After their miracle, the Japanese fear "advanced nations' disease"
Outside the Ryoanji temple, the newest Japanese surfaces shine. The taxi drivers bustle, sweeping huge feather dusters over their cars, flicking specks from the bright metal. The ritual, a writer once remarked, makes them look like chambermaids in the first act of a French farce. But it is utterly Japanese, a set piece: the drivers handle their dusters like samurai. The scene is a sort of cartoon of the busy, fastidious superego that is supposed to preside in the Japanese psyche. The drivers even wear white gloves. There is probably not a dirty taxicab in Japan.
These taxis in the old capital city of Kyoto wait outside the doors of the ineffable, of another Japan entirely. The Ryoanji temple's Zen rock garden—five austerely abstract boulder mounds set in a sea of curried sand pebbles—is a celebrated spiritual masterpiece. The garden is absolutely still, and yet tense with an obscurely bullying profundity. A guide whispers the sermons in the stones, the allegories: the rocks are, maybe, tigers swimming across the sea. Or they are whales rocking in the deep. Or perhaps they are these mysterious islands themselves: Japan. The abbot of Ryoanji, in a perfect eloquence of abnegation, wrote that the place should be called simply the "Garden of Nothingness."
The Zen silence is shattered. A swarm of schoolchildren in black uniforms enters, frisking and chattering. They horse around obliviously in the timelessness.
Their teacher bellows at them through a battery-powered megaphone: "All right, now: Meditate!"
A Westerner fidgets whenever he is asked to be impressed by nothingness. A Japanese is a good deal more at home with the native mysteries. But Japan almost always involves a certain intellectual wind shear. What one sees when contemplating those islands often depends upon the culture of the beholder.
Somehow that will have to change. The rest of the world must begin to perceive what the Japanese perceive. And the Japanese must reciprocate. The global economy cannot run on so many cultural subjectivities. Japan has become too powerful and too crucially interconnected in the world to be so little understood, or so little understanding. Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, likes to tell his employees that the company is a "fate-sharing vessel." They are all in the same boat. The Japanese for most of their history have thought of their islands as the fate-sharing vessel. The definition of the boat must now be expanded. It must learn to make accommodations for the world at large.
This will be difficult. Japan's culture, always kinetic, is now veering into territory where it has never been before. The Japanese postwar economic miracle is cresting. Japan is a fascinating success, as a business and as a society. It is prosperous and famously homogeneous, safe and civil, bound together by a social contract that is startlingly effective. Yet, paradoxically, Japan's very success has grown threatening, its future shadowed and complicated. The Japanese face new problems, inside, among their densely close-woven tribe, and outside, with the rest of the world.