Lost Japan

by Alex Kerr

Release Date: May, 1996

Edition: Paperback

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Insightful and beautiful, but overwhelmingly elitist

When Alex Kerr talks about "Lost Japan," it is clearly his own personal Japan that is being lost. He speaks fondly of the "literati" of old Japan, a group of well-off leisure class who whistled their days away creating art and appreciating beauty, free of toil or earthly constraints. Oxford and Yale educated, coming from money, Kerr firmly sees himself as the last vanguard of the literati, and his lifestyle is leaving him. The lifestyle of the educated elite.

Composed of a series of unrelated articles, the book tells the tale of Kerr's life, of things that happen to capture his fancy, and of the intersecting lives of wealthy art dealers, artists and artisans. Everyone in the book is a genius. Everyone, the last embodiment of their vanishing breed. The world has become too cold to appreciate them. This is the Japan that is lost.

The book is incredibly well-written, and Kerr sees with the eyes of an artist. He has insights into parts of Japanese culture that would normally be closed, such as the back stage scene of Kabuki theater. His writing is strong enough to make you long for that vanishing Japan. Secret places and unappreciated nooks will appear as interesting as the most famous temple in Kyoto.

Worth reading and enjoyable, but ultimately a grain of salt is needed. Kerr's elitism leaves him blind to anything modern, any new artistic innovation or art form. He sees only the past, and wants to capture Japan like a photograph, and preserve it forever.

Interesting but Incomplete Cultural Criticism

This book had an unusual origin. The author is an expatriate American and long-time resident of Japan, and this book was written originally in Japanese for a Japanese audience. It was translated subsequently into English, but not by the author, who apparently found it difficult to reformulate his book in English. The theme of the book is the decay of traditional Japan. Kerr is an aesthete, and both devoted and clearly knowledgeable about many aspects of Japanese culture. He is also a man who worked for almost a decade for a large American corporation and became knowledgeable about business. He came to Japan in the early 70s, just as the final remnants of traditional rural Japan were being swept away by development. He explores his theme from a number of angles. Each chapter is devoted to an aspect of traditional Japanese culture that is vanishing or under siege; Kabuki, traditional urban architecture, rural beauty, Zen temples, the city of Kyoto; the traditional rambunctiousness of Osaka. These topics are explored in the form of brief memoirs of Kerr's initial encounters with each aspect of Japanese life and/or travels in Japan. Kerr is a good writer and each chapter is both well constructed and contains interesting information. He does a very good job of conveying the unique features of traditional Japanese culture and the rather bland, pseudo-Western culture that has replaced it. He is not entirely pessimistic either; he clearly views Japanese society as possessing considerable capacity for responding creatively to external challenges and internal decline. What this book lacks is a really good analysis of what causes this phenomenon. He identifies the conformist nature of Japanese society as a major culprit but this is an incomplete answer. Homogenization of culture is a worldwide phenomenon, perhaps more obvious in Japan because of the very distinctive nature of Japanese culture. While the loss of traditional culture is regrettable, to some extent it is an inevitable consequence of marked rises in the standard of living and the erosion of a largely authoritarian, defence based society. These are not phenomena unique to Japan though the speed of the transition is very rapid.