RADBOUD MOLIJN

私の日本観(Watashi no Nippon kan)

My personalreflections on Japan20161

私の日本観(Watashi no Nippon kan)

My personalreflections on JapanOn the occasion of the conferral of theOrder of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with RosetteJune 21, 2016

Isolation and insularity: sometimes with England; also when it comes to queuingup.
The role of the government? Perhaps - and sometimes: with France.
Language? Perhaps with Finnish and Hungarian (also when it comes to suicide
rates).
Or can we compare Japan with the United States?
When it comes to the determination of doing business: yes.
When it comes to individualism: no way.

PROLOGUE“If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it
declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no realcountry by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the signsof literature). I can also, though in no way claiming to represent or analyse reality itself(these being the major gestures of Western discourse) – isolate somewhere in the world(far away) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics), and out ofthese features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan.”
The first book that I read on Japan was that by the French philosopher
Roland Barthes who had visited Japan in the 1960’s and published his bookl’Empire des Signes or: The Empire of Signs in 1970. In 1977 I decided to go to Japanand after a two-week voyage by Siberian railway and taking then a boat behind
an icebreaker from Nakhodka, I arrived in Yokohama in February 1978.
I have been “in Japan” since.

Then perhaps with countries in Asia?
China? When it comes to doing business: no.
Business drive: perhaps with South Korea.
Or: can we compare the organisational structure of society with China and / orSouth Korea? Perhaps in earlier times but not now.
Sometimes I think: it is all a matter of language and, perhaps, it is theschool system, very directive and focused at “unity” and “group” (and therefore
providing less room for the development of an individual identity.) Perhaps theJapanese language does possess fewer tools for a person to develop an individual
identity. But: is that really true? It is a fact that for us, westerners, identity isvery much related to individuality. To distinguish yourself from others: that isdifferent in Japan, perhaps. Or it is perhaps on a different level. And / or: with adifferent intensity.
But whatever makes Japan different from other countries: it is not one
single feature and it isn’t a simple combination of several features either.
Perhaps we have to accept that “other” or “different” is not a matter oftrying to understand, but rather accepting that people, cultures and businesspractices can be very different. Leaving your comfort zone behind you makes you
understand that fundamentally people are the same everywhere. That has been
my true “aha-Erlebnis”, my “satori”.

Let me make a strong statement: Japan is the most other country in theworld. And that raises the question: with what other country can we compare
Japan to? Any European country?
When it comes to design - sometimes – with Italy.
Work ethos – sometimes - with Germany.
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1. PHILOSOPHY VS. CRAFTMANSHIP
Japan does not have many what we would call “big thinkers”. Or better:
the type of thinkers that we call philosophers, asking questions about our“being”, focusing at resolving existential questions about the human condition,
developing big, large discourses about the essence of man and these philosophies
are often abstract and based upon mathematical principles. There is no Aristotle,
Zeno, Spinoza, Descartes, Kant or Nietzsche in Japan; not even an equivalent of
Confucius. Japanese philosophers had a more pragmatic approach when being
confronted with Buddhism and the often-devious Chinese explanation. Theirquestion was rather: “What can we do with it?”Yet, I cannot imagine a highly developed country that is able to function
without the energy of, or better, the contemplation of a philosophy. What thenreplaces the philosophies that we know in our western culture?
My answer: craftsmanship. Craftsmanship is for me not only a physicalobject that is made by a craftsman, a meister, it also can be intangible: alogistic system, a specific service, a ritual and even an elaborated train
schedule. Craftsmanship, or ”the pursuit of the ultimate meisterschaft”. It is thereplacement or, because replacement sounds inferior, the equivalent of what
we consider a philosophy. It is this full commitment, without any reserve, tomanufacturing a product, a car part, a service, a schedule, a quantitative analysis
that generates a spiritual experience, no less than that of a philosopher in his
Eureka moment. The subject (the maker) identifies himself with the object that
he manufactures, develops, or analyses.
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The Japanese art collector and writer Soetsu Yanagi founded in 1936 theJapanese Folk Crafts Museum, Nihon Mingeikan in Tokyo. It is a museum that
displays a collection of everyday utensils of ceramics, lacquer ware, textile,
carpentry and iron forgings. In 1972, eleven years after Yanagi’s death, theEnglish ceramist Bernard Leach published The Unknown Craftsman, a collection of
essays and articles by Yanagi. One of Yanagi’s findings was that many of the mostbeautiful utensils were manufactured by unknown craftsmen, not signed, no
trace of the maker’s identity. Why? These “objects born, not made” did not haveany pretentions, but were the result of a full identification of the maker with theobject that he was making. Moreover, explained Yanagi, these beautiful and very
accomplished objects were often the result of a spiritual journey by the maker tomake the most perfect product possible.
And there is no reason to assume that the identification of the maker withhis creation cannot be found in 21st century products, be it with the deep indigo
of Japanese blue jeans, the world’s most perfect melon, or in the finishing of a
Lexus.
Subject and object: they are much less separated in Japan than in ourwestern culture.

7• 生か死か、
それが奇問だ。
Sei ka shi ka, sore ga kimon daLife or death. That is the tricky question.
• どっちなのだ、
さーそれが奇問！
Dochi nanoda, saaa sore ga kimon
Which is it? Aaah that is the tricky question!

2. TO BE OR NOT TO BE“How do you translate in Japanese “to be or not to be”, I ask the brothers
Yamamoto Gaku, Kei and Sen, three of Japan’s best well-kown actors. The answer
is a big sigh. “Good question, the most current translation is ikirubeki ka shinubekika.” “But that has a different meaning”, I reply. “’To live or to die’” misses thepoint, the essence of the question.”
Here a number of translations:• 生きるべきか、死ぬべきか、
それが問題だ。
Ikiru beki ka, shinu beki ka, sore ga mondai da
Should I live or should I die. That is the problem.

Remarkable this struggle by Japanese theatre makers, directors, translators
and actors alike, to define the essence of Hamlet’s question. The word “to be”,
a key concept in our European culture, does not exist in Japanese. What doesthat mean? Is it because this concept “to be”, “esse” in Latin, is so evident thatyou don’t need a word for it? Is it a word, or a concept that isn’t subject forreflection?
Then the word “I”. In English just one letter, written with a capital. “I”
symbolizes your identity. In Japanese the word “I” does exist: there are evenquite a few words for it (watashi, watakushi, uchi, ore, ware, boku, kochira) but
they are not often used in conversation. Is thinking from the perspective of “I”
replaced by thinking from the group?
“To be”, “I”: how do we look at a society where such words, important for us,
do not exist?

• 生きてとどまるか、消えてなくなるか、それが問題だ。
Ikite todomaru ka, kiete nakunaru ka, sore ga mondai da
To stop living or to disappear and die. That is the problem.
• このままでいいのか、行かないのか、それが問題だ。
Konomama de ii noka, ikanai noka, sore ga mondai daJust like this is fine? Or not? That is the problem.
• やる、
やらぬ、
それが問題だ。
Yaru, yaranu, sore ga mondai da
To do it, not to do it. That is the problem.

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3. NIHONJINRON
No country exists without its own cultural identity. It is the common
denominator in which its population recognises itself. Whatever elements makeup cultural identity, language is an important factor.
Tadanobu Tsunoda (1926 – 2008), professor at Tokyo Dental and Medical
University made a very simple statement: the Japanese are Japanese because
they speak Japanese. The Japanese language, claimed Tsunoda, differs fromother languages because it is a vowel language and simply stated: this causes a
different functionality of the left and right hemispheres. Japanese brains hearmusic through the left hemisphere, and this is the opposite for western brains. I
have been one of Tsunoda’s many test persons and I had some doubts about theobjectivity and the set-up of his research, but this is not what I would like tostate here. What is of interest is the Nihonjinron, the ever-continuing odyssey by
the Japanese to define their own identity. What is it that makes Japan different
from other cultures? According to Professor Tsunoda it is not the genes, but it is
the language that provides the Japanese their identity.
In his book Bending Adversity former Financial Times Tokyo correspondent
David Pilling cites the conservative Japanese author and mathematician
Masahiko Fujiwara. Fujiwara wrote only half-jokingly in a popular 2005 bookthat the Japanese should stop trying to learn English altogether as this would
help preserve a barrier between their own exceptional culture and the rest of
the world. He told that when non-English-speaking Japanese went abroad, theypreserved the mystique of a profound culture beyond the grasp of foreigners tounderstand. As soon as they spoke in English, he said, the illusion was broken
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and foreigners realized the Japanese had nothing to say.
Shintaro Ishihara, novelist, actor, conservative politician and until 2012
governor of Tokyo, claimed that it did not serve any purpose to teach Japanesechildren English from an early stage. “Why should children learn English at
primary school? Because of globalisation? So what? Children should first learn tospeak their own language and understand their own national culture.”
The fact is that the Japanese have the lowest score in Asia when it comes totheir English speaking capabilities. And fact is that Japanese is a very different
language, in structure, grammar, precision. Japanese sentences are long and often
the last word in a sentence is the verb, including the confirmation or denial. That
is why “reading the air”, the effort to try to understand what point the speaker
would like to make, is so strongly developed in Japan. The famous Japanese tanka
poet Yamanoue no Okura (660-733) claimed that Japan “is the country where
the spirit of the language prospers”, where the literal meaning is subordinate
to intuition and emotion. That requires a close experience in a specificenvironment and that results in a very own identity that cannot be shared easily.
You will find abstract theories less in Japan. If I were to be the PR advisorof Japan, my advise would be simple: “Japan, don’t talk, just show!” My second
advise would be: learn to speak English as early as possible.

114. MAN AND LAND
Apart from the language, the physical characteristics of a country are an
important part of its cultural identity. The Meiji period (1868 – 1912), when
Japan started it spectacular modernization, was also a time when many Japanese
began to ponder the broader question of how their country’s natural features andlandscape shaped what was assumed to be its unique culture.
In 1894 the Japanese geographer and journalist Shigetaka Shiga published
his most famous book Nihon Fukeiron, “On the Japanese landscape”, in which
he eulogized the natural beauty of Japan, the moderate climate with its four
distinctive seasons, the rivers, its animals, its plants. Shiga’s vision of landscape
was a grandiose beauty embedded in the natural world that moved away fromestablished Confucian aesthetic conceptions of moral goodness.
All these natural elements helped to shape, claimed Shiga, the unique
Japanese character, the kokusui. He compared Japan with England and referredto the English naturalist John Lubbock who praised the scenic beauty of his
own country. “Surely, nothing can compare to the beauty of British scenery (asadmired by Lubbock). However, there is not even one volcanic mountain in the
United Kingdom. Japan has all the beautiful scenery that Lubbock expressed, andabove all: it has volcanic mountains, kings of the scenery between heaven andearth, everywhere in Japan, much superior!”
On March 11, 2011, the day of the Great Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami inNortheast Japan I was in the centre of Tokyo. Back in Amsterdam I asked myself
what is true of Shiga’s idea that volcano’s and earthquakes are of big influence
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on the character of the Japanese. “In The Netherlands”, I thought, “we live ina country partly created by ourselves. When there is the threat of a flooding,we counter that with higher dikes and more space for the water. In Japan you
can prepare for the effects of an earthquake by building earthquake resistant
structures, but the location and moment of each earthquake and tsunami arealways unexpected.”Three years before Shiga published his book and 37 years after Japan
opened up to the world, the Great Nobi Earthquake took place, 1891. There were
thousands of dead and many buildings collapsed - in particular those designed
by western architects and engineers. Most of the traditionally built Japanesehouses and buildings remained intact. The Nobi Earthquake had a huge impact
on the thinking in Japan about the import and use of western technologies - andeven on western ideology. The science-historian Gregory Clancey wrote in his
book Earthquake Nation that in the twenty years before 1891 most of the westernengineers in Japan advised to build in bricks and stone, often referring to the
old European cities and even Greek and Roman temples that had withstoodthousands of years. The Japanese however understood after the Great Nobi
Earthquake that they lived in a country with frequent earthquakes, volcanic
eruptions and flooding caused by typhoons. All these elements, they realized,
contributed to Japan’s cultural and national identity.
Thirty seconds after the beginning of the four minute earthquake on March
11, 2011 I stood in the middle of Tokyo, in Kayabacho in the middle of the street.
With an earthquake the danger comes from above, not from below. And there,with the ground shaking I watched hundreds of Japanese office workers coming
down via the emergency stairs, very disciplined, quiet, well prepared, everybody
waiting for his or her turn, the order of the group above self-survival andaccepting the disaster that was at hand.
Respect.

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5. JAPANESE TIME
How do the Japanese differ from the Chinese? Their relation to time.
Chinese are individualists living in the “here and now”, while their rulers(emperors, philosophers, party bosses) claim that their “Middle Kingdom” is for
eternity and that all political, economic and social developments have to be seen
in a long term context.
Japanese are no individualists. They know their position is based upon
hierarchy: identity as a result of the place in the picking order (bureaucracy,company, department, function). Dynamics is Mass x Velocity. “Japanese time” isdetermined above all by the Japanese dynamics: when the mass is the company(the organisation au lieu of the individual), it is easy to understand that Japanesedynamics are perhaps not high but steady, consistent and predictable.
“The Japanese have a keen sense of the unfolding or unwrapping of time”
and this is well described by Joy Hendry in her book Wrapping Culture. “People
familiar with Japan are well aware of the contrast between the breakneck pacemaintained by the Japanese factory worker on the one hand, and the unhurriedcontemplation to be observed in Japanese gardens or the agonizingly slow
tempo of a Noh play on the other.” What Hendry emphasizes, however, is the
meticulous, resolute way in which the Japanese segment time. This segmentation
does not follow the Western pattern, where tasks are assigned in a logicalsequence aimed at maximum efficiency and speed in implementation. The
Japanese are more concerned not with how long something takes to happen,
but with how time is divided up in the interests of properness, courtesy andtradition.
Then something different, time related. I read a study by a researcherof Tokyo University explaining why Japanese people are very strict when it
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comes to “arriving on time”. In the years during and after World War I, when
the industrialisation in Japan took off, there was a worldwide lack of iron to
manufacture rails and rolling stock. As a result the Japanese had to be extremely
efficient with the available materials, resulting in the circle lines in themunicipal areas. Also in entering and exiting the trains in a minimum of time.
Everybody (engineers, machinists, train guards, passengers) was told that there
were twenty seconds to get out and ten seconds to get into the train. And it istrue: there is no country on earth where trains are as punctual as in Japan. “Itis as if there is, since the first decades of the 20th century, a large clock hanging
above Japan that overpowers every excuse to not arrive in time.”
Surely there is another reason why not arriving in time is just not done inJapan. It creates an obligation of the latecomer vis-à-vis the other party. If he or
she waits a minute, 15 minutes, even an hour, that time could have been spent onother activities. There is nothing so awkward as being indebted to someone.
Time as one of the basic elements of society.

156. THE DEBT SOCIETY

When the lover of the journalist asks a favour from the secretary of the rulingparty, this government official tells him that he is not ready to grant a favour fornothing in return. “But I am a poor professor”, says the lover of the journalist, “I
have a second-hand car, a cheap watch and I cannot offer you any amount thathas any meaning for you.” “It does not have to be money or an object, it also canbe information, or a special idea”, says the politician. “It is my philosophy of life.
I don’t like to say ‘no’ to someone who asks me a favour, but I am not ready to dosomething for nothing. That is a bad idea, for both parties.”
One of the cohesive elements of the Japanese society is this continuous
exchange of gifts, on all levels of society, from small presents and money(discrete in an envelop) to returning favours; contrary to what the 20th century
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus: the reward can befound in the deed itself.

If you have the time and zest to read an anthropological study on theJapanese society, read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by the American
anthropologist and author Ruth Benedict. Although she had never visited
Japan, she was asked by the American Ministry of War in 1942 to write a study
on the Japanese society and the behaviour of the Japanese: they were notunderstandable for the Americans (off and on the battlefield). It is like 16th and17th century Dutch cartographers such as Blaeu and Hondius who mapped theworld without having travelled far away.
If you want to read a study on the Japanese society seen from the perspectiveof a Japanese individual vis-à-vis the Japanese society: read The Anatomy of
Self: The Individual Versus Society (1986) by Takeo Doi. Doi, psycho-analyst andpsychiatrist, lived and worked for some years in the United States and describes
in his famous book a number of concepts like Amae (“indulgent dependency“),
Omote and Ura (explicit and implicit), and Honne and Tatemae (true feelings andface to the world) that are fundamental to the way a Japanese individual relates
to society.
However, if you want to understand better the structure of the Japanesesociety without reading an anthropological or psycho-analytical study, read theoutstanding novel A Mature Woman (Onna Zakkari) by Saiichi Maruya. The bookpictures the inner workings of a major Japanese newspaper and the life of oneof its key-journalists: an independent woman, divorced, mother and ambitious.
It elucidates the gift-giving character of the Japanese society: each favour is tobe compensated with a little something, a present, a gift, money or even an idea.
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craftsmanship into the industrial process and as a country that pairs intense
scenic beauty with extremely unstable seismic conditions. As a country for greatfriendships.
But above all: Japan as a country that offers us a mirror and forces us, or atleast me, to profound self-reflection.
Radboud Molijn
June 2016

EPILOGUE
How to appreciate another society?
Perhaps only when (you imagine that) this society has disappeared.
Nihon Chinbotsu, or: Japan Sinks is a detective and disaster novel from 1973
by thriller-author Sakyo Komatsu. The Japanese government wonders why
every week a specific Shinkansen rail track subsides. At the same time a small
island far away from Tokyo has suddenly disappeared. A deep research is started.
Geologists around the world become concerned about Japan. One predicts
that the country will sink within 40 years; a Japanese geoscientist doubts theprediction, starts his calculations and realizes Japan will sink in 338.54 days (notethe accuracy!) instead of the original 40-year estimate. It becomes clear that theJapanese archipelago has been moving inexorably toward an unseen force in theJapan Trench. Now landslides, volcano eruptions and earthquakes are all overJapan and the Japanese government organizes urgency meetings with the United
Nations and all countries in the world to save its 127 million inhabitants. Old
accounts are settled. The Chinese are ready to accept Japanese citizens, but only
the doctors and engineers. The Americans accept a number of Japanese, Canada
is generous. By the end of this story most of the Japanese population find a new
homeland in America, Brazil, Europe, Australia, etc.
Reading this book my question was: how will the world remember Japan 75
years after most of the Japanese will have assimilated and integrated in their newsocieties?
My best guess: as a highly developed society that is no better or worse thanours, but at the same time a society based upon different concepts, including
the role of the individual vis-à-vis society, with a different psychology, anotherconcept of “I”, another perception of time, a very different language and allthat results out of this. It will be remembered as a country that re-introduced
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