Japan.
For a visitor, that means getting to experience an array of cultural delights often far removed from anything back home. You can eat forms of cuisine (pages 14–17) that have been perfected over centuries. You can shop for and even try your hand at traditional crafts as diverse as pottery, indigo dyeing, and making washi paper. You can even go deeper with Zen meditation classes, cooking classes, ikebana flower arranging workshops, the tea ceremony and far beyond. In cities such as Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, you can watch highly stylized kabuki theater or check out Noh theater, geisha shows and the old-fashioned slapstick comedy of manzai. All over the country you can visit historic sites like the World Heritage-designated shrines and temples of Kyoto and Nara, Himeji Castle, and many other places that leave an indelible imprint on travelers.
Along with all that tradition also comes formality. Japanese has a complex system of formal honorific speech for use in certain business and social settings to show respect, highlight status and so on. Behavior is formalized, too. The Japanese don’t go around bowing deeply to everyone all the time (life doesn’t mimic most travel documentaries), but there are set patterns of behavior for many situations, whether that’s how business cards are exchanged (given and received with both hands) or how a potential customer is greeted when they enter a store.
Remove the tourist brochure sugar coating and at times Japan’s fondness for tradition can be a negative, too; although for a foreigner the negatives often manifest themselves as humorous and quaint rather than an annoyance. Starting with the annoying, in many companies, business can progress slowly, with decision-making processes rarely deviating from cumbersome time-honored patterns. It doesn’t matter if a policy or procedure is inefficient, change would be worse—better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Avoid risk at all cost. Stick to the rules, at least publicly (one must keep face, after all), no matter how silly they seem. With that, Japan has “No” signs everywhere, from funny cartoon manner posters on the trains to warning signs in toilets (albeit not enough signs that tell elderly locals to stop spitting in the street!). Yet even the long list of “Nos” in places like hotels isn’t intended to be unwelcoming, it’s all about avoiding conflict and disruption; about keeping the wa (harmony). And in Japan, there’s nothing quite as timeless as that.
Horyuji Temple in Nara (page 82), home to some of the oldest wooden buildings in the world.
A monk in Kamakura (page 56), Japan’s capital from 1185–1333. The town is only an hour from central Tokyo, but retains so many reminders of its rich past that it feels like an entirely different world.
Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri is one of Japan’s biggest annual events. Lasting throughout July and featuring events that include a massive procession of floats through central Kyoto, the festival began in the 800s as a purification ritual to ward off a plague.
Be it Kyoto’s temple gardens or classic stroll gardens in Tokyo such as Kiyosumi and Rikugien, traditional landscaping is another aspect of old Japan that thankfully shows no sign of moving aside.
A display of archery in Tokyo’s Meiji Shrine. Japan is a very forward-looking country in many regards, but there is still a strong appreciation of (and pride in) its samurai past. You see that in so many places, from reenactments and even to Japan’s national football team—nicknamed “Samurai Blue”.
One of the small gardens at Daitokuji Temple in Kyoto.
Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, is an expansive example of traditional landscaping that utilizes the concept of borrowed scenery—incorporating the natural surrounds around the garden as a backdrop to its actual design.
Images of geisha and maiko (trainee geisha) in Kyoto might be considered a touch clichéd by some, but there’s nothing fake about the glimpses of geisha you might well get to enjoy in the former capital.
Magome, one of the beautifully preserved towns along the old Nakasendo highway that connected Edo and Kyoto.
Weddings for some are still a traditional Shinto affair, although white weddings are far more common.
Green tea doesn’t have to be part of a ceremony. For many, it’s a simple, daily staple much like coffee.
The stunning Himeji Castle.
NOW AND FUTURE JAPAN
Hi-Tech Design and an Obsessive Attention to Small Details
Visit any part of urban Japan and the country’s modern faces don’t so much reveal themselves, they pounce. For a first-time visit, it can be a dizzying experience. Concrete dominates. Cities increasingly grow upwards from their centers, and then roll long and flat unbroken far beyond their arbitrary borders. They are frequently crowded, too, from cramped train carriages and crawling highways to heaving shopping malls. Vending machines are on every corner; convenience stores, too. It’s energetic, often chaotic, but never dull. And while sometimes it feels like Japan refuses to cut its umbilical cord to the Edo era (try dealing with a Japanese bank or, far more seriously, look at something like the lack of gender equality) there are times when it feels the country has gone further into the future than Buck Rogers.
Architecture is certainly one area where Japan continuously pushes the boundaries, and the gray of central Tokyo in particular is often punctuated by the cutting-edge work of internationally acclaimed Japanese architects like Toyo Ito, Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Kisho Kurokawa, and Kenzo Tange. Pritzker Prize-winning Ando’s Omotesando Hills is an obvious example of modern Japanese style, although the former boxer, former trucker’s (and self-taught architect’s) work in Naoshima (pages 102–103) is arguably more representative of his distinctive use of rough concrete, stark spaces, and natural lighting.
Then there’s technology and manufacturing. With automotives, names like Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, Daihatsu, Mazda, and Toyota—the latter whose factory tours are a highlight of a trip to Nagoya—have made Japan one of a small group of global leaders, as, a little less fashionably, have industrial and heavy machine makers such as Mitsubishi. It’s similar within home electronics and brands such as Panasonic, Sony, NEC, and Hitachi. And don’t forget the cameras of Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Minolta, and more. Yet, back to the contrasts, even in a country where robots greet customers with a bow, bathtubs talk and toilets perform a wash and dry, sometimes even the simplest and most effective low-tech solutions are overlooked—just try and find a flat with good insulation.
Beyond that, Japan is also a leader when it comes to things geeky. For gamers, think PlayStation and Nintendo. For cartoons, comic and animation, where to start? It permeates all parts of Japanese society. You see adults reading thick manga comics on rush hour trains. All sorts of companies, from tourism agencies to shrines, use