Modernity outmoded?

“In Japan, turning twenty is cause for a national holiday. Since 1948, the country has held Coming of Age Day to celebrate when twenty-year-olds gain the right to vote, as well as buy cigarettes and alcohol. But this year, Japan’s demographic problems cast a shadow on the festivities with the smallest coming-of-age cohort since the government began tracking birth data in 1968.”

So says the story posted on the Quartz Daily Brief news aggregation site. The shadow cast is indeed a menace. The aging of the Japanese population is an issue with global ramifications. And yet it was another point made in the article which caught my attention.

“Tokyo Disneyland was a popular site for Coming of Age celebrations.”

The kids in Japan, like kids anywhere, were in a mood to party. They dressed up; their costuming reflected their nation’s ancient tradition. But they spent a lot of money at Disneyland! Aren’t the theme parks conceived in the dream factory of Hollywood in 1955 and now a global presence from Paris to Shanghai the very antithesis of the authenticity of the geisha or samurai? Playful fantasy? Disneyland as an expression of modernity, or as Michel Foucault stated a ‘heterotopia’?

Jean Baudrillard said in Simulacra and Simulations (1981) that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation.”

It could be that the Japanese, the inventors of the manga and Nintendo, embrace this kind of hyperreality with ease and alacrity. And yet Disneyland is an imported heterotopia, not one crafted by the Japanese, not in any way related to their own tradition or culture.

It was almost three months ago that I was sitting in the sun in Maastricht talking to a pair of charming young students. The conversation has remained in my mind ever since on account of one single fragment of our discussion.

“What about non-Western modernity?”

We had agreed that the ‘modernization’ seen in places as diverse as Dubai and Singapore, Tokyo and Hong Kong, has involved the import of a presumed modernity born out of the Western tradition, in part the implementation of futuristic visions imagined by writers from America, from Western Europe and from Russia. Futurismo unquestioned in the rush of so-called progress?

So why have cultures so very different from those of the West seen fit to adopt, mimic and even exaggerate entirely foreign modernities in preference to following paths of their own, rooted in their own specific cultures and traditions?

Can it be that the rest of the world has no real need of the thrusting modernity of which we in the West are so proud… except to enjoy the illusions, the glitz and the artificiality which make for suitable party locations?