David Mura
A JAPANESE·AMERICAN IN TOKYO
In
a sense, more so than most cities, Tokyo is one im–
mense shop : everywhere one looks there are billboards, neon signs,
shop windows, stores of all sorts and sizes, crowds of shoppers
clutching bags from Seibu or Issetan or one of the dozen other major
depaatos
(department stores) . Yet what I find intriguing here is how
the less gaudy Japanese aesthetic of the bare
tatatami
mats or the
polished empty boards of the
Noh
stage functions so well in the ser–
vice of commerce. Against the mash of people spilling through the
streets, you enter the finest stores and find interiors that are strik–
ingly sparse; the object, the saleable good, is suspended in space,
surrounded by blankness, conferring on it a matteness, an absence
of history (think of the rock garden of Ryoanji, great expanses of
white rippling pebbles dotted here and there with the darkness of
larger, ragged stones). How easily this native aesthetic, this Zen sen–
sibility , camouflages its advertisement, hides the where and how of
production, the human toil and material process, and presents each
item in a realm apart, pure, peaceful, timeless. A city of tremendous
wealth-where does it come from?
In
the vast
depaatos
everything can be bought; you need go no
further to have all your material needs met. The
depaatos
contain
restaurants, movie theaters, food shops, and on the top floors, art
galleries, performing spaces. They are a city in miniature, a maze to
wander through, a place to share in the mass and controlled hysteria
of change, to affirm one's place in this society. The pull here is not so
much that of class, though certainly such a pull exists: around ninety
percent of the Japanese think of themselves as middle-class. Yes,
some are more middle-class than others, but the whole society is
geared not towards increasing one's preciousness as an individual,
but toward securing one's membership as part of the group. To buy
goods which are too unique, too far out of reach of one's fellow
Japanese, to proclaim one's special privilege, can make one feel
isolated and disturb the intensely social Japanese sense of self. What
is affirmed in the
depaatos
is the Japanese fascination with newness,
with new codes of how to belong to the group, and one buys not be–
cause one feels inferior and must raise one's status, but because one
belongs to society and should do everything possible to continue to
