Culture matters: Americans through Japanese eyes.

Oh, she's such a nothing!" a friend exclaimed as we sat in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan discussing Charlotte, the heroine of director and screenwriter Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation. As an American expatriate in Japan, I am often peppered with questions about the movie, which was filmed in Tokyo. Whether you loved or hated the film, it provides a great jumping-off point for an examination of the cultural differences between the United States and Japan.

The plot revolves around a relationship between two Americans who meet while staying at a ritzy Tokyo hotel: Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, and an aging actor named Bob, played by Bill Murray, who is in Japan making whiskey commercials. Anyone who's seen the movie knows that Charlotte isn't exactly a forceful modern woman. However, I found myself feeling both surprised and wounded by my friend's remarks, so closely had I identified with the character.

Unlike my friend, most people I have spoken with about Lost in Translation agreed with the critics: they loved it. Coppola, who received an Academy Award for best original screenplay, was praised for her subtle handling of the relationship between the two lost Americans, as well as the film's innovative aural textures.

The real genius of the movie is the split-screen effect Coppola achieves through her deceptively simple script. On one side, the relationship between the two Americans is at center stage, with the manic synergy of noise and neon that is modern Tokyo serving as the backdrop. On the other, though, Japan is front and center--the extra who ends up stealing the show. To understand how and why this happens, we need to back up and look at the very different reactions the film provoked across the globe.

Although praised by American critics, the film was also dogged by charges that it discriminated against Asians. A reviewer from the London Guardian asserted Coppola was "shoehorning every possible caricature of modern Japan" into her story, while an Asian-American Web site dubbed the film "Lost in Racism."

Indeed, the film seems to indulge in some negative stereo-typing. Just as I was taken aback by my friend's dissing of Charlotte, so too did I cringe every time another self-serving Japanese pranced across the screen. The pompous director of the whiskey commercial who berates the world-weary American actor particularly stands out, as does a rather deranged hooker who accosts him. Not that these types don't exist in Japan--they do, and in abundance. But why would Coppola, known for her affection and longtime association with Japan, spotlight such unappealing personalities? Like the ponderer of a Zen koan, the viewer must come to terms with this paradox. Lost in Translation is not unlike a Kabuki play, its true meaning and emotion masked behind a painstakingly crafted facade--which here consisted of brash, Westernized Tokyoites.

The real Japan is very different. There are intimations of another country in the film--an old sensei teaching ikebana, chanting monks at a temple. This older Japan, however, was also denounced by Coppola's critics. "Ancient traditions have very little to do with the contemporary Japanese!" cried one, implying that they didn't belong in a depiction of contemporary Japanese society. What Coppola's detractors didn't realize is that with these scenes of "traditional Japan" the director was having her little joke--the monks and chanting and incense are a ruse to throw the uninitiated off the scent.

So what, you might ask, is the "real" Japan? In the Japan I know, a radically different paradigm of power exists--worlds away from the loudmouthed Japanese in the film. Unlike the story's in-your-face Tokyoties, the average Japanese is more muted and nonverbal, at least where the expression of personal opinions is concerned. A popular maxim--"the protruding nail must be pounded down"--captures the weltanschauung of the culture, one in which blending in and maintaining harmony are of paramount importance.

Undergirding this craving for harmony is the concept of amae. Although difficult to translate, it can be thought of as a kind of conditioned dependence. Where American children are encouraged to be independent and autonomous, Japanese are pushed toward relying on and finding their identity through others.

"Please, please," pleaded a Japanese mother to a Western friend of mine shortly after the birth of my friend's first child. "If you want a happy baby, let her sleep with you. No separate rooms!" From the very beginning, one's identity is intertwined with the Other--whether this is a parent or coworker. Ego boundaries are much more permeable than they are in the West, the average Japanese being more tuned in to others than his American counterpart is.

Which is why, even when they are at their most polite, most Americans can seem overbearing to the Japanese. A cartoon hanging over a toilet in a rural Japanese restaurant speaks to the difference: a steroid-enhanced Superman, muscles bulging and cape flying, is depicted taking a leak, his urine stream shattering the urinal. Even in their most intimate and trivial moments, Americans are, it would seem, overpowering.

The United States is not always perceived so negatively, as anyone who has been to Japan can tell you. American culture is ubiquitous--movies, music, and fast-food chains (there are four Starbucks in my neighborhood). My female students write research papers on HBO's Sex and the City. Indeed, they yearn to be the freewheeling women they see on their TV screens. Still, at the heart of this mania for things American, perhaps more unconscious than conscious, is a deep disquietude. And no wonder: the dominant cultural model of silent watching--one in which individual identity is submerged with the Other--is so very different from anything found in mainstream American culture.

Except, that is, for that which can be found in the film. Coppola's Charlotte is the personification of Japanese watchfulness. The camera lingers over Charlotte as she sits in her penthouse suite and contemplates the city below, and again as she watches her photographer husband flirt with a starlet. Later, as this nubile blonde gives a press conference, Charlotte stands silent in the back of the auditorium and listens--just as Coppola, the director, observes the pumped-up media types in Tokyo and captures them on screen.

The paradigm of watchfulness is not exclusively Japanese. It is the archetype of the artist and also the modus operandi of the mystic. One possible root for the word "religion" is the Latin relegere, to read again: to ponder that which everyone else is too busy or distracted to notice.

There's power in watching, as any Japanese can tell you. "Why do you think Japanese companies decided to make TVs and VCRs and stereos after the war?" Matsuda-san asked me back in the late '80s when I was working as a copy editor at a Japanese daily. The question came at a time when the Japanese economy was on high boil and the West was just beginning to realize what a formidable power the country had become.

I didn't answer--I knew my editor was throwing the question out in a Socratic sort of way to get me thinking. Over the years, though, I came up with a theory: the Japanese knew that TVs, VCRs, and all the rest would be a hit because they had observed so carefully, for so long, Americans' voracious appetite for entertainment and distraction. Having perceived this, they saw an opening and ran with it.

In its essence, this sit-and-watch mode is not unlike the months (years?) of surveillance by Islamic radicals as they planned and finalized every last detail of the 9/11 attacks; taking pictures of airport hangars, noting the routines of flight attendants, and, through it all, discovering manifold holes in security. It makes me wonder whether Americans have watched, with even half the intentness, the culture of the Middle East, let alone the psychology of terrorism.

There is much evidence suggesting they have not. A recent report by a Pentagon advisory panel excoriated President George W. Bush's simplistic notions that Muslims hate American freedom and liberty. Meanwhile, Muqtedar Khan, a visiting fellow in foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution, notes that while Britain and France spent decades studying the countries they occupied, the United States remains "extremely ignorant" about Iraq.

And then, of course, there is my friend, who pronounced the watchful, observant Charlotte a "nothing." It is a nothingness that, like an invisible tsunami, threatens to engulf those who are too self-absorbed to notice its slow, irrevocable approach.

Robin Antepara is a freelance writer in Tokyo, where she teaches at Waseda University.