Yesterday, I completed exact 3 months in Japan, but I realized that only after I started this post. Maybe this "anniversary" is one important point for my crisis relating to my research project yesterday.
Since my arrival, I've been thinking about and elaborating an interesting and culturally anlytical text to post here, as one of my ambitions was the transformation of this space in an experimental virtual place for cultural exchange and experiences with traveling around East-Asia. But many things refrained me from doing that. One of them was to come with the conclusion that, in cultural aspects, Japan is more relevant for us in São Paulo than Brazil is for Tokyo. Of course that I was not expecting that the average imaginarium about Brazil would be very different from any other foreign, but I expected at least that at my university or in cultural manifestation Brazil would have an important place or at least would be very visible and exposed. I was wrong. While sushi and Japanese festivals spread around São Paulo and Paraná and the J-Pop culture acquires more and more adepts, I don't see any Brazilian cultural symbol with the same role around here, except for some friends going to Barbacoa sometimes... On the opposite: the complete ignorance about my country is the rule, with questions like "you speak Spanish, right?", "you learn to dance salsa in school, isn't it?". I got very disapointed with this general rule and I even don't go further to try to talk about the new era of emergent BRICS. I keep asking myself what is this relation of friendship Brazil and Japan supposedly have. For me it's more and more clear that it is more on discourse level than in the real world. I hope that at least at diplomatic level my opinion changes as I develop my project. But to be honest I almost changed it yesterday to start studying China-Brazil relations.
