A review by tucholsky
Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan by Bruce Feiler

4.0

I read this when trying to find a book i had read nearly 20 years ago which described the way of life, society and culture of Japan. It wasn't this book, but it did much the same job. The direct experience of many, like this author, who live in Japan is that whilst loving their time there, the society is unfathomably daft. The society is revered by people who generally have never spent a day there let alone a year. They will laud japanese film and comic culture not because they do actually like it. No. They force themselves to like it because a film,culture or literature critic has laudedvit and it is just a little bit more niche than their friends like.Ditto, sushi. Vastly more people claim to like than the number of people who do actually like it.Someone once argued with me that japan is a less class subservient society. They were wrong and from nearly the start of this book there are clear examples that deny such rubbish.one anecdote i remembered from the book i was trying to find was about the proliferation of golf courses in japan. Most of these are now bankrupt. One in either Tokyo bay or Osaka bay was built on land reclaimed with landfill. The consequent and clearly neccesary smoking ban was strenuously fought by the company building it and prospective members. The need to be seen playing golf and the need to be seen to smoke were more important than the need to still be alive.it put me in mind of playing golf at Hawkstone Park in Shropshire in 1988. One time club pro at Hawkstone (Sandy Lyle) had just won the Masters at Augusta. The course was awash with Japanese would be golfers. They had come on this pilgrimage, probably bought expensive memberships, definitely bought ridiculously expensive sets of golf clubs......and couldnt hit a ball to save their lives. Looking the part was all that mattered, more important than being the part.....and the same is almost the most apt description of japanese culture in the 1980s when this book describes, the 90s and turn of the century (when my current read "demons and dogs" in searching fot my long lost read is set and still to this day. Maybe one day japan will wake up and actually try to be itself rather than a delusion of what it believes itself to be. One day it may learn something from the past, its own past....but the book gives no hope for that and it is well written and more sincere than those who claim to love the country and its society