‘So alien! So other!’: how western TV gets Japanese culture wrong www.theguardian.com

on Netflix and BBC Two’s drama Giri/Haji have obeyed the most basic rule of making British TV about Japan: don’t name it after that slightly racist 1980s hit about masturbation.
As Shinichi Adachi, the Japanese-British film-maker behind YouTube culinary series The Wagyu Show explains, Japanese culture isn’t particularly strange, just more accepting of humanity’s strangeness.
Hinton points out that the word “endurance” has a particular connotation in Japanese culture, akin to “stiff upper lip”, with roots in the resilience required for post-second world war reconstruction.
The Japanese gameshow is as much an example of cultural similarity as it is of difference, but it’s the latter that British TV producers choose to emphasise.
So, if anyone comes out of this looking like socially inadequate, culturally insular, sex-obsessed pervs, well, it’s not the Japanese, is it?