A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

by Pico Iyer

We think it improper to uncover our thoughts.”

How you enjoy Japan will depend in large part on how you take the two-dimensional quality that shimmers over so much of daily life,

“The most important things in our practice,” said the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, “are our physical posture and our way of breathing. We are not concerned about a deep understanding of Buddhism.”

Shinto, lacking arguments, cannot be refuted.

When Buddhism arrived in Shinto Japan, the two were brought together much as a foreign prince might be married off to a descendant of the Sun Goddess.

Seventy percent of Japanese sentences, by one count, lack a subject, and 50 percent of all spoken sentences do, too.

Now that I live in Japan, I see that it’s crowds that make the festival, much more than the spectacle itself.

When Japan was ushered into an arranged marriage with America after the war, it had to address, with fresh urgency, how much to follow the forward-looking way of its new partner, how much not to sweep under the carpet.

Yet today far more women are visible in Chinese boardrooms than in Japanese. Japan has taken the Confucian model and, as in so many other respects, pushed it to its farthest extreme.

Japan is so good at functioning on its own terms that its people find it ever more challenging to function on the terms of the rest of the world.

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.

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.

This must be the guy from lady and the monk!

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.

Sometimes Japan seems more than ready to change itself on the surface precisely so that it will never have to change deep down.