoons (forms) contain poison (content). But it’s easy to freak out at the sight of a form without bothering to look inside. Lazy self-righteousness is a comfortable blindfold. I’ve worn it. I regret that.
Besides prejudice against forms, there is also prejudice for forms. And the latter can take on cargo cult characteristics.
The classical education movement favors old forms of education. If we teach our kids in a Victorian or whatever fashion, we hope they will become like Victorians.
Follow ‘proper’ form, and content will follow … somehow. The cargo cultist expects full content out of forms - even empty ones.
If I perform the tea ceremony ‘correctly’3, I expect tea in the cup, even when there is none.
When I was a neoCON, I believed that imposing the cargo cult of democracy would save Iraq. If only Iraqis LARPed like Murricans and stood in line to Vote!™ just like folks in Indiana, they’d eventually become Middle Eastern Hoosiers.
Forms are easier to impose - to replicate - than content. Making Iraqis vote is easier than making them think like Murricans. Not that I think the supposed Murrican way of thinking is good.4 Whether it is or isn’t is beside the point, which is that the neoCONs failed to achieve their ostensible goals. (“Ostensible goals” being the Noble Lie5 that we peasants believed, not the actual goals of our masters.) Iraq did not become a “model”, as a popular neoCON site’s title claimed.
Iraq the Model is a currently-dormant weblog whose last post was made on October 5, 2011. It was set up in November 2003 by brothers Omar and Mohammed Fadhil which details accounts of the Iraq War from Baghdad. The blog was often cited by conservative commentators as a source for the good news in Iraq that the American media is not reporting, in contrast to other Iraqi-written blogs such as Baghdad Burning, which show far less pleasant or optimistic scenes from post-invasion Iraq.
Iraq became a disaster … as planned. Rurik Skywalker asked,
[F]olks, can we not see for ourselves a deliberate policy of pursuing permanent chaos, upheaval and instability abroad at this point?
I’m out of time. Can you think of other examples of form and content gone wrong?
Someone made this point to me many years ago. I imagine some weeaboos learn it the hard way when
they meet Actual Japanese People for the first time
they ask, “Do you like [some anime big in the USSA]?”
the AJP are like, “What?”
I did not make the mistake of assuming my Japanese host families would know about the manga and anime I was into, much less like it.
The “shudder” is a joke. I appreciate how the Japanese deal with dark subjects.
I have no idea how to do this, despite a vaguely memory of having gone on a field trip to witness a Japanese tea ceremony at Jakuan.
The photo of Jakuan is from this article:
For the last half century, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has taught thousands of students the art of the Japanese tea ceremony inside a traditional tea house. The structure sits under sprawling trees within the picturesque East-West Center Japanese Garden, where you can hear the faint sound of a bubbling koi pond. The zen-like atmosphere helps to put students into a meditative mindset before entering Jaku’an, the name of the Japanese tea house, which means the “hut of tranquility.”
I remember the setting - the form - but not the ceremony it contained!
As the USSA becomes even more diverse, speaking of an “American” anything is often meaningless. But that didn’t stop us neoCONs from promoting our “American” ideals. “American” means whatever a propagandist wants it to mean. It is an empty form, a hollow pill filled with various drugs.
The Noble Lie is a key component of Rurik Skywalker’s formula for totalitarianism:
Noble Lie ==> Ideological/Moral Code ==> Guardians of the Noble Lie + Moral Code.
We neoCON bloggers were volunteer lowercase guardians parroting the uppercase Guardians who knew the real deal.
Another example (copy pasting myself):
What you are calling race is a statistical collection of traits. Only some of these traits result in visible differences. Rightoids fail when they value the visual identifiers of race over the larger collection of traits.
Hello AMRX Mark II. Thanks for your article. I appreciated reading a calm and reasoned piece and your exploration of fundamental logic. Regarding a fundamental understanding of reason and the mind, I want to suggest the works of Nicolai Levashov. His books describe the "extra uterine" evolutional development of humans, including how the mind sequentially develops and how a reasoning mind can be developed (and what that actually is). He has a lot to say about how, why, and who is trying to prevent that from happening on our planet. His works on basic science, world history (including the development of different types of economic systems and why that matters), and his very interesting autobiography can be found at levashov.info and might be of interest in light of your search for answers. (And I assume that you understand that AI searches and wikipedia will return results aimed at discouraging your exploration.) Best wishes.