'this unromantic land'...

One more selected passage from a book to which I keep returning over and over again, Donald Richie's The Inland Sea. The most thoughtful, thought-provoking and movingly honest book about Japan as a place and as a state of mind I have ever read.

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The Japanese are resolutely of the here and the now, and this, to be sure, limits them. In the same way, one of the ways they have learned to survive in a sometimes quaking, ocasionally flooded, and always overcrowded archipelago is to prepare themselves, daily, continually, for the worst. If it does not come, they have had a good day. I have always wondered why Seneca is not a best seller here. His stoic admonitions would find, I should think, one hundred million pairs of willing ears. Do not fear the future - if it is too terrible, you will die; if you do not die, it could not have been too terrible. Such thoughts, so very Asian-sounding, might, one would believe, find a ready audience.

That they do not is largely because the Japanese - different in this from the Indians, from the Chinese - are not self-conscious except in the lowest and most social sense. They are literally not conscious of self and they literally have no conscience - Western man's pride and pain - at all. Thus Ruth Benedict's conclusion that they have an abundance of social shame but not a shred of private guilt is probably true. A thing is not a crime unless you are caught; nothing is bad except something that fails - and even then there is always the sense of shikata ga nai* to fall back on.

One can imagine what a Dostoievski or a Melville would have made of such a place. Here the very conflict that gives all meaning to Western life does not exist. It is not merely ironed out or hidden. It quite literally does not exist, has never even been imagined. Its mysterious attractions may be felt in whatever little a Japanese derives from a reading of Crime and Punishment, but, unless he is so awed by the idea of Literature that his mind numbs, I can imagine him first asking himself what was the matter with Raskolnikov, to carry on so about his crime when no one but himself knew anything about it and it would never have been known if only he had kept his mouth shut.

One can imagine, with more pleasure, what a Henry Fielding or a Jane Austen would have made of the country. Both would have criticized. He would have exposed, in the midst of laughter, the most awful discrepancies and she would have observed with her loving but cutting irony many an abyss between intention and fact.


Donald Richie, The Inland Sea (1971; Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2002), pp. 41-42.


*The link is to another must-read, a fine piece by Hugh Cortazzi on the fatalistic and passive 'shikata ga nai' (it can't be helped) mentality and its dangers in a supposedly 'democratic' society.