Traveling To Japan With A Perceptive and Sparkling Guide

Pico Iyer has lived in Japan for more than thirty-two years but has consciously avoided learning Japanese. This despite, being married to a Japanese woman, whose grasp of English is as feeble as Pico’s knowledge of Japanese. It’s a decision that has been partly driven by politeness. He observes that the Japanese people themselves would prefer that he not become too deeply Japanese. They would rather he retain his foreigner status, deploying only a functional smattering of phrases to navigate a nation teeming with contradictions.

Then there is his vocation. As a writer, he needs to retain an outsider’s perspective. His inability to understand conversations in their entirety forces him to notice the unspoken, the subtexts of mood, nuance, tone, and other nonverbal exchanges. To further accentuate his traveler standing, he retains a tourist visa. But, Pico’s dispatches on the culture and place and people emerge from an astute grasp of the peculiarities that knit together the islands’ inhabitants. This then is a “Beginner’s” guide only in the sense of a Zen-type Beginner’s Mind: an end-state achieved after intense training and attentive observation.

For those of you who have never visited Japan, or for those of you who already know the country, Pico’s is the kind of guidebook that is likely to fascinate or provoke. As the author puts it, with his trademark British wit, “Much of this book may infuriate anyone who knows Japan; it infuriates me most of the time.” His jottings tell you as much about Japan, as they do about the enchanting writer:

Fashion Is Used to Conform Rather Than Stand Out

If you see women shopping together, you might find they wear “the same hairstyles, false eyelashes and white boots.” Fashion is used to blend into some kind of micro-group, rather than to draw attention to their selves.  

But the conformity and diktats of culture extend beyond the clothes and accessories: “Girls in Japan are trained to put the right earring on with the left hand because it looks more attractive.” In other words, the process matters, not just the end. The manner in which they make themselves attractive also needs to be attractive.

Role-Playing or Acting Is Heightened

We are all different people in different situations. But in Japan, such play-acting and role-switching are elevated to absurd heights. Each role involves deeper changes. For instance, people use different voices when addressing a boss, a colleague, or a secretary.

It’s a society that dons masks, sometimes to perilous degrees. “You Europeans think it disgraceful to expose your bodies,” a Japanese host explained to a visiting writer in the 1920s, “but you shamelessly expose your minds. Everyone knows how men and women are made, so we have no shame in uncovering our bodies. We think it improper to uncover our thoughts.”

When living with her Japanese boyfriend, the novelist Angela Carter used to wonder if a long-pretended emotion could actually turn into the real thing.

When the photographer Ansel Adams took pictures of Japanese internees held in concentration camps in California, during World War II, the Japanese prisoners were so intent on looking optimistic and buoyant, that Ansel’s pictures were treated as fakes. Such a cheery front also reflects a culture that places greater emphasis on the collective than on the individual. To reveal one’s suffering would make the “other” suffer or express concern, which would place an undue burden on the community.

Paid actors will fill in for missing family members or friends. For instance, the outfit Family Romance rents out actors who play the roles of fake husbands, sometimes even for years on end. Others play bereaved wives, daughters, or grandparents. The boss of Family Romance has been a husband to a hundred women. Pico writes: “Young societies are distrustful of artifice; older ones – and few are more seasoned than Japan – know that artifice may be all we have in a world where pain is never too distant.”

A Japanese yakuza or gangster told The New Yorker in 2012, “Think of yourself as being onstage all the time.”

Separations Between the Public and Private Selves

Inside Japanese subways, people deliberately do not look at each other. People wear make-up not to attract glances, but to drive them away. There are different words for the self at home, and for the self when roaming in public spaces.

Despite such careful respect for privacy in public spaces, strangers will “routinely” lean their sleepy heads on a neighboring passenger’s shoulder in subways. And the neighbor will politely remain still, so as not to wake up the leaning stranger. An invasion of private bodily space that is surprisingly tolerated, rather than immediately repulsed, as it would be in most other places.

In Japanese love hotels, you might get beds shaped like pineapples. Or like a space shuttle or a Queen’s carriage. Essentially, these hotels are offering you an extravagant setting in which you can try out alternate personas or selves.

A worker in Marrakech said that Japanese guests are the most polite. But also the ones who would send the most complaint letters after they got back home.

What seems to matter to the Japanese more is what they’re seen to be doing, rather than what they are actually doing. “Identities are fluid, flexible in Japan, perhaps because reality is not.”

Conformity Is Countered By Private Self-Expression

Outward sameness, can also be indicative of greater internal diversity or difference. By comparison, Pico finds more homogeneity in thinking when he travels to California – where individual self-expression is publicly championed. As the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki told his students: “When you are all in your robes, I can see you individually.”

At one level, Japan is like a military academy. There is a reverence for authority and an emphasis on being dressed in homogenous ways. As the writer David Lipsky discovered when writing about West Point, the cadets there seemed happier on average, than students at Harvard, Brown, Stanford, and so on. As Lipsky put it, “I realized that nobody at West Point was worried about sounding original or being entertaining…and I understood the immense freedom this gave them.”

Pragmatism Often Trumps Idealism

Their dreams are often more compact, more pragmatic. “My friends in Japan are less inclined to try remaking the world than simply to redecorate its corners.”

Convenience is intensely prized. To further convenience, all convenience stores look exactly like each other. Amazon Japan will dispatch a Buddhist priest to your doorstep to conduct funeral rites for the passing away of a loved one.

Japan is a Land of the Must, unlike America, a Land of the Can. It’s like Iyer says, the difference between an Arranged and a Love Marriage. In one, the affections can grow deeper over time. In the other, the early lust and passions burn bright at the start but dwindle over the years.

On a typical Japanese date, a couple will watch a film together and then return home, being careful to avoid talking about it.

In a particular upmarket restaurant in Kyoto, there are five set menus, each ranging from $125 to $300. But if you go with a group of five or six people, each person in the group must order the same menu. Even in a restaurant, you have to honor conformity rather than exercise choice.

As the Zen teacher, Suzuki puts it, “The most important things in our practice are our physical posture and our way of breathing. We are not concerned about a deep understanding of Buddhism.”

Silence and Spareness Are Valued

The Japanese aesthetic rests on subtraction, rather than on the addition of stuff.

Inhabiting Japan is also about learning to dwell in silences and pauses, in the vast ocean of the unsaid, beneath the veneer of words. Japan’s Nobel-prize winner, Yasunari Kawabata said: “No word can say as much as silence.”

With the world becoming more cluttered and noisy, the Japanese emphasis on simplicity and emptiness are the luxuries we crave.  

Everything Is Imbued With The ‘Spirit’

In the Shinto culture, everything is believed to be imbued with ‘spirit’ – inanimate objects, even small motes of dust. It’s the reason the Japanese cover the eyes of their teddy bears when discarding them.

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki says, “Take care of things and things will take care of you.” When a Western student complained about not being able to clean toilets, Suzuki suggested she give the toilet a name, and treat it like a “friend,” telling it how delighted she was to take care of it. Strangely, this worked.

A Westerner who engages in Zen meditation looks for divinity within. To a Japanese, it is more about discovering divinity without, in everything outside oneself – whether animate or inanimate.

In the West, you enter a garden. In Japan, the garden enters you. And hopefully, you leave yourself behind and carry a bit of the garden, when you return to your trafficky, cluttered, dusty streets.

References

Pico Iyer, A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations, Penguin/Viking, 2019