Free Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan by Will Ferguson

the entire structure starts to give way. It isn’t true, of course. But the effectiveness of a fear has nothing to do with its reality. The tiles, held in place like standing waves, are stronger than they look. On older rooftops, moss and grasses grow, weeds, even the occasional batch of wildflowers.
    These rooftops are liquid in design, but heavy in their mass. They transform even the humblest Japanese house into a castle. (At times, I suspect that the main purpose of the house itself is just to hold up and best display the roof.) Homes in Japan are even built from the rooftops down, without central support beams, in a design that has been described as “a book balanced on top of pencils.” In many Western countries, the top-heavy nature of Japanese homes would not pass building regulations. But when the earthquakes rumble through Japan, they topple highway overpasses and split concrete, but the small, top-heavy wooden homes sway drunkenly and remain standing.
    Japanese homes crowd the very edge of city streets. They squeeze in, cheek-by-jowl, almost wall-to-wall. Alleyways, only an arm’slength wide, run between them. Neighbourhoods are a labyrinth of one-lane streets, narrow divides, dead ends. The Japanese usually cite the high cost of land for this closely packed effect, but there are other reasons at work. A typical Japanese village is surrounded by open, inviting areas: forests, rice fields, hills. But rather than spread the houses out and give everyone some elbow room, the Japanese wedge their homes into thickly clustered packs, as though huddled together for protection. The rice fields form a moat of green around them, and the Japanese live in each other’s laps.
    It is a habit born partly from geography—the fjords of the coastline naturally encourage villages to be clustered into coves. But it is also something else. The design of Japanese villages is born of a need that the West has largely disregarded as weak: the need for human company and the sadness of being left alone. In the West, we fear insignificance . In Japan, they fear loneliness . It is in this broad sense that Japan is described as being feminine and the West masculine. In the West we are obsessed with individuality. It makes us strong—in a very limited sense of the word—but like any commitment to an ideal it also requires a sacrifice. And what we have sacrificed in the West is our sense of belonging. In Japan, it is privacy that has been sacrificed. And it is this privacy that the Japanese home seeks to reclaim.
    Japanese homes are often disproportionately large for the amount of land they occupy. It’s the yards that are small, not the homes. Given a plot of land, the Japanese approach is to enclose as much space as possible within it. The yard, if it can be called one, is often a mere fringe of grass or a tiny miniature garden tucked in between the driveway and the front wall. In Japan the yard is still a semi-public place, and leaving it open is like making your house a public arena. Better to set the limits of your privacy as far as you can. You will often see houses along riverbanks cantilevered precariously over the river, trying to maximize the space contained even at the risk of losing it all. Japanese homes tend to slide into rivers a lot.
    Even the entranceway of a home is not a completely private space. Salesmen, visitors, bill collectors, and metermen all step right into your entry unannounced. The entrance of a Japanese home is built on street level, that dirty, littered, lower public world. The private and the personal is above it. You step up from the entrance. Theentire house is built on a higher level, and the rudest salesman in Japan, although he thinks nothing of barging right into your home, would never dream of stepping up uninvited. This is also why you take off your shoes. One leaves behind the dust of the world when you enter a home. You step up, you rise above.
    There are more mundane reasons as well. Japanese