A Beginner's Guide to Japan Page 4
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Returning from our trip, I noticed that the photos Hiroko had taken of stuffed animals were far more full of feeling and poignancy than the pictures she took of friends and family. The humans, after all, always flashed peace signs and put on smiles, as if to render themselves generic.
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My neighbors think nothing of flocking to a station to wave to a train that’s being taken out of service, bringing flowers or presents for the carriages—or sending a teddy bear on a journey if they can’t make the trip themselves. A school of local thought holds that “mountains and rivers, grasses and flowers, can all become Buddhas.”
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At the midsummer Festival of the Dead, Obon, I visit Kyoto’s central cemetery, lit with twenty thousand candles—one at every headstone—and find two life-sized cartoon characters being led around by a woman of around twenty and a slightly older boy, both in black gowns. One of the walking creatures represents the Buddha, I’m told with a giggle, one a book of sutras.
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When foreigners arrive in Japan, they sometimes remark—as I did, in 1985—that the people around them look like robots. This may be less because the Japanese are so machinelike and dependable than because inanimate things in Japan possess so much spirit and life.
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The people around you on a Japanese train are often strikingly poker-faced and self-erasing. Yet the cartoon figures in the books they’re carrying have bulging eyes and sport blaring colors, their ejaculations delivered in block capitals rife with exclamation points, the equivalent of “POW!” and “ZAP!!!” and “WOW!”
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Japan imported its first robot from the United States in 1967; within twelve years, it had fifteen times more industrial robots in operation than did the country that inspired it.
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In 1980, Fujitsu opened a factory where robots manufactured robot parts; today, a hotel in Nagasaki is staffed by one hundred and eighty robots. That state-of-the-art convenience has grown so popular that sister hotels are springing up across the country.
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A puppet, the novelist Tanizaki pointed out, may actually be truer to life than an actress, precisely because (in public at least) the latter is encouraged to be so wooden and remote. “The classic beauty was withdrawn, restrained, careful not to show too much individuality,” he wrote. “A more distinctive, more colorful figure would only have ruined the effect.”
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As I ride the elevator up in a crowded department-store, I notice that the machine itself is saying much more, announcing the floors, than anyone around me.
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Even the murderous Aum Shinrikyo cult, which killed thirteen people by planting sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, had its own “Anime Division.”
BETWEEN THE TORII GATES
This belief in 2.5-dimensional characters, as the Japanese phrase has it—cartoon figures who seem alive, living people who present themselves as cartoon characters—sounds curious until you recall that in the Shinto universe every last piece of dust and vegetable is believed to have a spirit.
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels derive much of their power from the fact that they’re haunted by not-quite-human creatures and walking shadows. Clones, dragons and what my neighbors might call “demi-humans” are everywhere in his work, hovering in our midst to remind us that we live in many realms at once.
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People down the road from me pray to trees.
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It’s often noted how Japanese Buddhism has influenced the modern world, everywhere from the Zen reductions of sushi bars to the wabi-sabi aesthetic of white-on-white hotels. But the culture’s most striking spiritual export these days is Shinto: the elevator-riding walruses and smiling blades of grass that animate Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning movies, the way “decluttering guru” Marie Kondo advises you to ask your one-piece if it’s “sparking joy.”
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Anime is the natural expression of an animist world.
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“Take care of things,” as the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, “and things will take care of you.”
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When one of his Western students was having trouble cleaning toilets, Suzuki suggested she speak to the toilets as if they were her friends, telling them how happy she was to get the chance to look after them. It worked.
AT YOUR DISPOSAL
Japan is the spiritual home of the service industry: the wish to serve—and to be industrious—sits at the heart of a culture of shared obedience.
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“If a fisherman sees you emerge from the ocean after swimming,” a German visitor to Japan in 1910 observed, “he will quickly remove the sandals from his feet, bow and place them before you in the sand so that you do not have to walk down the street barefoot.”
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In a mosh pit at a twenty-first-century punk concert in Osaka, I join a group of kids who are flinging themselves headlong in every direction, to set off what looks to be a riot. Young men in uniforms pass silently between our flying bodies, carrying large bags for us mock-hooligans to throw our trash in.
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I order some stationery from a bookshop—Japan insists on using paper a centimeter or two longer than “international size”—and some unknown bodhisattva packs my order in copies of The New York Times so that, when I unpack my booty, I can enjoy the wrapping as much as the item I ordered.
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The next time I place the same order, I get pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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It’s my wife’s birthday in a stylish, twenty-dollar-a-person, six-table Italian restaurant in the basement of a mini-mall in Kobe, so the sweetly smiling waitress brings out a yogurt sorbet on a plate, with one elegant candle placed in a piece of pastry—“Happy Birthday” written in chocolate around the outside—and then whips out a retro white Polaroid box camera and cries, “Chee-zu!”
She snaps twice, and her boss, a smoother woman in her early forties, sets a transparent cube on the center of the table, which I take to be a miniature travel alarm clock. As she turns a golden key, a laser image at its center starts revolving while “Happy Birthday to You” plays three times.
After an avocado milk shake is served in a micro-goblet to each one of us—on the house—the first waitress returns with two tiny laminated Polaroid pictures for us to take home, a memento of the meal.
In the bathroom, I notice before departing, is a basket of FRESH MORNING toothbrush sets, allowing every customer to go back out into the world renewed.
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“In a good democracy,” a character in Oscar Wilde observes, “every man should be an aristocrat.”
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Japan is also the spiritual home of that preemptive kind of service known as convenience, often delivered by automated devices that seem to be doing our thinking (or our living) for us.
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There are more than 5.6 million vending machines in Japan—the highest number per capita on the planet—and there are more than fifty thousand convenience stores, including convenience stores that deliver, two-story convenience stores, convenience stores just for the elderly.
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In the United States, convenience stores are know
n as places for holdups and no-hopers; in Japan, they’re the places you’re advised to go in the event of assault or threat, the safest space in the public domain.
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The ultimate convenience is, of course, uniformity. Every convenience store looks like every other; when I rent a car abroad, I always request a Japanese car, because a Nissan, a Honda, a Toyota all function in exactly the same way, their controls virtually indistinguishable.
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When convenience is applied to smiles and emotions, however—when people deliver “Welcome”s as reliably as machines—we lose track of how many dimensions our life really has.
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A bar in Japan will tell you exactly how many minutes of groping a hostess you get for your sixty bucks.
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Amazon Japan will send Buddhist priests to your door—the service is called “Obo-san bin” or “Mr. Monk Delivery”—to perform funeral chants and other postmortem services at a third the going rate. (They’ll also offer you a Buddhist name for the deceased at a fifth the usual price.)
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The company Family Romance employs fourteen hundred actors to pretend to be family members for clients who are going through hard times. Its boss has acted as a husband to one hundred women, and as a young girl’s father for months on end; one of his workers played a wife to one man for seven years. Another such company, Support One, sends actors to offer apologies on a client’s behalf, to pretend to be a betrayed wife, to act as an inconsolable friend.
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Foreigners sometimes balk at accepting such fake relationships—until they’re presented with one of Asia’s most beloved recent exports, the “girlfriend experience.”
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Japan has a sharp-edged sense of what can be perfected—gizmos, surfaces, manners—and of what cannot (morals, emotions, families). Thus it’s more nearly perfect on the surface than any country I’ve met, in part because it’s less afflicted by the sense that feelings, relationships or people can ever be made perfect.
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“If you do your work cheerfully,” Robert Baden-Powell instructed future Boy Scouts in his 1908 manual, Scouting for Boys, “your work becomes much more of a pleasure to you, and also if you are cheerful it makes other people cheerful as well, which is part of your duty as a scout.”
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Or, as Reese Witherspoon, playing a perky softball player in the lamentable movie How Do You Know has it, “If you do anything halfway, you’ll only be half happy!”
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Impeccable service, however, imposes demands and expectations on the customer as well. My local train in Nara now features announcements in English, Chinese and Korean, as well as in Japanese, reminding us, every few stations, “In order not to bother other customers, please show good manners and create a comfortable atmosphere.” We’re told to scrunch up to make room for more passengers on the bench, not to wear shoulder bags or backpacks, not to walk while using devices, not to talk on the phone, always to keep an eye out for “suspicious articles and behavior.”
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“Do not stand in this area” is marked out (in large English letters) at the bottom of a platform elevator. Out on the streets, a huge banner, as if to guide kindergartners, warns, again in English, “Many Crowds Are Coming. Let’s Walk in Line.”
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Perfection, in fact, is part of what makes Japan wonderfully welcoming to foreigners, and unyieldingly inhospitable, deep down.
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In war, the Japanese readiness to follow every order to the last degree—and beyond—can make its people as brutal and inhuman as, in the 7-Eleven, they’re unendingly sweet and obliging.
EAST POINT
I’d truly come home, I thought as I walked across the lawn in the chill, gray morning. Not just because of the severe, unsmiling buildings all around and the dense hills, but mostly because of the human factor. Everyone I passed, as in my neighborhood in Japan, acknowledged me in some way, with a sign of respect, and every last one was well pressed, immaculate and, in fact, in uniform. When I spoke to them, they listened; there was an alertness I wasn’t accustomed to when I tramped across other such places. The older souls seemed sensitive, uncommonly responsive to the needs of others: one of them, noticing I was flagging in the late afternoon, said, “Let’s cancel our plans and just have a quiet dinner at home.”
It was like being back at English boarding school, I thought at first: the young men in their serious costume, saluting every uniformed teacher they passed; the fact that everyone was known by last name, and was keenly aware whether he (it was mostly “he”s) was 246th or 247th in class. The room inspections and group exercises and waking up at dawn. “Sir”s and “ma’am”s to everyone before communal lunches in the huge medieval hall, and sports to be played every afternoon.
But it was something deeper and more heartening that made West Point, the United States Military Academy, feel unexpectedly like home, a perfect translation of the life I know in Japan: the courtesy, the sense of order—held up by an unbudging sense of hierarchy—the devotion to tradition and, most of all, the everyday humanity. People weren’t spinning off in different directions here, lost in their own plans or orbits; they were brought together into a unit—a sense of fellowship and community—that spoke for a commitment to something larger than themselves.
Not everyone is happy to hear a country likened to a military academy; visitors sometimes complain that Japan is “fascistic” and made for war, and it’s not always easy to contest that. It’s no surprise that Baden-Powell combined a military ideal with a vision of innocence in creating his Boy Scouts after watching, from afar, Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905. But what struck me, in the wake of thirty years of traipsing around Yale and Stanford and Claremont and Brown, was that the kids I met at West Point were wide-awake, spirited and unjaded—un–full of themselves, in fact—in a way I hadn’t encountered anywhere except, perhaps, Japan.
“I’ve never seen less-depressed kids,” wrote a reporter from Rolling Stone who had been keen not to write about West Point until he was given free rein by his hosts to see or say anything he wanted. I came upon his words after my first trip to the academy. Before a return trip, I read how David Lipsky, who had not found such happiness at Harvard or the University of Georgia or thirty-three other colleges he’d visited, had gone to West Point for a few weeks and been so disarmed that he’d ended up following cadets through all four years of their lives there. “It turns out that dressing like everyone else, sharing identical experiences, and being told you’re on a mission of importance to the whole country does wonders for the teenage soul,” he concluded.
And not just the teenage soul. At other colleges I visit, most of the professors I meet go off on long lectures about their specialized fields, as if they and their topics are the center of the world. I wasn’t prepared, before West Point, for a soulful colonel who told me he was a Buddhist at heart, though his uniform, he conceded, made it hard for him to live up to such a claim. For the one who led me around the cemetery on campus, recalling all the friends and colleagues and students who’d died for a cause no one could easily figure out. For the beautiful, tall young blonde Californian officer—currently “deployed” in the English Department—who strolled in with her wife, a navy officer who had spent a year in Yemen.
This doesn’t seem to go with a place I explain through Oscar Wilde. But Wilde, like Japan, lives on because he was never what popular image led one to expect. So, too, with West Point. It was startling to encounter a colonel who kept a large picture of the Qa’aba on his wall, a present from a
friend in Saudi Arabia; or the one who told me with ill-disguised pride how he’d invited not just Noam Chomsky but Chomsky’s daughter to the academy, to speak for peace and to challenge almost everything the cadets were learning. When I was a guest judge one year at the Academy Idol competition—West Point’s version of American Idol—I was taken aback by the brawny teenage cadet who chose to act out a dialogue between two high-pitched girls in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as by the classmate who elected to play out all the “rude mechanicals” in that same play (“I played Snug the Joiner in high school,” whispered the friendly lieutenant-colonel next to me, an expert, he later admitted, at spotting roadside explosives in Iraq).
Of course, West Point raised questions, difficult questions, in one who reflexively hates conflict and thinks of American foreign policy as an exercise in deadly quixotism; Japan often throws me off, too, by offering values and priorities the opposite of the ones I think I admire. But I’m struck at how the English and Philosophy Departments are twinned at West Point—plays aren’t mere texts for these kids—and how the seriousness of their sense of purpose makes, at times, for wild hobbies and private pursuits.