"Japanland is an engaging introductio to the contemporary Japanese (and American!) fascination with all things "ancient" and uniquely Japanese."
Ian Miller
Assistant Professor
Department of History
Arizona State University
Japanland
Karin Muller is an adventurous soul, and in Japanland she sets out to discover the “ancient heart” of modern Japan. Muller’s infectious enthusiasm and willingness to meet people on their own terms opens doors that might otherwise have remained closed. In the space of a single year she works with a Judo master, watches a sword master fold molten metal into a lethal work of art, learns to shoot a samurai longbow from horseback, is served breakfast by sumo wrestlers, and joins hundreds of nearly naked yakuza gangsters as they haul immense shrines through the streets of Tokyo in the city’s notorious Sanja Festival. Karin’s taste for the exotic transforms what might have been a simple trip to one of the world’s few developed capitalist democracies, a place that shares more with the United States than most nations, into an encounter with a strange land of contradictions. How can a place be so traditional and yet so modern?
Foreigners have sought the essence of Japanese culture since at least the mid-nineteenth century, when a squadron of American gunboats put an end to the country’s long period of limited foreign contact. On July 8, 1853, Commodore Matthew C. Perry steamed into Japan’s Edo Bay with four heavily armed United States Navy warships. Two were the so-called “black ships,” ominously painted, coal-burning steamships of the latest design. There, anchored close to the poorly defended capital’s port and within view of a stunned populace, Perry issued an ultimatum: open the country to trade or face unstoppable bombardment. Thus began Japan’s modern engagement with the outside world, a new chapter in the broader encounter between “East” and “West,” and Japan’s struggle to make its way in a world where “modern” was (and too often still is) understood to be synonymous with “Western.”
The country’s leaders met this challenge with a revolutionary program of political and cultural Westernization. This program was remarkably successful. By the opening of the twentieth century Japanese culture was so changed that Westerners and Japanese alike were left stunned. Basil Hall Chamberlain, a longtime professor at Tokyo Imperial University, expressed his astonishment in a 1905 essay. “To have lived through the transition stage of modern Japan makes a man feel preternaturally old; for here he is in modern times, with the air full of talk about bicycles and bacilli and ‘spheres of influence’, and yet he can himself distinctly remember the Middle Ages.”
Outfitted with a backpack, a handheld camera, and a dauntless spirit, Karin sets out to discover those aspects of authentic Japanese culture that have resisted Westernization. What her journey reveals instead is that tradition and modernity are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. This is the case in Tokyo or Topeka, New Delhi or New York. We moderns are constantly struggling to make sense of the rapid changes and uncertainties that shape our lives, and much of that struggle is expressed in debates and beliefs about tradition.
Karin’s passion for Japanese culture is focused on her love of Judo, a sport she studied for nearly a decade before arriving in Japan. For Karin and for most Japanese Judo is part of the broader tradition of Bushido, or the Way of the Warrior. I am constantly amazed at the power of this concept not only in Japan but here in Arizona. When my classes roll around to the Age of the Samurai, my students’ eyes light up: Bushido! We quickly move into questions about armor, swordsmanship, and the intense value placed on loyalty in feudal Japan. And each class I return to the same document, quoting again from Basil Hall Chamberlain, this time writing in 1912. “Bushido was unknown until a decade or two ago! The very word appears in no dictionary, native or foreign before the year 1900. Chivalrous individuals of course existed in Japan, as in all countries at every period; but Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption.” But it exists now, as an invented tradition. We have our Knights of the Round Table and they have their Loyal Samurai. Japanland is an engaging introduction to the contemporary Japanese (and American!) fascination with all things “ancient” and uniquely Japanese.
Links to further readings:
On Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan
Basil Hall Chamberlain’s 1912 essay
Recent PBS documentary, Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire
Japanland airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. December 15, 22, 29 and January 5 on Channel 8.
