Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (7 page)

Indeed the idea of
Nihonjinron
had not died completely. In 2005, Masahiko Fujiwara, an essayist and mathematics professor at Tokyo’s Ochanomizu University, published a slim volume called
Dignity of the Nation
. In it, Fujiwara did not argue, as had been common in the 1980s, that Japan’s unique qualities destined it to beat America at its own economic game. Nearly two decades of sub-par growth since the spectacular collapse of Japan’s twin asset bubbles had seen to that. Rather, he harked back to Japan’s supposed essence, captured in notions of samurai honour and codes of practice that would have been familiar to readers of Ruth Benedict. He yearned for a time before Japan had been sullied by contact with western capitalism. His was a call, in sometimes strident nationalistic language, for a return to a prelapsarian, mythical land.

It was tempting to dismiss all this as the ravings of an eccentric. But in the months following its publication, Fujiwara’s book came up time and again in conversations with businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats. Within a short time it had sold no fewer than 2 million copies. Only the translation of the latest Harry Potter had done better. I decided I ought to hear Fujiwara out for myself. At first, he was reluctant. Somewhat defensive on the phone, he appeared to have little interest in explaining himself to a foreigner. In any case, he was busy. He could not meet in Tokyo, since he spent summers in the coolness of the mountains. In the end, he relented. If I would take the two-hour train ride to Nagano in central Japan, he would talk over lunch.

We met in a Scandinavian-style restaurant in an airy and verdant
valley a world away from the sweltering heat of Tokyo. I took a taxi from the tiny, immaculate station at Chino. Even out here, the driver wore white gloves. The GPS system blinked reassuringly. There was something of the Swiss Alps about the neatness of the surroundings. Fujiwara was waiting for me at the restaurant. In his early sixties and skinny, he appeared slightly gawky, dressed in a check shirt and casual white slacks. His greying hair sprouted hither and thither like untamed weeds. He spoke decent, if slightly strained, English, an interesting touch for someone who advocated the wholesale abandonment of English-language teaching in schools. English was so intrinsically different from Japanese, he said, that it was almost impossible for Japanese children to master. ‘Only one in 10,000 can acquire both languages,’ he said. ‘I spent so much time on English, I now repent it.’ Besides, he said dismissively, failure to communicate preserved the image among foreigners that the Japanese were thinking deep thoughts. Only when Japanese broke the language barrier did they reveal to the outside world that they had nothing to say.

The first course of our exquisitely presented set lunch was a single prawn, with a few meticulously arranged chickpeas. So precisely did his arrangement match mine that I found myself counting the chickpeas to check whether the kitchen staff had, as I suspected, given us exactly the same number. I never discovered the answer since Fujiwara was in full flow. I had asked why he thought
Dignity of the Nation
had so caught the
Zeitgeist
. Japan, he was saying, had been pursuing the chimera of wealth for sixty years. That rush to prosperity had blinded it to the foolhardiness of the capitalist model it was pursuing and, more importantly, to its own virtues. Nearly twenty years of stagnation had brought a sense of perspective. ‘Japan used to despise money, just like English gentlemen,’ he said. ‘But after the war, under American influence, we concentrated on prosperity.’ He harked back to the golden age of the Edo period (1603–1868) when
bushido
, the ethical and spiritual code of the samurai, spread from the elites to the general population via books and popular theatre like kabuki. ‘People believed in
bushido
and for 260 years there were no wars,’ he said, referring to the peace established between clansmen under the strict control of the Tokugawa shogun. ‘When
bushido
started in the twelfth century, it was a kind of swordsmanship, but since there were
no wars in the Edo era, swordsmanship became a [set of] values, like sensitivity to the poor and to the weak, benevolence, sincerity, diligence, patience, courage, justice.’

Much of that had been lost through exposure to what he called the dog-eat-dog values of the west. He cited recent controversies over western companies seeking to bring alien concepts of ‘shareholder value’ and hostile takeovers to Japan. ‘Hostile takeovers might be logical and legal, but it’s not a very honourable thing for us Japanese,’ he said, smiling benevolently. ‘I find the idea that a company belongs to its shareholders a terrifying piece of logic. A company belongs to the staff who work in it. That goes without saying.’

Another plate arrived, this one a perfectly arranged display of scallops. ‘Chinese dishes, of course, are very delicious. But we pay greater attention to aesthetics. In writing we have
shodo
and for flowers we have
ikebana
,’ he said, referring to the calligraphy and flower arrangement that lift everyday experiences above the routine. In England, he had been appalled, though perhaps secretly delighted, to see esteemed Cambridge professors slurping tea from cracked mugs. ‘In Japan, we have tea ceremony. Everything we make into art.’

Fujiwara blamed Japan’s descent into militarism on its abandonment of samurai values and its embrace of prevailing western thought. In its quest to become a Great Power, it aped the colonial ways of that other island nation, Britain, he said. ‘I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally. For the past 200 years, after the industrial revolution, westerners relied too much on logical thinking. Even now, they tend to think that, if you really depend on logic and reason, then everything will be all right. But I don’t think so. You really need something more. You might say that Christianity is something that can come on top of those things. But for us Japanese, we don’t have a religion like Christianity or Islam. So we need to have something else – deep emotion. That is something we have had for twenty centuries.’

Such deep emotion, the sticky albumen of the shell-less society, is said to explain numerous facets of Japanese behaviour, from the way people interact with the each other to, of all things, their supposedly distinct
way of hearing insects. Not long into our conversation, Fujiwara, almost inevitably, cited the infamous studies of Dr Tadanobu Tsunoda of Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Dr Tsunoda’s research – and one can almost see the electrodes attached to the heads of earnest volunteers – concluded that the Japanese brain was different from that of most other peoples.
⁹
The Japanese, he found, heard the sound of temple bells, insects and even snoring with the left half of the brain, the opposite of westerners. In Fujiwara’s book there is an excruciating description of how a visiting American professor, on hearing the sound of crickets, asks: ‘What’s that noise?’ Fujiwara feigns to be appalled. How can the professor not recognize this as music? How, he wonders, could we have lost the war to these imbeciles? ‘All Japanese listen to insects as music. When we listen to crickets in deep autumn we hear it as music. We hear the sorrow of autumn because winter is coming. The summer is gone. Every Japanese feels that. We feel the sorrow of our very temporary, short life.’

I was looking sceptical, but he ploughed on. He explained another familiar, and related, concept, that of
mono no aware
. This is sometimes translated as ‘the pathos of things’, but can also mean sensitivity to the ephemeral. That is why, he said, in an explanation one hears trotted out every spring, the Japanese love cherry blossom – precisely because its bloom is so fleeting before it gently flutters to earth. ‘If cherry blossoms were in full bloom for six months, no Japanese would love them,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful because it dies within a week.’

I said I had no doubt that these were important cultural reference points, handed down from parents to children and expounded upon by poets and philosophers. The idea of the fleeting cherry blossom was indeed a beautiful metaphor. But I saw no need for brain-mapping experiments or assertions of Japanese unique sensitivity to explain it. Wasn’t the reaction to insects and cherry blossoms, and no doubt to countless other things, better explained as cultural association? I conjured up my own vision of a cricket match on an English village green. Where a Japanese might see red-faced men in white clothes panting aimlessly around a field, we British felt the beauty of summer, we tasted hops (and cheese and onion crisps) and, in our mind, heard the chatter of happy children. This didn’t make us naturally sensitive to the sound of leather against willow. It was the association of a shared cultural experience.

Fujiwara partially conceded my point, but he was reluctant to let go of the idea that the Japanese had a unique love of nature. Why did they prune bonsai trees to within an inch of their life then, I goaded? ‘They love nature so much, they want to keep it at hand,’ came back his ingenious reply. Why, then, was a nation of nature lovers so inordinately scared of rain, I pressed? It takes but a scattered shower to bring out a forest of previously secreted umbrellas and the merest few drops – between taxi and kerbside – to send young women screaming at the thought of getting wet. I didn’t mind getting drenched and never thought to carry an umbrella, I said defiantly. Didn’t that make me more in tune with nature’s bounties? I should have guessed the answer even as it was forming on Fujiwara’s lips. ‘British rain and Japanese rain are quite different,’ he replied.

•   •   •

The idea of Japan as an impenetrable island culture is not easy to dislodge. I once wrote an essay in which I sought to refute the notion of Japanese exceptionalism.
¹⁰
Before I submitted it, I sent it to a friend, Sahoko Kaji, a professor of economics at Keio University who specializes, for her sins no doubt, in the macroeconomics of the European Union. Kaji speaks impeccable English. She is as comfortable in the company of westerners as in that of Japanese and she carries herself as would any modern woman in London or New York. Now in her early fifties, she helped write a slim, tongue-in-cheek volume called
Xenophobe’s Guide to the Japanese
. In it, she and two co-authors poke gentle fun at Japanese customs – a fondness for ‘love hotels’, compulsive gift-giving, the art of bowing – as well as at foreigners’ misconceptions about what such practices might mean. Given her worldliness and sense of irony, I was somewhat taken aback to receive the following email response to my essay:

It seems to me the only people on earth that are not worried about understanding Japan are the Japanese. Nobody can ‘understand’ Japan in the western sense of the word, because in Japan there is no absolute.

I sometimes feel sorry watching westerners trying to define Japan or the Japanese. There are even well intentioned Japanese
who use western terminology to ‘explain’ Japan in their usual effort to be nice to guests and foreigners.

But it is futile. If you meet a Japanese who can define exactly what it is to be Japanese, he/she is not a true Japanese. In Japan, one thing blends into another seamlessly. And importantly, nobody (no Japanese anyway) worries about where the line is drawn. I would agree with the shell-less egg analogy.

I might add that my sister [a high-flier in the foreign ministry and also a friend] is the most Japanese of Japanese people. Maybe the most Japanese person I know. She has no borderline around her and it never even occurs to her to define anything at all. So you see, it has NOTHING to do with whether you can speak foreign languages or have lived abroad for years.

I cannot successfully engage in conversation with a westerner without defining things and showing borders. And yet I am certainly Japanese in the sense that I stand back and ‘marvel’ at westerners who keep trying to define this un-definable thing called Japan. Why bother? You cannot do it. I will not attempt it.

Japan will probably no longer be Japan if it is captured, defined, understood. I think I have confused you enough. I really should not have confused someone facing a deadline, but there it is.

Clearly it is hard to define things. How would you ‘define’ an individual, let alone something as complex and multifaceted as a national culture? But why should Japan be any harder to define than any other country? And, why should Japanese people not have borders – whatever that means – and exhibit less faith in absolutes than people in other parts of the world?

At the time, I had just finished reading a book,
Japan Through the Looking Glass
by Alan Macfarlane, a professor of anthropology at Cambridge University. Unlike me, Macfarlane was convinced that Japan was so different from other cultures that it could be understood only in reference to itself. ‘The Japanese do not seem to me to be just trivially different from the west and other civilisations, but different
at such a deep level that the very tools of understanding we normally use prove inadequate,’ he wrote. One evening I telephoned him from Tokyo at his Cambridge home. He told me, quite as if he were discussing a hidden tribe in the Amazon, that, in contrast to other societies he had studied, Japan became less comprehensible the more he thought about it. ‘When I go to India or China, I find lots of strange and amazing things. But I don’t feel a growing sense of confusion. In Japan, I start off with a feeling of similarity and then, growingly, things become more strange.’

It would be disingenuous to pretend I have no idea what Macfarlane is talking about. Whenever I fly out of Japan, I sometimes sense my understanding of the country trickling away, like water through fingers. Even experienced Japanologists are not immune from finding Japan difficult to pin down. Lafcadio Hearn, who pitched up on the archipelago in 1890 only a few decades after it had opened to the west, wrote, ‘The outward strangeness of things in Japan produces a queer thrill impossible to describe – a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar.’ Hearn, who adored Japan, was no
ingénu
, much less a racist, though he might be accused of making Japan seem more exotic than it really is. A naturalized Japanese citizen, he was known as Yakumo Koizumi – or Koizumi Yakumo in Japan’s ‘topsy-turvy’ word order. He married the daughter of a samurai family, spoke fluent Japanese and spent the last fifteen years of his peripatetic life in Japan. Yet of that country, he wrote, ‘The wonder and delight have never passed away; they are often revived for me even now, by some chance happening, after 14 years of sojourn.’ Foreshadowing a sentiment often expressed by today’s long-time residents, puzzled at their inability to grasp what they imagine to be the essence of Japan, he added, ‘Long ago the best and dearest Japanese friend I ever had said to me, a little before his death, “When you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you will begin to know something about them.”’ Hearn’s book was tellingly entitled
Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation
. A year after his attempt, he was dead.