Why Japan Is So Difficult to Write About

UNTIL I WAS 24 and first visited Japan, my relationship with the country — such that one could be said to exist — was of the most abstract kind. Strangely, perhaps, for Japan was inseparable from what I understood as my self: I was a yonsei, a fourth-generation Japanese American, and the food my family ate, the fairy tales I read, the sect of Buddhism to which we halfheartedly belonged, the myths we believed in, were all descended from Japan. “Act like a samurai,” my mother — who is not Japanese, and who like many other Asians of her generation regarded the country with a mix of admiration and disdain, her appreciation of the culture tempered by secondhand memories of Japan’s wartime atrocities — would say to me when I cried: a rebuke that seemed to acknowledge those contradictory beliefs.

So I was unprepared for how profoundly affecting I found the country in person. It wasn’t just that I finally understood how much of my aesthetic life had been wrought by Japan; it was that I understood that I was somewhere that had determined much of the modern world’s aesthetic preoccupations. It felt stubbornly sui generis, a place that had remained distinctly apart, despite all its trappings of modernity and globalization, a place whose visual and artistic sensibility, though much of it originated in China and Korea, felt irreducible and inimitable.

In this issue, we pay tribute to the culture that changed food, pop music, fashion, architecture and even our morning caffeine rituals. (The fact that you can now get matcha — over ice, with milk — in almost any medium-size city in the West is akin to ordering sacramental wine for fun: a ritual so removed from its context that it’s transformed into something different altogether.) And Japan’s influence extends beyond the material; our understanding of the beauty of the imperfect, of the joy of tidiness, of the power of cuteness, of the appeal of seasonal cuisine: All of that is derived from Japanese concepts or inventions.

BUT CELEBRATING A culture is different from venerating a country — Americans out in the world understand this distinction firsthand. And although this issue isn’t about Japan’s geopolitical past or present, nor its domestic problems and challenges, reading the articles in it is to be confronted with Japan’s modern history: the brutality it inflicted upon others; the brutality inflicted upon it; its ancient ideas that endured; its postwar innovations that led to paradigm shifts in almost every creative medium. Some of those who contributed stories are Asians of various ethnicities — the writers at large Aatish Taseer and Ligaya Mishan are of Indian and Pakistani, and Filipino heritage, respectively; Pico Iyer, a decades-long resident of Japan, is also of Indian descent — and it was fascinating to see in their pieces a complicated ambivalence toward a nation that, for better and worse, helped shape the 21st-century Asian continent.