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A very foreign life
In Nara, Japan, a universe of connections and contradictions unfolds daily.
By Pico Iyer
[02/22/00]

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[02/22/00]

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Dumpling-free Hong Kong
Hong Kong is changing. On a four-day tour of the city's culinary highlights, you can avoid the dumpling, but not the theme restaurant.
By Jamie James
[02/18/00]

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By Pico Iyer

Feb. 23, 2000 | Once, after I'd been living here, on and off, for three years, I decided I needed a typewriter. The machine I was using, an ancient Japanese manual, was as arthritic, almost, as myself, and the only other implements I had for composing my articles were a box of $1.19 pens, a limited supply of paper and an entirely illegible scrawl. I picked up a local magazine and started going through its classified section, finding at last the name of a company that offered simple, cheap electric typewriters similar to the one I'd had in college. I called them up, faxed them some forms, deposited a payment at the post office, and waited.

A few days later, as if by magic, a Black Cat messenger appeared at my door with my salvation in his hands. Eagerly, I began typing all the articles I'd previously handwritten, and before long, thanks to my expertise, the correction tape was all used up. Suddenly, I was helpless (having survived quite happily for years without a typewriter). Fretfully, I called up the company, got some more forms, faxed them back, deposited a further payment at the post office, and waited. Soon a whole box of correction tapes arrived. By then, however, the regular ribbon was worn out.

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Again I was at a loss, stranded, with no apparent way to complete the article I'd started. I rang up the poor salesman again, completed more forms, made more trips to the post office, and paced up and down like an expectant father. The problem, of course, lay not in the machine but in me, and I was reminded, firsthand, of how quickly we become the servants of our tools, habit-bound machines ourselves.

The story is as old as the camel and the tent -- we're always possessed by our possessions -- but it reminded me forcibly that the less one has, the less one has to worry about (a lesson that having one's house burn down, and all one's projects and hopes go up in smoke, ought to teach, but somehow does only on paper). And it brought me back to some of the defining principles of the society all around me, which more or less patented the notion that if you decorate a simple room with a single chrysanthemum, it will concentrate the mind and consecrate the flower. It pulled me back, too, to a simpler time, when small pleasures were big and old sensations new. If some of us feel nostalgic for childhood, for all its limitations, that is mostly because we long for a time when days could be eternities and the mind would be where the body is. In a small way, in Japan, with few belongings, no space, and not much savoir-faire, I'm carried back to that state of quick enjoyment, where phone calls are so occasional that they're actually welcome and every movie, seen once a month perhaps, seems special.

I dwell, of course, in a kind of parallel universe here, and it takes my girlfriend (who's away at work most of the day) to explain to me that the frightened, kindly woman at the convenience store is, in fact, the cruel owner's wife and the lady who sells me croquettes has a daughter at the local junior high school.

One summer evening, after I'd been here for perhaps four years, she offered to take me on a tour of the neighborhood on her motorbike, and suddenly, five minutes from our flat, I was in a sleek, unanticipated world of Big Boy burger joints and Chateau d'Or bistros, with the Hotel Silk Road nearby. In parts, the area looked like Atlanta with subtitles, a random suburb made for those with wheels, and appointed with the look-alike global props of Book Bahn, Sushi Land, and Bottle World. Here was the standard jabberwocky of the convenience universe in the latest International Style -- Mr. Pachinko, Taco Donald's, boys in baseball caps that said WHAT'S NEXT? SEX trooping into Neo-Geo Land.

In parts, though, it was something other, and as we drove, the shopping centers fell away, often, and gave onto open fields, and rice paddies, and farmers working outside straw-thatched houses, in villages still so linked that the news of the community was transmitted to every single house by speaker at seven o'clock each night.

And as the sky turned indigo, and a huge pulsing moon rose above the hills, suddenly we came upon something even stranger: huge transparent modern buildings, complex with tubes and workspaces, like the innards of a laptop, erected in the middle of nowhere. The signs said they were the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, here in the vastness of old green hills, and other tidy notice boards nearby explained, in English and Japanese, that they were the first signs of a whole Kansai Science City, which would one day extend for forty miles in every direction, linking all the areas of western Japan into a Silicon Valley East.

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