Free Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling

values, like sensitivity to the poor and to the weak, benevolence, sincerity, diligence, patience, courage, justice.’
    Much of that had been lost through exposure to what he called the dog-eat-dog values of the west. He cited recent controversies over western companies seeking to bring alien concepts of ‘shareholder value’ and hostile takeovers to Japan. ‘Hostile takeovers might be logical and legal, but it’s not a very honourable thing for us Japanese,’ he said, smiling benevolently. ‘I find the idea that a company belongs to its shareholders a terrifying piece of logic. A company belongs to the staff who work in it. That goes without saying.’
    Another plate arrived, this one a perfectly arranged display of scallops. ‘Chinese dishes, of course, are very delicious. But we pay greater attention to aesthetics. In writing we have
shodo
and for flowers we have
ikebana
,’ he said, referring to the calligraphy and flower arrangement that lift everyday experiences above the routine. In England, he had been appalled, though perhaps secretly delighted, to see esteemed Cambridge professors slurping tea from cracked mugs. ‘In Japan, we have tea ceremony. Everything we make into art.’
    Fujiwara blamed Japan’s descent into militarism on its abandonment of samurai values and its embrace of prevailing western thought. In its quest to become a Great Power, it aped the colonial ways of that other island nation, Britain, he said. ‘I always say Japan should be extraordinary; it should not be an ordinary country. We became a normal country, just like other big nations. That’s all right for them. But we have to be isolated, especially mentally. For the past 200 years, after the industrial revolution, westerners relied too much on logical thinking. Even now, they tend to think that, if you really depend on logic and reason, then everything will be all right. But I don’t think so. You really need something more. You might say that Christianity is something that can come on top of those things. But for us Japanese, we don’t have a religion like Christianity or Islam. So we need to have something else – deep emotion. That is something we have had for twenty centuries.’
    Such deep emotion, the sticky albumen of the shell-less society, is said to explain numerous facets of Japanese behaviour, from the way people interact with the each other to, of all things, their supposedly distinctway of hearing insects. Not long into our conversation, Fujiwara, almost inevitably, cited the infamous studies of Dr Tadanobu Tsunoda of Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Dr Tsunoda’s research – and one can almost see the electrodes attached to the heads of earnest volunteers – concluded that the Japanese brain was different from that of most other peoples. 9 The Japanese, he found, heard the sound of temple bells, insects and even snoring with the left half of the brain, the opposite of westerners. In Fujiwara’s book there is an excruciating description of how a visiting American professor, on hearing the sound of crickets, asks: ‘What’s that noise?’ Fujiwara feigns to be appalled. How can the professor not recognize this as music? How, he wonders, could we have lost the war to these imbeciles? ‘All Japanese listen to insects as music. When we listen to crickets in deep autumn we hear it as music. We hear the sorrow of autumn because winter is coming. The summer is gone. Every Japanese feels that. We feel the sorrow of our very temporary, short life.’
    I was looking sceptical, but he ploughed on. He explained another familiar, and related, concept, that of
mono no aware
. This is sometimes translated as ‘the pathos of things’, but can also mean sensitivity to the ephemeral. That is why, he said, in an explanation one hears trotted out every spring, the Japanese love cherry blossom – precisely because its bloom is so fleeting before it gently flutters to earth. ‘If cherry blossoms were in full bloom for