TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052592/0525640.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 6.0 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 76

What Oscar Wilde Knew About Japan


By Pico Iyer


    The whole of Japan is a pure invention," said Oscar Wilde,
who should have known, since he was a pure invention himself.
What he meant, of course, was that Japan, as much as anywhere,
is a product of our imagination, and the country that we see is
only the one we have been trained to see. Life imitates art.
Yet, in a deeper sense, anyone who would understand that land of
cultured surfaces can do no better than to turn to Wilde, who
kept up appearances as if they were the only reality he knew.
His championing of masks, his preference for style before
sincerity, his unfailing conviction that there was nothing
wrong with reality that a little artifice couldn't fix, might
all be prototypes of a certain kind of Japanese aesthetics (the
Japanese Book of Tea reads almost like a pure invention of
Wilde's, with its "cult founded on the adoration of the
beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence"). Yet
Wilde also saw that silver generalities conceal basic copper
truths: "The actual people who live in Japan," he wrote, "are
not unlike the general run of English people."

    That issue is, of course, an increasingly urgent one: Are
the Japanese really different from you and me (and not just as
the rich are)? Wilde certainly brings many Japanese cultural
positions into the living room. But culture, you will say, is
not the point. It is Japan's one-party democracy, its corporate
monopolies, its patriotism that amounts to protectionism that
exasperate; it is Japan's trade practices, in fact, and economic
strategies. But trade practices are in some respects the product
of cultural values, and no country pursues policies in which
self-interest plays no part. The Japanese system is different
from ours; so too are the French, the Chinese and the South
African. And when it comes to competition, all of those powers
go with their strengths. Yes, you will add, but the Japanese
keep telling us they're different. Indeed they do, and try to
make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Americans, who start
many of their sentences with the words "Americans . . .," may
not find this so alien.

    Inevitably, it is never hard to find differences across
the sea, and to say that we cannot possibly make our peace with
people who put their verbs at the end of their sentences, say
yes where we would say no, read their books back to front and
take their baths at night. Just as easily, we could say that
there is nothing much that need separate us from a race that
likes to eat at McDonald's, listens to the Walkman on the train
home, watches baseball on TV and takes its honeymoons in Hawaii
(some Japanese children, indeed, are surprised to find that
there are McDonald's outlets in America too, and that
foreigners play besuboru). Recently Japan's most prominent
gangsters reportedly complained -- in a p.c. fashion -- that
laws to curtail their activities were "a violation of their
human rights."

    It may be too that every nation acquires certain habits at
certain moments of its growth. One of the best descriptions of
Japanese "conformity," as stereotype conceives of it, was given
by William Manchester in The Glory and the Dream. Believing, he
wrote, that "leadership came from the group, that progress lay
in something called problem-solving meetings, [they] had no
use for drive and imagination. Above all, they distrusted
individualism. The individual sought prestige and achievement
at the expense of others. He was abrasive; he rocked the boat;
he threatened the corporate One, and they wanted no part of
him." The only trouble is, Manchester was describing Americans
there, in the "silent generation" '50s.

    Yet an even closer kinship links Japan, ironically, with
the country that many Americans feel closest of all to, and
regard as their second -- or cultural -- home, the country with
which we enjoy our "special relationship." The affinities
between England and Japan go far beyond the fact that both are
tea-loving nations with a devotion to gardens, far beyond the
fact that both drive on the left and are rainy islands studded
with green villages. They go even beyond the fact that both have
an astringent sense of hierarchy, subscribe to a code of stoical
reticence and are, in some respects, proud, isolated monarchies
with more than a touch of xenophobia. The very qualities that
seem so foreign to many Americans -- the fact that people do not
invariably mean what they say, that uncertain distances separate
politeness from true feelings, and that everything is couched
in a kind of code in which nuances are everything -- will hardly
seem strange to a certain kind of Englishman.

    Perhaps the best illustration of this can be found in the
best-selling novel about six days in the life of an English
butler, The Remains of the Day. The book reads almost like a
handbook of traditional Japanese values: a samurai-like loyalty
to a master, a quiet and impenitent nationalism, a sense that
self is best realized through self-surrender. Many of the scenes
-- in which the butler speaks to his father in the third person,
talks of "military-style pep talks" to his staff and resolves
to practice "bantering" -- might almost be translated from the
Japanese. Yet here are all these values, in the midst of an
instantly recognizable England, in 1956! The book's author,
Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved to England from Nagasaki at the age
of five, grew up simultaneously as a Japanese and an English
schoolboy, and so can see that the two are scarcely different.
"I think there are a lot of things about the Japanese way of
communicating that I don't know about," he says, "simply because
I don't know my way around the codes. But the actual Japanese
method, the actual approach, I think I'm quite at home with --
because I've been brought up in middle-class England." Japan,
as Wilde might have said, is only as alien as ourselves.