No way. Japs are different from Europeans and North Americans but so are many other kinds of Terrestrials. Mankind adapts to different parts of the Earth's surface and creates radically different cultures. We can seem like different species but any extraterrestrial race will probably have comparable internal variations and all of them will be more unlike us than we are unlike coelacanths or oak trees.
There is an argument that intelligence necessitates some physical similarities - but not two eyes above a nose above a mouth with an ear at each side. 2001: A Space Odyysey wisely did not show us any of its aliens. Poul Anderson had no choice in his Technic History where the story required many intelligent species but he did a particularly good job with his Ythrians.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I can see why some might find the Japanese very "alien." But they need to remember how many of the Japanese also found Europeans and Americans to be very strange and "alien."
And I'm sure some believers in UFOs and conspiracy theories are convinced sinister aliens are lurking among us!
Sean
"Women! The aliens among us!"
— D. Flandry
SOMEBODY had to say it.
Kaor, DAVID!
Ha, ha!!! I only wish I had thought of that APT quote from the end of A CIRCUS OF HELLS!
Sean
Paul and Sean:
Incidentally, I'm very fond of a number of Japanese manga and anime — comic strips/books and television cartoons — yet I've often joked that their plots prove that the Japanese are INSANE.
Take, for instance, one of my favorites, *Girls und Panzer* (not a translation; they use exactly those words in the original Japanese), about a sport played by, among others, high-school girls, in which they conduct mock battles in World-War-II-vintage tanks. And by "mock," I mean only that they're not trying to actually KILL each other, just score hits which the computer will record as disabling one another's tanks.
There's another series I like, a long-runner now completed, about an ordinary 20th-century Japanese college student ... who has a romantic relationship with a Norse goddess, one of the Norns.
The people who came up with this stuff may not truly be ALIENS, but they're seriously WEIRD, folks! (And what does it say about ME, that I ENJOY it?)
David,
Let's not go there.
Paul.
Kaor, DAVID!!!
Ha, ha!!! Very amusing! Only goes to show you are as eccentric as the Japanese who wrote and drew these mangas! But a good kind of eccentricity!
Sean
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