Japan!

Japan ...
is a neon tangle
of buildings and streets
and black-haired people
scuttling among
indecipherable signs
flashing ... flashing,
with vending machines
on every city block
dispensing
condoms, coca-cola,
coffee, beer, cigarettes,
whatever you want
but don't really need
in never-ending
hedonistic amoral
cornocupia.

Japan ...
when you step off the plane
for the first time
overwhelms your senses
and makes you
think seriously
you are on another planet;
nobody understands a word
you say, but when you
leave the "gaijin" cocoon
tentatively, slowly,
so hesitantly,
as when you first
do something unusual,
you can't help smiling.

Japan ...
sucks you in,
provokes and entrances
your roving imagination;
even frightful Tokyo,
a frenetic urban nightmare
with a whiff of drains,
evokes and enhances
your sliding divorce
from familiarity:
this country
this whole damn archipelago
hits you on the head
like Disneyland on wheels,
and when, finally,
you get food and drink
and shelter (a job),
you start to think
hoo boy!

Japan ...
revolves around you
spinning, spinning
a bit too quickly:
you can't understand,
you can't speak,
you can't read,
and you sure as hell can't write;
you just wander about,
an amiable impressionable
idiot; this is when
the first decision
comes, you either
seek out other exiles
to complain, to commiserate,
to criticize, or else,
quite simply, jump
into the strangeness.

Japan ...
is sensibly
indifferent to loud
opinionated people
from overseas;
yet when you crawl out
from under that shell
you start to discover
a very different country,
one in which delicacy
of feeling, sensitivity,
and a strong reverence
for ancient traditions
continues to exist
in quiet restrained
and understated ways,
as if people
were shy to share
subtle convictions
with yawping barbarians.

























Japan ...
is umbillically attuned
to each passing season:
festivals and family gatherings
are faithfully observed
from generation to generation,
but done so casually,
so confidently,
you can't help but sense
that you are walking
in the presence of the past,
and that long-dead generations
look down benignly
and with fond affection
on the children of the present;
you can feel that,
and before long
want to be part of it.

Japan ...
is almost wilfully
misunderstood;
we think of them
as worker robots
in a way that assuages
our pride and appeases the pain
of Pearl Harbour, Bataan,
the Bangkok Railway;
we make racialist jokes,
belittle them as buck-toothed dwarves,
these formidable people
who scared the living bejesus
out of our grandfathers;
but you wouldn't know it
now, with everything
so clean, so polite,
so effortlessly efficient:
leave your wallet at the bus-stop,
it will still be there tomorrow.

Japan ...
begins to open
its inner doors
when you start to crack
the hard nutty core
of its enclosed, nuanced,
layered language:
after the first three years,
sweating blood,
you think you are doing well;
after the next three years,
you slowly come to realize
you are still a blazing idiot;
so when I saw
that fashionable movie
"Lost in Translation"
I thought: these people
simply wallow in this stuff
and seem to cherish a dull
and cosy cynical incomprehension,
a rock-hard unwillingness to learn;
they place 'down-home' values on ignorance
and deride the English of the Japanese
in whose country they happen to be.
They embrace, they welcome alienation
in the puerile parochial hope
of getting the hell out, going home
to the Real World soon.

Japan
is
equally real.