The Global Soul

by Pico Iyer

  Japan treats its residents as coddled children, and so the props of infancy are all around, though found in the terms of my own distant past. Paddington Bear smiles down at me from street corners (not least because he’s the mascot of one of Japan’s leading banks), and those signs on the local train not advertising a Royal Riding School are announcing the arrival of Thomas the Tank Engine at the local theme park. Noddy books are scattered across the shelf of the desk where I work, and when I go to the Lawson Station around the corner, I find Smarties (here mysteriously rechristened Marble chocolate) and Mentos, Maltesers, and McVitie’s chocolate digestives (in bite-sized haiku form). Japan’s response to globalism, it sometimes seems, is a promiscuous consumption of all the cultures in the world, at the level of their surfaces—all of them converted into something so Japanese that I can feel as if I’m reading Proust in German.

  Yet deeper than such toddlers’ props, I recognize in the neighborhood the outlines and emotions of the safe, protected England I knew when young, with its orderly, changeless universe of corner shops and drizzly afternoons, tea served promptly at 5:00 p.m. I recognize, more than the words, the codes and silences, the emphases that politeness fights back or the force of all the things unsaid. I recognize the imperial shelteredness, the island suspiciousness of the personal pronoun, the Old World cultivation of private hopes and habits that leave the status quo alone.

  On its surface, Japan is more alien than anywhere I know; but underneath the surface, it speaks the language I was trained to hear.

  I am reminded of how little I belong here—how alien I am to Japan’s image of itself—each time I return to the place I like to treat as home. At the Immigration desk, the authorities generally scrutinize my passport with a discernible sense of alarm: a foreigner who neither lives nor works here, yet seems to spend most of his time here; an alien who’s clearly of Asian ancestry, yet brandishes a British passport; a postmodern riddle who seems to fit into none of the approved categories.

  After I’ve been reluctantly waved on to the customs hall, I collect my bag and park my cart in a line of obviously law-abiding Japanese tourists returning from their holidays in California. When it’s my turn to be questioned, I am confronted with a customs officer who is, for some reason, always very young and uncommonly fresh-faced. He (or sometimes she) goes through the standard list of queries: where have I come from? How long will I stay? What am I doing here? Then, abruptly, he asks, “You have marijuana, heroin, LSD, cocaine?” No, I say, I don’t. “You have ever had marijuana, heroin, LSD, cocaine?” he goes on, waving, now, a laminated picture of these forbidden substances. No, I say, not always able to keep a straight face. “Porno video?” No.

  “Please open your bag.”

  At this, he pores carefully over all my belongings—the stacks of faded notes in a hand even I can’t read; the scattered bottles of hotel shampoo, which have already begun to leak and deface everything in their vicinity; the Olympic pins I’m bringing for my girlfriend’s children, and the elaborate set of inhalers I need to protect myself from Japan’s allergy-producing cedar trees.

  Then, almost inevitably, he comes upon a tiny red tablet of Sudafed antiallergy medicine. Gravely, he mutters something to a colleague. Whispers are exchanged. Then, nervously, they radio a superior, and, with brusque politeness, I am led away, by at least two officers, to a distant room. My guards look anxious and unhappy, as if they recall that the only time Paul McCartney was separated from Linda was as the result of a Japanese customs check.

  In the back-room interrogation center, my home from home, I know the drill by heart, having visited so often, and proceed to take off my clothes, till I am down to my underpants. Meanwhile, as many as seven uniformed officials gingerly go through my possessions, surveying every last bottle of leaked shampoo, every last sticky Mento in my coat pocket, even the temple charm in my wallet. My shoes are shaken out, my toothbrush holder is fearfully inspected, a stick of incense is held up as if it contained cannabis.

  Then I am subjected to a barrage of questions. Why do I carry over-the-counter allergy pills that contain a stimulant as proscribed as LSD or cocaine? What prompted me to bring antihistamines into a peace-loving island? Will I formally consent to hand over my drugs to the Japanese authorities, and authorize a confiscation of my tablets, while signing a confession?

  I am more than happy to do all of that, sometimes saying so in such amiable gibberish that the officials, fingers sticky with shampoo, tell me, “Okay, okay. You’d better leave before you miss the last train.” But my answers only compound their dissatisfaction. “Where were you born?” one asks me, while another tests my case for false bottoms. “England,” I say, as they scrutinize a Hideo Nomo telephone card. “No, where were you really born?” “Oxford, England,” I say, “as it says on my passport.” “What are you doing here?” I show them my Time business-card, my Time Inc. photo ID, even my name in a copy of Time magazine. I show them a whole book I wrote on Japan, interviews I’ve conducted in Japanese magazines, notes on Japanese topics I’m working up. Unhappy with this, they try a spot quiz. “Who is Masako-san? What is the importance of Kyoto? Where are you really from?”

  Sometimes, sensibly enough, I have made sure that not a single antihistamine tablet could be found within a hundred-yard radius of my person. But, really, that’s beside the point, since it’s not my allergies that trouble them. Once, I was strip-searched for making a phone call from the customs hall, once for going to the men’s room. Once, I was taken aside because my overcoat was “abunomaru” (I was flying to the Himalayas), and once I was even stopped as I was going out of the country (“Why is your photo so creased?” “Because so many Japanese officials have pored over it”), and the British embassy was hastily faxed on a Sunday night to authorize my departure.

  What concerns the Japanese, obviously, is just that I’m a Global Soul, a full-time citizen of nowhere, and, more specifically, one who looks like exactly the kind of person who threatens to destroy their civic harmony. During the Gulf War, I was routinely treated as if I were Saddam Hussein’s favorite brother; at other times, I have been detained on the grounds of resembling an Iranian (41,000 of whom have stolen into Japan and live illegally, in tent cities in Tokyo parks, or nine to a shabby guest-house room, undermining the local economy with fake telephone cards). The rest of the time, I am suspected of being what I am—an ill-dressed, dark, and apparently shiftless Indian without a fixed address.

  The newly mobile world and its porous borders are a particular challenge to a uniculture like Japan, which depends for its presumed survival upon its firm distinctions and clear boundaries, its maintenance of a civil uniformity in which everyone knows everyone else, and how to work with them. And it’s not always easy for me to explain that it’s precisely that ability to draw strict lines around itself—to sustain an unbending sense of within and without—that draws me to Japan. In the postmodern world, to invert Robert Frost, home is the place where, when you have to go there, they don’t have to take you in.

  My daily life in Nara is itself a curious artifact, belonging to a kind of existence that even I could not have imagined only a decade ago, before “home office” fax machines and Global Village modems, with international telephones on every other street corner, made centrifugal lives possible. In terms of the world I grew up in, almost none of it makes any sense, but in terms of the world we’re entering, it forms the outlines of a complete sentence.

  I go to sleep every day here by 9:00 p.m., in part so as to wake up at 5:00 a.m., when my employers (thirteen time-zones away) are at their desks (their office hours stretching from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., Nara time). My research facility, if I need to check on something, is an English-language bookstore ninety minutes away by train, and my version of the Internet is a copy of the World Almanac. The person I see most often, outside my immediate household, is the Federal Express boy who comes to collect and deliver packages from distant Osaka. In the newly shrunken world, I can complete articles or
even books without having to exchange a word with editors, and can draw out money in a local department store from a bank account on the other side of the planet.

  For breakfast, I generally enjoy some combination of asparagus cookies or chlorella biscuits, chaperoned by what is here known as “Royal Milk Tea,” and for lunch I go to a convenience store round the corner, where all the goods of England and America are on sale, yet nothing is quite as I would expect. Little old women are photocopying Chopin scores to the sound of piped-in Clash songs, and teenagers with safety pins all over their faces are consulting magazines with names like Classy and Waggle and Bang. Though the whole place is only four aisles wide, it is crammed with wild plum chews and mangosteen candies, tubs of Grand Marnier pudding and vitamin jelly drinks. There are ice-cream sandwiches here made of Darjeeling tea, tandoori-flavored potato chips, and Kiss Mints that come in flavors of litchee and lime, kiwi, “Wake-up,” and “Etiquette.” There are “Moisture Desserts” and cups of “Mango Dream Snow,” injunctions on packages to “Listen to the sweet murmurings of vegetables. You’ll feel pleasure and find a smile.” Once, while munching from a bag of potato puffs, I looked down, to see three characters prancing around the bag, and identified as Jean and Paul and Belmonte.

  Usually, in the afternoons, I go to the post office next door, where all the clerks look up as I enter, as at the arrival of their daily soap opera. My principal means of communicating with the world at large is fraught with hazards: the envelope I’m using (from my company) is too large—measured against a transparent green ruler the workers wield—or I’ve neglected to attach a Par Avion sticker. Once I was rebuked for including too long a PS on the back of an envelope, and once, during the holiday season, I came in, only to be presented with a special invoice for thirty dollars when it was discovered that my New Year’s greetings exceeded the regulation five words.

  Afterwards, I walk around the local park, past the “bad boy” son of the electrician, polishing his Corvette till it’s red as his waist-length hair, past the dogs that bark furiously at my alien scent and children who back away as if at the sight of the summer horror blockbuster from California. At one street corner in this placid country neighborhood, there is a set of vending machines where I can buy forty-nine kinds of cigarettes, thirty-six alcoholic drinks, ninety-two nonalcoholic drinks, and a bewildering array of brightly colored cans advertising Corn Potage soup and Melon Cream soda, Calorie Mate Block and Drafty Beer. In the supermarket, grannies handle radishes with black-fingered gloves and the shifty character beside me at the butcher shop sports a gold star on his breast that says ASSISTANT SHERIFF, LARIMIE.

  Japan is notorious for treating all the world as a kind of giant souvenir store, from which it can mix and match at will, and many a newcomer, to Kyoto, for example, is taken aback to find the old imperial capital gaudy with “Think Potato” bars, “Amazement Spaces,” and stores styling themselves “American Life Theater” (while the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” is piped into the geisha quarter). Yet the impersonality of Japan, to me, is that not of a country that hasn’t matured into character so much as of one that keeps its passions to itself. The public world strives to be generic, to keep friction and confusion to a minimum; individuality flowers behind closed doors.

  And though the reach of such daily oddities is only shallow, I often think of that moment in Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, in which a woman from Sarah Lawrence reproaches California for offering “unreal places” instead of history and nuanced depth. Instead of Gothic cathedrals, she implies, it serves up Motel 6.

  At this, Isherwood’s stand-in narrator replies with passion, pointing out that it’s precisely the unreality of the look-alike motel that prevents one from taking it too seriously; synthetic surfaces, he says, are a good deal less likely to keep one enthralled to them than that whole “old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and white wine.” California encourages transcendence, he argues, precisely because its surfaces are so empty.

  A position easier for an Old World exile to take, perhaps, than someone native to its state of permanent revolution; yet a salutary reminder that a place of hollow surfaces has some advantages over one of seductive ones. It’s only the invisible things that make us feel at home.

  My next-door neighbor in the four-apartment building where I pass my days is a Baptist minister who speaks perfect English, from his student days in Chicago, and dispenses his wisdom from a drab second-story apartment in the building across from ours, with a cross on the balcony outside and a sign reminding potential parishioners that attendance of a service brings with it a free English lesson. Whenever he passes me on the stairs, he looks away as if confronted by an agent of Beelzebub’s. By contrast, the apartment upstairs from mine is occupied by a yamama (or “young mother” crossed with “Yankee mother,” as the cunning Japanese term has it), who greets me with extravagant delight every time we meet, her long hennaed hair flying as she wrestles with two toddlers, a stroller, and the exigencies of her leopard-skin attire.

  Occasionally, Jehovah’s Witnesses appear at my door, with copies of The Watchtower in Japanese and, rallying at the sight of me, pass over a page on which their prayers are printed in fifty languages. Occasionally, telemarketers call up to plug some international phone service, but they are quickly scared off by my indecipherable answers. The world is here if one wants to follow it, even in this historically most closed of cultures: my local English-language paper carries even the scores of the Albanian and Luxembourg soccer leagues, and the monthly English-language magazine has notices for the Baha’i Communities of Osaka/Kobe, the Synagogue Ohel Shelomoh, even the Norwegian Seamen’s Church (close to its ads for “culture friendships” and “marriage-minded Canadians”).

  But what the people in my small apartment block enforce, every day, is that, increasingly nowadays, a sense of home or neighborhood can emerge only from within; I have never talked to the Baptist minister or to the rock ‘n’ roll mother, but for both of them, in opposite ways, I am a symbol of a world they cannot touch. And I, in reverse, can’t begin to sustain the illusion that I know very much about them (as I might do “at home”). The Global Age reminds us of how little we really know about the people we pass on the stairs every day; identity will have to be deepened without much help from outside.

  Every few weeks in Nara, in order to pay the bills, I take a bus down the street to a bank with stained-glass windows, where the cashier, as she changes my dollar traveler’s checks into yen, hands me a Nara Bank toothbrush, to ease the silence, or, as often as not, two packages of Kleenex. One woman, on the Foreign Exchange floor, greets me every time I visit with a rapturous “Pico-san, long time no see!” and congratulates me on going back to California to see my mother, or on not doing so, and protecting my family here. When she is absent, her place is taken by a grimacing superior who glowers at me with obvious distaste, and pages through my passport in the hope of finding an irregularity.

  Afterwards, I generally stop in at the library, my only real source of English-language news, and then at the Tsutaya Culture Convenience Club, where, when I rent, say, Chungking Express (in Cantonese, with Japanese subtitles), I am offered a choice between a small box of Kellogg’s Genmai Flakes and a 289-page book listing all the store’s animated videos. Though not enormous, the Culture Club has special sections for every actor you can think of (and many whom you can’t), right down—or up—to Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vanessa Paradis, and Moira Kelly, and brings home to me that even the things I know get translated into something other here (as Jerry Maguire becomes The Agent, and Up Close and Personal, Anchor Woman). When I watched Forrest Gump’s rise to fame on video in Japan, I was surprised to see the hero, during the turmoil of the sixties, attending UCLA (as the Japanese translate Berkeley), though that is probably no stranger than the local baseball broadcasts, with their talk of “dead balls,” “timely errors,” and “sayonara home runs,” and their habit, when the tying run’s on third, with two outs in t
he ninth, of breaking for an ad for sanitary napkins, or switching to the next show because the time is up.

  In short, the very notion of what is here and there—what is familiar, what is strange—has to be reconfigured in the modern world. In Japan, it is the apparently familiar things—the Western things (played out here, as it were, in katakana script)—that are most strange to me, as I have found it to be the tempura palaces or the Buddhas by the hot tub that are most curious, often, for Japanese visiting America. Speaking a foreign language one has scarcely learned is easier, perhaps, than trying to negotiate a tongue in which all the letters are the same, but ineffably scrambled, so that home appears as oh me, and life comes out as file.

  And once a year, on the night of the harvest moon, I make a trip to the center of Nara, the imperial Buddhist capital of thirteen hundred years ago, and see costumed dancers in wooden boats ceremoniously floating around a pond into which a heartbroken empress once threw herself. A four-story pagoda is reflected in the water, and men in grass skirts brandish burning torches against the dark. Every now and then, the nighttime is pierced by the long, plangent wails of a bamboo flute.

  The courtesans in their boats look out at us like wraiths, faces ghostly white and kimono the color of blood against their crow black braids. The wind sends red lanterns fleeting against the trees. Old women, hunched over, carry luminous globes up hills like shadows from a Hiroshige print, and schoolgirls at the stands nearby giggle over Marilyn Monroe telephone cards and hand puppets in the shape of Buddha.