Have you seen the attached picture? A few days ago, I happened to find it on Facebook. According to a Taiwanese who posted it on Facebook, this is the oil painting, "Beijing 2008", drawn by Liu Yi (劉湓), a Chinese person living in Canada, and this painting has been drawing considerable attention and becoming controversial on the internet. To see what was going on, I googled it both in English and Chinese. It seems that the painting is very popular, at least in China and Taiwan .
The picture shared on Facebook is accompanied by a very long interpretation of what the painting implies. The interpretation is originally written in Traditional Chinese, but the Japanese version translated by a Japanese person is attached. There is no information about who first gave the interpretation. Also, I'm not sure if the interpretation is exactly what the painter wanted to indicate. As a matter of fact, when I was browsing Chinese sites to see how popular the painting was on the internet, I found different interpretations on some details, but the outline is same. I think that the painting is interesting to see.
Although I don't intend to elaborate on the interpretation, I'll tell you the outline. There are four women playing mah-jong. The lady with tattoos on her back is Chinese. The bare-naked lady sitting to the left of the Chinese lady is Japanese. The lady lying on her back is Russian. The lady with a lace top is American, and her bottom half is naked. The girl standing and watching them play is Taiwanese. Their actions portray how these five countries are behaving and negotiating with the other countries. Their clothes imply the countries' situations. I'll leave more interpretations but the Japanese lady to your imagination.
According to the interpretation shared on Facebook, the Japanese lady is seriously playing mah-jong without paying attention to the other people. She is only focusing on what she is supposed to do. When I read that, I sighed deeply because I've been worried about this point. In Japan, due to the prolonged stagnation and politics in disarray, some journalists and experts have insisted that there are significant suggestions from the past, but despite that, we haven't learned a lot from the past. Especially since the Fukushima accident, the need to learn from the past has been increasing. Because of this, I've been paying more attention to suggestions from the past which some experts have highlighted.
Actually, one of the suggestions is that Japanese people pay less attention to and are less sensitive to what is going on in the world, and they are very bad at thinking with a broad view from various perspectives. I really noticed this, especially when I was outside Japan. On top of that, it seems to me that many Japanese people haven't even realized that Japan neither pays enough attention to what is going on outside Japan nor knows what other countries consider Japan to be like. Thus, when I read that interpretation on the Japanese lady, I though that it was just as I had expected and sighed deeply. At the same time, I wondered if I should consider it to be good that at least Japan is in the painting.
