Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  In the professional ranks, of course, the regimen was even more tyrannical. Before every single game of the season, whether in midwinter or 100-degree heat, the players had to practice for four hours and run three miles. One team did a daily “Death Climb” that included twenty sprints up and down the 275 steps of a Shinto shrine; others did “1,000 ground ball” drills, performed 500 “shadow swings” daily, or ran sprints with weights tied to their backs and tires attached to their legs. A laggard player was routinely humbled by having balls hit directly at his body for hours on end. In the United States, star pitchers are handled like precious objects who need at least three days of rest between appearances; in Japan, a successful pitcher is made to appear day after day after enervating day, until he virtually collapses into retirement in his mid-twenties. “American players start spring training on March 1, Japanese on January 15,” Whiting explained succinctly in a television interview. “American players spend an average of three hours a day on the field, the Japanese spend eight. Americans run one mile a day on average in camp, Japanese run ten.” In 1987, even Lou Gehrig’s seemingly unbreakable record of playing in 2,138 consecutive games had been shattered by Sachio Kinugasa of the Hiroshima Carp, who had appeared in every game for 12 years.

  Japanese baseball, in fact, was driven by the same unbending will to succeed, the same single-minded determination, the same almost inhuman commitment to industry that had made the entire country a world leader in industry. Hard work, and more hard work, and then still more. Practice, practice, practice. Practice made perfect, and perfection made for supremacy. If the country could lower its birthrate, increase its average height by four inches in four decades and solve what had been the worst pollution problem in the world, why could it not also conquer a game? Mind, it was felt, could always master matter; greatness could be achieved through willpower alone. Even the dignified Oh, for all his emphasis on toughening the spirit, acknowledged that one of the keys to his accomplishments was simple repetition. “I have always believed,” he said, “that success in this life owes to a strong will.”

  Thus the coaches in Japan worked on the assumption that there was nothing that a man could not be trained—or forced—to do. “If your mental attitude is right,” said Giant pitcher Tsuneo Horiuchi, “you can make your body work.” Absolute efficiency was the highest goal. “The fewer mistakes you make,” said Shigeo Nagashima, once Oh’s only rival as the greatest player in the land, and later a coach, “the more games you will win.” The logic was as relentless as calculus: do not try to manufacture felicities, just eliminate all mistakes. Do not make good, just make perfect. The Japanese were already working on such technological innovations as a system to warn outfielders of the proximity of the fence, and a batter’s helmet equipped with electronic buttons for the relaying of instructions. But the greatest of all the creations they envisaged was a man, or a group of men, who could be made to operate as flawlessly as a car. Nothing could defeat an error-free machine.

  A purification of the spirit and a series of soulless exercises, a way of elevating men into monks and of reducing them into machines: from head to toe, the Japanese game seemed thoroughly Japanese, and not much of a game.

  III

  As I spent longer in Japan, I increasingly came to feel that the “empire of signs” was, as I had half expected, the most complex society I had ever seen, and to that extent, the most impossible to crack. If nothing else, its assumptions were so different from those of the West that to understand it seemed scarcely easier than eating a sirloin steak with chopsticks. The Japanese might drink the same coffee as their American counterparts, and their magazines might boast English titles. But how could one begin to penetrate a land where shame was more important than guilt, and where public and private were interlocked in so foreign a way that the same businessman who unabashedly sat on the subway reading a hard-core porno mag would go into paroxysms of embarrassment if unable to produce the right kind of coffee for a visitor? Japan defied the analysis it constantly provoked; Japan was the world’s great Significant Other.

  By the same token, I also found that discussions among foreigners about the true nature of Japan continued endlessly, and fascinatingly, yet never seemed to come to anything new. Every foreign “explanation” of the country seemed finally to revolve around exactly the same features—a reflection of the place’s homogeneity, perhaps, but also of its impenetrability. How, every foreigner wondered (in unison), could a culture promiscuously import everything Western, yet still seem impenetrably Eastern? How did the place remain so devoted to its traditions even as it was addicted to modernity and change? What to make of a people with an exquisite gift for purity as well as an unrivaled capacity for perversity? And how on earth could a land of ineffable aesthetic refinement decorate its homes with the forms of cartoon kitties?

  Japan, for the foreigner, was all easy dichotomies: samurai and monk, Chrysanthemum and Sword, a land, as Koestler wrote, of “stoic hedonists.” If the test of a first-rate mind, as Fitzgerald once wrote, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time and still keep going, Japan had the most first-rate mind imaginable.

  To me, however, all these familiar contradictions seemed finally to resolve themselves into a single, fundamental division: between the Japan of noisy, flashy, shiny surfaces and the Japan of silence and depth. The first—the face of modern Japan—afforded a glimpse into a high-tech, low-risk future, a passage into the clean, well-lit corridors of a user-friendly utopia, where men glided on conveyor belts into technocentric cells that were climate-controlled, sweetly scented and euphoniously organized by a PA system. Here was society as microchip, a tiny network of linked energies. Commuters functioned like computers, workmen like Walkmen. Every morning, armies upon armies of workers—men all in jackets and ties, women all in look-alike skirts and blouses—surged through the subways of Tokyo, undifferentiated, unerring, and undeflected.

  This was the Japan of no fuss and no static, the Japan where everything was accurate to umpteen significant places. In parking lots, all the nearly identical cars were lined up in perfectly symmetrical rows, shiny and well organized as compact, economical little boxes (and, in Japan, I saw no big cars, no old cars, no dirty cars, or showy cars). In the bullet trains, every passenger placed his suitcase, just so, on the overhead rack, then sat down bolt-upright, and in silence. Taxi drivers here wore the spotless white gloves of a queen’s lady-in-waiting. Everyone, in fact, seemed to have been provided with the same well-packaged contentment kit. Art, wrote Pater, should approximate to the condition of music; Life, the Japanese seemed to believe, should approximate to the condition of its ever-present Muzak.

  And though such formal perfection could be cloying at times, and antiseptic at others, it was also undeniably comforting. I always relished flying with Japan Air Lines, for example, because I always knew—could be 100 percent certain—that the flight would proceed without slip-ups, disturbances or arguments. In demonstrating the safety maneuvers, each of the hostesses performed a harmonious miniaturized ballet in which every act of mock desperation was suggested by one tiny gesture as slight as it was beautiful. And throughout the flight, the cabin attendants themselves seemed to work on automatic pilot, cruise-controlling the aisles without wasted motion, tending to every need with clockwork grace and a smile. Japan had brought class to economy by making an art form of convenience.

  In Japan, in fact, everything had been made level and uniform—even humanity. By one official count, 90 percent of the population regarded themselves as middle-class; in schools, it was not the outcasts who beat up the conformists, but vice versa. Every Japanese individual seemed to have the same goal as every other—to become like every other Japanese individual. The word for “different,” I was told, was the same as the word for “wrong.” And again and again in Japan, in contexts varying from the baseball stadium to the watercolor canvas, I heard the same unswerving, even maxim: “The nail that sticks out must be hammered down.”

 
One paradigm of this sense of flawless conformity was the perfect being: the robot. When I picked up a copy of The Student Times, a bilingual newspaper designed to assist the study of English, I found its longest article entitled “Robot Walks at Almost Human Speed.” Its Tom and Jerry cartoon featured B3-Ze, a robotized mouse. Two months later, I read that the country’s latest toy was a $14,000 kimono-clad female robot that served as the Perfect Receptionist, welcoming visitors with a smile, ushering them into the office and seeing them off with a courteous farewell. Naturally, the robot never complained, never grew tired, never fouled up (though a malfunctioning robot on an automobile assembly line had, it was true, recently claimed its first human victim). In Japan, where there are almost twice as many television sets as people, one company had even started having robots manufacture other robots.

  But an even more eloquent microcosm of modern Japan, I thought, was Tokyo Disneyland. A vision of an ideal order—sanitized, homogenized, unsmudged by human hand—it was a perfect toy replica of the tinkling, sugarcoated society around it, a perfect box within a box. Immaculate in its conception, it was flawless in its execution. American Disneylands are impeccably clean; Tokyo Disneyland was more so. American Disneylands are absurdly efficient; the Tokyo branch put them to shame. Within its sparkling, fairy-tale portals, everything—and everyone—worked, and worked perfectly.

  In Tokyo Disneyland, everything had been thought of, and nothing was left to chance. Suddenly discover that you need extra money? No problem: around the corner is a Mitsui Bank. Torn by a wish to get rid of a loved one? Never fear: there is a Baby Center not far away, as well as a Pet Club. Subject to unusual needs? Relax: there are thirteen rest rooms for the handicapped here and (since dining, according to the official program, “will be an important part of your visit to Tokyo Disneyland”) more than forty restaurants. Outside the main pavilions were parking spaces for baby strollers; and along the dustless malls stood a Signature Shop, in which every one of your souvenirs could be “personalized.” Not only was there a “Parade of Dreams Come True,” but the miracle took place every day, and promptly on the hour.

  To me, however, the particular, the preeminent charm of the Disneylands at home—what gave them their life and narrative tension—had always been the unending friction between the seamless perfection of the place and the irredeemable, intractable, sometimes intolerable, humanity of its visitors. Technologically, Disneyland was a monument to all that was great in man, his ability to manufacture perfection and to make even the most cartoonish of conceits grand and moving through sheer mechanical wizardry. Yet in the midst of all these glittering conceptions were fat women in shorts and slobbering bikers, stringy blondes on the make and screeching brats with ice cream dribbling down their cheeks.

  Tokyo Disneyland, however, had no such enlivening contrasts. Indeed, there was no disjunction at all between the perfect rides and their human occupants. Each was as synchronized, as punctual, as clean as the other. Little girls in pretty bonnets, their eyes wide with wonder, stood in lines, as impassive as dolls, while their flawless mothers posed like mannequins under their umbrellas. Mass-producing couples and 1.7-children families waited uncomplainingly for a sweet-voiced machine to break the silence and permit them to enter the pavilion—in regimented squads. All the while, another mechanical voice offered tips to ensure that the human element would be just as well planned as the man-made: Do not leave your shopping to the end, and try to leave the park before rush hour, and eat at a sensible hour and do not, on any account, fail to have a good time.

  In a recent poll, a group of Japanese had been asked what had given them the most happiness in life. More than half of them had answered, “Disneyland.”

  THE BEAUTY OF the Zen temples was, of course, quite the opposite. There were no signposts along their paths, and no signs. Every visitor had to make his own way, fill the emptiness with something from within. There was nothing for him to see or do, nothing to find save what he had brought himself. And that, very often, was the greatest find of all.

  I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain. Bells tolling through the dusk, calling the faithful to prayer.

  In Kamakura, at the end of a bright afternoon, everything was mute. An old man sat on a wooden bench, motionless, lost in contemplation. Light fell through the hushed, unpeopled groves. Nothing stirred. The mind absorbed the calmness, the calmness absorbed the mind. Thoughts fell away, or were gentled into something purer. And the air was filled with something more than wonder: peace, and the drift of meditation.

  And all about the lantern-lit passageways of Kyoto in the twilight hung the same enraptured stillness. A little boy threw a pitch, and a littler boy missed, missed, missed the luminous yellow ball, and a girl looked on from the curb. Behind every tidy vertical white sign was a blond-wood door, and through the door, red lanterns led the way to tiny rock gardens. The silence was quickened by the sound of falling water.

  After nightfall, the cobbled streets grew secret, almost silent, but for an occasional footstep in the distance, the sound of a faraway piano. I saw a shiver of light beneath a bamboo screen. I glimpsed a pair of slippers twinned outside a tatami room. I heard the rustle of a kimono swishing upstairs. Now and then, I caught a snatch of laughter from an upper room.

  The same Japanese who relished Tokyo Disneyland seemed also to enjoy a remarkable gift for stillness, for furnishing their lives with absolutes. Clean lines, empty spaces. Silence and space. Water and air. In the ringing, silver purity of the streets, the abstract was brought close and given warmth. It was given further plangency by the country’s sense of exquisite agony, its appreciation of the way in which all the floating world is shadowed by mortality, so that loveliness is sad, and sadness lovely. Thus the bare rooms and sparse trees of the gardens were designed to register all the inflections of the passing seasons, and the gardens themselves became elegiac odes, haikus that arrest all the fugitive sensations that catch at the Japanese heart: longing and parting, the passage of time, the ache of recollection.

  A less thoughtful people might be maddened by the seething buzz-saw noise of cicadas in August. But the Japanese reminded themselves that the insects came up from underground only on the final day of their lives, and so found in even the cacophony a lovely, haunting symbol. “It is the sound of summer,” a Japanese girl explained to me, “and it makes us sad. Because it makes us think of their dying. And then we realize that we too must die.”

  Deepest of all the autumnal beauties of the Zen gardens, though, was their simple rightness. Some blessings, I knew, came from Nature, unbidden and unplanned: the play of moonlight on the water, or mountains at daybreak; the woods at dusk. But the Zen gardens were images of a perfection that came not from the heavens, but from men. The lantern, the wooden bridge, the stream had been placed just so, not by accident but design. The gardens showed how perfection could be fashioned out of nothing. They revealed how, through attention and deliberation alone, men could be brought into harmony with the ideal. They sang, in effect, of how much humanity could achieve.

  AND IT WAS here, I felt, that the two sides of Japan, the lyrical and the mechanical, the frenzy of the video revolution and what Kawabata called “the deep quiet of the Japanese spirit,” came together. The mechanical smoothness that I saw all around me was, in its way, just the secular equivalent of the garden, a profane counterpart to that exact geometry of the spirit. The items laid out in the department-store racks were no less perfect in their man-made arrangement than the rocks in the raked gravel of the temples; the rides in Disneyland were no less precise than the empty spaces of Kyoto. Both worlds were governed by the same aesthetic clarity, the sa
me delicacy of suggestion, the same will for harmony. Both, in fact, arose from the same perfectionist ideal: not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but unity, discipline and the pursuit of purity.

  Thus the one thing that seemed to run like an electrical current through every aspect of Japan, linking its computers to its temples to its ballparks to its offices, was an impatience with all limitation. The Japanese did not see why everything should not be made perfect. Whatever can be, they seemed to say, shall be. And the people had not only the vision to see what was wrong but the discipline to correct it. Thus everything was made flawless, and no draft was rough. Between the idea and the reality, between the construction and the creation, there fell no shadow.

  Everything, in fact, approximated to its Platonic image: every Zen garden was a picture-perfect image of what a Zen garden should be; the Emperor disappeared within the idealized role of an Emperor; and every geisha corresponded exactly to the prototypical model of a geisha (a Tokyo rose was a Tokyo rose was a Tokyo rose). Everything not only conformed, but conformed to the ideal (and I often wondered whether this in part explained the much-remarked Japanese fondness for photography, the art of suspended animation which composes the chaotic world into tidy pieces, reduces 3-D mess to 2-D order, and not only transfixes the evanescent, but also domesticates life into still life). Calligraphers in Japan would devote themselves to making just a single stroke, and making it perfect; gardeners would cultivate one flawless chrysanthemum a year. In Japan, I had little sense of wasted hope or rusted ambition: everything—including the future—could be programmed; everything—including humanity—could be perfected.