Japan - love it and leave it

When people ask me about my twenty-three years in Japan, and what I learned from it, the first thing that comes to mind is that it made me a firm believer in scientific truth. And by that I mean that when one speaks of truth, one is revealing little more than what the world knows at any given point in time. Absolute truth is pure illusion, and the best metaphor for knowledge is the story of the blind men and the elephant. One man grabs hold of the tail and describes the elephant as being "like a whip." Another touches its side and sees it "as a wall." A third puts his hands on the trunk and thinks it is a hose.  And that's only half the story. The truth is not that we should stand back and wait till we can get a view of the whole elephant, i.e., the actual truth. The truth is that even then all we have is a better picture. But not the whole picture. The whole picture remains eternally beyond our grasp.

Let me explain why I say I learned to think like that from my time in Japan.

I learned to accept, gradually, that I was always going to be changing my take on the place.

All life is about change, and hopefully, if one is lucky, I think one comes to see personal change as growth, as something positive.

I had a conversation some years ago with John Bester, the English language translator of a book which was, for many years, central to my understanding of Japanese culture. It's called 甘えの構造, Amae no Kōzō, in Japanese. In English, it's The Anatomy of Dependence. I took issue with the author's, Doi's, contention that Japan is not merely "unique" but "uniquely unique," i.e., that it is more of an outlier culture, at least compared to all other modern cultures, than the rest. John Bester, whose knowledge of Japan greatly exceeds mine, agreed with Doi: Japan is "uniquely unique." 

I just refused to buy it. All cultures are unique, I insisted, and when one tries to describe something so complex as a national culture, all one is really doing is revealing one's experience of it, and perhaps more significantly, one's inexperience.

I have left Japan - I left it in 2006 - and so the question no longer hounds me. But I continue to live with a Japanese husband, and the once endless sifting through the question of the ways Japan might be said to be unique has been replaced by endless speculation about how to separate the ways my husband seems to reflect traits that I want to mark as "Japanese" and the ways in which he is merely a distinctive human being. In the end, this question has gone from being an interesting academic pursuit to being of no consequence. Boring, even. What does it matter. We are in a committed relationship and what matters is that commitment, not the correctness of any analysis of his behavior.

For those still engaged in such pursuits, however - and I assume that means most foreigners who are long-term sojourners in Japan - I assume it continues to be relevant, and inevitable.

Another insightful Japan observer once told me that he could pretty much put his finger on how long a foreigner had been in Japan by their choices of what to say about Japan and how to describe it. One goes, he said - and I agree very much with this view - back and forth from the conviction that one has "figured it out" to the conviction that one really doesn't have a very accurate picture of the culture as a whole. The more one knows, in other words, the more one has to accept that one doesn't know all that much. Which, I suppose, is one way of defining wisdom, the admission of one's own limitations.

Many people come to Japan and instantly decide they have to write a book. "This is such an interesting country," you hear foreigners say all the time. "I need to get it all down while it is still fresh." But that's the point. What you're "getting down" isn't insight so much as it is truth as defined by "everything we know so far." Truth is the sum total of all knowledge but only to date, and anybody with a good background in science knows that truth gets redefined with each new bit of data. Only fools make absolute truth claims. Everybody else realizes it's like grabbing a handful of mercury. If you're smart, you'll avoid statements that begin with "the truth is..." and say something like, "As far as I know..." instead.

Most books written for the general public on Japan, if I'm not mistaken, are written by people who have lived there for no more than a couple, three, four years. And that means, if my other observations are correct, that they are inadequate takes on a complex civilization. I taught language and culture, i.e., the stuff of the fields of linguistics and anthropology, at a Japanese university for eighteen years. That means I was frequently more familiar with Japan than my younger students were. Because I am not racially Japanese and because my knowledge of the language is limited, many of my students took it upon themselves to explain Japan to me, thinking they were doing me a favor. They, most of them, had no way of knowing that when they began a sentence with "Wareware Nihon-jin..." - "We Japanese..." they were not so much informing me of something I might not know as they were inviting a response like, "Shame on you. Why are you reducing such a wonderful broad civilization to a mere listing of a few ways in which Japan strikes the world as distinctive?" They were, in other words, no more sophisticated about the land of their birth than most foreign sojourners. And they were easy prey to those who would sum up complexity in a few sentences.

I maintain that view. Japan will always be a major part of who I am. It will always be home. Both alien and strikingly familiar. Rich and wonderful and maddening.

I came to these reflections this morning after watching a video of a young American who was about to leave Japan after six years there. He is a wonderful illustration of what I mean. He has a love-hate relationship (and perhaps that's too strong: like-dislike will probably do) with Japan that reflects the experience of somebody with six years of intimate connection. Not necessarily a more accurate description than by somebody with two years or a less accurate description than by somebody with fifteen years, but a different experience. In a different place of an evolution which is not necessarily linear.

I can relate to this guy. He's playing the game all of us gaikokujin - non-Japanese - have played and will probably always play. Developing our knowledge base and simultaneously playing with the idea of truth. And getting only a partial picture.

Here's the video in question, if you're still reading and are still interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yauSILFvC5U