KYOTO, Japan — The robot appeared in the hotel hallway as if out of nowhere, R2D2-sized, silently rolling, on a mission of undetermined nature from its robot overlords.
A group of us Yankee travelers had just exited the elevator, and somewhere in the Cloud there is a video of me attempting to interact with the little fellow. I couldn’t help it. Something in me could not let him — who knows why I felt the need to assign it a sex — just be ignored.
“Do you have … a pizza for me?” I inquired. “A beer, maybe? Or can I help you? Can I steer you in the right direction?” I paced all around the android.
He was having none of it. He had called the elevator, somehow, on his own volition. The car arrived. He rolled aboard, and was gone into the night.
The writer and internationalist Pico Iyer, who lives in Kyoto but who on that very robot night was swapping hometowns with me as he was in conversation at an event at the Huntington Library, notes in his new “A Beginner’s Guide to Japan” that in some given recent decade United States scientists won 24 Nobel Prizes, whereas Japanese scientists won one. However: in that same time span, Japanese inventors were awarded by far more patents than those in any other nation in the world.
They build stuff, the Japanese. They are makers. And they make it really, really good. There was a brief post-war time in the early ‘50s when Made in Japan meant, well, cheap, and not so good. That time is long gone. Now, if you can find something made in Japan, buy it, babe. Bought a cordless power drill lately? Yeah, you probably bought a Makita, if you wanted the best.
Iyer, a British-American of Indian descent who married a Japanese woman, found a book written by his “cousin’s great-grandfather” a century ago that rather brilliantly explains everything here: Japanese “indifference to the Mystery of the Universe is that which enables them to give more time and to spend more energy on the solution of the problems nearer at hand.”
The Japanese didn’t invent robots. They just perfected them. They didn’t invent Zen Buddhism. The Chinese did. The Japanese perfected it: “We are not concerned about a deep understanding of Buddhism,” writes Shunryu Suzuki. “The most important things in our practice are our physical posture and our way of breathing.”
Fewer than one in four Japanese, reports Iyer, has any real religious belief. But fully 96% say they participate in religious rituals. That’s what we saw as we ran from Shinto shrine to Buddhist temple in this ancient city — locals bowing, tossing a coin in the slot, making a wish. And the wishes are so specific! You check them on a list: “entrance examination passing,” “a charm against accidents,” “finding employment prayer,” “have a child prayer,” and then two just for the fishers among us: “a large catch satisfaction” and “marine security.”
Thank goodness for that wish list, fishers. I had two ethereal sushi meals in literally a train station, a place that would have earned a Michelin star if it were in L.A. The chef was so pleased that I was pleased, he kept giving me nigiri beyond what I’d paid for: a beautiful dollop of uni, a scallop with gold leaf atop it. There are no gold mines in Japan: they “urban-mine” it from old, discarded tech.
A reader of last week’s column about the lack of a single piece of litter or a spray of graffiti in this whole wonderful country wrote to suggest we start a movement among American cities to become as clean and safe as Tokyo. I’m all in. More on that conspiracy to come. They’ve synthesized some ideas from the West down the centuries — we need to synthesize more of theirs in return.
Larry Wilson is a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com