Tip #3: BOOKS for your Journey and for understanding Japan

Tip Three:  My Japan Fulbright Fellowship provided an excellent reading list for my first experience, but those books and that list are buried in storage too deep to access. I have sent Kyoko and Edward Jones of Japan Fulbright an email to retrieve a copy of that list for you. In the interim, these books shed a clearer light over the eight additional trips I’ve taken since that Japan Fulbright introduction.  

Two thoughts shaped by decision to go to Japan: 1. a quest to find the origin of the Japanese side of my heritage and understand how I came to be me, and 2. to learn about my ancestral history, language and culture, not the business end of Japan’s geopolitical power but the lunar world found in the silence of temples and changing seasons, their floating world beyond precision of their bullet trains and busy streets. I want to understand the events that have shaped the evolution of the Japanese people we see today in book stores and coffee shops and on train station escalators. Perhaps I'll better understand who I am.

Read on for recommendations for your journey to Japan.

1. Hitching Rides with Buddha by Will Ferguson.  Recommended by Patricia Vining.  I loved this introduction to Japan through Will Ferguson’s insight filled eyes.

His journey into the heart of Japan chronicles a JET teacher as he hitchhikes the length of Japan and the ordinary people he met along the way. Hitch hiking is uncommon in Japan which caught the attention of Ferguson’s teaching colleagues when he boasted one Friday night over too much sake that he would follow the Sakura Zensen, the Cherry Blossom Wave, hitch hiking all the way from their school on the southern end of Japan to the main island's northern end at Point Sato. Filled with humor and deep sentiment, Ferguson shines a warm light on the kind and inspiring people that picked him up along the country roads and highways of Japan.

*In Japan, students take six years of English before high school graduation. Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) teachers are brought to Japan as Assistant Language Teachers to help Japanese school children practice English. To qualify, one needs to be  have a degree from a 4 year college and be fluent in English. Start saving for the experience of a lifetime!  Click HERE for a JET application

Remember... you have an 11 hour flight between LAX and Narita, so don't worry if you haven't finished Hitching Rides With Buddha, just remember to pack it in your carry-on bag.

But be forewarned, from the very first moment I set foot in Japan,  I heard a magical thought: "This is the way Life Ought to be!" Some days this thought whispered across my journey many times a day and over each of my many adventures across Japan!

Tell us if this happens to you.

2.  Meeting Japan by Fosco Mariani. A personal introduction to its people, their culture, and their history.

Tip # 32 In his book Meeting With Japan, Fosco Maraini explains the complexity of Japan and Japanese people with a sensitivity and a profound narrative skill for those who admire fine accounts of distant places and wish to learn more about the East part of Eastern thinking. I found a used copy at BetterWorldBooks.com. Moraini describes stopping at a Kabayaki-ya restaurant his first day back in Japan:

“the most famous and venerable Kabayaki-ya in Tokyo” at the time.   “Our dinner of eels lasted a long time, we drank more sake, and reached that happy state of vagueness about the exact relations of spacial coordinates that leads to the opening of hearts.”

 

A desire to read and write the Japanese language has been inspired somewhere along my 9 explorations into the heart of Japan. What I like about Fosco Moraini’s book, seen on the page below is his integration of Kanji characters onto the margin of some pages.  They lend an aesthetic note to his stories, written with a depth I’ve not seen in other books. Even reading just the two paragraphs below kindles a passage into the inner nature of Japan.

Mapping Japan in the 1700's from Meeting With Japan

The Shinto god Daikoku and His Miraculous Mallet for Bill Steele

Alexandra Linden and Bill Steel were with us at a Giza Craft Fare where he found an ideal souvenir of his visit to Japan, a bit bulky but never-the-less, magical mallet. Let’s talk to Bill about his marvelous mallet! Where does he have it on display in his Southern California home?

3. Lost Japan by Alex Kerr ...

Alex Kerr, born in Maryland, is an expert on Japanese art and culture who also writes and lectures in Japanese. He moved to Japan in 1977. You can stay at his Chiiori (House of the Flute). Once abandoned and decomposing, Alex has completely restored this exceptional traditional Edo period (1600-1868) beautifully thatched Minka farmhouse. Chiiori is on my list! 

“The house began essentially as an experience of this extremely romantic landscape.”  --Alex Kerr

 
Become a time traveler. Imagine staying in a Japanese home built 300 years ago (in the Tokugawa period also know as Edo!) Take your entire family, Chiiori sleeps 10! For reservations, click HERE!  And click HERE for the Chiiori Project.  Kerr thought he was restoring a thatched Minka home, but Chiiori was a passageway into another universe, the traditional crafts and culture of a Japan almost lost in the mists of time. This is no time machine, but you’ll awaken your first Chiiori morning 300 years in the past. Will we ever see you again? Click HERE for a time traveler’s peek.  By the way... you too can buy a beautiful home in Japan. Stay tuned, or scroll down to #15.

4.  The Lady and the Monk by Pico Iyer

5. A Beginners Guide and 6. Autumn Light also by Pico Iyer.

 

Both Jenni Hesham Elmished and Alexandra Linden of Laguna Beach tipped us off... Pico was in town.  We met Pico Iyer at the Laguna Beach Book store where he was signing his new book: A Beginners Guide. It came as an epiphany that as a child he once ran down the stairs of his home to meet the anthropologist Fosco Mariani who wrote Meeting Japan! I’d like to meet Fosco in my living room! 

Be forewarned! Going to Japan might do to you what it did to Pico Iyer, and Fosco Mariani, and thousands of other visitors. The wabi sabi, shabui, romance and tradition of Japan charm their way into the intracellular spaces of the human brain. Being highly contagious, it happened to me too! Once setting foot in Japan, I wanted to live there all the rest of my days! I’m working on it!

“This is the way life ought to be!”

--Toby Manzanares

7. Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Hector García and Francesc Miralles

8. Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, & Philosophers by Leonard Koren

9. Wabi-Sabi: A book for children and adults by Mark Reibstein 

“ Wabi Sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture. It finds beauty and harmony in what is simple, imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious... It may best be understood as a feeling, rather than as an idea.”

10. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by the renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict traces the evolution of political, economic, and religious life in Japan from World War II back to the seventh century and its influence on Japanese ideology and their complex society.

11. The Old Capital  by Yasunari Kawabata is one of the three novels cited along with Snow Country and A Thousand Cranes, when he was recognized in 1968 with the Nobel Prize in Literature. His characters, including the daughter of a kimono designer, trace the generational legacy of shabui and beauty as they navigate the vagaries of post World War II Japan.

12. Japanese Master Swordsmiths:

 The Gassan Tradition by Morihiro Ogawa.

Of all the books I’ve encountered about Japan, I treasure this one the most because it was a gift from the Master Swordsmith Gassan Sadatoshi. 

Sadatoshi’s father Gassan Sadaichi holds the title Living National Treasure: Important Intangible Cultural Property.

Sadaichi-san was making swords when General Douglas McArthur, commander of the Allied Occupational Forces ruled that: “the Japanese sword, as lethal weapons, be prohibited not only in production but also in individual possession.” Thus began a very dark age in the art of making Japanese swords. The prohibition deprived them a means of living and was finally repealed repealed in 1954 after 9 years  but not before large numbers of craftsmen went out of business or were forced into crafting kitchen knives. By the time the Japanese economy turned upward in 1960 Japanese swords gained increasing interest as art objects. 

In 2015, Yoshio Murakami had arranged for our small group to visit with Gassan Sadatoshi in 2015. I felt honored and humbled to chat with him through the Akiko my friend and interpreter.

“Swords are not for fighting.”  --Gassan Sadatoshi told us during that wonderful visit. 

We talked into the afternoon over tea and pastries. I told Gassan about Bushido in the Classroom, my thinking as a teacher in California public schools. Samurai tenets I believe are the fabric of my classroom teaching beyond science content: of honor, serenity, compassion, calmness, fairness, justice, sincerity, responsibility, frugality, politeness, modesty, loyalty, harmony, tranquility, courage, respect, honesty and duty. I wish my students to aspire to these attributes and I embed them in the teaching in my classes.

The concept of Bushido in the Classroom had precipitated in the 10 years following my Japan Fulbright trips in 2005/2006 and the idea sparked an interest in Sadatoshi. I shared my dream of writing Modern Bushido in the Classroom, as a curriculum project. For most people the words Bushido and Samurai conjure war and violence, but I’ve come to realize that these are mostly media images that sell movies.  The percentage of time  Samurai historically spent in battle was less than 5% of their time according to one estimate. The rest of the time a Samurai’s life was consumed with family, calligraphy, art, poetry and leading by example the tenets of honor, respect, courage, honesty, sincerity and compassion.

13.  Genzaburō Yoshino’s book soon to be Miyazaki's Last film.

 君たちは  どう生きるか 

How Do You Live? This Japanese classic shines a light upon how we find our place in the world.

It is about to be made into Hayao Miyazaki’s last film.   

I had an epiphany this morning that bridges Yoshino’s book to a Japanese phrase I heard at my first homestay in Japan... itadakimasu, before eating a meal.  I was told that it is a “thank you” to the gods of the animals and plants from where our meal was derived. That it also included a thank you to all those who helped bring the food to our table.  Now when I am about to begin my serving of rice I thank the gods of the rice, the farmers who worked from before dawn each morning, the people that made the tools used by that farmer, the drivers that carried the rice to market, the person who stacked the market shelves, the cashier, the box girl, the people that built the grocery store... next time I’ll continue with thanks to the iron gods, the people who made the steel used in the machines to transport the rice and those who harvested it, the people who made the chopsticks, the gods that watched over the chopstick trees, the people who made the chopstick making machines and those who repair those machines, and thank you to all the families of the people who gave us the hard working people involved all the way back to the rice.  Oh thank you to the gods of sun, wind and rain that all helped the rice to grow.

Granted it was a shorter itadakimasu that I first heard but I understood the message: “be thankful to all the people who make our meal possible.” and on a more global level, thank you to all those making life itself not only livable, but meaningful.

So when Copper, one of the two main characters in the book discovers the Net Rule of Human Particle Relations, you will see echoes of itadakimas.

... some may feel,

as this reader did upon closing it,

inclined to affirm an unusual truth: 

“I am wiser for having read this book.”  

--Adam Gopnik New York Times Book Review

14.  Geisha of Gion: The True Story of Japan’s Foremost Geisha by Mineko Iwasaki.

“No woman in the 300 year history of the karyukai has ever  come forward in public to tell her story. We have been constrained  by unwritten rules not to do so,  by the robes of tradition and by the sanctity of our exclusive calling. But I feel it is time to speak out. I want you to know what it is like to really live the life of a Geisha. My experiences as a gieko.”

Mineko-san, was a gieko (woman of art) designated as a atotori, an heir to the house, a successor much like a highly educated CEO. She closed her Gieko Okiya Iwasaki, one of the best in Japan, at the age of 30, at the height of her success after trying to effect reforms to increase educational opportunities, financial independence, and the professional rights of giekos in Kyoto.

15. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden was written based on many interviews with Mineko-san but Arthur Golden betrayed Mineko when he broke his promise to protect her privacy. Memoirs was made into a beautiful movie but her story was not only corrupted by Golden, but many scenes reveal Golden’s prejudiced western misconceptions. Still, the novel paints a vivid portrait of Japan.

16.  Click HERE to learn how to buy a home in Japan.