The land of the victorious sun

by Nikita Vul (Russia)

I didn't expect to find Japan

“One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things…” – Henry Miller once wrote. For me, 20 y.o. (still boy, rather than adult) my destination – Japan was indeed a leap into the unknown, almost a journey to the other planet, especially bearing in mind that it was my first trip abroad. I did not know what to expect: I had little, almost non-existent knowledge about this country – motley potpourri of stereotypical images: geisha, samurai, kamikaze, hara-kiri, sakura blossom, tea ceremony. Those images turned out to be only partially stereotypical, but I am not going to write about that. Well yes, I could have written about the bus-stop which addressed to me in Japanese, how I wondered in the streets of Tokyo, feeling like Jonah in the belly of a giant fish. I could have written about Japanese homes – the magic of Barbie-like houses where you slide vertical panels fusuma and make two rooms out of one, or roll a futon mattress, hide it in a built-in wardrobe, thus turning a bedroom into a living room. I could have written about Yasukuni Shrine which commemorates all those who died fighting for Japan and about the swords being forged near that Shrine – symbolism which I found shocking and appalling. But I firmly believe that discovering the unknown through travelling is a life-long process of widening one’s outlook. Travelling is not the relentless accumulation of sites visited, pictures taken and meals eaten. It is about building attitudes which go well beyond any single particular trip. The unknown, something that I did not expect to find and which I discovered during that trip to Japan was a different attitude to life. I had always believed: the bigger – the better. Only in Japan I realized the absurdity and foolishness of this approach. The lack of space in Japan causes the need in beauty in small but concentrated form. Imagine a patch of greenery near the house. The backbone of the garden is a dwarf pine – bonsai. The garden starts from it and ends with it. Bonsai is the root of Japanese passion for miniaturization. Due to the lack of space, Japanese reduce the garden practically to one single almost eternal tree – a concentrated doze of beauty. The apogee of miniaturization. The crown of pithiness. The Universe has collapsed and there is no need to go beyond its boundaries. It’s just pointless. There are four types of bonsai. Four types of beauty – and they will outlive the gardener who grew and took care about them. Bonsai serves as a constant reminder about the brevity of human life. The perception of this brevity finds its reflection in the desire to grab and hold – at least for a short while – the moments which are slipping away from us. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly”, - says the fox in The Little Prince. This is about Japanese. “Nobody cares about the seconds”, - says Sei Shōnagon in Japanese novel The Pillow Book. Now this is about us – westerners. Japanese, quite the contrary, do care about seconds. They somehow learned how to do that. A finger snap. Fleet sakura blossom. Shortness of hokku poem. Kamikaze dash at the enemy. A cursory drawdown of the ink. And then another finger snap. The time has stopped. Japan gives even a shallow person a pause for thought. It feels as if you have been running at full speed and all of a sudden hit a brick wall with your face. And then you make a discovery. You realize that you were running in the wrong direction. You realize that if you want to find peace with yourself and the world, you do not need to move mountains or make rivers flow backwards. You simply need to notice their existence. This is what Japan taught me. This is the truth, which I didn’t expect to find but still found there, in the land of the victorious sun.