Film Club [Uncut]: Oliver Jia / Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983)
The Kyoto-based American researcher talks living on Japan, fighting randos on Twitter and Nagasi Oshima's masterpiece.
Welcome to the Lack of Taste Film Club, where we talk to non-cinephiles and non-professional cinephiles about themselves and the movies they love. You will find a different flavour to Film Club entries going forward. We want to get to know our guest more before we talk about their chosen film. So a general Q&A will come first, and the film comes second.
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Oliver Jia is a researcher and journalist based in Kyoto, Japan, who you can find on Twitter where he talks about geopolitics and pop culture. He also has a Substack called Foreign Perspectives. If you’ve ever followed him, you will also see him argue with strangers on these same topics. We talk to Oliver about that, living in Japan and his journalism, before we dive in to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence.
How did you get into the world of journalism and into where you are right now?
I don't have any formal training in journalism, and in fact, I rather disliked writing for most public schools. However, I realized that once I could actually choose the subjects I'd be writing about, the whole thing came to me rather naturally. I wrote for my high school's newspaper, but at the same time, I was also being published on some defunct media websites. One was a long-gone video game music website where I'd review albums (provided to me for free in lieu of actually being paid), interview composers, write news updates, that sort of thing. I started a Medium blog which gave me a bit more freedom on wider topics, but it made practically no money.
Getting into the world of big-boy professional journalism actually didn't come to me until the end of 2019 when I pitched a freelance piece about an American soldier who had lived in North Korea for nearly 40 years to a specialist website about DPRK issues called NK News. I had actually met this American on Sado Island, Japan a few months before he passed away in 2017 and for the next two years, I was thinking about how I could turn it into a story. Things were pretty busy in my life as I was moving back and forth between the U.S. and Japan, but ultimately once I was settled in this part of the world permanently I could finally sit down and do more writing. So after that piece which got accepted by NK News, I began writing for them on a monthly basis and still do to this day. I've since been building my bylines and have been published by The Spectator and Asia Times among other outlets, though it's still a side hustle as I'm a full-time graduate student in international relations here in Kyoto.
I launched my Substack
this year and it's already becoming a smashing success with over 200 subscribers in just a few months. More people than I thought would be interested are also opting for a paid subscription, so I hope to continue this new venture of mine. My friends Noah Smith and Konstantin Kisin write some of the most successful Substacks on the platform, so what they've done has really inspired me with my own work. You don't have to go to journalism school to get into this profession and that's more apparent than ever now.You currently live in Japan. What do people usually get right and wrong about the country, and why do you think a lot of people in the West are obsessed?
think Westerners have always had a degree of fascination with Asia as a whole, though people often forget that it goes both ways. There are tons of Japanese people who get their perspective of America from Hollywood films and television shows just as we can get skewed perspectives of Japan from anime and video games. I plan on getting into this in a future Substack article, but I've noticed in recent years how Americans both on the political left and right like to use Japan to "prove" their respective agenda while ignoring the parts that would go against it.
For example, the right likes Japan for having stricter immigration policies and often praises this country for supposedly being "traditional," but conveniently forgets that this place produces some of the most popular pornographic videos in the world while also having just as much consumerism and materialism as the United States. Similarly, the left likes how Japan has strict gun laws and free healthcare, but eventually realizes that this country is no paradise for "woke" ideas like forced diversity. There are plenty of examples of both sides looking at Japan through blinders, but if you're super left-wing or super right-wing, you're inevitably going to find something that'll force you to hate the whole place.
My overall point is that Japan is Japan. It doesn't operate on the same societal rules or political spectrum that other countries have, while American culture wars certainly don't exist over here. I chose to live here because it's most aligned with my own values, but if anything Japan has just made me more of a political moderate over time.