Shimaguni
Japan is an island nation. That is a fact of enormous, not to say exaggerated, importance to many Japanese. In the Japanese language, the word for island is shima. In written form, it is represented by the ideograph of a bird sitting on top of a mountain as though, exhausted in flight, it had found a place to perch in the vastness of the ocean. The word for country is kuni. When the two are run together, they fuse into the magical sounding shimaguni, or ‘island nation’. The syllables have a sonorous heaviness about them, like the title of some lost epic. Even in everyday language, the term is occasionally invoked like an incantation, as though its very utterance settles everything. In the presence of foreigners, it can serve as the final word on the subject of Japan. Shimaguni. All there is to know – and all that can never be known – about an archipelago whose customs are felt to be beyond the understanding of outsiders.
Few would deny that Japan’s island status has had tangible effects on its history and culture, even if the Japanese tend to make too much of it. To the outsider, Japan can seem a mysterious, even unknowable, place. Before it was opened up by American warships in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japan spent long stretches of its history mostly shut off from western, if not Asian, influence. Both Japan and China, at one stage in their history, banned the construction of seafaring vessels capable of sailing far from land. In Japan’s case, that was largely to prevent its people from being poisoned by foreign ideas, whether those were Christianity or rebellion against the shogun who topped the feudal order. Thus, for a quarter of a millennium, until the country was prised open like a shell, the Japanese government forbade most people from entering or leaving Japan on pain of death. Under the system of sakoku, or closed country, which operated from the early seventeenth century, only minimal contact was permitted with traders from Korea, China and Holland. Dutch vessels were restricted to the tiny man-made island of Dejima. Built in the shape of a fan off the coast of Nagasaki in Japan’s southwest, it was as much a prison as a port of entry.
Even before the period of sakoku, the waters that separated the Japanese archipelago from the Asian continent diluted the cultural influence exerted by China over Japan. At its closest point, roughly where the modern-day city of Fukuoka is located on the island of Kyushu, Japan lies some 120 miles from the Korean peninsula. That is nearly six times further than the mere twenty-one-mile gulch that divides Britain from continental Europe. China, the ancient civilization from which so much Japanese culture derived, is some 500 miles away, a formidable distance in centuries past.
• • •
Jared Diamond, an American thinker who has written extensively, and controversially, about the effects that geography can have on a nation’s development, argues that Japan’s location – 100 miles from the nearest continent – has had a distinct bearing on its culture.1 Despite what many British like to think, the islands that form the United Kingdom have been closely integrated with the continental landmass for hundreds of years. There has not been a single century in the last ten in which British armies have been absent from the European continent. Britain itself has been invaded by Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. By contrast, Japanese armies have ventured onto the Asian mainland only twice, in the 1590s, when the newly unified country invaded the Korean peninsula, and in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Japan annexed Korea and attacked China. Conversely, apart from what may have been a large influx of Koreans 2,300 years ago, Japan has escaped the military conquests that have shaped other nations.2 The Mongols twice failed to invade, in 1274 and 1281. On the second occasion, the ships of Kublai Khan were wrecked by a typhoon, the ‘divine wind’, or kamikaze, from which the name of Japan’s suicide pilots was later taken.
Even after its defeat in the Second World War, Japan was spared full colonization. The Americans, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, stayed only seven years and ran the country at arm’s length through a local bureaucracy. That was not even long enough to leave a strong tradition of proficiency in the English language. Even today, Japan scores worse in English tests than almost all other Asian nations. When the Dalai Lama visits Japan, he is sometimes asked what would most benefit the country. Tibet’s spiritual leader never fails to disappoint his audience. Instead of philosophy or religion, he has more practical advice on how Japan can better integrate with the world. ‘Learn English,’ he says.3
Japan’s position on the extreme east of the Eurasian continent made it a backwater in which concepts developed on the mainland came late and took on their own form, like algae in a stagnant pond. From China, often via the Korean peninsula, came new ideas: written language, Confucianism, Buddhism, architecture, metallurgy and poetry. But once these concepts arrived, they fused with Japan’s nativist traditions to undergo a subtle transformation. Undisturbed by a constant back and forth across land borders, ideas took their own course. In religion, Buddhism melded with animism, ancestor veneration and Shinto beliefs. Today, shrines dedicated to foxes sit alongside temples devoted to the Buddha. Acknowledging their religious syncretism, the Japanese like to say they are born Shinto, marry Christian and die Buddhist. In surveys most describe themselves as atheists. In language too, Japan absorbed Chinese characters developed on the mainland several thousand years ago. By the late Shang Dynasty (1600–1029 BC), the Chinese were scratching characters on the back of turtle shells as part of royal divination ceremonies. Many hundreds of years later, Japan, which had no native writing system, adapted the same characters to their own, entirely distinct, language. Partly because the fit was imperfect, the Japanese created two more phonetic alphabets known as kana. Today’s written Japanese is a mixture of the three scripts, one Chinese and two homegrown.
This cultural appropriation and subtle subversion of outside influence is hardly unique to Japan. But the distance between Japan and the outside world, both physical and psychological, perhaps exaggerated the phenomenon. The Japanese adapt what comes from outside. They mix strips of seaweed or sea urchin in their pasta. They use the term sebiro to mean suit, mostly unaware that the word is a distortion of Savile Row, a London street famed for its men’s tailors.4 More recently, they have taken western technology and modified it. In the inventive hands of Japanese engineers, trains became bullet trains, and mobile phones morphed into powerful computers (and electronic wallets) well before the onset of Apple’s iPhone. Even the humble western toilet, adapted to the Japanese mania for cleanliness, became a high-tech contraption of sprays, massage nozzles and hot-air dryers. Yet the modern rarely supplants the old entirely. In many public lavatories, these lavatorial wonders sit alongside old-fashioned squat toilets just one up from a hole in the ground.
The oceans around Japan are not merely shock absorbers that break the intensity of foreign influence. The sea itself has become part of Japanese culture. Its people have a relationship with their surrounding waters perhaps more intimate than inhabitants of any other large nation. No part of the Japanese archipelago lies more than eighty miles from the ocean, still the country’s main source of protein despite the relatively recent encroachment of milk and meat. Old Jomon mounds, some dating back more than 10,000 years, have traces of fish bones from multiple species, indicating how long the Japanese have been active fishermen.
The influence of the ocean on culture is ubiquitous. Sporting fans eat octopus balls at baseball matches and shopkeepers sometimes offer young children not sweets, but raw shrimp, as a treat. In the same way that people discuss the weather or football in England, the Japanese talk excitedly about the coming into season of a particular fish. In Tohoku and other coastal regions, the years when great tsunamis struck the coast are remembered like the dates of battles. The very language is awash in watery imagery. A lackey or sidekick is a ‘goldfish poo’ trailing behind its master. What we would call a ‘spike’ in English, say in the price of gold, is unagi nobori, or ‘surging eel’. (A canned drink by the same name was launched a few years ago.) Prime ministers have been known to compare themselves to fish: one likened himself to a loach, an unflashy bottom-dwelling creature well suited, he said, to muddy politics.5 Even in moments of extreme distress, the ocean may be the first thing that comes to mind. A mother who witnessed the atomic mushroom cloud spreading malevolently over Hiroshima mouthed in horror: ‘It moves like a sea slug.’6
• • •
Japan is not a single island, but an archipelago. Its four main islands – Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – stretch 1,200 miles from the northeast to the southwest, forming an apostrophe on the edge of the Eurasian landmass. That makes Japan roughly the same length as the east coast of America, though its total area is no bigger than the state of Montana. Even then, over two-thirds of Japan’s territory comprises steep mountains that are virtually uninhabitable, while only 17 per cent of its land is arable. Thus, the country’s 127 million inhabitants are squeezed into an area about the same size as Bulgaria. In other ways, though, Japan is not small at all. If it were in western Europe, it would be the continent’s most populous nation by far, with more people than Britain and Italy combined. Economically, notwithstanding two supposedly ‘lost decades’, it remains a giant with an output half as big again as Germany.
Japan’s island status has helped foster the idea that it is somehow unique among civilizations. Of course, it is not the only country to consider itself unique. During the US 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, made it clear he put his faith in ‘that special nature of being an American’. Barack Obama, the US president, has been taken to task for questioning the concept of American exceptionalism. Still, the idea of Japan’s separateness from other cultures has gained currency among both foreigners and Japanese themselves, though many, as we shall see, vigorously, and properly, contest the notion. Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations divides the world into seven categories, of which Japan – alone – has a category of its own.
At its most benign, discussion of Japan’s uniqueness is an attempt to define the country by explaining what makes it different, in the way that all cultures are different from one another. Yet obsession with the idea of Japan’s supposedly uniquely homogeneous, group-oriented society has become a fetish. At its worst, it has slipped into a dangerous assertion of racial superiority. It was, after all, a sense of Japan’s uniquely divine origins and its emperor-centred system – a mythology largely manufactured in the late nineteenth century – that stoked its poisonous sense of manifest destiny in the 1930s and 40s.
It is not only the Japanese who have laboured the country’s supposed uniqueness. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written in 1946 by Ruth Benedict, an American anthropologist, painted a picture of the Japanese as ‘the most alien enemy the United States has ever fought in an all-out struggle’. Explaining why it was incumbent to study Japan’s culture so closely, she wrote: ‘In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking.’ The underlying assumption of the book – of a people with codes of behaviour entirely distinct from those of westerners – made it respectable to see Japan as a nation apart. After the war, the success of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword helped breathe life into an entire genre of writing called Nihonjinron, or ‘treatise on what makes Japan separate’. The form had its origins as far back as the seventeenth century but reached an apogee in more modern times. In 1977, Joji Mori, a poet and English teacher, wrote a treatise on Japan’s group-oriented society called The Shell-less Egg.7 The book postulated that Europeans and Americans were like eggs with their own shell, self-contained individuals. The Japanese, by contrast, were shell-less – sticky rather than hard, amorphous rather than rigid. They did not, the book argued, conceive of themselves as individual human beings unless defined in relation to family, village, workplace, superiors and inferiors, insiders and outsiders. By the 1980s, when some Japanese became convinced their nation’s unique characteristics would propel it past America to become the world’s economic superpower, whole sections of bookshops were devoted to these self-absorbed tracts.
Nihonjinron builds on the phoney concept of a racially homogenous society. One only has to look at the faces on a Tokyo or Osaka subway to realize that the Japanese originated from many different parts of Asia. Nevertheless, the idea of a pure Japanese essence persists. This would have it that the Japanese are cooperative, sedentary rice farmers, not garrulous, mobile hunter-gatherers; that they have a unique sensitivity to nature; that they communicate without language through a sort of social telepathy; that they use instinct and ‘heart’ rather than cold logic, and that they have a rarefied artistic awareness. Much emphasis is placed on the advantages of a harmonious society. Taiichi Ono, considered the father of the ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing method that revolutionized Japanese productivity after the war, cheerily told a documentary filmmaker, ‘With a racially homogenous workforce, it’s much easier to discuss things. In fact, it is perfectly natural for us to have a unanimous agreement in whatever we undertake.’8
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, when I moved to Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, talk of Japan’s uniquely admirable qualities had faded somewhat along with the vigour of its economy. ‘When I hear people talking about ishin-denshin, I wonder what they have in their heads,’ Noritoshi Furuichi, an academic, told me, referring to a belief in a unique Japanese ability to communicate non-verbally. ‘The interesting thing about Nihonjinron is the extent to which the Japanese want to believe it.’
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.
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:
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.’17
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.
Divisions of class, gender and geography are often played down in a society that has grown to think of itself as uniformly middle-class. But they are just as real as in other societies with no history of claiming, as Japan did in the war, that ‘a hundred million hearts beat as one’. Yoshio Sugimoto, a Japanese academic, rejects the idea that ‘the national character of the Japanese [is] cast from a single mould’.21
• • •
The leaders of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 needed to concoct a new sense of what it meant to be Japanese. The old feudal order had been dismantled in the name of modernization. Samurai had to dispense with swords and topknots. Commoners, who had previously been forbidden from carrying weapons on pain of death, were suddenly required, if necessary, to die for the state. Manufacturing a sense of national identity became essential. As Japan’s imperial ambitions grew, the idea of Japanese identity became more enmeshed with the psychological preparation for war. The Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 was treated as a sacred text and committed to memory by students. In it, the sons and daughters of Japan swore loyalty and filial piety to the emperor and pledged, should they be required, to sacrifice their lives in his name. What Benedict saw as indelible cultural traits – she described how a Japanese schoolmaster would sacrifice his life to rescue a painting of the emperor from a burning building – might better be described as brainwashing.
Half a century later, on New Year’s Day 1946, newspapers carried an imperial proclamation declaring as false the ‘conception that the emperor is divine and that the Japanese are superior to other races and fated to rule the world’. The very terms of the announcement suggest that these were precisely the assumptions of pre-war Japan. Even today, myths surrounding the imperial family have not been expunged. More than 150 gigantic kofun tombs built for emperors between AD 300 and AD 686, are off limits to Japanese archaeologists. Presumably, the Imperial Household Agency suspects they may contain some unpleasant secret, for example the possibility that Japan’s imperial line can be traced back to the Korean peninsula.
Some modern writers and intellectuals have stressed the importance of thinking and acting individually rather than following received practice. One is Haruki Murakami, whose protagonists tend to be loners and drifters. In 2009, Murakami won the Jerusalem Prize, Israel’s highest award for foreign writers. Standing next to Shimon Peres, Israel’s prime minister, he gave an acceptance speech that many interpreted as pro-Palestinian. ‘If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg,’ he said. The speech, with its echo of Joji Mori’s shell-less egg, the idea that Japanese society is communal and sticky, could also be heard as a defence of the individual. It expresses the opposite of the idea that the Japanese are homogenous. ‘Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg,’ he went on in words that implicitly challenged many of the tenets of Nihonjinron. ‘Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system.’22
Chiba, my diplomat friend, said education played a fundamental role in moulding Japanese people’s self-image. ‘There are things we are taught at school, for example that the Japanese bring in things from abroad and then adapt them to how things are done on these islands. That’s our self-image. That’s how we teach our children: that the Japanese are different.’ Such reinforcement through education, he said, could become a mantra. ‘We have to do the same as everyone else or else it’s very shameful. Conformity and preservation of tradition: that sort of mentality is very strong.’ He was sceptical about any notion that this made Japan unique. ‘In the past, we were very different because we ate raw fish. But now everybody eats raw fish, so that’s a point less,’ he said in his tongue-in-cheek style. ‘We have sumo wrestlers, very fat people trying to beat each other up. But now we have Mongolians and Belarusians doing the same thing. So that’s another point less.’ Chiba said the Japanese tended to compare themselves to Europeans and Americans, rarely to fellow Asians. By that measure, it was only natural that Japan should appear an outlier in a world still seen mostly from a European, Judeo-Christian perspective.
That affects not only Japan’s view of itself, but also the world’s view of Japan. It is worth conducting a thought experiment. Imagine for a second that, rather than Japan, Thailand had startled the world in the latter half of the twentieth century by attaining western levels of wealth and technology. In that case, there would have been shelves of books explaining Thailand’s success based on its unique culture, the unique position of its king, its uniquely Thai way of conducting business, the unique properties of Thai cuisine and so on. If we stop comparing Japan with Europe or America and look at it in relation to China and Korea, it suddenly looks less of an outlier. ‘Korea has its own forms of animism, which are not so hugely different and China is full of folk beliefs that often derive from Taoism, which is not a million miles removed from nature worship and Shinto,’ says Ian Buruma, a thoughtful scholar of northeast Asia.23 According to him, the problem is that foreigners take at face value what the Japanese say about themselves. ‘But the reason the Japanese nativists describe their own culture as completely different from China was a form of defensiveness. They were, of course, deeply influenced by China. But precisely because of that, in order to carve out their own space, they have tended to exaggerate the differences.’
• • •
Yoichi Funabashi is one of Japan’s most respected journalists and international commentators. He’s also an old friend. I asked him whether he agreed with those who said that Japan’s sense of unique self-identity had been manufactured in the interests of nation-building and maintaining political power. ‘I think to some extent that may be the case,’ he said. He mentioned a number of books – all written around 1900 – including Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido, the Soul of Japan and Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea. ‘Although they did not use the word Nihonjinron, what they had in common is that they were searching for a new Japan. It’s a revolutionary concept. They believed that tradition was very much relevant to Japan’s future. So even though they learned so many things from abroad, from Germany, France, Britain and eventually the United States, what they sought was a combination of the national soul with foreign expertise. That is what we call wakon yosai,’ he said, using the words for ‘Japanese spirit and western knowledge’.
Japan, he said, lost the balance of those two concepts in the run-up to its military expansionism of the 1930s and 40s. ‘We were intoxicated with Japanese-ism.’ After defeat in the war, some equilibrium was restored as Japan sought to learn again from advanced countries, particularly the US. ‘Now I think we are losing this delicate balance again. This is the Galapagos phenomenon, an intoxication on the part of the Japanese with their own things, their own Japanese-ness.’
The idea of Japan as a Galapagos island, whose culture is perfectly adapted to its own environment but not to the rest of the world, has become fashionable. It has been applied to the business environment, particularly to the creation of products tailored too narrowly to local tastes or local operating systems. ‘This Galapagos-ization doesn’t just apply to mobile phones,’ Funabashi said. ‘It applies to nuclear safety regulations, to English-teaching methods, to almost everything. In my view, this Galapagos mentality is really toxic because it inflates our narcissism, our belief in Japan’s unique way. “We don’t need to learn from other countries. Other countries should emulate our way because our products have been tested by the most picky consumers in the world.”’ He paused for effect. ‘This is a myth.’
I asked what the word shimaguni, ‘island nation’, meant to him. He told the story of when he took six months off to write a travelogue about Asian waters. ‘The more I travelled the Japanese seashore, the more affectionate I became for this small island,’ he said. But then he went to China. He started off in the northern port city of Dalian, moving down the lengthy eastern seaboard to Tianjin, on to Shanghai, the ancient city of Hangzhou and ending up in the Pearl River Delta trading port of Guangzhou in the far south, near Hong Kong. ‘I was struck, overwhelmed even, with the vastness of the Chinese maritime world. That was a rude awakening for me.’ The journey upended Funabashi’s long-held view of Asian geography, that of Japan as a seafaring nation, a lone island, and China as anchored to the great continental landmass. ‘We have to understand the reality that China is a maritime nation too.’
His point made me think of something Hama, the Doshisha professor, had told me. An island nation, she said, could choose either to look inwards or outwards. ‘There was a time when Japan was – though not quite on a British scale – a nation of pirates. We weren’t afraid of going out to sea, we were adventurous and risk-taking. To the extent that we are a maritime nation, I think we ought to assume that there is that underlying trait in the Japanese psyche. But the more we isolated ourselves from the rest of the world, the less of that boisterousness and buccaneering spirit we were able to retain. I like the buccaneering image of shimaguni. But when it is used as shorthand in conversation, it is definitely used to mean an isolated island mentality, inward-looking, not looking beyond your shores.’
Funabashi said it was true that Japan had once been outward-looking but had turned in on itself during the Edo period of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868). However, even in the so-called period of sakoku isolation, the country maintained more links to the outside world than generally realized. ‘Shimaguni can mean an island that separates itself from the world or an island that connects with the world. In Japan’s case, our island mentality makes people tend to believe that we can go back to being a secluded island of peace. But that’s never going to happen, and never did happen actually, not even in the Edo period. It’s a fantasy of Japanese seclusion.’ He paused again. ‘I think it’s dangerous. We cannot go back to the Edo era, we cannot seclude ourselves. One way or another, we will have to live with the world.’