A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

by Pico Iyer

in Japan even the word for “I” is different for a woman and a man.

A lot of what I ascribe to Japan clearly applies to much of East Asia, and some of what I see in Kyoto you’d never find in more rural areas.

So much is available, almost nothing can be found. You’re in a living Web site of sorts—boxes and links popping up on every side, leading to art gallery and “Happy Terrace,” to six-story post office and thirteen-floor department store—but nobody’s given you the password.

There are no addresses, it’s said, in Japan—or, worse, there are collections of numbers, but sometimes they refer to the chronology of construction, sometimes to something else. When my daughter, my wife, and I write down the address of the flat we’ve all shared, each one of us inscribes a completely different street name.

For her, putting on a designer outfit to go to the ATM is as much a sign of courtesy as wearing black to a funeral or speaking in complete sentences.

Two out of every five Japanese men pluck their eyebrows—and the first geisha, in the thirteenth century, were men. “It is best that you carry powdered rouge in your sleeve pocket,” an eighteenth-century manual for samurai advises. “We sometimes are of bad color when sobering up, lying down or rising.”

The Buddha himself took pains to say opposite things in different situations, since what works for a crowd of monks will make no sense to a group of businessmen. What we call “inconsistency” speaks in fact for a consistent wish to do the appropriate thing.

“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?”

My friends in Japan are more expert at posing for photographs, at singing on cue, even at stepping onstage than nearly anyone I know in the West. But ask them what they think or feel, and they look uneasy and say nothing.

This means, in turn, that 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.

By making individual figures indistinct—it’s the secret of many a Kazuo Ishiguro novel, as of Oscar Wilde fairy tales—one turns a “he” or “she” into a “we.”

When Ansel Adams took pictures of Japanese internees in Californian concentration camps during World War II, his subjects were so determined to offer bright smiles and to project a hopeful confidence to the world that the photographer was criticized for falsifying the truth.

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.

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.

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

The best place to stay on a crowded night in Japan is a love-hotel: less costly than a business hotel, it’s appointed with amenities in every room—karaoke systems, high-tech showers, mini–dance floors—that you’ll never find in a Four Seasons.

We sometimes say that love-hotels look like Las Vegas, but really what’s truer to note is that Las Vegas is our loudest taste of the “Playland” to be found in every city in Japan. The idea that what plays in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas is the first principle of Japan’s “water world,” or entertainment quarters.

The basic rule of a regular Japanese hotel is that its public spaces will be as grand and often gilded as its private spaces (the rooms themselves) are functional and bare. A love-hotel tidily reverses this, by offering you no public space at all—only a half-hidden counter under which you push your cash and from which you receive a key—and the most extravagantly baroque private spaces.

In choosing rotating mattresses, glass-bottomed bathtubs and beds shaped like pineapples, the space shuttle Columbia or even, impressively, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation carriage, a married couple in search of privacy is simply choosing a self that belongs neither to home nor to the streets.

“The Japanese are the easiest students we have,” the director of an English-as-a-second-language school in California tells me. “They never make any problems; they’re ideal guests. But they’re also the ones who need the most hand-holding.”

“The Japanese are the most polite, accepting guests we have,” a worker tells me in a super-luxe hotel in Marrakech. “But they’re also the ones who send the most letters of complaint after they get home.”

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.

Living in California, in New York City, I felt that reality was plastic and could be bent in the direction of my dreams. 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.

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.”

There were, in 2016, ninety-two such mascots in Osaka prefecture alone, including two dogs to represent tax departments, and a caped, flying hot-water bottle.

Japanese cartoons are as popular across the globe as Japanese actors and leaders are not. Yet Japanese cartoons are based on strange caricatures of the West.

When my daughter, in her mid-thirties, makes a birthday card for her five-year-old niece, she spends hours over an exquisite drawing of a little Japanese girl. But since this is a manga drawing, she takes pains to give the Japanese girl blond hair and large Western eyes.

During the war, the Japanese referred to B-29 planes as “B-san,” meaning “Mr. B.” As if the planes had minds of their own. Deferring to forces larger than oneself is a large part of how Japan carries itself, seeing the advantage of waiting to pushing ahead.

Returning from our trip, I noticed that the photos Hiroko had taken of stuffed animals were far more full of feeling and poignancy than the pictures she took of friends and family. The humans, after all, always flashed peace signs and put on smiles, as if to render themselves generic.

My neighbors think nothing of flocking to a station to wave to a train that’s being taken out of service, bringing flowers or presents for the carriages—or sending a teddy bear on a journey if they can’t make the trip themselves. A school of local thought holds that “mountains and rivers, grasses and flowers, can all become Buddhas.”

When foreigners arrive in Japan, they sometimes remark—as I did, in 1985—that the people around them look like robots. This may be less because the Japanese are so machinelike and dependable than because inanimate things in Japan possess so much spirit and life.

Japan imported its first robot from the United States in 1967; within twelve years, it had fifteen times more industrial robots in operation than did the country that inspired it.

In 1980, Fujitsu opened a factory where robots manufactured robot parts; today, a hotel in Nagasaki is staffed by one hundred and eighty robots. That state-of-the-art convenience has grown so popular that sister hotels are springing up across the country.

A puppet, the novelist Tanizaki pointed out, may actually be truer to life than an actress, precisely because (in public at least) the latter is encouraged to be so wooden and remote. “The classic beauty was withdrawn, restrained, careful not to show too much individuality,” he wrote. “A more distinctive, more colorful figure would only have ruined the effect.”

Even the murderous Aum Shinrikyo cult, which killed thirteen people by planting sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, had its own “Anime Division.”

Japan is the spiritual home of the service industry: the wish to serve—and to be industrious—sits at the heart of a culture of shared obedience.

In a mosh pit at a twenty-first-century punk concert in Osaka, I join a group of kids who are flinging themselves headlong in every direction, to set off what looks to be a riot. Young men in uniforms pass silently between our flying bodies, carrying large bags for us mock-hooligans to throw our trash in.

“In a good democracy,” a character in Oscar Wilde observes, “every man should be an aristocrat.”

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.

There are more than 5.6 million vending machines in Japan—the highest number per capita on the planet—and there are more than fifty thousand convenience stores, including convenience stores that deliver, two-story convenience stores, convenience stores just for the elderly.

In the United States, convenience stores are known as places for holdups and no-hopers; in Japan, they’re the places you’re advised to go in the event of assault or threat, the safest space in the public domain.

When convenience is applied to smiles and emotions, however—when people deliver “Welcome”s as reliably as machines—we lose track of how many dimensions our life really has.

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.

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

“It turns out that dressing like everyone else, sharing identical experiences, and being told you’re on a mission of importance to the whole country does wonders for the teenage soul,” he concluded.

“I realized,” Lipsky concluded, “that nobody at West Point was worried about sounding original or being entertaining…and I understood the immense freedom this gave them.”

In a Confucian world, human relations are the closest thing people have to God. So manners become a kind of sacrament. They are the way you pray before the common altar.