Edging Toward Japan: Japan's extraordinary pursuit of the ordinary

The Mainichi

2 days ago

Recently, while I was in England, I was surprised to see a documentary on NHK World about a small tunnel near where I live in Nishinomiya. The tunnel is only about 1.3 meters high, quite narrow and runs under the JR train line between Kobe and Osaka.
I've lived in the area for 30 years and so inevitably have been through the tunnel a few times to get from one side of the rail tracks to another. But generally I avoid it as I have to heavily bend and stoop my head the whole time while passing through it. Until I saw the documentary, I'd almost completely forgotten about it.
I learnt from the programme that the tunnel is actually called the "Manbow Tunnel" and the show -- filmed over three days -- merely consisted of asking local people who passed back and forth through it how often they used it, why they used it and generally what their thoughts about it were. This doesn't sound like the most exciting premise for a 30-minute documentary, but the tunnel turned out to be a useful means of finding out about the lives of local people, what their daily habits and patterns were, their relationships with one another and their thoughts about life.
For some people, the tunnel represented "work" on one side of the tunnel and "home" on the other, a transition between two worlds and two frames of mind. For one grandmother, the tunnel was how she passed over to the home of her daughter and grandson, whom she looked forward to seeing every day. One person said that the tunnel slightly freaked him out so he liked to run through it every time. Other people skilfully cycled through it. One person comically observed that it seemed like the climate was different on each end of the tunnel -- it would be raining on one side and dry on the other.
There is a genre of Japanese television -- which is often brash and celebrity-driven -- that is, by contrast, extremely gentle, meandering and concerned about interacting with the simplicities of ordinary life that I find curiously compelling. The long-running NHK series "Somewhere Street" in which a camera takes a starting point in Vienna or Adelaide or Cambridge and moves us in real time on a walking tour of the streets, stopping and saying hello to people as they go, is a masterclass in this art.
When people abroad think about Japan, they very often latch onto the more unusual and elaborate aspects of Japanese culture -- swords and seppuku, Noh theatre, geisha, anime and Zen. Yet for me, Japan is most interesting and beguiling when it is at its most ordinary and everyday. It is the daily life of my neighbourhood -- the little shops, the people going to and fro on bikes, the children playing in the small dusty parks -- that I love most about life in Japan. It's very hard to convey what is so attractive about this very ordinariness in words or on screen.
The late British writer Alan Booth, author of "The Roads to Sata" and "Looking for the Lost", was a man who went in pursuit of the everyday characters of back-of-nowhere Japan by going on walking expeditions across the country and writing up his encounters with the people he met there. His friend Tim Harris recounts in an introduction to his writings ("This Great Stage of Fools") that Booth used the word "ordinary" about Japan almost as a kind of thrilling compliment -- "it is so ordinary" he would gush when discovering something simple that filled his heart with delight.
The Manbow Tunnel itself is not something about which I used to feel much affection, but I was immediately drawn to the local characters who daily pass back and forth through it. As much as any I have ever seen, this seemingly insignificant programme happily defines why I love living in Japan and in my neighbourhood. Japan is never more extraordinary than when it is just getting on with the happy pursuit of the everyday.
@DamianFlanagan
(This is Part 62 of a series)
In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain.
Profile:
Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).