The Land od the Rising Yen

of my
jacket or on my tie. I always dropped it on my trousers.
    You can carry this passion of going
Japanese a little too far. Once, with a number of English residents in Tokyo, we went to a very Japanese Japanese restaurant in a hidden corner of popular Asakusa
— off the beaten track where few tourists turn up. We were led up to one of
those small, special rooms where the meals are served and on the way up one of
my companions discovered one of his friends — another Englishman — having
dinner, squatting on the floor with apparent ease.
    ‘I envy you,’ he said. ‘The one thing
I cannot learn is this squatting.’
    ‘Quite easy, really,’ the other
replied, a shade patronizingly, I thought.
    We proceeded to the neighbouring
room, ate our dinner and would have forgotten about him but for his unexpected
reappearance. He had wanted to straighten his tired legs — squatting was easy
but not that easy — had lost his balance, rolled over, fallen against the thin
paper-wall, burst through it and ended up — with proper English apologies — in
my soup.

A CRYPTO-MATRIARCHY
     
    ‘If you want to be a Japanese, be a
man.’ This is the advice most superficial observers would give you. But it is
not followed by about half of Japan’s population, and they know what they are
doing. ‘It’s a man’s country,’ the short-term visitor would add. The long-term
visitor would not be quite so sure.
    Most Japanese live a double life: a
Western one in the office and in public and a Japanese one at home. Most of
them wear Western dress for work and kimono or yukata — the
dressing-gown version of the kimono — in the house. This may not be only
the result of devotion to tradition, but also of good sense. I have little
Japanese blood in my veins but I got into the ywAata-habit soon enough: it’s
pleasant, comfortable and cool. Whatever the reasons and motives, once people
wear Japanese dress they behave in a Japanese manner. Even I did. Dress maketh
the man. I have noticed that some of my close friends behave like
eighteenth-century courtiers when they put on tails, like Edwardian clubmen
when wearing dinner-jackets and like itinerant students — even if well over
fifty — as soon as they don blue jeans on Greek islands.
    In Japan, between the two lives of
the people there is the shoe. I believe that the shoe barrier is an
important dividing line. I am not speaking simply of the rule that you take
your shoes off when entering a Japanese house — this is purely physical. My
point is that the psychology of the shoe has not been properly explored.
When a Western resident in Japan starts expatiating on the cleanliness and
sensibleness of the Japanese habit of not wearing shoes inside the house, then
he has caught the oriental bug and has fallen for Japan in a big way; when a
Japanese suddenly declares: ‘To hell with it! I am tired of taking my shoes off
all the time. I don’t do it in the office, why should I do it at home ..then he
is truly westernized. (He will, nevertheless, have to go on taking his shoes
off at home. Japanese floor coverings — the famous tatami — are not made
for shoes.)
    The point I am driving at is this:
the consequences of this double life are seemingly disastrous for the women. In
the home they are treated as they were in the old days, they have to obey their
lords and masters, and on top of that they are totally excluded from their
husbands’ Western life, the often gay and eventful social life which follows
office hours.
    In many households, when the master
comes home the wife bows; if they walk together in the streets of their
neighbourhood, the wife walks behind her husband; if, home again, the husband
sits down, he will not dream of getting up to get a newspaper: he will snap his
fingers and his wife will fetch it for him; if the family has only one bath
tub, there is no question as to who should have first bath.
    But all this is changing in various
ways and for diverse reasons. More and more women go out to work. More and more
women — even in the remotest country places — watch television. (Nearly a
hundred per cent of the people have the box and see a different way of life
every day.) Many of them, therefore, are now refusing to remain their husbands’
— or fathers’ — obedient and obsequious servants. There has not been a violent
revolution: there has been — and it is continuing — a slow change of attitudes.
    Younger women in growing numbers —
but still in a