Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (8 page)

It is true that, in a hundred tiny gestures and assumptions, Japan can seem just slightly out of kilter with other countries, at least western
ones, a modern society that nevertheless appears to move to secret rhythms. Well-travelled foreigners visiting Japan for the first time frequently describe an encounter with what strikes them as an altogether alien, if fascinating, culture. Pico Iyer, who has lived around Kyoto for a quarter of a century, describes Japan as being ‘less like anywhere else than anywhere else I know’.
¹¹

Like Hearn and Iyer, I too am sometimes struck anew by patterns of behaviour as if observing them for the first time. I am rarely less than surprised when, in what is in many ways a conservative country, a female caretaker breezes into a public lavatory while men are urinating. I often forget that when Japanese people refer to themselves they point not to their heart, but to their nose. When they hand over a business card or a yen note, they always rotate it so that it is facing the recipient, since not to do so is considered quite rude. Linguistically, the Japanese revel in ambiguity. The first, second and third person often blend into one. The phrase ‘I love you’ contains neither the word ‘I’ nor ‘you’. Businessmen introduce themselves as belonging to their company, as if their own identity and that of the business they work for is partially fused. ‘I am Tanaka of Mizuho bank.’ The word ‘san’, a polite appendage usually translated as Mr or Mrs, is also used for animals, as in ‘Did you see Mr Elephant at the zoo?’

One should not, however, make too much of such differences. Perhaps one should make nothing of them at all. Any western-centric observer who assumes that what he does is ‘normal’ will find equally unfamiliar practices in Peru, India or Papua New Guinea. Macfarlane’s argument, though, went further. He was saying the differences between Japan and other countries went beyond the superficial. According to him, whereas other modern societies had gone through a profound separation of the spiritual from the everyday, no such division ever took place in Japan. It never underwent, he says, what German philosopher Karl Jaspers called an ‘Axial Age’, a separation creating a dynamic tension between the world of matter and another world of spirit. Japan had no heaven or hell against which to benchmark its worldly actions. ‘Japan rejected the philosophical idea of another separate world of the ideal and the good, a world of spirit separate from man and nature, against which we judge our actions and direct our attempts at salvation.’
¹²

A retired geisha in Kyoto, whose life provided some of the material for Arthur Golden’s
Memoirs of a Geisha
, once spoke to me in similar terms. ‘I have read the Bible,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘In comparison, our gods won’t test us to see whether we are bad or whether we are good.’
¹³
Out of interest, I asked several Japanese friends how, if at all, they conceived of god. One young woman, who worked as a telephone sales clerk, said she immediately thought of her dead grandmother, not an answer I would imagine hearing in the west. Another, Akira Chiba, a friend who works for the foreign ministry, said, ‘I don’t know much about Christianity, but seen from the outside it looks as though there’s a difference between your role and god’s role, your terrain and god’s terrain. In Japan, gods are floating around and they’re together with the people. Essentially, we live together with the gods.’

Macfarlane saw what he called this lack of separation everywhere. Thus sumo, with its purification rituals, was both sport and religion. A garden was both nature and art, as was the food I shared with Fujiwara. A temple was a place of worship in a country without faith. Economics, as Fujiwara said, was not a science to be placed outside the moral sphere. ‘Gardens, ceremonies, people cannot be understood in themselves, but always in relation to something else,’ Macfarlane wrote.
¹⁴
His idea of a world ‘without partitions’ echoed my friend Kaji’s insistence that Japan was ‘without borders’, a place where ‘one thing blends into another seamlessly’.

In art, too, Macfarlane detected this lack of separation. The Japanese, he said, did not distinguish between art and craft. Their best artist-craftsmen – potters, swordsmiths, papermakers, lacquer workers and calligraphers – were afforded enormous respect, designated ‘National Living Treasures’. Like many observers of Japan, he found art everywhere, in the exquisite arrangement of flowers, food laid out on lacquerware or ceramic, even in the movements, passed down the generations, with which people sliced fish or swept a stone garden. ‘For the Japanese, in Keats’s words, truth is beauty, beauty truth.’

The haiku, a poem of just seventeen syllables that includes an obligatory allusion to the season, supports the idea that little in Japan makes sense without reference to something else. The best-known haiku by the poet Basho is:

furu ike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

Hearn rendered it:

old pond

frogs jumped in

sound of water

In English, it sounds like doggerel. The beauty in Japanese comes from its reference to things outside; the season (spring is mating time for frogs), the setting, the sound of water conveyed by the onomatopoeic word
oto
. A master of wine who is also an expert in sake once told me that the most elegant Japanese rice wines are defined by the absence of taste, the reverse of what one looks for in a claret or a Chardonnay. ‘Sake is about what’s not there. With wine it’s about what’s here. It’s like in speech. The pauses and the silences, the things that aren’t there give a hint of the meaning. The most elegant sakes are barely there at all.’

•   •   •

The idea of thinking about Japan as different from anywhere else is seductive. Yet there are many reasons to reject the notion. Those feelings that Japan moves to rhythms incomprehensible to most outsiders have reinforced an almost morbid sense of separateness. The Australian academic Gavan McCormack sees Ruth Benedict’s
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
as ‘one of the great propaganda coups of the century’.
¹⁵
In stoking Japanese fantasies about their own separate identity, he says, the book helped sever Japan’s psychological ties with its Asian neighbours in the years after the war, making it more dependent on the US.

If we look closer, much of Japan’s supposed ‘essence’ turns out to be a relatively modern distillation. Nineteenth-century nationalist leaders found it useful to create emperor-centred myths around which a new, post-feudal nation could rally. They elevated Shinto, an animist set of folkloric beliefs, to the status of national religion. The various strands of Shintoism were united under the banner of the emperor. Amataresu, the sun goddess from which the imperial line supposedly
sprang, was placed at its centre. From the 1880s, history textbooks in school began not with Stone Age man but with the birth of the Sun Goddess and the start of the imperial line. Much of Japanese uniqueness, in other words, is propaganda. Blending nativist animism with the cult of emperor worship was a political artifice. The emperor became so powerful an expression of the Japanese state that even the occupying Americans preserved the institution, exonerating him from any responsibility for the war fought in his name. ‘All of this left him as the supreme icon of genetic separateness and blood nationalism, the embodiment of an imagined timeless essence that set the Japanese apart from – and superior to – other peoples and cultures.’
¹⁶

It is all too easy to attach cultural explanations to what were, in fact, exercises in the consolidation of political power. It turns out, for example, that the practice of recording dates according to imperial reign is not – as some would have it – an expression of Japan’s uniquely cyclical view of time. Rather, it dates back merely to the mid-nineteenth century when the imperial cult was being created. Of today’s nationalists pining for a supposed Japanese essence, McCormack writes: ‘What they believed to be ancient tradition was quintessentially modern ideology.’
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After the war, when the Japanese traded in emperor worship for the ‘cult of gross domestic product’, new notions of what it was to be Japanese arose. Noriko Hama, a professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto, a delightfully brusque iconoclast, disputes the common notion that there was anything fundamentally ‘Japanese’ about Japan’s post-war economic model. At the turn of the twentieth century, she says, Japan practised an energetic, cut-throat form of capitalism that had little to do with the communitarian values later put forward as the secret of its economic miracle. According to Hama, some post-war arrangements, such as lifetime employment and seniority pay, which promotes people according to age not ability, were practical responses to demographics and the need to keep a manufacturing industry supplied with labour. They did not reflect any underlying Japanese proclivity for a gentler form of capitalism. As growth has slowed and society aged, many of the post-war arrangements once hailed as essentially Japanese are fast evaporating. By some measures – for example in the high percentage of casual labour – Japan now has a more flexible
labour force than many western countries. For some, the lifetime employment system and seniority pay had been a modern version of Fujiwara’s
bushido
sensibilities. If that really is the essence of Japan, then such essence is fast vanishing, like drops of ink in water.

•   •   •

Contrary to the views of essentialists, cultures are not immutable. Like language they evolve and adapt, though they may take generations to do so. To seek to explain the history of a country – let alone its future – on the basis of supposedly fixed national characteristics is to succumb to a determinist view of the world. We should challenge some of the assumptions that give rise to such opinions.

The starting point is the belief that island Japan is a racially homogenous society. But where do Japanese people actually come from? There were two distinct phases. The first people who came to the islands probably walked there over land bridges that connected the Japanese islands to the continent during the low sea levels of the Ice Age. The existence of stone tools suggests humans may have arrived, probably from both the northeast and southwest, some half a million years ago. By about 12,000 years ago, shortly after the glaciers had melted all over the world, these hunter-gatherers were thriving.
¹⁸
These so-called Jomon people were making the oldest examples of pottery yet discovered. They lived not unlike the Native Americans of the northwest and had a varied diet. They ate nuts, berries and seeds. They harpooned tuna, killed porpoises and seals on the beaches and fished with nets and hooks carved from deer antlers. There was little sign of hierarchy.

But the Jomon lifestyle, which remained largely unchanged for some 10,000 years, underwent a radical transformation around 400
BC
. At that time, the inhabitants of Japan began to use iron tools and to produce rice in paddies with sophisticated irrigation systems. These people, since named Yayoi, adopted customs previously unknown to Japan. They wove, used bronze objects, glass beads and rice storage pits. They buried the remains of their dead in jars. Who were they? The evidence of geneticists and archaeologists points to an influx of Koreans, a theory resisted by some Japanese scholars. They could have come from the peninsula through mass migration, overwhelming the Jomon population. Alternatively, they may have arrived in far fewer
numbers, but their superior agricultural techniques would have meant that, over time, their population grew much faster than the Jomon people. Either way, the new Yayoi lifestyle spread rapidly from the southern island of Kyushu, where it first took hold, to Shikoku and then up the spine of Honshu. It did not reach the much colder island of Hokkaido. The view of the Japanese as a mixture of Korean-like Yayoi people with an indigenous Jomon population is now largely accepted by academics. But it does not sit well with those who would like to portray Japan as an essentially island civilization, whose culture and genetic inheritance arose in isolation from the mainland.

Neither is modern Japan quite as monocultural as is often presumed, though it is certainly more so than societies with large immigrant populations. One scholar, exaggerating a little for effect, calls Japan a ‘multi-ethnic, multicultural society in denial’.
¹⁹
Japan has about 2 million ‘non-Japanese’ in a population of 127 million. At about 1.5 per cent of the total that is small compared with more open countries such as the US, the UK and Spain. But it is not negligible. About 1 million of those so-called foreigners are, in fact, ethnic Koreans, most of them born and brought up in Japan, the descendants of those who came, sometimes involuntarily, between 1910 and 1945 when Korea was a Japanese colony. In less closed societies, they would already be classified as Japanese. Even so, that still leaves 1 million registered foreigners and at least 200,000 illegal residents – many of them students, temporary workers or ‘tourists’ who have overstayed their visas.

There are also between 1 million and 3 million so-called
burakumin
, the descendants of an ‘untouchable’ class known as
eta
in feudal times. As in India, they were a caste restricted to ‘polluted’ work in slaughterhouses or tanneries. Theoretically liberated with the abolition of the feudal caste system in 1870, the
burakumin
continued to suffer discrimination well into modern times.
²⁰
In addition, there are the roughly 1.3 million people living in Okinawa, many of whom trace their heritage back to the independent Ryukyu kingdom before it was annexed by Japan in 1879. Finally, there are still scattered descendants of Ainu hunter-gatherers in the northernmost island of Hokkaido. The Ainu, who speak an entirely different language from Japanese and are lighter skinned and with more body hair, were pushed into the north some 2,300 years ago. Like Okinawa, Hokkaido
is a fairly recent addition to Japan’s landmass. For centuries the lands in northern Honshu, where the 2011 earthquake and tsunami took place, were known by the derogatory term of Ezo, which could also refer to its native Ainu people.