A friend took a tour of Japan with a prestigious tour company and the first stop, for a few days, was Tokyo. I screamed in disbelief.
I spent the first ten years studying Japan by visiting Kyoto. In the following three decades, I took all new friends with me to a small beach town for the first three or four days to acclimate to Japan. Tokyo is probably the most complex modern city in the world and it is overwhelming. The streets are laid out based on rice paddy paths and old daimyo estates. It has 40 million residents. Kyoto is wide boulevards laid out on a north/south grid and much slower.
Japan was the first stop on a global trip where I first became aware of culture at age 33. I was well educated and knew about culture from reading Benedict, Mead, Bateson, Boaz, Sapir, Whorf, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Malinowski and others. But I didn’t know what culture is.
I would guess Americans who know what culture is are less than one in a thousand. A higher percentage are probably found in Europe.
Culture is the totality of a people’s life. People are a group that speak the same language and live most of their early life together. Our perception of the world is created and that creation is done by the group of people who surround us and have a common experience.
At 33, I realized what culture was and decided to study it for the rest of my life. I chose Japan as the object of my study because I liked the food, it was clean and I was comfortable in Japan. I could have chosen Switzerland but it was too similar to my own culture, making it more difficult.
Over the past 50 years I have gone to Japan for a month or more, every year, and visited most of the country. Now I just sit in one high pedestrian traffic place for hours and watch life go by and lead as simple a life, the rest of the day, as I can. I have about 25 close friends whom I have watched and visited annually for many decades. My friends range from a man who was homeless for a decade in a large Tokyo park to a woman who helped shape Japanese fashion and was recognized for her life’s work by the Emperor, last year.
To give you a taste of culture: When the Japanese look at a rainbow they see two colors of blue; we, as indicated by a rainbow flag, see one. We have a Federal law that commercially sold hot tubs can not heat water to more than 104 degrees. A Japanese adult would consider any bath below 108 degrees as lukewarm.