...The sense of complete safety; I can wear the most ridiculous clothes without fear of embarrassment or assault. Never having to worry about prying hands near my wallet, even in the densest crowd. A sense of being, if not in the future, at least in a parallel world where people are quite a bit more refined, well-mannered and intelligent than I'm used to. A pervading calm inhibition. The mechanical tenderness of soothing lift music. The women, their manner, their faces, their legs, their hair...
Here's another recent entry:
Japan is -- continues to be -- the most different society I know. While it may superficially look like any number of other advanced modern cultures, this place has something very, very strange going on just below the surface. I've been fishing about for a word or phrase to describe one important dimension of this strangeness, a thing I pick up here as I move around. The first word that occurs to me is "motherlove". But perhaps a better term would be "ambient impersonal tenderness". Japan is a society shockingly full of ambient impersonal tenderness, overlapping with tender-mindedness, shading into tweeness...
...the other night at Vacant the dynamic between the panelists was completely different. There was indeed something "vacant" about the conversation, but also something kind, even tender. Two women photographers were questioned by a male photographer, Masafumi Sanai. I was struck by the casually caressing way Sanai asked his questions and the tenderness with which he interjected his "yes I am listening, oh, that's interesting" noises. I'm sure linguists have a name for these sounds -- they're much more important in Japan than in the West, where you'd just tend to listen silently (possibly critically) then respond. Here you interject "uh... oh... ah... so..." syllables in a rhythm and a tone which, to me, makes the conversation sound so empathetic that it's almost like a minor act of lovemaking....It was more like a very, very light form of group sex. It rode on a clear empathy between clearly-differentiated men and women; the gender element was much more structurally central than it would ever be allowed to be in the West, where the questioner would (in the name of enlightened gender politics) be doing his best to relate to the women "as if they were men" (and of course this careful "non-misogyny" is precisely where I think the West carelessly encodes its misogyny).
Wearing my "Western eyes" I'm perpetually shocked by the sexy shortness of skirt and bareness of leg I see on Tokyo public transport, because of course through Western eyes this betokens a "sexualisation" which will surely lead young women "duped by a male-dominated society" into dangerous situations where they'll be taken advantage of, abused, even raped (though of course associating skirt length too explicitly with rape becomes a reactionary argument). We Westerners extrapolate from short skirts out into a whole series of awkward or dangerous scenarios played out in a low-empathy, low-trust, Western-style environment, a Resident Evil sort of environment where you never know what alienated person or flesh-eating zombie you're going to meet next. But these projections don't match the Japanese context, a situation of almost-twee security, cleanliness, low crime, low-to-no anomie, and familial tenderness between strangers (with occasional disturbing gropings into the territory of incest).
Yesterday I went with friends to see a studio theatre version of Shuji Terayama's autobiographical 1974 film Den'en ni Shisu. We, the audience, were treated -- kindly but firmly -- like children as we were "boarded" into the tiny Shimokitazawa theatre. We were called up the narrow steps by ticket number, then ushered through into the theatre, where a belted, braced, flat-capped actress on the stage shouted affable instructions and ushers made sure we found seats. To be "mothered" in this way is odd -- the female authority figure is a collective mother, not one you have a personal connection to -- and yet becomes more and more familiar when you're in Japan. Possibly Japanese -- herded around by this primal mother the whole time, treated like children, indulged and spoiled, suckling from the social oppai -- become mollycoddled milksops, the most idiotically sheltered consumer society ever known to man. But possibly it's also massively wise, the secret of their social success, and a huge saving of psychic energy. Why be manly? Why be individualistic? Why struggle, why fight, why criticize? Any revolution here would have to be a revolution against the ambient tenderness of this great primal social mother, but revolution against mother is not in the nature of mammals. We need the milk...more...
[/floatr]As the Spike Japan blog puts it, rather amusingly, "almost every conceivable travel book about Japan has already been written... The country has been walked, hitched, and written across from north to south and from west to east... it's a vanishingly small world"...I'm happy to announce that I'm about to enter this crowded field with my own book about Japan. I've promised Sternberg, publisher of The Book of Scotlands, that I'll deliver the finished manuscript by October 1st this year, for publication in early 2011.
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