Pico Iyer Reflects on a Quarter-Century of Life in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Pico Iyer Reflects on a Quarter-Century of Life in Japan

nytimes.com

29 points1PlayerOne7 comments

From the article, without comment: 'He’s a big proponent of his own ignorance, saying he doesn’t choose to learn more than a smattering of Japanese because he needs mystery and “a sense of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar.”'

A sign of the privileged, to be able to move to a foreign country and categorically refuse to attempt to integrate.

The 7/11 clerk from Sri Lanka or janitor from the Philippines who emigrated to Japan for a better life certainly don’t have much room for “a sense of open space in life, something to offset the sense of the familiar”.

It really depends on critical mass. If the foreign pop achieves critical mass it can operate within its own bubble within a country. Some are ghettoes, some are little [some country|some city], some are clubs for foreigners who are passing through.

In the US, as well as some EU countries and elsewhere, you can have foreigners who don’t speak the local language outside of a few stock phrases because of critical mass.

> The 7/11 clerk from Sri Lanka or janitor from the Philippines

Most of the Filipino workers I’ve come across in South East Asia don’t make any effort to learn the local language, and just stick with English.

> A sign of the privileged

Growing up brown in the UK doesn’t scream privilege to me, and anyone who’s spent much time in Asia will have witnessed that people of South Asian extraction can run into some serious prejudicial turbulence

How about growing up brown in the UK, but also being able to immigrate to California?

> Born in England to Indian parents who later moved to Santa Barbara, Calif., [Pico Iyer] attended graduate school at Oxford and Harvard and then went to work for Time magazine.

We're getting off course here, but I do think there's a certain level of privilege when one snowbird's in a foreign country and doesn't bother learning the local language.

Immigrant workers in SE Asia would probably love to learn the local language if they weren't occupied working 16 hour shifts or sleeping.

I don't think I know of Pico Iyer (I'm pretty sure I've never seen any of his books). Nara is an extremely wonderful place, though. It's a really nice mix of suburbian/small town living, with a ton of beautiful scenery, insane amounts of history and culture and is only a stone's throw from the metropolis that is Kyoto. He seems to have his feet in two places, though. Coming to Nara in the fall is great, but I can't quite wrap my head around the concept of living in Japan and not "experiencing the 4 seasons". Any foreigner who has lived in Japan long enough has been asked "Does your country have 4 seasons" an incredible number of times.

When I first moved to Japan, I asked an old woman how to learn about Japanese culture. She told me, "Spend a year with no heating and no air conditioning. Use only a hand fan in the summer. To be Japanese is to be acutely aware of the seasons". And so I did it (to be fair, Shizuoka rarely gets below freezing in the winter, so I wasn't going to die -- and I admit to 2 weeks of heat in March ;-) ). Going without heating or air conditioning in itself didn't actually teach me anything, as you may have already suspected. However, if the inside of your house has the same weather as the outside of your house, you have no incentive to stay inside. Indeed, walking around in the abundant sunshine was my only way of warming up. This meant that I had to go places and meet people and live in my town.

Every season is different too. I mean, it's not unique to Japan by any stretch of the imagination. However it was the first time in my life that I just went out and looked at everything every day. The birds are different. The fish are different. The sky is different. The flowers and plants are different. They change from day to day. It got so that I couldn't bear to be away from it -- I would miss the day that the crocuses open. Or I would miss the day that the namazu barge their way into the rice fields to spawn.

People wonder why the Japanese celebrate cherry blossoms. In fact, hanami (or flower watching) was originally meant for an earlier season when the ume (flowering plum, though actually a type of apricot) blooms. In the olden times cherry blossoms were seen as over the top and audacious. However, there is something to be said for cherry trees -- they bloom for a very short time. You might have only 1 day or at best 2 days to enjoy them when they are at the peak and so you must pay attention. Similarly, when the time is right, you must make sure to stop what you are doing and go to see the cherry blossoms. They will not come again for another full year.

This is what Japanese culture means to me. I'm not sure if it is only me, though :-) My town is my town because I live in it, not just exist in it. Every rock, every flower, and every animal is precious to me. I can't bear to be away from it. I also have to travel for work and every time, I leave a piece of me behind. For me, I can't imagine having my feet in 2 different places.

I really appreciated how the little details of a place are so distinctive in Japan, be it the special local food, the local craft or just some strange old temple or shrine. I remember going into a temple in gifu somewhere that seemed to randomly have this giant wooden Buddha in the back. Back in my home country it is a creeping sense of every town becoming the same place, with the same chain stores on every corner.

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