A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

by Pico Iyer

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.

If a neighborhood is much like a family, addresses are relatively unimportant. Crime makes no more sense than robbing Peter to pay Paul. And people keep giving expensive presents to one another because they know that all the money is simply circulating within the same closed system.

Ninety percent of Japanese women have defined themselves as “middle-class.” More than half the country’s citizens support just one of the country’s twelve professional baseball teams, the Tokyo Giants. On New Year’s Eve, nine in every ten television-owning households in Japan have at times been said to tune in to the same show, pitting a group of female singers against a group of men. But still the country around me remains a society based on a vertical, not a horizontal, model.

No choir can function without a conductor.

In North Korea, I’m regularly startled to encounter a Hermit Kingdom where a leader is taken to be a god, everyone marches to the beat of a single drummer and mass chants and calisthenics are daily enforced to remind everyone of collective responsibility. My neighbors in what for more than two centuries was itself a Hermit Kingdom tend not to think of most of this as strange—when they were young, they saw Japanese policemen arrest citizens for going to the movies, drinking coffee or eating sweet potatoes in the street. It’s not North Korea’s unbending upholding of order that unsettles my friends in Japan; it’s their neighbor’s indifference to boundaries.

In terms of wealth distribution, Japan in 2017 was “the most equal” society on the planet; many CEOs in Japan earn less than some of their employees do. But in terms of the gulf in public status, Japan is much more unequal than the United States. There’s no overturning the hierarchy.

“The Japanese managed to create a competitive society sans competition,” Arthur Koestler concluded in 1959.

If you constantly adapt to circumstances, however, will you ever be able to change them?

The Happiness Paradox states that happiness increases in relation to income until a certain point, after which income becomes immaterial. The great exception is Japan. Incomes have gone up six times, adjusting for inflation, since the 1950s, yet people confess themselves less happy than before.

“Emotions,” writes the Zen philosopher D. T. Suzuki, “are just the play of light and shadow on the surface of the sea.” · Which doesn’t mean we don’t feel them, only that we’re unwise to take them to be something they are not.

The computer company Apple Inc. has sometimes seemed to be almost Japanese, not just because of its sleekly minimalist designs, or because of Steve Jobs’s delight in the walled gardens of Kyoto, to which he took each of his children; but simply because it has maintained its perfection by operating within a tightly controlled closed system. It remakes the world by keeping most of the world out.