"My" Japan

Memories confound and mix within each of our heads. Memory and expectations I remember Krisnamurthy say, are the source of all human sorrows. "My" idea of Japan, was no different. Not that it was sadness or a painful memory of the country that caused the “sorrow”, quite on the contrary, the exhilaration at the differences, the constant intellectual challenge from a country so different to mine. Everytime since I first landed in 2005, I had missed the country and wanted to go back.


And although the fascination comes from every angle, metro, bus rides, neighborhoods etc. there is a certain "je ne sais quoi" of the country where I could almost go back and forth endlessly, tirelessly.

This something is not an object, in fact, not sure if there is a word to describe the aesthetic beauty of the blurred boundary between urban and nature. Of a certain nature bent to man’s will at times, and others, just molded to subsist within the urban landscape. The effect caused is one that it gives breathing space to objects; allows sentiments such as solitude, peacefulness, and silence exist within its confines, steps away from streets and a megalopolis like Tokyo.

In my view, nowhere is this more true, than in the gardens, cemeteries, Shinto shrines, ponds, pools and even streams and waterfalls crisscrossing the urban landscape.

 The latter in particular are a constant source of amazement from one that comes from Latin America, where any public water source or conduit carries untreated waste and is treated with such disregard that it becomes an open air dump / latrine. I think of the Rio Tiete in the City of Sao Paulo, or Bahia de Guabara in Rio, the Igarapes in Manaus, Lake Texcoco in Mexico City, el Sabinal in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas (note: I have not made deep research about polluted canals in Japan, hence I am just refraining my view point to what was observable).

Japan however has taken another path. In the Japanese urban gardens, its dieites lie shaded by large buildings. Small rivers in Kyoto crisscross neighborhoods on their downslope from mountainsides irrigating neighborhood ponds and gardens.

The effect is one of an oasis of silence for the inhabitant; modernity being eased in to the nature of viceversa. Man not so far divorced from self. (note: these again obviously exist amongst a background of pachinko halls, and I am not lionizing here idealism of a society, rather just remarking its existence)

I always keep thinking of Latin America, comparing. After all from Willy Brandt to Newton, great people have always advocated “standing on the shoulder of great men (and women!) in order to reach and see far”. So in performing this exercise, one looks at home and think: there is not one single city like Kyoto in Latin America that I know of, where nature integrates with urban landscape in unison and beyond the challenge of human versus others.  There were some, i think of the gardens described by Mixtli for which Nezahualcoytol was known in Texcoco, Mexico.

Yet, today, Latin American cities need space, need room not for more people but for silence. Latin America cities need canals and avenues, not to transport more commerce but to stop making the countryside a “side” and to let nature come in and be part of us once again, as it has always been.

Our idols, our lives do not need to be behind fences and domed encasings, they need to exist outside close to the where the life takes place, close to the sun, the earth.

Not every country or person has to be the same. Yet, everyone has a responsilibility for life, this is just one way to do it.