A Beginner's Guide to Japan

by Pico Iyer

  When I spent a whole day with Murakami to conduct a public conversation with him in Los Angeles, however—he came onstage dressed as a cartoon clown—I saw what a thoughtful and precise, deeply Japanese soul he is, even while playing the opposite. He grew quiet, almost reverent, when I spoke of the anime director Hayao Miyazaki, whom he called his “guru and mentor”; it was his doctorate in classical Japanese painting, I realized, that schooled Murakami-san in the traditions that now he was turning upside down.

  The serufu-esutimu he broadcasts—as with the novelist Natsume Soseki’s claim, a hundred years earlier, “Self-centeredness became for me a new beginning”—was simply, I realized, his way of reminding his country not to believe in the shy and self-deprecating role it has taken up on the global stage.

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  A traditional home in Japan—a classical self—is all shifting panels and self-contained compartments. Even as the absence of locks and curtains keeps the individual aware at every moment that she’s part of a larger whole.

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  Thus a shoji screen turns a figure into a silhouette, an Ozu movie gives us archetypal characters—Daughter, Father, Neighbor—who move like a commedia dell’arte troupe from film to film. My wife didn’t tell me, for years, the name of her boss; calling that boss “Department Head” took the sting out of interactions as calling her “Nakata” never could.

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  This means, in turn, that the theme of most Japanese scenes is less the individual drama than the larger canvas (of Nature, of Time, of gods) against which it plays out. Look at a Hiroshige woodcut—read a haiku—and what you see is not so much a human being as the passage of time, the falling snow, a sense of loneliness.

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  By making individual figures indistinct—it’s the secret of many a Kazuo Ishiguro novel, as of Oscar Wilde fairy tales—one turns a “he” or “she” into a “we.”

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  Young societies are distrustful of artifice; older ones—and few are more seasoned than Japan—know that artifice may be all we have in a world where pain is never distant.

  THE PERFECT ACTRESS

  One foggy night in early March, Hiroko and I went up to Tokyo, at the invitation of an old friend, for the Japanese premiere of The Iron Lady, the 2011 film starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. It’s not the kind of event we’re used to attending, living in a forgotten suburb, and as we took our places in the center of one row, brushing past former Japanese prime ministers and their wives, I could hear one or two grumble about the disheveled Indian and his youthful-looking Japanese companion. Most of them were here to enjoy the sensation of meeting onscreen a British leader they’d worked with in life.

  Before the film began, Ms. Streep came out to offer a few words of introduction. She was preternaturally gracious and charming and poised. But it was something else that shocked both Hiroko and me. Ten days earlier, we’d seen her accept the Academy Award on TV in a not entirely flattering gold costume that contrived to make her look like a matriarch, a kind of fairy godmother to all the younger beauties seated before her. Now, not three hundred hours on, we found ourselves looking at the most ravishing young beauty we could remember seeing, tall and slender, in little black dress, golden hair tumbling down her back.

  We’d guessed she’d been dressing down at the Oscars; the first thing she’d said after collecting her award was “I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, ‘Oh no! Oh come on, why? Her—again?’ ” Besides, she’d been wearing a similarly broad gold dress the last time she’d received an Academy Award, twenty-nine years before. But of all the things for which Meryl Streep is famous—her intellect, her accents, her stamina, her political courage and the makeup artist who, for thirty-seven years at that point, had been turning her into perfect renditions of Karen Silkwood and Isak Dinesen—we’d never heard her drop-dead beauty mentioned.

  After the closing credits, our friend invited us to join the star and the director and another friend for an intimate dinner high atop the hotel where they were staying. Through the three hours that followed, Hiroko and I were witness to everything we might have hoped for from the world’s most accomplished actress, and much more: she was sparkling, responsive, vulnerable, even haunting. She seemed to shrug off her celebrity, speaking to us as openly, it felt, and as warmly as she did her friends. But when she got up and strode across the empty restaurant at evening’s end, far taller than even the waiters, we were reminded that we were forty-five stories above the ground.

  On the long trip home, I tried to work out what we’d just seen. I remembered that Streep had told an interviewer that she was drawn to playing Thatcher because the British prime minister seemed so “designed,” not the first word that comes to every mind. I recalled her adding that she felt terrified only when called upon to play Meryl Streep. As a girl, she’d recounted—she’d grown famous for talking about the way women are pushed into boxes—she’d seen that the way to get ahead was by saying as little as possible and just exclaiming, “Wow!” and “Great!” and “Cool!”

  In some curious way, I felt that spending an evening with her had opened up to me the society all around. The mystery of Meryl Streep is that we know it’s hardly possible, even with a brilliant makeup artist, to be the golden songstress of Mamma Mia! one year and the Alzheimer’s-stricken prime minister of Britain three years on, to not just resemble—but become—Emmeline Pankhurst and a ragged, leather-jacketed rock star in the same year. The deeper mystery is that, the more she showed herself to us, across the table, the less we could say who she really was.

  “You must be happy to be going home after a month on the road,” I offered as we stood by the elevator doors, waiting for her to fly away.

  She looked startled in the quiet space high above the fog. “I really feel at home,” said the perfect actress, “when I work.”

  MAKING ONESELF UP

  Makeup is essential to a society in which public face is crucial—and in which making up with everyone is an indispensable part of sustaining a larger harmony.

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  “My colleague spends two hours a day making herself up,” my wife says, on her way to the department store where she works.

  “She wants everyone to look at her?”

  “No. She wants everyone not to.”

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  Hiroko will spend twenty minutes hastily applying makeup just to go to the grocery store around the corner. But when even the most elegant visitor comes to our flat, she thinks nothing of running around with no makeup, in T-shirt and jeans.

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  The Japanese, famously, have separate words for the self inside the home and the one that’s out on the streets. But what is less often noticed is that many spaces are a kind of transit zone, effectively public sites turned into private thoroughfares.

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  “Everybody wants to look their best,” advises the notice in a Brooklyn subway car, filthy with trash and smeared with graffiti, “but it’s a subway car not a restroom.” In Japan, however, the subway car really is a public convenience that serves (since everyone contrives not to look at everyone else) as a private antechamber.

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  The New York subway, however quixotically, bans “Clipping” and “Primping,” though everything else seems more than permitted. In Japan, where carriages are spotless and people highly proper, every other woman seems to be applying final touches to lips and eyes and cheeks as the train pulls into her station.

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  The Japanese are as adept at not looking as they are at not speaking. In Bunraku drama, the three black-clad puppet masters are seated onstage; yet the audience silently consents to
see only the dolls that the masters are manipulating.

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  Strangers routinely sleep with their heads on strangers’ shoulders on Japanese trains, and the leaned-upon agree not to flinch. A sign of trust—of community, perhaps—but also a reminder that what constitutes public and what constitutes private is something subtler than homes and walls.

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  To make oneself up, in a deeper way, is a mark of courtesy. In the face of great suffering, the very English novelist Jane Gardam writes, an English person has to put on a brave face, “a mask slapped on out of consideration, out of a wish not to increase concern and also out of a genetic belief that our feelings are diminished when we show them.”

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  When Ansel Adams took pictures of Japanese internees in Californian concentration camps during World War II, his subjects were so determined to offer bright smiles and to project a hopeful confidence to the world that the photographer was criticized for falsifying the truth.

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  Yet, when my neighbors apply too much lipstick and rouge to real life—calling captive wartime prostitutes “comfort women” and the single moms who now rent out their bodies “female hygiene agents”—their determination to deodorize embarrassment can smell to unsympathetic outsiders like nothing but a way to stink up the whole neighborhood.

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  Keeping up appearances, my neighbors might reply, is not the same as denying what’s beneath. It’s simply a way of placing the needs of the whole before those of the self.

  PARTS AND THE WHOLE

  “Think of yourself as being onstage all the time,” a yakuza, or Japanese gangster, told a reporter for The New Yorker in 2012. “It’s a performance. If you’re bad at playing the role of a yakuza, then you’re a bad yakuza.”

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  When uniforms don’t broadcast what role you’re playing, subtler signs must suffice. A Japanese businessman sports a company pin on his lapel; a woman from the entertainment quarter carries herself with a confident stride and a direct gaze that let you know that she’s not just a regular woman with a sense of style.

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  That old man in a baseball cap is telling you he no longer has to work. That gangster who hands you his business card, complete with e-mail address and fax number, is ensuring there’s no uncertainty about what part he’s taken on in the collective script.

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  I hear a woman’s voice in the street and honestly don’t know if it’s the wife I’ve known for more than thirty years or a stranger—so perfectly are my neighbors taught to speak in a single voice, with the same cadences.

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  This doesn’t mean that people in Japan are less individual than elsewhere. Their tastes and passions are as wildly divergent, as unpredictable, as their looks and voices may not be. When I return to California, I sometimes feel I’m stepping into a world in which everyone longs to be distinct—“themselves”—and yet many political positions and interests and inclinations can seem all but interchangeable.

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  “When you are all in your robes,” the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki told his students in San Francisco, “I can see you individually.”

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  We have a self, the Buddha asserted, and we don’t have a self. We live simultaneously on levels both subtle and gross.

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  For a maître d’ at an elegant restaurant to don black tie is not pretentious; it might be pretentious for him not to do so, as if putting himself before the role he’s been asked to play.

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  Playing a part is, deep down, about seeing yourself as a part, a tiny part of a much larger whole that, if you play your part perfectly, can be greater than the sum of its parts.

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  “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,” said Cary Grant, “until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”

  OUT OF TIME

  The most forward-looking place I’ve encountered in Japan is also, intriguingly, the one most rooted in the past. The first time I stepped onto Naoshima, a long-forgotten island in the quiet Inland Sea, I could hardly believe what I was not seeing. I followed a long, silent path beside the great still blue plate of the water and came to what looked like a Space Age booth of glass and concrete in a deserted parking lot.

  I parted with some money and then followed a long empty driveway to a series of passageways culminating in a tall concrete all-but-imprisoning windowless tunnel. Then I arrived at a small chapel that was simply a small square room, empty, with pews around every wall. In the roof a perfect square had been cut out, so I sat down and looked up. I could see a very black crow bisecting the blue. Vapor trails, a fleece of clouds. Nothing but blue again.

  James Turrell, born to a conservative Quaker family in California, has constructed such Skyspaces in many places across the globe, but nowhere is he revealed to be a Japanese artist quite so movingly as on this rough backwater known as “Honest Island.” Just around the corner from his installation, I slipped off my shoes, as at a temple, and walked through a large room, an antechamber of a kind, that was entirely empty.

  In the inner sanctum beyond, a set of five Monet water lilies gleamed against white walls. Illuminated only by natural light, they came, as the afternoon darkened, to resemble ghostly Rothkos. Then I walked back to the Turrell, and saw how his exploration of light began to explain the Monets. Then I returned to the Monets, and saw how the Frenchman’s rectangles matched the square that Turrell had used as a frame for the sky.

  A museum that worked as a choir does, each voice heightening and deepening the others: I’d never seen a place like this. One in which there’s only one way to enter—and the formidable gray twenty-first-century concrete feels anonymous, until you realize that it’s drawing all your attention to the light at its end. An entire museum built underground, so it barely disturbs the tree-covered hills all around, and what you’re getting is not just something to see, but eyes with which to look.

  Even the simple, small café in the Chichu Museum highlights a single blond-wood bench in front of a long horizontal window, revealing the great blue expanse of the sea. Nature, you realize, works in canvases as much as any artist might; installations are everywhere if only you have eyes to see them.

  The story of Naoshima is well known by now. During the economic boom of the 1980s, the Fukutake Publishing Company, based in the nearby town of Okayama, bought large swatches of the impoverished, remote island (the northern half is given over to a Mitsubishi smelting plant). Specializing in textbooks, Fukutake initially opened a cultural and educational center on a Naoshima beach, complete with yurts. Then the Osaka architect Tadao Ando, a former boxer, was invited to create a museum (tucked, almost invisibly, into the hillside) in which guests could stay, allowing them to walk late at night among the artworks as if the pieces were their neighbors. Every division between their lives and the art around them dissolved.

  Then he constructed a secret set of rooms on top of the mountain above the museum, erected around an oval reflecting pool and attained only by hidden monorail. At night, you can see great stretches of water and the silhouettes of islands, the lights of boats tracing silent patterns in the dark. Then he built two hotel structures on a beach, but without television (even Internet reception can be spotty there). The result is that guests are moved to sit out on their terraces and attend to the beauty of blue water and blue sky they otherwise sleepwalk past.

  Naoshima, I quickly saw, is essence of Japan. Every last detail is curated, and all the museum guards are silent and young, dressed in white. You’re no
t allowed to use pens in the museums—a worker will quietly hand you a pencil if necessary—and there’s usually only one way to pass through an Ando corridor. Yet all the immaculate spaces effect a single transformation: erasing the boundaries between out there and in here. After I exited the Chichu, I saw two black-clad Japanese along the road, and wondered if they were an installation, too. I returned the minute the place opened the next morning and spent four hours looking at just the Monets and the Turrells (there’s only one other room in the whole large space). Every moment, these pieces shifted as the sun moved across the sky.

  The word that its overseers use for their project in their English-language promotional literature is “reactivate.” Their mission is to reactivate old villages and villagers that have been left behind by the industrial revolution. Their goal is also, clearly, to reawaken the senses of everyone who visits, to remind us how much there is to see, if only we attend. In the sixteenth-century village of Honmura, an easy walk from the Chichu, old wooden houses have been shaken awake with a huge Statue of Liberty, an enigmatic rock, a pond on which one hundred twenty-five colored LED digital counters keep flashing.

  The result is that more and more people from modern Tokyo—or Milan or the West Village—come to visit this old place, and the old place itself feels new. Longtime residents no longer have to quit their homes; they can restore them instead, develop gardens. And what all the art—of a piece—across the island is doing is reactivating the classical principles of Japan: simplicity, clarity and emptiness. On one cliff above the waves, Hiroshi Sugimoto has hung a framed black-and-white photograph of the horizon; as seasons pass, Nature and the spray all around apply their own touches to the piece.