Thursday, May 20, 2010

Great Old Albion and the Land of the Rising Sun

Notes:
Thursday, May 20, 2010

I originally posted the following sometime in April, 2010. Later, I decided to delete it because I wasn't sure anyone was actually interested in reading such a long piece of writing about something so specific. However, I've now come to know that a few people at least may actually be seriously interested in posts of this sort. So I'm re-posting it.

Monday, August 02, 2010

I've decided to submit this post as my entry for the writing competition announced by The Banyan Trees. Yes, it's old, more of an essay than a short-story et cetera, but if anything that I've ever written represents Home - Home, as different places I've seen, as my creative roots, as my literary journey - this is it!


This post is about two countries that are so unlike each other, literally worlds apart, yet are, in more ways than one, similar. They also happen to be countries both possessed of and possessed by historical, linguistic and literary sensibilities that have, over the years, come to determine my personality. I've inhabited England only in my imagination. Through its literature, the history of its imagination and most significantly through its language that I've adopted and adapted as my own. Japan, on the other hand, is a country that I've actually lived in and, though I was only a child then, imbibed a part of its culture and collective imagination.

It was Japan that gave me the sublime animated movies of Miyazaki. It was Japan that presented me with a civilization that had, in the past, imbued in itself the very essence of the sparse, minimal yet beautiful primal surroundings in which it found itself. And it was in Japan that I was faced with the contradiction (though I understood this only in retrospect) of a society that derived its strength from modern technology while at the same time being inextricably rooted in its past and steeped in folklore. It is this inextricable link with the past or, more specifically, with the imagination of the past that lies at the heart of the similarity between England and Japan.

In ancient times England was known as Albion. People considered it an ethereal land shrouded in mist and legend. Being an island with a language and imagination all its own, detached from the mainland must have surely contributed to this image. I believe this is a more or less accurate description of ancient Japan as well. So here we have the first set of similarities: unique geographical location relative to the mainland and resultant quirks in the language and the imagination.

Beowulf, the epic Old English poem exemplifies every aspect of the English imagination. There's the darkness. There's the element of surreal fantasy that flows out of the harsh, unforgiving, atmospheric surroundings. Somehow, the battle against the monsters, Grendel and his mother, is (for me) representative of the struggle against cruel, capricious nature itself and the complexities of a fragmented world. In some strange sense, by the very act of being imagined, transmitted and eventually written down, the tale signifies acceptance as well. The Japanese never struggled against nature; they reconciled themselves to it. This is epitomised by early Japanese architecture that emphasised merging unobtrusively into the natural surroundings. Houses were built so as to be easily and harmlessly dismantled in the face of a natural threat like a forest fire or an earthquake. Japanese literary forms possess this quality as well. The Haiku poems, for example, represent moments frozen in time and so do Zen gardens. They represent an acceptance of the fact that natural beauty and beautiful moments in Japan do not last long. So we see an emerging pattern: the struggle against and eventual reconciliation with the ebb and flow of nature through art.

As the next, final and relatively light hearted link I offer Lewis Carroll! Martin Gardner notes in his Annotated Alice that the Alice books have a large following in Japan and that the most number of Lewis Carroll societies are to be found there. How are we to explain this phenomenon? As I've said, the Japanese imagination has a lot in common with the English imagination and if you look close enough you'll find Alice everywhere in Japanese popular culture. For example, in one of Miyazaki's most successful movies, Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro, in English), there is a scene in which the younger of two sisters goes chasing behind a small, white, rabbit like creature into a hole in the ground and falls on something huge, furry and soft. She then falls asleep on it. And then there's Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, in English) in which a young girl enters a spirit world centred around a bath house for the Gods and ruled by a wicked witch who also happens to have a benevolent twin sister. The thing to be noted here is that it doesn't stop with the Alice books or Lewis Carroll. Most genres that came out of the glorious period of the English imagination have found a place in the popular Japanese imagination. Detective stories, ghost stories and fantasy, for instance. England brims with fantastic creatures and spirits of nature (Hobbits, Pixies, Imps, Elves, Dwarves....) and so does Japan!

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