This Japanese Life.

On Being Illiterate in Japan | 馬鹿外人

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Eryk Salvaggio

There are incomprehensible signs, everywhere, and every sign is made of smaller signs I can’t read. I can’t read a map or follow directions. I am educated and illiterate, wealthy and incapable of communicating anything to anyone. But, I have an iPhone.

iFluency
I am crafty. I can order food in a restaurant by pointing at a cell phone picture of the plastic tray in the window. Show the waitress, eat. Like a lab rat, I have figured out the levers that lead to food.

The need for directions, maps or understanding landmarks is irrelevant, because I have GPS. As long as my battery is alive and the signal is strong, I don’t need to learn anything.

It is remarkably easy to find the meaning of signs: Electronic dictionaries (also built into my cell phone) show me the meanings of any Kanji character. Then I turn off the phone and go back to forgetting.

In other words: I can afford a certain degree of faux fluency.

Engperialism
Thanks to the financial dominance of English, there’s a sense in Japan that people ought to know how to talk to you. It’s never implied that you should learn the words for “left,” “right,” or “straight.” It’s embarrassing for them – it carries connotations of being uneducated, too lazy, or a rube. (I suspect Korean and Chinese immigrants have a different story to tell).

English speakers are notoriously paralyzed by foreign languages. Even by being surrounded by one on a daily basis, my incentive to spend hours – nay, years – studying a foreign language wanes. At my workplace, speaking Japanese is actively discouraged: I’m a tool for learning English. I do my best work if I am kept in my pure, ignorant state. It’s simply too easy for exclusive-English speakers to stay that way.

Nationally, America has a dismal track record for polyglots. Only 8 percent of US college students study a second language. When then-candidate Barack Obama suggested students should learn a second language as a requirement in high school, he was blasted for kowtowing to immigrants.

The Brits do no better than the Yanks: 95 percent in Britannia are monolingual, a number suppressed in America merely by our higher rate of immigration: The US has more bilingualism because more people are forced to learn English. Australia is 80 percent monoglot. (New Zealand, like Canada, is fluent in French).

Meanwhile, more students are studying English as a second language, globally, than any other language on Earth. And as English becomes a need for access to power, some say it is becoming a kind of linguistic imperialism, “essentially a demonstration of power—traditionally, military power but also, in the modern world, economic power—and aspects of the dominant culture are usually transferred along with the language.”*

Eigo Excuses
None of this makes me feel better about whipping out my 80,000-Yen, 6,000-yen-a-month iPhone 4 to find out what room I need to pee in. I am not proud of my lack of ‘linguistic diversity’ and I’m not trying to excuse it.

However, any expatriate can get away without accessing the ‘primary sources’ of their surrounding cultures because we know it will inevitably be translated for us. This awareness is a massive drain on the core component of successful language acquisition: Motivation. Because there is no need to learn Japanese, coming to Japan won’t teach you Japanese by osmosis. (Losing weight, yes; speaking Japanese? No.)

It’s an act of will. Occasionally this willpower inspires a burst of vocabulary acquisition and the casual perusal of language-school sites in Japan or online. Then one day I’d rather watch a movie, or go sight seeing, and it’s all so easy that I forget why I would ever stay home with flashcards.

Now, my strongest incentive to speak Japanese is not what happens when I’m here, it’s what happens when I go home. Living in Japan without learning the language is like eating way more cake than everyone else. It’s bad for you, it’s selfish and it’s done purely out of a lack of willpower. It suggests a trail of annoyed waiters, grocery clerks and coworkers serving an oblivious white guy. I’m not cool with being accommodated without trying to give something back. It’s embarrassing.

But here I am, writing a blog post about being illiterate as a stack of white flash cards stares at me through an intact plastic wrapper.

Here goes nothing.

Posted in Culture Shock, Kanji, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

On Watching “Mad Men” in Japan | セクハラ

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Eryk Salvaggio

Every guy in Japan wears a suit and smokes.

They take trains from the suburbs into an office with a formal dress code and work until 10 p.m. every day. On their breaks, they’re going to convenience stores in suits to buy sandwiches. When work ends, they’re going to bars to change air into an alcohol-and-nicotine haze until the boss goes home.

Meanwhile, women are expected to work part-time, make coffee for the men, raise the kids and eat dinner last.

For the single girls, women’s magazines include dating columns with questions such as, “Why do men talk about difficult topics like politics and the economy?” notes the NYT’s Hiroko Tabuchi, who also Tweeted the mag’s answer:

“Men care about complex topics because it affects their jobs. And they want to educate us girls… But don’t worry if you can’t keep up. Just change the subject!”

Watching “Mad Men” – a TV show set in an American ad agency just before 1963’s Equal Pay Act – holds an accidentally accurate mirror up to Japan. It’s only a slightly exaggerated view of modern gender roles.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Between 1985 and 2008, the proportion of female full-time employees fell from 68.1 percent to 46.5 percent. Put another way, 53.5 percent of women in the workforce are part-time or contract workers, while the figure for men is 19.1 percent.” (Japanese part-timers are increasingly falling into poverty).

The World Economic Forum rates Japan at 94 out of 134 countries on gender equality in its 2010 survey, up from 101 but still lower than Zimbabwe.

The “Mad Men” era started its slow decline in the 1960s with the Equal Pay Act (1963) and the Civil Rights Act (1964). Today’s still-flawed U.S. workplace is the result of 45 years of social adjustment to the idea of equal rights.

These laws came to Japan in 1986 and they came without any feminist social movement. You can assume that Japan is about 24 years behind the U.S. in workplace equality laws and, culturally, about 34 years behind. Basically, it’s roughly around the Don Draper era.

Intermission: The Gojo Cat Bag Man
The cat-food slogan bag was broadcasting the sound of rushing water.* It was slung over the shoulders of a fellow train passenger, who had started up an awkward conversation with a young lady who laughed nervously.

We walked to another train car. The Cat Bag Man followed us. Soon, his rushing-water broadcast gave way to the lustful moaning of a porn actress. The Cat Bag Man was playing hardcore pornography through loudspeakers in his handbag, surrounded by elderly women staring silently at the ground.

When my girlfriend and I talked too loudly, he stood up, walked over to her and accused us of making petty assertions or asked her out for drinks.

Trickle-Down Harassment
The Cat Bag Man was not my only encounter with a creep. One man had a camera pointed at the window of a women’s yoga class. I bumped into one guy who squatted on a stairwell to look up a skirt.

Before we go on, let’s be clear: The superpervs are a rarity. What’s striking is not the abundance of creeps, but the brazen nature of creeps.

Men certainly check out women in America. But the time spent “looking” at women is directly related to the degree of power held by women. Men in the modern U.S. make wide sweeping glances, men in Japan just as often unapologetically leer. The really deviant guys take video.

What, then, do creepy old perverts have to do with watching “Mad Men” in Japan? Only that the diminished role of women in Japanese society reduces their ability to respond to men who go too far. The problem with the world of “Mad Men” wasn’t Don Draper. The problem is the lowered bar that Draper and his ilk set for the men they shared a culture with.

When the middle ground is low, you dig a pretty deep hole for the bottom-dwellers. The problem with Don Draper in Japan is that the hole fills up with guys broadcasting pornography to middle-aged women and children on their way to a museum.

The Trouble With Wa
Japanese women are in a double bind: They earn less while surrounded by gawking men in a culture that emphasizes social harmony and saving face (“wa“).

Publically complaining about being gawked at is awkward. So women aren’t confrontational. The guy knows it. No one will be confronted, and no one will confront anybody. It’s the opposite of what happened to this guy in New York City (NSFW).

Which just goes to show that perverts are everywhere.

And Now for Some Cultural Relativism
While the problem of sexism in Japan is real and clearly problematic, there’s one caveat I’ve heard from female expats in Japan: The motives behind “sexual harassment” in Japan can be innocent. Japanese women will ask Western women if they can touch their breasts, so will the men. Male students will ask embarrassing questions to male and female teachers.

I won’t try to discern the lines between naive question and objectification here. Obviously, if someone’s uncomfortable, it should stop. What shocks foreign visitors to Japan is that it even has to be explained. But Japanese ideas about the body are much more casual than in the US. Families and co-workers bathe together at onsens. Nudity is not as explicitly sexualized. So attitudes in Japan can strike some (Americans, particularly) as a bit too cavalier.

For our part, the Gojo Cat Bag Man delivered his epithets or his invitations and then ran to another car. There’s no doubt that this wasn’t an innocent cultural misunderstanding, even though none of the other passengers said a word. You can imagine that this wasn’t the first time they’d seen someone cross the line.

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Posted in Culture Shock, Uncategorized | 17 Comments

On Abandoned Ski Resorts in Japan | 逃散

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Eryk Salvaggio

I spent Halloween on top of a mountain in Oita Prefecture at a 3-star resort hotel in an otherwise abandoned resort complex surrounded by rice paddies, a ski slope overrun by weeds, two empty minimalls, a locked-up bowling alley and a stripped-down pachinko parlor. A hypermodern Japanese ghost town.

It’s history reads like a ghost story: The resort was built by a “completely mental” rich guy who went crazy in the late 90’s and spent his fortune developing a sprawling tourist village in the middle of a farming village. This legend is tempting. The hotel holds more people than could live in the surrounding 4 towns combined. The route to get here is a bewilderingly dangerous narrow road winding up the mountainside, spitting you out into a gravel-paved, unfinished parking lot and then, miraculously, to a fully staffed valet.

The hotel interior is gorgeous. There’s a breakfast buffet (or “Viking-Style Breakfast,” as it’s called in Japan) and a public bath that looks out at the miles of mountains and rice fields. The staff is polite and the gift shop sells cheesecake-and-marshmallow mochi, one of the best snacks I’ve had in Japan.

Japan’s Bubble
During the American banking crisis, Japan had the dubious distinction of being a “worst case scenario” reference point in the media. Despite maintaining 5 percent unemployment (compared to America’s 10 percent) in a nation with universal health care and one of the lowest crime rates in the world, Japan is viewed as a colossal failure of capitalism. Around 1990-1993, Japan endured a similar economic crisis to what hit the United States in 2008. Japan has failed to grow its economy substantially since, resulting in a “lost decade” that has extended beyond 20 years, and this year China finally pushed Japan aside as the world’s second-largest economy.

The Hotel Sekia seems to have been constructed at exactly the wrong time. From the decor and the video games locked up in the bowling alley (including one pizza delivery game with the slogan, “Nobody orders a COLD PIZZA!”) the hotel smacks of Clinton-era aesthetics. Rainbows meet sharp angles inside, while the exterior fuses Spanish architecture and the opening credits of “Saved by the Bell.”

Knowing all this, you could imagine the Hotel Sekia being a reasonable business venture caught up in a sea of popping economic bubbles, scheduled to launch just as a stock market crash and real estate loan crisis (and declining property values) drown everyone out in a sea of rising debt.

This could be a rational explanation, if the core business strategy was sound. Which it wasn’t.

The Ski Resort
Hotel Sekia was designed as a ski resort. The problem is, Kyushu has a climate comparable to South Carolina. It doesn’t snow here – it frosts.

Japan is known for its overreach when it comes to entertainment: Indoor golf courses, indoor tidal pools, onsens made of ice. But those were all the products of a rising bubble, when the novelty of defying nature was affordable to build and worth the price to tourists. Hotel Sekia seems to have been built just as defying nature lost its charm.

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Now, what would have been a ski slope, fueled by a constant stream of artificial snow on artificial soil, is a field of rusty ski lifts. The mountainside is coated in long patches of fake grass being torn up by real weeds.

The Minimall
The two minimalls at Sekia Hills are sorted into shop fronts and an entertainment complex. The entertainment complex hosts a bowling alley and children’s play area left to birds and a rainbow-striped, warehouse-sized room that smacks of pachinko. The other side of the mall is abandoned store fronts: An outlet mall, a deli shop filled with ancient computers.

There are probably about 14 store fronts in the hotel parking lot, and 17-21 in the neighboring complex. Both malls are separated by fields of parking lots and foundations laid for some crazed Japanese tycoon’s now-abandoned dreams.

The Chapel
Somehow, the Hotel Sekia has survived, possibly as one of many Japanese “Zombie Corporations” propped up exclusively by subsidies from struggling economic regions. There is another survivor of the resort’s long-ago apocalypse in the hotel parking lot: A wedding chapel.

The Hotel Sekia is selling itself, these days, as a place for weddings. Its literature obviously stresses the beauty of its countryside surroundings over any pitch to the abandoned-minimall-wedding fantasies of young Japanese brides. You can go there and find a dress for yourself and clothes for the entire wedding party. Two families were at the hotel when I stayed there, clearly out for matrimony.

But there’s a certain kind of irony in a struggling hotel – and ski resort without snow – changing its strategy to weddings in a country with one of the most rapidly declining birthrates in the world.

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Posted in Fun, Photography, Travel, Uncategorized, Weird | 10 Comments

On Eating French Fries in Japan | フライドポテトがたべマス

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Eryk Salvaggio

Sometime during the three months I have been in Japan, my pants got too big.

The legend of the Japanese diet is so widespread that no one doubted that I would lose weight. There were a number of theories as to why, mostly involving chopsticks: It’s harder to eat with chopsticks, so people eat less. Everything is in smaller portions to fit on chopsticks. All the food is sticky so it will be more filling, etc.

So, as someone who has come to Japan and fulfilled the weight-loss prophecy, here’s a few observations about eating in Japan.

Eating is Everything
Food is a centerpiece of life in Japan. There are holidays celebrating the day a child first chooses its own meal. Rice – and farming – form a number of the basic pictographs in the Kanji system. A look at any Japanese lunch box, from a kid’s to an adult’s at lunch break, reveals the intricate nature of designing a meal. Meanwhile, the government sponsors “traditional” Japanese farming methods, keeping the cost of rice somewhat extravagant through trade barriers and agricultural protectionism. One of its largest international disputes is about food: Particularly, hunting and eating whale.

Japan is serious about food. That brings with it a certain air of respectability. Even in an ice cream chain, you’ll find people taking real pride in their work. Eating out is a social experience, and every shop specializes in one group of food with a handful of varieties – an omelette shop, an udon shop, a sushi shop. This raises a culture of foodies who eat for taste and flavor and not the endless ulterior motives we have for eating in America.

The American Stomach
American food is kind of disgusting. It is heaping mounds of greasy deep-fried protein that leaves everyone queasy 20 minutes after swallowing. The grease is served with some sort of side, such as a deep-fried starch, which is the size of a Japanese meal. Couple this with an appetizer – another Japanese-sized meal, usually involving a greasy, deep-fried variation on the main course – and you have, in a single meal, two day’s worth of Japanese meals, before dessert.

Of course, all of this shit is delicious, and some recent research suggests that these combinations of fat, sugar and salt can be literally addictive.

So, how did I lose weight in Japan? It wasn’t with a shred of exercise, since my daily walk to work was cut in half. I didn’t work out and I haven’t deprived myself of anything. Nonetheless, here’s my attempt at reverse-engineering my new dietary habits.

1. Portions.
Portions are smaller here, unless the food has nearly no caloric content. For example, you will get a pile of delicious shredded cabbage as a salad and tons of broth in the Udon. The noodles are just enough – in America, they’d rise above the bowl, I think. Here, nothing overflows.

It’s still filling. Rice is filling, noodles are filling, etc. The protein is about the same size as the salad. And you eat all of it at once, switching tastes between bites. The centerpieces are highly satisfying and low-calorie – one cup of udon noodles is 115 calories.

I ordered french fries at a kaitenzushi place and discovered that the caloric value of a standard, small french-fry was about a third of the meal’s total. One group of four split the small fry between them, making the fries calorically balanced on the food-to-shit ratio.

(Having calories on the menu, by the way, is a great motivator to eat healthy).

2. Fresh Food
Food in Japan is almost neurotically fresh. At the end of the night, any prepared food at the convenience store or supermarket is thrown into the trash in an orgiastic display of capricious wealth. The upside to this is that you get everything half-priced or more after 9 p.m. The other upside is that the food is always fresh.

Every convenience store has fresh salads ready around the clock for its healthy, cabbage-loving children, but at the cost of literally 19 million tons of wasted food on an annual basis.

On the micro-level, though, it’s remarkable to go to a gas station and find a fresh salad, fish, rice and sliced vegetables, because once I could only get day-old hot dogs, cookie-filled pastries and entire pies disguised as “snacks.” Restaurants do it the same way – an udon shop gives us their leftovers at the end of the night in exchange for showing up.

If a small bowl of shredded cabbage, corn and sesame seed dressing sounds like a shitty lunch, it’s because you live in America. You are visualizing brown iceberg lettuce mixed with bland, tasteless vegetables. There is a world beyond this, America.

3. Desserts
Desserts in Japan range from the basic mochi (rice beat into a glutinous shell surrounding a bean paste) to the American-sized sundae behemoth (imagine ice cream, corn flakes, hot chocolate syrup, a full kit-kat, and as a topping, a soft-serve ice cream cone and a peanut butter cup).

Of course, the more common route here is the mochi – or a banana. Banana-as-dessert explains the difference between American and Japanese attitudes toward food. America says; “This is 1200 calories, so it’s bad for me – I’ll eat it after I finish eating.” Japan says; “This is sweet, so I’ll eat it after I finish eating.” Therefore, Americans eat fried peanut butter cups topped with ice cream while Japanese eat congealed rice wrapped around beans.

The Lifestyle
I have another theory about losing weight in Japan: Social engineering.

Bringing endless green tea (no sugar, no milk) to patrons reduces the odds that they will ingest half of their day’s calories through soda. Eating food hot – often boiling hot – and slurping noodles to cool them increases the heat in your stomach, causing you to feel full faster (rice also expands after being swallowed).

Also, the entire meal is served at once, in tiny dishes. Everything is a side dish. Having food laid out in front of you reduces the sense that you need to “finish” a part of the meal to “progress” to the “real” meal. You don’t feel like you have to eat all your potato skins to get to the hamburger.

Instead, it’s presented as a single, beautiful display of food, where each bite is presented to be savored (in turn slowing down your eating and increasing the amount you digest in the same time span, filling you up faster). Savoring the bite is the silver bullet. You eat slower and get full faster.

Adapting in America
I haven’t lost weight because of willpower, exercise, or any effort. I lost weight because I am surrounded by a culture of healthful eating. A diet of context.

I’ve been haunted by the idea of returning home and eating massive cream-cheese covered bagels and pastries for breakfast, pizza slices for lunch and then a dinner of gigantic, gravy-and-sugar-covered fried fats. It is easy to fall prey to normalized overeating in America, where portions are double the size you need and where corn syrup makes you hungry every time you’re thirsty.

It’s a shared delusion of American culture. Breaking out of cycles of horrific eating habits is an act of cultural liberation. Not only do you have to stop buying into “the system,” you also have to envision and realize an alternative method of surviving.

I’ll start by learning how to make udon.

Posted in Food, Uncategorized | 19 Comments

On Dining Out in Japan | 外食と義理

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Eryk Salvaggio

When it came time to ask for the bill, I couldn’t do it. I sat, and I waited. And then, 10 minutes into waiting, it hit me: I will never stop being American.

“Sumimasen.”
In the United States, courtesy means letting the waiter do the enormous backlog of shit that they have to get done during their shift. You trust that the server will come when they are ready, check in, ask how the meal is and if you need anything. You respect them by saying, “Hey, we’re both just people trying to get by, I’m in no hurry, so do what you have to do, within certain limits.”

In Japan, in contrast, you shout “Excuse me!” (sumimasen) when you need something.

On the plus side, waiters never interrupt a patron’s punchline to ask if anyone needs refills. They hang out in the kitchen. You also pay when you’re ready – just take the bill to the front register. In a sense, the system is ideal for the patrons and the waiters. The waiter gets to chill out. Patrons get what they want when they need it.

Ordering food in a Japanese restaurant is pretty straightforward. But for certain kinds of Americans – passive, laid back apologists who don’t talk on trains and over think to nearly catastrophic degrees (i.e., “wimps”)(i.e., “me”) – that curry comes with a cultural crisis.

There was no good reason for me to wait so long for the bill. I knew it was just one “Sumimasen!” away. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to shout for an absent, unseen waiter. I didn’t want to interrupt him. So I waited until he came out to serve someone else and then hesitantly nodded.

That’s how I asked for everything that day. As a result, I spent 2 and a half hours in a restaurant.

Giri
Oddly enough, this whole experience also illustrated a natively Japanese concept: Giri, or “the proper way of things, the morals which guide personal and social conduct, that which must be done in social relationships.”

Giri is a big deal in Japan – a central part of wa, or social harmony. Giri is social duty – or as explained in the Nov. 19, 1986 episode of The Transformers, it is the burden hardest to bear“. It’s doing what you don’t feel like doing because you don’t have a choice.*

A waiter is obligated to serve patrons. It’s the job. And she expects, when she shows up to work, that she will do that job. The waitress has a role. This is how customer-server relationships work in Japan. You have your personality, but you sublimate it into the goal of your work.

Notably, Japanese waiters don’t tell you their names. And leaving a tip is a faux pas.

Ninjo
Ninjo is the opposite of Giri. It’s when human emotions conflict with social obligations. Ninjo is calling in sick because you want to sleep late. It’s quitting your job because ‘you don’t feel fulfilled’. In other words, it’s America.

In Japan, ninjo complements giri. There’s a struggle between individual wants and social needs. As an American in a Japanese restaurant, I am so infused with ninjo over giri that I can’t bring myself to call the waiter. I am paralyzed by the cultural baggage of individualism: The need to recognize waiters, bus drivers, convenience store clerks and students as people.

I try to be polite. America defines politeness in certain terms: “Don’t shout at the waiter. They are people, too.” And when that imperative value to respect individuality and reject hierarchy meets the imperative value to allow someone the honor of performing their social obligation, there’s a crisis. I want to be polite. Social obligation requires me to be – subjectively – rude.

Something about a precious snowflake
The ingrained, live-with-myself problem of shouting for a waiter or waitress exists solely in my skull. For everyone else, it’s just what happens, every day, hundreds of times. No one shouts angrily. They just shout. Shouting doesn’t come with American connotations of shortness, impatience, demand. It’s just louder talking. They need to hear you, after all.

But culture sneaks inside of us. We build personalities in reaction to cultural practices so early that we forget that it was all constructed in the first place. We mistake architecture for instinct.

It isn’t all bad – no one should feel guilty about rejecting 14-year-old prostitutes in Thailand, or genital mutilation of young African girls. We ought to instinctively revile certain social architectures. But even in the most cosmopolitan and enlightened minds, tiny details can spawn paralysis.

What you thought was a self-made individual is in fact molded by arbitrary practices that just happened to surround you at birth. Your brain runs certain programs on American software and you are rendered deeply incompatible with other systems.

And you think about all of this for 20 minutes or so before you hold up a finger and nod with a trembling and half-hearted, “sumimasen.”

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Posted in Culture Shock, Food, Uncategorized | 11 Comments

On Taking a Bath in Japan | お風呂

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Eryk Salvaggio

If you are hot, or cold, go soak in a tub.

Sitting in a cold bath with a 2 liter of Polcari Sweat after days of suits, airports and 92-degree humidity is euphoric. Now, the cicadas are all dead, the breeze is crisp and the water, 50 degrees C and steaming, is divine.

Bathing in Japan predates any concern for modern sanitation. People did it because it felt good, and they do it so often that it has influenced architecture: You will rarely see (ie, I have literally never seen) a Japanese home where the toilet is in the same room as the bath. And you will rarely see a shower and a bath in the same space – usually, they’re next to each other, in their own room, next to a room for the sink/toothbrush/makeup.

The bath tub has a dashboard in the kitchen: Wake up, get the coffee going and hit a button to start the water running in the bath. There’s even a timing mechanism. Tell the bath what time you want to come home, and there will be a full tub of water waiting for you at whatever temperature you want.

This isn’t so sophisticated everywhere in Japan. Some people hand crank water and light a gas grill underneath a water pipe. I’ve heard stories of apartments where occupants had to boil water manually on the stove, but I suspect these people have been placed in barbarian housing.

Regardless of the squalor, the tub exists for reasons unrelated to getting clean.

Everyday Rituals
In Shinto, purification rituals typically involve fire, salt, or water. If you mix these things, you get soup or a bath. (Bathing salts aren’t built into the system, but they’re sold in the “Bath and Relaxation” sections of department stores).

When bathing at home or in public, you shower first, soap down and wash your hair. The goal of the bath isn’t to get physically clean, it’s to soak.

Most Japanese people probably wouldn’t say they like baths for religious reasons. But the public bath as a purification ritual – and the bathing instinct distinct to Japanese culture – has Shinto roots.

Outside of every Shinto shrine is a ceremonial stone fountain with fresh, running water. Before you enter the shrine, you use a bamboo ladle to rinse your hands of impurities. Some Shinto diehards also sip and spit the water out. It’s a purification ritual.

Impurity, in the Shinto sense, isn’t sin. Rather, impurity is more akin to “distractions,” as in the poem of Shen-hsiu, a famous Chinese monk, about dust on a mirror. Shen-hsiu’s poem, like a lot of things in Japan, bridges Shinto and Zen Buddhism: It’s said that the human mind should simply absorb and reflect the light of the world, such as it is, and not be distracted by its own projections. Water symbolizes a cleaning of the mirror and a restoration to a natural, open, flexible peace with the world.

And so, the bath is a kind of accidental meditation, a cleaning of the mirror. Tubs are small, so you sit still, staring at steam as it rises from your body. The waterline ebbs and flows visibly with every breath. The outer contours of your flesh blurs in the water. You stop knowing precisely where your body ends.

The result is that the bath becomes a rejuvenating moment of simply being.

The tub is also a little small – I’m not much taller than the Japanese average, and most of the time my legs are forced into a cross-legged pose similar to the lotus position of Buddhist meditation, only I’m floating. To expand on the new-age cliche, I usually set up some incense.

If a pure mind washed clean of all distractions sounds too boring, there are plenty of distractions for sale in department stores. These range from egg-shaped, weighted lights that sink to the bottom of the tub to project waves across the room, to waterproofed floating iPod cases, to small lanterns that project the night sky or Aurora Borealis onto the ceiling.

Baths are one of my favorite habits that I’ve picked up in Japan – that and the habit of never walking while eating or drinking. A handful of companies offer Japanese baths in the States at prices they don’t seem to advertise, but any old bath tub will probably be fine.