"Time is a recurring theme in your book"--With Excerpts

Journalist Aneli Rufus asked, "Time is a recurring theme in these chapters. How did your perception(s) of time change as you lived in Japan, and came to know these people as you wrote about them for this book?"  


I answered her question, and included several excerpts from the book.

I think the main thing I understood was how I was making myself miserable around time simply because I was trying to pack more things into my days than was actually possible.  (And I certainly haven't yet solved this problem in my own life!)

Chapter 2, on Mr. Nakamura, really speaks to this issue quite a bit. Here's a man who does almost everything by hand, and yet he seems to have so much time.  As he says:

“If you have time, a lot of

things are enjoyable. Making this

kind of woodblock, or collecting the

wood for the fire, or even cleaning

things—it’s all enjoyable and satisfying

if you give yourself time.  Humans have a tendency to

create a visual image in their minds of what they think they can accomplish in a particular period of time—say in a day or a week or a year. But one thing I noticed when

I first came here was that there was a gap between that

image and the amount I can actually accomplish. I felt

ill at ease and irritable all the time. I eventually learned,

however, to adjust my imagination, and plans, to what

was actually possible.”

Perhaps this is another way that Nakamura keeps his

presence so calm: by reducing the number of plans he

makes so that they fit easily into the time he has available,

instead of trying to accelerate his life to accomplish a long

list of projects. And, I speculate, maybe he has come to

this understanding of how to live a satisfied life precisely

because he has set a pace slow enough to observe the processes

of the mind.

When I compare his absolutely simple, almost bare, existence to the sophisticated level of his thought, I admire his decisions about

what to prioritize in life. For all the time he spends cutting

and gathering firewood, growing food, carving woodblocks,

cooking, or just gazing into the fire, it doesn’t

seem that his intellectual life has suffered in the least. It

is as though the mastery he has achieved as a craftsperson

suffuses all the other spheres of his life.

Another change in me I noticed was when Atsuko (chapter 3) said to me:

"It is like what Rousseau said, Il faut cultiver son jardin: You must cultivate your own garden. They say that ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ and I wanted to have some moss.”

and also when Nakamura critiqued Thoreau's Walden Pond:

“Thoreau only lived there for a

little more than two years. It’s more like he moved there

in order to write the book. But someone needs about ten

years, I think, to understand a particular way of living.

Thoreau seems like he was more of a tourist.”

In Japan in general, there's an assumption that if you want to be good at something, you have to put years and years and years in to that.  I think we Americans, and I include myself, childishly want to be experts right away.  Here's another passage that speaks to that, from chapter 4 on the Zen bamboo flute player Kogan Murata:

Then, contemplatively, Murata tells me about searching

for “the true sound.” Although he says he’s never heard

it, he believes it exists, and that looking for it is the real

work of the bamboo flute player. “The true sound can’t

be found in one or two years. Ten years is not enough,

twenty years is not enough. The real thing takes a minimum

of thirty years. That’s why you have to be mad. You

have to give it all your heart, as my teacher said, otherwise

it’ll never be the real thing.”

“But,” I ask, “what is wrong with doing it as a hobby,

a part-time thing, after getting home from the office

or something?”

“You wouldn’t understand at all. Better forget it. It’s

a waste of time. It’ll never be the real thing that way.”

I’m not sure I completely agree with Murata on this,

but perhaps I am thinking inside my own culture’s tendency

toward dabbling. And, after all, isn’t turning away

from “just messing around” what mastery means?

I'll also say that I learned from Nakamura that when you put a lot of time  and care into something, it gives back to you later, again and again:

And yet as Nakamura starts to explain to me the painstaking

process of sewing the cover on a book—how the cloth has

to be tucked in at a certain angle under the paper, how

the cover should extend just one millimeter beyond the

stack of pages—I still wonder whether it’s really necessary

to be that careful.

Nakamura’s answer is simple, and clear: “If you make

it this way, every time you look at it later, it’s an enjoyable

experience.” It is almost as if the energy he puts into making

something remains stored in the object and feeds his

spirit every time he looks at it or touches it.

I certainly have found this with my own book, with how much time I put into it.  It's really so satisfying for me to re-read the sentences of my own book, and that may be because I put years of care into writing the book. 


I think about a lot of journalists (and I don't blame them for this, because it's the situation of their jobs)  who parachute into a foreign country, get an interpreter, ask some questions, and then file a story on deadline.   And then the world of Western readers bases its view on that "foreign" place on this supposedly expert person who has "been there".  While I know this circumstance is a function of how much time the journalist is given by their agencies,  isn't it a shame?  I think of my own half-baked theories I had about why people behaved in a certain way when I was in Japan for 4 months and how they were totally shattered  by one year in, and those again were proven wrong when we'd been there two or four years.

I finally got how really understanding another culture, or anything for that matter, takes much much much more time than we Americans are accustomed to--or even willing to-- give to it.

Insightful Review by Anthropology Professor Barbara King

Anthropology professor Barbara King was curious about Japan, and "began scouting around on the internet for recent books involving Japan, and your title came up as I played around with a search engine. I ordered a copy for my friend and another for me."

In the review below, one line I particularly felt moved by was “It’s become thoroughly unremarkable to feel stoop-shouldered with work, [and] glassy-eyed from the assault of information’s flow through electronic outlets ...”

 

She added, in an email to me that, "As anthropologists we're interested not only in the amazing variation among individuals in any society, but also in thinking about patterns within cultures. My friend felt a different sense of order, and structure, and attention to aesthetics and design, in Japan."

She then chose to review A Different Kind of Luxury in her monthly column.   Barbara's website, with her own books is here.

EXCERPT FROM THE REVIEW:

My habit for years has been to sign emails to colleagues and acquaintances with the phrase “Best, Barbara.” I type fast, and usually accurately, but in the last few weeks I’ve been startled to see appearing on my screen the sign-off “Beset, Barbara.”

In some ways I do feel beset: by too much work, and too much challenge in finding time for family, friends, books, films, and quiet reflection. I’m hardly alone in this sense that it takes incredible energy just to resist being engulfed by culture’s great forces. It’s become thoroughly unremarkable to feel stoop-shouldered with work, [and] glassy-eyed from the assault of information’s flow through electronic outlets.

Many of us may seek micro-escapes, fixing ourselves to a spot in our home or yard, or in a nearby park or beach, that invites us to think, read, talk with others, or do something old-fashioned and creative with our hands. In such a place, our vision may clear long enough to daydream a fuller resistance to the prevailing hamster wheel. At such times, a good book to have is Andy Couturier’s A Different Kind of Luxury: Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance.

Couturier, when living in Japan, interviewed eleven people who embrace a differently-paced life.

Koichi Yamashita was once a professor of literature and philosophy and is now a farmer in a remote area of southern Shikoku. His family embraces food self-sufficiency. “I would like to be an artist of farming,” he told Couturier, “to achieve the same level of artistry and creation of beauty as does a novelist or a painter.”

Two comments that Yamashita offered up to Couturier caused me to close the book for a few moments, and simply sit with his thoughts.

When he’s out in the rice fields, Yamashita is, he says, “simply glad. I understand that I myself am living, that I am in possession of a living spirit. In the rice paddy with the plants you just naturally develop a feeling of compassion, of sympathy…”  

What I like best about the Yamashita chapter is its direct engagement with the costs of this kind of living: it’s not all mystical meshing with the Earth and its living creatures. Yamashita’s work is hard. He cares also for an organic tea plantation high in the mountains, and the weeds require constant attention.

It’s physically strenuous, it’s time-consuming, and together with the rice-field work, it leaves Yamashita without enough free time. “I do feel,” he notes, "that I don’t have enough time to read and write for myself.” Here we learn that “simple living” does not equate -- as it might in the popular imagination -- to a leisurely freedom.

Yamashita muses about reading and writing books in a wholly fascinating way. Equally engrossing are the fruits of Couturier’s interaction with Jinko Kaneko, a painter and textile artist living in the distant shadow of Mt. Fuji. Couturier describes Kaneko as “one of those rare people who has not only been able to contact the mystic energy in nature but can also communicate what it feels like in the paintings and fabric work she makes.” She embodies, to me, a mix of practical sensibility and airy thinking, and, like Yamashita, a mix too of happy choices and hard sacrifices.

The book reproduces some of her art; even in small black-and-white squares, the trees, flowers, mountains, and skies offer a sense of her fusing with nature as she paints. It’s a kind of slow art, too, in the making. The colors, Kaneko explains, are made from ground stones, and materials like mica, pearls, silver and gold.

Kaneko speaks about the challenges of being both a woman and an outsider. She comes originally from a different region of Japan, meaning that now she’s perceived as beneath not only all the men where she lives and works, but all the women too. “I am at the bottom of the ranking… It’s tiring. The village mindset is narrow, and there are all kind of tasks to do that take me away from my painting. I feel drained.” Yet there is joy, too, in her words, and in her art, and in her choices.

I’ve been dipping, at a graceful pace (and feeling not at all beset), into the nine other chapters in A Different Kind of Luxury. Sitting with the book in my sunroom, the view out to our garden expands, and I imagine I can see much, much farther, even a little way into the lives of people in Japan I’ll never meet. 

From the Archives: Carrying the Stone Buddha of Life

I'm currently in Nepal, and have been experiencing the beauty of the town Pokhara, which I wrote about in one of the Japan Times articles I published in 1999.   Only 11 of the original articles I wrote made it into the book as full fledged chapters, and 11 others undortunately did not.  This article is about a quirky sage of a man named Ichikawa. Here's one that didn't but indeed is full of much of the same spirit.  I hope you enjoy it.

Ichikawa shows a village woman an avocado--
something she'd never seen before

Ever since he was a boy, Taizo Ichikawa wanted to be a saint, to attain enlightenment.  "I don't know why I was so interested in achieving satori," he tells me as we sit at the table of his small shop in the mountain hamlet where he lives.   "Perhaps I did some kind of spiritual training in a previous lifetime, but I died before I reached that state.  Or maybe the reason was just that I was got angry so easily when I was young.  I wanted to become a more gentle person."

         It's hard to imagine this peaceful and unassuming man with his goofy smile, thick black hair and ready laugh as a volatile youth.  He does, however, often have a look of merriment and even mischief in his large expressive eyes, as if he is privy to some secret joke.

         Pokara, Ichikawa's shop, also has something of the preposterous to it.  Besides its location on the virtually deserted main street of a village five hours from the nearest prefectural capital, there's the utterly incongruous nature of the items for sale.

         One may buy or borrow books on transpersonal psychology and Steiner education, partake of a steaming bowl of noodle soup, purchase Hawaiian necklaces, woven sandals, Indian incenses or Uruguayan ceramic owls.  Or, alternately, one can order a tall glass of beer.

         On the wood-paneled walls--giving the shop a kind of rural cosmopolitanism--are a number of finely rendered line drawings hand painted by women from the northern Indian village of Mithila, a place on the other side of Asia, perhaps similarly remote.  In the background quiet flute music fills the warmly-lit room. 

View from Pokhara Nepal (25,000 feet!)

         "I want this to be a place where people walk in and say 'Aaah,' and their body drops all of its tension," Ichikawa says.  "Some people have never experienced a state of complete, utter relaxation.  They don't even know what it feels like."

         Ichikawa opened his shop originally, he tells me, as a place to hold holistic and transpersonal psychotherapy workshops.  "But," he laughs, "there's no one to lead them!"

         Seemingly illogical business concepts like this reflect Ichikawa's approach to efficiency and rationality--he doesn't put much stock in them.  He admits, for example, that the few other homesteaders in the village to whom Indian folk crafts or books on  spiritual psychology might appeal "are poor like me;" and the ordinary villagers, who are mostly in their seventies and eighties, don't show much interest.

         Still he doesn't want to leave this remote area and move the shop to where there might be more traffic.  "Here is good," he says.  "At night, the sky is full of stars.  Also the water is pure and the air is clean. I can make enough money to survive selling beer and ramen to my three customers, and that's enough for me."

         Since becoming the cook, bartender and sage of this tiny, one-room establishment a year ago, he has rarely returned to his homestead several kilometers up the road.  The rice fields that he assiduously cultivated for seven years have become choked with weeds, and the house itself looks almost abandoned.  Characteristically, he doesn't appear to mind, except to joke about it to his visitors.  He's clearly doing what he wants to be doing.

         Absurdist ventures have apparently inspired Ichikawa from early on.  He first got the idea of going to India from a story he read when he was in junior high school.

         "This guy," he tells me in an animated voice, "was traveling through India without any money when he discovered a large stone statue of the Buddha that he really liked.  In spite of the fact that he had almost no money, and that the statue was big and heavy and made of stone, he bought that statue, put it in his rucksack, and carried it everywhere with him.  I knew then that I wanted to do something like that someday myself."

         Before he left Japan however, he worked for several years as a road construction laborer in Tokyo.  "I even tried college for a year!" he says.  "But  soon I could see that everyone around me was on a career track.  They wanted to graduate and enter some big-name company.   I got afraid that if I was around that kind of thinking for four years, I would become like them.  I didn't want to have that kind of life ahead of me."

         He spent years traipsing around India, off and on for a decade or more, before returning to search for a place in the mountains of Japan.

         I asked him about the name of his shop. 

         "Pokara," he says, "is the name of a town in Nepal at about 800 meters of elevation.  And just next to it, right up against the town, is an mountain ten times that high."   As he says this, he holds his head down and his shoulders hunched and looks up and to the right, a sly grin on his broad-featured face.  It's as if he's re-experiencing being a tiny human figure in such a landscape and inwardly laughing at how ridiculous we are.

Ichikawa crushes spices for some chai!

         I see this same expression of both amusement and awe in Ichikawa a lot, as though he were standing next to that mountain most of the time.

         "In India," Ichikawa tells me, "I became baki-baki ." 

         It's a word I don't know, but he laughs out loud when I reach for my dictionary.  "You won't find it in there!  I made that word up myself!" 

         "Baki-baki means being connected with the universe, it means the microcosmos and the macrocosmos are intertwined, in sync, it means transpersonal; it means satori, love, tons of it, full up to the top."

         Ichikawa then hands me a box filled with flyers and pamphlets for workshops he has attended in diverse areas such as energetic healing, the Alexander Technique, reiki, butoh dance, solo performance, kinesthesiology, and left-right brain integration.

         "I want to have workshops like that here," he says, "because a lot of people are out there suffering, and they don't know why.  Maybe when they were very small, they were hurt emotionally in some way, but they have no consciousness of that trauma now.  They just know that they are suffering.  Even if they think about it intellectually, they still have no idea why.

         "So when they are relating to other people, they say things that they really don't want to say, and they are unable to speak the things they do want to say.  It's all unconscious however.  In the end they become exhausted and depleted of energy, sick, low-spirited, and downhearted.

         "I want to help people solve such problem themselves, and then use that understanding in their everyday lives."

         For Ichikawa, helping other people is directly connected to his own fulfillment and happiness. 

         "My purpose in life, and that of human kind, and that of the earth are the same, absolutely," he says.  "That's what I mean by transpersonal, by baki baki.   The earth is a single life form, a single soul--the whole planet is a single body of life.  I myself am just one cell in that body, that entity. 

         "My individual purpose in life is to be vibrant, alive and vigorous, and to continue on that way, full of spirit, healthy and energetic, endlessly.  I will die and be born again, come into the world, and pass away, be born again and vanish.  That's also the purpose of the human race, and the purpose of the whole life-planet, to continue on, healthy energetic and alive."

         "This is not a thought in my head, and it's not a belief.  I am totally uninterested in belief, because belief means 95%, belief means conceiving of something with your brain.  What I am talking about is an understanding,  a  felt thing in my body, something I know intuitively.  It happens in an instant, and it's an absolutely sure, 100% thing."

         "That's why I have given up on negativity.  I used to go around saying 'this thing is bad and that is bad,' naming the problems in Japan--pesticides, nuclear energy, destruction of nature, the behavior of politicians.  But it only made me feel worse all the time, brought my energy to a lower level; and what's more, it probably didn't accomplish anything.  So now I try to just be positive, saying 'this is right, and that is good!' "

         "Was there any other major influence you got from your years in India?" I ask.

         "Well, one thing I noticed is that on an Indian bus, if you sit next to someone, you always talk to them.  Japan isn't like that at all.  That's why I only have one table here at Pokara, this is a place for people to talk, and, maybe, hopefully, to raise each other up." 

To Love Nepal

Anapurna South, in the
Nepali Himalayas

A Different Kind of Luxury is not a travel book, and I certainly don't claim that the good life can only be lived after spending time in another culture.  Still, all of the people in the book did travel outside of their own country, outside of their own comfort zones, and learned tremendous things, which they use daily in their lives.  Many of these tools, techniques and philosophies have come from India, but perhaps even more, they came from Nepal.  Over the 15 years of writing and working on this book, I must have written the word “Nepal” hundreds of times, yet until two weeks ago, I had never been here.  I had learned a lot about its culture and art and especially, speaking with the 11 people in the book I learned how they interacted--in different ways--with Nepali people and the land here. 

A Nepali Traditional House
at Rice Harvest Time

But there’s nothing like experiencing the real thing.  I’ve only been here such a short time but I can easily see why the tremendous people I was able to interview and become friends with in the process of the book, could really love this country.  It is a very gentle place, and yet in love with beauty and full of vitality.  The mountains, of course, take your breath away, but the people’s ways, and their art, and their food, and their hand crafts, and perhaps especially the way they make things by themselves, and use them, using just their own hands, it has moved me time and again.  It’s peaceful just to be here.

         After all these years, I feel like my understanding of what I have been writing is so much closer to complete.   I’d just note here, with some photos, how Nepal has touched the lives of so many people in the book.

Nakamura Showing his collection
of Nepali cloth printed with woodblocks

Osamu Nakamura, profiled in Chapter 2 lived for almost 10 years in the mountains of Nepal.  I have seen here many of the characteristic black and red woodblock prints I first saw at his cabin in the mountains of Japan.  Also, his kitchen arrangements, and the woodstove he cooks on are distinctly Nepali.

Nakamura collected samples of Nepali cloth
and then made versions on handmade paper
by carving individual woodblocks

Jinko Kaneko painting

Jinko Kaneko, profiled in Chapter 10 cooks Nepali style curries at her restaurant Bontenya.  She documented the different ways the curries were spiced in many different Himalayan valleys.  She also studied fabric dying and design while there.

Inside Jinko's restaurant

A delicious Nepali curry
in the mountains of Japan

Gufu Watanabe

Gufu Watanabe, profiled in chapter 8, who I just spoke to on the phone, explained to me the festival of lights here in Nepal, in incredible detail, explaining the cultural significance of the many lanterns and candles.  Gufu hasn't been in Nepal for 30 years.  Here's an illustration from one of his journals of a tea stall in Kathmandu, where many of the people in the book first met each other.

Interviewing Akira Ito about his book
documenting handmade paper in Nepal

And finally, a man who deeply loved Nepal, Akira Ito, profiled in Chapter 6.  Ito-san wrote much about traditional woodblock carving in several magazine articles, and about the traditional mountain cultures here.  I've translated parts of these articles in the chapter, and I think you can feel Ito's spirit in his writing.  Here is one of the pages of one of his illustrations of Nepali handmade paper making.

Nepali Paper Making Illustration by Akira Ito