Pico Iyer - A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

Ive been living in western Japan for more than thirty-two years, and, to my delight, I know far less than when I arrived. A land of streamlined surfaces gives you very much what you expectand so much you didnt expect, under the surface, that you dont know what to do with it. The home of collected inwardness has also shown me daily how much, as Proust observed, a change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world, and ourselves.

Ive never studied Japan or worked here, and I stay in Nara on a tourist visa to remind myself how out-of-it I remain. I speak the language as a two-year-old girl might, since such Japanese as I know Ive picked up from my wife, and in Japan even the word for I is different for a woman and a man. But Ive been with my Kyoto-born wifeand our entirely Japanese kidsfor more than thirty-two years now, most of them in an anonymous suburb where no other foreigners are to be seen. I seldom speak English in Japan, and in any case Japan has taught me how deeply the truest things lie beyond the reach of any language.

Much of this book may infuriate anyone who knows Japan; it infuriates me most of the time. Assertions in one section seem to contradict those in another, and what appears to belong in the temple appears in a section on the love-hotel, and vice versa. A lot of what I ascribe to Japan clearly applies to much of East Asia, and some of what I see in Kyoto youd never find in more rural areas.

No matter. These are simply provocations, opening lines designed to quicken you to better comebacks of your own. The opposite of a great truth, as they say in the temples of Kyoto, is also true. Ive tried to order my salvos so you travel, as most of us do, from the noisy, congested streets to impeccably well-made-up interiors to, at last, that private domain where you cant even think in terms of Japan or the West. But if you read out of sequence in this fan-shaped book, now on a jam-packed train, now in a noiseless temple, youll be taking in the country as most of us do, bumping from the strange to the familiar and back again.

I call this a beginners guide not only because its aimed at beginners, but mostly because its written by one. Being in Japan has taught me to say, I wonder, more often than I think. The first rule for any foreigner in Japan is not to talk of this-or-that; the second is never to take anything too seriously.