From the Land of the Rising Sun

I think I said just yesterday how thrilled I was to be in Japan where you can drink the water, eat raw vegetables, and there's high speed internet. I would now like to amend that by saying you can drink the water, but something has been added to it, and if someone says its excellent, you could bet that every single person in Japan would suddenly start drinking it. I was writing yesterday about an 8 km walk I took the day before in Arashiyama, a farming/mountain village just outside of Kyoto. It was a very pleasant walk, and like all vaguely pleasant things in Japan, there were a lot of Japanese people doing it as well. During the walk I noticed an unpleasant lingering odor, which at first I thought was my own b.o; but as time went on I realised it was an unpleasant odor I've long associated with hiking: it was bug spray. Those cute pleasant fields were being zapped with DEET.

This odor has come to represent Japan for me in the same way I associate it with hiking: that regrettable unpleasantness that is a part of all beauty. I would even go so far to say that the Japanese have perfected this: the slight imperfection that make things seem more perfect. But perhaps I'm giving the country too much credit. I had at first been thrilled to be in Japan because it seemed so much cleaner and tidier than India. Now I am reminded that Japan may appear clean and tidy, but they have the same ecological nightmares that every other industrialized society does.

None of which is meant to trash the place. Whatever else you can say about Japan, the love of nature is genuine, and the sense of style that developed organically from it, is spectacular. Now if we can just wean them off that plastic artificiality...