by Pico Iyer
My friend says nothing; that’s one of the practices he’s trained me in since we met, my third day in the country. Back home, when I tell friends that I always buy Toyotas because they’re so uncomplicated and reliable—fewer features mean fewer things to go wrong—they don’t always realize I’m speaking about relationships and conversations as much as about cars. When I talk of the economy of verbal and facial expressions in Japan, they may not see that stock verbal exchanges make the country go round much more than the Nikkei Index does.
We’ve been on the bench for more than an hour now. The sky is slowly darkening. The deer are still grazing in the falling light. Children are beginning to collect their things to follow their parents back home. Michael will soon be moving back to California after half a lifetime in Japan.
“I suppose it’s all the things you don’t have to say or explain,” I conclude, “that I’ll miss when I’m not here,” and we stand up and walk back to the station.
CROWDS
More people live within thirty or so miles of Tokyo than on the entire continent of Australia.
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Northern Greenland, which occupies a space as large as Japan and France, combined, has a population of exactly forty.
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Lacking space has naturally made the Japanese masters of making space—in a crowded rush-hour train, in a poem or a painting.
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Making room for the new or different is less easy, however; in tight quarters, there’s less room for taking chances.
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The main road in Kyoto was, in the eighth century, said to be the widest in the world. As if in response, the side roads are most notable for their narrowness and intimacy. The magnitude of public spaces has made for an intricacy of private ones.
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“The extreme physical intimacy of this society necessitates emotional reserve,” writes Andrew Solomon of, in fact, Greenland. “Yes, it is true,” a local woman tells him. “We are too physically close to be intimate.” It’s rude, she goes on, “to say to someone, even a friend, ‘I’m sorry for your troubles.’ ”
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In Tokyo, one building of just nine hundred and fourteen square feet stretches across twenty-one stories.
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In Tanizaki’s novel The Maids, set in 1937, seven or more maids share a room of seventy-five square feet. In those days, the average resident of Washington, D.C., enjoyed four hundred times more private space than his counterpart in Tokyo.
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A typical Japanese convenience store is one hundred square meters in size, and stocks twenty-five hundred items. A typical page in a Japanese magazine is often no less cluttered. Emptiness in Japan becomes the luxury that grandeur is in the West.
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My first days in Japan, I was startled at the almost overwhelming crowds that dwarf many a festival, making it difficult to move, even to breathe. Now that I live in Japan, I see that it’s crowds that make the festival, much more than the spectacle itself. It’s their unembarrassed gasps, the high-pitched cries of delight, the collective roar—the whole sense of being part of a large and happy unit—that gives a public celebration its warmth.
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In Japan, a crowd is less a threat to public order than a reaffirmation of it: at a Japanese festival of thirty-two thousand holidaymakers in 1878, Isabella Bird noted, “A force of twenty-five policemen was sufficient.”
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As the world grows more cluttered, the spare Japanese aesthetic (of clean sushi bar and severe minimalism) grows ever more appealing. In a global Varanasi, nothing so clarifies as a bamboo flute in an empty room.
IN THE GARDEN
In Europe, a garden is something you enter, walk around in and leave behind; in Kyoto, a garden is more like something that enters you, inviting you to become as silent and well swept as everything around you.
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Departing a Japanese garden, you hope to carry some of its pruned stillness out into the streets; the only thing you need leave behind is yourself.
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When Chinese tourists began shaking cherry trees in Tokyo in 2017 to make picturesque backdrops for their selfies, it struck many Japanese as a kind of sacrilege; the whole point of a Japanese landscape is that it makes a schedule for you rather than the other way round.
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What Nature does to us defines us much more, my neighbors know, than what we do to Nature.
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A garden is therefore observed as a ceremony might be.
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A Japanese psychiatrist asked every prospective patient to keep a daily journal. He consented to see each one only after all her sentences were devoted to the world outside her.
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A Christian church generally has a roof and directs your eye towards a single cross; a Shinto shrine is often surrounded by a large expanse, so your attention is drawn to trees and grass and sky, the place where Japan’s sovereign deities live.
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“Look beneath your feet,” says the inscription at the entrance to many a Kyoto temple, reminding you that Heaven can be found by looking down as much as up.
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The running water all around tells you that you step into a Japanese garden not just to open your eyes, but to close them.
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The pond in front of you is often kept deliberately shallow—no more than thirty inches—so below becomes a crystalline reflection of above.
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“There’s no performance,” says my wife, as we sit in a Japanese garden (in California). “The trees are in harmony; none of them stands out. There are no bright colors.” And the trees enfold us in a circle.
“No big light,” she goes on. “Everything is hidden. That makes us calm.”
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In the English summer gardens of my youth, we exulted in a dozen brilliant colors; in Saihoji in Kyoto, there are one hundred and thirty shades of green, radiating from as many different kinds of moss.
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Growing things in Japan are kept mostly inside the house. The garden is more liberally appointed with boulders and stone lanterns. Unmoved by wind, they bring us to stillness, and freedom from distraction.
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That the Japanese garden is about transformation is evident from the way it makes rivers out of dry sand and turns “living curtain” hedges behind its walls into a part of the organized scene. A white-pebble courtyard creates a space as large as the heavens.
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Silence, the running water tells you, is no more the absence of noise than health is mere freedom from sickness, or stillness an absence of movement. The richest part of life lies in the space between absence and presence.
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Reading Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence in a traditional Kyoto inn, Martin Scorsese noticed how the room and its garden were essentially one. The Japanese didn’t need a Christian God, he realized, because streams and rocks and flowers brought local deities into the house at every moment.
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When Francis Xavier came to Japan to try to carry the Gospel to its people, the Japanese he met became “the delight of my soul.” But he found they quickly, reflexively, translated the word “Deus” into “D
ainichi,” converting the Christian God into a god of wind and rain.
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On arrival in Japan, I hurried to the rock garden at the temple called Ryoanji, eager to work out whether its arrangement of fifteen stones—you can’t see all of them from any one position—represented clouds in the sky or a tiger carrying her cubs across a stream. Now that I’ve spent time in Japan, I walk past that garden to the stone basin around the corner, whose characters, one on each of its four sides, read, “What you have is all you need.”
FREEDOM FROM CHOICE
Japan is the Land of Must, I decided as soon as I set foot in Tokyo, as surely as America is the Land of Can. It’s the difference between an arranged marriage, a practical affair in which, it’s hoped, affection can grow and grow, and an affair of the heart, in which, too often, passions burn wildly and then peter out.
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“Nothing sets you (or at least me) free creatively,” says the untamed film director and Monty Pythonite, Terry Gilliam, “like having a set of limitations to explore.”
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Even modest restaurants in Japan often present you with a prix fixe menu. Freedom doesn’t mean an abundance of choice so much as liberation from the burden of too much choice.
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At a very elegant restaurant in Kyoto, there are only five set menus on offer, ranging in price from one hundred and twenty-five dollars to three hundred dollars each. Each person in a party of five must choose the same set, so each has to learn, as Tolstoy had it, how “freedom consists in my not having made the rules.”
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As soon as prostitution was banned in postwar Japan, the number of prostitutes (said to be roughly eighty thousand in Tokyo alone) rose sharply.
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It took me a long time, after meeting my wife, to see that the kindest and most thoughtful thing to do in many situations was not to ask her where she wanted to eat or go. To take the decision myself was to free her from both the burden of choice and the responsibility that follows (knowing that, when it came to what to wear or what to eat at home, she’d extend the same kindness by making the decisions for me).
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“To know that you are a sparrow and not a swan; or, on the contrary, a swan and not a sparrow…gives a great security, stability and quality of harmony and peace to the psyche,” Joseph Campbell wrote in Kyoto in 1955, drafting a convocation address for his students back at Sarah Lawrence.
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If you’re always wondering what you will become, he went on, “you will soon become so profoundly implicated in your own psychological agony that you will have little time or energy for anything else, and certainly no sense whatsoever of the bliss and wonder of being alive.”
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In Japan, a son traditionally follows his father into his profession, even if that’s the profession of monk or musician. Rather than choosing what he’ll be good at, he aims to be good at what’s chosen for him.
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“We only escape limitation,” wrote Simone Weil, “by rising up towards unity or going down towards the limitless.”
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Soon after I came to know her, my wife-to-be said, “I can’t change you, so I have to change myself, since you’re in many ways not so easy.” I was so disarmed by this spirit of accommodation that I tried to do the same with her, changing myself to adapt to everything in her that was difficult.
Thus the history of Japan.
BEING RESPONSIBLE
“If you want condition of warm in your room,” says the instruction manual for a Japanese air conditioner, “please control yourself.”
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The pressures of responsibility are what make the Japanese the strictest people I know, even as the constant attention the pressures encourage makes them the kindest. After the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, modern Japan’s proudest moment, one woman hurdler who didn’t win the medal she expected took her own life. A Japanese marathoner who was overtaken at the last moment and claimed only a bronze did the same.
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I arrive at my local health club to be greeted by an elaborate red-and-blue diagram on the floor in front of each elevator, to show me where to stand when the elevator doors open. On arrival at the fifth floor, I see arrows denoting which side of the stairs I should use in walking down to the locker room. There are ghostly outlines of feet at the entrance to the toilet, telling me where to place the toilet slippers. Farther inside, a laminated card shows a woman deeply bowing as she reminds me not to wear my athletic shoes here.
If ever a locker is broken, another large card is hung on its front, depicting a woman offering a deep bow, accompanied by fulsome words of apology in both Japanese and English.
Meanwhile, an elderly woman moves among all the naked men, sweeping up the trash.
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When conflict arises in Japan, it’s often because one person wishes to give up her needs as much as another wishes to give up hers. Such duels of self-sacrifice leave everyone stranded in an agony of thwarted self-denial.
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People in Japan are sometimes slow to intercede in an emergency, because they don’t want to impose a debt on those they help.
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To be part of a circle frees you from the pressure of having to make a decision. But it imposes on you the pressure of knowing that every move you make will affect everybody else.
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When a man tried to kill the country’s regent, in 1923, the village in which he was born canceled all New Year festivities, and the man who was principal at the time of the elementary school where the attacker had studied, decades before, resigned.
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Several hours after my wife is made to wait a few minutes at the bank, there’s a knock on our door, twenty minutes away by car: the bank manager, here at our distant apartment at 9:00 p.m., to offer an apology and to hand us a small gift in recompense.
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In England, I was taught never to take anything seriously, least of all myself. When I moved to America, I was encouraged to take everything seriously, especially myself. In Japan, the people I know don’t seem to take themselves very seriously—but only because they take their roles, the parts they have to play in the national pageant, very seriously indeed.
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The pressures that accompany every decision leave many a foreign businessman—or Western husband—in Japan unsure of whether the person beside him is following her inclination or his own.
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The truth is that she herself may not know—or want to know.
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The Japanese after the war “gained a strange peace of mind,” Isamu Noguchi observed in 1950. “They are as it were free, free from the responsibility of being powerful.”
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The buses in my neighborhood run on the honor system; no one seems to notice whether I pay the requested three dollars or three cents. Yet, if I pay upon entering when we’re leaving the train station—or fail to pay upon entering when we’re going in the direction of the train station—the driver flies into a spasm of displeasure. It’s not morality that’s important, but the unwritten rules.
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Twenty miles from where I live, organized criminals invite kids to their headquarters every October to collect candy for Halloween. When a factional battle made that impossi
ble one year, a sign came up outside the building, regretting the cancellation and announcing, “We realize this is causing great sorrow to those parents and children who looked forward to this, but next year we will absolutely hold the event, so please look forward to it.”
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After murdering (and dismembering) the English bar hostess Lucie Blackman, the Japanese man suspected of being her killer sent money to the police, through a friend, to settle all her outstanding debts.
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