Masuji Ono, the protagonist of the story, is known to have been a famous artist. When he mets the daughters of Sugimura, who "was unquestionably amongst the city's most respected and influental men."(Ishiguro pg 7), he is praised by them, "He (Sugimura) had much respect for artists. Indeed, he knew of your work."(pg 9) Unsurprisingly, Sugimura was also an artist. What I noticed about this is that the Japanese had much respect for artists. Not the artist that sing hip-hop or appear in Hollywood movies, but the ones who do actual art- paintings, murals, masterpieces.
There is also a deep sense of patriotism and securing the right future for your children and their children. Ono was one the people behind the imperialist movement that eventually pushed Japan into getting involved in WWII. However both Ono and Sugimura, who happened to be very well respected man, have quite a bit of differences with the children of the current times of the latter part of the first hundred pages.
Ono's grandson Icharo, appears to be a weird, complex kid. The first scene where I noticed this was when Icharo was pretending to be a cowboy, which is a crucial part of West American culture at the time the book was written. However, Icharo is also interested in painting. There is a scene where Ono notices that Icharo is a "promising" kid. The problem comes when Ono invites Icharo to the movies- Icharo somehow loses concentration to the point where "the shapes merged and became meaningless."(pg 34) Then all of a sudden he gets up and speaks cowboy. Ishiguro does this to show how the combination of American and Japanese values led to a bit of chaos- the "shapes merged and became meaningless".
After thinking about these two passages, I gathered more clues from my own knowledge. I know that once the the Japanese surrendered to the Americans, they had to give up their military, or most of it. Americans then volunteered to become the Japanese army. That move probably brought in quite a bit of globalization and a strange mix of cultures. I mean, look at Japan today- it's a place full of technology with mass population and a fast-growing economy and population. I probably need to keep reading more, but what I am getting is that Ishiguro wants to use Ono in order to reflect his views on the slow loss of original Japanese culture, that is, before the war.
I think you mean the slow loss of Japanese culture after the war. Yet, your passage makes much sense, especially since Ono stopped painting and was well aware that his grandson, Ichiro was behaving quite differently. I believe Ishiguro is trying to use Ichiro as the new, modern Japanses culture that is to emerge from the bombed-out ruins of Imperial Japan. Nt only do we see such strange behavior on Ichiro as trying to talk English and be a cowboy, but we also see this in Ono's son-in-law, Suichi. He says, " Brave young men die for stupid causes, and the real culprits are still with us" (58). Suichi refers to tha people who caused the whole war and such unpatriotic talk about how the war was worthless would've been received in a different tone. The war caused great devastation, not only on human lives, but also changed the way Japan saw the world, more or less, the Western half of it.
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