Visiting Japan with Dr. Johnson

In 1772, the year before their tour of the Hebrides, James Boswell mentioned to Samuel Johnson that he was thinking of buying St Kilda, the most remote island of that chain. "Pray do, Sir," Johnson replied. "We shall go and pass a winter among the blasts there. We shall have some fine fish, and we shall take some dried tongue with us, and some books." To which Boswell, who, one suspects, had mentioned the prospect more as a form of boasting than in seriousness, answered, "Are you serious, Sir, in advising me to buy St Kilda? For if you should advise me to go to Japan, I believe I should do it."



{Photos by rocketlass.}

I read that passage on a thirteen-hour flight home from Japan earlier this month, and all I could think was how sad I was that Dr. Johnson--perhaps hoping to rid himself of the presence of Boswell, who, much as their friendship seems to have been genuine, surely was nonetheless an irritation at times--failed to order his friend to hie himself to Tokyo posthaste. What would Boswell have made of eighteenth-century Japan, utterly foreign to British sensibilities? I realize the journey's not truly to be wished, for it could only have come at the cost of the Life of Johnson, but that doesn't stop me from imagining a parallel universe Boswell visiting temples in Kyoto, telling tales of his bravery in support of Corsica (then explaining what and where Corsica is), and picking up ladies in the seedier districts.



On our trip, we took no dried tongue, but we did have some fine fish, and of course I took some books. Last time we visited Japan, four-and-a-half years ago, I read The Tale of Genji, which was a very good choice as reading material, but, at nearly four pounds, a lousy choice of a physical object to lug around. So this time I chose more wisely: I packed a similar number of pages, but spread across more books--among them books that I could leave behind when read, including a couple of disposable mass market paperbacks, a galley, and a copy of Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, which, fortunately, I can always get again at the office.

Young Men and Fire, which I was re-reading for the first time since it was first published, in 1992, was my company in Kyoto, and its quiet, meditative tale of loss and attempts at understanding it suited that ancient city. And finishing it there allowed me to improve the meager bookshelf in the Shunkoin Temple guest room, which, when we arrived, looked like this:



That's a Lilian Jackson Braun cat mystery; John Gardner's novelization of the Bond film Goldeneye; Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, a fine book but not exactly a vacation read; Less Than Zero; a forgettable thriller; and--the one book in the stack that would be a pleasure to find in a guest room--Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo Rising. May Maclean find a new reader among the Americans and Aussies who seem to be the bulk of the temple's guests; may they be surprised to find a lost little bit of Montana in Kyoto.

Our return to Tokyo for one last night was the occasion of the trip's other book-related venture: meeting an online literary pal. Julian, one of three people behind the Only a Blockhead blog (its name keeping nicely with the Johnson theme), is an Englishman who's been living in Japan for decades, and I've been enjoying his thoughts on Japan and books both for years now, but this was our first actual meeting. He led us to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, high above the city, where he was kind enough to buy me and rocketlass drinks while we all talked books. It was a sheer pleasure, especially talking favorites and trading recommendations. Take my advice and meet your Internet friends, folks: I've yet to find that anyone I like through their online presence doesn't live up to that impression in reality.



{Note the book that Julian was reading when we walked up to him on the street: Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity!}

We three--worn by late-summer heat, dressed casually for travel--didn't exactly reach the elegant heights of the 1950s Tokyo party described by Edmund de Waal in a memorable passage in The Hare with the Amber Eyes (a favorite shared with Julian):

Back in the corridor we move through an open doorway, under a Noh mask and into the sitting-room. The ceiling is of slatted wood. All the lamps are on. Objects are displayed on spare, dark, clean-lined Korean and Chinese furniture alongside comfortable low sofas, occasional tables and lamps, and ashtrays and cigarette boxes. A wooden Buddha from Kyoto sits on a Korean chest, a hand raised in blessing.

The bamboo bar holds an impressive quantity of liquor, none of which I can identify. It is a house made for parties. Parties with small children on their knees, and women in kimonos, and presents. Parties with men in dark suits seated round small tables, loquacious with whisky. Parties at New Year with cut boughs of pine trees hanging from the ceiling, and parties under the cherry trees, and once--in a spirit of poetry--a firefly-viewing party.

But the drinks were splendid, and the fellowship of books was with us, so what more could one reasonably ask for?

Elsewhere in The Life of Johnson, Johnson assures Boswell that "he never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat, were an angel to make the proposal to him." Having closed my trip by experiencing something along those lines in a peculiarly modern way, arriving home on a Saturday morning two hours before we'd left Tokyo, I can understand Dr. Johnson's sentiments. But two weeks in Japan to live again through the agency of an angel? Well, it would be hard not to be tempted.

Forbidden things

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Reading Grace Dane Mazur's Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination the other day, I encountered an object well worthy of a ghostly tale or two:

But some mirrors must never be looked at, not ever, at least by humans. This is the case with the sacred regalia mirror, Yata no Kagami, kept at the Ise Shrine in Japan. This is presumed to be an octagonal mirror, ritual in nature, similar to other known octagonal mirrors.

This forbidden mirror is kept in a box within a box within a box, hidden from outsiders in a ritually restricted area of the shrine. The outermost box is made of Japanese cypress wood (Hinoki). The middle box is also of cypress wood. The innermost box, containing the mirror, is made of gold, and thus is incorruptible.

This Shinto sacred mirror is not, in fact, a looking glass, but rather an emblem of imperial nobility in ancient Japan, and, at least in ancient times, possibly a device for reflecting light, thus connected with life and fertility.

No one may look at this mirror, not even the Emperor, though some say the Emperor may have seen it during his pilgrimage to the shrines in 1869; and there is the possibility that Shinto priests may have glimpsed it during a ritual in 1901, when the innermost container was permanently sealed.

I'm enchanted with the idea of a mirror that has never reflected any image that can be aware of its reflection, never had a chance to steal a soul. Surely the story of the Emperor and the priests are but rumors, right? No punishment is spoken of, but it's hard to imagine a forbidden mirror that wouldn't exact a vicious punishment for a transgressive glance. I like to think that, rather than your soul, it would steal your sight, so that as it sat, solitary, in its box of gold in its box of cypress in its box of cypress, it could see, while you, the whole world all before you, are lost in blackest night.

All I know for sure is that, should I ever happen to get to see this mirror, it would be the one mirror in the world into which I would stare while saying, "Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary."

"I seem to have known and loved them somewhere before," or, On Japan

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The quake and tsunami had me thinking inescapably about Japan today. Our friends in the Tokyo suburbs are safe, as are acquaintances we made in the course of our visit there two years ago, but that doesn't significantly lessen the impact of the images of devastation.

Midafternoon, I turned to Lafcadio Hearn, to see if I could get from him some account that would convey how special, and fascinating, yet comfortable Japan felt from the minute we arrived. This, from his Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1905) isn't perfect, but it's close:

The majority of the first impressions of Japan recorded by travellers are pleasurable impressions. Indeed, there must be something lacking, or something very harsh, in the nature to which Japan can make no emotional appeal. . . . My own first impressions of Japan,--Japan as seen in the white sunshine of a perfect spring day,--had doubtless much in common with the average of such experiences. I remember especially the wonder and delight of the vision. The wonder and delight have never passed away: they are often revived for me even now, by some chance happening, after fourteen years of sojourn.

Then there's this, from Jonathan Cott's Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (1990):

"Here I am in the land of dreams," Lafcadio wrote to Henry Watkin,"--surrounded by strange Gods. I seem to have known and loved them before somewhere." To Elizabeth Bisland he wrote: "I feel indescribably toward Japan. Of course Nature here is not the Nature of the tropics,which is so splendid and savage and omnipotently beautiful that I feel at this very moment of writing the same pain in my heart I felt when leaving Martinique. This is a domesticated nature, which loves man, and makes itself beautiful for him in a quiet grey-and-blue way like the Japanese women, and the trees seem to know what people say about them--seem to have little human souls. What I love in Japan is the Japanese--the poor simple humanity of the country. It is divine."

After he'd lived there a while, he would write in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation about how different the Japanese are from Westerners, a position that's less troubling coming from Hearn, who loved Japan so much he made it his adopted home, than it would be from many another mouth. But it nonetheless feels wrong, a century on: when we visited, the wonder and the delight and beauty he describes were there, unquestionably, and, as with any nation you look at closely, we got the sense that Japanese culture could repay almost infinite attention and study--but the overall feeling was one of welcome. I've never in all my travels been treated as kindly, been shown such courtesy, or given such (often elaborate) assistance as we were as strangers in Tokyo. Kindness and courtesy are to some extent cultural, but that doesn't mean their existence shouldn't be celebrated.

Our thoughts are there.