Thursday, February 27, 2014

Japan vs. The West: FIGHT!

What I mean, of course, is that I'm going to perform a needlessly belabored analysis of how the differences in action scenes between the two cultures reveal things about them. What else could that have meant? I thought I'd just go on about this for a little while, for those who have a lack of experience with such things, have trouble understanding it, or whatever. Also, I wanted to write it, so there.

Action movies in the West (Europe, the U.S.A. and the poor bastards who've had to deal with us) usually go something like this: Person A and Person B walk into the same area, exchange a look and perhaps a sentence or so of dialogue, and then proceed to whale on each other for several minutes. Ordinarily there are guns initially, but when the bullets run out, the only option is (obviously) a face-to-face, eye-to-eye, sweaty and frequently shirt-free grunt- and growl-fest. It's obviously all very well-rehearsed; if you watch closely you can see the actors cue each other. The fight needs to be visually spectacular, but remain "realistic" enough to believe. Remember the fights from the Bourne series: in one, a guy swings through a window to shoot the two main protagonists. The gun lasts for about eight seconds of footage. For the next two minutes, Bourne and the assassin spend a lot of time rolling around on the floor, throwing elbows and knees at each other, and generally getting collectively more sweaty. At one point, Bourne snatches up a pen and stabs it deep into his adversary's hand, prompting him to drop his knife and have a four-second shot of a very grim facial expression and him pulling the offending ink-stick out. 

Other recurring features of Western fight scenes in the modern era are numerous, but I'll only mention some to give the general impression. The combat almost always comes down to a duel of some kind, for one thing, protagonist vs. antagonist. The camera usually cuts around rapidly during the fight and there's lots of blur, increasing the feeling of high pace. The combat also usually "devolves;" the two combatants begin by shooting at one another in suits (highly civilized) and end the scene trying to strangle each other with their ties, or just in the legendary Movie Headlock.

Japan has some different ideas about how their characters go about destroying one another. The loose format of a duel remains, but the impromptu context of Western films is gone. The protagonists figure out the enemy's plan, which the enemy in turn expects, and everyone turns up to the same neutral ground to have it out. Additionally, I do mean everybody; the protagonists of the West are the chosen one, whereas in a lot of Japanese art it tends to be the chosen one and their chosen few. Both duelists bring their entourage of friends and allies rather than trying to single-handedly topple empires and rewrite history. In Bleach, for example, the final confrontation does eventually boil down to a one-on-one duel, but starts as two small armies' worth of characters having it out. For the West, consider Rambo

The combat in Japanese media is usually much more restrained than in the West as well. For most of the fight, in fact, there simply isn't any fighting. The vast majority of the confrontation is simply tense dialogue with the potential of great violence looming in the back of the mind. One recurring pattern is provocation; the first person to be taunted into attempting violence usually plays directly into the other's hands and is promptly squashed. Another recurring scene is what I call the Impossible Pause: two opponents, flying together at prodigious speed, somehow have time for a several-sentence exchange of face-to-face dialogue before the clash occurs. When the fight actually does properly begin, the emphasis is placed more on mastery, skill, and sometimes restraint than on power as such. Anime duels, for example, often feature katana as the chosen instrument; the sword itself is a work of art, historically forged with intensive amounts of labor and beautifully decorated, to be wielded delicately with the same control as a painter with his brush. In the West, killing your opponent with a brick is totally acceptable as long as they're dead. For Japan, demonstrating the ease and artistry with which you destroy them is more important.

In the thread of artistry, there's an old anime trope called the Death of a Thousand Cuts. In this event, the two combatants are seen rushing together. The screen cuts to black and is diagonally split by a pair of white or blue slashes. The scene fades back in to show both opponents having passed each other, seemingly untouched and holding their poses, before one or the other almost explodes, split in an impossible number of places. This is just a demonstration of the importance of skill; the fight, rather than a protracted series of clashes, comes down to a single moment of consummate, intense (and impossible) skill.

Another crucial difference: in both Western and Japanese media, the fight naturally escalates. In Japan's combat scenes, however, the fight evolves as it progresses. Where the Western fighters degenerate into headbutting and suplexing each other, the Japanese duelists will simply display increasing levels of their skill and power. To cite Bleach again, the swords the characters wield have several graduated levels of power, increasing in difficulty of performance and general spectacle in addition to raw power. These techniques are accessed through extended periods of meditation wherein the character communes with the sword (which is, in fact, a manifestation of their own spirit). The ancient anime trope of loudly announcing one's attacks exists for a reason. The whole idea is to display the level of your power and skill, for the benefit of both your opponent and the audience. There's no sense using your ultimate technique if it simply kills your opponent immediately; summoning a huge dragon made of ice from within your sword is much more worthwhile.

What I'm essentially trying to get at here is this: the West culturally tends to favor an individual, achieved sort of power in its protagonists. Lift all the weights, crush the bad guys' necks, no assistance required. Japan, conversely, prefers a sort of "power from within." The protagonists of anime are almost universally required to go through more spiritual trials than physical, tapping their own inner potential through reflection and self-understanding. Put another way, Western protagonists will turn to "any means necessary," whereas Japanese media protagonists will have to discover "what it all means" in order to unlock the power that was within all along. 

TL;DR I'm a weeaboo.

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