Bruce Feiler's Learning To Bow

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The writers were, as a whole, particularly and sometimes perplexingly inept at turning their own harsh gaze onto their culture and balancing their perspective. They also rarely engaged with critical texts from the actual culture there were criticizing. Bruce Feiler in his ironically mis-titled and New York Times best-selling memoir Learning to Bow, was particularly unskilled about being self aware of the constant heavy handed judgements he was making about a nation with 120 million people, in which he spent only one year. His memoir is subtitled “Inside the Heart of Japan” and is indexed to signal his assumed and fraudulent expertise. I will take the reader through my own mental journey as I realized the historic niche I was occupying the baggage I was handling as a white male travel writer, which these other writers handled badly.

Chapter Synopsis

1: The Divine Coming of the Light: The book opens in classic Aristotelian in media res, as I hike up the 3,776 meter …show more content…
I began picking up hitchhikers as a kind of test on the universe. The chapter profiles a humorous as well as a harrowing experience and concludes with a scene, after a long hike, where I was rescued by three unfamiliar Japanese men. The chapter concludes in a kind of humanistic outlook. It has been accepted for publication by Hotel Amerika.
11: Live from Kosuge Village: While I was living in Kosuge, I was stunned when I came across two Americans with rocker hair buying carrots in the village store. They introduced themselves as trance music DJs, part of an “eco-friendly” concert at a campground on the far side of the Kosuge. I joined them and tried to unite, if only in my head, how thundering base, acid, and gyrating dancing could fit in with mountain streams and bird song to redefine “nature.” A draft of this chapter is finished but will require tuning.
12: Japanese Gift
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Summary Of Bruce Feiler's Learning To Bow

Bruce Feiler’s book Learning to Bow is a memoir that offers a detailed description of what it means to be Japanese. Feiler who is an American from Georgia was sent to Japan to teach Japanese students about American values, customs, and language. Feiler discusses his experience teaching and his life in Japan during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In the meantime, in what became more of a life lesson, the author learned to understand as an outsider what it truly meant to be Japanese or as the title…

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