The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

by Eric Weiner

It’s about a temple I visited in Japan. It was a very old and beautiful temple. More than one thousand years old, my guide told me. How remarkable, I thought. I’d never seen such an old structure so perfectly preserved. The wood had hardly any splinters, and not a log was out of place. I read a plaque mounted on a small stand in front of the temple and, sure enough, the temple was built in the 700s. But then, I noticed a few more words, in smaller print. “Temple rebuilt in 1971.” What was going on? Were the Japanese trying to pull a fast one on unsuspecting tourists, pretending the temple was 1,200 years old when in fact it was fewer than forty years old? Not exactly. In many Asian cultures, what matters is not the age of the physical structure but the spirit of the place. Temples in Japan are routinely destroyed and rebuilt, yet people still consider them as old as the day they were first built. This is not a semantic sleight of hand. It says a lot about how a culture relates to its past.