A Japanese sentence is often as mongrel as a Japanese street. While walking through a shopping arcade in Osaka — here a tatami tearoom, there a French cafe, in between a McDonald’s — you’ll notice Chinese characters, known as kanji, on many storefront signs. Elsewhere are words written in a simplified Japanese syllabary (hiragana), and also in another syllabary (katakana), generally used for transliterating foreign terms; both were developed in the ninth century. You’ll even come across Roman letters, as well as Arabic numerals, making for a mixture drawn from many places that remains exclusively Japanese.
The result is what Christopher Seeley, a scholar of languages, has called the most complicated system of writing in use in the modern world. It’s also a system largely inaccessible to those who read only Chinese. Even as the Japanese were relying entirely on Chinese characters 14 centuries ago, they placed them in a word order that was distinctly Japanese. And when foreign items began flooding into the country in the 19th century during the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese flouted traditional logic by transliterating the word for “logic,” for example, into homophonic Chinese characters, rendering the term doubly impenetrable.
Many of us know that Japan took its Buddhism, its urban design, its flower-viewing rites and several of its art forms from China, often by way of Korea. You feel that influence today everywhere from the Confucian values that order society to the 72 microseasons that determine what quite a few of my Japanese neighbors eat and what they wear. After the country was forced to open up in 1853 with the arrival of four ships led by the American commodore Matthew C. Perry following 214 years of official isolation, suddenly everything Western — garden parties, waltzing, even rabbits — became the rage. And after being defeated in war in 1945, the ever-practical Japanese decided to import many of the products and customs — right up to democracy — of their conqueror.
In every case, however, importation led to transformation. By the late 1800s, the British diplomat and scholar W.G. Aston was noting that “the Japanese are never contented with simple borrowing … they are in the habit of modifying extensively everything which they adopt from others, and impressing on it the stamp of the national mind.” As an island nation accustomed to centuries of seclusion, Japan has always prided itself on its uniqueness and stressed its distance from everywhere else. That spirit, akin to a fortress mentality, is accompanied by a commitment to harmony that moves the Japanese to stitch every influence from near or far into a single distinctive whole. Thus, Buddhist beliefs were woven into indigenous Shinto customs to the point where the two became part of a single Japanese tradition. My Japanese friends in Nara think nothing of heading to the Shinto shrine when a baby is born, and then to a Buddhist temple — sometimes in the same space — as soon as Grandma dies.
Where many countries see foreign cultures as a threat, Japan tends to treat them as adornments that, once adapted, can make Japan even richer. Look at sushi, which many of us think of as the quintessence of Japan. In truth, it was farmers along the Mekong River — where southern China meets Laos and northern Thailand — who first came up with the idea of preserving fish by storing it between wedges of cooked rice. Yet it was the Japanese who cultivated 2,000 different kinds of rice and required apprentice chefs to spend up to two years learning how to cook and season it (without ever touching fish).
Often, in fact, Japan so improves on what it takes from anywhere that it finds its imports reimported. Osamu Tezuka, known as the king of manga for the 700 graphic novels he created from the 1940s through the ’80s, grew up on Walt Disney films, famously seeing “Bambi” more than 80 times; he surely never expected that in time Disney might be taking its cues from him — “The Lion King,” for one, seems to owe a lot to his 1966 “Kimba the White Lion.” Students of the tea ceremony in San Francisco might be surprised to learn that scholars have argued that this most refined of Japanese customs may well have been inspired by the Catholic Mass that European priests brought to Japan in the 16th century. Just notice how the cup is ceremoniously lifted high, a white cloth used to wipe its edges clean.
None of this is singular in our postmodern world: After all, the California roll is thought to have been invented in the 1960s or ’70s in the United States, earlier the birthplace of chop suey and pepperoni pizza. Yet Japan remains in a category all its own, frequently taking what it needs from anywhere, then adding its own grace notes: On Valentine’s Day, for example, only women give presents to men, whereas on White Day, a holiday originating in Japan and taking place one month later, men return the favor. The custom has now spread across East Asia.
Yet however much the country imports foreign products (and some ideas), it has traditionally remained wary of foreign beings. In the Britain where I grew up, chicken tikka masala became a national dish in part because of the huge number of immigrants streaming in from India, Pakistan and especially Bangladesh; in Japan, where strict immigration laws have long discouraged transplants, I devour Indian curries made by young Japanese who have traveled to India, mastered its recipes and then returned to serve up more delicate versions of what they learned in Delhi. There are more than 2,000 Indian restaurants in Japan (some run by Nepalis), but only about 50,000 Indians in residence.
Such hard-and-fast divisions are fading a little now that many Japanese are marrying foreigners. When the half-Haitian tennis star Naomi Osaka was invited to light the torch at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Japan seemed to be acknowledging that its face was changing with the times.
But centuries-old habits don’t die quickly, and sometimes Japan seems to change constantly on the surface so as not to change much deep down. Many of my neighbors still seem keener to welcome foreigners for two weeks than for two years, even though the nation’s rapidly declining population rate demands foreign workers. The fact that the country keeps its distance from the larger world has made it irresistible to tourists; it’s not like anywhere else. But in a global economy where most countries speak the same language, Japan is also left ever more alone.
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