When I first came to Japan, Japanese culture was hot coffee and cold beer from vending machines; it was packed commuter trains passing under mountains and compact neon streets designed, seemingly, by Nintendo's computer programmers.
　 Coming from Australia - a land where everything by comparison is dusty, rusty and second-hand, where people dress as if they've just camped for three days beside a waterhole, I felt as if I'd just stepped five years into the future.
　 GPS navigation systems sat on dashboards, the toilets had microchips and the ATM's had bots that bowed. Fruit was packaged as if it was to be sent into space on the space shuttle. Genetically-cloned convenience stores glowed everywhere as softly as shoji doors. The trains had heated seats. Japanese people were as perfectly groomed as the pines that leapt from their tiny gardens. Here, I thought, was a turbo-charged capitalist culture, populated by a wealthy global elite, leading the world into a technological utopia.
　 I was fortunate enough to have landed in Kyoto, hence I soon learned I wasn't just living in a futuristic society, but also one that stretched back into ages long past. Daily I pedalled my gomi-bicycle along streets laid down by ninth-century Chinese geomancers, following the footsteps of mystical dragons. My daily commute held the greatest concentration of World Heritage sites outside Egypt. After work, I sat next to stone gardens no wider than my six-mat room, lost in gigantic landscapes.
　 I found myself as easily lost in Gion's famous water-trade, drunk and in love with strangers, six storeys above the raging Kamo River. I realised that I was in a culture that stretched back unbroken to the times of shaman-priests and sacred groves, of burial mounds and city-states. It was if I lived in a misty mountain kingdom, cut off from the world by a bamboo screen, but one in which the inhabitants didn't construct stone tablets to their deity, but Toyotas and flat-screen TVs. I remember thinking one day on the Hankyu train, watching well-dressed college students pluck satellite phones from Gucci handbags, projecting perfectly mannered images of themselves into the stratosphere - here is a land whose God lives in surfaces and appearances. Whereas the West delegates perfection and beauty to a hidden realm, in Eastern traditions, the world's face is perfectible. In the West, it is corrupt and broken.
　 I thought I was dreaming. Before I came to Japan I imagined I was headed for a grey industrial land of apartment blocks and polluting factories, populated by overworked drones trapped in an overheated economy. While this widespread overseas image of Japan contains an element of truth, it in no way captures the subtle joys and pleasures of living here - quiet, lush mountainsides rearing above busy city streets, the frantic camaraderie of a four-storey izakaya, bicycling through quiet wooden laneways at night, plunging naked in the snow into a steaming rotembori. The biggest revelation was that Japanese people were fun to be with; not just in a gentle and polite way, but in a playful, party-loving, informal, and irreverent way. Many Westerners mistake the famous Japanese 'shyness' for inhibition, for that's what it means in the West. After an upbringing in a WASPish, Anglo-Saxon culture, the subtle lusts of the Japanese for the simple pleasures of life - food, sex, laughter, beauty, nature - was an awakening.
　 Returning to Australia was a reminder of just how unknown and misunderstood Japan is. While most countries have projected to the world at large a reasonable image of their contemporary life, a lot of people in other countries are quite ignorant of Japanese life. Many retain either a romantically na_ve or historically negative impression of the place. The Japanese are either kimono-wearing, flower-arranging geishas, with whom it is impossible to communicate without a full-blown display of archaic language and etiquette, or stone-faced corporate samurai contemplating the next World War while devouring slabs of raw whale.
　 These sad and silly views of Japan unfortunately remain at large, partly because of a sad and silly truth about Japanese culture - it has retained a sense of exclusion and separation from the world at large, often celebrated here as unique-ness. It's as if a smokescreen has gone up around the archipelago, through which it's impossible to get a clear view from either side. Japanese culture is indeed unique and special, but so is South African, Nepalese and French culture. But in Japan, it seems the Brazilian, the Australian and the Chinese are all the same - they are foreigners, which really means Not-Japanese. This brutal concept of 'foreign-ness', so prevalent in daily conversation and media in Japan, whitewashes the entire globe into one separate entity. In fact - as the growing number of Japanese immediately realise when they step off the plane into one of the world's many melting pots - it is the Japanese that are one unique entity among many.
　 But once the foreigner in Japan stops obsessing about the country's mythic monoculture, he or she realises that this whole idea of separation and isolation is focussed within the society, onto the Japanese themselves, as well as outside it, onto the world. Japan has a 'club' and 'member' culture, in which everyone is either 'in' or 'out'. In poor Japanese-English translations, casual Saturday barbecues have 'members' and kindergartens are 'clubs'. This membership mind-set stems from the family-orientated outlook of 'uchi-soto', inside the house and outside, starting from the private world of the kotatsu dining table and extending into the unmarked boundaries of the neighbourhood, then into Japan's conveyor-belt like education system, with its clubs and circles, and ultimately into Japan's curious corporate tribalism, a social organisation that is both anciently feudalistic and uniquely modern. In Japan, you are who you belong to.
　 The point is that with such a constant sense of exclusion and inclusion pervading the life of most Japanese, 'foreign-ness' is just another club that they don't belong to. Having to try so hard to stay 'in' in their own society, it is hardly surprising that most Japanese have no time or inclination to forge networks or interests that stretch outside it. It just doesn't make sense - unless you have a deep sense of social alienation. So the club/member society, the uchi/soto generalisation, creates a steep, Confucian ladder of divisions and hierarchies that is immune, it seems, to 'outside', 'foreign' influences, including people and ideas. The bamboo screen has gone up, and the global family catches occasional glimpses of its shy, elegant cousin - a sleeve here, an eyebrow there - shuffling quietly behind.
　 Men, particularly, in Japan seem to disappear rapidly up this Oriental ladder, out of international airspace. Before leaving Japan for the first time, I lamented to my Shodo teacher, a patient and delightfully severe woman who devotes her time trying to educate sloppy foreigners in the strict aesthetic of sumi and fude, that I had made no lasting male friends in Japan. Believe me, this is a common experience amongst 'foreigners' here. She nodded immediately and remarked, “Men in Japan have created a separate society.” Every club needs a President, and Japanese men disappear up the Confucian ladder because they have to - pushed up from below into positions of power and control, sometimes unwillingly, I note. Male Power in Japan however is not the dictatorial 'do-as-I-say' kind it is often portrayed as, or the egotistic 'where-can-we-go-today' freedom of the individualistic Western entrepreneur - it is the power of collective responsibility for the group, particularly those members underneath.
　 This sense of care and responsibility is, to foreign eyes, almost pathologically paternal. Like a bunch of forgetful school-children, the Japanese populace is constantly reminded not to leave things behind in trains, nor to carry explosives onto buses, nor to light fires in the neighbourhood, and even, in some country towns, when to go to work and school. The voices of these constant public instructions may be endearingly maternal, but the rules are paternal ones.
　 All this would be just another quirky aspect of Japanese life if the paternal voice didn't pervade every cranny of it, from the breathtaking childhood schedule of play groups, school, clubs and cram schools, through to grown-ups (particularly women) being told by their companies where to live, what time they should be home, what to wear, where to shop, where to go for vacation, what to take, which house to buy and who to vote for. Put simply, Japan is a paradise for control-freaks.
　 Even at a trivial daily level, just in the last few days I have been instructed by well-meaning superiors when to take a bath, where to park my bike outside my house and what time to extinguish my backyard barbecue.
　 This control-freakery sucks away at individual responsibility and decision-making and leaves it in the hands of a few senior males who, despite Confucian theory, do not necessarily know best. The unchanging crag of Japanese governance and finance, the infamous accounting and accountability cover-ups, the famous lack of research and innovation in academia - behind all these are committees dominated by control-freaks, clinging, responsibly, to the top rung of the ladder. Frighteningly, some celebrated aspects of Japanese culture - the exquisitely designed gardens, the impeccable household hygiene, the automated production lines, the mystically-correct ritual of the tea ceremony - can be seen as control-freakery refined to an artform. And the famously mild, temperate Japanese character, and the language's regular, predictable, polite phrases, were created in response to authority's constant presence - how best to behave around a control freak with a sharp sword.
　 But as we foreigners are always told when we whinge about Japan, all this is changing. And it might be true. More and more men, it seems, are jumping or getting pushed off the Confucian ladder, and finding it's not such a long way down. More and more people are leaping through the national uchi/soto smokescreen into international airspace, and finding that they belong to that club too. Even better, they are finding they can re-enter Japan without being treated as a deserter. Inside houses, more and more families are finding foreigners sitting around the kotatsu table as in-laws and cousins, and neighbourhoods are hosting more and more permanent residents demanding equal rights. So gradually, the boundaries of what and who is Japanese, and who belongs where, under whose rules, will broaden. And the control-freaks Well, maybe the mild, patient Japanese character will win out in the end.
　 On my fifth night in Japan, I had a dream which - naïve as it sounds - has resonated with me ever since. I was walking around a museum with a pair of chopsticks (as you do), and I found an invocative shape of coloured rice inside a glass case. Clumsily wielding my chopsticks, I removed the glass and started dismantling the curious rice shape, grain by grain. A curator ran up to me and, quite reasonably, furiously gestured for me to stop. These grains of rice, he explained, contained the essence of all people in the world. How dare you pull them apart! Baffled, and not a little embarrassed, I awoke.
　 A few days later, I was wandering around the Okazaki district of Kyoto, and looked up in awe at my first sight of the giant red gate of Heian Shrine. I was stunned. Here was the curious rice shape of my dream, thirty metres high, straddling a four-lane street. It was a torii gate, the entrance to every Shinto shrine in Japan.
　 Now I'm not a Shinto-ist, but it seems to me that Shinto is a religion that stretches back to the distant past, to what some people call the Universal Religion. Always situated between the forest and the city, between Nature and Culture, the shrines contain gods that are both human and natural - our natural human selves, if you like, kept alive inside a sacred space, outside of daily life, into which we can enter to pay homage, or wish for good fortune, or clarify our minds. This natural human essence is truly Universal, truly inclusive of everybody, and is an idea that is getting very lost in the tumults of history and modernity nearly everywhere in the world.
　 It is ironic, but wonderful to me, that this most nationalistic and 'unique' aspect of Japanese culture has retained an essential truth for all humanities everywhere - the message of my dream-curator, an ancient lesson of one-ness and equality, that all of us deeply need to understand. May that be the future for all of us.