A Beginner's Guide to Japan Read online

  ALSO BY PICO IYER

  This Could Be Home

  Autumn Light

  The Art of Stillness

  The Man Within My Head

  The Open Road

  Sun After Dark

  Abandon

  Imagining Canada

  The Global Soul

  Tropical Classical

  Cuba and the Night

  Falling Off the Map

  The Lady and the Monk

  Video Night in Kathmandu

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Pico Iyer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Iyer, Pico, author.

  Title: A beginner’s guide to Japan : observations and provocations by Pico Iyer.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018038539 (print) | LCCN 2018039527 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493965 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493958 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524711733 (open market)

  Subjects: LCSH: Iyer, Pico—Travel—Japan. | Japan—Description and travel.

  Classification: LCC DS811 (ebook) | LCC DS811 .I95 2019 (print) | DDC 952.05—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018038539

  Ebook ISBN 9780451493965

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  v5.4

  ep

  From crazy title to eccentric procedure, this little book owes almost everything to wildly generous Annie Dillard, champion of things seen and unseen, with a heart the size of Forbes Field; and to Robert Richardson, model of selflessness and grace, beautifully elevating writer and gentleman.

  Thank you both.

  Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

  —SIMONE WEIL

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Pico Iyer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Several Grains of Salt

  ON THE STREETS

  The Enigmas of Arrival

  Dressing the Part

  Empire of Smiles

  The Perfect Actress

  Making Oneself Up

  Parts and the Whole

  Out of Time

  AT THE COUNTER

  No Bed for the Night

  In Your Dreams

  The Advanced Guide to Japan

  The 2.5-Dimensional Character

  Between the Torii Gates

  At Your Disposal

  East Point

  Looking for a “Yes”

  The Apple in the Garden

  IN THE TEMPLE

  The Empty Room

  On the Mat

  Words

  No Words

  What Will You Miss?

  Crowds

  In the Garden

  Freedom from Choice

  Being Responsible

  The Bridge of Hesitation

  Topsy-Turvy

  BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  What Lies Within

  The Fairer Sex

  The Family Writ Large

  The Other Side of Sorrow

  OUT THE WINDOW

  The Faraway Island

  A Walk in the Park

  Learning to Be Foreign

  Just Like Us

  Playing Ball

  ON THE HORIZON

  Spirits from the Past

  Plus Ça Change?

  The End, a New Beginning

  A Letter from a Friend

  A Note About the Author

  SEVERAL GRAINS OF SALT

  I’ve been living in western Japan for more than thirty-two years, and, to my delight, I know far less than when I arrived. A land of streamlined surfaces gives you very much what you expect—and so much you didn’t expect, under the surface, that you don’t know what to do with it. The home of collected inwardness has also shown me daily how much, as Proust observed, “a change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world, and ourselves.”

  I’ve never studied Japan or worked here, and I stay in Nara on a tourist visa to remind myself how out-of-it I remain. I speak the language as a two-year-old girl might, since such Japanese as I know I’ve picked up from my wife, and in Japan even the word for “I” is different for a woman and a man. But I’ve been with my Kyoto-born wife—and our entirely Japanese kids—for more than thirty-two years now, most of them in an anonymous suburb where no other foreigners are to be seen. I seldom speak English in Japan, and in any case Japan has taught me how deeply the truest things lie beyond the reach of any language.

  Much of this book may infuriate anyone who knows Japan; it infuriates me most of the time. Assertions in one section seem to contradict those in another, and what appears to belong in the temple appears in a section on the love-hotel, and vice versa. 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.

  No matter. These are simply provocations, opening lines designed to quicken you to better comebacks of your own. “The opposite of a great truth,” as they say in the temples of Kyoto, “is also true.” I’ve tried to order my salvos so you travel, as most of us do, from the noisy, congested streets to impeccably well-made-up interiors to, at last, that private domain where you can’t even think in terms of “Japan” or “the West.” But if you read out of sequence in this fan-shaped book, now on a jam-packed train, now in a noiseless temple, you’ll be taking in the country as most of us do, bumping from the strange to the familiar and back again.

  I call this a “beginner’s guide” not only because it’s aimed at beginners, but mostly because it’s written by one. Being in Japan has taught me to say, “I wonder,” more often than “I think.” The first rule for any foreigner in Japan is not to talk of this-or-that; the second is never to take anything too seriously.

  ON THE STREETS

  THE ENIGMAS OF ARRIVAL

  There are eleven arrows on the sign above you, as you disembark in Kyoto Station. They point left, right, straight ahead and backwards. In the middle is a question mark.

  * * *

  ·

  Platform 0 is close to Platforms 31 and 32, and a large “Restaurant Guide” board informs you that there are one hundred and seven dining options around the station alone. There are also twenty-two hotels in the immediate vicinity, just one of which offers fifteen banquet halls, five hundred and sixteen rooms, a halal menu, a clinic, a photo salon and a church.

  * * *

  ·

  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 snatches of English, French, German everywhere, but serving almost as decoration—like colors or sounds—and surrounded by characters in three non-overlapping alphabets. The net effect is of a hundred and one people speaking a thousand and two languages, none of which they understand.

  * * *

  ·

  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.

  * * *

  ·

  Before the West arrived, there were twice as many T-junctions and dead ends in Tokyo as there were thoroughfares. A castle town needs to confound invaders. After World War II, the city was reconstructed along the pathways that had come up around the rubble of bombed buildings, rendering the terrain even more impenetrable.

  * * *

  ·

  On the train into Kyoto, I point out to my Japanese wife a sweet ad full of teddy bears, one sporting a badge, another next to a bright-red ambulance.

  “Yes,” she says. “It says that if you see a child who’s been beaten, please call that number. If you do not, the child may die!”

  “And that picture of the cute fox and bear exchanging whispers?”

  “A lawyer,” says Hiroko. “If you have some kind of accident, he can help.”

  DRESSING THE PART

  After a rabbit appeared in Japan in 1873, the craze for the creatures grew so intense that a single animal fetched the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars.

  * * *

  ·

  After a woman threw herself off the roof of a Tokyo apartment complex in 1970, roughly one hundred and fifty others threw themselves off the same roof.

  * * *

  ·

  I board the train on a Saturday morning, and face a gaggle of schoolkids in uniform, lines of businessmen with badges on their lapels, squadrons of young women in dark suits. The next day I board the same train, to be greeted by a young guy in sockless canvas shoes and his date clomping along in high-fashion snowshoes (in a place where snow is all but unknown). Everyone’s taken on a part, but in the off-hours, even partners may find they’re acting in different plays.

  * * *

  ·

  Thus, Japanese couples on honeymoon traditionally plan matching outfits for every hour of their trip. Even girls on a Sunday shopping spree often sport the same hairstyles, false eyelashes and white boots. Fashion becomes less about standing out than fitting in, at least within the micro-group of which you are a part.

  * * *

  ·

  For a foreigner, therefore, clothes don’t make the man here; they simply mark the role. But roles shift at the speed of light in Japan, as people adopt a radically different voice (even a different word for “I”) for colleague and secretary and boss. If it’s treacherous to judge a book by its cover, how much more so if it’s a foreign book and has a dozen covers to go with every audience.

  * * *

  ·

  In 1999, I sought out the man said to have invented karaoke, to tell him that my editors at Time had chosen him as one of the “100 Asians of the Century.” He handed me in response a business card advertising his services as a dog trainer.

  * * *

  ·

  That mild-mannered matron with her hands in her lap, dressed as for church, is, my wife explains to me, a wild thing, ready to do anything with anyone. And that rail-thin twenty-three-year-old model in fishnet stockings, perfectly made up, turns out, her startled Californian boyfriend tells me, never to have had a boyfriend before.

  * * *

  ·

  Whenever we’re abroad, I have to spend hours persuading my wife to dress down, since dressing up will make everybody around us feel underdressed. 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.”

  * * *

  ·

  My wife said she’d never seen a real man in Japan, an American friend who grew up in Tokyo tells me—until she met a Kabuki actor who specialized in taking the part of women.

  * * *

  ·

  No one but the simpleminded would call my neighbors “two-faced”; they command a huge repertoire of faces, to deal with every setting, and we who describe that phenomenon in entirely different terms to lover and to mother can only conclude that we’re much the same, but with a narrower range.

  * * *

  ·

  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.

  EMPIRE OF SMILES

  Girls in Japan are trained to put the right earring on with the left hand, because it looks more attractive.

  * * *

  ·

  Young women in Japan are also trained to seem as cheerful, as sweet—as girlish—as teenagers. Since we often try to seem sophisticated, we don’t always know what to do with those who aspire to seem innocent and wide-eyed.

  * * *

  ·

  A celebrated French semiotician wrote a ludicrous book on Japan called Empire of Signs; what he failed to see was that Japan is in truth an Empire of Smiles, smiles being more human, more alluring and much more emotionally complex than any sign.

  * * *

  ·

  “Jaguar model names sound like rockets,” notes Paul Beatty in The Sellout. “XJ-S, XJ8, E-Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight.”

  * * *

  ·

  Japan believes in accentuating the positive—black markets after the war were known as “blue-sky markets,” a Tokyo garbage fill was called “Dream Island”—because it knows that the Buddha’s First Noble Truth posits the reality of suffering. When a character in a Yasujiro Ozu movie smiles, it says more about sadness than any sob or spasm might.

  * * *

  ·

  “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?”

  * * *

  ·

  The British, after all, tend to wink at the part they
’re assigned in the national pantomime; in pre-ironic Japan, it’s much more important to be earnest. Style is less the enemy of sincerity, as Oscar Wilde had it, than its public expression.

  * * *

  ·

  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.

  * * *

  ·

  The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami has won a storm of global recognition by titling his exhibitions Ego, by setting up shops in the middle of his shows, by receiving thirteen million dollars for a single piece even though the pieces no longer issue from his hand.