Okay, so I've gazed up Buddha's nostril. I've dined on eel at breakfast; I've quaffed yogurt-flavored Pepsi (or is it Pepsi flavored yogurt?) and I have sampled every variety of tofu except piňa colada.
Welcome to Japan, home of the exposed overhead power line and the fully weaponized toilet seat. It is indeed as weird as they say, although not, perhaps, in quite the way that they say. I suppose my most vivid impression is best summed up in the old New Yorker cartoon, where one dog says to another: “As long as you wag your tail, you can say anything you want.” I am sure I have never been bowed to or shyly giggled at, or simply thanked (Arigato ghozaimas! Arigato ghozaimas!) as much in a month as I was in Japan in a day.
This is wonderful in its way and who knows, maybe all it's perfectly sincere (on which cf. more infra), but you can't help that some of them are really muttering “death to the infidel.” You need to remind yourself that this is also a country with one of the most efficient organized crime networks—and best developed porn industries—and most rapacious bureaucracies—in the modern world.
That said, sit is amazing how many things actually work in Japan—trains that run on time, service people that actually give service—and how lively all seems after nearly two decades of a(n allegedly?) sluggish economy. You read about how the young people have all fallen into the grip of a chronic malaise, but you wouldn't guess it from the noise and bustle on the streets, not just in Tokyo, but in (say) the smaller cities on Kyushu further south.
Kids in particular: they say the birth rate is about 1.2 per couple, but you'd never know it from the crowds of schoolchildren at the shrines and temples. They're a wonderful combination of rambunctiousness and order—lively enough so you know they are kids, but sedate enough so you never feel that they are going to morph into flesh-eating piranha. Item: Mrs. Buce undertook to snap a picture of a platoon of middle-schoolers all decked out in Prussian-style blue uniform concessions (I wish I had the brass button concession). As if on cue, a half dozen or so boys fell into silly mode: posturing, mugging, and making V-signs for the camera. But as soon as the camera clicked, they fell back into formation, just like in synchronized swimming.
[Another point on order: pedestrians and motorists seem almost obsessively orderly here, but bicyclists do any damn thing they want, and without helmets: is this generational, or just an artifact of the moral arrogance of cyclists everywhere?]
Plenty of schoolchildren, then; on the other hand, there are (almost) no birds. I have a friend who once wrote an English-language guidebook to the birds of Japan. These days, she'd have to send out search party: the few that you do see seem to have shown up here by some tragic mischance on the route to someplace else. No mosquitoes, either, which in so humid a country is a blessing, but also sinister—what, exactly, are they using that leaves the landscape so antiseptic and so dead?
Aside from birds and mosquitoes, here's something else that seems to be in short supply: tourists, particularly westerners. You'll see a few westerners in Kyoto at the UNESCO World Heritage sites; you'll see Chinese (Mainland Taiwan? Chinese?) and Koreans down south in Kyshu. But most of the tourists you see (read: I saw) are Japanese. People mutter stuff about the overvalued yen and yes, Japan is expensive but so are a lot of other places. One can't escape the notion that when push comes to shove, the Japanese really aren't that all interested in becoming, say, another Paris, or another Tuscany, or another Costa Brava.
[Oh, as to the headline, above: Alex Kerr (in Dogs and Demons, at 312) offers as evidence of the apotheosis bureaucracy. Could be: warnings, encouragements, prohibitions, etc., are indeed just everywhere.]
A final note on sincere: I did say above that I didn't know what to make of all that smiling, giggling courtesy. But here is one datum: out for a walk one evening in Kyoto, we got ourselves thoroughly lost. Badly in need of guidance, we latched onto a promising-looking twosome outside a 7-11 and asked for help(Sumemasen! Doko des ka?). The woman seemed to catch the question; she exchanged a word or two with her companion and then said – get in the car. Whereupon they piled us int o an $85,000 Mercedes and drove us 20 minutes about of their way back to our hotel. The Mercedes matched her coat: both cream. It's a bit of courtesy that we greatly appreciate, and can't imagine having enjoyed in any other place.
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