Some Truly Useful Japanese Concepts

Although I travel to Japan almost every year to look at people and building, the most memorable image of Japan in my mind is actually that of a tranquil scene situating everything in nature in a quasi-manmade manner. Photo: Author.

If not because of COVID-19, I would have travelled to Japan again for 16 years in a row.

In some years, I travelled to Japan more often than once. My love for Japan went all the way back to when I was about three-year-old, reading my very first manga (or Japanese graphic novels).

Although I can’t make Japan my profession, I always read carefully into Japanese life, especially its traditional and recent concepts. Some of which have helped me to escape my darkest moments.

A solitary travel to Japan whenever I have gotten a chance to from 2015–2019. COVID-19 has put a stop to my completing a series of visit to Japan — the country whose culture I grew up with — 20 years in a row. Photo: Author

Here are some on my list and how I interpret them.

1. Wabi-Sabi — “Th beauty of imperfection,” is my favourite translation among many. Wabi-Sabi is about the acceptance that mistakes and errors are parts of our lives. The idea is not trying to find what is so beautiful about the imperfect things in and about you, but to realize that the record of such imperfect is itself beautiful and therefore one should not even waste time to try to find it.
2. Kodawari — “An attempt to the absolute perfection” is probably the closest translation. Even though we aren’t perfect (hence Wabi-Sabi), it doesn’t mean that we should not put our heart and focus on things we enjoy doing. Pushing the limit of our own capacity to perform, as near perfection as possible, is at the heart of this concept. In Japan, you can see “kodawari masters” everywhere from a noodle shop to a cafe, to a wood-carving studio, to the lab of a Nobel Prize laureates. Psychologically, what kodawari does to you is putting you in the state of flow, whereby your sense of space and time gets distorted as you are no longer thinking about what you doing but “flowing” within it. Certainly, there’re some evidence that the more you put yourself in the flow when you do something, the higher chance your skill will improve.
3. Konmari — Love her and her approach to tidying up or not, we all love Marie Kondo, the most famous living tidying up guru in the world. I read all her books, despite my resistance at the beginning. “I know how to tidy my own stuff,” said my inner voice. As it turns out, I have learned so much from the techniques that Marie Kondo spearheads. The core message is the classic one: Less is more. How to systematically and practically evaluate what’s useful in life and what’s not? How to let go of things that are more liabilities than valuable? How to not feel so bad when you throw away what was once so important to you? I have become a minimalist partly thanks to my being introduced to Marie Kondo’s words.
4. Bushido — Is “ways of warriors.” A few words that come to your mind may be honour, sacrifice, respect and fairness. All of those are true. But even more true and deeper for me is the sense of responsibility. We are living in a world ridden by the forces that are compelling us to think that our problems and issues are not due to our own doing. Some would even go so far as to say that it’s the structural vis-a-vis systemic problems that none of us can do anything about. While that might be true to a degree, what we should not forget is that a warrior would not surrender just because the situation gets tough. They take the situation as a given and fight to their last breath.
5. In’ei Raisan — “In Praise of Shadow,” a concept that comes from the name of the book written by the master of letters Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. His comparison between how brightness and darkness are not universally cherished cross-culturally gives us a glimpse into the forgotten bliss of mother nature. The idea in this short book spurs a wave of interest in the layers of darkness and how they make us appreciate our surrounding, making us want to understand things before making an effort to intervene the way human beings like to do with just about everything they cannot put a spotlight on. But sometimes, it’s simply amazing just to look at something visually enticing whose form is not immediately specifiable but the clue is embedded in the gradation of the seeable along the line of shadows from pitch black and hollow light.