A Beginner's Guide to Japan Read online

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  No wonder, perhaps, that around Kyoto a woman often seems to choose her husband on the basis of the man’s mother as much as of the man himself. It’s the mother-in-law who’s going to be everywhere in the house, even as the husband may be seldom seen.

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  “The woman obeys the man,” Confucius laid down in his Book of Rites. “In her youth she obeys her father and elder brother; when married, she obeys her husband; when her husband dies, she obeys her son.”

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  “In today’s world,” a Chinese “mistress dispeller” told The New Yorker in 2017, “a secondhand woman is like a secondhand car. Once it’s been driven, it’s not worth a fraction of its original selling price.” And a secondhand man? He has the lure, she says, of renovated real estate. “The value only appreciates.”

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  Yet today far more women are visible in Chinese boardrooms than in Japanese. Japan has taken the Confucian model and, as in so many other respects, pushed it to its farthest extreme.

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  Boys in her world were allowed to sleep outstretched, an early-twentieth-century “samurai daughter” reported; but samurai girls had to adopt a stance while sleeping that represented kinoji, or the “spirit of control.”

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  Thus women in Japan have every reason to make contact with a foreign world—by going abroad, by learning another language, even by marrying a foreigner—and men in Japan have every incentive to remain in a system that flatters and protects them.

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  After I got strip-searched every time I returned to Japan, a fellow traveler with equally dark skin told me how to avoid this: always go to the customs lane manned, so to speak, by a woman.

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  In response to all the opportunities denied them in the public sphere, Japanese women have traditionally made the most of the private.

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  In two out of every three Japanese households, it’s the woman who handles all the earnings, giving her husband an average of 15 percent of his salary as pocket money.

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  In the night world—as at my local ping-pong club—women call the shots, precisely by pretending to allow men to assume they’re in control.

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  A woman in Japan, James Merrill observed, “has less face to lose and proportionately more ‘personality’ than her refined husband.”

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  Or, as Wilde’s Mrs. Allonby has it, women “have a much better time” than men in this world. “There are far more things forbidden to us.”

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  I used to think that Hello Kitty, the cartoon character who’s cute, infantile and pretty in pink, was a model of how women are encouraged to be in Japan. Then I saw that being mouthless, as Hello Kitty is, is not the same as being toothless.

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  In 1965, four in every thousand Japanese marriages failed; forty years on, sixty did.

  THE FAMILY WRIT LARGE

  Japan is a society based more on trust than on faith; and lack of transparency can be less the enemy of trust than its perfect safeguard.

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  Couples on dates in Japan often prefer to sit side-by-side rather than face-to-face.

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  If a neighborhood is much like a family, addresses are relatively unimportant. Crime makes no more sense than robbing Peter to pay Paul. And people keep giving expensive presents to one another because they know that all the money is simply circulating within the same closed system.

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  My cosmopolitan, fashionable wife startles friends everywhere from Colorado to Tibet by reflexively referring to them as “Little Sister.” They don’t know that Japan is still enough of a traditional society that people address strangers as “Grandpa,” “Father” or “Older Sister.”

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  Ninety percent of Japanese women have defined themselves as “middle-class.” More than half the country’s citizens support just one of the country’s twelve professional baseball teams, the Tokyo Giants. On New Year’s Eve, nine in every ten television-owning households in Japan have at times been said to tune in to the same show, pitting a group of female singers against a group of men. But still the country around me remains a society based on a vertical, not a horizontal, model.

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  After Japan drew up a Victorian-style constitution in 1889, roughly one in every eighty citizens was qualified to vote. As the twentieth century began, every Japanese house-holder was still obliged to nail a wooden sign above his door on which was inscribed his name and his standing in society.

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  “A man of the lower class,” wrote Basil Hall Chamberlain, at the turn of the twentieth century, “will often hold a partially opened fan in front of his mouth when addressing a superior, so as to obviate the possibility of his breath defiling the superior’s face.”

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  No choir can function without a conductor.

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  In North Korea, I’m regularly startled to encounter a Hermit Kingdom where a leader is taken to be a god, everyone marches to the beat of a single drummer and mass chants and calisthenics are daily enforced to remind everyone of collective responsibility. My neighbors in what for more than two centuries was itself a Hermit Kingdom tend not to think of most of this as strange—when they were young, they saw Japanese policemen arrest citizens for going to the movies, drinking coffee or eating sweet potatoes in the street. It’s not North Korea’s unbending upholding of order that unsettles my friends in Japan; it’s their neighbor’s indifference to boundaries.

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  One thief in Japan, after taking what he wanted, “would stay for a while,” the scholar of Japanese literature Edward Seidensticker writes, “and talk with his victims, pointing out to them the advantages of watchdogs and well-locked doors.”

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  This reverses the celebrated story of how, upon finding a thief in her hut, the nineteenth-century nun Rengetsu is said to have turned on the light, so he could do his job more effectively, then prepared tea and rice for the intruder.

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  The ratio of engineers to lawyers in Japan—of people building things as opposed to people organizing arguments—was forty-one times greater than in the United States for years after I arrived in Japan.

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  Free agency didn’t exist in Japanese baseball till the 1990s. When, through a contractual loophole, the Osaka pitcher Hideo Nomo became the first Japanese to become a longtime player in the American major leagues, his father is believed to have stopped speaking to him.

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  In terms of wealth distribution, Japan in 2017 was “the most equal” society on the planet; many CEOs in Japan earn less than some of their employees do. But in terms of the gulf in public status, Japan is much more unequal than the United States. There’s no overturning the hierarchy.

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  Japanese macaques are of interest to scientists, because, as one scientist says, they “are very status-conscious individuals. They’re very intimidated by power.” They will challenge only those lower in the pecking order. But they’ll generally do this only in the company of the powerful.

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  My Japanese
friends are as rattled by the idea of adoption as I would be if someone were to choose a child from a Humane Society shelter. Yet, traditionally, the Japanese thought nothing of taking on an orphaned nephew, a cousin studying far from home, even a prize pupil, as an adopted child. So long as he’s within the circle, boundaries can be extended.

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  “The Japanese managed to create a competitive society sans competition,” Arthur Koestler concluded in 1959.

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  The shock of the 2018 Japanese movie Shoplifters is that it shows a post-nuclear family so shattered that parents choose their children, children their parents. The deeper shock is that in this upside-down world—the photographic negative of the Japanese Dream—a tangle of lies somehow adds up to a truth and a family of criminals proves closer and more loving than one bound by blood.

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  An American instructor was upbraided, Joseph Campbell heard in Kyoto, for flunking a class of young women who had written papers that were word-for-word the same. A Japanese professor, Campbell was told at the same dinner, offered quite openly that he had taken his entire paper from another scholar.

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  All of them were diligently honoring tradition. The earliest historical texts in Japan, dating from 712 and 720 respectively, take whole incidents and speeches from Chinese history and present them as Japanese.

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  “Having to be different,” noted the artist Robert Rauschenberg, famous for his enigmatic all-white canvases, “is the same trap as having to be the same.”

  THE OTHER SIDE OF SORROW

  “We are taught that suffering is the one promise life always keeps,” a Buddhist from Burma explains to a visiting American in the movie Beyond Rangoon. “So that if happiness comes we know it is a precious gift, which is ours only for a brief time.”

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  After 9/11, many foreign observers were shocked that the terrorists’ long-term strategy had reaped such dividends, leaving Americans traumatized for years; after 3/11—the “triple threat” of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that took more than eighteen thousand lives in Japan in March 2011—foreign observers were shocked at how orderly and calm the Japanese remained, as if loss, and not its absence, is the norm. In Buddhism, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

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  Mexico is happier, deep down, than the United States, my Mexican American friend Richard Rodriguez keeps telling me, because it has a tragic sense.

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  “Recent academic work,” writes Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree, “suggests that people who know their condition to be irreversible are happier than those who believe their condition may be ameliorated.”

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  “You can alter behavior,” says a woman in the Yasujiro Ozu film The End of Summer, “but you cannot alter character.” In simpler cultures, behavior is taken to be a reflection of character.

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  Happiness thus becomes less the place where pain subsides than the one where the expectation of pleasure gets real.

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  If you constantly adapt to circumstances, however, will you ever be able to change them?

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  Twenty years before Camus was invoking Sisyphus as an emblem of futility, the Japanese philosopher Shuzo Kuki was affirming Sisyphus as a resident of Heaven, Christopher Benfey explains. The Japanese Sisyphus, pushing a rock fruitlessly up a hill, “finds in this very repetition an entire system of morals and, consequently, all its happiness.”

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  The Happiness Paradox states that happiness increases in relation to income until a certain point, after which income becomes immaterial.

  The great exception is Japan. Incomes have gone up six times, adjusting for inflation, since the 1950s, yet people confess themselves less happy than before.

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  Is this because they are shy about claiming happiness? Wary of asserting it when everything could change? Or are they truly in despair?

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  “Emotions,” writes the Zen philosopher D. T. Suzuki, “are just the play of light and shadow on the surface of the sea.”

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  Which doesn’t mean we don’t feel them, only that we’re unwise to take them to be something they are not.

  OUT THE WINDOW

  THE FARAWAY ISLAND

  “The only people in the world today who don’t learn from Japan,” Isamu Noguchi told his friend Saburo Hasegawa in Kyoto, soon after the war, “are the Japanese.”

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  In Sei Shonagon’s classic Pillow Book, from the early eleventh century, not a single foreigner is mentioned in all its two hundred and fifty-six pages. In the epic Tale of Genji, from the same insular Kyoto court, the only foreigners alluded to are some Korean astrologers in the opening chapter.

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  Foreign travel at the time was reserved for monks and priests who could bring back treasures from abroad.

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  In Victorian times, while the Grand Tour was flourishing, a Japanese man could be executed for trying to leave Japan, and a foreign vessel landing in Japan would be destroyed, and all its cargo and passengers slaughtered.

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  “To be told he is not a true Japanese,” wrote my cousin’s great-grandfather, visiting Japan in the 1930s, “was a greater punishment to a person than to be abused or even beaten.”

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  “People here must be trying really hard not to learn English,” a young visitor from New York said as we sat in a little Italian restaurant along the lantern-lit old lane of Pontocho, in a geisha district in Kyoto. “Because, whatever they set out to do, they do so well.”

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  On English as a Foreign Language tests, the Japanese score lower in English proficiency than the North Koreans (and, as a two-time visitor to North Korea, I have not found English to be of Shakespearean levels in Pyongyang).

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  “In a foreign country, everything is a source of fear,” wrote the boldest and most English-fluent of all modern Japanese novelists, Yukio Mishima, about living in New York. “You cannot go to the post office or to the bank, as you are frightened of going by yourself.” The Japanese writer most celebrated for his time abroad, Natsume Soseki, did not entrust himself to a train or a cab in London: “their cobweb system is so complicated.”

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  In the Commitment to Development Index’s 2017 ranking of twenty-seven of the world’s richest nations in terms of policies that benefit underdeveloped countries, Japan came second to last (ahead only of South Korea).

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  That same year, this country of one hundred and twenty-seven million accepted exactly twenty asylum-seekers, out of almost twenty thousand who were considered. In Canada and Germany, the rate of acceptance was 40,000 percent higher; a single Turkish town had taken in more than a hundred thousand refugees from Syria alone.

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  Japan is so good at functioning on its own terms that its people find it ever more challenging to function on the terms of the rest of the world.

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  Indeed, it’s precisely the things that keep Japan out of step with the larger global community—its treatment of women, of outsiders, of those of different sexual orientation—that allow
it to function so harmoniously with itself.

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  “Increasingly, she found it difficult to be off-campus anyway,” writes Dave Eggers of a new employee at a spotless, state-of-the-art computer headquarters in Silicon Valley, in his 2014 novel, The Circle. “There were homeless people, and there were the attendant and assaulting smells, and there were machines that didn’t work, and floors and seats that had not been cleaned, and there was, everywhere, the chaos of an orderless world.”