Viewed Sideways. Donald Richie

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ will be lost, but much of that—traditional Japan—has now become so gentrified, so compromised, that one can only question its assumed validity. Patterns of thought, cultural assumptions, and language itself are changing as the internalization process continues to break slowly down.

      What Japan is changing into I cannot even guess. One sort of Japan observer insists that though forms change, the spirit is maintained. You tear down the old neighborhood but build it over again in the high-rise that takes its place. Well, yes, but has the spirit been maintained after an operation that extensive? I feel that something basic has been changed.

      I also feel that this is the price that change extracts. And current pressures from both outside and inside the country are changing the kind of Japaneseness that has resulted in a people mostly afraid to speak out because the conceptual framework for being afraid is still in place.

      Just who these new outspoken Japanese will be is something I can guess even less. From among the young? Yes, I hope so, but looking around me I seem to see mainly productions of a society that pushes docility: manga-minded, game-addicted boys and girls who wander around in earphone sets. There are many exceptions I am sure, but these super-dociles form the more visible element.

      An inarticulate and uncomplaining general public is the answer to the collective wish of society (any society) and consequently of (all) governments. Here we would have ideal citizens, all of them agreeing and all of them contributing in their passive way to the great ideal of unthinking harmony.

      Yet, there are dissenters in the ranks, and I think that these will become more numerous as authoritarian ways are becoming more questioned. A chorus of concerned groups and individual voices—Oshima, the mayor of Nagasaki, my taxi driver—are growing in number and in volume.

      —1991

      Interpretations of Japan

      Perceived as somehow different, Japan has long seemed to require interpretation. It is assumed that the country and its culture is not to be comprehended without some sort of mediation, that before the place can be properly understood a theoretical toolkit is needed—models, metaphors, paradigms.

      This seems strange. Few other places are thought to need such explication. Yet, one still hears about mysterious, enigmatic Japan though few have ever referred to, say, mysterious, enigmatic Luxembourg.

      There are, to be sure, reasons for this, among these that Japan only relatively recently—some century and a half ago—joined what is sometimes called “the family of nations.” Before that it was a hermit empire, closed and by nature unknown. It was perceived as different because it was not a family member. Another reason, however, is that Japan itself early learned to value its singularity; being unique, being difficult to understand—these are qualities of which much can be made during “family” squabbles.

      Due to the perceptions of those outside the country and the inclinations of those inside it, there is now an accumulation of well over a century’s worth of interpretations—a whole chronology of attempts. A short perusal of these strata indicates some of the shapes that Japan has assumed in the eyes of others and of itself, those levels of “appreciation” upon which apprehension is even now based.

      *

      A major assumption has always been that each approach presumes a nearer accuracy even though these various interpretations overlap. At the same time prudence is advised. Lafcadio Hearn’s early endeavor is cautiously titled Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation. Perhaps this initial discretion—an attempt rather than a certainty—is the result of even earlier explanations having been so reckless.

      One of the first was discovered after Commodore Perry had “opened up” the country. The contents were carelessly examined and the first paradigm was minted. Japan was to be seen as the opposite to the West. The country was what one of the earlier writers called a topsy-turvy land, one in which everything was upside down, a state to be found either disconcerting or delightful. Here is Mark Twain on the subject: “Their coin is square instead of round; their workmen pull the saw and plane, instead of pushing; they begin dinner with tea and confections and close with the heavy work; they love turnips and disallow potatoes.”

      In his Things Japanese, one of the first serious attempts to describe Japan to the West, Basil Hall Chamberlain has a whole section on “Topsy-turvydom” in which he lists examples and then says, “It was only the other day that a Tokyo lady asked the present writer why foreigners did so many things topsy-turvy, instead of doing them naturally, after the manner of her country-people.”

      If we see others as upside down then, perforce, we see ourselves as right side up. The ascribed abnormality of others serves to reinforce the idea of our own normality. As Ian Littlewood has reminded us, “Without East there is no West, without natives there are no sahibs.” This could, of course, cut two ways. Mark Twain could be affirmed in his assumptions and Chamberlain’s Tokyo lady could be affirmed in hers.

      Further dualistic anomalies were sought for and found. Japan was shortly discovered to be paradoxical, a country which was a contradiction in terms. The people were quaint, childlike, and polite on one hand, but militaristic, cruel, and treacherous on the other; they were artistic but they were also the yellow peril.

      Sir Rutherford Alcock, an early diplomat and theorizer, could summarize his account with “Japan is essentially a country of paradoxes and anomalies. There all—even familiar things—put on new faces and are curiously reversed.”

      Fifty years later this early attempt at interpretation was still around. Ruth Benedict in her 1946 Chrysanthemum and the Sword (a dualistic title) says that “The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite.” One hears echoes even later. Peter Tasker in 1987 was writing, “They are the hardest-working hedonists, the lewdest prudes, the most courteous and cruelest and kindest of people.”

      The success of this particular model was that it was based upon an unquestioned assumption: the duality of all reality, the necessity of “either/or” above “both.” This is how most Westerners structure their lives and it is therefore often the paradigm of choice whether it actually fits its subject or not.

      That it does not became apparent as later generations of foreign observers looked more closely. Or rather, it fits us all too well. We are, every one of us, creatures of paradox and it is only wishful thinking that finds us consistent. And so, just as Japan was not really to be fully described in presuming to find it upside down, so it was eventually seen as something more than an illustration of rampant paradox.

      Yet one paradigm does not succeed another. All the earlier models continue to exist and the new is simply added to the pile. Ruth Benedict offers a sample of this strata, and even an attempt as structurally sophisticated as Roland Barthe’s Empire of Signs held that contrary to Japan with its elegant suimono, “for us in France, clear soup is poor soup.”

      *

      A further refinement came with the next model—one we might place as encountered during the first half of the twentieth century. This retained duality but the emphasis was different. Japan was now Land of Contrasts, a place that naturally, even intentionally, found room for paradox. Old Japan and New Japan were thus harmonized. As I myself described it elsewhere: Old Shinto shrines on the top of new high-rises, white-robed acolytes on motorbikes, and ancient zaibatsu executives reclined in their new steel-and-glass headquarters.

      Unlike the primitive topsy-turvy paradigm, this one was initially convincing since each part of it was apparent. There really were towering skyscrapers, there actually were cherry-blossomed СКАЧАТЬ