A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

by Pico Iyer

“The opposite of a great truth,” as they say in the temples of Kyoto, “is also true.”

Being in Japan has taught me to say, “I wonder,” more often than “I think.”

So much is available, almost nothing can be found. You’re in a living Web site of sorts—boxes

When a character in a Yasujiro Ozu movie smiles, it says more about sadness than any sob or spasm might.

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?”

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.

and what you’re getting is not just something to see, but eyes with which to look.

Naoshima, I quickly saw, is essence of Japan.

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.

My friends in Japan are less inclined to try remaking the world than simply to redecorate its corners. ·

In the 1990s, scientists living in the United States won forty-four Nobel Prizes, while those working in Japan—with a population and funding roughly half as big—received just one. Yet, in the same period, Japan applied for far more patents than any other nation on the planet.

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“Consistency,” Wilde declared in an essay, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

“Life is far too important a thing,” we hear in Lady Windermere’s Fan, “ever to talk seriously about.”

The police force in Japan is represented by an upbeat orange fairy named Pipo-kun.

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.

that “mountains and rivers, grasses and flowers, can all become Buddhas.”

Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out.

In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.

Words only separate what silence brings together. ·

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.

“No word,” wrote Japan’s Nobel Prize–winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, “can say as much as silence.”

“Jikan,” sometimes translated as “the silence between two thoughts.”

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.

Shinto shrine is often surrounded by a large expanse, so your attention is drawn to trees and grass and sky, the place where Japan’s sovereign deities live.

with a prix fixe menu. Freedom doesn’t mean an abundance of choice so much as liberation from the burden of too much choice.

how “freedom consists in my not having made the rules.”

It took me a long time, after meeting my wife, to see that the kindest and most thoughtful thing to do in many situations was not to ask her where she wanted to eat or go. To take the decision myself was to free her from both the burden of choice and the responsibility that follows (knowing that, when it came to what to wear or what to eat at home, she’d extend the same kindness by making the decisions for me).

The Japanese after the war “gained a strange peace of mind,” Isamu Noguchi observed in 1950. “They are as it were free, free from the responsibility of being powerful.”

“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.” ·

We pass a thread through the eye of a needle, Hearn recalled; the Japanese pass a needle through a thread.

We “avoid vague expressions,” he continued, gaining steam, “while they set high value on the ambiguous.

On being awarded the Kyoto Prize, the artist William Kentridge was greeted by the mayor of Kyoto. The man wore a kimono that was completely plain, Kentridge noted. But when the mayor opened it up, his visitors saw that the inner lining, the part almost nobody would ever see, was fantastically embroidered.

“Our ancestors lacked the word ‘individualism,’ ” Tocqueville wrote, “which we have created for our

own use, because in their era there were, in fact, no individuals who did not belong to a group and who could consider themselves absolutely alone.”

Old World cultures cherish grace in defeat because they know we all lose in the end;

New World cultures remain confident they can keep destiny at bay, perhaps forever.

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

Japan in the postwar years—this is Murakami’s setting, his lament—has a door that’s permanently half open. “Are you coming in or going out?” one might ask the entire culture.

At the end of his hugely popular novel from 1947, Osamu Dazai notes, “However much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water at the bottom, far from experiencing a revolution, lies motionless, awake but feigning sleep.”

“The front part of the home of a successful Japanese businessman,” Joseph Campbell was told on his way to Japan, “will be in the Western style….But his living quarters will be Japanese and without furniture; and when he returns in the evening, he puts off his Western garb and dons Japanese.” ·

“I traveled around Japan these last three years,” says my friend the techno-visionary Kevin Kelly, “and I never saw a single broken roof tile. Not one. On the other hand, I didn’t see much new construction. Maintenance: that’s what Japan does.”

But as China grows ever more American in its capitalist ways and skyscraper cities, and as America looks ever more to the East to ground itself, Japan ends up ever more confused, not sure whether it’s looking at everything with two faces or with none.

The master animator, in his seventies, smiles and says, “The end is a new beginning.”

Since Japan seems to be in constant motion, we assume that if it’s not necessarily getting any better it must be getting worse. But maybe running in place is precisely how it keeps itself intact?

The holiest shrine in the land, at Ise, is completely rebuilt every twenty years, and all the twenty-five hundred ceremonial objects and instruments within the shrine are carefully re-created. The wood for the

new building comes from trees that are more than three hundred years old, the pillars from trees that have been standing for more than five hundred. Every twenty years, the shrine is made not new again, but old.

Hokusai was said to have moved ninety-three times in his life and taken on thirty-one noms de plume. But for seventy years he kept on painting Fuji.