Japan (1 of 2 Articles)
If you want to experience a country of social contrasts, then visit Japan. Or, better still, live for a while in Japan. I know of no other society that has created for itself so many dualities. Japanese culture is rife with contradictions and inconsistencies. To the perceptive observer of Japanese society, this duality is both intriguing and puzzling: it begs the question, “What cultural imperative and subtle socialization processes have led to such anomalies?” The Japanese, it seems, have somehow managed to juggle centuries-old tradition with spanking-new modernity and come up with a mystifying cultural concoction that makes the nation unique. Here are some examples:
The quiet, self-controlled, almost self-effacing Japanese man or woman is the image often held by foreigners who visit Japan or meet a Japanese traveling in another land. Yet, this soft-spoken, demure Japanese nature contrasts sharply with their public and personal environments- both visual and aural - which can be gratingly loud and obtrusive. Inside a crowded commuter train in Japan you will see passengers studying a newspaper or book, playing a silent computer game on their cell phones or using it to send text-messages, and catching up on badly-needed sleep (I once observed carriage-full of morning commuters, where two thirds of the seated riders were fast asleep, some even resting against the lap of the adjacent passenger). But the train carriage in which all of this is quietly going on is cluttered with advertising messages, car cards and banners hanging from the ceiling. Every cubic inch of air space, it seems, is shouting its messae to bleary-eyed commuters.
If you happen to stumble upon one of the many Pachinko parlors a city has to offer, on a typical weekday evening, a look inside will introduce you to some of the noisiest aspects of outwardly quiet Japanese life. Pachinko is the Japanese equivalent of Las Vegas-style slot machines - the Japanese version of electronic gambling and gobbles up metric tons of metal tokens within each hour. The air inside is thick with tobacco smoke and the din is unbelievable. Row upon row of after-work hopefuls diligently feed these noisy machines and the metallic roar inside the warehouse-sized building rivals that of a mid-20th century textile factory.
Drop into a typical, non-franchise restaurant in Japan to enjoy a relatively quiet and leisurely meal, and you will be offered a visually pleasing and esthetic dining experience. The dish you ordered will come to your table in the most harmonious presentation imaginable. Each piece of food and its accoutrement is painstakingly placed around the plate or small dish with visual balance and color harmony in mind. Step onto the street outside this very same restaurant, and you will find a visual cacophony that offends the senses in the extreme. The street itself, while clean and generally free of garbage, is festooned with telephone poles, power lines, countless wires and cables crisscrossing the sky, railway tracks with overhead high-tension wires everywhere, promotional cloth banners flapping in the breeze and selling everything from massage parlors to new high-rise apartments-visual chaos that even a Japanese Jackson Pollock could not replicate.
In public, the Japanese usually present themselves as neat, clean, even spic and span. Being a crowded country, personal space is considerably reduced and the Japanese have adapted accordingly. Far into the night, after time with children and a favorite TV program have been enjoyed, comes the ritual of the “ofuro” - the personal, in-home bath before retiring for the night (often at 2 a.m.) and facing the next day’s challenges. First a shower, and then a relaxing soaking in the hot tub. There is a certain neatness to the whole procedure. Slippers for the shower area, separate slippers for the ofuro section, and certainly separate slippers for the separately enclosed toilet (which is never located in the bath area). The hygiene is ritualistic but ultimately aimed at not offending co-workers or when riding in close proximity to other commuters.
But it is the home where they can “finally” let their hair down at the end of a long and stamina-sapping day. You will be fortunate, indeed, to be invited into the inner sanctuary of Japanese family life. The home is reserved for family. The Western visitor to a Japanese house will be astonished at the terribly messy and disorganized ambience. The clutter is unbelievable. Every conceivable horizontal surface will be covered with trinkets, laundry, snack foods, souvenirs, gifts from visitors, letters, stationery, electronic gadgets, household utensils and furnishings. And in the living room sits the ubiquitous television set. The TV programming, too, is unbelievably cluttered. Pick any station program, and you will see countless windows opening up all over the TV screen - sideshows to the actual program at hand - side bars with moving messages, writing superimposed on every corner of the screen to add “information,” and mini-cameos of whatever else is going on during the televised segment. Even the commentary or conversation captured in a jumble of back-and-forth sound bites is irritating and distracting. The Japanese mantra is the preservation of harmony: harmony at work; harmony in interpersonal relations; harmony in business dealings. But not, it seems spatial harmony in the personal retreat of the home, nor audio-visual harmony in the TV programming.
The Japanese can master the intricacies of production systems to such a degree that they consistently achieve incredibly high quality standards. It’s as though the supreme goal is flawless design and zero-error tolerance: Give us the original product idea, and we will polish it to perfection. Yet, they can be unbelievably inefficient and bureaucratic in service delivery and regulatory procedures. Apply to open a personal account at a neighborhood bank branch and you will be taken on a harrowing expedition through an ocean of paperwork long before you have access to your own money.
In a nation which takes manufacturing precision to unparalleled heights, you will also find a train system that is so reliable, you can set your watch by the times a train arrives at or leaves any railway station. Yet, you will witness a people who are astonishingly imprecise and vague in interpersonal communication. The Japanese language is a very “high-context” one: the meaning of a word or written character depends on the context in which it is used. Research indicates that the Japanese are able to fully understand each other only about 85 percent of the time. In ordinary conversations, people will often stop in mid-sentence and trace with their finger, in the air or on a flat surface, the intended Japanese character or ideogram to clarify what they mean.
In the suburbs of a Japanese city, you can stroll at leisure inside an exquisitely manicured Japanese rose garden and admire the endless variety of cultivated flowers. You will mingle among other quiet admirers of the gardening touch and barely hear the polite and subdued conversation of passers-by. But lift your eyes to the horizon spreading behind this horticultural extravaganza and your gaze will be jarred by half a dozen tall industrial smokestacks belching thick, fout-smelling pollutants straight into the hazy sky. Nearby, the bridges and overpasses are carpeted with high-speed traffic, the hiss of tires rolling on concrete amplified into an incessant roar.
The Japanese are painfully hesitant about taking any form of military role in the global arena. Yet, when it comes to commercial whaling, they can be aggressive, defensive and blatantly war-like in protecting their right to cull certain species of the mammals that most humans shower with affection and a motherly, protective instinct. In a country that has thoroughly embraced the modern sports of soccer, golf and baseball, they venerate the ritualistic moves of their national spectator pastime, the 400-year-old sport of sumo wrestling.
That’s Japan for you, traditional, thoroughly modern, and maddeningly contractory.
TEM