No. 9
Admiration as another kind of misunderstanding
What one sees most is unstinting praise.
"The Japanese never do ANYTHING half-assed! Every time I see a video of something made in Japan, I know it'll have insane attention to detail, craftsmanship, and honor to tradition." Thousands of likes gather beneath such words. The feeling is easy to understand.
But that same comment went on: "Heck, just to make sushi rice, you have to apprentice for 350 years to learn how to wash it properly!" This is, of course, affectionate hyperbole. Yet here the mechanism of translation appears plainly. Praise often slides into exaggeration, and exaggeration hardens into mystification. Respect — "Japanese artisans are remarkable" — turns into a story unmoored from reality: "in Japan, everything is superhuman."
Admiration can be a misunderstanding without malice. Believing you are lifting someone up, you may in fact cut them off from reality and seal them inside a myth.
"The true art of Japan is marketing"
One comment cut into this mechanism more sharply than any other. Beneath a Kyoto-based channel explaining Japanese culture, someone wrote: "The Japanese are really great at making their shortcomings sound like magic. The true art of Japan is marketing."
Caustic, but impossible to ignore. It is a question aimed at us, too. In conveying Japanese craft abroad, we often drape it in a veil of mystery — "centuries of tradition," "an inexpressible spirituality." It travels easily. But that veil makes the object itself harder to see.
As we have seen again and again, real value lies not in mystery but in the concrete. Why urushi takes a month; how a joint absorbs the movement of wood; the unit of 60,000 hours of training. These are explicable facts that need no mystification. And explicable facts reach the heart far more deeply than mystery does.
Why doesn't admiration turn into buying?
The gap of translation produces one curious phenomenon.
Analyzing the data behind this series, something strange emerged: the most admired crafts are the least bought. Take woodwork — the virtuosity of kumiko and joinery gathers thousands of "beautiful"s. Yet the rate at which that praise converts to purchase was less than a quarter of urushi's.
Why? I believe this, too, is a problem of translation. A craft translated as mystery comes to be complete as "something to behold." Amazing, beautiful, unbelievable — there the emotion is satisfied, and one never arrives at the thought of welcoming it into one's own life. A myth is to be gazed at, not used.
The urushi fountain pen, by contrast, is bought because it is translated not as mystery but as a reachable object. You can use it daily, mark your milestones with it, grow a collection. The thinner the veil of mystery, the more a craft can enter into a life.
What is a good translation?
So what is a good translation? Not mystification — nor, conversely, stripping away all cultural context to make "just a product." A good translation converts something into a form understandable within the other culture's framework, while telling no lies.
To translate indigo as "sustainable natural dye" is a correct doorway. But do not stop there: add the accuracy that "natural color, too, is a technique born from dialogue with the chemistry of mordants." To translate kintsugi as "the philosophy of beauty in brokenness" is lovely. But show the ground beneath: "the real thing is a craft that dries urushi for a month."
A good translation keeps the doorway of the concept open while guiding, without lies, to the object beyond. Not baiting with mystery and stopping there, but dissolving the mystery and showing the real thing that still remains.
The responsibility of translating
Finally, this is an admonition to ourselves. Those in a position to convey Japanese craft abroad are translators. And translators bear responsibility. Pile on mystery in pursuit of praise, and it reaches people in the short term. But it locks craft in the cage of myth and, in the end, turns it into "something to behold" that can enter no one's life.
What we truly wish to convey is not myth. It is the hand that dries urushi for a month, the eye that reads the movement of wood, the 60,000 hours. These reach far deeper without mystification — indeed, precisely without it.
The gap of translation can be closed: by removing the veil of mystery one layer at a time, and showing the concrete beneath it accurately, honestly. That is what this series has tried to do all along — and, I believe, work that should be handed on to everyone who speaks of craft from here.
Next (No. 10)
"Why Doesn't Admiration Turn into Buying?"
The paradox touched on here, that the most admired craft is the least bought, examined head-on. The structure of cultural consumption, and the conditions under which admiration becomes purchase, read from the data.
