What Oscar Wilde Knew About Japan

The whole of Japan is a pure invention," said Oscar Wilde, who should have known, since he was a pure invention himself. What he meant, of course, was that Japan, as much as anywhere, is a product of our imagination, and the country that we see is only the one we have been trained to see. Life imitates art. Yet, in a deeper sense, anyone who would understand that land of cultured surfaces can do no better than to turn to Wilde, who kept up appearances as if they were the only reality he knew. His championing of masks, his preference for style before sincerity, his unfailing conviction that there was nothing wrong with reality that a little artifice couldn't fix, might all be prototypes of a certain kind of Japanese aesthetics (the Japanese Book of Tea reads almost like a pure invention of Wilde's, with its "cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence"). Yet Wilde also saw that silver generalities conceal basic copper truths: "The actual people who live in Japan," he wrote, "are not unlike the general run of English people."

That issue is, of course, an increasingly urgent one: Are the Japanese really different from you and me (and not just as the rich are)? Wilde certainly brings many Japanese cultural positions into the living room. But culture, you will say, is not the point. It is Japan's one-party democracy, its corporate monopolies, its patriotism that amounts to protectionism that exasperate; it is Japan's trade practices, in fact, and economic strategies. But trade practices are in some respects the product of cultural values, and no country pursues policies in which self-interest plays no part. The Japanese system is different from ours; so too are the French, the Chinese and the South African. And when it comes to competition, all of those powers go with their strengths. Yes, you will add, but the Japanese keep telling us they're different. Indeed they do, and try to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Americans, who start many of their sentences with the words "Americans . . .," may not find this so alien.

Inevitably, it is never hard to find differences across the sea, and to say that we cannot possibly make our peace with people who put their verbs at the end of their sentences, say yes where we would say no, read their books back to front and take their baths at night. Just as easily, we could say that there is nothing much that need separate us from a race that likes to eat at McDonald's, listens to the Walkman on the train home, watches baseball on TV and takes its honeymoons in Hawaii (some Japanese children, indeed, are surprised to find that there are McDonald's outlets in America too, and that foreigners play besuboru). Recently Japan's most prominent gangsters reportedly complained -- in a p.c. fashion -- that laws to curtail their activities were "a violation of their human rights."