Mind-Rain: Your Favorite Authors on Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series

Conformity by Design by Linda Gerber

As those of you who’ve read Extras may have guessed, I have an abiding interest in Japan.

I studied the language in college, and read manga ages before it was cool. (You must

believe me!) But Linda Gerber does one better: she was living in Japan while she read the

Uglies series.

In a way, living in another culture is like reading science fiction—you’re engaged in new ways of existing and of seeing that can wind up rewiring your brain. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Gerber saw parallels between the dictates of Japanese society around her and those of Tally’s city.

Join her in exploring how conformity and rebellion work together to build a culture,

both in the U.S. and in Japan, and in the Uglies series. (And, as an added bonus, learn the

secret meaning of “wa.”)

Several years ago I lived in Tokyo, where I volunteered at our international school’s library. It came to my attention that a book called Uglies was getting checked out. A lot. Once I tuned in to the title, I began to notice girls in the halls asking their friends if they’d read it yet. Naturally, my interest was piqued. I’m a book lover and always open to recommendations so, like a good little lemming, I put my name on the reserve list. When that wasn’t fast enough, I ordered my own copy from Kinokuniya, one of the few bookstores in Tokyo to carry foreign titles.

At long last I got my hands on the book and quickly understood what the hype was about. I was sucked right into Tally’s world and, living in Japan as I was at the time, understood a little too well the pressure she felt to be like everyone else. Conformity was also the rule in Japan, and I knew from experience the downsides of that rule.

The citizens of Tally’s world are carefully programmed to accept a predetermined reality, their lives laid out in a pattern they are conditioned not to question. They move from littlies to school-housed uglies to partying pretties and finally to crumblies with no need to ponder the next step—or to think for themselves. Though Tally’s society takes it to an extreme, I saw the same sort of indoctrinated pattern among my Japanese friends. They would study themselves dead from preschool through high school, often spending evenings and weekends in the Kumon study centers so they could get into the right university where it was widely accepted that, having achieved the goal of getting that college acceptance letter, they would party through the next few years. New Pretty Town, anyone? After college, it was time to get serious again and then join the ranks of salarymen—just like middle pretties—taking on more responsibility and bowing to the predetermined societal pattern.

In Japan, of course, dissenters are not hunted down and forced to submit as they are in Tally’s world. There are no brain lesions to suppress individual thought. There is, however, a cultural expectation to conform that can be just as restricting. Reading the books, I felt a kinship with Shay and the others who long to break the mold and escape to the Smoke. I knew their anxiety of feeling trapped in a don’t-be-different mindset.

In the United States, we have an old adage that says, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Japan has a similar saying with a much different take on that idea: “The nail that stands up gets beaten down.” To simply things: Western society teaches that if you stand out or make enough noise, you’ll eventually get what you want. Japanese culture says it’s better to be the same and not draw attention to yourself.