Cultural Clashings

It has been theorized that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This holds true for My Year of Meats, where the television show My American Wife! attempts to bridge the cultural gap between America and Japan and encourage the Japanese to consume American meat products. Yet, when the cultures do collide, the results are not always positive and lead to problematic situations for those involved. Similar to The Edge, where it was said “They want the black everything but me and you,” saying white people are only interested in black culture while simultaneously afraid of black people, My Year of Meats represents the part of human nature that only wants to see the prettier comfortable parts of life, symbolic in My American Wife! and when things are not appealing, it is necessary to edit the material to present it in a better light, changing what people view and their ultimate beliefs about American life, although ironically even those involved prefer the ruse.

When making the television show My American Wife! in America for Japanese audiences, Jane Takagi-Little is forced to use an angle with many of her example families to create the image of the wholesome American lifestyle, even if it is not wholly truthful. The fabricated show that stars Suzie Flowers is ironically preferred, because she liked the way in which her family was portrayed, even though it was not truthful. On the other hand, in Japan where Akiko Ueno was watching the shows, she is getting a taste of American life that is so wholly edited that the glimpses she gets of life, appear better then the life that she has, and due to the shows and the bad behavior of her husband, decides to leave him to live in America. The fictitious nature of the show, collides with Japanese culture in a way that leads its viewers on a fabricated path that was supposed to just lead to higher consumption of meat, but ultimately leads to a lifestyle change for both Akiko and Jane who are adversely effected by the show. For Jane, the cultural colliding that she experiences when she enters the world of a meat packing plant changes her perspective about meat, which leads her to decide to sabotage a job that she desperately needs by trying to put the truth about meat on television. The cultural collisions that are created by the television show in the end change the course of every life effected but because the stories are built on fictitious events that are only meant to show the happy parts of daily life, we continue to focus only on the good while ignoring the negative aspects of the world around us.