bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 24–26
by David Anido
The ancient myth of Japan was first borne in its Chinese name, Chipangu (islands of gold), which was anglicized as “Japan”. The softer Japanese name for the archipelago, Nippon, was not transliterated.
The Chinese Emperor Kublai Khan tried to invade the islands of gold in 1281, but his bickering generals lost their fleets to the “divine winds” or kamikaze. Marco Polo heard about Chipangu from Kublai Khan and the myth of secret gold beyond imagination returned with him to prosperous and adventurous Venice. Neither Kublai Khan nor Marco Polo ever visited Japan.
It is said that, years later Columbus, while seeking the Spice Islands, hoped that he would discover the golden islands. But, like elusive Atlantis, Japan remained mythical and isolated until Portuguese missionaries arrived there in the 16th century. The Japanese did not like these Christians who had called their language “the devil’s language”, so they got rid of them, except for a small pocket of Dutch who remained behind in Nagasaki during the Tokugawa isolation. The wily Dutch provided a meagre contact with the outside world — particularly when gaijin (foreign) shipwrecked sailors, carried onto the rocks and shoals of Kyushu by northern-flowing currents, brought foreign maps, charts, and languages to the Japanese archipelago.
Japan knew it could not escape the world forever, but its leaders were determined to remain hidden for as long as possible. Internal battles kept feudal Japan in a flux of power-plays which was stemmed by the isolationist authority of the Tokugawa regime.
The modern myth of post-industrial Japan is that it is still a myth and still feudal. Many believe that Japan remains as mercurial and as unpredictable as the eruptions of its volcanoes: the shocks of its temblors that give the islands ten percent of the world’s seismic activity; and, for good measure, the tsunamis that thrash and flay its coasts.
Japan performs in the world to a varied audience of lovers, haters, bashers, revisionists, apologists, tourists, carpetbaggers, and scholars. The key question most asked is: who are the Japanese, and where in the world are they going?
No wonder that the efficiency of its Nissans, the speed of its bullet-train shinkansens, and the eight-hour daily world focus of the Tokyo Stock Market on global financial affairs, offer the logical western mind a seemingly comprehensible prism through which to understand and to criticize “the floating world”, as author Kazuo Ishiguro calls his former homeland.
Like a comet, Japan has entered the dying years of a deadly century as the second-brightest economic light in the world. Japan saw first hand with the rest of the world the lies and ghoulish behaviour of communists and fascists, the denizens of the post-industrial revolution. And Japan’s neighbours around the Pacific, including the United States and Canada, witnessed similar monstrous and unacceptable behaviour from Japan. But in a world of instant communication, the assumption can be made that peaceful behaviour can prevail in a cooperative atmosphere. Japan is in an ideal position to contribute to this atmosphere because it is rich and it is respected for its ability to meet extraordinary challenges.
For the memory of 50 years ago and for its brilliant reconstruction since then, Japan is taken seriously – with both fear and respect. Asian neighbours entreat Japan to be honest about historic shortcomings which hurt most of them so much. Contrition is possible if the global will and the marketplace can make it so.
In the mind of the sceptic, the enigma remains — is Japan a reformed alcoholic who might revert back to “the bottle” if isolated or provoked? It is probable that, if Japan is isolated by the world from human exchange, commerce and natural resources, we can expect the empire to strike back. But few western countries care to remember that only just over a century ago many of them were involved in similar brutal imperial behaviour with the added obscenities of racism and slavery. Amnesia is a convenient moral stance among states.
Japan has achieved half a century of geopolitical sobriety, and has created a successful Asian democracy in the world. No western or Asian country can with justice take a morally higher road today than Japan whose democracy is working with all the successes, failures, and scandals that a free press and informed citizenry make public.
It is said that after a few days in Japan you can write a book about it; after a few years you can write a page about it; and after a decade you have been absorbed by it and can write nothing. However, one way to understand Japanese people is to know that often it is what remains unsaid that is better understood than what is said. Communication begins by observation with patience.
The empirical western mind is comforted by the logic, statistics, tangibles, and certainties of prediction about Japan’s future presented by the same pundits who promise also to predict interest rates and forecast weather. For the Japanese, silence is golden.
In a geo-strategic competitive world, no country remains an island — not even an island. Each is an integral part of the cobweb of satellites, fax machines, TV cameras, and trade routes of the “global village”. Networks have corners to hide in, but the spider of information has access to every part of the cobweb where there are no corners but only links across links.
The concept of democracy is fuelled today, as never before, by the free flow of ideas that cannot be censored or controlled like commodities at the borders of a state. Samizdat, perestroika, and glasnost are three new words in the English (sic) language which illustrate the power of democratic ideas and the flow of information. Japan is inextricably linked to this flow and is contributing to it.
Japan is an economic giant skilled also in the ability to create miniatures. Japan strides the economic globe like a colossus, but is capable of keeping the cultural privacy of the tatami room in a world demanding transparency. For this right to privacy, the Japanese are often misunderstood and are accused of being cryptic or superficial. Lovers, sceptics, revisionists, and bashers all articulate views of Japan; but still demystification is elusive.
Asao Shin’ichiro, on assuming the Presidency of the Japan Foundation in 1992, said that “Japanese themselves and the country from which they come are still shrouded in mystery. Cultural exchange must be directed with renewed determination at remedying this situation. The rest of the world should be able to see our faces and know what kind of people we are.”
Cultural exchange, in the broadest sense (eg. arts, science, tourism, scholarship, environment), is an increasingly important aspect of relations among countries, though this is often overlooked because such exchanges sometimes clash with official policies and exigencies of the treasury.
International cultural exchange does not imply that all that is seen is exemplary. What is implied is that rhetoric, propaganda, official posturing, and falsehood can be exploded by a more profound understanding of the strengths, weaknesses, traditions, achievements, and evolution of a people.
Cultural exchange has no strategy or policy (unless it is “cultural diplomacy” or propaganda) because participants make up their own minds about what they see and experience. This gives the citizens of all countries the power to apply knowledge to judgments on the nature of a country and its behaviour in a democratically international fashion. No ideology or policy can stop such insight.
Cultural exchange begins with a knowledge of languages. Japanese, with kanji and kana, is certainly one of the most difficult languages for an Indo-European to learn. But, in the dialogue, it takes a Japanese at least an equivalent two to three years of hard study to master an alphabetical language like English or French. Japanese is no more “the devil’s language” than are English or French depending on which is native to the speaker.
There are two aspects of Japanese culture that lead from the language. The first is that the kanji represent an aesthetic of communication that is rendered in the art form of calligraphy. The nearest representation in western culture might be the illuminated manuscript painstakingly crafted to beautify a text.
The second aspect is to understand that the “search for excellence” in the Japanese context is just that — the “search”. Excellence is never attained, however perfect the product. Improvement is always possible. Such wisdom is exportable.
In Japan, the cultural road has no beginning and no end because life and achievement are a continuum. Thus a westerner must learn to accept Japanese and Asian culture as a new dimension — not as a balance of similarities and differences with, in its own right, an equally sophisticated western culture influenced by Greek philosophy, the Roman Empire, monotheism, and various revolutions.
For two millennia, Japan has digested foreign influences carefully and without international coercion. Buddhism from India, via China and Korea, came as a means of scholarly and artistic learning — but not to replace the native animism of Shinto.
Japan, throughout its history, has added dimensions without tampering with the bases of its evolving “traditional” culture. Most western countries throughout history have been invaded by foreigners. European cultures have evolved through the transfer of genes, languages, and cultures by trade and warfare.
In Japan, foreign cultural influences were “screened” long before being absorbed. The Chinese characters of the kanji were imported from China, but are used with different pronunciations and without tones. The vernacular written language, the hiragana, added flexibility to the grammar and to the calligraphy of scribes, and the katakana script gave a dimension to acceptable foreign words to be used but not necessarily to be assimilated.
The ancient fine art of calligraphy dealt gracefully with kanji and hiragana — but the “ugly” katakana was seldom used as art except to comment on foreign cultures. Perhaps the nearest equivalent in western aesthetics is the Italian bella figura (the beautiful) versus the bruta figura (the ugly). Whatever genes were imported were never imported by invasion or conquest but rather by assimilation, and often, denial.
In the west, the myth of the Asian was one of fear and distance. The Mongols and other ancestors of the Japanese sped across the plains of Eurasia on horseback, past the Urals, to the Danube.
The Roman Emperor Constantine, who sowed the seeds of (Judaeo) Christianity in his pagan empire created an eastern capital at Constantinople as the barbarians poured west into the Italian peninsula and captured Rome. A thousand years later, the Ottoman Turks, also arguably part-ancestors of the Japanese, took Byzantium and turned a Christian city into Moslem Istanbul.
Unlike the Vandals, Goths, and Visigoths who had taken the western Roman empire, the Turks were monotheists – though this made no difference to the objectives of the Crusaders. Asians were Asians, and the cliché was that east and west did not meet – except quietly in trade or openly in war.
Long before all this happened, as the cultural tectonic plates of Europe and Asia collided in war — or in trade along the Silk Road — other Asians crossed the ice-bridge of the Bering Strait, and the islands of Diomede, and settled the latterday Americas with Asian blood. This wave of homo sapiens, following the hunt of the mammoth, spread in tribes across the continents bringing prehistoric Asian cultures to the Atlantic coast.
As European empires such as Venice declined, and the fall of Constantinople reinforced fears of marauding Asians, the explorers Giovanni Caboto and Christoforo Colombo sailed westward through the pillars of Hercules toward their destiny — the meeting with the “Asians” of the Atlantic who were to be called “Indians”.
It is an irony of history that Sanscrit was the precursor of both the Indo-European (Caucasian) and Indo-Persian (Asian) languages, the alphabetic and the hieroglyphic. The word “Indian”, in retrospect, may not have been such a misnomer if the imagination is allowed to be retroactive and to trace civilization back to where there was no east or west in the Indus Valley.
The world has come almost full circle as caravels capable of crossing the Atlantic, with the Arab invention of the lateen sail and Arab techniques of navigation, made landfall in the Americas. The circle was finally to be closed by the brilliant voyages of Captain James Cook, who first brought the science of navigation to an art form.
When Commander Perry’s “black ships” threatened the Japanese Shogun with American guns in the name of trade, Japan added the world to its other dimensions. The Emperor Meiji sent his foreign minister as head of the Iwakura Mission to the advanced imperial world of the west to study the infrastructures of the Industrial Revolution and the political and economic systems of major powers.
Superficially, much was imported (including, sadly, the virus of militant imperialism), but little was permitted to sink deep. Like a growing onion, new layers were added to protect the centre.
The question of today is whether the 21st century will bring a sea-change to break the millennia-old mystique of a secretive Japan. The evidence is that Japan officially will become “global”, while much of the traditional culture will remain “silent” in the “village”. This may be an ideal balance of dimensions for a people who are so deeply rooted in native traditions and myths of a rising sun, a chrysanthemum throne, mirrors, swords, and jewels.
No two democracies function identically, so it is foreseeable that Japan will offer the example of “first-world” Asian democracy, rooted in its culture, but working in concert with other democracies and their myriad cultures. The challenge will be that more than 100 million Japanese have little to do with the outside world except for what they see through television and tourism. Like other island peoples, their island is as much a refuge as it is a launching pad for knowledge and commerce.
Japan may have discovered the new wave for international democratic life. To be proud and knowledgeable of one’s own cultural history gives comfort and stability in a changing world because proven traditions breed self-confidence.
Japanese dynamism is Japan’s greatest human resource. Japan will only remain an enigma to those who wish it to become “more western”, and will only remain a myth to those who do not study its language, culture, and performance in the world.
It is in this light that all countries can be judged by the international community and guided away from predatory behaviour. The moribund legacy of the 20th century teaches a lesson — that war, genocide, poverty, and humiliation are evil and are avoidable if groups of nations cooperate against aggression. The lesson for the 21st century is that no nation must ever be alienated because now the cobweb of the planet is interconnected to the benefit or peril of all.
Japan can add a formidable dimension to the world that goes beyond its economic prowess. The dimension is Asia, and the challenge is how to strengthen domestically their historic cultural roots while, internationally, reaching into a wider world of shared traditions, products, and enterprise.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 24–26. Read the rest of this issue →
