The story

Imagine a small, balding man, smiling wide like the rays of the sun, throwing pebbles at your back door, begging you to come out and play. This man is generous, kind, and funny, too. He is your father’s age, and cannot speak your language, nor you his. Yet somehow, through his invitation to a daily walk, you have become close friends.

This man is called Sasaki-San, and he may change the way you look at his country, Japan. This book is about him, our relationship as it grew, and about the gift he gave to me with his friendship.

Arriving to a faraway land without even a cursory knowledge of its language or its customs, I was forced to rely on those around me more than I ever had in my native, individualistic homeland. In a small rural mountain town called Mima, where hardly anyone spoke English, I depended on gestures to communicate, smiles and bows to ingratiate, and on the kindness of neighbors like Sasaki-San for sustenance and direction. Over the two years I lived there, I learned to appreciate just how powerful such kindness could be, but it was not until many years later that I learned how transformative.

In this memoir, I look back on living in Mima, and I describe how, at exactly the time when I felt most lost and confused, when I was frozen by a frigid Japanese winter and what could be seem like an even colder culture, I found what I needed in a neighbor who asked me to go for a walk.

Above all, this is a work of gratitude for that invitation, and so it aims to lift the reader up.

Walking with Sasaki is also a story about Mamiko-Sensei, a sweet if sometimes difficult ally, Nishinaka-Sensei, a strong and stoic guru of yoga and calligraphy, and Arima-Sensei, an odd young teacher just as lost in his homeland as I was in mine. In their own important ways, these characters all helped me establish a foundation upon which I have been able to learn more about Japan, and, ultimately, build a career out of interpreting Japanese culture.


The journeys

Walking with Sasaki is the story of how an outsider’s immersive transformation—from simple cultural naivete to modest linguistic ability and cultural awareness—would not have been possible without the kindness of strangers. In the beginning of Walking with Sasaki, I am trying to understand the basics of Japan and its culture, but by the end of it, I have realized that my studies of Japan and its people have always been a mirror-like study of my own.

As the narrative progresses, and I become more of a knowledgeable observer, the book’s insights about Japan also deepen. In the book’s second half (which correspond to “year two” living in Mima), I begin to weave stories of Sasaki-San, Mamiko-Sensei, and Nishinaka-Sensei with stories of Japan’s past, current, and future challenges, especially in terms of history and international relations, culture and art, social order, and spirituality. I chose to add this depth because if we in the West are to truly understand why the Japanese are who they are, and why they do what they do, we must understand these issues as she sees them. In the Epilogue, I consider Japan’s most pressing current challenge: energy. In that sense, Walking with Sasaki is more than just a personal journey. It is also an anthropological rumination on the key forces shaping a highly misunderstood country. Throughout my musings about Japanese culture, I try to take the readers of Walking with Sasaki on their own journeys of exploration. The journeys I share include living a slow and spiritual life in a small Japanese town, a journey of appreciation for nature and the countryside, and a journey ruminating on the meanings of Japan, its people, and the human condition.


The narrative

Walking with Sasaki begins with the following quotations:

Better than a thousand days of diligent study
is one day with a great teacher.
—Japanese proverb

What is to give light must endure burning.
—Viktor Frankl

These teachers are the Japanese people themselves, especially the most generous among them, like Sasaki-San, who have over the years have taken me under their wing and helped me understand how they see the world. For me, Frankl’s light is the light that Japanese culture shone upon me, despite our collective—and for a time my own—misunderstanding of it. In another sense, this light is my own internal light, which endured burning before finally achieving a sense of purpose.

The various lessons learned from these many teachers are elucidated throughout the book in eight thematically driven chapters. Chapter one deals with the spirit (on the connections people have to religion and spirituality in Japan, past and present), chapter two with song (on language and communication, especially as they reflect a shared sense of community), chapter three with standing (on notions of hierarchy, gender, and discipline as I first misunderstood them), chapter four with flow (on play and body movement and friendship and their power), chapter five with growth (on Japanese history during its imperial age, Japan’s view of history, and learning to appreciate how another people views the world), chapter six with culture (on the meanings of and debates over Japanese culture, as well as the beauty of Japanese art), chapter seven with order (on realizing the logic behind the Japanese sense of order in education), and chapter eight with music (on the light of music and how it helped me write this memoir). This final chapter thus brings the book full circle, returning the narrative to the spirit of the Japanese first touched on in chapter one. An epilogue that deals with fuel (on technology, energy and the man’s relationship with the environment) concludes the book by suggesting possible paths for Japan’s future. As I remember the so-called Triple Disaster of March 11, 2011, I weave stories about work and power in order to describe Japan’s contemporary challenges through the lens of people I call “slow-lifers”. People like Sasaki-San.

The narrative structure of the book is multi-dimensional, and it reflects the arc of my own journey of learning, from a naive outsider to rather fluent member of this foreign society. The book’s second half, which corresponds to the second year I lived in Mima, brings new insights as I become a more intelligent observer. I use flash-backs and flash-forwards to paint this picture of growth. In chapter five, for example, I focus on the theme of growth in history, and, as Sasaki-San begins to take me under his wing, I begin to be able to see the Japanese perspective on global history. In chapter six, I look at Japanese culture and begin to see the beauty of the Japanese way of doing things, especially through my interactions with Nishinaka-Sensei, my calligraphy teacher. In chapter seven, through my interactions with my colleague Mamiko-Sensei, I begin to appreciate the Japanese emphasis on order in education. Finally, in chapter eight, I return to the book to where it began, with essays on the spirit of the Japanese, this time as seen through its music, and the light it emits.

In writing Walking with Sasaki, I have tried to weave stories of these “ordinary Japanese” with relevant thoughts and insights about Japanese society, history, culture, language, and international relations. Through carefully selected vignettes from my time living in Mima, Walking with Sasaki illustrates both Japan's challenges and its triumphs, and provides Anglophone readers with an intelligent, entertaining, poignant and humorous look at why and how a nation that has faced its share of struggles has always remained resilient. Walking with Sasaki is a human-oriented, uplifting story, structured around issues central to the Japanese people, and to our understanding of them.

Through it all, the nuances of Japanese culture are explained to the reader through heartfelt reflections of interactions with real people. In that regard, Walking with Sasaki is not only a subtle personal transformation story but also a potentially transformative story for readers, offering a new way that we in the West might begin to understand Japan differently.


The style

I believe that Walking with Sasaki is told with a depth and dimension that one rarely encounters in a travelogue, and with a style, pace and rhythm rarely encountered in memoirs on Japan. My writing style has been influenced by Peter Mayle in Provence, Mark Salzman in China, Pico Iyer in Japan, Bruce Chatwin in Australia, and Paul Theroux anywhere. The prose in Walking with Sasaki is slow and languid, like life in the small town of Mima itself. There is a balance in the narrative between thought and feeling, and between seriousness and humor. I try to draw out sentimental connections with people, and then reflect upon these connections in a contemplative way, and I also try to emphasize the deep connections between people and nature.

Walking with Sasaki follows the seasons as they change, which is in itself might be seen as a rather Japanese narrative device. The “colors” of the seasons are reflected upon in brief ruminations at the beginning of each chapter, which transports the reader to this small town and sets the stage for thoughts on the chapter’s particular issue. The descriptions of the sky and the mountains around Mima, as well as the rice fields and other aspects of the natural world, are intentionally symbolic, subtly evoking the central message of each chapter. In the first year, which was more difficult for me, I write about sunsets, but by the second year, I have begun to be able to write about sunrises, and about appreciating the experience I had in Mima for what is was, and not what it was not.

In flash-backs and flash-forwards, I also explore the differences between rural and urban Japan, where I have also lived for extensive periods of time. This adds depth to the story that would not be possible had the book been written soon after I left Mima.


The message

The message of Walking with Sasaki is that we all wield great spiritual power in our interpersonal relationships, especially cross-cultural relationships. Sasaki-San taught me how strangers could become friends, regardless of age or cultural origin, so the moral of Walking with Sasaki, though never directly stated, is that an open mind and an open heart can conquer all. Spiritualism is a central hallmark of rural Japanese society, though it can often seem absent from Japan’s modern, busy, and urban society. Certainly such spiritualism seems absent from the urban American society that I know. That is why, in this book I describe the spirituality that I saw in everything that happened in rural Japan in the hopes that it may enjoy a resurgence in urban Japan, and perhaps even in America.

Unlike some travel narratives about Japan, Walking with Sasaki captures the humanity of the rural Japanese people in a personal way, without the common stereotypes and generalizations that plague much writing on Japan. Unlike my academic work, I have felt liberated to write about real people and tell their stories, and in the process have tried to celebrate the slow, spiritual life that 6 rural Japan symbolizes. I feel that Walking with Sasaki shows how real understanding of an otherwise opaque country can be achieved.


The audience

Walking with Sasaki is a non-fiction travelogue and memoir, and as such might compete with books by travel writers such as Bruce Feiler, Donald Richie and Pico Iyer. However, I believe that Walking with Sasaki has something for other people as well, from the youngest Japanophile to the oldest bibliophile. Walking with Sasaki also has the potential to interest readers from many walks of life, not only travelers to Japan. The intergenerational, cross-cultural relationships upon which the book’s narrative hinges might especially interest older readers, as well as a lovers of travel literature of any age. Walking with Sasaki can of course be specifically targeted to foreigners living in or traveling to Japan. There is a large expatriate community living in Japan and there is also a large community of non-Japanese people who have lived in Japan and still maintain an abiding interest in the country. Walking with Sasaki might also be read by the Japanese themselves, in English or in translation. Although the writing is to some degree informed by academic scholarship in the fields of anthropology and Japanese studies, and while I am currently employed in the field of academic research, this book was not written for and is not aimed at an audience of scholars. That being said, some might be interested in it.

To the best of my knowledge, the most similar publication to Walking with Sasaki in print is Bruce Feiler’s Learning To Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan (1991), which is a great early look at an American teaching English on the JET Programme. However, Walking with Sasaki focuses on growing interpersonal relationships with Japanese people and the personal transformation they stimulate, rather than on thoughts about the Japanese education system. Walking with Sasaki also describes the diversity of and the challenges faced by the Japanese people today in a fresh and reflective way. Much has changed in Japan since Feiler’s book was published more than twenty years ago.

Donald Richie’s Inland Sea (1971) also strikes me as a similar work, though it is even older than Learning to Bow. In order to write this book, Richie traveled throughout the Inland Sea, which is north of Shikoku and shares some of its landscape, which means my own descriptions of Mima and its environs may resonate with Richie’s readers. Richie’s book also reflects my own sympathy for the Japanese and their traditional way of life, and he is an admirably honest narrator. Still, I do not believe he develops individual characters or relationships as much as I have here.

Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk (1991) as well as Robert Twigger’s Angry White Pajamas (1997) also come to mind when I think about recently published comparable works, and I think that Walking with Sasaki compares strongly with these titles in that it combines a bit of Iyer’s style of reflection with a bit of Twigger’s self-deprecatory humor. Walking with Sasaki is different, however, in that it captures the heart of the rural Japanese in a way that neither The Lady and the Monk nor Angry White Pajamas attempt to do, and it tells a unique story of an improbable intergenerational, cross-cultural friendship.

Alan Booth’s Looking for the Lost and The Roads to Sata are also competition, but these books are nation-wide travelogues across Japan, while Walking with Sasaki primarily focuses on life in one rural town over a two-year period, giving the reader a sense of place as it changes. Walking with Sasaki is also unique in that I sometimes compare rural life in Mima with my own experiences living in Japanese cities years later.

Finally, Walking with Sasaki describes a relationship that even very few Japanese youth could ever tell, a story of friendship between young and old, which observers of Japan rarely see or hear of 7 today. In that regard, I hope it may one day be translated, published, and read in Japanese, perhaps even by older Japanese people like Sasaki-San himself.