Whenever I have travelled in Japan, I’ve wondered what precisely is soul of this great country. Is it the dreaming traditional gardens and the tea ceremony with the period porcelain carrying the smell of centuries? Is it the shinkansen, the glitter of speed and the dazzle of industry, commerce and IT? Is it the Shinto shrines, the geisha girl celebrated in Yasunari Kawabata’s novels and now written about the afresh in Arthur Golden’s Memories of a Geisha and made into a film by Steven Speilberg? Is it the obsession with national honour that may induce a great novelist like Yukio Mishima to commit Seppuku (ritual suicide) in front of the army headquarters? Is it the country of the most isolated individuals who implicitly believed that the Emperor was a living god? Whatever, few countries live as intensely as Japan in two conflicting worlds at one and the same time: an ever-present mystery-laden past and a harsh glow of contemporary reality. I feel Japan has a schism in the soul as much as country or of Octavio Paz’s Mexico. As a writer myself, I’ve always tried to see how the Japanese writers have handled this division in the national psyche.
Perhaps no one has delineated it more gloriously than Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel-winning novelist of Japan. A few days after he won the prize in 1994, I was in Japan attending a meeting of UNSECO on Development and Culture. I had requested for a meeting with Oe, but he was away in Kamakura cutting a disc of his disabled son Hikari (meaning light). In Oe’s hands, myth is life and life is myth too.
a curious mix
Personal tragedy merges into national catastrophe and the Japan before and after Hiroshima, Japan the global player and the Japan of Kamakura Heiankyo (Kyoto) mysteriously impinge on each other. While in Japan, I read an interview he gave to Tony Parsons for The Daily Telegraph in which he had referred to his growing up believing that the Emperor was living god and that Japanese victory in the World War II was, therefore, a certainty. Then came Hiroshima. No writer has written as compulsively and with as much élan of the curious mix that is post-Hiroshima Japan and its ancient heritage. His work is global unlike Kawabata novels like Snow Country, The Mountain is Young or Thousand Cranes which are steeped in Japanese tradition. But Oe’s obsession is still Japan even while the echoes and influence may western. On the other hand, he is not an archetypal romantic or obsessively pessimistic about Japan’s lost imperial glory like Mishima, whose suicide deeply affected the great novelist friend Yasunari Kawabata. My first visit to Japan was in 1980 as a member of the Indian National commission for UNESCO. In all my interactions then, what impressed me most was that mysterious quality of nation living in several centuries and several layers of complex psyche at one and the same time. There was no obsession with the past, instead there was a forceful determination to look beyond tomorrow to be the last word in state-of-art technology.
kurosawa’s samurais
Scholars articulated this integrative outlook which writers had expressed through non-academic works in fiction or poetry. Akira Kurosawa’s films with its Samurais and the ancient ways of life were eloquent of the same respect for the Japanese tradition and history. I have seen every film that Kurosawa has made and enjoyed the brilliant flashes of insight that makes the past live once again. In them, the past is a grand vision, but it does not smother the present. The concern in all the three major novelist of Jaoan, Oe, Mishima and Kawabata is with life and all that it has to offer. One must take time to live for the world has so much to give. In Shuntaro Tanikawa’s poetry, this emerges as great celebration of childhood. As in literature or filmmaking so too in social sciences, the living reality of the past is emphasised. Social anthropologist Chie Nakane speaks of this duality. So, does Michiko Ayogi who years ago contributed a wonderful paper on the “Tug of War by Ritual Rope and its Social Relevance” to the volume Gods, Spirits and Men, which I edited. Talking of gods, I recall how filmmaker Sohei Imamura had said “performing arts in Japan originally began which people imitating the dance of gods by inviting gods into their bodies.” This is also similar to spirit-possession in the ritual art of healing by traditional tribal gurus in India when specific gods are invoked to come into the body of the guru. This is also seen in the painted icons of sun, moon and the gods in the mud-washed walls of the tribal Saoras of Orissa.
the lotus and the robot
To me, Japan has thus always been both the lotus and the robot, a country that can say no to the world with Akio Morita and whose best managers can be the most westernised, sophisticated, cyber-surfacing experts in office and in no time chance into the traditional dress, sipping tea and enjoying Kabuki or Noh. No city has impressed me with its past as much as Kyoto or Heian Kyo, Japan’s capital from 794 AD in Heian Era to 1969 when under the Meijis the Capital shifted to Tokyo. When walking through the old city, I could smell the past everywhere, in its traditional palaces, moats, streets, Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples. I learnt of the garayoe service, the incantations, songs and dances to appease the spirits are believed to create pestilence. Heian means peace and clam. But the imperial capital was always a center of upheaval and calamities during the 1000-odd years it remained Japan’s capital. I noticed how popular the ancient shrine Gion Kitano is still with the Kyotans.
From my room in the 31st floor of New Otani Tower as I watched the sun go down the Japanese garden outside looked extremely beautiful in the fading light. In the distance in the west was the Shinjuku Gyoen garden and beyond that Shinjuku, the Meiji shrine, the Akasaka palace. Then, Roppongi in the south and the east the Imperial palace, the Diet, Kasumigaseki and further beyond the palace Marunouchi. In the midst if the heavy traffic and feverish motion everywhere I knew that the Japanese garden of this hotel, a picture of serenity and calm, was once the site of a 16th-century residence of the Samurai Lord Kiyomasa Kato. Later it went to the powerful Li clan and given the name Kioicho. It was thus, in the midst of high modernity, an ancient place and stones from all over Japan were brought to make the garden. Infact, some of the stone lanterns in the rock garden adjoining the moat of the 1st Edo Castle date back to the Edo and Kamakura periods. I remembered the parallel experience in my home-town Bhubaneswar where at the end of a street of the 20th-century capital one is suddenly face-to-face with 9th-century temple with all the whisper of the past.
The writer is a recipient of the Jnanpith Award. sitakantmahapatra@rediffmail.com
Factfile
getting there : Air India operates six flights from India to Japan every week. Log on to www.airindia.com for more information. JAL also flies to India twice a week from Tokyo. In Japan, public transportation is available in both cities and suburbs. Visitors who expect to change trains many times per day can go for ‘one-day tickets’ or other holiday and discount tickets. In cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya and Sapporo, the subway networks facilitate travel enormously. If you want to travel extensively between towns, you can very well do it by taking a bicycle on rent. Bikes are available on rent not only at sightseeing spots, but also in main cities.
accommodation: Staying in Ryokan (a traditional inn) is one of the most enjoyable ways to experience the Japanese atmosphere. There are posh and economy hotels offering good services. Also, there are about 360 youth hostels in Japan. For more information, log on to www.jnto.go.jp/eng/