A Beginner's Guide to Japan
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“The most important things in our practice,” said the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, “are our physical posture and our way of breathing. We are not concerned about a deep understanding of Buddhism.”
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Japanese “indifference to the Mystery of the Universe,” my cousin’s great-grandfather was wise enough to add, “is that which enables them to give more time and to spend more energy on the solution of the problems nearer at hand.”
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That same indifference binds them together, because there’s no need for individual speculation or debate in a choir; Shinto, lacking arguments, cannot be refuted.
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To Marcel Duchamp’s blithe “There is no solution, because there is no problem,” the Japanese visual artist Shigeko Kubota replied, “There is no problem, because there is no solution.”
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“To do nothing at all,” as Wilde noted, “is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.”
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The mother of Jesus, I sometimes remember, was visited by an angel and is seen as a saint; the mother of the Buddha died at his birth. Is it any surprise that Buddhism is about learning to live with loss, while Christianity is about salvation from above?
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Many a visitor, arriving in Kyoto in late December, notes how the Japanese flock into Christian churches on Christmas Day (for Bach and Beethoven), head to a Buddhist temple on New Year’s Eve for the ceremonial ringing of a bell one hundred and eight times, to purge the sins of the year now passing—and then hurry into a Shinto shrine early on New Year’s Day, to set an auspicious tone for the year to come.
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To binary minds, this seems strange. To practical Japan, it’s just about meeting different needs, akin to looking in on Mom before going off to talk business with Dad. When Buddhism arrived in Shinto Japan, the two were brought together much as a foreign prince might be married off to a descendant of the Sun Goddess.
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The mind says, “Either/or.” The spirit embraces both.
ON THE MAT
Zen is what remains when words and ideas run out.
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What we see and smell and hear is real, it reminds us; what we think about that is not.
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In much the same spirit, the Japanese aesthetic is less about accumulation than subtraction, so that whatever remains is everything.
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A perfect date in Japan involves accompanying a loved one to a movie, watching the film together in silence and then, on the way home, taking pains not to talk about it.
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Words only separate what silence brings together.
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After embarking on a study of Zen, the American writer Peter Matthiessen wrote a four-hundred-and-forty-nine-page novel, Far Tortuga, that contained exactly one simile. Nothing was “like” anything else; his book aspired to give us reality unadorned.
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The last book Matthiessen published, after a quarter-century as an ordained Soto Zen priest, was about a Buddhist meditation retreat at Auschwitz, aimed at bearing witness to suffering and remembering who we really are; the novel that resulted was almost entirely an expression of rage and lust and impatience and confusion. Its title was In Paradise.
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Matthiessen’s novel appeared three days after its author’s death. Thus, seventy-two hours after taking in Matthiessen’s obituary, readers encountered the words “Peter Matthiessen, In Paradise.”
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For Arthur Koestler, a Westerner in love with distinctions, the fact that Zen monks could be seen driving to movie houses in luxury sedans, geisha beside them, showed how unenlightened they are; for those within the tradition, it shows the opposite.
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Is not a geisha at heart the same as any other human being? Cannot a movie house liberate one from illusions as much as any meditation hall might?
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Screens in a Zen meditation place are pulled back at dusk, to let the mosquitoes in.
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A monastery, for St. Benedict, was “a school for charity.” A Zen temple might be called a school for clarity. The challenge in either tradition is to see how one leads to the other.
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For a Westerner, Joseph Campbell noted in Japan, meditation may awaken a sense of divinity within; for a Japanese, it’s more likely to inspire a sense of divinity inside a temple, a flower, a gnat. The person sitting still doesn’t say, “I’m awake.” She says, “The world is illuminated!”
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When my mother learned Japanese flower-arrangement in California, her (American) teacher explained that it was a kind of meditation, a training in attention. I mentioned this to a Japanese man, and he grimaced. He’d never use the word “meditation” for ikebana, he replied; it was a form of hospitality, of caring for a guest.
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“Buddhist meditation frees you from God and frees you from religion,” said the singer-poet Leonard Cohen, deep into a forty-year-long Zen practice.
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Cohen’s final album, however, was clearly addressed to God, as well as to a religious teacher. In his final press conference, late in 2016, when asked why he was shown on the album’s cover holding a cigarette after claiming to have given up smoking, the sometime monk cracked a smile and said, “Some guys you just can’t trust.”
WORDS
More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. What is the virtue of speaking Japanese, Lafcadio Hearn noted, if you cannot think in Japanese?
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A typical sentence in India—or from my friend from Mexico—begins, “No, but…” Every other Japanese sentence begins, “So, so, so, so,” or “Yes, yes, yes, yes.”
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Seventy percent of Japanese sentences, by one count, lack a subject, and 50 percent of all spoken sentences do, too.
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Japan’s foundational novel, The Tale of Genji, is notoriously hard to translate, because proper names are sometimes avoided, the subject of a sentence changes halfway through and speakers are seldom indicated. As the scholar of Japan Ivan Morris writes, the hard-and-fast divisions we like to maintain—between past and present, question and statement, singular and plural, male and female—don’t apply. “Sometimes it is not even clear whether the sentence is positive or negative.”
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Even those sentences that do have clear beginnings in Japan generally trail off, like pen-and-ink drawings that leave most of the page open for a viewer to complete. In England, I learned to start sentences by saying, “I’m not exactly sure…” but in Japan the studied vagueness is not just about diffidence but about allowing room for someone else to turn an opening note into a duet.
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Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it. It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are said to be twenty ways of saying “I.” Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not. A single verb in Yasunari Kawa
bata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in twenty-nine different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or twenty-seven other things.
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One prince in Genji has never been allowed to speak with his own sister except through curtains or behind a screen. Yet men in Genji’s world think nothing of going to bed with women with whom they’ve never exchanged a word.
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You can tell a Japanese restaurant in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris, my wife points out, by the fact that (unlike the places run by Koreans or Chinese) it never says “Japanese” at the entrance.
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In Japan, more than anywhere, nothing is more fatal than thinking you know what’s being said. The English word “hip” in Japan refers to the buttocks, and “smart” means slender. “Naïve” is a good word in Japan, and so is “tension.” A “mansion” refers to a thick-walled, modern and often small apartment.
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A couple that got married in Nagasaki soon after the bomb was dropped on the city, Susan Southard reports, would mention the transfiguring event once, and then never again.
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“If you think, ‘I breathe,’ ” said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, “the ‘I’ is extra.”
NO WORDS
“There are two silences,” wrote Harold Pinter, introducing his Complete Works. “One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it.”
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Perhaps the most celebrated poem in Japan is Basho’s gasp of delight at seeing the island of Matsushima. The whole poem consists of just the name, a gasp and two particles: “Matsushima ya / Ah Matsushima ya / Matsushima ya.”
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Hours after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, what struck a German priest was the silence, even in a grove where hundreds of survivors had gathered. No one wept or screamed; no one complained; children barely cried. Those who sobbed, sobbed silently; those given water bowed their thanks.
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“No word,” wrote Japan’s Nobel Prize–winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, “can say as much as silence.”
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“People in America would be upset,” I said to my wife when she informed me that her doctor had just told her, for the first time, that she’d been suffering from a mild form of cervical cancer ten years previously (he’d told her now only because the danger seemed to have passed).
“Really?” she sang back. “I thought he was being kind!”
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When, however, Hiroko went into the hospital for a simple infection, nineteen years later, her friends assumed she was struggling with cancer.
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Editions of The Tale of Genji come with seventy closely packed pages of genealogy. But the book’s author, Lady Murasaki, never mentions either her late husband or her small daughter in her diary.
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At Kyoto’s most exclusive inn, Tawaraya, its thousand-dollar-a-night rooms often the preserve of European royalty or Hollywood movie stars, many of the staff don’t speak English. Finding English-fluent workers would not be hard, but part of the grace of the inn is to see that English doesn’t go with shuffling feet and kimono, with seasonal delicacies and polite demurrals. The most essential things come across without words.
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“His magnanimity was apparent to all who met him,” a local guide told the American poet James Merrill of Arnold Toynbee’s visit to Japan. “Never once did he reveal his true feelings.”
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In England, Japan’s Western cousin, I learned that the ultimate sign of intimacy is not all you can say to a friend, but all you don’t need to say.
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The less my Japanese neighbors talk, the more room there is for surprise, and for them constantly to transcend my understanding.
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Sometimes, in fact, my friends in Japan disarm me by not seeming eager to have the first word, sometimes by not seeming anxious to have the last.
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“My voice gives out when I’m singing for someone I know well,” says a geisha in Kawabata’s Snow Country. “It’s always loud and brave for strangers.”
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In Japan, I never forget that a great conversationalist is one who listens. The visionary theater-director Peter Brook told me he’d bring all his productions to Japan because even in his nine-hour rendition of The Mahabharata, without subtitles, Japanese audiences sat rapt. In L.A., where people could follow every word, they were fidgeting in their seats, whispering, barreling off to the restroom and falling asleep.
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In the public sphere, this commitment to saying nothing may suggest a crippling caution and refusal to take the initiative. In the private, it opens up to a bottomless intimacy.
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I used to watch Leonard Cohen and his great friend of more than forty years, the Zen teacher Joshu Sasaki-roshi, sit in silence together for long stretches, not least because Cohen spoke no Japanese and Sasaki limited English. When I visited Cohen at his home, he would take a couple of chairs out into his tiny front garden, overlooking a bed of flowers, so we could sit there for half an hour or more, saying nothing.
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One sign that Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a Japanese movie is the fact that the audience never hears its last, and presumably most important, sentence.
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Another is that we don’t know whether it has a sad or happy ending.
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The first koan given in many a Zen temple is mu. The best translation of this is “Not one, not many, not no, not yes.” It might almost be the interval between the notes out of which John Cage made his Japanese-inflected music—or the name Cage’s fellow Zen student Leonard Cohen took on with his black robes: “Jikan,” sometimes translated as “the silence between two thoughts.”
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Long before Cage’s 4'33", a musical piece in which nothing was played, Shinto shrines were said to offer “silent concerts,” in which wind instruments and strings assembled, and not a note was delivered.
WHAT WILL YOU MISS?
“What do you think you’ll miss most when you leave?” a close friend from California asks me one bright autumn afternoon. We’re sitting on a bench in the Deer Park at the heart of Nara, watching the holiday atmosphere of a warm November day unfold. A chic couple, dressed in black from head to toe, is batting a shuttlecock back and forth. Children play far off amidst the trees. Above a pond, the rusting leaves on the misty slopes look like something out of an old Eastern watercolor.
“Usually, people say they’ll miss the food, the hot springs,” my friend goes on, perhaps to prompt me. “Or the freedom of being a foreigner, able to get away with almost anything.”
“I’ll miss the cleanliness of the air,” I say. “I don’t mean just the spotless streets and the fact that everyone changes clothes every few hours, and always looks so freshly pressed and laundered. I don’t mean even the shine around things, which makes you feel as if you’re seeing every last surface through freshly polished glass, framed by doors and screens as in a lens.
“I just mean that people don’t feel the need to smudge every moment with their signature. When it
’s hot, they don’t say, ‘It’s warm enough to roast a chipmunk in the streets!’ or ‘Phew! It’s hotter than a squirrel on a barbecue!’ They just say, ‘Hot, isn’t it?’ in exactly the same words and exactly the same tone, so that it might be the air itself speaking, or the day. It might be no one at all.”
Around us, the scene is not so different from what you might find in Hyde Park or the Jardin du Luxembourg. People everywhere stretch out and have fun in much the same way. But there is a stillness, a self-containment in every direction—so crowded and so quiet—I haven’t felt even in Myanmar or Singapore.
“Every night, when I leave the health club, four or five kids at the front desk shout out, ‘Take it easy. You’ve worked hard!’ I know it’s just a formula; I know it means nothing at all. But it’s an attempt to sweeten the moment, to give me energy, to make every departure feel like the first step towards coming back. It suggests that something remains steady in a world of constant change.”