Pico Iyer

Japan is traditionally called mysterious, inscrutable, and stoic. It prefers total isolation to dealing with the rest of the world (It used to destroy ships and cargo and execute those onboard upon arrival). Now Pico Iyer, who has lived there for 32 years tells us the how and why. In A Beginners’ Guide To Japan, a short book of even shorter anecdotes (often one-liners) he describes living in Japan as the Japanese do, and how very different that can be from the rest of the world.

The basic show more theme is keeping personal (self) control. This means not standing out. It means women dressing to not be noticed, never showing hurt, or emotion, and keeping civil for the common good. Nudity is not taboo, but asking people to express feelings is offensive. Iyer says passengers routinely sleep with their heads on strangers’ shoulders on Japanese trains, and the leaned-upon agree not to flinch. A sign of trust—of community, perhaps—but also a reminder that what constitutes public and what constitutes private is something subtler than homes and walls.

There is an emphasis on cleanliness, honesty and harmony: “Keeping up appearances, my neighbors might reply, is not the same as denying what’s beneath. It’s simply a way of placing the needs of the whole before those of the self.”

There is a lot of contradiction in Japan, and therefore throughout the book. The Japanese have adopted it and value it. The book cites Oscar Wilde numerous times. He was famous for pithy contradictions that made fun of human society, habits and morals. In Japan, this is not for laughter, it is for satisfaction of the Japanese way. Iyer cites the first time an American, Bobby Valentine, was brought over to manage a professional Japanese team, in 1995. He was fired after leading his hapless squad to a stunning second-place finish, because, a team spokesman announced, “of his emphasis on winning.”

Iyer has learned not to fit in or pretend he is Japanese. He needs to be accepted as an exception who nonetheless respects Japanese ways. He found that friends will come over, sit in the garden with him and say nothing. Total silence makes for a satisfying visit in Japan. Temples guide the eye toward a peaceful opening in the roof, where nothing is going on. Gardens are not spectacles, they are oases.

The silence and the separation and the holding it all in also breed unusual workarounds for human needs:
“The company Family Romance employs fourteen hundred actors to pretend to be family members for clients who are going through hard times. Its boss has acted as a husband to one hundred women, and as a young girl’s father for months on end; one of his workers played a wife to one man for seven years. Another such company, Support One, sends actors to offer apologies on a client’s behalf, to pretend to be a betrayed wife, to act as an inconsolable friend.”

A Beginners’ Guide To Japan is not comprehensive; it is instead whimsical. It is Iyer’s almost childlike fascination with and appreciation of a totally different society. In true Japanese fashion, no one should take offense; none is intended.

David Wineberg show less

Pico Iyer's wife is Japanese, and they've lived in Japan (in Nara) for much of the last thirty years, so he's probably better-qualified than most foreigners to be writing about the country, but he's clearly not entirely joking when he tells us that we should read "Beginner's Guide" as referring to the inexperience of the author, not the reader. Japan is not an easy place to pin down, apparently, especially not if you didn't grow up in a Japanese family and your command of the language is show more less than perfect.

Iyer therefore largely avoids subjective statements of opinion (a very Japanese approach, as he points out) and leans quite heavily on things other people — Japanese and foreign — have said about Japan. Or, occasionally, things people have said about other places that can also be read onto Japan. He arranges them cleverly to expose the many paradoxes in what "we" think we know about the Japanese, and in what the Japanese think they know about themselves, until we find ourselves nudged gently towards the conclusion that, in fact, the Japanese are just like everyone else. Only more so. There are plenty of other places in the world where people eagerly embrace new technologies whilst finding great significance in archaic traditions, or where a a strong desire for outward conformity and avoidance of any kind of individualistic display in public creates masks for people who are wildly eccentric and creative in their inner lives (England was just coming out of that mode when I was growing up, for example). But the Japanese have somehow refined all these things a degree or two beyond the rest of the world.

An enjoyable, thought-provoking book, which will probably become an essential — if useless in practice — reference for anyone visiting Japan for the first time. show less

This relatively short book has something to surprise on nearly every page. It's one of those unusual books that starts out, as so many travel books do, as merely interesting, and turns into something much deeper by the end. You could call it a collection of essays on a theme, and certainly there's no indication that the places Iyer visited were visited recently or in the order presented, although you could read the book thinking that. What we have here, in part, is a work by a man who has show more spent decades traveling and is no longer content to simply report on wonderful and unusual destinations. Instead, he's looking deeper, finding new connections between the people and cultures he's encountering and humanity at large, and especially, the connections between humanity at large and he himself. Although he never says so outright, it's clear that he's feeling the approaching shadow of mortality and is no longer content to merely marvel at the surface of things, or to find patterns only a few levels deep. Hence the subtitle of the book, "In Search of Paradise." Not only are we individuals fated to fade away, but so are our cultures. What really, beneath all the bright diversity of people and places, undergirds this vast web called humanity?

Not that this book is at all difficult to read, or that it can't be experienced as travelogue. But late in the book, when Iyer happens to mention that he has spent much time with the Dalai Lama, traveling in his company on several occasions, I wasn't as surprised as I might have been.

Nevertheless I do recommend the book to those who are not looking for something deep; that's how I discovered it. I read the opening pages about Iyer getting off the plane in Tehran and liked his voice and didn't expect anything other than a fresh perspective on overlooked or misrepresented places. The full list of places visited and discussed, in addition to Iran, are North Korea; Kashmir; Broome, in Western Australia; Jerusalem; Ladakh, on the border of India and Tibet; Sri Lanka; Gokurabashi, Japan, an ancient cemetery near Osaka; and Varanasi. Although that last section is only 24 pages long, it let me imagine the place so vividly that my "memory" of it is as strong as my memory of places I've actually visited!

Highly recommended, whether you consider yourself a spiritual person or not. show less

On its face, fire seems to be an unusual metaphor for quiet contemplation. Yet Iyer finds so much to reflect on there that he uses it as the title of his memoir. Both are difficult to control. Nirvana, one goal of meditation, literally means “blowing out” or “becoming extinguished.” Both promise renewal. And flames threaten both of Iyer’s California refuges—a Benedictine monastery he has visited for 30 years and his family homes.

His principal setting is in the Big Sur hills show more overlooking the Pacific. This is a place of quiet but also one that is prone to wildfires. Iyer manages to make his story interesting by including details of his life. Iyer’s life is not just silence, reading and meditation. In addition to concerns about fire and the threat of fire, he spends time with the resident monks. These men are dedicated to prayer, contemplation and service. Yet they find time to watch Monty Python and read secular books, which they keep in a library separate from the sacred. Iyer also converses with fellow travelers including an erudite prior, an elderly female French-Canadian, his wife in Japan, his aged mother, the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and even the Dalai Lama.

His narrative style is more meditative than conventional. It is timeless. There is no past or future, only the now. It is mindful, “…letting everything extraneous fall away.” And it is non-judgmental. There are no tips for a successful life. Instead, he accepts that life is mysterious and not easily resolved into goods and bads or a few aphorisms. This memoir is for anyone interested in the benefits of a meditative lifestyle. show less