by Pico Iyer
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The computer company Apple Inc. has sometimes seemed to be almost Japanese, not just because of its sleekly minimalist designs, or because of Steve Jobs’s delight in the walled gardens of Kyoto, to which he took each of his children; but simply because it has maintained its perfection by operating within a tightly controlled closed system. It remakes the world by keeping most of the world out.
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“Many of the qualities about the Danish system that work so well for those born into it have made it particularly hard for outsiders to penetrate,” wrote Hugh Eakin in 2016, explaining why the friendly, prosperous, benign society of Denmark is often not so kind to refugees.
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“To be completely Japanese,” said Isamu Noguchi, who saw a lot by being incompletely Japanese, “you can not have a world viewpoint.”
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Japan is never going to flourish at the global game, says my savviest financier friend, who’s made billions off his intuitions; its only hope in the twenty-first century is to market its otherness, its foreignness, and sell itself as a tourist destination. Precisely what makes it so frustrating to foreigners trying to do business there makes it fascinating to foreigners wishing to explore a deeply foreign culture.
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At my smallish neighborhood train station in Nara, I’m greeted every day by a McDonald’s outlet, a Kentucky Fried Chicken parlor, a Mister Donut store and a Starbucks café. The whole complex bears the title “Le Ciel,” and across the street is a department store called “Paradis.”
But when I step into McDonald’s, it’s to find Vegetable Juice on the menu. I can choose between Rosehip-and-Hibiscus Tea and Corn Potage Soup to go with my Petit Pancakes. Colonel Sanders across the way is sporting a kimono, as befits one who is doling out Wa-Tu Chicken cuttleballs, Tokumori Fish Cakes and Chinese Cabbage and Bacon au gratin.
At Starbucks, I’m invited to choose between Strawberry Mille-Feuille Crepes and Marshmallow and Nut Chocolate Cake; at Mister Donut, there’s Shrimp Gratin Pie on sale and a poster for an “Ice cream au lait debut” under the ads for a Misdo Club Card (for frequent doughnut-eaters) and a sign defining the space as “San Francisco Chinatown.” Even the other eateries in the station building—an Italian restaurant offering what it calls “Japolitan” cuisine, a “Thé Thé” tea room, next to the Nuku-Nuku eatery—don’t fit into any lexicon I recognize.
In Japan, I’m reminded, nothing seems so foreign as the things I associate with home.
A WALK IN THE PARK
“I was four when my parents divorced,” says my old friend from Nagasaki. We’ve known each other for more than twenty years now, after meeting in a foreigners’ café in his hometown. Whenever he comes to Nara, he mentions how “local” the place is, how he loves the quality of mystery around it. “You can still feel a real connection between the temples and the community, like in classical Japan. Even the weather is different in places around here like Asuka and Horyuji, the way the sun rises and sets.”
Around us are pagodas and temples going back to the eighth century, when this was the capital of the land. Downtown is ruled by twelve hundred wild deer, who walk calmly along busy streets and halt traffic on the rare occasions when my four-legged neighbors refuse to wait for a green light.
“In those days,” my friend goes on—speaking of 1964—“almost no one in Japan got divorced. Everyone in the neighborhood knew.” His mother had gotten pregnant by another man, and left the house, abandoning four-year-old Joji, as I’ll call him, in the care of a bewildered father who, three years later, married a second woman, who proved keener to lavish affection on her own two children than on the lost little boy she’d taken on.
“Then the man my mother went to join died. Cancer. And she married another man, and had another child.”
The result—unusual for Japan, but hardly unknown—was that Joji had almost no contact with mother or stepmother or father or half-sibling or step-siblings; for as long as I’ve known him, he’s been traveling—Myanmar, Iran, Maine, Australia, Nepal, Thailand, Afghanistan—and yet, like many a traveler, finding no home anywhere, even as he comes to see that the only home he has is the one that he is fleeing.
I think of the CDs lined up along every shelf in his little room, the gifts he keeps showering on me—T-shirts for ping-pong, apples from the north, even knickknacks for Hiroko, whom he’s met just once.
“I saw my mother last week,” he says, as we pass the stately four-story structure that is the second-highest pagoda in the land. It’s no surprise she’s on his mind.
“In Nagasaki?”
“Yes. It’s difficult, because she knows I cannot love her. But she’s ill.”
Cancer again, epidemic in post-atomic Nagasaki. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “The government pays all her medical expenses. Because she was a victim of the A-bomb.”
He pauses, and we walk around the little pond where a young lover of an ancient emperor plunged to her death.
“My father, too. It’s not so bad. He was seven at the time; she was five. He was in a park; she was in school. But afterwards they went to the center of the explosion, and caught the radiation. They didn’t know.”
In 1995, half a century after the atom bomb was dropped, a study found rates of leukemia among survivors in Nagasaki to be ten times higher than would otherwise be expected.
Yet Joji loves Dylan and jazz and the blues, and every last piece of America he can get; that was how we first met, he riffing wildly about Saturday Night Live and cheeseburgers as we reeled around the streets of Nagasaki late at night. He follows American affairs more closely than I do, has visited forty-six of the fifty states and is definitive on both Thanksgiving and the vagaries of American foreign policy.
“In Japan,” Joji continues, “people don’t know the world. They know even less than Americans do. They’re not like the English, the Germans, the Australians. But also they don’t know what to love about their own country. They have no direction. Only exam-knowledge, no real intelligence.”
I’m used to this complaint from him, and it doesn’t subside as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, eight days before the sixty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. It’s the complaint of the no-longer-youthful almost everywhere, I think.
A young friend of Joji’s strolls up—polite and quiet, engaging with his shy English, as he walks through the arcade—and when he strolls off across the Deer Park to fetch his car, I say to my old friend, “He seems nice. Innocent.”
“Maybe. But so much counseling. Every night I have to counsel him, two, three hours. He has problems with his father.”
“His father is unkind?”
“No. His father is a kind man. But he doesn’t know what his son wants.”
It’s simple, as Joji sees it. Japan has left old Japan behind, and not found anything to replace it with. It can’t be modern America, and it can’t be ancestral Nihon.
As his friend pulls up, Joji wishes me a brisk, rather American goodbye—a jolly handshake—and I say, “Joji,” when he gets into the car, wondering how much of what he’s said about Japan may be a reflection of himself. “What is the best thing about Japanese culture?”
“Silence,” he says, as he closes the door, and rolls down the window. “It’s a silent world.”
LEARNING TO BE FOREIGN
On an ever-more-global planet, Japan can look like a seventy-year-old man who dons a brand-new “I ♥ NY” T-shirt, but remains no less old for his youthful gear, and no less himself.
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A foreigner sees contradiction in this, while a Japanese sees only compartments. Dessert, appetizers and the main course are often served in the same tray in a traditional Japanese restaurant.
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Within a month of the end of World War II, the leading historian of the Occupation, John Dower, points out, around four hundred Japanese companies were manufacturing chewing gum. No one, however, was likely to mistake Osaka for Chicago.
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Some foreigners, confronted by a place that looks and acts so different, try to become Japanese. They soon find that, the more they speak Japanese, the more they should pretend not to (nobody likes a trespasser); the more they want to be taken for themselves, the more they’re seen as symbols of the outside world. Others go in the opposite direction, choosing to play bulls in a china shop, hyper-Falstaffs, like the Americans hired for pro-wrestling bouts in Japan in the 1950s who were paid handsomely to cheat and kick, thus confirming every stereotype of barbarians at the gates.
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Japan does not permit dual nationality.
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When I arrived in Japan, I noticed—and wrote about—how the word for “wrong” was the same as the word for “different.” In truth, of course, it was I who had gotten it wrong, failing to understand the explanation a book had laid out. In effect, I was calling the Japanese wrong simply because they seemed so different.
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“What do you do,” I saw a Canadian in a large auditorium in Japan ask the Dalai Lama, after a talk, “if you really love a foreign culture and you really want to be part of it and you dream of being there for life, but everyone reminds you that you’re different?” The leader of the Tibetans looked at the young man with a grandfather’s warmth and said, “Frankly, I think you should go back to Canada.”
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Put another way, anyone who bows while speaking on the phone may have spent too long in Japan. Anyone who laughs at those bowing while speaking on the phone hasn’t spent enough time here.
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An American friend of mine in a Japanese organization in California took pains to make public acknowledgment of a sex scandal that had torn the group apart. Instantly he was berated by his American colleagues for giving the matter short shrift—and berated by his Japanese colleagues for mentioning it at all.
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“I was no more than the Foreigner,” observes an American narrator living in the Netherlands, in the Richard Powers novel Galatea 2.2, “but even that bit part wound me tighter into the social web than I’d ever been in my country.”
JUST LIKE US
On arrival in Japan, I recited all the standard guidebook proverbs—“The nail that sticks out must be hammered down.” After I’d been here a while, the only proverb that seemed to make sense was the Buddhist maxim “Even the reverse has a reverse.”
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Every time I stressed how different Japan was from everywhere else, I found a near-perfect explanation of Japan—in a passage describing somewhere else.
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“Our ancestors lacked the word ‘individualism,’ ” Tocqueville wrote, “which we have created for our own use, because in their era there were, in fact, no individuals who did not belong to a group and who could consider themselves absolutely alone.”
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“It is sometimes said,” writes Diana Eck, scholar of Hinduism, “that in India the ‘individual’ as we think of it in the West does not exist. A person thinks of himself or herself not as a singular entity, but rather as part of a larger interdependent whole, in which the parts mirror one another in an infinite, intricate pattern.”
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“Historically,” the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar tells the Indian American writer Anand Giridharadas, “the fulcrum of the Indian family has been the parents-sons unit rather than the couple….The couple is now taking center stage and is under great pressure, not only from the normal expectations that the partner fulfill all emotional needs, but also from the persistence of the former ideology, which leads to conflicts of loyalty, especially in a man who is torn between his wife on the one hand and his parents and siblings on the other.”
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“A man who knows the court,” the seventeenth-century moralist La Bruyère wrote, “is a master of his gestures, of his eyes and of his face….He is profound; impenetrable; he dissimulates bad offices, smiles at his enemies, controls his irritation, disguises his passion, belies his heart, speaks and acts against his feeling.”
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“We are very like bricks in a wall,” writes Baden-Powell, in the “Citizenship” chapter of Scouting for Boys, “we each have our place, though it may seem a small one in so big a wall. But if one brick gets rotten, or slips out of place, it begins to throw an undue strain on others, cracks appear, and the wall totters.”
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“Just because we were lying,” writes the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, evoking the beloved Istanbul of his youth in A Strangeness in My Mind, “it didn’t mean we weren’t sincere. We understood one another’s private motivations, while making sure to keep up public appearances.”
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“Wherever you find yourself, and in whatever circumstances,” wrote Epictetus, “give an impeccable performance.”
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“Be suspicious,” Epictetus also wrote, “if you appear to others as special.”
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Meeting the woman now my wife, I was struck by how much she’d grown up in Japan on the same global culture that had formed me, during the very same years, in England—The Beverly Hillbillies, Yogi Bear, “The Sound of Silence,” cotton candy and Audrey Hepburn. Getting to know her a little, I ran into assumptions and responses I’d seldom meet in the West, as recorded throughout this book. Now that we’ve been together for more than thirty years, I find her—of course—little different in her anxieties and pleasures and jealousies from anyone I would meet anywhere.
Though always individual, in the same breath.
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“FREE OF PEANUTS,” it says in English on the front of my little bag of Kameda Seika rice crackers. On the back it says, “This product may contain traces of peanuts.”
PLAYING BALL
The first year I visited Japan, two coaches from my local Hanshin Tigers baseball team beat up an umpire so violently that they were suspended for the rest of the season.
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Two years later, an umpire at the Tigers’ venerable ninety-five-year-old stadium, Koshien, had to be carried off the field after being hit by a bicycle chain flung by a fan.
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In a country by every measure at least six times safer than the United States, an umpire from the States was prevented from working games in Japan, writes the leading American expert on Japanese baseball, Robert Whiting, on the grounds that it “was not safe to umpire in Japan.”
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You go to a baseball game in Japan, as to every other public event in Japan, not for the game—which is often cautious and flawless to a fault—but for the fans. The most exciting action is nearly always to be found in the stands.
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In the neighborhood where I’ve lived for twenty-seven years, little girls hide behind their mothers’ skirts every time they see me, dogs bare their teeth at me as I walk past, day after day for decades. At the ballpark, a grandmother I’ve never met beams down and offers me some of her fried octopus, and a huge stranger dressed from head to toe as a tiger wraps me in a bear hug.
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Even a foreigner can become part of the team in a place
where private passions are given vent in public and the slogan in the souvenir shop says (in English), LET YOUR YOU OUT.
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When I took my wife to a professional baseball game in Los Angeles, she could hardly believe that fans were strolling around the grounds, heading off at critical moments to get jumbo helmets filled with nachos and leaving early to beat the traffic. In Japan you come to the park to cheer your team to victory.
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After the Tigers finished last, the year I came to live in Japan—they were thirty-seven and a half games out of first place—the demand for tickets was so intense that, as Whiting writes, “even the benches in the outfield were converted into reserved seats, sold by lottery months in advance.”
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The full-time cheerleader choreographing the individual song and dance each one of us delivers for every player as he comes up to the Koshien plate has as many as thirty assistants; some such cheerleaders have been known to take attendance to make sure not a single assistant is missing.
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Though the fans all around me are desperate for victory, the players are mostly trying not to lose. The first time an American, Bobby Valentine, was brought over to manage a professional Japanese team, in 1995, he was fired after leading his hapless squad to a stunning second-place finish, because, a team spokesman announced, “of his emphasis on winning.”
