Hanako was born.
This geological correlation was attractive but as a working model it somehow reminded of Donald Keene’s precise metaphor for the place. The onion: you remove layer after layer and finally you get to its core, which is . . . empty.
Another model was a complicated structural affair in which the country was seen as moving through such polarities as uchi and soto (inside vs. outside), ninjo and giri (one’s own feelings vs. society’s), and one that exhibited many other moving parts as well. This made Japan seem a unique place and was consequently a popular model with the Japanese themselves as well as the interested foreigner. It was a solid stage, however, and impervious to change. Perhaps for that reason I never found much use for this model. It could not prepare us for what was occurring. It lived in the past, and, as was becoming more apparent, as the economy bubbled, Japan lived in an eternal present.
I, who sort of believed in ancestor worship, even if the Japanese did not, was thus surprised when I saw the Shiba Tokugawa tombs razed to make way for the Prince Hotel. And I, who thought that a cozy symbiotic relationship existed between Japan and nature, reacted with alarm when I saw the coastline being concreted over, forests cut down to accommodate golf courses, and national park land given over to developers.
More was to come. Later on I saw that lifetime employment, a Japanese tradition if there ever was one, was there no longer; that the upward-bound escalator—just stay on, don’t bother to work, and you will be safely carried to the top of your bureaucratic profession—had stopped; and that the national diet had changed: coffee and toast became the easy-to-make national breakfast with difficult gohan and miso soup reserved for Sunday, maybe. And finger-licking-good American junk for in between.
And that wasn’t all. My former models had all made room for the idea of defenseless little Japan inundated by ruthless Western imports. These poured into the country and thus diluted tradition—that was how my paradigm worked. Now I saw that it was not that way at all.
Japan reached out and dragged in. Anything it wanted it got, anything it didn’t was kept out. A discerning shopper, the country willingly opened to what was useful, and snapped shut to what was not. Well, so did Ohio, I supposed, but with nothing like the scale, the openness, the panache. This simplified bivalve exemplar of the country did not have the elegance of former miniatures but it seemed to have the virtue of accuracy, at least for the present. It explained a lot.
For example, the true use of English in the country. For decades now the Japanese had been getting it all wrong. We chuckled over it (We Play for General MacArthur’s Erection). Then it occurred to me that this misuse of my language was not funny and further did not, as I then believed, show a contempt for English by ignoring the integrity of the original.
No contempt was involved, and no ignorance either. Writings in ads, on signs, over T-shirts and on shopping bags alike were not intended to be “English.” They were Japanese-English and this was not a subdivision of English but a subdivision of Japanese—a language directed only toward an uncritical audience for whom meaning had no importance, though this significance of the newly acquired did.
Tradition was judged by the same rule. If it could be turned into the pragmatically useful it remained. This usually meant becoming a new product. Kimono and geta had all but disappeared, yet some remained as new signifiers: a girl in a kimono meant Traditional Type, going about her ikebana or her koto lesson; a boy in geta meant either Traditional Tradesman or Traditional Student Rightist, probably going to Takushoku University. And the despised Hanako was revived as the trendy and self-mocking title for a new magazine, which told all the young people what to buy.
The kimono itself was subsumed in the wrappings of Issey Miyake; the architectural tradition turned into the eclectic Japanesque of Arata Isozaki; Edo-mura became a local tourist draw; and the Japan Travel Bureau began urging a trip to Kyoto as time travel to the picturesque Orient, while I sat and watched my traditional Japan turn into Japanland.
“Trad but mod” said a slogan of the 1980s, and it said this about the new. (“Established in 1988” one read, carved in stone, in 1989.) From abroad poured in the products Japan thought Japan wanted as the traditional was being sliced into bite-sized pieces.
I felt I was living in a museum that was now being swiftly destroyed. The wreckers were at work and—oh, there goes a room I thought never would; oh, there goes a whole wing of what I thought was the permanent display.
And there I was in the shambles without a map, minus even a model, because eventually my two-cylinder paradigm could not begin to cope with change this great.
*
Then I remembered something that fine scholar and good friend Edward Seidensticker had once written: “The relationship between tradition and change in Japan has always been complicated by the fact that change is itself a tradition.”
I had, of course, long been aware of Japanese consciousness of change. For example, the fuss made about the seasons. Japan has four separate and distinct seasons, I was forever being told. Well, so does Ohio, I was tempted to answer, and then I remembered that there we only mentioned the seasons to complain about them, that we rarely celebrated them for their own transient sakes.
Yet even now in contemporary Japan with its vast hydroponic farms and its enormous distribution circuits, flowers and food in season were still made something of, and this seemed so because it gave some excuse for celebrating transience. Certainly the annual cherry-viewing orgies all over the country were such. Particularly, I was told, evanescence is celebrated when the petals are floating to the ground and change was at its most palpable—the death of the blossom. There was even an exclamation for appreciation of natural change: ah, aware.
And I remembered my classical readings. For example the famous opening line of Kamo no Chomei’s Record of the Ten-Foot-Square Hut (here given in Burton Watson’s translation): “The river flows unceasingly on, but the water is never the same water as before.”
I had thought that in looking at the stream Kamo was affirming the reassuring fact that the body of water was, after all, permanent. But now I saw that what he was indicating was, instead, the fact that the water itself changed, was always different.
I remembered the shrine at Ise. This single wooden edifice is replaced every twenty years. It is torn down and an identical replica is constructed. This has been going on for centuries. And it had seemed to me obvious that this exemplary structure celebrated tradition. It was the core holding.
But now I was not so certain. Ise surely satisfied the claims of eternity and the hopes of immortality—though in a way quite different from that of, say, the Pyramids. But at the same time it celebrated transience. It accepted change and incorporated it. It did so by accommodating it, by building evanescence into the structure of the Ise shrine itself.
Every culture copes with change but how many, I wondered, had made it a moving part? Lots of nostalgia for the good old days to be sure, lots of bad-mouthing the new bad ones, just like everywhere else, but in addition to this, an accommodation to the evanescent, an acceptance of this fact of life. Shikata ga nai (It can’t be helped), that bleat which so irritates the foreign resident, could now be seen as a graceful acquiescence to the great principle of change itself. After all, that there is nothing one can do about it really means, Let us rather get on with life.
Change is in Japan put to use in the most pragmatic of manners. It alone is permanent and hence a steady source of power. It is perpetual motion, the dream of the physicists come true. And I saw that during all my decades in the country Japan had not changed in its attitude toward change. It was always hands-on and still is. Any respect for the integrity of any original becomes beside the point when it is change itself that is being accommodated.
