Empire of Signs

"I suppose what all these books have in common is that they are written not by novelists but by scholars – all of whom are interesting for their literary style, as well as their scholarship. Barthes again, unlike many of his followers, was himself a very fine writer. His followers took the jargon but didn’t have the style, and Barthes, of course, invented a lot of the jargon of cultural studies. “ One thing that interested him about Tokyo was the fact that nobody really knows anybody’s address – it’s a not a city of addresses.” He went to Japan without really knowing anything much about it. Yet I think it’s one of the most intelligent accounts of Japan. He had never been to Japan before, and did not go there as a scholar, or as a researcher, or to go deeply into a particular subject. He simply let the impressions of Japan sink in and made something of them. And what he made of them is still of great interest. In fact I think he says, at the beginning of the book, ‘This is not about Japan, it’s about an imaginary country I call Japan’ – so it’s very much his take, based on random impressions. He was such an intelligent and observant man, that they’re still very much worth reading, even to someone who knows Japan well. Well he was a semiotician, and semioticians look for signs and symbols. So, for example, one thing that interested him about Tokyo was the fact that nobody really knows anybody’s address – it’s a not a city of addresses. If you go somewhere for the first time, your host or hostess has to give you an accurate map or description – for example, you turn right at the greengrocers and left at the tobacconist and then you go straight on, and so on. And if you don’t have those directions, then no taxi driver will be able to take you there. He found that fascinating. So he looked at a map of Tokyo and the geography of Tokyo and extrapolated from that a particular way of thinking, an attitude towards urban space which was unusual and interesting."