After Bookdwarf finished with Japanland it was my turn. I’m most of the way through it now. Outline: hardy American, documentary filmmaker, world-citizen, and individualist Karin wants to truly understand wa, the Japanese concept of harmony. So she arranges a host family through her judo teacher, and stays for a year and tries to understand Japanese subtelty. She is not a subtle woman: she is outdoorsy, outspoken, unable to follow directions, can’t cook or clean, and is single past the age of 30. Big no-nos.
She obviously loves the country, but also strains against its insistence on order and obedience, and she definitely highlights several unflattering examples of the human cost of wa. In particular, she travels to a shrine in northern Japan to film a weeklong retreat of a spiritual group known as Yamabushi. Most of the attendees are older men, newly retired, some sent there by their wives because they have nothing else to do and just get in the way around the house. Retired guys out in the woods getting in touch with themselves, each other, and nature are not unfamiliar to American society, but she describes the men as desperately in search of meaning in their lives now that their salaryman days are over:
One man retired less than a week ago. He began working for his company at twenty-one. His commute was two hours and thirty-four minutes each day. I do the numbers. Five days a week. Fifty weeks a year. Thirty-nine years.
“You’ve spent twenty-five thousand horus on the train,” I say. “That’s nearly… three years, night and day.”
He gets very quiet. I leave him alone.
As the passage illustrates, Muller is not always the most sensitive to the feelings of others, and her portrayal of Japan is, while appreciative and honest, not 100% positive. I am sure that this comes as a great disappointment and dishonor to her host family. I was glad to see that while she is critical of some aspects of Japanese society, her self-assessment is also unsparing: she certainly doesn’t shy away from discussing her cultural miscues, which range from comical to genuinely painful, especially when she offends someone she respects and scrambles ineffectually to apologize.
In all, Japanland is balanced and well-written. Recommended.
Secretly Ironic 