202012221456

The Search for Meaning

As I wrote earlier this year, I long viewed the Japanese fondness for sanitary masks as evidence of some deep-seated cultural defect. Now that I wear a mask myself every day, it’s amazing to me that I could not see the obvious, banal reason people use masks: to protect their health.

Following on from yesterday’s piece about [[new-medium]], here we have another example of revelations on the veracity of a (this time New Yorker) story, about the phenomenon of rental families in Japan. At the onset, this piece is about the West’s fetishization of Japan, that depicts it as “a menagerie of the weird, the alien, the freakish”. But then it shifts gears, and calls into the question of the idea of stories, and the need for some kind of narrative or explanation.

Clearly, that’s how we function as humans (and in particular as academics). That’s also how I operate: finding patterns and grand theories in the vagaries of the real world. And perhaps that’s actually a strong bias, and in much the same way that journalists have some kind of narrative that they’re trying to push, however innocuous it may be, it might help contextualize the problems similarly faced in academia. The problem is that, if we don’t have the stories, the ability to generalize, then we really have nothing as academics. The stakes seem even higher for us.