In Alex Kerr’s crit. lit / autobiography Lost Japan – appropriately enough in a chapter on Chinese studies, which seems to give him the proper distance – he writes about westerners “converting” to Japan. He cites Americans who practice the tea ceremony or reverently recite certain Zen incites as examples of a worshipful attitude to the country. Living so far away from Kyoto, and maybe an equal distance, culturally, from such Tokyo institutions as the kabukiza, it’s not an easy matter to choose one feature of Japan that I adore. Living in this piecemeal, renga cityscape, I can’t even say with any precision that I love “Tokyo”.
Being in Japan, for me, has meant forgetting Japan. Very little that I imagined has turned out to be – not valid, but – accurate. “It’s a tidy country”. Well, yes, I suppose that means the granular light on the tarmac as the summer evening, always early to a north European, comes in. “It’s a land of tradition and modernity.” That sagging wooden roof, penned in behind the concrete embankment walls on the Sumida: that must be it. “Japanese pupils are so well behaved…”
The things that I do love are becoming more and more specific, as if the world around this school were coming into focus now after 23 months. Of course, in the case of the kanji over the station entrance, this is literally true. Day by day we’re trading one country for another. That’s the good sort of conversion.