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Fushimi Inari Shrine
Ginkakuji Temple
Umeda Sky Building
Traditional Restaurant
TIMELESS JAPAN
A Modern Nation That Still Values its Traditional Past
Progress is unrelenting and rapier in many fields and facets of Japan, yet there’s no shortage of areas where the country happily stands firm against the drifting sands of time. Just cast your eyes over a typical tourist brochure, where kimono-clad geisha shuffle between appointments in Kyoto’s Gion district, Mount Fuji stands capped in white and sumo wrestlers batter each other senseless, and you’ll realize that timeless is big in Japan.
For a visitor, that means getting to experience an array of cultural delights often far removed from anything back home. You can eat forms of cuisine (pages 14–17) that have been perfected over centuries. You can shop for and even try your hand at traditional crafts as diverse as pottery, indigo dyeing, and making washi paper. You can even go deeper with Zen meditation classes, cooking classes, ikebana flower arranging workshops, the tea ceremony and far beyond. In cities such as Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, you can watch highly stylized kabuki theater or check out Noh theater, geisha shows and the old-fashioned slapstick comedy of manzai. All over the country you can visit historic sites like the World Heritage-designated shrines and temples of Kyoto and Nara, Himeji Castle, and many other places that leave an indelible imprint on travelers.
Along with all that tradition also comes formality. Japanese has a complex system of formal honorific speech for use in certain business and social settings to show respect, highlight status and so on. Behavior is formalized, too. The Japanese don’t go around bowing deeply to everyone all the time (life doesn’t mimic most travel documentaries), but there are set patterns of behavior for many situations, whether that’s how business cards are exchanged (given and received with both hands) or how a potential customer is greeted when they enter a store.
Remove the tourist brochure sugar coating and at times Japan’s fondness for tradition can be a negative, too; although for a foreigner the negatives often manifest themselves as humorous and quaint rather than an annoyance. Starting with the annoying, in many companies, business can progress slowly, with decision-making processes rarely deviating from cumbersome time-honored patterns. It doesn’t matter if a policy or procedure is inefficient, change would be worse—better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Avoid risk at all cost. Stick to the rules, at least publicly (one must keep face, after all), no matter how silly they seem. With that, Japan has “No” signs everywhere, from funny cartoon manner posters on the trains to warning signs in toilets (albeit not enough signs that tell elderly locals to stop spitting in the street!). Yet even the long list of “Nos” in places like hotels isn’t intended to be unwelcoming, it’s all about avoiding conflict and disruption; about keeping the wa (harmony). And in Japan, there’s nothing quite as timeless as that.
Horyuji Temple in Nara (page 82), home to some of the oldest wooden buildings in the world.
A monk in Kamakura (page 56), Japan’s capital from 1185–1333. The town is only an hour from central Tokyo, but retains so many reminders of its rich past that it feels like an entirely different world.
Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri is one of Japan’s biggest annual events. Lasting throughout July and featuring events that include a massive procession of floats through central Kyoto, the festival began in the 800s as a purification ritual to ward off a plague.
Be it Kyoto’s temple gardens or classic stroll gardens in Tokyo such as Kiyosumi and Rikugien, traditional landscaping is another aspect of old Japan that thankfully shows no sign of moving aside.
A display of archery in Tokyo’s Meiji Shrine. Japan is a very forward-looking country in many regards, but there is still a strong appreciation of (and pride in) its samurai past. You see that in so many places, from reenactments and even to Japan’s national football team—nicknamed “Samurai Blue”.
One of the small gardens at Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto.
Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, is an expansive example of traditional landscaping that utilizes the concept of borrowed scenery—incorporating the natural surrounds around the garden as a backdrop to its actual design.
Images of geisha and maiko (trainee geisha) in Kyoto might be considered a touch clichéd by some, but there’s nothing fake about the glimpses of geisha you might well get to enjoy in the former capital.
Magome, one of the beautifully preserved towns along the old Nakasendo highway that connected Edo and Kyoto.
Weddings for some are still a traditional Shinto affair, although white weddings are far more common.
Green tea doesn’t have to be part of a ceremony. For many, it’s a simple, daily staple much like coffee.
The stunning Himeji Castle.
NOW AND FUTURE JAPAN
Hi-Tech Design and an Obsessive Attention to Small Details
Visit any part of urban Japan and the country’s modern faces don’t so much reveal themselves, they pounce. For a first-time visit, it can be a dizzying experience. Concrete dominates. Cities increasingly grow upwards from their centers, and then roll long and flat unbroken far beyond their arbitrary borders. They are frequently crowded, too, from cramped train carriages and crawling highways to heaving shopping malls. Vending machines are on every corner; convenience stores, too. It’s energetic, often chaotic, but never
