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

with whether you can speak foreign languages or have lived abroad for years.
    I cannot successfully engage in conversation with a westerner without defining things and showing borders. And yet I am certainly Japanese in the sense that I stand back and ‘marvel’ at westerners who keep trying to define this un-definable thing called Japan. Why bother? You cannot do it. I will not attempt it.
    Japan will probably no longer be Japan if it is captured, defined, understood. I think I have confused you enough. I really should not have confused someone facing a deadline, but there it is.
    Clearly it is hard to define things. How would you ‘define’ an individual, let alone something as complex and multifaceted as a national culture? But why should Japan be any harder to define than any other country? And, why should Japanese people not have borders – whatever that means – and exhibit less faith in absolutes than people in other parts of the world?
    At the time, I had just finished reading a book,
Japan Through the Looking Glass
by Alan Macfarlane, a professor of anthropology at Cambridge University. Unlike me, Macfarlane was convinced that Japan was so different from other cultures that it could be understood only in reference to itself. ‘The Japanese do not seem to me to be just trivially different from the west and other civilisations, but differentat such a deep level that the very tools of understanding we normally use prove inadequate,’ he wrote. One evening I telephoned him from Tokyo at his Cambridge home. He told me, quite as if he were discussing a hidden tribe in the Amazon, that, in contrast to other societies he had studied, Japan became less comprehensible the more he thought about it. ‘When I go to India or China, I find lots of strange and amazing things. But I don’t feel a growing sense of confusion. In Japan, I start off with a feeling of similarity and then, growingly, things become more strange.’
    It would be disingenuous to pretend I have no idea what Macfarlane is talking about. Whenever I fly out of Japan, I sometimes sense my understanding of the country trickling away, like water through fingers. Even experienced Japanologists are not immune from finding Japan difficult to pin down. Lafcadio Hearn, who pitched up on the archipelago in 1890 only a few decades after it had opened to the west, wrote, ‘The outward strangeness of things in Japan produces a queer thrill impossible to describe – a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the perception of the totally unfamiliar.’ Hearn, who adored Japan, was no
ingénu
, much less a racist, though he might be accused of making Japan seem more exotic than it really is. A naturalized Japanese citizen, he was known as Yakumo Koizumi – or Koizumi Yakumo in Japan’s ‘topsy-turvy’ word order. He married the daughter of a samurai family, spoke fluent Japanese and spent the last fifteen years of his peripatetic life in Japan. Yet of that country, he wrote, ‘The wonder and delight have never passed away; they are often revived for me even now, by some chance happening, after 14 years of sojourn.’ Foreshadowing a sentiment often expressed by today’s long-time residents, puzzled at their inability to grasp what they imagine to be the essence of Japan, he added, ‘Long ago the best and dearest Japanese friend I ever had said to me, a little before his death, “When you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot understand the Japanese at all, then you will begin to know something about them.”’ Hearn’s book was tellingly entitled
Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation
. A year after his attempt, he was dead.
    It is true that, in a hundred tiny gestures and assumptions, Japan can seem just slightly out of kilter with other countries, at least westernones, a modern society that nevertheless appears to move to secret rhythms. Well-travelled foreigners visiting Japan for the first time frequently describe an encounter with