Japanese culture

There's a term in Japanese that means 'no fool like a specialist'. It refers to the natural tendency to become biassed towards the field one is an expert in, whether in work or in play. I myself never think of anything apart from go, so I had no idea what other Japanese cultural pursuits had a presence overseas or what kind of activities they were carrying out. To my great surprise, however, I found that they are actually very numerous and that they are much more popular than go. Aikido, judo, and karate are the stars: they are very popular with Italians. Aikido, in particular, has a magnificent dojo in Milan, and there's a Japanese teacher who always has 300 disciples. In Rome there's a veteran teacher who's been teaching the Ura Senke school of tea ceremony for 30 years. This teacher is a charming, petite woman in her 60s, but she's a very active teacher. The vagueness of the Japanese language doesn't work with Italians, so you have to convince them with logic. That means you end up becoming a fluent speaker. There are good and bad sides to this, but anyway she has developed her skills over the last 30 years.The impact of this teacher is really something. She sometimes visits Milan, as there's a group of tea-ceremony aficionados here and they built a tea house last year. As you can imagine, there are no specialists in building tea houses in Italy, so it was all made by hand. A lot of ingenuity went into completing it. This teacher speaks Italian as a matter of course and she's also fluent at French, German and English. She even writes papers in each language. Italy is too narrow a sphere for her: she travels all over Europe, spreading knowledge of the tea ceremony.

Recently, shiatsu (finger massage) and reiki (spiritual energy) have been enjoying a bit of a boom over here. Shiatsu started to become popular a few years ago. As it's a form of massage, it's easy to understand why. I'm suspicious about reiki, however. This is a form of Japanese culture I'd never heard of. But it's spreading at a tremendous speed. Just walking the streets, you come across posters for reiki classes and shops selling related goods. Apparently you use 'ki' to improve your physical well-being. There are all kinds of stories of miraculous recoveries from illnesses, of people whom doctors had given up on getting better, and that adds to the popularity of reiki. These stories are usually second-hand, but actually I have an acquaintance who was bedridden but got better thanks to reiki. There may be something in it, after all . . . My circle of friends is made up almost completely of go players, just like an overconcentrated shape in a game, but there's one precious exception, a flower-arrangement teacher. She's the same age as me and she came to Milan because of her husband's job and has been here more than eight years. Until recently, she taught flower arrangement to Italians. In contrast to major cities like Paris and London and New York, Italy is backward in becoming internationalized. Or perhaps it's just that Italians are conservative. She was the first full-fledged teacher of flower arrangement in Milan: she was the pioneer. Perhaps because of the similarities in our positions, we really get on well. However, she has finally admitted defeat and has given up teaching for a while. 'I can't teach my own style of flower arrangement in Italy,' she lamented. Flower arrangement has a short history in Italy; the first problem is the lack of the right varieties of flowers. That reminded me that I had sometimes been astonished by some of the ridiculous objects included in flower arrangements here: kiwis, pineapples, boiled eggs! If you can't get hold of the right kinds of flowers, you can't even make a start. Then, of course, you're ordering from Italians. You'll get a delivery of a large box of flowers: the top layer will be fresh, but the bottom of the box will be filled with rotting leftovers. This kind of thing happens all the time; apparently my friend had to lodge complaints on a daily basis. 'Yuki, you're so lucky with go. If you have the equipment, you can play it anywhere,' she muttered. I'd never thought of it like this. Go is fantastic! Suddenly I felt a lot more optimistic. My friend's story brought home to me how important it is to experience other worlds and to broaden your horizons. (Monthly Go World, May 2002. Translated by John Power.)