Japan is a country of beauty, depth and surprises, says English-American writer Pico Iyer who has lived there for 32 years.
Hōkanji Temple, Kyoto, Japan Photo: Daniil Vnoutchkov / Unsplash
Pico tells Wallace Chapman his first time to Japan was on a stopover – not by choice – and he decided to walk around the "town" at Narita Airport.
"I walked around the town, which was small streets, wooden houses, a beautiful 1000-year-old temple. It was a late October day which means in Japan blazing blue skies and the first turning of the leaves to scarlet and gold and lemon-yellow… and something in it felt familiar. I thought 'I know this place. I know it better than the street where I grew up in England, I know it better than my apartment in New York and if I don't come back here something in me will always remain unresolved'."
By the time Pico boarded his plane, he'd decided to move there.
Three years later, he made that happen, and within three weeks of arriving met his Japanese wife, Hiroko Takeuchi.
"She is from the ancient capital of Kyoto, she sells punk clothes, she roars around the neighbourhood on a motorbike. She couldn't look more international and 21st-century. Every morning she wakes up, heats up tea, gathers her father's favourite snack and she puts the tea and the snack out for her father, even though he died six years ago. As far as she's concerned, she has breakfast every day with her departed father.
"She belongs to this Shintō universe that I can't really penetrate – which is wonderful."
While Westerners are encouraged to speak up and have their say, Japanese people are more interested in harmony, Pico says. Photo: Pico Iyer / Twitter
"The ideal date in japan involves two people going to a film, watching it, enjoying it, then going back home without saying a word about the film. If you start talking you're only going to divide yourself and be apart.
"One of the startling things when you meet a Japanese person, her interest is not in telling her opinions, giving you her business card, rattling on about herself, but finding out what makes you comfortable, what's your favourite kind of tea, what would you most like to do this afternoon?"
The Japanese love of harmony even extends to the sports field, he says.
"[Japanese] are not playing to win, they're playing not to lose.
"[Westerners] think of winning as the thing everyone wants to do – especially in a sporting context – but in Japan, winning is not so good because that means somebody else loses. You're thinking about the harmony of everybody else, whether you're driving on the road or playing a sport, you don't want to separate yourself from the people around you in Japan."
- Related: Pico Iyer on how to stay still (Nine to Noon, February 2015)
People visiting Japan for the first time are struck by the modern, zany, wacky, innovative stuff, but if you stay longer you'll feel you've actually gone back in time, Pico says.
His own neighbourhood, in a suburb of Nara, looks like a Steven Spielberg stage set, he says: "no temples, no shrines, no crooked little lanes".
But Nara is also a very old city which happens to be home to 1200 wild deer.
"My daily life is in a neighbourhood that couldn't be more anonymous and generic and yet I'm on the outskirts of this place that's ancient and deep and ruled by deer and filled with spirits.
"When we think of Japan from afar, we think bullet trains and futuristic cities and department stores, but the heart of the country is a sense of neighbourhood – which is hard to get in big cities."
The more we can access the world secondhand, the more important it becomes to visit places firsthand, Pico says.
"If any of your listeners were to arrive in Kyoto tomorrow and start walking the streets of this big western-seeming city, I can almost guarantee they would find surprises, they'd get lost, they'd be happy about being lost, they'd see things they could never see in any other country. Even though they could access so much of Kyoto on their laptops, there's no substitute for the strangeness and beauty of encountering it in the flesh."
Pico Iyer's latest book is A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations.
