Last Notes: Oct. 5, 2001

Generalizing about other cultures is dangerous, as we’ve certainly seen in the weeks following the World Trade Center attack. Generalizations involving a single observer are even worse; they’re one person’s subjective opinion, nothing more.

But I have to deal with the question people ask me: “How did you like Japan?” The following should be taken only as a response to that question, how I, and only I, felt about what happened to me, and what only I observed. Japanophiles (and, indeed, Japanese) may take offense at some of this. To some extent, I don’t care: these are my values against which I’m putting the observations to the test, and I still hold to them. But nobody should feel personally attacked, as I’m not criticizing individuals by any of this.

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Japan is an island -- or, rather, a series of islands, most of which are joined together by bridges by now. This explains a lot of things about the place: the persistance of trainspotters, for one thing, a hobby I was astonished to see going full-bore, particularly in places like the small towns the train passed between Gifu and Takayama, for instance. But lacking a track to off-island, the number of trains is finite, and thus can be catalogued.

It also explains its insularity. We all know that Japan was sealed off from the rest of the world by Imperial decree for centuries, and only “re-opened” in the mid-19th century. From your stereo system to your car to any number of other things, you can see that Japan re-engaged with the world enthusiastically and successfully. But I think the insularity is still there.

It’s a lot like an insularity I’m well familiar with: American insularity. There’s a sense of entitlement, a feeling that what your country does is its own business and thus not accountable to the rest of the world, and that, by some mystical process, you’re entitled to do what you do. In Japan, one good example is fishing: the Japanese continue to scoop up every fish their nets can grab, with the result that the majority of the fish (and other creatures) thus netted are thrown away, dead, because they’re inedible. This strip-mining of the sea (as well as the whaling they continue to do -- and lobby to expand) is an ecological disaster. Another example is the use of wood. How many trees do you think it takes to make the disposable chopsticks everyone takes for granted? Or the lovely bento boxes that come with some of the higher-priced bentos?

That, of course, is just the tip of the consumer madness you see everywhere. It’s odd to see brands which most of the world considers luxury (Chanel, Harrod’s) as everyday brand-names there. Although there is poverty (albeit not much) and homelessness (more than you’d think, although the encampments are very neat and well-maintained), spending much time in a place like Tokyo, you get the impression that everyone is rich, from their clothing to their cell phone gadgetry to the prices in stores and restaurants. And this stuff gets consumed, by which I mean used up and discarded, much faster than elsewhere. There are no garage sales in Japan, and few second-hand stores. The only place I’ve seen a faster turnover is the Jamaican record business, where I’ve gone there two weeks after a friend got back telling me about the top record of the moment when he was there, only to be told “that finish” the day I arrived.

The consumer fervor is of a higher level, in terms of expenditure, than it is in the U.S., but it’s every bit as intense. The wasting of natural resources reminds me of the sudden and inexplicable rise of the SUV in the US, where suddenly everybody seemed proud of wasting the diminishing supply of gas. Like Americans, the Japanese don’t seem to get it: there’s no more where this came from. This said, there’s an attempt at recycling and garbage sorting, and people seem to be taking it well.

But the things that really got to me that don’t resemble American or European society are also worth pondering.

High on this list, of course, would be uniformity. The Japanese, of course, don’t “all look alike” any more than any other people do, and in fact within a couple of days you start to notice a wide variety in facial and body types there. But starting with the school uniforms, particularly the girls’, and going on to the salarymen in suits, you can, in a crowd like Shibuya or Shinjuku, feel like you’re seeing the same person over and over again. The girls’ uniforms are particularly interesting: one crowd was wearing thick leg-warmers despite the heat. Now, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t something the school decreed, but, rather, a modification of the dress-code that the school allowed. But rather than do little modifications of the uniforms so that each girl could express some individuality, they chose a uniform rebellion, if you could even classify it as a rebellion.

I’ve read that those who choose not to fit in, avant-garde artists, for instance, pay a high price for their unconventional behavior. And, while I can understand what might motivate people down that road, societal horror notwithstanding, I didn’t see much evidence of their existence. This, of course, is as much my fault as anything. Of course, I was actually hanging out with avant-garde artists for a good part of the trip, although I never really got the sense of a “scene” or a community among them. I suspect that, were I in Tokyo for long enough, hanging out at a place like Radio On would introduce me to various subcultural beings. But I never got a feeling that there was a neighborhood with suport systems of the sort you’d find in Greenwich Village or Mitte in Berlin during the classic times of ferment. If there is, my guess is that it’d only be in Tokyo, that, like France, Japan is a country which “really” only has one city, and that’s where you’ve got to go if you want to pursue a life apart from the mainstream.

It could be, of course, that the need for uniformity is tied in with the need for the much-vaunted Japanese politeness as a means of keeping a society with far too many people living in far too small an area together. But in many cases I felt that the politeness was only ritualistic, and felt the constant yelling of greetings and farewells in stores was not only insincere, as it has to be, but oppressive. So were the hordes of schoolkids in uniform, and the incessant parade of suits.

You’d get used to it after a while, I guess, although I wasn’t there long enough for that to happen. It probably gets to be a part of the landscape like the incessant noise. I don’t mean the traffic and the sirens and the normal sounds of a city, though. I mean the blare of music and the things that talk. There seems to be a horror vacui in Japanese life that exceeds anything I’ve yet seen. I joked that, in Akihabara, the electronics district in Tokyo, it was bad enough having to hear the new Mariah Carey album everywhere, worse hearing a different track every time you turned around, but hearing all the tracks simultaneously was excruciating. But at the center of that joke is a truth: everything was blaring all the time. I pity anyone trying to buy a sound system there, because you simply can’t hear for all the noise. But there’s music in the subway, in the stores, along the sidewalks, in the halls in the hotel, in the restaurants -- everywhere.

And, rising above it, or mixed in, there’s the talking stuff. I guess ostensibly some of this is for blind people. The train welcomes you aboard, tells you the line you’re on, its destination, and the next station, and then repeats it -- at least in Tokyo and Kyoto -- in English. It tells you when you get there and tells you to watch your step as the station plays its own distinctive little digital melody, which is often cut off by a live announcer. You then proceed to the escalator which tells you to hold on to the railing as you get on, and, just before it ends, that it’s ending. You walk out into the street and a dozen stores are yelling at you, either through recordings placed in boom-boxes outside or through wall-mounted loudspeakers or actual people standing outside with bullhorns. You get to the hotel, there’s music in the lobby, in the elevator (which announces the floor), and in the hall. Parking lots talk, warning pedestrians that a car is leaving, while telling the departing parker how much is owed on the ticket. The lot also generally has a honking siren as an additional warning. At temples and shrines there are recorded voices, often on a continuous loop, telling you what you’re seeing and warning you not to smoke. In public places like Shinjuku and Shibuya there are huge video screens, sometimes several, all with audio. It is, in short, the loudest country I’ve ever visited. Even America.

Another thing which disturbed me pretty much from the beginning through the end of the trip is still very messily organized in my mind, but exists at the nexus of kawaii, infantilization, and the whole subject of women. These seem to exist at least partially as one phenomenon, although they each have their own discrete places.

The kawaii thing is legendary, and it’s also inescapable. Nearly everything is advertised with some degree of it. I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see a funeral parlor making use of it. If you’ve seen Hello Kitty, you’ve seen a tiny tip of the iceberg of kawaii. Bunnies, kitties, puppies, and kids, cartoon girls with big eyes, these are all standard icons in Japan. The sign saying the elevator is out of use has a cute construction worker on it. Cutting from the umpteenth replay of the United plane going into the side of the World Trade Center to the commercial with the cute purple bunny in the field felt like a punch in the stomach to me, but maybe it’s a transition a Japanese person could make more easily.

But I connect kawaii to infantilization. We give our kids cute things because they’re not threatening. A teddy bear that was anatomically correct, with teeth and sharp claws, not to mention the smell they give off, wouldn’t be such a hot idea. Eventually, though, a kid can start to deal with reality: you go to Yellowstone and yes, the baby bears are cute, but you also (should) realize that mama bear would be just as happy to disembowl you as not. They’re not toys, they’re complex animals. But meanwhile, as a kid, the cute world is a nice place to retreat, to feel unthreatened when a world you don’t understand seems to be on the verge of hurting you. Hell, adults do it, too. If you want to retreat to bed with a hot cup of cocoa and read Winnie the Pooh after a brutal emotional shock, I’ll defend you, as long as it’s the edition with the original illustrations. The Disney ones are too kawaii, you see. But infantilization is a way not to take someone seriously, and that’s where I think it’s dangerous.

Which brings me to women, who, as girls, are the largest consumers of kawaii (I even came upon a group of schoolgirls at a pet store’s window, pointing at the puppies there in and yelling “Kawaii! Kawaii!”) and are, for the most part, married at 25. Marriage is big business. As I mentioned, the hotel we stayed at in Nagoya specialized in it, but the Holiday Inn in Kanazawa had not one, but two wedding chapels (one was the lobby, the other was called Aspirare), and the entire area around the Goo shrine in Kyoto seems to be a wedding district. Even better, though, are the chapels. There was a hotel I could see on my way out to Ueno in Tokyo that was I guess 20 stories high. On its roof was a perfect replica of a New England brick church, with one telling difference: although there was a front door, there was a much bigger one on one of the sides, with broad steps so that every member of the wedding party could be assembled there and photographed. Presumably after the wedding you went downstairs into one of the banquet halls and celebrated. Carl and Yoshiko seem to think that a half-way decent wedding would cost you $50,000. Ads for wedding-related services are everywhere in the subways and on billboards. Oddly, most of the photos show Western women, usually blondes.

No doubt there’s been some sort of advance in feminism in Japan, but, as in Germany, I don’t think it really caught on, or caught on enough. With German women, dealing with issues such as career-and-relationship turns inward, resulting in the self-loathing I’ve noted so often in bright women I’ve known. But I don’t know what to make of the situation I observed in Japan. You marry a guy and he all but disappears into his work. Eventually, the kids go to school. That, apparently, is when you enter the women’s culture.

Shopping, taking coffee in elegant coffee-houses, and taking part in religious observations (particularly as you grow older) would seem to be your fate. Japanese women are elegant. I think this is by default: there isn’t much cheap crap out there. Department stores are worlds to themselves, with entire floors filled with restaurants of one sort or another, departments dedicated to the complete faux British or faux French environment, and then, of course, there’s the food floor. Coffee shops with elaborate displays of pastry and, usually, French names are all over the place, and my guess is that that’s where the elegant ladies go to compare their experiences after shopping. Or you can do the “let’s go to Kyoto” thing, and do your shopping somewhere else, and perhaps take in a cultural spot or two. As I noted, the vast majority of non-group tourists I encountered were women, and they were in their 30s and 40s, as far as I could estimate.

Not that there was any contact. No, I didn’t bring home that ultimate souvenir, a Japanese girlfriend. Anyway, that’s so downtown New York ’80s. In fact (to get serious again), although there were beautiful women everywhere, I wasn’t attracted to many. But then, what attracts me to a woman may not be very mainstream, and I certainly got the feeling that it was almost beyond the pale in Japan: I am attracted to a certain degree of aggressiveness, to intelligence, to a certain indefinable residue of tomboyishness, and to the ability to define and execute a plan with autonomy. The intelligence, I’m sure, is present in plenty of Japanese women -- Yoshiko, for instance, is plenty smart, and, I would be willing to bet, the exception to a lot of rules. (She also, I believe, has spent a lot of time in the States). But I don’t get the feeling that for most Japanese women the rest of those attributes are considered desirable in the slightest. Okay, that’s the American cultural imperialist in me. But there was the night, early on, when Carl told me that Noda’s girlfriend wanted to practice her English on me, but was too shy to do it. Then when I tried to talk to her, she was too embarrassed by having that revealed to me that she wouldn’t talk. I can’t deal with that. And a lot of these attributes I look for depend on a certain amount of life-experience, which just isn’t going to be achievable if you get married at 25. Could it be, then, that when a Japanese woman turns inward, it’s to a societally-approved degree of infantilization (the little-girl voice, speaking very very quietly, pampering yourself and buying lots of toys) which has been started early in your childhood with a hearty dose of kawaii?

Okay, let’s leave the ravings of a bitter old involuntary bachelor behind, and finish up with some musings on language. Not the Japanese language -- I could hardly do that -- but other people’s languages, as appropriated by Japan.

English, as everyone knows, has been subject to countless outrages in Japan. Some of the very best of these are lovingly collected and updated almost weekly at engrish.com, so I didn’t bother to assiduously note down every weird sign I saw. Some, however, were irresistable: in Takayama, a beauty parlor, offering as many do to “cat” your hair, gave further reassurance by stating “Member of an association.” In Himeiji, an otherwise healthy-looking teenage girl walked past me with a t-shirt that had a stars-and-stripes design and the logo “Heroin chic.” And Calton tells me he was out in Tokyo one day and saw a girl with a t-shirt saying, in huge letters “FUCK ME.” Since I doubt she meant it, she may have been following the logic of the guy I saw in Akihibara with the Nazi shirt.

As far as I can decode it, English means being up-to-date, French means elegance, and Italian is where the two meet. What’s weird about English is that everyone studies it -- six years, I’m told -- and yet nobody except in the most obvious places, like tourist information booths, speaks it. Sometimes, as happened at Yamamoto or the eel place in the Kyoto market, people will shyly reveal their limited abilities, and then be embarrassed when you praise them, as happened with the teenage waiter at the tofu place my last night in Tokyo. But, as is evidenced by the labelling of a lot of products, people can read it. One specialty of the teenage girl stores at the moment is parodying products on t-shirts, spelling out the Japanese in Roman letters. I have no idea what’s going on, but the popular Coffee Boss is parodied as Coffee Bosu, which is apparently worth a giggle.

There’s also German. I don’t know if this means that the Special Relationship is still in force, but I saw lots of it in odd places. The first was a bilingual t-shirt, which I saw twice: in big letters it says ICH MÖCHTE... and then, underneath, in tiny letters in English, “I think it’s time to do a little shopping.” There was an apartment house called Volks Haus, one of several apartments I saw with German names. Kanazawa, though, seems truly Germanified through and through. There, at the Grand Hotel, you can drink in the Bar der Dichter, or send your kids to the Private School of Der Meister, which is located in a men’s haberdashery. But my favorite bit of German -- bilingualism, actually, and for this to be funny you’re going to have to know German and English -- was a truck I saw sitting in the rain as I was almost back to my room in the typhoon there: LECKERE HAM. To balance all of this, though, Toyota has a car model called the Levin.

So, have I offended everyone yet? Like I said, these are musings of one person based on three weeks of observation. I’d be happy to discover that I’m wrong about a lot of this, but I can’t undo what I saw and felt. Almost every day I’d see something that completely blew me away (for instance? How about license plates whose numbers are illuminated from behind at night: what a great idea!) and then get slammed by rudeness or discrimination or ignorance.

Would I go back? Maybe. Not immediately. And not for a vacation: I’d go back to do a story or for another business reason, and I’d make sure, since such a thing would almost certainly be in Tokyo, to have a short trip out into the country planned if at all possible. All in all, this wasn’t the horrendous mix my trip to Italy in the early ’90s was, the one I decribed as “either the worst good time I’ve ever had, or the best bad time,” but then, there weren’t so many personal things going down on this trip, either.

Let’s just put it this way. I’m glad I did it. And I woke up every morning for a week glad I was back.