A Beginner's Guide to Japan Read online

  I’d long begun to feel that Naoshima, the last word in cool among worldly collectors of exquisiteness, was as pure an expression of ancient, ancestral Japan as I’d seen outside a three-hundred-year-old inn. And then I went to some of the other islands that have become part of the constantly expanding project. I saw a museum built in the ruins of a century-old copper refinery on a rough island of eggplant patches, with onions hanging outside its walls, its population forty-nine (average age almost seventy). I heard the kind of rural speech, amidst hilltop shrines and half-tended fields, that is the equivalent of Shakespearean English, with contemporary installations all around.

  And I slipped into the Teshima Art Museum, which consists of nothing but an empty white cave of sorts, two hundred feet long at its deepest, with an oval opening in the ceiling at one end, another oval at the other. The only things to see were the few other visitors, silent, and some droplets of water coaxed out of tiny openings in the ground by a female artist, Rei Naito, from Hiroshima.

  Somehow, shockingly, tears pricked at my eyes after a few minutes in the silence. I realized how the ovals in the roof of this womblike space recalled the oval pool around which I was staying. I noticed how this space rhymed with the Turrell opening in the sky, on the neighboring island, but in a softer and more feminine key, the two openings allowing me to see different scenes from wherever I sat. I watched a light drizzle falling against the trees, the sky change color. A young woman lay down on the floor, silky black hair fanning out against the white.

  The effect was not conceptual, but dazzlingly sensual; there was nothing to think about, only to feel. One result—so Japanese—was that I was bound together within a community of strangers; we were not in our own heads, but in some shared encounter. Which century had we ended up in? I couldn’t say, and perhaps it didn’t matter. Really, we were just out of time altogether. In a chapel of contemplation, you simply bow before what you see. Everything was here, where there was almost nothing to be seen.

  AT THE COUNTER

  NO BED FOR THE NIGHT

  The best place to stay on a crowded night in Japan is a love-hotel: less costly than a business hotel, it’s appointed with amenities in every room—karaoke systems, high-tech showers, mini–dance floors—that you’ll never find in a Four Seasons.

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  On official maps of Tokyo, love-hotels are marked out by blank spaces. Other maps show you nothing but where the wild things are.

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  Japan is the land of the bento box. Portions are small, and divisions absolute. Everything is in its place—right down to the condiments—and no sauce slops over the side, as it might in a tiffin box in India.

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  The term “love-hotel” is said to have been coined in Japan, where the establishments (traditionally designated by an upside-down jellyfish) have been around for three centuries or more. Relatively recent Japanese terms for them—“motel” and “boutique hotel”—remind you that knowing you don’t speak the language is far safer than thinking you do.

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  You can tell a Japanese love-hotel by its theme-park architecture—suggesting a neglected, secondhand version of Sleeping Beauty’s castle—and by the prices (for three hours or all night) broadcast outside its entrance, and by the curtained parking lots.

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  You can also tell it by its name: the Hotels Labia, Pasha, Listo and Brown Made are unlikely to offer conference rooms or babysitting facilities.

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  The largest red-light district in the country, with three thousand establishments pushed into a Tokyo area barely five hundred yards wide and two hundred yards long, is called “Kabuki-cho.” Formerly the site of more official theatrical performances, it has a name that can be translated, rather perfectly, as “Playland.”

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  We sometimes say that love-hotels look like Las Vegas, but really what’s truer to note is that Las Vegas is our loudest taste of the “Playland” to be found in every city in Japan. The idea that what plays in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas is the first principle of Japan’s “water world,” or entertainment quarters.

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  The basic rule of a regular Japanese hotel is that its public spaces will be as grand and often gilded as its private spaces (the rooms themselves) are functional and bare. A love-hotel tidily reverses this, by offering you no public space at all—only a half-hidden counter under which you push your cash and from which you receive a key—and the most extravagantly baroque private spaces.

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  In choosing rotating mattresses, glass-bottomed bathtubs and beds shaped like pineapples, the space shuttle Columbia or even, impressively, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation carriage, a married couple in search of privacy is simply choosing a self that belongs neither to home nor to the streets.

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  A Japanese man may spend all night—for fifteen dollars—in a “comic café” offering him unlimited XXX videos and then, in the words of the house-tidying expert Marie Kondo, cover the eyes of his teddy bear before throwing it away.

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  This doesn’t mean that emotions or passions are different in Japan; only that sentiments attach themselves to different objects.

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  “The Japanese are the easiest students we have,” the director of an English-as-a-second-language school in California tells me. “They never make any problems; they’re ideal guests. But they’re also the ones who need the most hand-holding.”

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  “The Japanese are the most polite, accepting guests we have,” a worker tells me in a super-luxe hotel in Marrakech. “But they’re also the ones who send the most letters of complaint after they get home.”

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  The Japanese are so committed to hard work, we sometimes overlook their rare gift for having fun. “To divert one’s self seems, indeed, the purpose of Japanese existence,” wrote Lafcadio Hearn, after years in Japan; his colleague, the English professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, after decades in Tokyo, called his adopted home “the most holiday-loving of nations.”

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  If shame is social rather than, say, sexual, however, it matters less what you do than what you’re seen to be doing.

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  On a jam-packed train at 11:00 on a Saturday night, a glamorous woman in her early forties with permed hair, black shirt and a short black skirt, not to mention a wedding ring, sits beside a handsome guy of around the same age, in suit and open-necked white shirt.

  For a second, she hooks her finger under his wrist; he rubs the sheer surface of her black chiffon sleeve, as if checking its texture. Then he slips out at the next station, and she extracts her smartphone.

  IN YOUR DREAMS

  Japan abounds in fantasy spaces in part because the press of reality is so insistent. Theme parks are the confessionals of a culture that doesn’t make so much of guilt, but remains in crying need of Sundays.

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  Since context determines content in Japan, you can imagine yourself to be anyone—anywhere—for a moment, so long as you accept that you can’t be what or where you choose most of the time.

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  Living in California, in New York City, I felt that reality was plastic and could be bent in the direction of my dreams. Coming to Japan, I learned that its language doesn’t have a future tense, but the present tense can be tweaked in any number of ways.

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  Identities are fluid, flexible
in Japan, perhaps because reality is not. And in a culture based upon impermanence, you can give yourself up to any disguise, because it doesn’t last.

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  How you enjoy Japan will depend in large part on how you take the two-dimensional quality that shimmers over so much of daily life, the “Cinderella Station” that dominates one whole area in a chic department-store, the “Dream-Fueling Station” at Universal Studios Japan. For some this will always speak of a hole in the heart, an absence; for others, it’s the no-nonsense, practical response of a culture that deals with illusions by marking out a place for them.

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  If Japan is becoming more “American,” the challenge lies not in the fact that the average height of a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy shot up by more than seven inches between 1948 and 1978 but in the fear that his ambitions and expectations may have risen accordingly.

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  When my wife walked out of her marriage at thirty-one, seeking a freer and more imaginative life, she was becoming an American in a much more fundamental way than when she married me.

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  We marvel at the tininess of devices and spaces in Japan; we fail to recognize the compactness of dreams. My friends in Japan are less inclined to try remaking the world than simply to redecorate its corners.

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  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.

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  A forgetful son on his way to the Buddha was asked by his mother to bring back a relic of the revered teacher. Belatedly recalling his promise just before he arrived home, the man chanced to see a dead dog lying along the side of the road. He snatched up a tooth from the corpse’s mouth and presented it to his mother as belonging to the Buddha. The old woman, moved, prayed and prayed to the object with such devotion that, it’s said, the decaying tooth began to glow. It thus became as priceless as any true relic of the Buddha’s might have been.

  THE ADVANCED GUIDE TO JAPAN

  I devoured the country’s classic novels when first I arrived in Japan, and long tracts on the national economy; I steeped myself in poems and memoirs and literary treatises. But one day I was browsing through Oscar Wilde and I found the line “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” It was a typical Wilde-ism, inverting the expected so as to make an impression and couching an observation about society in a wit half borrowed from Thoreau. Then I read something else: “It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.” So much of my new home lay in that simple provocation.

  With his insistence on Individualism, his delight in self-advertisement, his unrelenting ironies, Wilde did not seem an obvious guide to Japanese life. Yet he was born one year after Western ships sailed into Japan, opening up the islands after more than two centuries of almost entire seclusion. He came of age just as Japonaiserie began flooding into Europe; suddenly van Gogh was painting Hiroshiges, Manet and Lautrec were experimenting with flattened perspectives and bright colors. More deeply, Wilde saw the folds within emotions and knew that social life was a theater where the emotions are very real.

  And as soon as Wilde began bringing Japanese principles into the West, Japan began turning with reverence to Oscar Wilde; my neighbors most value their own things after these come back to them with foreign stamps. Towards the end of World War II, kamikaze pilots—most of them young humanities graduates from Japan’s best universities—started penning poems as if in the shadow of Wilde. “The pain of love,” reflected one, “is happiness itself.” Another wrote, “Strolling in the dusk with my comrades, we dream of beautiful pastures and orchards.”

  The prime minister in 1941, Fumimaro Konoe, had published a translation of Wilde while at Kyoto Imperial University; the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki schooled himself in the works of the renegade aesthetician from Dublin. Soon after the war, Japan’s most assertive novelist, Yukio Mishima, published a book whose title—Confessions of a Mask—was pure Wilde, as were its sentiments: “It is precisely what people regard as my true self that is a masquerade.”

  If you want to understand Japan, I grew tempted to tell friends, fling this book aside and spend time instead with ten precepts from the undercover Transcendentalist who saw that fashion was a way of concealing the hurts and hopes you were too shy to show to the world.

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  “You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art,” Wilde wrote to his young friend Bosie in 1897. “Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.”

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  “I adore simple pleasures,” he observes in The Picture of Dorian Gray. “They are the last refuge of the complex.”

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  “Some things are more precious,” it’s asserted in the same text, “because they don’t last long.”

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  “Beauty, real beauty,” Wilde also notes in Dorian Gray, “ends where an intellectual expression begins.”

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  “To be modern,” it’s said in A Woman of No Importance, “is the only thing worth being nowadays.”

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  “Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern,” we read in An Ideal Husband. “One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.”

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

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

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  “And out of the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth For Ever,” Wilde sighed in a poem, “he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment.”

  THE 2.5-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTER

  The police force in Japan is represented by an upbeat orange fairy named Pipo-kun. The nuclear industry has presented itself to the world through a perky cartoon character called Pluto-kun. The Self-Defense Force is given a pretty face by a pink sea cucumber (replacing, in late 2018, dimpled, saucer-eyed Prince Pickles).

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  There were, in 2016, ninety-two such mascots in Osaka prefecture alone, including two dogs to represent tax departments, and a caped, flying hot-water bottle.

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  The last time I checked, Kumamon, a red-cheeked, lovable cartoon bear who’s the mascot of Kumamoto Prefecture, had more than eight hundred thousand followers on Twitter, not many fewer than the Japanese prime minister.

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  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.

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  When my daughter, in her mid-thirties, makes a birthday card for her five-year-old niece, she spends hours over an exquisite drawing of a little Japanese girl. But since this is a manga drawing, she takes pains to give the Japanese girl blond hair and large Western eyes.

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  During the war, the Japanese referred to B-29 planes as “B-san,” meaning “Mr. B.” As if the planes had minds of their own. Deferring to forces larger than oneself is a large part of how Japan carries itself, seeing the advantage of waiting to pushing ahead.

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  “Now,
Life Is Living You,” says the large sign in English outside the big temple that greets you as you proceed one block north from Kyoto Station.

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  On Naoshima, my wife and I had to ride a private train up to our room; within moments, Hiroko had dubbed the vehicle “Tom.” Suddenly the green six-seat contraption that rattles up and down a hill, a single lamp at its front, had as much character and warmth as a beloved train-set, and we were being careful with it and looking out for Tom’s arrival as fondly as if we were awaiting a small nephew.