A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

by Pico Iyer

We have a self, the Buddha asserted, and we don’t have a self. We live simultaneously on levels both subtle and gross.

Coming to Japan, I learned that its language doesn’t have a future tense, but the present tense can be tweaked in any number of ways.

Perfection, in fact, is part of what makes Japan wonderfully welcoming to foreigners, and unyieldingly inhospitable, deep down.

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.

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.

Thus women in Japan have every reason to make contact with a foreign world—by going abroad, by learning another language, even by marrying a foreigner—and men in Japan have every incentive to remain in a system that flatters and protects them.

In two out of every three Japanese households, it’s the woman who handles all the earnings, giving her husband an average of 15 percent of his salary as pocket money.

In the night world—as at my local ping-pong club—women call the shots, precisely by pretending to allow men to assume they’re in control.