From Sukiyaki to Storippu

MEETING WITH JAPAN (467 pp.)--Fosco Maraini--Viking ($8.50).

LIVING JAPAN (224 pp.) -- Donald Keene--Doubleday ($7.95).

About the turn of the century, a popular song among Japanese students had a refrain that ran "dekansho, dekansho." It was shorthand for "Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer." In the early 1950s, the hit refrain was "chiiku dansu" i.e., dancing "cheek to cheek." In symbolic miniature, the two songs reflect two staggering cultural encounters between Japan and the West. Clam-shut to the outside world for centuries, Japan was pried open by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and avidly, if erratically, soaked up Western thought and technology. In 1945, the vanquished paid the victors the sincere, if at times embarrassing, flattery of trying to adopt with gusto not only U.S.-style democracy but chewing gum and storippu (the strip tease). The Japan-U.S. relationship also has undertones of tragedy and love, ranging from Hiroshima to the 20,000 almond-eyed brides brought home by G.I.s.

The Floating World. Despite a growing infusion of Japanese culture since the war, in U.S. popular folklore Japan still exists largely as an exotic cliche bounded on one side by cherry blossoms and geishas, and on the other by hara-kiri and kamikaze. Readers who suspect that there is more to Japan than this may find out precisely what by opening either of two handsome, informative, reliable and engagingly written books. Living Japan is a succinct introductory, from Zen Buddhism to transistorized radios, by a top U.S. scholar, Donald Keene, associate professor of Japanese at Columbia. Author Keene's book has the edge in the number and beauty of its photographs. But Meeting with Japan is steeped in deeper experience. From 1938 to 1943, Italian-born Anthropologist Fosco Maraini studied and taught in Japan. Two of his three daughters were born in Japan, and when Italy surrendered in World War II, he and his family, interned, nearly starved to death in a prison camp near Nagoya. Meeting is the elaborate, graceful story of Maraini's 1955 return and rediscovery of his "adopted homeland." A Buddhist scroll hanging in a friend's house provides Author Maraini with one of his key themes: "Free yourself from attachment to useless things." The Japanese mind is obsessed with the transience of things, which may help to explain both gimcrack exports and the scroll paintings of ukiyo-e ("the floating world") of the theater and the geisha. This wars with the principle of permanence reflected in the Shinto worship of nation and ancestor. Innovations change the Japanese scene without changing the Japanese.

Santa's Workshop. At the core of the Japanese character, Author Maraini sees certain determining qualities. The first is intimacy with nature. The Japanese garden is nature in the raw, scaled down but retaining its own asymmetrical harmony. The Japanese goal is not decoration or domination but communion, to experience the rockness of a rock or the treeness of a tree. A second quality-- is seemingly innate manual dexterity. As Author Maraini describes it, Japan is a kind of mammoth Santa's workshop full of exquisite wood and paper toys.

There is also the specialization of classes. A geisha is the daughter of a geisha, a painter is the son of a painter. Whatever its feudal origins, this specialization persists more as a craft system than a class structure. Omnivorous consumers of print (more than 5,000,000 newspapers a day in Tokyo), the Japanese are none theless nonbelievers in learning by the book.-They believe that only a master can teach a master. Still another quality, the Spartan frugality that governs the daily life of an overcrowded people with insufficient farming land, forms the genius of its art. Whether it is a room or a flower arrangement, the Japanese strip away nonessentials to achieve the elegance and drama of simplicity.

Bushido Is Out. While probing intellec tually at the substance of Japanese life, Author Maraini rarely slights its colorful and frivolous surfaces. These range from the ritual of the late afternoon bath (the Japanese equivalent of the cocktail hour) to the perennial recalcitrance of English. Sign once seen above a tailor's shop: "La dies have fits upstairs." There is a whole galaxy of crazes, customs and superstitions. In 1954 a sum equal to one-quarter of the national budget went into a pinball machine game called pachinko. The number four (ski) is as unlucky as 13 is in the West because ski also means death. Chopsticks must never be left in the rice; the right side of the kimono must not be worn over the left; and a bed must not be made with the head toward the northeast; all these tabus stem from resemblances to funeral practices. There is no word for privacy in teeming Japan, but the language of poetry is a commonplace. Tokyo Haneda airport means "the field of wings," hedges are "living curtains," a blend of tea is "jewel dew."

Why are the sense and sensibility of the Japanese occasionally marred by spasms of savagery? Author Maraini suggests that it is the terrible underside of an "imperious need to live in a spirit of heroic self-dedication to something or somebody." At any rate, the Japanese are a people of moods rather than logic, as Maraini sees it, and the present mood is: bushido is Out, chiiku dansu is In.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.