Surely that utterly dishonest Japanese substitution and impersonation of real persons in real situations is just weird, and wrong? Confusing psychodrama and reality as if there is no difference says something disturbing about the Japanese sense of self. Any Westerner would find such a practice a disturbing and offensive intrusion into and offensive parody of their personal integrity.
In the West we can accept role-playing dramas, which often have satisfying or even cathartic effects, because the illusion is a temporary imaginary leap, and the experience an exercise in self-analysis and mindfulness. Lessons are drawn which can be applied back in one's real life, having been a recreation that strengthens our emotional life, just as physical exercise strengthens our body. Well-written dramas can also impart this kind of creative refreshment. But the Japanese acceptance of play-acting as essentially indistinguishable from actuality, and as having the identical moral standing of authentic behaviour, is surely a dangerous category confusion? This seems to be exposed as the film shows the difficulty the man finds in posing convincingly as the father of a young child while at the same time keeping his emotional distance - as it is stipulated he must as a condition of his employment. One thinks in the West of those unpleasant consequences where undercover security operations have led to the betrayal of the emotions and the lives of partners whom agents have fallen in love with, even married and had children by, in the guise of an entirely false persona. Court cases have tended to follow.
One can speculate that this disturbing insincerity, which can so easily turn into real but still cheating feelings, is only tolerable in a society and culture that within living memory was still highly formalised according to strict traditional imperatives, that dictated not only the physical but also, to an extreme degree, the interior life of the people. This deprived thought and action of any moral component, producing a culture - as is well known - of shame, instead of guilt; of dissimulation, not confession.
A society that recently valued only mere correct appearance remains vulnerable to such imposture, treating what we would deem impostors and deceivers exactly like authentic persons. If the Japanese still lack, to some degree, the moral centre to distinguish between mere artifice and psychological integrity, then their obsession with automata as acceptable simulacra of human beings, even without application of any Turing test to demonstrate actual sentience, is indicative.
I don't say the Japanese have no modern sensibility, of course. After the terrible debacle, in the Second World War, of their unique traditional world-view, they have finally entered the moral universe. However, it seems they do retain a residual psychological tendency that remains susceptible to mere appearances. This has led them seriously astray (I suggest) in the current practice, as it is shown by this interesting Herzog film, 'Family Romance.'
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