Stranger in a Strange Land

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And yet for all this mutual strangeness, I recognize in my neighborhood the outlines and emotions of the safe, protected England I knew when I was young, with its orderly, changeless world of corner shops and drizzly afternoons, with tea served promptly at 5 p.m. I recognize--more than the words, the codes and silences--the force of all the things unsaid. I recognize the imperial shelteredness, the island suspiciousness, the old-world cultivation of private hopes and habits that leave the status quo alone. On its surface, Japan is more alien than anywhere I know. Under the surface it speaks the language I was trained to hear.

I am reminded of how little I belong here each time I return. At the immigration desk the authorities scrutinize my passport with a discernible sense of alarm. I am a foreigner who neither lives nor works here, yet seems to spend most of his time here; an alien who is clearly of Asian ancestry, yet brandishes a British passport; a postmodern riddle who seems to fit into none of the approved categories.

I've been strip-searched for carrying over-the-counter allergy pills, for making a telephone call from the customs hall, for going to the men's room. Once I was taken aside because my overcoat was abunomaru, abnormal (I was flying to the Himalayas). I have shown them my Time business card, a book I wrote on Japan, interviews I have conducted in Japanese magazines. But these do not satisfy them. What concerns the Japanese, clearly, is that I am a modern citizen of nowhere and, more specifically, one who looks like exactly the kind of person who threatens to destroy their civic harmony. During the Gulf War, I was routinely treated as if I were Saddam Hussein's favorite brother; at other times I have been detained on the grounds of resembling an Iranian (thousands of whom live illegally in tent cities in Tokyo parks). The rest of the time I am suspected of being what I am--an ill-dressed, dark, and apparently shiftless Indian without a fixed address.

The mobile world and its porous borders present a challenge to a uniculture like Japan, which depends for its presumed survival upon its clear boundaries, its maintenance of a civil uniformity in which everyone knows everyone else--and how to work with them. And it is not always easy for me to explain that it is precisely this ability to draw strict lines--to sustain an unbending sense of within and without--that draws me to Japan. To invert Robert Frost, in the postmodern world home is the place where, when you have to go there, they don't have to take you in.

My daily life in Nara is a curious artifact, belonging to a kind of existence even I could not have imagined a decade ago, before technology made centrifugal lives possible. I go to bed every day by 9 p.m., in part so as to wake up at 5 a.m., when my New York employers (13 time zones away) are at their desks. My research facility is an English-language bookshop 90 minutes away by train, and my version of the Internet is a copy of the World Almanac. The person I see most often, outside my immediate household, is the Federal Express boy who collects and delivers packages from distant Osaka. In our shrunken world, I can complete articles or even books without having to exchange a word with editors, and can draw money in a local department store from a bank account on the other side of the planet.

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