Wednesday, August 22, 2012

In Japan, 2012

In Japan, 2012


It is easy to travel in Japan. On both of my trips to Japan I traveled alone and felt totally comfortable. Tokyo reminds me of the England I grew up in during the 60's:  the smell of coal smoke in the air, driving on the left, tea, small spaces and lanes, a public politeness, lots of French pastry, densely populated towns but plenty of green space, 3-speed bicycles, and the preponderance of trains. It is odd and unexpected. I am simply comfortable in Japan. 

We use the word in as a synonym for being there, or visiting. In implies being enclosed or surrounded by, with the implication of penetration. I suppose can never really be in Japan, not like the native Japanese must be. I can experience Japan, perhaps even be mindfully there, but never see it with native eyes. My Japan will always be foreign, my eyes are always those of the ganjin; yet Japan is such a developed modern society, so resplendent with the familiar: wide screen TVs, cars and electronics; that it is familiar -- but a familiar which has evolved from a different mind-set and aesthetic.

For me the attraction of Japan is exactly this soupy blend of strangeness and familiarity, a nutritive broth in which foreignness floats like a twisted strand of noodle in udonic harmony. I visit Japan to sharpen my wits and my senses; to live for a time in a new scene half cut off from all language derived meaning, to wallow in ostensible politeness; to eat the unusual and to wander and relish all the daily visual surprises. There is a real freedom in being lost in another culture surrounded by spoken language unintelligible to me and the writing unreadable.


All this -- yet I have been to Japan only twice and briefly each time. In 2008 late in the year. I visited Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagasaki and the Aso volcano. Then I went again in the spring of 2012 to see Osaka, sail on its bay, hike the Kii peninsula's Kumano Kodo and visit the remote and beautiful southern island of Yakushima.

Each of these trips began here at home with a planning stage where I read guides, scoured the Internet and listened to conversational Japanese in the hope I would at least be able to say: Please, Thank You and Excuse Me in a convincing way. The language lessons marched on 
for weeks, with CD after CD popping in and out of black plastic slits. An hour a day I listened and struggled to create memorable patterns of sound which I could fix in my memory. Eventually I could visualize myself finding my way across Tokyo to Ueno Park with a simple Uenokōen wa doko des ka? or greeting my hosts with a hearty morning greeting: Ohayōgozaimasu

However difficult speaking was for me, it was child's play compared to reading the same : おはようございます! Reading Japanese seems to me an impossible task. I know only a very few Japanese symbols. The one for 'man/male' which I think of as the running window: 男 -- necessary in finding the correct toilet and onsen bath doors. Then there are the symbols for 'entrance' : 入口 which I think of it as something like 'pointing the way in' (to the square). That the symbols for 'exit' begin with a figure like a 5 pointed candelabra 
(出) completes my ability to read any Japanese. 




I think I begin a trip with an anticipated vision of what the trip is to be, what it is to mean, what I will experience. This imagining shapes the experience. It is a kind of deterministic foretelling

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