Japanese dreams

What can I say about Japan? I have a love hate relationship with this place. I love the aesthetic, both real and imagined, both modern and historical. I love the mentality of the place, the creativity of the people and sense of the spiritual that pervades all. I love the way it looks, the way it feels. I even love the weather both hot and cold, dry and humid. I love the practicality and pragmatism of the thinking behind the way the society works. I particularly like the way the trains run on time. Not sort of on time, I mean to the second. I love Japanese food, and in particular I love the Japanese breakfast, complete with natto, a statement that gets the strangest of looks from Japanese people. (Natto is made from fermented soybeans and has, ahem, an acquired taste and texture).

Most of all, I love the diversity of the place. I have spent the last few years travelling and writing about the places I have visited for my job. I’ve visited many countries but nowhere is like Japan.

As the world moves with crushing inevitability towards a global monoculture, it’s refreshing to visit somewhere that is truly unlike anywhere else, or at least is still more like itself than anywhere else. To land in Japan is to arrive on a foreign planet – and I am only beginning to feel like I’ve started to get a feel for the place after many trips. Even so, I know it’s merely the omote, or the outer face, of the society that I am seeing.

More than anywhere else, this society places great store on the disparity between the Ura and the Omote (inner and outer), the Tatamae and the Honne. Tatamae means façade and refers to a person, culture or institution's public face, the position it projects to the outside world, versus the honne, which refers to it’s inner/true feelings. Japanese society places a lot of store in the maintenance of harmony in the group and often maintaining an illusion of harmony can take precedence over the interests of the individual. This happens in other places in the world and in other cultures as well, but here's it's raised to an art form.

One famous proverb goes: a man has three hearts—the one in his mouth he shows to the world; the one in his throat he shows to his friends; the one in his chest he keeps only to himself.

Don't get me wrong, there's lots about Japan that I'm not so fond of. I couldn't live there. It's loud, noisy, incessent, and in many ways quite superficial. It squashes it's young people to achieve conformity and many people search for a spirituality that really isn't there for the most part. People are people everywhere and here is no exception.

It’s very difficult for a westerner to truly assimilate into this culture and I know people who have lived here for up to 20 years, are naturalised Japanese citizens and have children with Japanese partners in Japan who are still treated as fresh-off-the-boat gaijin.

Interestingly, most Japanese people and even westerners in Japan use the phrase gaijin, or ‘outside person’ to refer to non westerners. This is actually quite rude and carries a derogatory meaning, where the more correct term is gaikokujin, or ‘outside country person’. One means ‘outcast/weirdo/non group member/not like us’ and even ‘enemy’ and the other just means ‘person from a foreign country’.

Anyway, it’s just a country. : )

We spent 11 days there this trip, based in Tokyo so I could spend time visiting my kobudo teacher. However, the trip was also a holiday, as the long suffering other half was with me. So as a treat, we took the shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo station to Kyoto on Sunday afternoon, after I had spent the morning training. The journey took 2.5 hours at 285 kilometres an hour but cost a small fortune at around €350 for both us. It’s a funky train, but after a while I found the extreme motion blur out the window started to give me motion sickness. That’s not a problem I’ve ever had on the Dart.

Kyoto is a really beautiful place – I had never really been outside Tokyo before, other than day trips to Kamakura and Nikko – so I just presumed all Japanese cities were the same as Tokyo, but I now know that’s not the case. Most of Japan was flattened in World War Two, and hence is very modern, but Kyoto was spared the bombing and hence retains much more of it’s ancient architecture and design. It’s the ancient political and cultural capital of the country and in modern times is best known from being the city that most modern geisha work out of.

We spent a fantastic few days visiting the tea houses of Gion, the Sanjusangendo shrine with its thousand statues of the thousand armed buddhist god of mercy Kannon and the Kiyomizudera. A really amazing place.