Get out the map!

Hey everybody, apologies for the shameful seven-week gap in my blog. I've been working some serious overtime lately and I really need to learn to pace myself.

So, for today's topic... I think I often write and talk about how great this country is. There are so many things I love about Japan - the people are wonderfully hospitable; the public transit system is quite convenient, runs on time, and is generally clean; the TV commercials are hilarious; the food is delicious; and people are like, "yeah, I went to Boston once and visited MIT. I also visited... what's it called again? It's a pretty well-known university kind of up the road from MIT..." Yes, this is a wonderfully quirky and interesting place.

But if the ability to produce a clear and accurate map were a skill essential to survival, the entire population of Japan would have died off long ago.

No, despite the meticulous attention to detail for which the Japanese are famous, despite their love of complex graphical representations of information, and despite the extraordinary lengths to which they go to make the world accessible to everyone - the blind, the physically handicapped, the hard of hearing, and pretty much any other disability you can imagine - they seem to be unable or unwilling to convey geographical relationships effectively through a map, particularly to foreigners. (Somehow, it appears that many Japanese people are able to navigate effectively using Japanese maps. How this is possible is an absolutely unfathomable mystery to me.)

Of course, I've tried to understand the cultural context for the seeming universality of inscrutable maps. I long ago discovered that very few Japanese have any sense of direction. I've noticed that a lot of my Japanese friends have difficulty giving and receiving directions over the phone. Why this should be, I don't understand. I can't say whether it applies over all of Japan, either. The Tokyo subway system, for example, is so complex and convoluted that it makes New York look like Beijing. I can't imagine people not having a pretty good grasp of where they are and where they're going if they can navigate that. Likewise, Sapporo is laid out in a very rigid, equidistant grid system oriented along North-South and East-West axes, so it is certainly possible that people there have an intuitive grasp of cardinal directions.

In general, though, people here seem to have no knowledge of or interest in cardinal directions at all. All directions here are relative. On the street, in the train stations, at the temples, every map you find is oriented to be relative to the observer. Up is forward, down is back. The narrow, twisty, unnamed streets in residential neighborhoods are notoriously hard to navigate, and so every few blocks it's not uncommon to find a local map, always oriented in relative coordinates.

Perhaps this is related to the general inward focus that seems to permeate Japanese culture. Most buildings here are horribly ugly on the outside, yet beautifully architected and elegantly decorated on the inside. Most people I've met here don't think about big things like global economic trends, government issues, or international politics as much as the Westerners I know - rather, the focus seems to be inward, local, personal, on the details. Movies, too, seem to me to have much smaller-scale themes than the movies back home. Does this society not value the "big picture"? That could be why maps are so highly localized. (the follow-up question, of course, is whether it is necessarily so important to focus on the "big picture" - maybe if Americans spent more time working on the tiny details, we'd have a more harmonious society...?)

Or maybe one could look at it from a religious perspective. In monotheistic religions there is a clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. In Shinto, however, where countless kami are all around us, there doesn't seem to be such a need for moral absolutes. Morality, or so I've read in a number of places, is judged relatively, with respect to the group - harmony or disharmony is a more important distinction than absolute ideas like right and wrong, good and evil. It seems like one might draw a parallel here, too, to the widespread disregard for concepts like "north".

Another possibility... one of the wonderful things about Japan is their customer service. Rare it is indeed to find someone behind a register not armed with a genki smile and greeting you with a cheerful "irrashaimase!" and a cheerful sparkle in the eye. Maybe it's considered a courtesy to the customer to provide a custom map in the most convenient, personalized orientation possible.

While walking, hopelessly lost, in misguided circles today for almost 40 minutes in the hot sun, getting navigational misinformation from absolutely every person I asked, passing parks, high schools, and highways not to be found anywhere on my map, and searching for streets that existed only in the deranged imagination of some creative cartographer, a few other thoughts occured to me.

The first thought was that perhaps this is a manifestation of the ever-mysterious dichotomy of "tatemae" and "honne". "Tatemae" means the outward behavior and actions of a person, whereas "honne" is a word for their true feelings and intentions. In Japanese culture these are not expected to be even remotely connected. Back home that's called scheming, two-faced hypocrisy. Here, it's called everyday life. Why should that not extend to mapmaking? The actual layout of roads and buildings is the "honne", and the map is merely "tatemae". Is it really so bad to draw two buildings right next to each other when actually they're a 15-minute walk apart? What if drawing them that way made the map-reader feel better, thinking the destination was right around the corner? Is that really so different from asking whether it's wrong to lie in order to avoid hurting somebody's feelings?

Then I had a vision of an apprentice cartographer and his master, in a setting reminiscent of the bonsai tree scene in The Karate Kid:

"Daniel-san, close eyes. Trust. Concentrate. Think only 4-lane elevated highway. Make perfect picture, down to the last exit ramp...

"Wipe mind clean, everything but the highway...

"You got it?

"Open eyes. Remember picture?"

"Yeah"

"Make like picture. Just trust the picture."

"But master, how do I know my picture's the right one?"

"If come from inside you, always the right one."

Seriously. I strongly suspect that a number of the roads on my map today were placed there for aesthetic value alone.

My final thought was that maybe the reason why there is so much less illegal drug use in Japan than there is in the US is that THEY DON'T NEED IT. Living in their little universe of imaginary streets connecting at nonexistent intersections, seeing the world through psychedelic noneuclidean lenses where all distances between topologically similar forms can be considered equal and even the twistiest, most convoluted maze of snaking streets can be warped into a perfectly symmetrical grid, and simply erasing from the map and the world anything negative, anything they don't want to see... it makes me wonder whether anything was really accomplished when they made shrooms illegal here a few years ago. The trippiness in this culture comes from deep within its roots.