Back from Japan

June 22 – Entering the Tokyo airport, I found myself thinking “Clock time says 2:30 PM, four hours after we left. Body time says 10:30 at night. Calendar time says it’s tomorrow afternoon.”

To put it another way: flying west across the Pacific, the whole flight was a long, slow midday with the sun always out there shining in on the left side throughout the flight. I’m very aware of the movement of the sun and shadows so I was aware of the sun moving in slow suspension and knew, body-deep, that my body was eight hours behind its normal sun setting but society’s arbitrary international dateline put me a day ahead. I never could adjust to that.

The trip was mind-warping in multiple ways. Time warp. Different food. Very different culture with different customs. Different religious tradition. A language without an alphabet that would allow my mind a phonetic handhold on the words. Different climate, plants, birds. But wonderfully friendly people. Much to ruminate upon.

Numbers without units

The Japanese use our numbering system, so numbers are one thing I could read in Japan . Therefore, as I scan the Japanese environment, numbers are something I notice. But the units are in Japanese. I woke this morning realizing that numbers without units don’t help much. In human history, the study of pure number (number theory) is a great intellectual development but in terms of using the tool of numbers to understand this world, almost every number has a unit. “1492” is really 1492 A.D. Netherlands winning 4-3 is really four goals scored by one team compared to 3 goals scored by the other team. Or, in baseball, “A 3-2 pitch.”

I quickly assume that most of the numbers I see are prices with units of yen and I come to recognize the yen symbol that follow these numbers. But if I can’t connect the number to a unit, the number exists useless upon the sign. Without a unit, no information flows from the number into my mind. Unit is so fundamental and necessary to our understanding of any number that we can, paradoxically, usually not mention the unit because it’s embedded in the context of the conversation. I never noticed that until I didn’t have it.

July 7, 2010 – I deplane and walk into the San Francisco airport and immediately feel, “Oh, I can sleepwalk through this place.” A few hours later, I’m back in Redding , standing disoriented (jet-lag, exhaustion, culture shock, …) in front of Petco while Alysia shops within for her classroom. I’ve been gazing out at the parking lot but the glare is beginning to become unpleasant so I turn and look in at the store. My eyes survey everything. After a few minutes of this, I start reading one of the text blocks that so fill contemporary space. A bit later, I realize, “I can read the writing” and information about a dog house product starts flowing into my brain. A few seconds later, I stop. I don’t want to have a dog house sales pitch flowing into my mind. I don’t want to go back to printed words having fast-track priority to my eye/mind. For two weeks, I’ve practiced scanning my entire environment with all my senses for guidance and understanding. It was exhausting but it was also mentally broadening. I don’t want to slip back to having my awareness go into hype about a doghouse product when I am standing within this amazing universe where a change of several thousand miles changes the nature of the place and thus the culture that evolves to it.

Two Important Facts about Japan I did not know until this exchange program

Second, the population of Japan is currently declining. The current birthrate is 1.4 children per woman. For zero population growth, 2.1 or so is necessary. As someone who believes any path to a sustainable future requires a smaller human population, I viewed this as exciting, a welcome development that will lead to opportunities for nature to rebound and human freedom to grow. But most Japanese see it as a problem. As far as I can tell, the economy is a major driver of the low birth rate. One of our interpreters in Tokyo told us how she and her husband bought a 600 sq. ft. condo on the outskirts of Tokyo for the equivalent of $1,000,000. For 600 sq. ft! Both she and her husband have to work full-time to pay the mortgage. They can’t afford for her to stop working to raise a family. If I understood one of our Japanese teachers correctly, the decade-long economic recession in Japan has made it hard for many of his male students to graduate into a job where he could support a wife and children; this makes the young men feel a shame that prevents them from marrying. Another economic concern is that the nation’s social services and pension plans (like the United States) are based on a demographic pyramid in which a growing base of younger workers pay into a system that supports a smaller group of older workers. It doesn’t work if the population is shrinking at the base. Most of the schools we visited had declining student bodies – though often with the same number of teachers so that class sizes were diminishing, opening up possibilities for a different kind of teaching.

Tokyo Infrastructure

The first few days and last few days of my two weeks were spent in Tokyo. Tokyo has the most stunning, intense infrastructure I’ve ever seen. Every time we got on a bus to go somewhere in Tokyo, I was glued to the window, either staring or snapping pictures. How can a metro area of thirty million, densely-packed people function well enough to create one of the world-class economies? By levels stacked upon levels. I often saw three to five layers of roadways, railroads, pedestrian walkways, bridges over rivers with boats. And I couldn’t see the level of subways (with their underground shopping malls and vast pedestrian walkways). Often it was beautifully done. Build major streets on different levels so there are no intersections with stop lights! And all manner of curving ramps rising or descending from your level to another level.

On the other hand, all of this infrastructure was stacked onto the most unexpected street layout – for me reminiscent of a medieval European city. There is no rectangular street grid. Streets go off at all angles. More surprisingly, most of the streets are so narrow that any car traffic has to be one way and at about 5-10 mph sharing the lane with pedestrians. I was told that if you are going to visit someone’s house, their address won’t suffice. They have to draw you a map of their local area. Having walked some of those streets, now I understand why.

Car travel is slow. On the elevated highways, the speed limit was 30 miles per hour (and there wasn’t open space where you could pass if you wanted to go faster). One advantage of that slower, uniform speed is fewer accidents. Mass transit is dense. I sense that the fastest way to move around the city is subway and train. So you ride the rails to your district and then take a bus, taxi, or walk the final leg. (Our hotel was in the Shinjuku district, which has lots of government and financial industry skyscrapers. We were told that the Shinjuku railroad station is the busiest in the world with 2-3 million people passing through each day.) Lots of foot traffic and bicycles. If you are on your own and you know your way around, probably the fastest way to move in Tokyo is by motorcycle. I suddenly realized why back in the 60’s and 70’s all the small motorcycles being sold in America came from Japan.

Real estate is incredibly expensive. The rest of this paragraph is my interpretation of what I saw – unsupported by any other documentation. I think ownership of real estate lies in very small lots so that if you wanted to build a “big footprint” building, you would have to (a) spend lots of money and (b) somehow have to successfully purchase tiny parcels from a whole lot of different entities. As a consequence, you end up with lots of small footprint buildings (because its hard to acquire any more land than that) that are proportionally tall (because that is how you are going to generate the return on your investment). This is one of the shaping influences that created the skyline that captivated me. An incredible mélange of color, texture, and style of tall narrow buildings tightly packed with an occasional skinny street cutting through.

An amazing cityscape, sometimes subsiding into miles of two to three story, mostly residential areas with local commercial areas woven throughout and sometimes rising into intense commercial districts with ten to twenty story department stores and apartments lining big streets. Every now and then the city swells into a skyscraper district. Los Angeles has really only one skyscraper district within its huge sprawl. Imagine thirty to fifty skyscraper districts rising within the same sprawl.

Tobetsu

And then, for the rest of my group’s stay, we flew to Hokkaido, the northernmost large island. We spent a week in and around Tobetsu, a town of around 18,000 surrounded by rice paddies and fields of wheat and vegetables. Instead of snapping pictures of tiny side streets, I found myself snapping pictures of how almost every home had a garden. I grew up in a farming town of 25,000 people. I was caught off guard at how many of the land/people patterns felt like home. Almost all of the American teachers from rural areas expressed a similar feeling.

I would often see one or two people hoeing in a very large field of vegetables. It would take several days to hoe out the weeds from that field. But maybe that is exactly what they were doing – spending several days working their way through that one field with hoes. Once I saw a person roto-tilling a large field. The roto-tiller was large but still it would take all day to work that field when a large tractor could do it in an hour. But a large tractor costs a lot more and is heavier on the land than a roto-tiller. (I did see small tractors on larger farms.) Am I seeing the upper-field size limits of small-scale agriculture? Is it an exciting exploration of human-scaled agriculture or is it a fading of it as the younger generation says “I’m out of these big, hot fields and off to the big city as soon as I can get out of here?”

Tobetsu helped me understand that first fact I shared about Japan. The broad expanses of the Tobetsu and Ishtari river floodplains contain fields, paddies, and homes. Forests cover the steeper slopes bordering the floodplains. I was aesthetically delighted with the many views I had of side drainages, narrow but level with rice paddies, snaking their way out of steeper forest lands. Flat land does not lie idle in Japan.

 (In Hokkaido, the northernmost island with lots more space and far fewer cars, the speed limit on the open roads around the island was also 50 km/hr, about 30 mph. The highest speed limit I saw was an expressway in Sapporo that was 70 km/hr, about 45 mph. Cars were driven significantly slower in Japan.)

Reading Japanese history and piling it onto whatever other history I know inspired a hypothesis about how organizations/governments/cultures tend to become top-down when they have a certainty (often arrogantly so) about the way of the world and their role within it. “Top-down” can lead to rapid development in a certain direction but history is full of movements that go awry (either not quite right to begin with or getting bent off by historical developments along the way). On the other hand, history is also full of bottom-up efforts that dither about with no resulting accumulation but also with an exploratory freedom which develops the correction that the certainty-bound dominant culture needs to correct course.

So it’s wise to design “genetic diversity” into one’s institutions, to actively invite an openness to new ideas flowing into the organization. That is part of what I find beautiful in the Fulbright Japan teacher-exchange program I was part of. It’s a manifestation of wisdom at the level of civilization – transcending any particular culture.

American culture and Japanese culture are very different. American schools and Japanese schools are very different. I observe in Japanese schools many things that I think are wonderful and I’d love to fold into Chrysalis. The Japanese teachers come to America and observe our schools and see many attributes in our students they would love to instill in their students. Some changes seem easy; just a matter of having a different perspective to bring it into awareness. (Every school I saw in Japan – both rural and urban – had a place where rice was grown. One school in Tokyo had a plastic-lined 4×4 planter for their rice paddy but every Japanese student knows how the rice they eat comes into being.) Other changes though – whoa, it’s a whole different culture. Japan is a very homogenous culture. Every class, for example, began with the class standing, one of the students saying an exhortation, and the whole class bowing. I watched high school baseball players singing loudly together as they did their exercises up and down the field and I watched businessmen at a conference in our Tokyo hotel standing in line outside the conference door and enthusiastically belting out in unison a greeting to each new participant approaching the conference. Japan nurtures something wonderfully encompassing and supportive – but, from an American point of view, restrictively confining if you wanted to diverge. Is it possible to create a culture that enthusiastically supports and celebrates the diverse differentiation of individuals in a way that also allows them to flow back together whenever appropriate to work together in a resonant team?

I am really looking forward to consciously experimenting with this question with my eighth grade students this upcoming school year. In fact, this year at Chrysalis could be intensely creative because several teachers are coming into the year very excited by particular experiences, ideas and visions during the summer. 

Wall Street Ronins

If I understand Japanese history correctly (major if), Japan went through centuries of feudal civil war. During this time, samurais became a large part of the Japanese population. Samurai were trained warriors who were deeply devoted (to the point of self-sacrifice) to their feudal lord who, in return, supported each samurai with an income derived from a certain portion of peasant-farmed land. In the early 1600’s, the Tokugawa clan finally “won” and consolidated Japan under one rule for a couple of centuries.

One of the problems they had was the presence of all those samurai loyal to various clan lords. What to do with all of these ronin (unemployed samurai)? Japan went through a long, awkward process (with several ronin rebellions) of gradually disenfranchising samurai from their annual “retainer” income. One of the things the Tokugawa rulers tried was channeling samurai energy into writing poetry, flower arrangement, and all these things we now think of as classic Japanese. Gradually the samurai became incorporated into the upper echelons of governance.

Reading this made me think of many of the people in Wall Street as fierce, aggressive samurai who are masters at zero-sum game thinking. (Zero-sum games refers to most games in our culture where one side wins and the other side loses. If the winner gets +1 and the loser gets -1, the two sum to zero. Hence, a zero-sum game.) Transcending zero-sum game thinking is part of the process of moving into a future sustainable society. What will we do with the intense energy of our unemployed ronins then?

That question arose as we flew to Japan and it has been percolating ever since. I’m mulling the possibility that zero-sum thinking transforms upward spirals into “the commons”. Upward spirals (such as more plants anchoring and composting into more soil which holds more of the rain which grows more plants which transpires (recycles) more of the rain so there can be more rain…) bring new possibilities into existence. This ability for possibilities to emerge is why upward spirals are so important to both ecosystems and the human spirit. But zero-sum thinking leads us to see that if the upward spiral is producing enough grass (or whatever) so that some other living thing is “winning”, then we must be losing. Therefore, we harvest the spiral until there are no other winners, thinking then we must be winning. But instead, we’ve degraded the wellspring of the upward spiral and all lose. The non-zero-sum game approach towards an upward spiral is to never harvest so much that the spiral ceases its upward generation. One wants the spiral to keep bringing new possibilities into existence. One gives up short-term wealth for oneself in order to generate long-term health of the entire system.