The Essence of Japan
by Barry Eisler
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Barry Eisler spent three years with the U.S. government. From 1992 to the present he has practiced various aspects of international law, including a year with the Japanese law firm of Hamada & Matsumoto in Tokyo and two years as in-house counsel at the Osaka headquarters of Matsushita Electric & Industrial Co., Ltd. Eisler earned his black belt in judo from the Kodokan International Judo Center in Tokyo. Today he lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area and travels to Japan frequently on business. Rain Fall is his first novel.
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While I was touring to promote my novel Rain Fall, which is set in Tokyo, a number of people asked me what I thought was the essence of Japan. Despite the years I spent living there, I found that it wasn't an easy question to answer. Having struggled with the question several times now, I believe I have an answer: restraint.
Restraint makes itself known in the construction of the language, where the subject of a sentence often goes unnamed and must be gleaned from context. To name the subject of a thought directly, when implicit understanding might instead suffice, can be considered rude. Likewise, to ask someone frankly whether she would like something to drink would be unpardonable. People should not be casually asked to reveal their desires. Instead, one would ask "Won't you have something to drink?" In fact, the more polite the construction, the less is said, and Japan's most polite verb forms often have several meanings, and so deliberately foster comforting ambiguities.
In art and literature, the country traditionally prizes wabi and sabi, medieval aesthetics combining elements of old age, resignation, serenity, and tranquility (wabi is derived from the word for languish; sabi, from the word for lonely or desolate). In poetry, these concepts are expressed in the pared-down, five-seven-five structure of haiku. They can also be observed in the austere rites of the tea ceremony. In other contexts, they are revealed in the minimalism of ikebana and the severity of bonsai.
In social relations, the country emphasizes giri and ninjo -- duty, and human feeling. When there is a conflict between the two, a person must restrain his own feelings and carry out her duty. Similarly, as between honne and tatamae -- inner feelings, and pro forma aspects of social relationships -- the former must be restrained in the service of the latter.
Suppressing human feeling when duty or the good of the group demands requires gaman -- patience, perseverance, endurance -- and this trait is valued so highly that children are sent to school every day in the winter without jackets and wearing short pants. It manifests itself in more subtle ways, as well. When I was training in judo at the Kodokan in Tokyo, I attended the required 10 days of the January kangeiko, or special winter training, which began every morning at five o'clock. The unheated dojo was cold enough to frost breath at that hour, and the mats were hard and unyielding. On the last day, I mentioned to one of the instructors that I was looking forward to the summer equivalent, because in July the morning dojo would be comfortably cool. He looked at me, clearly at a loss, and explained that the summer training would take place in the afternoon.
But perhaps the culture of restraint reveals itself most pervasively in the phrase shoganai -- literally, there is no way of doing, or nothing can be done. Shoganai is the equivalent of c'est la vie, but with an important difference: where c'est la vie and its foreign variants focus on external circumstances, shoganai focuses on the inability of the actor to change those circumstances. The person is restrained, but the restraint has an element of self-imposition, indeed, arguably, of learned helplessness. Perhaps this is not a surprise: at the same time those shivering school children are developing gaman, they must be watching the warmly dressed adults around them and concluding that "what can you do?" is not an inappropriate response to life.
Three book recommendations:
James Elroy's latest, The Cold Six Thousand
Nobody writes like Elroy. Nobody can. Nobody should even try. (Couldn't help giving it a whirl there, though.)
I can't get enough of Elroy's delicious mood of cool, ironic detachment. There are the repeated sentence subjects: "Pete greased him. Pete suborned him. Pete bought his soul." And the adjectives used as adverbs: "Barb got hooked resultant." And who else (outside of antediluvian lawyers) could use "said" as a replacement for "the"? "Said parking lot was dark."
Also, although the story is told in third person, Elroy subtly shifts his voice to ape the vocabulary and cadences of the character whose view he's describing. "Wayne scared them" is the narrator. But who's talking when the narration is "Wayne -- he bad!"? The result is a panoramic, insidious collection of ricocheting perspectives.
Finally, there's the setting: big, dark, kaleidoscopic. The story surfs on the waves of every 1960s personality and event that seared itself onto the nation's collective unconsciousness: the assassination of JFK; Cuba and Castro; RFK; Vietnam; Martin Luther King; J. Edgar Hoover; the civil rights movement. It's all in here, woven together through the actions of the protagonists in the most compelling and believable conspiracy I've ever read.
I love this book.
Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
On Killing is a fascinating study of an important but neglected subject: how the military overcomes the innate human reluctance to kill, and how soldiers deal with the experience of having killed. The book's conclusions are as surprising as they are convincing. They are also terribly relevant given our society's escalating levels of violence.
Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan
Dogs and Demons is a carefully documented but passionately written account of how Japan is systematically destroying its natural environment. Kerr is a longtime foreign resident of the country and his book is the most comprehensive I've come across. If you love Japan, as I do, it's depressing stuff, and if you've lived or even just traveled in Japan, you'll recognize that Kerr's points are dead-on.
You have to hope that there is some way the country can correct course before the last river is dammed and paved over, before the last forest is uprooted and replaced with monoculture cedar trees, and before there is a meltdown in the banking (figurative) or nuclear (real) industries -- but it is hard to be optimistic while reading this book.
Photo courtesy of the author.