By my last day in Tokyo before heading north, I had started to wonder if Japan’s obsession with American culture had been exaggerated. I had been expecting a sort of American-inspired dream world of gibberish English signs, gratuitous electronic gizmos, and garish storefronts hawking inscrutable merchandise. I had seen a little bit of garbled English, right from the moment I landed at Narita, but by and large it seemed that Japanese English was a serious effort to communicate. Akihabara was filled with gizmos, for sure, but they were the familiar cell phones, MP3 players, and the like, just with much better style sense. And although Shinjuku’s neon jungles of commerce were like nothing I had seen before, they were less a parody of American shopping centers and more like an alternate universe.
I stepped out of the train at Harajuku Station and everything changed. The view looks out onto a street swarming with people, mostly teenagers, exhibiting every conceivable color of clothing and hair and cell phones. The latter were ubiquitous—I lost track of how many were in use, and this in a society that frowns on cell phone use in most public places. Little narrow streets were lined with stores selling brightly colored shoes and absurd tee-shirts. Wide avenues sported five-story clothing stores, television screens that were hardly smaller, genuinely American fashion stores and fast-food joints, and imposters who look like American restaurants except that we probably wouldn’t come up with a name like Mos Burger or Doutor Coffee—or, for that matter, Condomania. Not in the middle of a main street, in a two-story glass building with anthropomorphic cartoon condoms painted on it. Harajuku looked exactly like America, except with the intensity cranked up, and the brightness and contrast as well.
That’s one side of Harajuku Station. Across the tracks is a wooden platform with a weather-beaten old sign, looking out onto a thick forest. A wide footpath leads through a thirty-foot-tall shrine gate and, ten minutes later, to a large shrine, less pompous than some I saw, but still enormous and very, very traditional. The station divides the twenty-first century from the nineteenth.
The shrine is dedicated to the Meiji Emperor, under whose reign Japan entered the modern world. The reforms that began in Meiji’s time produced Japan’s industrialization, rail infrastructure, and economic growth; a few Emperors later, something went awry and produced a militaristic monster. The Meiji Shrine itself, in its sheer size and its association with the cult of the Emperor, belongs to that vanished world of imperial ambition, but the war was the beginning, not the end, of Japan’s modernization, a false start and not a final failure; just across the JR tracks, Harajuku bustles with nothing if not modernity.
Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese lived in a magical fantasy-land of forest spirits, mystic swordsmen, and divine emperors. Today, they live in a magical fantasy-land of intelligent cell phones, gigantic video screens, and divine emperors. The Meiji Restoration has achieved its goal, and more. What would Meiji make of it?