A Tale of Two Japans

SHIKOKU, JAPAN – I am approaching the end of a two-week stay in Japan, and as always when I prepare to leave this stupefying and seductive country, I’m filled with a profound contradiction of feelings.  

On the one hand, I’d like to stay longer to savor more fully the exquisite delicacy of this culture, the poetic packaging of every thing and the public politeness requisite in such a compact land. Once again, I have found the Japanese unfailingly kind and willing to go many minutes and meters out of their way to deliver a foreigner safely to the place he’s seeking.  

On the other hand, I’ve realized once again that it would be too stultifying to live here, too prescribed, and so a short stay is the best compromise. Plus it’s summer, surely the most unpropitious time to visit these islands, with the weather so unbelievably hot and humid that just moving from one room to another is exhausting and all I want to do is linger over a glass of iced coffee in an air-conditioned café from about 10-5 every day. 

On this trip I’ve been privileged to experience two of the poles that help define the composite of contemporary Japan: Tokyo, the capital – the biggest, most bustling, most cosmopolitan and most future-obsessed city in the country; and Shikoku, the smallest and most traditional of Japan’s four principal islands, and emblematic of the country side of Japan that many visitors never glimpse.  

My wife, daughter and I began our stay in the exhilarating and exhausting mega-metropolis of Tokyo, where my daughter had been studying for a year at International Christian University in the leafy green suburb of Mitaka.   

Though I lived in Japan from 1977-79 and have visited at least a dozen times since, I had forgotten how astonishingly crowded Tokyo is and how dizzying and disorienting the crush and rush of humanity in the train/subway stations can be. If you hesitate for a second in a bustling Tokyo train station, you’re liable to get swept away like a leaf landing on a rainy-season river. The city streets throng with people too, and the only way to escape them is to duck into an air-conditioned coffee shop and temporarily rent a small plot of semi-tranquil space for $5 per coffee (and you can’t get away with ordering one for three people; everyone has to order something).   

Another quality I’d forgotten was the characterlessness of the vast majority of the architecture. The Roppongi Hills complex is an elegant and imaginatively integrated addition to the Tokyo architectural landscape, but ascend to the 52nd floor Tokyo City View in its signature Mori Tower and you’ll discover a 360-degree panorama of mind-numbing blandness: one anonymous office or apartment building block after another, stretching almost as far as eye can see. Virtually nothing leaps out to distract or delight the eye except for a few green pockets of parkland, the occasional extravagant coffeehouse or love hotel, and the simple, spare temples and shrines, which are oases for the mind as well as the eye.   

On the plus side, for such an intensely crowded city, Tokyo functions with remarkable efficiency and politesse. As my daughter instructed us, no one talks on their cell phones in the subway or elevators or other crowded public spaces; instead, they text message. Incessantly. Every other person, it seems, has their phone in their hand furiously thumbing out messages to friends in similarly crowded public places who are thumbing them back.  

Another aspect of this politesse: Whether in shops or subway stops, people young and old are extremely aware and respectful of personal space, and if you’re jammed elbow to chin in a rush-hour subway, you simply make yourself as compact as you can and adopt a Zen-inspired koan-ic calm.  

Service is held to an extraordinarily high standard here too; we haven’t encountered a single surly service person. Instead, shop clerks and waiters/waitresses are efficient and polite, greeting you with a cheery “Irasshaimase!” when you enter and thanking you with a hearty “Domo arigato gozaimashita!” when you leave.  When they take your order at a restaurant, they repeat it to you to make sure they got it right, and when they deliver it to your table, they begin by saying, “Thank you for waiting!”  

I admire its efficiency and civility, but the real wonder and allure of Tokyo for me is its electric, eclectic energy. Everything is available here: from world-class museums and galleries, cutting-edge fashion and interior design, and the latest high-tech hybrids and global fusion cuisine to centuries-old fish markets, tatami-makers, shrine complexes, rice crackers and red bean sweets.   

I always fall under the spell of its jostling, irrepressible, bonsai-beauty, past-meets-present and let’s-embrace-the-future ambience.  

Shikoku presents a very different Japan. As it has been for centuries, this island is a place of farms and fishing villages, where lush mountains densely mantled with bamboo and cedar trees plunge to the sea, and houses are tucked into the thin ribbons of flat land that intermittently appear.   

If you drive around Shikoku, as we have done on this trip, you’ll pass mile after mile of mountain with no homes whatsoever. The concrete and crowds of Tokyo seem worlds away.   

You’ll also find a much slower pace of life. You’ll pass farmers in wide-brimmed straw hats pedaling ancient bicycles along dirt roads, and women in old-fashioned sunbonnets sitting by the sea mending fishing nets. You can stop at wooden roadside stands and buy plump tomatoes and cucumbers fresh from the field. In the late afternoon you’ll see schoolkids laughing and skipping home in uniformed flocks -- white shirts and blue skirts or pants for some, plaid patterns for others – and balancing backpacks as big as they are on their backs.   

In the country locals still occasionally pause to stare at a foreigner, and kids still call out, “Herro! Herro! How are you?” Even if you speak Japanese, as I do, sometimes you need your wife or daughter to disentangle the thick accents and idioms. Rice paddies glisten a deep lush green in the summer sun, and sparkling rivers ribbon among the paddies and gray tile-roofed farmhouses to the mountains.   

You can visit a venerable bridge made of twisted vines here, slurp soba noodles on tatami mats at a river-side restaurant, imagine the old way of life as you study farm tools and kitchen implements in a 400-year-old thatched-roof farmhouse, listen to the summer cicada symphony, buy a wind chime and grilled squid on a stick at a summer festival, and stare at the endless Pacific from the tip of Cape Komo.   

You can sit on a sandy beach or in a bamboo grove, walk the sacred circuit of 88 temples created by the great Buddhist monk and traveler Kobo Daishi, eat sashimi straight from the sea, run your fingers along the mustard-colored walls – made of twigs and hard-packed mud – of an abandoned farmhouse deep in a green gorge, walk the creaking floorboards of a soaring white and stone castle, begin a day lounging in the legendary waters of the Dogo Onsen hot spring spa, and end that day – that stay – celebrating fireflies and stars on a sultry night.   

As in most places around the world, the young people here are gradually fleeing the country for the cities, but once again, as I have every time I visit this blessed and blessing place, I have found a timeless and restoring serenity on Shikoku.