Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling

what strikes them as an altogether alien, if fascinating, culture. Pico Iyer, who has lived around Kyoto for a quarter of a century, describes Japan as being ‘less like anywhere else than anywhere else I know’. 11
    Like Hearn and Iyer, I too am sometimes struck anew by patterns of behaviour as if observing them for the first time. I am rarely less than surprised when, in what is in many ways a conservative country, a female caretaker breezes into a public lavatory while men are urinating. I often forget that when Japanese people refer to themselves they point not to their heart, but to their nose. When they hand over a business card or a yen note, they always rotate it so that it is facing the recipient, since not to do so is considered quite rude. Linguistically, the Japanese revel in ambiguity. The first, second and third person often blend into one. The phrase ‘I love you’ contains neither the word ‘I’ nor ‘you’. Businessmen introduce themselves as belonging to their company, as if their own identity and that of the business they work for is partially fused. ‘I am Tanaka of Mizuho bank.’ The word ‘san’, a polite appendage usually translated as Mr or Mrs, is also used for animals, as in ‘Did you see Mr Elephant at the zoo?’
    One should not, however, make too much of such differences. Perhaps one should make nothing of them at all. Any western-centric observer who assumes that what he does is ‘normal’ will find equally unfamiliar practices in Peru, India or Papua New Guinea. Macfarlane’s argument, though, went further. He was saying the differences between Japan and other countries went beyond the superficial. According to him, whereas other modern societies had gone through a profound separation of the spiritual from the everyday, no such division ever took place in Japan. It never underwent, he says, what German philosopher Karl Jaspers called an ‘Axial Age’, a separation creating a dynamic tension between the world of matter and another world of spirit. Japan had no heaven or hell against which to benchmark its worldly actions. ‘Japan rejected the philosophical idea of another separate world of the ideal and the good, a world of spirit separate from man and nature, against which we judge our actions and direct our attempts at salvation.’ 12
    A retired geisha in Kyoto, whose life provided some of the material for Arthur Golden’s
Memoirs of a Geisha
, once spoke to me in similar terms. ‘I have read the Bible,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘In comparison, our gods won’t test us to see whether we are bad or whether we are good.’ 13 Out of interest, I asked several Japanese friends how, if at all, they conceived of god. One young woman, who worked as a telephone sales clerk, said she immediately thought of her dead grandmother, not an answer I would imagine hearing in the west. Another, Akira Chiba, a friend who works for the foreign ministry, said, ‘I don’t know much about Christianity, but seen from the outside it looks as though there’s a difference between your role and god’s role, your terrain and god’s terrain. In Japan, gods are floating around and they’re together with the people. Essentially, we live together with the gods.’
    Macfarlane saw what he called this lack of separation everywhere. Thus sumo, with its purification rituals, was both sport and religion. A garden was both nature and art, as was the food I shared with Fujiwara. A temple was a place of worship in a country without faith. Economics, as Fujiwara said, was not a science to be placed outside the moral sphere. ‘Gardens, ceremonies, people cannot be understood in themselves, but always in relation to something else,’ Macfarlane wrote. 14 His idea of a world ‘without partitions’ echoed my friend Kaji’s insistence that Japan was ‘without borders’, a place where ‘one thing blends into another seamlessly’.
    In art, too, Macfarlane detected this lack of separation. The Japanese,