User:GoneAFK/Japan

God Hates Japan is a 2001 novel by Douglas Coupland. It was released solely in Japan and has little English text in it. The book was published by Kadokawa Shoten and illustrated by Michael Howatson.

The key driver to the book's release in Japan was something of a personal curiosity regarding a kind of Japanese "English" student found in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. These students (particularly throughout the 90's), were plentiful, and given Douglas's personal experience with Japan from earlier in life, very different from what was expected of Japanese youth. They were best described as detached, lazy, leisure-oriented (snowboarding and smoking pot), aimless, and very much ignoring the Canadians around them at all times. They were floating, but searching. Denying their home culture, yet ignoring the culture of their current environment. This book is Douglas Coupland's shot at trying to create a narrative to explain the who, what and why for these Nihon-jin drifters.

Travelling back and forth to Japan with Michael Howatson, they absorbed everything possible. They dug into Jimbocho back-alley used book and magazine stores, photographed all the "little moments" that make up the Tokyo experience (lotus flower manhole covers, buildings' externally exposed plumbing and electrical without Victorian prudity to tame it, insane electrical pole arrangements, the mish-mash of western brand icons absorbed and re-defined through the sheer weight of the Japanese culture, etc.) Through this culture mining along with Ken-ichi Eguchi (the translator of Douglas Coupland's original English Text), a reflection and a narrative was formed. Through this culture mining, the illustrations that richly fill the book from cover to cover were developed as a reflection of the tone, essence, direct narrative, or figurative metaphor of each section. The goal of the illustrations in particular, was not to imitate Japanese design and illustration, but rather to reflect it, and reflect the deeper ability and passion for fixating upon the banal of global popular culture by the Japanese themselves. That sense of curated understanding of the most esoteric of media and popular culture from outside Japan that really acknowledges the meaning and beauty of what the West sees as media waste right up until the Japanese fetishize it through their singular, and intense, lens.