by Pico Iyer
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An identity may be no less strong for being an identity crisis as well.
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The holiest shrine in the land, at Ise, is completely rebuilt every twenty years, and all the twenty-five hundred ceremonial objects and instruments within the shrine are carefully re-created. The wood for the new building comes from trees that are more than three hundred years old, the pillars from trees that have been standing for more than five hundred. Every twenty years, the shrine is made not new again, but old.
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Or maybe Japan is changing, slowly, under the surface? As of 2016, barely 2 percent of Japan’s population was foreign-born (as opposed to the more than 50 percent in Western cities such as London and Toronto). Yet the number of international marriages went up tenfold between 1965 and 2007, to the point where one in every ten weddings in Tokyo included a Japanese and a foreigner.
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In 2016, Miss Japan was a part-Indian called Priyanka, much as the winner of the Miss Universe Japan contest the previous year had been part African American.
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Two years later, it was partly Haitian-American Naomi Osaka, with her 119-mile-per-hour serves and unflappable poise, who demolished Serena Williams in the U.S. Open to claim Japan’s first major tennis championship.
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Such “hafu”s have been fashionable on TV for decades, but now, it seems, the phrase you see on Japanese vending machines—“Blend Is Beautiful”—is seeping more and more into the culture.
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“The spirit of Tawaraya has not changed in three hundred years,” Toshi Okazaki Satow, eleventh-generation owner of Kyoto’s most celebrated traditional inn, told me of her place. “But the style has to change to keep that spirit alive.”
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Thus she included Indonesian and Chinese and Egyptian accents in a deeply Japanese setting, and introduced telephones and televisions, but covered in traditional fabrics.
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“It’s by bringing in new elements,” she explained, “that we keep everything old.”
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“Tradition is not simply ‘preservation,’ ” the director emeritus of Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art was quoted as saying in Kyoto Journal in 2018. “It is that element in creative art which does not change at its core but which changes constantly in its expression.”
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Hokusai was said to have moved ninety-three times in his life and taken on thirty-one noms de plume. But for seventy years he kept on painting Fuji.
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“The only thing I know about war are two things,” Dwight D. Eisenhower announced at a press conference. “The most changeable factor in war is human nature in its day-to-day manifestation; but the only unchanging factor about war is human nature.”
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“Looking at things from a broad perspective,” the wartime Showa emperor told a journalist in 1975, “I do not think there has been any change between prewar and postwar.”
A LETTER FROM A FRIEND
One late-autumn morning, I receive a letter from an elegant Japanese painter whom I’ve met only twice, very briefly (the first time I was introduced to him, he gave me and Hiroko a dazzlingly elegant big abstract canvas—a richer and more mysterious Rothko, all impeccable stripes of red and black—as a wedding present, the only one we received, in fact, since we made no ceremony of our trip to City Hall).
Now, from the wild and windswept shaman’s island near Tokyo to which my friend has decamped, in his late sixties, in flight perhaps from his samurai background (he spends time with members of the imperial family, and used to live with a Mitsubishi heiress), he writes me a letter of many short pages, the strong black strokes of his English-language calligraphy allowing, in the classical way, for just a couple of sentences on every sheet.
Last night we had a strong typhoon that passed over the island. So I took your book for the night under fearful wind; it was perfect.
After a few hours, I started thinking about my father. Our family just escaped from China right after the Second World War by the last refugee ship leaving Shanghai. I was about four years old, so I remember people packed in the bottom of the ship and an oily smell, and what kind of clothes I was wearing.
We came back to Nagasaki (my father’s home) safely. But unfortunately the city was already completely wiped out by the A-bomb.
My first footstep in Japan I encountered American M.P. [Military Police]. They sprayed me with D.D.T. from top to bottom, so I became a white boy. We left Nagasaki soon and lived in Tokyo ever since.
But my father never took us back to Nagasaki again and did not ever talk about it till he died.
More than fifty years passed after the war, and I visited Nagasaki. I wandered around the city all day, looking for something that did not exist any more. At night I ended up at the harbor, standing alone in the rain blankly for a while with no umbrella.
Then, suddenly, I broke down crying, burst into tears. I was surprised but calmly I watched over floods of tears for some time. I do not know how long it lasted, but I was sure it was not myself, but my father crying. It was the first time I witnessed his hard emotional expression through me, twenty years after his death.
Thank you so much for your existence.
S. NOTOMI.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pico Iyer is the author of more than a dozen books, translated into twenty-three languages. His four recent TED Talks have received more than eight million views so far. In the summer of 2019, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, guest director of the Telluride Film Festival and the first official writer-in-residence at Raffles Hotel in Singapore.
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