Honor and Orientalism

In my posts about story axes, one of the ones I talked about was self verses community, and I explained that as being related to the stats for glory and honor in the Legend of the Five Rings RPG.  Honor, and how it works in L5R, is a big deal for me, and related to a lot of things I want to talk about in this Blog, but before I do so, I better get the bad part out of the way.

Before I go on, I need to state clearly that I'm not the best person to talk about these sorts of topics.  I will probably mess up, and certainly,  I cannot have the same personal stake in the discussion and personal understanding as an Asian person would.   However, this is my blog, and there aren't really many good discussions on this topic for L5R, and it's not fair to the Asian members of our community to endlessly have to explain things like this over and over again, so you, gentle reader, are stuck with me and my own poor offerings.  If you wish to contest...I read comments gratefully and am happy to reassess.

Anyway.  

If you watch the Asians Represents podcasts about L5R (here), the immediate response when the word 'Honor' was raised was a collective Ugh.  Even though Honor has many interpretations even just in English, even though the group had not yet read anything about how Honor was interpreted in the L5R system.  This response is very understandable.  From my reading,  Honor is problematic for many in the Asian community in two ways.

The first is its association with Orientalism.  Orientalism in this context is a form of racism that focuses on the exoticness of another culture, playing up the differences between that culture and European/North American culture to titillate or add excitement.   Some consider it a way to praise the culture it is describing, but the net effect is to make members of that culture seem less human, alien, and unable to be understood and therefore subject to both gawking and fear...and treatment as other-than human.  This othering is perpetuated in the media long after the original orientalist style is gone.

This othering effect is compounded by a certain 'explorer' syndrome.  Prior to the advent of cameras and modern anthropology,  the understanding that was developed in the West of the cultures of faraway places was based on travel diaries and observations by those who had visited those cultures.  Observations from these travel logs were publicized and shared and eventually committed as public knowledge.  However, as stories written for publication and the excitement of the reader,  experiences that were strange and alien to the writer were played up for excitement, and remembered the most by the readers, while mundane things that were the same were forgotten or not written about much.  This emphasis caused something that may have been a very rare occurrence in the different culture to seem, to readers from the West, to be happening very frequently. This also increased Orientalism. These early perceptions are our descriptions of the past, and the history of Japan, lacking any other force to update them,  has used these descriptions, and has lasted  uncontested for hundreds of years.

Honor, as a concept, or at least, terms that were translated into English as 'Honor', was often the emotional motivation for these actions that seemed remarkable to Western observers, and the term became a shortcut for what seemed like a completely alien way of thinking.  The actual meaning of the term, as used in China and Japan, and the motivations behind such actions was lost in the simplicity of one word that can be interpreted in many ways.   Honor is an incredibly difficult word to define even referring to what it is used for in English.  Used to describe these "alien" actions,  the term evolved,  as such misunderstandings and exaggerations do, from concept, to catch-all, to caricature.   It becomes a parody.  

And, for many in the Asian community now living in the West, a hurtful one.

Honor has a second complication.  The term really does have significance, and is linked to a variety of honor/shame family dynamics that are common in many Asian families.  These family dynamics can have considerable psychological implications, some beneficial, some harmful.  For those who have been harmed under such a family dynamic,  honor, especially the caricature of honor, carries a different level of significance, and it can cause understandable pain to see it used trivially.

All of this is a really long way, I suppose, of saying that it's completely understandable why some would have issues with using Honor in Legend of the Five Rings.  

But, using this concept of Honor can bring some really powerful storytelling to your game, and it can touch upon concepts deeper than you find  in other games.  

Next week, I'll try to explain how I interpret Honor as used in L5R, and how it fits in with the culture of Rokugan.  Again, I'm sorry I'm not the best person to talk about these topics, but I've tried to do my homework and want to share it so I have a chance of reducing harm in the way we play L5R.