Writing About What You Don’t Know

I received positive feedback on my “Nature’s Foundling” edited story from my sympathetic reader, but she is only 8. 🙂 Yet that makes her the target market.

As I don’t speak Japanese and have never been to Japan, what qualifications do I have to write a series of stories set in feudal Japan? None. I don’t even watch Anime except “Black Lagoon,” which is awesome especially Rock as the salaryman archetype.

Maybe I should start watching “Shogun.” 🙂

Or at least binge “Blue Eye Samurai,” cuz that first episode was really good.

However, I did gain familiarity with Japanese history and culture during school from the academic hangover responding to Japan’s economic assent. During which, I spent more than a year watching NHK Tokyo as my source of news as a contemporary window on Japanese culture.

In the first Hiro story, a living Hiro met Shohei in the middle of the night in the park. Elements of the setting and mood, such as buying a beer from a vending machine on the street, came from decades old memories of Edward Fowler’s San’ya Blues about the life of then contemporary itinerant laborers doing construction jobs in a Japanese city.

Meanwhile, a book I read back then about the meritocratic organization of high school education in Japan will likely play a role during editing for any of my drafted stories that take place in a Japanese high school, like with Hiro’s third story.

Add to that the last several novels that I read in the Gorean Saga have focused on the Pani culture beyond the world’s end, which is based upon feudal Japan, so my thoughts are recently conditioned to that tradition.

Fortunately, Microsoft Copilot has been a quick resource for research to validate my assumptions. Asking AI questions about Japan doesn’t contain the same woke cultural bias AI has with the US. For example, when I was asking about names for a Burakumin (historically Japan’s lowest caste) character for my “Nature’s Foundling” story, I didn’t get a lecture from the AI about stereotyping as I did from Google’s Gemini about a name for a woke Leftist who changed her name to reflect her revised self-awareness.