Japan: Final impressions, Osaka, October 28, 1981

What better place to write my final impressions of Japan than here, sitting in one of the very few seats provided in the Osaka airport with a tv blaring nonsense right beside me?  Having driven for almost an hour through a sea of industrial crap – Japan’s ‘countryside.’  Every inch of the landscape seems to have been claimed by industry, and the air is thick with smog and diesel fumes.  From this standpoint, it will be a relief to leave. It will also be a relief to leave behind the expense – of food, accommodation, and transport.  

There are also a number of things about Japanese culture that I find disconcerting – some almost frightening, especially if I consider that this may be the direction in which all of us are heading.  These are the main things that I find somewhat off-putting:

•          Their obsession with ‘face’ and appearance.  Women, men and children clearly pay a lot of attention to their make-up, hair style, and dress, with ‘not a hair out of place.’  This focus on presentation, combined with their decidedly formal, stiff and reserved mannerisms, contrasts sharply with the casual and carefree styles of North America and Europe.  The focus on appearance and perfection is also manifest in parks and gardens where trees are carefully pruned, propped and wired into fantastic, and quite unnatural shapes, often, at least to my eye, displeasing.  I’m more at home in the untamed and often messy forests of the West Coast, where folks in jeans and untucked t-shirts care not a whit about how they look.

from my journal

•          Their seeming addiction to external sources of entertainment such as tv, radio, electronic games, and comics.  On buses, on the metro, in their homes, everyone is focussed on something – most frequently tv.  It may be primarily a way of preserving privacy, and avoiding engagement with others.  There was a distinct absence of eye contact between and among people on the street or on buses and in the metro. And certainly no smiles or nods of acknowledgement.  The ultimate of the Japanese addiction to games can be seen in the famous Pachinko halls, where rows of Japanese men, and some women, sit zombi-like watching the little silver balls drop though the slots.  And almost all of them are smoking.
•          The amount of gratuitous, and graphic, violence portrayed – on tvs (which are often playing in restaurants, shopping malls, and other public spaces), in comics, and in pornographic magazines and posters.  It seems at odds with the uber-polite and reserved Japanese ‘nature,’ or at least what is most often seen of it.  How far under the surface is their fascination with violence?  Where does it come from?  

If I had only one word to sum up my impression of Japan and Japanese culture, it would be ‘DECADENT.’  Everywhere I felt the weight of too much and too many.  A people who have it all, and have had it all for a very long time.  Who cannot help but show that they have it all, and who have come to depend on that show.  There is about the Japanese a quiet, very subtle arrogance – frequently their formal politeness is tinged with an underlying disdain. We seldom saw a smile on the face of anyone over twenty.  Their expressions, their actions, bespeak an incredible intensity.  Perhaps it is the pressure of competition – so many people vying for so few places…

But, but, but… the taste of Japanese fruits and vegetables is beyond almost anything I’ve tasted ‘back home.’  I had forgotten the flavour of a tomato, an apple, a pear.  Even the carrots are juicier and sweeter.  Considering the scale on which these things must be grown to meet the needs of such a large population, it seemed all the more amazing that the fruit and vegetables taste like they’ve been grown in the store’s back garden, and just picked a couple of hours ago.  Even in the smallest ‘corner groceries’ we found wonderful produce, beautifully arranged.  But… the price tags on all of these items was at least double, and often triple, the price of similar (but not the same, at least taste-wise) items at home. 

One of the most amazing food items we saw, mostly in specialty stores, were the hand-picked mushrooms, some almost a foot long, and clearly very fresh.  They were often carefully arranged on beds of ferns and pine boughs.  They were fantastically expensive, clearly for the elite few with refined epicurean tastes (ie. not us).

I also loved window-shopping here in Japan, gazing at exquisitely arranged windows of sweets (Japanese love their candy!), vases, beautiful fabrics and papers (I bought a couple of notebooks just for the paper they contained), and of course, kimono silks.  Sometimes a shop window would contain just a simple tatami mat and a framed picture or a plant – or one hand-bag or statuette - truly a ‘picture-window.’

And we enjoyed walking in residential areas, their streets lined with wonderful potted plants and bonsais.  A fully mature oak or maple tree, just 8” high, with gnarly bark and multiple twisting branches.  Truly works of art.  Houses used a lot of stained cedar and bamboo.  Sometime there’d be a wonderful old pieces of wood worked artfully into the frame of house or shop – a simple elegance and grace, a pleasure to the eye, and to the touch.  A wonderful richness of natural, muted colours and textures.  

On the funny side, we were often amused by the small-ness of things in Japan:  little toy-like cars and trucks with funny meep-meep horns scooting around the narrow city streets.  Miniature washing machines.  Little spaces crammed with tiny things.  Tiny bottles of milk and packets of biscuits.  In a place where space is at a premium, there’s a necessity for little things that will fit in tight spaces.

And we were tickled by the imaginative ways in which the Japanese use – and mis-use – the English language:

 

On t-shirts: ‘The Sporting,’ ‘Smart Girl,’ ‘Lovely Cluck,’ ‘May Out But Classic.’  

On a coffee shop menu: ‘Coffee Cook,’ ‘Smart Coffee,’ Nice Coffee.’ 

Soft drink: Pocari Sweat 

Non-dairy creamer:  Creap 

Club sign: Toropical Banana Fish 

Popular biscuit brand: Lovely Cream Sand 

Shop sign: Pritty Fashion House 

Sign on the bathroom door at Mrs. Uno’s house: ‘On Bathing,’ which flipped over to say ‘Next Please.’ 

Our 'next please' is Taiwan, where we’ll be in just a few hour’s time….