Generation Gap

I've long thought that one of the biggest gaps between me and my parents can be seen in our respective attitudes towards talking about race. My parents never talk about race. Doing so, they think, is almost inherently racist. Although I grew up in this environment--one in which, for instance, you would never identify someone by their ethnicity--something happened around the time I went to college and realized that not talking about race doesn't make all race-related problems disappear. So whereas I've grown more comfortable talking explicitly about race, my parents haven't.

I think our respective attitudes towards "Lost in Translation" can be partly explained by this gap. To my parents, a movie that depicts what Tokyo looks like from the point of view of a young American who knows nothing about Japanese culture is racist. I see it rather differently, as a honest depiction of how different, and alien, things look when you're that young American. A crucial question is whether the movie's intent is to depict what things look like from that point of view (that of an alienated recent college graduate), or to poke fun at the alien appearance of Japanese culture from that point of view. I can't help but think that the movie's clear intent is the former. And I think the gap between me and my parents blinds them to this possibility.

The simplest possible version of my point: growing up, I never once said "that's weird" in response to something we experienced abroad. But I think honesty sometimes demands saying "that's weird (for me)". And I think you can honestly say it without being racist, or without it being a trivial point.