UNTIL I WAS 24 and first visited Japan, my relationship with the country — such that one could be said to exist — was of the most abstract kind. Strangely, perhaps, for Japan was inseparable from what I understood as my self: I was a yonsei, a fourth-generation Japanese American, and the food my family ate, the fairy tales I read, the sect of Buddhism to which we halfheartedly belonged, the myths we believed in, were all descended from Japan. “Act like a samurai,” my mother — who is not Japanese, and who like many other Asians of her generation regarded the country with a mix of admiration and disdain, her appreciation of the culture tempered by secondhand memories of Japan’s wartime atrocities — would say to me when I cried: a rebuke that seemed to acknowledge those contradictory beliefs.
So I was unprepared for how profoundly affecting I found the country in person. It wasn’t just that I finally understood how much of my aesthetic life had been wrought by Japan; it was that I understood that I was somewhere that had determined much of the modern world’s aesthetic preoccupations. It felt stubbornly sui generis, a place that had remained distinctly apart, despite all its trappings of modernity and globalization, a place whose visual and artistic sensibility, though much of it originated in China and Korea, felt irreducible and inimitable.
In this issue, we pay tribute to the culture that changed food, pop music, fashion, architecture and even our morning caffeine rituals. (The fact that you can now get matcha — over ice, with milk — in almost any medium-size city in the West is akin to ordering sacramental wine for fun: a ritual so removed from its context that it’s transformed into something different altogether.) And Japan’s influence extends beyond the material; our understanding of the beauty of the imperfect, of the joy of tidiness, of the power of cuteness, of the appeal of seasonal cuisine: All of that is derived from Japanese concepts or inventions.
BUT CELEBRATING A culture is different from venerating a country — Americans out in the world understand this distinction firsthand. And although this issue isn’t about Japan’s geopolitical past or present, nor its domestic problems and challenges, reading the articles in it is to be confronted with Japan’s modern history: the brutality it inflicted upon others; the brutality inflicted upon it; its ancient ideas that endured; its postwar innovations that led to paradigm shifts in almost every creative medium. Some of those who contributed stories are Asians of various ethnicities — the writers at large Aatish Taseer and Ligaya Mishan are of Indian and Pakistani, and Filipino heritage, respectively; Pico Iyer, a decades-long resident of Japan, is also of Indian descent — and it was fascinating to see in their pieces a complicated ambivalence toward a nation that, for better and worse, helped shape the 21st-century Asian continent.
Reading many of the articles in this issue also confirmed my belief that Japan is a particularly difficult place to write about. Not because its people are inscrutable — as goes the dumb old stereotype about Asian people in general — but because something about it seems to elude even the most dedicated, longtime or enthusiastic observer. Japan’s sophisticated court society, as well as the centuries of isolation before it was forced open to the West by the Americans in 1853, allowed the nation a sustained period in which its culture could mature unchecked, free from outside influence or threat — what emerged was a framework so well developed that not even the metaphorical earthquakes of the next two centuries (the rise of Japanese imperialism, war, defeat, occupation by the American army, the triumph of globalism) could shake it. If creative people look to the culture now with envy, it’s because it feels both completist and magically able to take a foreign object or concept and make it not just its own but definitional. The Japanese didn’t invent blue jeans, but any serious denimhead will tell you they make some of the best around. Ditto sushi (that originated in China and Southeast Asia), whisky and convenience stores (Americans now turn to Japan for these totems of Americanness). I can’t think of another nation in recent history that borrowed so freely from the culture of their occupiers, transformed that culture into something novel, and theirs, and then exported it back to its place of origin.
Ever since that first visit, I’ve returned to Japan once a year, every year (except during the pandemic). The country undeniably belongs to the world. But as I walk through the strangely suburban backstreets of Tokyo — which Taseer characterizes as “a town where a dozen Times Squares had been set down in a low-lying city of neighborhoods” — I always have the powerful sense that if Japan were to once again close its borders, its people not only wouldn’t mind but would make something different: maybe something new, or maybe something old made into something new. Whatever it would be, I would want to see it.
Background: Mari Maeda and Yuji Oboshi. Photo assistant: Caleb Henderson
Hanya Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T Magazine.
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