bucko Wrote:Into the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami. A look at life in Japan today.

I enjoyed reading this book, but I wouldn't recommend it to get any insight into Japanese society or culture. I wouldn't call it an accurate portrayal of "life in Japan today." Modern Japanese life does not boil down only to Tokyo's sex clubs, hostess bars, and omiai pubs. Remember that it's a thriller, so a lot of what's written is there for the shock value.

And the correct title is In the Miso Soup, by the way. (It's a play on the expression "in the soup.")

aphasiac Wrote:Learning to Bow (An American Teacher enters the Japanese School system)
http://www.amazon.com/LEARNING-BOW-Ameri...039558521X

I second "Learning to Bow" and also suggest this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Japan-Through-Look...392&sr=8-1

It's newer so not so outdated and gives a pretty broad scope. It is more sociologically oriented and has lots of analysis probably more so than some of the others listed.

For me, the best books about Japan have been non-fiction narratives of some particular corner of Japanese life. Ones I've liked, just off the top of my head:

• Geisha by Liza Dalby. Participant/observer ethnographic study published in pre geisha-fad 1998.
• The previously mentioned Angry White Pyjamas by Robert Twigger. Interesting and enjoyable read despite my complete lack of interest in martial arts.
• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by novelist Haruki Murakami. Collection of narratives by victims and perps.
• A Man with No Talents by Oyama Shiro (pseudonym). Written by a former salaryman who dropped out to stay in flop houses and eke out a living as a day laborer. On a lark he submitted this, his journal, to a literary contest and won, although he refused to appear to accept the prize.
• Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World by Theodore Bestor. Harvard professor's decades-long study of the complex social institutions that culminate in the guide-book staple. Dense, but engagingly written.
• Untangling My Chopsticks by Victoria Riccardi. Despite the lame title, a good read about a woman's year as a food (tea kaiseki!) apprentice in Kyoto.

re:matthewmuller

You can also read "Japan: A Reinterpretation" by Patrick Smith to see someone who thoroughly hates Reischauer for good reasons iirc, but that book warped my views of Japan pretty bad; or rather should I say that it gave me some very inconvenient ideas that needed to be discarded when I got here?

The books that made the most impact on me have been:

Haruki Murakami 'Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche'; especially why he wrote it (claim that Japanese would not discuss the tragic incident). I've tried reading Murakami's fiction but didn't enjoy it so cannot recommend other titles.

Amelie Nothomb 'Fear and Trembling'; vituperative and comic nightmare of a Belgian author's year working at the Yumimoto Corp and although fictionalised I doubt much is exaggerated. She went from photocopying needless piles of paper to scrubbing toilets.

Roger Davies and Osamu Ikeno (eds) 'The Japanese Mind'; is a textbook series of chapters arranged around concepts (eg aimai, amakudari, chinmoku etc) and grazes lightly over each without detailed analysis; fine (and not overly expensive) if you want a broad intro with some secondary literature suggestions to dive deeper.

Christopher Benfey 'The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan'; entertaining and eclectic account of diverse intellectuals and eccentrics looking to each others' cultures for inspiration; I liked the chapter about Melville a lot.

Takuan Soho 'Unfettered Mind - Writings from a Master to a Master Swordsman'; book is translation of three letters written by Takuan to Yagyu Munenori; if you study Japanese martial arts and especially kobudo or kenjutsu techniques this is indispensable; cf 'The Sword and the Mind' (by Yagyu Munenori) which is also excellent; although no expert and although I've not read the originals in Japanese both these books continue to inspire me.

Karl F Friday 'Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima-Shinryu and Samurai Martial Culture'; very academic and detailed account of samurai culture and especially the origin and role of the Kashima Shinryu koryu along with descriptions of some of its principal techniques and proponents.

Kakuzo Okakura 'The Book of Tea' (1906); reads a bit clumsily at times (the whole East vs West stuff) and occasionally eulogises 'teaism' at the expense of readability but I do often go back to this book and am convinced Heidegger drew more from it (in formulating 'Dasein') than he could ever admit.

The one book I have violent allergic reactions to is Inazo Nitobe's 'Bushido The Soul of Japan', every page of which seems to try equating 'Bushido' with chivalric/ancient Greek/Christian codes of behaviour. I see it as a dated 'product of the (Meiji) times', but others seem to find a lot of value in it and it was nothing if not hugely influential. If only writings by writers and Shinto theorists like Ashizu Uzuhiko 葦津珍彦 (1909-1992) were being published.

Oh, speaking of Shinto, don't go past 'The Essence of Shinto: Japan's Spiritual Heart' by Motohisa Yamakage. It isn't a 'how to' guide but gives a well-informed (if partial) account of basic tenets and concepts.

Second the recommendations for Alex Kerr, Alan Booth and Will Ferguson.

bucko Wrote:Transparent_Aluminium,

I will reiterate what others have already said about those types of books you mentioned - the behaviours and cultural norms written in them are often grossly exaggerated and stereotypical and will leave you with a warped sense of Japan. Likewise many novels written about Japan by foreigners, such as James Clavell's Shogun will leave you with a warped sense of reality. These tend to lean waaaay to much towards concepts such as honour, shame, nature and other stereotypical nonsense. I actually have a study on the misconceptions about Japan Shogun has created - given its popularity over the years many stereotypes around today can be directly attributed to stuff in Shogun.

Totally agree. That was the point I was trying to make in my earlier post which may not have been clear. Most popular accounts of the Japanese exaggerate the cultural differences to a ridiculous degree that has no relationship to reality.

MeNoSavvy Wrote:If you want to understand Japan really you have to live there and interact with Japanese.

aphasiac Wrote:That's just silly. You don't have to experience everything first hand; it is possible to learn from other people's experiences.

What I meant was that the vast majority of books on the market are either inaccurate or that while accurate focus on the author's own experiences and amusing anecdotes which only capture a small part of the reality of life in Japan. There is no number of books you can read which will provide a relatively complete insight of life in Japan.

If you can speak Japanese (and even if you can't) just a few weeks in Japan travelling, observing life, talking with people etc is worth way more than reading dozens of books on Japan.

Just as you cannot learn to cook just by reading cookery books, you can't understand life in Japan without living in Japan.

I learned about the Japanese from that show Chuck! The manager of the Buy More was telling the employees to be more like the Japanese: "The Japanese have 137 words for 'yes', but not a single word for 'no'."

MeNoSavvy Wrote:Most popular accounts of the Japanese exaggerate the cultural differences to a ridiculous degree that has no relationship to reality.

They also tend to barbarise Western culture to the extreme too. Westerners are often dipicted as ineloquent, smelly, rude, nasty baboons with no sense of nature or deep thought completely offput by Japanese sensibibilities. An example off the top of my head is in Shogun the main character Blackthorne was shocked that Japanese bathed regularly and used soap and shampoo, thinking that such behaviour was deadly. Whereas at the time (early 1600s) bathing with soap had been going on for centuries in Europe and the Middle East.

bucko Wrote:

MeNoSavvy Wrote:Most popular accounts of the Japanese exaggerate the cultural differences to a ridiculous degree that has no relationship to reality.

They also tend to barbarise Western culture to the extreme too. Westerners are often dipicted as ineloquent, smelly, rude, nasty baboons with no sense of nature or deep thought completely offput by Japanese sensibibilities. An example off the top of my head is in Shogun the main character Blackthorne was shocked that Japanese bathed regularly and used soap and shampoo, thinking that such behaviour was deadly. Whereas at the time (early 1600s) bathing with soap had been going on for centuries in Europe and the Middle East.

That actually seems to be some kind of reference to a belief at the time that bathing spread disease. A quick search supports, at the least, that historians mentioned this belief for a while, however accurate.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/savage/HYGIENE.PDF (p.7, p. 9)

Funny though, to read that and then this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_...estigation

Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr

Books in Japanese about your home country. They'll teach you to take the genre with a suitable quantity of salt.

re: coverup

I'll look that one up. A book that gave me some inconvenient ideas about Japan was The Enigma of Japanese Power by Karel van Wolfren.http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Japanese-Power-Politics-Stateless/dp/0679728023 (How do I make a hyperlink?) This was back in the late 80's early 90's when Japan as #1 was a big hit, and everybody thought that the Japanese were going to buy the world. I had previously thought of Japan as an idyllic cooperative paradise, and van Wolfren's book showed me lots of negative sides to Japan's 'economic miracle' that I took too seriously for a while and really made me no fun at the 居酒屋.

matthewmuller Wrote:(How do I make a hyperlink?)

This site automatically converts URLs to hyperlinks, provided you do not immediately precede the URL with text.

matthewmuller Wrote:(How do I make a hyperlink?)

Follow the link labelled BBCode just above the text box in a message composition page for help on how to do URLs with random link text (and all the other things you can do in a message).

Speaking (writing!) for myself, I don't look for cultural books with the hope of finding out anything about the 'essential Japan.' My preference, since I am not an academic or preparing to teach others about Japan, is always going to be for books that deepen my appreciation for Japan and further my interest in the country and its people in an entertaining way. Here are examples of books that worked for me:

Oliver Statler, Japanese Inn (he also wrote a very good book about a series of visits to 88 temples called "Japanese Pilgrimage")
Robert Whiting, Tokyo Underworld
Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
Alex Kerr, Angels and Demons
Kazuki Sekida, Zen Training
David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber
James Heisig (the very one!), Philosophers of Nothingness
Ian Reader, Shinto
Richard Seager, Encountering the Dharma (about the controversial Soka Gakkai)

None of these books will give you any special insights into the Japanese (indeed, eight of them are by non-Japanese) but all of them are great reads. Also, a few of them are only tangentially about Japan. For example, "Crooked Cucumber" is the biography of an
American zen teacher. Nevertheless, it is quite good on what it was like to grow up in Japan before World War Two and how the war affected life for the Japanese people. Similarly, the Seager book is an unusually sympathetic portrait of the Soka Gakkai branch of Nichiren by an American academic: it gives a pretty good description of the movement's history and, in the process, says quite a bit about Japan in the early to mid-twentieth century.

I should caution you that Kerr's book is quite negative.

My interests are philosophy and religion, so you will find more than a few items on the list boring if you don't share these interests. And this leads me to my last impression. I think the best way to enjoy Japan is to find a niche and explore: whenever I visit, I like to go to shrines and temples. Needless to write, this forum is an example of this principle.

Another great book, mentioned by chorismos above, is "Underground," by Haruki Murakami. This was a fascinating read, not least because of my surprise at Murakami's approach. I enjoy his novels but find them occasionally cloying. While Murakami's style is familiar, he has clearly chosen to stay out of the way and let the victims and witnesses tell their own stories. The result exhibits a deep humanity I hadn't suspected in that compulsively post-modernist author.

Japan at War: An Oral History is a fascinating read.

Dang! bluemarigolds made me think of another winner: "Embracing Defeat," by John Dower.

PParisi Wrote:Alex Kerr, Angels and Demons

That's "Dogs and Demons", isn't it? "Angels and Demons" is the Dan Brown bestseller :-)
I agree that it's quite negative but it is a good book and sometimes you need a bit of the negative outlook for balance...

YOu are absolutely right, pm215. Sorry for the mix-up! Believe it or not, my first thought upon awakening this morning was "Did I write "dogs and demons" or "angels and demons"? My daughter, however, would say "what's the difference, Dad? all dogs ARE angels! when are you going to buy me a puppy?"

I agree that we need to take the bad with the good. And the book is occasionally funny: I just re-read his story of Madame Nui and her remarkable toad.