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HomePageTurnerBook ExcerptsExpensive rabbits, men as Geishas, honeymoon fashion: Seeing Japan through Pico Iyer’s...

Expensive rabbits, men as Geishas, honeymoon fashion: Seeing Japan through Pico Iyer’s eyes

Author Pico Iyer spent 32 years in Japan. In his book, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Japan’, he gives tiny insights into Japanese culture, observations, conversations and anecdotes.

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After a rabbit appeared in Japan in 1873, the craze for the creatures grew so intense that a single animal fetched the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars.

After a woman threw herself off the roof of a Tokyo apartment complex in 1970, roughly one hundred and fifty others threw themselves off the same roof.

I board the train on a Saturday morning, and face a gaggle of schoolkids in uniform, lines of businessmen with badges on their lapels, squadrons of young women in dark suits. The next day I board the same train, to be greeted by a young guy in sockless canvas shoes and his date clomping along in high-fashion snowshoes (in a place where snow is all but unknown). Everyone’s taken on a part, but in the off-hours, even partners may find they’re acting in different plays.

Thus, Japanese couples on honeymoon traditionally plan matching outfits for every hour of their trip. Even girls on a Sunday shopping spree often sport the same hairstyles, false eyelashes and white boots. Fashion becomes less about standing out than fitting in, at least within the micro-group of which you are a part.

For a foreigner, therefore, clothes don’t make the man here; they simply mark the role. But roles shift at the speed of light in Japan, as people adopt a radically different voice (even a different word for “I”) for colleague and secretary and boss. If it’s treacherous to judge a book by its cover, how much more so if it’s a foreign book and has a dozen covers to go with every audience.

In 1999, I sought out the man said to have invented karaoke, to tell him that my editors at Time had chosen him as one of the “100 Asians of the Century.” He handed me in response a business card advertising his services as a dog trainer.

That mild-mannered matron with her hands in her lap, dressed as for church, is, my wife explains to me, a wild thing, ready to do anything with anyone. And that rail-thin twenty-three-year-old model in fishnet stockings, perfectly made up, turns out, her startled Californian boyfriend tells me, never to have had a boyfriend before.

Whenever we’re abroad, I have to spend hours persuading my wife to dress down, since dressing up will make everybody around us feel underdressed. For her, putting on a designer outfit to go to the ATM is as much a sign of courtesy as wearing black to a funeral or speaking in complete sentences.

Two out of every five Japanese men pluck their eyebrows—and the first geisha, in the thirteenth century, were men. “It is best that you carry powdered rouge in your sleeve pocket,” an eighteenth-century manual for samurai advises. “We sometimes are of bad color when sobering up, lying down or rising.”

My wife said she’d never seen a real man in Japan, an American friend who grew up in Tokyo tells me—until she met a Kabuki actor who specialized in taking the part of women.

No one but the simpleminded would call my neighbors “two-faced”; they command a huge repertoire of faces, to deal with every setting, and we who describe that phenomenon in entirely different terms to lover and to mother can only conclude that we’re much the same, but with a narrower range.

The Buddha himself took pains to say opposite things in different situations, since what works for a crowd of monks will make no sense to a group of businessmen. What we call “inconsistency” speaks in fact for a consistent wish to do the appropriate thing.

This excerpt from Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.


Also read: How an obscure Japanese anime made a genuine attempt to understand Pakistan


 

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