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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Pico Iyer
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October 6, 2024 - July 4, 2025
We come to Japan expecting a beautifully designed motherboard in which every part of the circuit works flawlessly. And after half a lifetime in Japan, I count on such precise procedure as if I were Japanese myself. Yet 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.
In answer to a poll conducted in 2005 by the country’s largest newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, 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.
“She told Herzog that she was not sure she believed in God,” Saul Bellow writes of Sono Oguki, the Japanese lover of his eponymous character, “but that if he did she would also try to have faith. If on the other hand he was a Communist she was prepared to become one, too. Because ‘Les Japonaises sont très fidèles.’ ”
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.
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.”
Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out.
What we see and smell and hear is real, it reminds us; what we think about that is not.
In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.
For Arthur Koestler, a Westerner in love with distinctions, the fact that Zen monks could be seen driving to movie houses in luxury sedans, geisha beside them, showed how unenlightened they are; for those within the tradition, it shows the opposite.
Is not a geisha at heart the same as any other human being? Cannot a movie house liberate one from illusions as much as any meditation hall might?
For a Westerner, Joseph Campbell noted in Japan, meditation may awaken a sense of divinity within; for a Japanese, it’s more likely to inspire a sense of divinity inside a temple, a flower, a gnat. The person sitting still doesn’t say, “I’m awake.” She says, “The world is illuminated!”
Even those sentences that do have clear beginnings in Japan generally trail off, like pen-and-ink drawings that leave most of the page open for a viewer to complete. In England, I learned to start sentences by saying, “I’m not exactly sure…” but in Japan the studied vagueness is not just about diffidence but about allowing room for someone else to turn an opening note into a duet.
Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it. It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are said to be twenty ways of saying “I.” Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not. A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in twenty-nine different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or twenty-seven other things.
One prince in Genji has never been allowed to speak with his own sister except through curtains or behind a screen. Yet men in Genji’s world think nothing of going to bed with women with whom they’ve never exchanged a word.
You can tell a Japanese restaurant in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris, my wife points out, by the fact that (unlike the places run by Koreans or Chinese) it never says “Japanese” at the entrance.
Hours after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, what struck a German priest was the silence, even in a grove where hundreds of survivors had gathered. No one wept or screamed; no one complained; children barely cried. Those who sobbed, sobbed silently; those given water bowed their thanks.
In England, Japan’s Western cousin, I learned that the ultimate sign of intimacy is not all you can say to a friend, but all you don’t need to say.
In the public sphere, this commitment to saying nothing may suggest a crippling caution and refusal to take the initiative. In the private, it opens up to a bottomless intimacy.
Long before Cage’s 4'33", a musical piece in which nothing was played, Shinto shrines were said to offer “silent concerts,” in which wind instruments and strings assembled, and not a note was delivered.
“I’ll miss the cleanliness of the air,” I say. “I don’t mean just the spotless streets and the fact that everyone changes clothes every few hours, and always looks so freshly pressed and laundered. I don’t mean even the shine around things, which makes you feel as if you’re seeing every last surface through freshly polished glass, framed by doors and screens as in a lens. “I just mean that people don’t feel the need to smudge every moment with their signature. When it’s hot, they don’t say, ‘It’s warm enough to roast a chipmunk in the streets!’ or ‘Phew! It’s hotter than a squirrel on a
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A typical Japanese convenience store is one hundred square meters in size, and stocks twenty-five hundred items. A typical page in a Japanese magazine is often no less cluttered. Emptiness in Japan becomes the luxury that grandeur is in the West.
Reading Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence in a traditional Kyoto inn, Martin Scorsese noticed how the room and its garden were essentially one. The Japanese didn’t need a Christian God, he realized, because streams and rocks and flowers brought local deities into the house at every moment.
As soon as prostitution was banned in postwar Japan, the number of prostitutes (said to be roughly eighty thousand in Tokyo alone) rose sharply.
“To know that you are a sparrow and not a swan; or, on the contrary, a swan and not a sparrow…gives a great security, stability and quality of harmony and peace to the psyche,” Joseph Campbell wrote in Kyoto in 1955, drafting a convocation address for his students back at Sarah Lawrence.
If you’re always wondering what you will become, he went on, “you will soon become so profoundly implicated in your own psychological agony that you will have little time or energy for anything else, and certainly no sense whatsoever of the bliss and wonder of being alive.”
Soon after I came to know her, my wife-to-be said, “I can’t change you, so I have to change myself, since you’re in many ways not so easy.” I was so disarmed by this spirit of accommodation that I tried to do the same with her, changing myself to adapt to everything in her that was difficult. Thus the history of Japan.
When conflict arises in Japan, it’s often because one person wishes to give up her needs as much as another wishes to give up hers. Such duels of self-sacrifice leave everyone stranded in an agony of thwarted self-denial.
People in Japan are sometimes slow to intercede in an emergency, because they don’t want to impose a debt on those they help.
To be part of a circle frees you from the pressure of having to make a decision. But it imposes on you the pressure of knowing that every move you make will affect everybody else.
In England, I was taught never to take anything seriously, least of all myself. When I moved to America, I was encouraged to take everything seriously, especially myself. In Japan, the people I know don’t seem to take themselves very seriously—but only because they take their roles, the parts they have to play in the national pageant, very seriously indeed.
Twenty miles from where I live, organized criminals invite kids to their headquarters every October to collect candy for Halloween. When a factional battle made that impossible one year, a sign came up outside the building, regretting the cancellation and announcing, “We realize this is causing great sorrow to those parents and children who looked forward to this, but next year we will absolutely hold the event, so please look forward to it.”
The United States sees ten times more murders every year than does Japan. Yet Japan has been home to sixteen times more professional gangsters than the States had when the Cosa Nostra was at its peak.
The conviction rate of suspects in Japan is 99.85 percent (as against around 80 percent in Britain and the United States). Is this because the police are so efficient—or so reluctant to admit a mistake? Is it because the accused assume they must have done something wrong—or because they’re pressured to act as if they did? Is it because prosecutors take on cases only if they expect to win—or simply because in Japan an arrested person is assumed to be guilty unless proven innocent?
“If you’re always thinking of the other person first,” a sister pointedly reminds her clergyman brother, always too set on doing the right thing (in Elizabeth Strout’s novel Abide with Me), “you don’t have to bother with what you’re feeling. Or thinking.”
George Mikes begins his classic text How to Be an Alien—the funny, wide-eyed tale of a Hungarian coming slowly to know the upside-down ways of his new neighbors, the English—with the simple truth, “In England everything is the other way round.” To Englishmen, of course, this applies even more to Japanese, the people who flip their light switches up, not down, for off, who used to count the hours backwards, from twelve to four, and who say “Yes” where we would say “No.” A book called How to Be a Japanese would point out that people in this looking-glass world admit to feeling happiest when they
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Japan likes to present itself to the world in its collective, corporate face—in groups—and we like to see it in terms of stereotypes. Yet everything fresh, surprising and warm in Japan takes place at the level of the individual: Japan’s great accomplishments may be communal, but its treasures are its constantly unexpected and passionate people.
No one married to a Japanese would ever call her “repressed.” She simply has a sharp and unwavering sense of where emotion is appropriate and where not; she lives in the gap the British classicist Jasper Griffin explained to his friend Ved Mehta between denying one’s emotions and choosing not to indulge them.
The Japanese Constitution, unlike its American counterpart, speaks explicitly of “the essential equality of the sexes,” thanks in part to the Western woman who helped draft it. Having honored that on paper, however, Japan feels free to ignore it in real life.
In Japan, as Tiger Tanaka advises Sean Connery’s James Bond upon the latter’s arrival in Japan (in the film of You Only Live Twice), “men always come first.”
To early Japanese, one sign of Western barbarity was the respect foreigners showed to women. Japanese gallantry had less to do with chivalry to a lady than with fealty to a lord.
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.
When I arrived in Kyoto in 1987, women were known as “Christmas cakes” if they were still unmarried at twenty-five (since, by December 25, a Christmas cake is too old to be of any use). Now—progress is slow—they are known as “New Year’s Eve gifts.”
“As women,” a scholar from East Asia told me, merrily, “we’re so used to being put down that we’re always waiting to become mothers-in-law. Then, at last, we have someone to boss over.” Or, as my Japanese wife has it, having survived a marriage to a Japanese man, “He know he can anytime get new wife. But cannot get new mother!”
No wonder, perhaps, that around Kyoto a woman often seems to choose her husband on the basis of the man’s mother as much as of the man himself. It’s the mother-in-law who’s going to be everywhere in the house, even as the husband may be seldom seen.
“In today’s world,” a Chinese “mistress dispeller” told The New Yorker in 2017, “a secondhand woman is like a secondhand car. Once it’s been driven, it’s not worth a fraction of its original selling price.” And a secondhand man? He has the lure, she says, of renovated real estate. “The value only appreciates.”
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.
Boys in her world were allowed to sleep outstretched, an early-twentieth-century “samurai daughter” reported; but samurai girls had to adopt a stance while sleeping that represented kinoji, or the “spirit of control.”
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.
After I got strip-searched every time I returned to Japan, a fellow traveler with equally dark skin told me how to avoid this: always go to the customs lane manned, so to speak, by a woman.
