(The picture is a painting I did around 2016 of a plate I bought in England which subsequently got broken. The background is the kitchen floor where it broke. I was asked why I painted the plate broken; my response was, “Because it’s broken.”)
A great deal of life is dealing with things that are broken in this material world. Things are not meant to last forever, change is inevitable, be grateful for things that held up until now and decide what to do when they break. It all sounds easy, and something we need to come around to thinking, but it isn’t easy.
I’m going to discuss a few things I feel are broken and how (and whether) they can be fixed.
Beginning with the small – in the last couple of blogs I have discussed being injured and what kinds of changes that brings to everyday life. I’m doing rehabilitation for little-used muscles, trying to get them back to some kind of strength, but this is a slow process and like most human beings, I’m impatient and want to see progress NOW. Getting used to being patient with my recovering body is hard. In some other blog I mentioned Joseph Campbell’s idea that the aging body is like an old car. Things break and we can’t fix them, because those parts are no longer available. We just have to get used to a non-functioning windshield wiper or window crank. I don’t think my poor dislocated arm will ever be the same as before, when I used it unthinkingly for so many things. I can’t replace it, so I have to get used to diminished function, perhaps for months, perhaps for as long as I still have to be alive. My arm is now (in some degree) a broken part of me. I do have others, but I will spare you descriptions of them. Yes, I realize other people have it much worse, but though I’m sorry for those people and now have an inkling of how their lives changed because of their misfortune, these kinds of thoughts don’t really help. As many have found. Once I was confronted with a doctor who wanted to stick a camera tube up my nose with no warning. As I was freaking out, he said, “even seven-year-olds have this procedure done”. What was he trying to do – shame me into it? That won’t work. They are them, this is me. I panic in such situations; maybe this is a broken part of me – if so, it has been broken since I was a child. And the Japanese custom of endurance, which I am surrounded by, just makes it worse.
A little larger sphere – I live in an old house where many things are simply broken and have never been fixed – some (such as covered-over termite-ridden beams) come back to haunt us. At the moment, we still have craftsmen in our area who understand the measurements and construction of hundred-year-old household items, and can fix them – but many simply aren’t fixable, as heavy old doors that increasingly don’t open or close properly, old locks that don’t work; things that probably won’t be endured in later subsequent generations, if there even is a later (see below). We accept them because they are part of our old house, and to accept them feels like respect. Some we fix, if possible; some we don’t.
Now we come to larger things that feel broken.
An aspect of Japanese society which is disappearing is the taking over of the family property by the eldest son or other family member. It may not be a problem where the property is only a few generations old, or where it doesn’t involve physical work. But in our case, and in many older rural communities (not only in Japan but elsewhere too), it feels heavy. We have a completely viable, continuously lived-in property that is upward of 400 years old, now being maintained by the 19th generation (my husband), with a lot of land around it. This requires young strength to maintain it, which we don’t have, as the younger generation doesn’t feel its importance – there are no decent jobs out here, the house conjures childhood memories of darkness and fear, they want a house of their own without being made to care for older relatives, etc. This social custom is now broken, and the aging population which is still here makes it worse. (Did anyone ask us if we wanted to live longer, watching both our bodies and society as we know it crumble around us? No, it was taken as a given that people would want to live longer, and medical science has made it a reality, so there are a lot of disenfranchised, helpless older people around, who were created by the system and now are a liability.) Rural society, which has been a mainstay for centuries, and the people who live there, have become something to forget about while we younger people pursue our dream of an ever-more convenient lifestyle. Good things about this older way of life, such as thrift, have fallen by the wayside; no one values them any more. A transition period is always painful for those enduring it; it feels broken, and there won’t be any going back, because the things and people that made it are fast disappearing, never to be seen again. Probably going back is not only impossible, but undesirable. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Actually, I feel many parts of Japanese society are broken in this way. Increasingly it seems as if only people my age and older are prepared to be kind and polite in public; too often the rest of the population seems to regard other people as just a disturbance in the way of their getting somewhere, and push past without any kind of “Excuse me”. Not always, I will not hesitate to say; but I have seen this creeping up in the time (50 years) I have lived here. At the same time, I was “raised” (by my very conservative mother-in-law) in the mores of politeness and good behavior in our area. I feel reassured now, when I have an interchange with someone who understands the nuances of “after you” or “Excuse me for going ahead” in elevators, etc. I think this kind of thing would be laughed at now in many circles. But what has replaced it? Nothing. It is getting harder to trust the innate public goodness of people, just at a time when we older people feel we will need the kindness of strangers in some situations. In that sense, Japanese society as it was is broken, and the parts to fix it are no longer made. I know many influencers say Japan is so polite, and without doubt there are many places where this survives; but you have to understand and speak Japanese to understand WHY they are polite (many times they are trained in the workplace, such as shops, which is where most of these influencers encounter them), whether they always feel like being so polite, what happens if they aren’t, etc. Yet at one time, this kind of politeness (ki o tsukau) was to be trusted, it was ungrained in people as part of the socialization process, and it is no longer absolutely the case.
I know all of this is in transition. Something else will replace it. It remains to be seen what that will be. I and lots of others will never see it. And some irreplaceable things will be lost.
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