Western time or Japanese time? A line or a dot?
I’d never thought about time as a cultural concept until I moved to Japan. Time was, well, time. Time passes. Too slowly on a rainy day, too quickly on happy days you wish would never end. From the Creation of the World to the Apocalypse, time passes. Whether we’re killing time to fend off boredom, or whether time is slowly killing us, it passes. As the inscription on the sundial reminds us, Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat: every hour wounds, the last one kills! Time passes, and so do we.
A view which I was forced to reconsider in Japan. The Japanese experience time differently to Westerners; their vision of time is different too. Indeed, the perception of time is first and foremost an intellectual construction, and as such it is shaped by the surrounding culture. Western time is objective, linear and continuous whereas Japanese time is subjective, periodic, cyclical and most of all instantaneous. The Japanese live in the present, as part of a cycle of constant new beginnings. Time is not a straight line but a point within a circle. This subtle difference changes how we and they see the world.
In Japan, everything coexists
Awareness of this cyclical rhythm is made stronger by the multitude of religious and non-religious rituals that are a part of Japanese life. The most spectacular is, without doubt, the enjoyment of the cherry trees in full bloom, in early April (which also happens to be when I am writing this). This is a time of collective celebration, when people picnic under the trees (hanami) and appreciate the fleeting beauty of the petals as they are carried away on the breeze, themselves carried away by the sweetly intoxicating beer. The Japanese also celebrate autumn leaves, new year, girls’ day, boys’ day, and more. Each ceremony is an opportunity to mark this rhythm, even in a hyper-urban civilisation that is no longer subjected to the seasons, that is heated in winter and cooled in summer, lit day and night, fed daily with freshly-picked mangoes and freshly-printed news. Even statistics are adjusted for seasonal variations.
It is this perception of the present moment and cycles, imprinted on them from an early age, that gives the Japanese an intimate awareness of the impermanence and fragility of life, its constant destruction and regeneration. Enjoy the moment but remember that nothing lasts. Prepare and repair. Destroy and rebuild. Because everything is perishable, because everything must be endlessly reinvented, preserving the spirit takes precedence over preserving stones. Temples are destroyed every thirty years and rebuilt in the spirit of their founders. Tokyo is a city under construction. Entire districts are razed to the ground to rise again. And yet ultra-modern skyscrapers still house restaurants from another era, with sliding doors and tatami, the rustle of kimonos and the delightful froth of moss set delicately on concrete slabs. We are outside the city, outside time, but well and truly in Tokyo. Everything coexists, everything cohabits in Japan.
Time in Japan, and more generally the Far East, is ideally suited to the challenges of the twenty-first century, whose centre of gravity is somewhere between Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The new world’s sun rises in the east, between the Middle Kingdom, the Land of the Morning Calm and the Land of the Rising Sun. It rises very early and goes very fast.
No more straight lines
The faster the world goes, the more we too are obliged to live in the present and accept impermanence. The transformations brought about by technology and made possible by means of communication are now happening so fast, they have become almost impossible to predict. The more we live with our times, the less we are able to imagine the future. This paradox has burdened us with new responsibilities: governments must find a way around global bankruptcy, global warming and the end of natural resources (even James Bond gets easier missions than this); CEOs must steer their companies into a future of which they know nothing; parents must give their children the foundations they need to live in tomorrow’s world, yet no one can predict what this world will be.
How can we do this other than by teaching them to be more resistant to the unknown, to enjoy today while preparing for tomorrow? To know who they are and where they come from, without being afraid of not knowing where they are heading. To enjoy the journey more than the destination. In other words, to forget the certainty of a straight line and guide them towards the impermanence of a dot and the constantly renewed beauty of a circle.
Incidentally, what do the hands on our (round) dials show? They show dots inside a circle that represents a cycle. So is the circle now complete? Nothing is that simple. Teenagers today don’t wear watches. With music blasting from their MP3, they go where ill winds blow, tossed to and fro like dead leaves blow, multiplexing in a strange language (wr r u? c u at hm. Ks.). At the end of the day, are they really the ones most in need of recycling?
