Visiting Asia can be disconcerting for an American.
Trips to Europe, and even to Australia and New Zealand, are about as exotic as going to New Orleans: The people are sometimes a little hard to understand; the food is different; and the climate can be distracting. But, by and large, the people, the customs and the infrastructure are so similar to America’s that nothing really screams “foreign.”
Asia isn’t like that. It provides the strong counterpoint to the West that strips away the familiarity with one’s own culture and allows one to see it with fresh eyes.
Returning from visiting family in Japan, it’s no exaggeration to say that I was shocked when I arrived back in the Western hemisphere. Westerners look so unhealthy! Japan is a land of trains and pedestrians. In a country of millions, cars are few, which is just as well because the Japanese are terrible drivers. People walk, sit, and then walk some more. The Japanese are lithe and agile. People who would scarcely be called plump in America are considered to be embarrassingly fat in Japan.
The Japanese take food very seriously. It’s not enough that it be edible: it must be pretty. There are food advertisements everywhere, and there are whole streets lined with restaurants, but no one eats large quantities. You walk to the restaurant, eat a little, then return to walking.
The West is dirty, messy and wasteful. People in Japan live in small houses and tiny apartments and all of these things are close together (which makes sense if you take the train to get there and then walk), so the area that needs to be maintained is very compact. People are able to keep their houses clean and neat. The towns and cities can keep the public places clean and neat. Families don’t accumulate the great masses of goods that Americans do, so they can actually take care of what they have. Japanese don’t gather at home, so they don’t need big houses. Family and friends meet at the many small restaurants.
People in America simply have more than they can care for. So we end up with decrepit houses, trashy roadsides, disintegrating roads, deteriorating bridges, failing utilities and neglected public spaces. America is a land of waste.
Since things are done on a small, personal scale, the Japanese pay attention to details. People do all of the small chores by hand, so things carry the marks of individuals. In the West, it seems that people have forgotten how to use their hands for anything other than stroking keypads, relying instead on multitudes of machines of varying horsepower. That produces a crude sameness in everything, from the stores to the foods, from the yards to the parks. America is a land of massive excess, not finesse. America is a land of might, but atrophied muscles.
The care of small things in Japan extends to individuals. Owning few things encourages people to choose their possessions carefully, and being attentive to detail, those pieces are always stylish. People dress in elegant simplicity, and their dress accommodates their quietly active lifestyles. I’m certain that Japanese women wear makeup, but it never looks like they do. Piercings and tattoos are virtually non-existent. The most one sees are Anime-inspired hair colors. The Japanese are a beautiful people who look like gazelles next to the plodding cattle of the West.
Japan is a technologically advanced, globally-integrated country, but it remains mostly closed to foreigners. Westerners are sufficiently uncommon that they are still stared-at, and a pair of young women collapsed into giggles when one had the temerity to speak her halting English to me, and I answered her. The homogeneity of the culture makes it easy for the Japanese (and challenging for the American) to get along since everyone knows what to do, and exactly what response it will invoke. That makes the society very polite and orderly, especially compared to the casual indignities (and frequent acts of violence) that Americans inflict upon each other.
Japan certainly has its share of foolishness. It continues to expand its coastal cities, even as sea-level rise threatens them, and its continued reliance upon seafood leaves much of the country’s agriculture primitive. It struggles with the same decline in birthrate as other developed countries, and it is heavily indebted although, not surprisingly, its debt is held mostly by its citizens rather than foreign interests.
But there are things America could learn from Japan: pay attention to little things; live modestly; use technology only when it benefits people, not to replace or disempower them; plan public projects for long-term benefit rather than to perpetuate an unsustainable past; and stop blundering along in pursuit of ever more stuff while letting what we already have, including ourselves, decay.
John Blasiak lives in Greenfield.