Macrobiotics Today, September/October 1994, Vol. 34, No. 5
"A Journey in Modern Japan" Liliane Papin
Destiny has its ways . . . from a book on macrobiotic philosophy to a "One Peaceful World Tour" organized by Michio and Aveline Kushi four years ago to now . . . finding myself living in Japan, teaching French and French literature in a Japanese University.
Adjusting was a challenge: Gone was the leisurely sight-seeing of lovely inspiring spiritual places during the tour, gone were the sweet aromas of the past. In modern Japan I was not studying shiatsu or miso making, Zen philosophy or martial arts . . . no . . . just in everyday today's Japan, on a campus that looked just the same as the one I had left in America: not any prettier and certainly not any cleaner. On my way to campus, the first day, I was happy to discover a beautiful river gracefully winding its path through deep rock formations. Alas, by the same token, I also discovered the litter on its banks: Coke bottles, plastic bags, cigarette butts . . . I was truly shocked. I had naively believed that cleanliness and respect for nature were genetically ingrained in the Japanese character.
It did not take me long to discover that if I wanted to appreciate my stay in Japan - modern Japan - I had better put aside my cliches and images of Zen gardens, Oriental serenity, and natural wisdom. The Japan I had unconsciously created in my mind did not exist - not now anyway - if it ever did exist. I did not know I carried a fantasy-dream. I thought I knew about the modernity of Japan. The deep pangs of regret and my feelings of loss and disappointment made me aware that I did not. I already knew how to use chopsticks and sleep on a futon. I knew more about Japanese cooking than most modern Japanese people. I was not coming for the folklore. What would I find here? Was it really worth traveling half the globe?
My answer now is yes, definitely yes. . . although not in the way I anticipated.
The peak of my "letting go" took place a few months after my arrival, when a young student came to me and asked me if I would talk to her about Christianity and religion in France and in the West. Many young people in Japan, she said, are disappointed with Buddhism and Shinto. The priests she said, are often more interested in money, prestige, and drinking than in spiritual pursuits. Religion in Japan is mostly a social facade, rituals without meaning, she added. She felt that Christianity was much more pure, less corrupt and probably meant more to the people. She herself was seeking spiritual answers, but did not find them in her own traditions.
I was stunned. But with a kind "mini-satori"-like feeling, I was aware that our interaction was typical of a much larger-scale phenomena and that we were exact mirrors of each other. I had turned toward the East to find answers. She was turning toward the West. I became aware that the West was just as exotic to her as the East was to me. What I had somewhat offhandedly dismissed as "Westernization" and "Americanization" did not explain everything. There is a myth of the West just as there is a myth of the East. Such myths might get distorted, but they reveal what a culture or society is lacking and for what people are searching. I realized then that the unraveling of our double myth - mine and theirs - would be part of what I would find in Japan: East and West looking at each other today.
Macrobiotic Philosophy From A Different Angle
Japan is of course, to me as to many people, the country where George Ohsawa and our "famous" macrobiotic teachers of today were born, the cultural backbone of macrobiotic philosophy.
Like many others, when I discovered macrobiotic books, I embraced a whole way of life and enthusiastically took up chopsticks, Japanese-style cooking, chanting (I occasionally show off by reciting the Heart Sutra). How many times since I have been here, have I heard that I am more Japanese than the Japanese. My students, meanwhile, tell me that they drink a glass of milk for breakfast and know more about modern Western music, Jazz and baseball than I do.
Most of the people in Japan who still eat "traditional" food eat white rice, but also miso and shoyu sweetened with sugar, and umeboshi plums and pickles artificially and chemically colored. Even nori, served in Japanese restaurants is coated with sugar. Miso and shoyu companies usually sell two kinds of miso: a "pure" kind mostly for export and a "sweetened" kind for the Japanese market. The production of the most traditional products such as those distributed by Mitoku or Muso for example, is sustained mostly through export sales.
Food in Japan can be highly deceptive to the naive macrobiotic student: it all looks "macrobiotic," but watch out; it ain't. Even natural health food stores in Japan sell products with sugar, including miso and shoyu.
I found myself in a somewhat ironical dilemma when I was asked in cooking classes to cook "Western-style" macrobiotic meals and even better, "French-style." I had not eaten anything "French" in years. So I bought a few cookbooks in France, tried to remember some family recipes and come up with macrobiotic versions. So, sweet irony of life, if only to please the Japanese and help with the development of macrobiotics in Japan, we had better come up fast with truly original ethnic macrobiotic recipes. Of course, this is only a natural stage of development which has already begun (although, I think we have to go beyond the "look-alike" recipes using Japanese ingredients). I could see my Japanese students or guests were only half-pleased. Let's explore our own "ethnic" backgrounds freely. The time has come, and the Japanese want it!
A Modern Phenomena: Collective Guilt
Media, television, education, and films all make it impossible to be unaware of our past and present histories as well as of other cultures. At one extreme of the pendulum one finds xenophobia, racism, ultranationalism, and the fear of losing one's own culture. At the other extreme, perhaps, lies the rejection of one's own culture, especially when young people's idealism is confronted with the knowledge of their past cultural heritage such as the extermination of Indians and the enslavement of blacks for America, and the atrocities of World War II: the extermination of Jews and concentration camps for Germany; colonialism, Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the West; and, I realized, for Japan, her role and the effects of nationalism.
Each country, each culture carries its burden of bloody and senseless destructions and often turns to "others" to find something more "pure" be it the past, a religion, gurus, drugs. A book by Michio Kushi describes very well how many young people coming from a past of drugs turned to brown rice as if it was some kind of guarantee of instant "enlightenment." I might add I was one of them.
Although my enthusiasm for macrobiotic philosophy, the East and Japan was a very healthy choice which I do not for one moment question or regret, I realized once in Japan, that this choice had also carried much unconscious self-condemnation. Not because of the teachers. Not because of the philosophy. Because of my own projection. I had passionately rejected my own cultural background. I compared a glorious "natural" past of Oriental wisdom to the poor analytical, dualistic, simplistic mind that was my own heritage. I welcomed the discovery of religions not based on guilt and the fall of Adam and Eve. I rejected science and modern medicine. I felt ashamed of the economic colonialism which destroyed traditional cultures and brought sugar, dairy products, jeans and Coca-cola to the rest of the world. I stopped reading Western philosophers for the narrowness and analytical view of their thinking. The West was only bringing evils. The modern world was rotten. The traditional past was better. The East was better.
It would take me years of good chewing and brown rice to erase the effect of generations of meat-eaters and a childhood of dairy products. I was lucky to have found macrobiotic philosophy to give me a chance to transform myself into something other than what I was. It was a close call, but with lots of chanting to dissolve stagnation, maybe . . . Maybe what? Achieve some kind of macrobiotically correct kind of health and happiness, Oriental serenity, automatic enlightenment?
In an interesting way, Japan has freed me from many misconceptions. A feeling of freedom and personal adventure might be the other side of disillusion. Through the curiosity of Japanese people, through their eyes, I now look at my own background and culture in a different way, and feel freer in my perception of what a macrobiotic way of life is about.
A New Macrobiotics
For one thing, I realized that our macrobiotic teachers - beginning with George Ohsawa - are not so common in Japan. There is a world of difference between them and the common "company men" in Japan. Japan might be a friendly country which has much to teach us in terms of respect for others, community values, kindness, politeness, the spirit of cooperation to achieve a common goal, but it is not a country that encourages creativity, difference or originality. Japan values obedience, hierarchy, and conformity.
The Japanese themselves are well aware of the export and loss of their most creative thinkers: Japanese composers, artists, and thinkers are better received abroad and often leave Japan to find the space they need to create. Ohsawa himself was imprisoned for speaking up in Japan. So, I listen with interest to my young "Westernized" Japanese students who criticize and reject their own culture with as much zeal and passion as I rejected mine. They say how tired they are of the heavy burden of obligations that codify their everyday life and shape their future, how they cannot feel "themselves" in Japan, how everything is codified - the behavior to the senior colleague, to the boss, to the younger brother, what is expected from the wife of the first son etc., and the list goes on and on.
What I perceive as kindness and social courtesy, they harshly describe as hypocrisy. In the West, they say, people are free, they can be "themselves." I smile knowingly. Themselves? Young people in schools might still wear uniforms in Japan, but American students also wear their own uniforms - jeans, tennis shoes. I had jokingly pointed out to my American students how they were all dressed alike. The dictates might not be those of the school principal, but the fashion industry and the media exerts a similar conformity. The big accomplishment in the West might be that we think that we are free - a great achievement and feast of media propaganda.
But I do not say that to my students. There is no need. I only encourage them to travel, explore, learn, make mistakes, passionate mistakes. This is what human life is about, isn't it? We have to know for ourselves, learn by ourselves. That is also what George Ohsawa encouraged his students to do: travel, discover, explore, find difficulties and adventure. "Non credo" was an important precept he taught, one that we forget too easily because believing in ready-made answers is so much easier.
With Different Eyes
So I now read the same macrobiotic books with different eyes. I read them as a sharing of knowledge, as the result of a common adventure to find answers to the problems of our modern world - not a complete system with all the answers. As a result of my experience, I am leery of any idealization and find in macrobiotic literature a tendency to idealize the East and "traditions." A thread unraveled from the past would bring us right back to today, wouldn't it? Tradition is not by any means a guarantee of perfection. I discovered for myself that I had idealized the past of Japan, a past that is also marred by episodes of violence, tortures, famines just like the rest of the world. I appreciate the qualities of chivalry, the high sense of honor and bravery of the samurais, but I cannot say that these models appeal greatly to my heart, and I love disagreeing with George Ohsawa with what I feel is his own idealization of the Japanese past.
Shinto and Buddhism might have lived in peaceful cooperation in comparison with the religious wars of the West, yet bloody feuds divided different sects of Buddhism at various times and when Christians became threatening to the government of Japan, they were persecuted and crucified. I do not know how far back we would have to go to find an "ideal society," but even then, the same thread and patterns of behavior would still connect us to today.
I do not know what shape future society will have in terms of families, communities, or marriage arrangements. But I do feel that we have a tendency as macrobiotic practitioners to be too conventional in our thinking - in words and in public façade, if not in actual behavior - to rely on "tradition" as a proof that we are on the right track. This attitude can prevent us from being really free to explore our own world, its human experience with its mistakes and gains. We might deplore divorce as a breakdown of traditional values, but we might also see it as an opportunity to really develop relationships between men and women, to question what a commitment within a couple entails and means.
Yin and Yang Haze
I often feel impatient at the hazy application of "yin" and "yang" to social relationships and the role of men and women. The contraception pill for example might have been a mistake in terms of health, but the risk of mistakes is part of unexplored territories and freedom. We might today reject materialism, but only because we have experienced it and reached its limits. Whether we deplore or accept it, it is fact that humans only learn through experience. This is the realm of human play. Playing with fire can he disastrous and often is. Life is a journey to awareness: we need to make conscious choices and decide for ourselves. Conformity is safer, but it limits potential and adventure. When societies become too rigid - even with perfect values - young people become impatient and go to the other extreme of complete rejection of the past.
The modern macrobiotic movement is in its infancy. Adjustments in the dietary practices for example have already been made in terms of the amount of salt, consumption of fruit, etc. Our point of reference, though, is still pretty much the Japanese diet of last century. It is my feeling that more allowance will still have to be made for climactic and environmental differences.
Japan, for example, is so wet in comparison with Europe and America. In addition to the "tsuyu" or rainy season, it enjoys rain or snow all year around. Everywhere you go, there are springs jutting out of the soil and hot springs bursting forth from the ground. In summer, everything gets so wet that the pages of books curl up, leather in closets gets rotten, and the varnish on tables gets white and sticky.
In modern Japan you can buy small machines to dry up the air, and department stores offer sales of various products to help you save your clothes and belongings from mildew. Rice, gently growing out of several inches of water in rice paddies, makes perfect sense as a staple cereal in this country and Asia. Whether it is really the appropriate grain in the long run for the rest of the world is questionable.
Although macrobiotic literature recommends food that grows in local environments and mentions civilizations of the past based on other cereals, there is a tendency to consider brown rice as the "perfect" cereal. Is it really? Or should we consider its use more as a transition until macrobiotic communities in the world develop their own styles? Japan in that respect is a good example of a country that always freely adopted traditions from the rest of the world (Buddhism, and writing from China), but transformed them and gave them an unmistakable Japanese stamp. (Japanese Zen Buddhism for example is unlike any other form of Buddhism practiced in the world.)
Yes, my view of macrobiotics has changed in Japan. I appreciate what this country has to teach me, but by the same token, I feel more at peace with my own analytical Western mind and Western traditions of philosophy, psychology and literature. I enjoy the blending, the exchange, the exploration. I know my young eager student, if she "goes West" will probably also be disappointed and will have to come to terms with her own past and culture - and hopefully will appreciate them better. Strange how human beings appreciate health better when sick, peace in times of war, and friends when lonely.
As for myself, thanks to modern Japan, I gladly give up my ossified version of Oriental wisdom for the vibrancy of human life and human changes. I cannot say I do not feel nostalgia for the glorious image of a past Japan so beautifully depicted by Lafcadio Hearn. The modern world is not easy and I do not know where it is going. Creating it, all of us, is part of our macrobiotic adventure and challenge. Some of it might bring us back to old models, some of it might carry us further. Our teachers and books are guides, but like in music, once you know the scales, you can play your own music.
Let us not create an ossified version of a "macrobiotically" correct way of life. Let's acknowledge our mistakes, questions, doubts, and failures as well as successes. The one truly important - and most difficult - principle of macrobiotic philosophy in my mind is not any one of the seven principles or twelve theorems, it is "non credo".
End of Article
Author bio-statement: Liliane Papin lives in Sendai, Japan where she teaches French language and literature at the University of Tohoku in addition to teaching macrobiotic cooking.
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