Pico Iyer Journeys

Living Among Incompatibles

The first thing to remember when coming to Japan, I therefore tell my friends who visit, is that everything is reversed here. The Japanese read their books from right to left and from back to front (as it seems to us), and they take their baths at night, before they go to sleep; even their baggage carousels move in the opposite direction. And so, naturally enough, what is exotic for them, and what is normal, is the opposite of the way it might be for us. Sometimes, here in Nara, where I live, I go out at dusk and walk along the great park that surrounds Todaiji Temple, home to the largest bronze Buddha in the world. As night falls, the only beings visible are deer, grazing under trees or pricking their ears at me, like ghosts come down from the hills. The place is largely deserted because most of the local Japanese are heading in the opposite direction, to the “Dreamland” amusement-park 10 minutes away.

The other thing to recall is that the Japanese keep their different selves perfectly organized (as everything else is here) by drawing strict lines between different worlds. There is one set of rules and expectations for men, another for women (and, indeed, one set for “normal” women, and a very different set for those who belong to the “mizu-shobai,” or water-world of the night district); in the same way, there are firm divisions between the office world and the play world. That is why the same Japanese businessman who is so flawlessly polite to you in a meeting will vomit in the street; and the one who fashions a delicate ikebana flower-arrangement will be incomparably ruthless when it comes to war.

Yet within these strict rules, too, things are very different from in the West. The Japanese woman, for example, still enjoys almost no power in the workplace; yet at home she controls all the household finances and makes most of the big decisions (even the highest-ranking “salaryman” often hands over his entire paycheck to his wife). There are cartoon figures on screens in many public telephones, yet the figures bow when you put down the receiver. Japanese men are encouraged to be as macho and even gruff as possible; yet 40 percent of them, I recently read, pluck their eyebrows.

The thrust of all this, then, is that appearances, of every kind, are even more deceiving in Japan than elsewhere, and the biggest “contradiction” of all is the one that separates surface from depth. If you go into a McDonald’s in Kyoto, and see the kids dressed all in surfer shorts and Chicago Bulls T-shirts, watching a baseball game on TV, you may begin to tell yourself that Japan is “Americanized.” But the baseball players smile when they strike out (as seldom happens in America). The McDonald’s salesgirls offer you Moon-Viewing Burgers and “Corn Potage Soup,” and pear sorbets (and cup your hand when they return your change). And the girls in the Chicago Bulls T-shirts still eat with a delicacy and demureness you’d never find in Chicago.

This is how Japan can take in scores of Mexican restaurants, Iranian immigrants, Indonesian fashions and African rhythms and still remain as Japanese as it’s always been (and farther from the world at large than any culture that I know). It is why many Japanese you meet in the street will be too shy even to answer a question, though nearly all of them have learned English for six years in school (while the villagers of Bali, Nepal and Thailand chatter away in French, Italian, German and English). And it’s why the Japanese in some ways seem to have the best taste in the world (when they’re working in their own distinctive and elegant tradition) and the very worst taste (when they adopt the trappings of the outside world). Japan is the fastest culture in the world to gobble up the latest fashions, and the slowest when it comes to change deep down.

The newcomer arriving in Japan will probably find more that she didn’t expect than in any other country in the world (even as much of the country looks exactly the way it’s supposed to in every photograph). He will find, for example, a quiet people who (maybe for that reason) love nothing more than noise. Not far from one of the 2,000 temples in Kyoto, where you find a stillness and calm unparalleled in the world, are the brightly-lit, clanging arcades of pachinko parlors—the local equivalent of pinball—which could put Las Vegas to shame. The more low-key the ancient spaces are, the more revved-up are such places as Shinjuku in central Tokyo, or Shinsaibashi in Osaka. And though it is rare to see young couples kissing—or even holding hands—here, Japan famously has unabashed swingers’ clubs that would make a Parisian blush.

So, too, the visitor will find people more uniform in their public behavior than anywhere around, and yet more eccentric underneath, and unexpected behind closed doors (a female neighbor of mine here flew all the way across the world to see Jon Bon Jovi’s house, before turning around and flying back, and one Zen priest I know is famous for his collection of videos of every episode of the American cop show CHiPs ever filmed). She wlll see exquisitely dressed young women in the latest from Dior, with Snoopy key-chains around their Gucci bags.

I no longer think of any of this as contradiction so much as a special gift for knowing how to honor each self in its own place. In some ways, in fact, this practical gift is what has allowed the Japanese to stay true to their traditions while devouring the new, to remain lovers of beauty while surrounded by some of the ugliest things on earth, and to remain inalienably themselves while importing everything from everywhere. When you walk amidst the festival flutes and lanterns on a Kyoto summer day—even when I walk among them, after all these years—they have the capacity to move and transport you as if nothing had changed since the 9th century (when the Gion Matsuri began). The men around me are using at least three different words for “I,” and the women at their side are using different words—or, as often as not, none at all. It’s all a way of telling us that the self, whether it belongs to Mrs. Suzuku or Japan, is a pliable, fluid, mutable thing in Japan, less like a monument than a river. Try to put a Western frame on it, and everything slips through your hands.

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