A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

by Pico Iyer

Japan believes in accentuating the positive—black markets after the war were known as “blue-sky markets,” a Tokyo garbage fill was called “Dream Island”—because it knows that the Buddha’s First Noble Truth posits the reality of suffering. When a character in a Yasujiro Ozu movie smiles, it says more about sadness than any sob or spasm might.

“You Europeans think it disgraceful to expose your bodies,” a Japanese host explained to a visiting writer in the 1920s, “but you shamelessly expose your minds. Everyone knows how men and women are made, so we have no shame in uncovering our bodies. We think it improper to uncover our thoughts.”

If nothing’s personal in public Japan, you may conclude that Japan is an impersonal place. But as the woman in the tiny patisserie flashes you a beautiful smile and spends many long minutes placing your $1.50 éclair in a pink box, enclosing a bag of ice so the pastry won’t melt on the long way home, wrapping the box in seasonal paper and appending a bow (pick any color) under a badge to keep the box shut, you’re really in the realm of the transpersonal. Everything is deeply personal; it just has nothing to do with you.

Even in love, living with a longtime Japanese boyfriend, the British novelist Angela Carter “used to turn over in my mind from time to time the question: how far does a pretense of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?”

The serufu-esutimu he broadcasts—as with the novelist Natsume Soseki’s claim, a hundred years earlier, “Self-centeredness became for me a new beginning”—was simply, I realized, his way of reminding his country not to believe in the shy and self-deprecating role it has taken up on the global stage.

A traditional home in Japan—a classical self—is all shifting panels and self-contained compartments. Even as the absence of locks and curtains keeps the individual aware at every moment that she’s part of a larger whole.

Thus a shoji screen turns a figure into a silhouette, an Ozu movie gives us archetypal characters—Daughter, Father, Neighbor—who move like a commedia dell’arte troupe from film to film. My wife didn’t tell me, for years, the name of her boss; calling that boss “Department Head” took the sting out of interactions as calling her “Nakata” never could.

the theme of most Japanese scenes is less the individual drama than the larger canvas (of Nature, of Time, of gods) against which it plays out. Look at a Hiroshige woodcut—read a haiku—and what you see is not so much a human being as the passage of time, the falling snow, a sense of loneliness.

Young societies are distrustful of artifice; older ones—and few are more seasoned than Japan—know that artifice may be all we have in a world where pain is never distant.

Makeup is essential to a society in which public face is crucial—and in which making up with everyone is an indispensable part of sustaining a larger harmony.

“My colleague spends two hours a day making herself up,” my wife says, on her way to the department store where she works. “She wants everyone to look at her?” “No. She wants everyone not to.”

The Japanese are as adept at not looking as they are at not speaking. In Bunraku drama, the three black-clad puppet masters are seated onstage; yet the audience silently consents to see only the dolls that the masters are manipulating.

Strangers routinely sleep with their heads on strangers’ shoulders on Japanese trains, and the leaned-upon agree not to flinch. A sign of trust—of community, perhaps—but also a reminder that what constitutes public and what constitutes private is something subtler than homes and walls.

To make oneself up, in a deeper way, is a mark of courtesy. In the face of great suffering, the very English novelist Jane Gardam writes, an English person has to put on a brave face, “a mask slapped on out of consideration, out of a wish not to increase concern and also out of a genetic belief that our feelings are diminished when we show them.”

Keeping up appearances, my neighbors might reply, is not the same as denying what’s beneath. It’s simply a way of placing the needs of the whole before those of the self.

Think of yourself as being onstage all the time,” a yakuza, or Japanese gangster, told a reporter for The New Yorker in 2012. “It’s a performance. If you’re bad at playing the role of a yakuza, then you’re a bad yakuza.”

Playing a part is, deep down, about seeing yourself as a part, a tiny part of a much larger whole that, if you play your part perfectly, can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Their goal is also, clearly, to reawaken the senses of everyone who visits, to remind us how much there is to see, if only we attend.

the classical principles of Japan: simplicity, clarity and emptiness.

Somehow, shockingly, tears pricked at my eyes after a few minutes in the silence. I realized how the ovals in the roof of this womblike space recalled the oval pool around which I was staying. I noticed how this space rhymed with the Turrell opening in the sky, on the neighboring island, but in a softer and more feminine key, the two openings allowing me to see different scenes from wherever I sat. I watched a light drizzle falling against the trees, the sky change color. A young woman lay down on the floor, silky black hair fanning out against the white. The effect was not conceptual, but dazzlingly sensual; there was nothing to think about, only to feel. One result—so Japanese—was that I was bound together within a community of strangers; we were not in our own heads, but in some shared encounter. Which century had we ended up in? I couldn’t say, and perhaps it didn’t matter.

In a chapel of contemplation, you simply bow before what you see. Everything was here, where there was almost nothing to be seen.

Japan abounds in fantasy spaces in part because the press of reality is so insistent. Theme parks are the confessionals of a culture that doesn’t make so much of guilt, but remains in crying need of Sundays.

Since context determines content in Japan, you can imagine yourself to be anyone—anywhere—for a moment, so long as you accept that you can’t be what or where you choose most of the time.

Identities are fluid, flexible in Japan, perhaps because reality is not. And in a culture based upon impermanence, you can give yourself up to any disguise, because it doesn’t last.

If Japan is becoming more “American,” the challenge lies not in the fact that the average height of a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy shot up by more than seven inches between 1948 and 1978 but in the fear that his ambitions and expectations may have risen accordingly.

“It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

Wilde saw the folds within emotions and knew that social life was a theater where the emotions are very real.

The prime minister in 1941, Fumimaro Konoe, had published a translation of Wilde while at Kyoto Imperial University; the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki schooled himself in the works of the renegade aesthetician from Dublin. Soon after the war, Japan’s most assertive novelist, Yukio Mishima, published a book whose title—Confessions of a Mask—was pure Wilde, as were its sentiments: “It is precisely what people regard as my true self that is a masquerade.” If you want to understand Japan, I grew tempted to tell friends, fling this book aside and spend time instead with ten precepts from the undercover Transcendentalist who saw that fashion was a way of concealing the hurts and hopes you were too shy to show to the world.

the culture’s most striking spiritual export these days is Shinto: the elevator-riding walruses and smiling blades of grass that animate Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning movies, the way “decluttering guru” Marie Kondo advises you to ask your one-piece if it’s “sparking joy.”

“Take care of things,” as the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, “and things will take care of you.”

Japan is also the spiritual home of that preemptive kind of service known as convenience, often delivered by automated devices that seem to be doing our thinking (or our living) for us.

The company Family Romance employs fourteen hundred actors to pretend to be family members for clients who are going through hard times. Its boss has acted as a husband to one hundred women, and as a young girl’s father for months on end; one of his workers played a wife to one man for seven years. Another such company, Support One, sends actors to offer apologies on a client’s behalf, to pretend to be a betrayed wife, to act as an inconsolable friend.

Japan has a sharp-edged sense of what can be perfected—gizmos, surfaces, manners—and of what cannot (morals, emotions, families). Thus it’s more nearly perfect on the surface than any country I’ve met, in part because it’s less afflicted by the sense that feelings, relationships or people can ever be made perfect.

“If you do your work cheerfully,” Robert Baden-Powell instructed future Boy Scouts in his 1908 manual, Scouting for Boys, “your work becomes much more of a pleasure to you, and also if you are cheerful it makes other people cheerful as well, which is part of your duty as a scout.”

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

manners are seen as a way to be self-possessed and other-possessed at the same time.

“She’s friendly without ever suggesting she wants or ought to be your friend,” a member of her staff says of Queen Elizabeth II.

It’s impossible to tell how much distance lies between a yes and an unwillingness to say no.

In the gap between obedience and acquiescence, in fact—“Hai!” means “I’ll do it,” not “I agree with it”—lies much of the bewildering brutality of the Japanese in war, and the never-ending question of how much, for example, the wartime emperor was complicit in his country’s aggression, how much just unable to say no.

the system operates to perfection only so long as everybody knows the rules. Once the smallest malfunction (or outsider) shows up, the effect is like a concertina crash on a freeway, in which each car smashes into the one in front of it and the collateral damage spreads, unsettlingly. Japan has trained all of us to deal with everything except exceptions.

“I’m sorry,” I say, in Japanese that is not gaining in translation. “I’m very clumsy about these things.” “I’m sorry,” he offers. “I’m only a delivery boy.” “I’m more sorry. To keep you here on a busy day.” “I’m deeply sorry,” he says, even to be alive.

barely one in four Japanese answered “Yes” to the question “Do you believe in any religion?” More than 96 percent, however, admitted to participating in religious rites of some kind.

Shinto has no texts or doctrines; Buddhism in Japan is so much a matter of rites and recitations that for centuries no one even bothered to translate many of its canonical texts into Japanese.

When he gives lectures in the West, I heard the Dalai Lama say in Japan, the audience tunes out the minute he starts speaking about ritual and comes to life as soon as he speaks about philosophy; in Japan, the formula is reversed.

The Japanese tea-ceremony—with its formal raising of the cup, the handing round of the sacramental vessel, the wiping clean with a white cloth—seems to have been inspired by the Catholic mass, which European missionaries brought into the country just as Sen no Rikyu was codifying the rites of tea. But what in the Catholic church is centered on an altar, in Japan takes place in a social circle, within a largely empty room.

“When one tries to discuss with [the Japanese] the problems of higher philosophy or religion, in the real sense of the term,” the great-grandfather of my first cousin complained in a book he published in 1933, after visiting Japan from his home in Bombay, “one feels that their religion begins and ends in ringing the bells, twice clapping their hands and then bowing with joined hands.” · Intelligence in Japan is emotional and social, someone should have told him; analysis is as inappropriate here as eating noodles with a knife and fork.

“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.”

Japanese “indifference to the Mystery of the Universe,” my cousin’s great-grandfather was wise enough to add, “is that which enables them to give more time and to spend more energy on the solution of the problems nearer at hand.” · That same indifference binds them together, because there’s no need for individual speculation or debate in a choir; Shinto, lacking arguments, cannot be refuted.

To Marcel Duchamp’s blithe “There is no solution, because there is no problem,” the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, “There is no problem, because there is no solution.”

“To do nothing at all,” as Wilde noted, “is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”