Letter from Osaka

It is a nation of 128 million packed into a usable landmass less than the size of Connecticut. It has one of the world’s most formidable economies, yet possesses almost no natural resources. Its history and culture is dynamic and elegant but it is trashing past and poetry and embracing a chrome and neon Frankenstein of discarded Americana. It is a dense, noisy, ultramodern, relentlessly paced and organized place, inhumanly scaled and almost insufferable. But it works. And if the future is overpopulated and under-resourced, it is Japan.

You literally fly into tomorrow to get there, since Japan is 15 hours ahead of the West Coast. On approach to Kansai, the swept wing airport built in the middle of Osaka Bay, a caravan of marine transports, tankers, ships and ferries connecting Japan to the ports of Asia and the Pacific plies the waters. They form a lifeline of supplies and goods that keeps Japan from economic collapse and social upheaval. Little over fifty years ago Japan went to war with the United States over that lifeline, over a perceived need to keep the sea lanes open, to keep the supplies coming, to maintain and administer their "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity" sphere. For the Japanese, WWII was a historically unprecedented imperial adventure, infused with the usual mix of greed, racism and power-madness. But the very fact that they were willing to hazard all with the greatest killers in the history of the world exemplifies--despite their current throwaway culture--a uniquely Japanese obsession with scarcity. For despite recovery and prosperity, there is something embattled about Japan. At some visceral level the Japanese fear imminent catastrophe, and if this is understandable in their tectonically active and typhoon-prone circumstance, it is also more or less universal: in that dark technological night that is our likely future, the Japanese are showing us how to prosper.

Osaka is the best case study. The city is a pitiless warren of scattershot housing, industrial plant and freeway sprawl, all of it in honor of the great Shinto god concrete. It is gray tile and chalk wall, built and overbuilt upon itself, without any discernable zoning, house next to factory, hospital beside cinema, restaurant against jail. Los Angeles on steroids, as built up as built out, and with nightfall, all of it electric, neon, garish advertisement, resembling nothing so much as a machine, an endless complex of circuits and connections without any human scale whatsoever. People move through it like impulses, like electrons in computers, ones and zeros, executing deliberate binary tasks. It can be overwhelming, but in fact, it is not. Despite all the chaos, Osaka is orderly; despite all the grime, it is clean.

I don’t know how else to describe it. Osaka is really a horrible place, without a single redeeming aesthetic principle, but it actually ain’t all that bad. You get used to it quickly. The speed and energy of the place impresses. The spirit of Osaka, a city so historically rooted in commerce that the locals greet each other with the question, "Moo kari makka?" (Making any money?), renders objections based in art or ethics or scale moot: get on with it; get back to work. That is what makes Osaka the model for the future: despite the grimness, despite the pressure, the city works. Order is maintained. The fact that it is maintained is enough; it’s a relief that a city so chaotic is not actually in chaos.

Penned-in and bounded by mountains barely discernable through the pollution, Osakans have adapted. They have developed a set of governing principles and customs that have enabled them to prosper in difficult circumstances, and their case is a testament to the malleability of people to environment generally. In a strict Darwinian sense, societies do not adapt their core principles to circumstance and moment (it was a competing theory, Lamarckianism, which maintained that animals develop adaptations in response to the environment). But Osakans are proof that, even in the barrens, societies have developed viable governing concepts like apes developed opposable thumbs; pressed condition calls forth specialized tool; stress mutates the body politic. Osaka Castle drove the point home. The castle grounds are just about the only green space in the city, a relief after the endless interchangeable streets. The cherry blossoms are here, as is a (of course!) concrete reproduction of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s famous redoubt. The curve of the castle ramparts and the flared roofline of the castle tower illustrate a concept of nature that is distinct from that found in the West, an adaptation to circumstance that has likely contributed to the success of Osaka.

To put it simply, the walls and roofs of Osaka castle bend.

A contemporary fortress found in Germany or England would be notable for its angularity. The towers run straight, at 90-degree angles to the ground, the walls and battlements are square and rectangular. The broadswords of knights are the same, straight pieces of steel. Not so those of the samurai. They curve. And the battlements of Osaka Castle are laid out at irregular angles.

There is a tradition in Japanese thought that maintains the imperfect is more valuable than the perfect; the irregular more prized than the regular. The irregular and imperfect leave room for improvement, for human intervention. The eye straightens the irregular cup and makes it complete; thought squares the misshapen rectangle. Here is the 14th century Buddhist priest Kenko: "In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth." The perfect is complete in and of itself; it is dead. But that is the aesthetic foundation of the Platonic West, striving for the invisible ideal, for the essence of things behind the world, beyond it. The German castle is square and angular because those are the idealized forms behind nature; the Japanese castle curves because in nature everything curves. The Japanese eye is more rooted in the world, as it is.

This is especially true of traditional Japanese attitudes towards beauty and existence. Where the Greeks championed the idealized form, the perfected body, the Japanese prized the irregular form, the incomplete object. Things before or past their prime: "Branches about to bloom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration," say Kenko. Nijo Palace in Kyoto is filled with fading wall murals, dimly lit and unrepaired, unlike the restored glories of Schonbrunn or Hampton or the palaces of Europe. Beauty, like existence, is transient and perishable, and where the West has devoted itself to overcoming this fact (if not denying it altogether), the Japanese have embraced it. "The most precious thing in life is uncertainty," writes Kenko, adding, "In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting."

This subtle distinction is crucial. The West has always primarily viewed itself as apart from nature, outside of it, mastering it and making it hew to form. The Japanese see themselves within nature, working through it. My guess is that they see human nature as part of the broader whole, unlike the West where, although there are occasional philosophic gestures acknowledging that humans are animals, meat, material beings, the dominant trend has, since the Greeks, conceived of human nature as apart from the world, as separate and distinct from nature. It is the foundation of western technology; it is the conceptual precedent to our toolmaking. We have always flattered ourselves as closer to angels than apes, which is why our history is so primitive and simian. Since the Meji Restoration, the Japanese have undoubtedly absorbed a full measure of Western Platonism. In many ways it was always present in Japan, found, for example, in the geometric streets of some Japanese cities, laid out according to a historically Chinese plan. But it is the minor key for the simple reason that in Japan nature is so much more capricious, arbitrary and catastrophic than in the West. If there are invisible forms behind nature they would be—as they are in Shintoism and Buddhism—irrational gods as stormy as gales and unpredictable as earthquakes. The West developed with the same catastrophes, though less common, and the difference is everything: The Dutch reclaimed their nation from the sea and mastered the oceans; the Japanese, with deep harbors, never became a great seafaring power prior to the 20th century.

The West ordered nature from without; the Japanese from within. Again, the distinction is not absolute, and where mindsets overlap (as in the similarity between some forms of Protestant and Buddhist thought) convergence becomes possible. The Japanese possessed enough of an idealist tradition to master the technological ethos of the West, and we are realists enough to learn, as we will, to adapt to difficult circumstance, to accept and embrace an urban future, polluted, man-made, relentless, and squalid. Because it will come to that. The West imposes technology upon the world; the East helps us accommodate ourselves to it. Population booms, the wild places of the globe disappear, technology prevents starvation and chaos, but the world becomes more technologically ordered. A grid of wires, roads and pipes covers the landscape and people and thinking becomes just as regular and as ordered as technology. Already it is impossible to say whether computers think like people or people think like machines. Already the virtual aesthetic supplants the organic. Most Japanese—most Americans in fact--would rather take their families to Tokyo Disneyland than to Osaka Castle and have the pleasure—as I did—of viewing the cherry blossoms in the spring twilight.

I sat at Osaka Castle as the pedals dropped and speculated that one day, three or four generations from now, people would look up at a brown sky and find it beautiful.

I sat at Osaka Castle drinking sake in the late day and realized that only someone rooted, however tenuously, in the tradition of Jeffersonian agrarianism and Emersonian naturalism would find a city as dynamic as Osaka squalid. But then again, what value does Jefferson or Emerson’s musings about nature matter in an age when computers get viruses and viruses are patented? Little, except to highlight the futility of Western distinctions between man and nature. The Japanese do not acknowledge the difference. Man and nature; city and country--both are part of the same nature, one manifest through hand and sweat, the other through sun and rain. Given the likelihood of disaster, given the perishability of all things, it is good and beautiful enough that Osaka exists and works. And I am not disingenuous when I say I agree with this.

But I sat at Osaka Castle in the late day with the smell of cherry blossoms and realized that my measure of things is pitched wrong. My thinking was keyed to the past. I was rooted in Emerson and Jefferson and hiking in the Cascades and in the Kenko who meditates before the bamboo tree, bending gently in the wind. All of which is most beautiful right now, as it perishes.