2 February 2007 (14 Shvat 5767)
[no update due to a trip]
9 February 2007 (21 Shvat 5767)
Last Thursday I arrived safe and sound in the Land of the Rising Yen to spend a three-week vacation here and to give a talk on Jewish onomastics in Tokyo. Having spent the first four days in Kobe, including the whole Sabbath at Ohel Shelomo Synagogue, where I used to daven for several years before moving to Jerusalem two years and a half ago, and the fifth day in Kyoto, I arrived at my parents' hourse this Tuesday. Although it is already one year and a half since my last visit here, I have not experienced any serious culture shock. The more I travel between Japan and Israel, the more objectively I seem to be able to observe and appreciate each of the two societies, therefore nothing surprises me.
I am not naive any more as to believe that there is a rosy garden on this planet, including these two countries. With such antipodal cultures it may not be a coincidence that advantages and disadvantages in their respective societies are in complementary distribution. Each of the two will be able to make itself a much better society by learning what the other excels in.
What I consider one of the most impressive things in which Japan excels and Israel falls behind is the quantity and quality of services in the commercial sector. Of course, it is not fair to compare one of the biggest markets in the world with a market which is not only small but also has to bear the burden of heavy expenditures crucial to its own existence. Anyway, I have found few things in Israel attracting my interest as a customer, with the exception of bookstores, which, nevertheless, are too small and poorly stocked. It was not only a pleasure to visit my favorite bookstores in Kobe with so many books on so many subjects but also a torture because I had to choose only a small number of them to shlep with me back to Israel. This means that in Japan everyone has an access to a large portion of the intellectual treasury of the human being in print media if he or she so wishes, while in Israel such an access is a privilege restricted to a relatively small part of the population. Jews are called a people of the Book, but unfortunately, Israelis as a whole may not called a people of books for this reason.
What has really impressed me this time back in Japan is, however, the quality of services rather than their quantity. How sales clerks relate to customers is naturally important, but I now realize that it is no less important to pay attention to esthetics in displaying merchandises to attract potential customers. One reservation I have about this esthetics in the commercial sector is that people are lured into constantly buying even unnecessary things one after another, partly as a way to fill their spiritual void unconsciously.
In what areas then does Israel excel and does Japan falls far behind? One of the most important things, I should say, is interpersonal relationship. Japanese society has developed a very intricate system of watching its members and shackling their behaviors not only in public but often also in private. Few areas of interpersonal relationship are open to spontaneous decisions; instead, many of them are almost artistically ritualized. Even such basic things as expressions of emotions are often controlled by agreed formulae. Less and less people seem to know how to communicate with other face to face without fearing of confrontations. As a result, face-to-face communication is becoming more and more devoid of real contents, and virtual, often anonymous, communication as a compensation is becoming more and more aggressive. Israel is very healthy in this respect, and this is what I like best in Israel, especially as a person interested in languages and communication.
There is at least one area in which both societies have a problem, at least for me: noise, though of a different kind in each of the two. It is true that it is prohibited to speak on the mobile phone in public in Japan, and few people violate this agreement for fear of being ostracized from the society, so I am temporarily liberated from the hell of noisy stupid talks on the mobile phone. Naturally, however, there is a different source of noise here that does not exist in Israel: mechanical announcements from loudspeakers in almost every public place, often on an endless tape. I am quite surprised anew to see that nobody seems to be bothered by this incessant auditory torture. But I am not sure which of these two tortures is more endurable.
16 February 2007 (28 Shvat 5767)
Even a person with wildest imagination would not have been able to foresee that someone with a background like mine would eventually find himself in such a situation where I am now. Each stage of my life may not always have been drastically different from its preceding one, but each decision I made at each crossroad has cumulatively contributed to such a distance between the first and present stages of my life. Few of the decisions I made were conventional in a conformist society called Japan, and for this reason I did often suffer, especially in my childhood. But it was - and still is - far more important for me to do what my innermost voice told me to do than to have my life dictated by the surrounding society for fear of being ostracized. There may be no if in one's personal history, but if I am to "reboot" my life, I would probably choose more or less the same path.
Nevertheless, it might have taken me less time and effort in making each decision if I had been born now. Each decision that affects your life requires prior information about where it will take you and careful preparation, as it can often be reversible. The main sources of my information back then were family, relatives, teachers and classmates, i.e., people with whom I could be in direct contact, as well as printed books. As the web is becoming more and more indispensable for me as a new source of information, my decisions are also influenced more and more by the information I find online, part of which is available nowhere in the first two types of sources of information.
Since I became a netizen in April 1996, I have been taken the Internet for granted. But even in a developed country like Japan with probably the best infrastructure for the Internet, there still exist a large number of people who are not benefitting from what I consider one of the greatest inventions of the humankind. In the part of the city where my parents live, my father is among the very few who are netizens. Television and sometimes printed books still remain the main source of information for the majority of the inhabitants.
This digital divide has nothing to do with money, at least in Japan, where probably everyone can afford to buy a personal computer and have access to the Internet. It seems to be caused mainly by computer literacy or lack thereof. I am often surprised to see the ignorance of so many long-time users of personal computer and the Internet, so there is no wonder that many people are left in the "Dark Ages". Ability to use hardware and software is only a prerequisite. What really divide people into the haves and the have-nots are, as far as information is concerned, the knowledge about where and how to find information online and the ability to distinguish reliable from unreliable pieces of information. It is probably no less important to be alert to the change of paradigms and be flexible enough to switch to a new one if it has proved to be superior to an old familiar one. Web 2.0 is a good example of such a paradigm shift that is taking place right before our eyes.
23 February 2007 (5 Adar 5767)
Having spent about three weeks in Japan, I returned to Israel this Wednesday with a few rediscoveries about Japan. One of them is traditional Japanese diet. In order to keep kosher there, I ate only rice, udon, vegetables, sea weeds, soybean products and occasionally fish, but no meat and dairy products. I ended up eating what I could identify as the traditional Japanese diet I used to eat in my childhood. Although the main purpose of eating these foods was not necessarily to keep healthy, I felt a significant internal change for the better in my body.
Vegetarian foods offered here in Israel are rather bland and cannot be compared to the taste of meat meals I eat several times a week. But the vegetarian diet I ate in Japan was also a pleasure to my palate and stomach. Taking two Israeli meals in the El Al flights back to Israel was enough to feel some change for the worse in my body.
Some outsiders who are not familiar with Jewish dietary laws may equate kosher foods with healthy foods, but as far as I understand this is not always the case. Keeping kosher means keeping spiritually healthy and not necessarily keeping physically healthy (incidentally, kosher foods do not have to be "Jewish", nor are all the "Jewish" foods kosher!). One can easily see this difference in the physical unfitness of so many religious Jewish Israelis. I always feel sorry to see how they eat kosher but unhealthy foods, often with in such a quantity, especially on Sabbath.
In order to keep the same nice feeling in my body I have decided to eat less meat and dairy products here. The mostly easily available diet of this kind in Israel would be macrobiotics, which is based on traditional Japanese diet. I have started reading an introduction book about it by one of its world authorities, and what he has to say seems to make perfect sense to me. Besides, my own body knows empirically that it does me good physically. For a couple of practical reasons I may not be able to strictly follow macrobiotic diet, but I will definitely try to follow some of its tenets.