by Pico Iyer
“Family not send money?” my wife asks, when we hear that a train killed a pedestrian in an accident in California. “No,” I say, “the family is more likely to sue Amtrak to get money out of them.” She looks confused: in Japan, the family feels obliged to take financial responsibility for the inconvenience caused by a suicide, or even an accident.
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The United States sees ten times more murders every year than does Japan. Yet Japan has been home to sixteen times more professional gangsters than the States had when the Cosa Nostra was at its peak.
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The conviction rate of suspects in Japan is 99.85 percent (as against around 80 percent in Britain and the United States). Is this because the police are so efficient—or so reluctant to admit a mistake? Is it because the accused assume they must have done something wrong—or because they’re pressured to act as if they did? Is it because prosecutors take on cases only if they expect to win—or simply because in Japan an arrested person is assumed to be guilty unless proven innocent?
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Although at least one hundred and forty nations have abolished the death penalty, in Japan support for capital punishment runs at more than 80 percent. Inmates—often half blind or in wheelchairs—are routinely hanged on Christmas Day, when not so many will notice, and neither they nor their families are given advance notice.
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Inquiry, in every sense, is not encouraged in a society based on harmony. Japan is the rare society that offers no life sentences without parole.
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I’m stunned, in a Californian ICU, that the nurses tending to my stroke-ridden mother change every day.
“I suppose they don’t want the staff getting too emotionally engaged with patients who could die at any moment,” I tell Hiroko.
“No,” she says. “Responsibility. If something happens, they don’t want any one individual to feel it’s her fault.”
THE BRIDGE OF HESITATION
The first sentence of Kazuo Ishiguro’s second novel, set in Nagasaki just after the war, introduces us to a painter living next to a thoroughfare known as “The Bridge of Hesitation.”
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In Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel The Makioka Sisters, set a decade earlier, the action for more than five hundred pages turns on nothing but a young woman’s refusing to say yes to any proposal, and not really saying no.
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“Whenever they had to decide whether to go out or not,” Tanizaki writes of a married couple in Some Prefer Nettles, “each of them became passive, watchful, happy to take a position according to the other’s manner. It was as if they had a basin of water balanced between them and waited to see in which direction it would spill. Sometimes the day passed without their coming to a decision.”
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That indecisiveness is fatal, because both husband and wife are unhappy in their marriage and both have taken on lovers. But neither will take responsibility for being the one to break their union, so they remain in sorrowful limbo forever.
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As the husband says, inverting the sentiment I expect to hear elsewhere, “Each of us thinks the other is perfectly right, and that makes everything impossible.”
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“If you’re always thinking of the other person first,” a sister pointedly reminds her clergyman brother, always too set on doing the right thing (in Elizabeth Strout’s novel Abide with Me), “you don’t have to bother with what you’re feeling. Or thinking.”
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Zen teachers in Japan are often invigorated by Western students, because they’ve chosen to engage in the practice and are not just, as are their Japanese counterparts, following family obligation. But Zen teachers in Japan are often frustrated by Western students for the same reason: they choose to move off again, as their Japanese counterparts seldom do.
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The Japanese game of Go has only two rules, but there are more possible moves, by several orders of magnitude, than there are atoms in the universe.
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When Japan was ushered into an arranged marriage with America after the war, it had to address, with fresh urgency, how much to follow the forward-looking way of its new partner, how much not to sweep under the carpet.
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The theme of Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki in 1954, is always what to do with the past—how at once to respect it and to set it aside. His characteristic time is twilight, when what has recently been visible becomes as bleary as what is about to come. His first non-Japanese novel, bearing the very Japanese title of The Remains of the Day, centers on one postwar figure who, realizing, too late, that he failed to take responsibility in the public sphere and failed to take initiative in the private, is left in a shadowland of “If only”s.
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Its sequel, set a generation later, is the book the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami entitled After Dark—or, in postwar Japanese, Afuta Daku.
TOPSY-TURVY
George Mikes begins his classic text How to Be an Alien—the funny, wide-eyed tale of a Hungarian coming slowly to know the upside-down ways of his new neighbors, the English—with the simple truth, “In England everything is the other way round.” To Englishmen, of course, this applies even more to Japanese, the people who flip their light switches up, not down, for off, who used to count the hours backwards, from twelve to four, and who say “Yes” where we would say “No.”
A book called How to Be a Japanese would point out that people in this looking-glass world admit to feeling happiest when they can feel sad and see a gift as less a blessing than a burden (since now they’ll have to reciprocate). They traditionally wrote their names and addresses backwards (as it seems to us) and placed footnotes at the top of a page and a period at the beginning of each paragraph.
For fires or an ambulance they dial 119, and at a baseball game you hear of “two-and-three” counts.
I step into a bullet train in Osaka and see that the seats are numbered “E-D” and “C-B-A.” I get off the train and walk into an elevator, to ascend from the B1 floor to the B2. Prices are described as “Y7000–3000,” and bars advertise their opening hours as “9:00–25:00.” A vegetarian meal in my favorite Kyoto restaurant, Kerala, costs 50 percent more than one with chicken or beef or lamb.
“Always the left is the right side,” Lafcadio Hearn noted, of the adopted home he often loved, “and the right side the wrong; and keys must be turned, to open or close a lock, in what we are accustomed to think the wrong direction.” We pass a thread through the eye of a needle, Hearn recalled; the Japanese pass a needle through a thread.
“To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards,” wrote the Boston polymath Percival Lowell, in 1888, “is but the a b c of their contrariety….From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle instead of its head to dry to the striking of a match away in place of toward one, there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however trivial, but finds with them its appropriate reaction—equal but opposite.” After writing a provocative book on Japan as America’s mirror society, which, “like all mirrors gives us back left for right,” Lowell turned his gaze to Mars.
In all of this, Hearn and Lowell—Mark Twain, too, and Britain’s first permanent diplomatic representative in Japan (“They write from top to bottom, from right to left, in perpendicular instead of horizontal lines; and their books begin where ours end”)—were following in the footsteps of one of the first foreigners to set foot in Japan, the sixteenth-century Portuguese missionary Luis Fróis. In a letter to a fellow Father, in Nagasaki, Fróis wrot
e, “This is a country seen in a mirror, where everything is backwards compared with Europe.
“In Europe,” he went on, in a frenzy of listing all the ways in which “everything is reversed” in the East, people “of rank ride in the stern of the ship, while in wrong-way-around Japan, they ride in the prow.” We “avoid vague expressions,” he continued, gaining steam, “while they set high value on the ambiguous. We sew a wound where they paste a piece of paper on it. Our ink is liquid, but theirs is a lump of black stone. We write letters at great length, while they write brief ones.”
On and on the list went, citing matters of etiquette and emotion and religion, and when Fróis published a book, listing six hundred and eleven ways in which Japan was Europe inverted, its title was rendered as Topsy-Turvy, a term that many a newcomer trots out to this day.
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Every November, my local bus explodes into a chorus of deafening sniffles and coughs, of cleared throats and gagged sneezes and running noses, the last word in unseemliness, as it seems to me. But that’s only because, although every Japanese carries a handkerchief, every Japanese believes that to blow your nose into something that’s already unclean is the last word in unseemliness.
So, by trying hard to be polite, they affront me (and many a foreigner) with what we take to be maximal rudeness.
If, as Mikes says, “in England, everything is the other way round,” Japan manages to be the wrong way round from England, without ever becoming Hungary. As my Japanese neighbors would say, “Nothing is really white-and-black.”
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
WHAT LIES WITHIN
Japan likes to present itself to the world in its collective, corporate face—in groups—and we like to see it in terms of stereotypes. Yet everything fresh, surprising and warm in Japan takes place at the level of the individual: Japan’s great accomplishments may be communal, but its treasures are its constantly unexpected and passionate people.
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Nowhere else I’ve been, in fact, are individuals so disengaged from the political domain; my Japanese friends assume they can no more address their leaders than they can a group of look-alike men in suits in a corporate boardroom with the doors locked and the curtains drawn. So they turn their backs on the public sphere, and make fantastic worlds out of their passions, counter-societies out of their hobbies.
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“Success and satisfaction could rarely be sought by way of public accomplishment,” writes Krista Tippett of East Germany in the 1980s. “In response, ordinary people defended and grew their inner lives defiantly.”
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Pragmatic to the core, my Japanese pals are happy to take four-day trips around Europe, because they know that four days of novelty can furnish forty years of memories. Experience is less important than what we make of it.
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If they can’t get to Europe, they’ll find their way to a local theme-park Eiffel Tower. Even a place that we write off as “inauthentic,” they realize, can arouse emotions that are entirely authentic.
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At a Starbucks in central Kyoto, seats are lined up in a row, so you can look out at a sixth-century temple in a courtyard. At the National Museum of Modern Art, not far away, chairs are likewise set out in a line in a large empty room so you can look out at the busy streets, the girls flowing past in spring kimono, the cherry trees framing a thin canal.
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No one married to a Japanese would ever call her “repressed.” She simply has a sharp and unwavering sense of where emotion is appropriate and where not; she lives in the gap the British classicist Jasper Griffin explained to his friend Ved Mehta between denying one’s emotions and choosing not to indulge them.
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“Have more than thou showest,” as his Fool advises Lear, “speak less than thou knowest.”
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Read the classic poems of Kyoto and you see that a night of love is less important than the way one anticipates it or the words with which one commemorates it. What we do with our feelings lasts longer than the feelings themselves.
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In the most celebrated modern essay on classic Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, Tanizaki extols the beauty and suggestiveness of all you can’t see, because that gives the imagination, the inner world, more to work with.
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By the time of Haruki Murakami, however, the outside world has become such a mist, a mystery, that one descends into the hypnotic passageways of an inner world that seems to lead nowhere at all.
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Four million people pass through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo every day—it’s the busiest station in the world—but many Japanese believe that hundreds remain within its bowels, unable or unwilling to come up to any of its two hundred exits. Real lives are played out under cover.
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As many as one million people in Japan are so estranged from the outside world that they are shut-ins, living in their own heads, much like the dangerous dreamers of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, who, in Murakami’s nonfiction book about them, inhabit the subterranean tunnels of delusion, working to hatch utopias.
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On being awarded the Kyoto Prize, the artist William Kentridge was greeted by the mayor of Kyoto. The man wore a kimono that was completely plain, Kentridge noted. But when the mayor opened it up, his visitors saw that the inner lining, the part almost nobody would ever see, was fantastically embroidered.
THE FAIRER SEX
The Japanese Constitution, unlike its American counterpart, speaks explicitly of “the essential equality of the sexes,” thanks in part to the Western woman who helped draft it. Having honored that on paper, however, Japan feels free to ignore it in real life.
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In Japan, as Tiger Tanaka advises Sean Connery’s James Bond upon the latter’s arrival in Japan (in the film of You Only Live Twice), “men always come first.”
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To early Japanese, one sign of Western barbarity was the respect foreigners showed to women. Japanese gallantry had less to do with chivalry to a lady than with fealty to a lord.
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Japan’s streets are less threatening to women than those of almost any other country; but that is partly because pleasure is left to the domain of professional women, relegating their everyday sisters to the realm of duty and domestic obligation.
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In traditional Japan, it was considered discourteous for a man to be too friendly to a woman, because that suggested, in the division of responsibilities, that she was a worker in the “pleasure quarters.”
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As of 2019, fewer than 1 percent of management positions in Japan are held by women. And by 2016, the majority of women in Japan who did hold jobs were engaged in “nonregular work”—sometimes temporary, sometimes part-time. Their average salaries, as of 2014, fell well below poverty levels.
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The year after I arrived in Japan, a Japan Times survey found that seven in ten Japanese men refused even to consider working for a woman.
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In a survey conducted in 2014, nine in every ten young Japanese women said that remaining single was preferable to what they imagined marriage to be.
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When, after five hundred and twenty-nine pages, Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters concludes at last in a wedding, its final sentence shows the bride on her way to
the altar, stricken with diarrhea.
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In Sawako Ariyoshi’s The Doctor’s Wife, a twentieth-century novel set in late-eighteenth-century Japan, a woman is “considered past her prime” because “she was still living with her parents at the age of twenty-one.” When a lord stops by the parents’ home, it’s assumed he will enjoy their daughter after dinner; if he does not, it will be a mark of shame to his hosts.
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When I arrived in Kyoto in 1987, women were known as “Christmas cakes” if they were still unmarried at twenty-five (since, by December 25, a Christmas cake is too old to be of any use). Now—progress is slow—they are known as “New Year’s Eve gifts.”
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“As women,” a scholar from East Asia told me, merrily, “we’re so used to being put down that we’re always waiting to become mothers-in-law. Then, at last, we have someone to boss over.” Or, as my Japanese wife has it, having survived a marriage to a Japanese man, “He know he can anytime get new wife. But cannot get new mother!”
