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Authors: David Pilling
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supplants the old entirely. In many public lavatories, these lavatorial wonders sit alongside old-fashioned squat toilets just one up from a hole in the ground.
The oceans around Japan are not merely shock absorbers that break the intensity of foreign influence. The sea itself has become part of Japanese culture. Its people have a relationship with their surrounding waters perhaps more intimate than inhabitants of any other large nation. No part of the Japanese archipelago lies more than eighty miles from the ocean, still the country’s main source of protein despite the relatively recent encroachment of milk and meat. Old Jomon mounds, some dating back more than 10,000 years, have traces of fish bones from multiple species, indicating how long the Japanese have been active fishermen.
The influence of the ocean on culture is ubiquitous. Sporting fans eat octopus balls at baseball matches and shopkeepers sometimes offer young children not sweets, but raw shrimp, as a treat. In the same way that people discuss the weather or football in England, the Japanese talk excitedly about the coming into season of a particular fish. In Tohoku and other coastal regions, the years when great tsunamis struck the coast are remembered like the dates of battles. The very language is awash in watery imagery. A lackey or sidekick is a ‘goldfish poo’ trailing behind its master. What we would call a ‘spike’ in English, say in the price of gold, is
unagi nobori
, or ‘surging eel’. (A canned drink by the same name was launched a few years ago.) Prime ministers have been known to compare themselves to fish: one likened himself to a loach, an unflashy bottom-dwelling creature well suited, he said, to muddy politics. 5 Even in moments of extreme distress, the ocean may be the first thing that comes to mind. A mother who witnessed the atomic mushroom cloud spreading malevolently over Hiroshima mouthed in horror: ‘It moves like a sea slug.’ 6
• • •
Japan is not a single island, but an archipelago. Its four main islands – Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – stretch 1,200 miles from the northeast to the southwest, forming an apostrophe on the edge of the Eurasian landmass. That makes Japan roughly the same length as the east coast of America, though its total area is no bigger than the state of Montana. Even then, over two-thirds of Japan’s territory comprises steep mountains that are virtually uninhabitable, while only 17 per cent of its land is arable. Thus, the country’s 127 million inhabitants are squeezed into an area about the same size as Bulgaria. In other ways, though, Japan is not small at all. If it were in western Europe, it would be the continent’s most populous nation by far, with more people than Britain and Italy combined. Economically, notwithstanding two supposedly ‘lost decades’, it remains a giant with an output half as big again as Germany.
Japan’s island status has helped foster the idea that it is somehow unique among civilizations. Of course, it is not the only country to consider itself unique. During the US 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, made it clear he put his faith in ‘that special nature of being an American’. Barack Obama, the US president, has been taken to task for questioning the concept of American exceptionalism. Still, the idea of Japan’s separateness from other cultures has gained currency among both foreigners and Japanese themselves, though many, as we shall see, vigorously, and properly, contest the notion. Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book
The Clash of Civilizations
divides the world into seven categories, of which Japan – alone – has a category of its own.
At its most benign, discussion of Japan’s uniqueness is an attempt to define the country by explaining what makes it different, in the way that all cultures are different from one another. Yet obsession with the idea of Japan’s supposedly uniquely
The oceans around Japan are not merely shock absorbers that break the intensity of foreign influence. The sea itself has become part of Japanese culture. Its people have a relationship with their surrounding waters perhaps more intimate than inhabitants of any other large nation. No part of the Japanese archipelago lies more than eighty miles from the ocean, still the country’s main source of protein despite the relatively recent encroachment of milk and meat. Old Jomon mounds, some dating back more than 10,000 years, have traces of fish bones from multiple species, indicating how long the Japanese have been active fishermen.
The influence of the ocean on culture is ubiquitous. Sporting fans eat octopus balls at baseball matches and shopkeepers sometimes offer young children not sweets, but raw shrimp, as a treat. In the same way that people discuss the weather or football in England, the Japanese talk excitedly about the coming into season of a particular fish. In Tohoku and other coastal regions, the years when great tsunamis struck the coast are remembered like the dates of battles. The very language is awash in watery imagery. A lackey or sidekick is a ‘goldfish poo’ trailing behind its master. What we would call a ‘spike’ in English, say in the price of gold, is
unagi nobori
, or ‘surging eel’. (A canned drink by the same name was launched a few years ago.) Prime ministers have been known to compare themselves to fish: one likened himself to a loach, an unflashy bottom-dwelling creature well suited, he said, to muddy politics. 5 Even in moments of extreme distress, the ocean may be the first thing that comes to mind. A mother who witnessed the atomic mushroom cloud spreading malevolently over Hiroshima mouthed in horror: ‘It moves like a sea slug.’ 6
• • •
Japan is not a single island, but an archipelago. Its four main islands – Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – stretch 1,200 miles from the northeast to the southwest, forming an apostrophe on the edge of the Eurasian landmass. That makes Japan roughly the same length as the east coast of America, though its total area is no bigger than the state of Montana. Even then, over two-thirds of Japan’s territory comprises steep mountains that are virtually uninhabitable, while only 17 per cent of its land is arable. Thus, the country’s 127 million inhabitants are squeezed into an area about the same size as Bulgaria. In other ways, though, Japan is not small at all. If it were in western Europe, it would be the continent’s most populous nation by far, with more people than Britain and Italy combined. Economically, notwithstanding two supposedly ‘lost decades’, it remains a giant with an output half as big again as Germany.
Japan’s island status has helped foster the idea that it is somehow unique among civilizations. Of course, it is not the only country to consider itself unique. During the US 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, made it clear he put his faith in ‘that special nature of being an American’. Barack Obama, the US president, has been taken to task for questioning the concept of American exceptionalism. Still, the idea of Japan’s separateness from other cultures has gained currency among both foreigners and Japanese themselves, though many, as we shall see, vigorously, and properly, contest the notion. Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book
The Clash of Civilizations
divides the world into seven categories, of which Japan – alone – has a category of its own.
At its most benign, discussion of Japan’s uniqueness is an attempt to define the country by explaining what makes it different, in the way that all cultures are different from one another. Yet obsession with the idea of Japan’s supposedly uniquely
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