Japan's Latent Cultural Power
By Ms. Wang Min, Professor at Hosei University, Japan
Though I live in Japan, I go back to China several times a year to keep up to date on Chinese views of Japan, which relate to my own research on this country. One thing that has struck me during these repeated visits to my homeland is the spread of people's acquaintance with Japan's culture of daily life.
When I visited in March this year, a university teacher I know told me about a "strange action by a Japanese person" and asked me to explain it.
The action in question happened one day when my acquaintance treated a Japanese teacher to a meal at a restaurant for the first time. A dish holding a cooked duck was placed on the table, at which point the Japanese teacher, moving in a very natural manner, produced a tissue from his pocket and gently placed it over the duck's face. (In China the custom in such cases is to place the bird with its head facing the main guest.) My acquaintance noted that he had taken teachers of many different nationalities out to meals, but none of them ever did such a thing before. It seemed strange and stuck in his memory.
I could imagine that this Japanese person found it emotionally difficult to look at the face of the duck on the plate. So I explained, "Perhaps it was an expression of Japanese tenderness toward living things." This visibly surprised my acquaintance, because no such custom or thinking is part of China's culture of daily life.
The anti-Japanese demonstrations that occurred across China this spring received extensive coverage in Japan. Meanwhile, however, Chinese people have also been showing heightened interest in learning about Japan. Just before the demonstrations broke out, two publishers came out with Chinese translations of Ruth Benedict's classic study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). And after the protests, sales of these translations reportedly increased at bookstores around the country.
Another work that has been selling well since the demonstrations is Inazo Nitobe's Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), which is a serious effort by a Japanese person to transmit his country's culture to non-Japanese. It was originally published in Chinese in 1993 and is now in its seventh printing. And in May a work titled Riben lun (On Japan) was released in comic-book form, reflecting the preferences of the younger generation.
Unbeknownst to most Japanese, the texts used in high school Chinese language classes in China since the second half of 2003 include a translation of Yasunari Kawabata's essay "Hana wa nemuranai" (Flowers Don't Sleep). There are reportedly 31,800 high schools in China, with 32.43 million students, compared with 480,000 people studying Japanese. It is noteworthy not just that the work of a Japanese author has been included in the Chinese high school curriculum, but that China's many high school students are being exposed to the essential concepts of Japanese culture, such as mono no aware, wabi, and sabi,* by reading Kawabata's essay.
The rising interest in Japan is not limited to Chinese people. During my March visit I met a 20-year-old South Korean woman, Hwang Heui-yeong, who was waiting on tables in the coffee shop of the hotel attached to Beijing Language and Culture University. She was a student at a college in the United States, where she was majoring in design, but she had chosen to spend half a year abroad studying at this university in Beijing. When I met her, she had been there for just two weeks.
As Hwang explained, her parents had emigrated from Korea to Brazil 25 years earlier. First they sold clothes, but noticing how the Brazilians love to sing, they figured that there would be a good market for karaoke equipment, and they established a successful business importing it from South Korea. Five years ago they moved again, this time to the United States.
Hwang aims to learn eight languages. The next destination she has picked for overseas study after she graduates is Japan. She explained, "I want to go there to study design. Japan's sophisticated fashions are beautiful. France and Italy are fine, but Japanese fashion is free of flashiness. Having come in contact with lots of languages, I can say that it's the same [absence of flash] as in the sound of the Japanese language."
For people from the world of high-pitched Chinese, it is pleasant to encounter the quiet tones of the Japanese language, which conveys meaning with very little accent or intonation. Asked for their first impressions of Japan, Chinese tourists offer comments like this: "The noises of everyday life are low in volume, both out on the street and indoors. And Japanese conversation sounds like whispering." This is something that they realize only after experiencing it in person.
Thirty-two years ago, when the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, I entered the Japanese language department at the recently reopened Dalian University of Foreign Languages and started learning Japanese in an environment where direct exposure to Japanese books and Japanese people was strictly forbidden. At night, hiding nervously under my bedcovers, I would tune in to shortwave radio broadcasts from Japan. My father had sent me a small radio, which cost him a month's pay. As I listened with strained ears, the melodies of Japanese folk songs like "Furusato" and "Sakura, sakura" penetrated my heart like a soothing murmur. This was the starting point of Japanese culture for me.
Just after I first came to Japan, I was at a post office and asked to borrow a pair of scissors. The clerk handed them to me while keeping the blades pointed away from me. After that, I started noticing all the little ways in which consideration for others has been made a matter of custom within Japan's culture of daily life. Language, song, fashion, literature-it seems to me that these are all interwoven in the appeal of Japanese culture, which includes kindness, receptivity, and transparent simplicity of a sort that cannot be expressed logically in words.
By comparison with the culture of China, which favors grand ideas, Japan's culture has an aesthetic of wrapping things in tidy little packages. Therein, I believe, lies a power like that of a gentle rain shower. I would like to see this aesthetic regain more appreciation among the Japanese themselves.
In today's world, where political and diplomatic interests clash and failure to learn the lessons of history leads to repeated follies, a cultural power that firmly eschews overreaching may be able to serve as a beacon of peace.
*: Mono no aware refers to what might be called "the pathos of evanescence." Wabi is an aesthetic of preference for simplicity and austerity. Sabi is an aesthetic of understated elegance, often paired with wabi.-Trans.
Wang Min
Born in Hebei Province, China, in 1954. Came to Japan in 1982 as a government-sponsored foreign student. Is now a professor at Hosei University in Tokyo. Her most recent work is Nit-chu hikaku: Seikatsu bunka ko (Comparing Japan and China: A Consideration of the Culture of Daily Life).
(Translated from Asahi Shimbun, morning edition, September 5, 2005, p. 11.)
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