Category: Musings of a Mile Grinder

In Japan, high school kids wear school uniforms. That’s not particularly unusual – school kids in the UK also wear uniforms. But the rules for uniformity among Japanese kids don’t end there.

If a Japanese high-schooler wants to ride a bike to school it can only be a certain type of generic bike, with a carrier on the handlebars, a kickstand and fenders front and back. No other type of bike is allowed. Helmets are optional, and rare.

Japanese school kids are also expected to have several pairs of shoes for use at school, including a pair of soft-soled shoes to wear inside the school, running shoes for gym, and street shoes.

Making kids conform to standards of dress and behaviour seems a good idea. Among other things it helps reduce the number of superficial distinctions between kids, which can only help reduce teenage angst. It also eliminates the distractions of fashion and the pressure to keep up with the cool kids.

On the whole, conformity appears to rate pretty high as a social value in Japan. The same goes for gestures of respect. Bowing, for example. At Nagoya airport I saw airline staff arriving at the departure gate for my flight. As each employee reached the check-in desk they turned and bowed to the room of waiting passengers before starting their work.

At the end of a school swim team practice I watched the student swimmers walk to the lifeguard stations on either side of the pool and bow to the lifeguards before heading to the change rooms. On highways in Japan, the stylized figure of a person bowing is used on signs to apologize for interruptions caused by roadwork.

I can’t think of any formalized, universal gestures of respect like these in my culture – at least not current examples.  Our society values individuality over conformity, which is viewed as negative, and personal versus collective rights and responsibilities.

In Japan preserving social order is an overriding cultural value. This may mean Japan is not culturally suited to producing visionary business disruptors like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, but then the Japanese are certainly not opposed to adopting and refining useful technologies. As for the benefits of prizing social order, theft in Japan is practically unknown and Japan is arguably the safest country in the world.

Actually, it’s no shoes allowed nearly everywhere in Japan: in homes, restaurants, even some museums.

In the Hikone Castle Museum slippers are provided for walking around the carpeted hallways. But there were no slippers for visitors to the actual castle – you have to roam the wooden corridors and climb the unbelievably steep stairways to the top level in your socks.

Hikone Castle was built in the early 1600s and is one of just 12 Japanese castles that has not needed reconstruction. Although the foundations and lower walls for Japanese castles are made of stone, unlike castles in Europe most of the lived-in parts were made of wood. In Gifu, where Peter and his family live, the local castle was reconstructed in the 1930s as a national heritage site. About 100 of these castles are scattered around Japan.

It’s also no shoes allowed in Hikone’s Tobaya Ryokan.

A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn. My room came furnished with a futon mattress, a chair, a TV (no English programs), a space heater, and a desk raised about 16 inches from the tatami mat-covered floor. There was a chair with no legs, to go with the desk – to sit you extend your legs under the desk. Personal hygiene needs are dealt with down the hall. That was fine by me, but I was puzzled by the communal shower room and bath. The room

features four small stools in front of four hand-held shower nozzles – two stations on each side of the room. Showering is done sitting down with soap and shampoo provided. After showering, the routine is to get into the hot bath – large enough for four people to share. Japan is a northern country with cold winters (and springs) and no central heating in older, traditional buildings like Tobaya Ryokan, so in cold weather a hot bath is a very welcome part of daily life.

At Tobaya Ryokan the shower/bath room is open from 4 to 9 pm. No mention is made about different times for women and men to use the facility, so I guess it’s mixed. I used it twice – loved the bath! – and had the room to myself both times. I might have asked the innkeeper if the showers were meant to be mixed/communal, but he spoke very little English and was never around.

The entry from the street to Tobaya Ryokan is a sliding wooden door in the traditional Japanese style. When I first arrived at the ryokan I slid the door open and looked inside – there was nobody there and no sign of a front desk for check-in. I ended up waiting an hour before someone showed up. During my two days at Tobaya, the sliding door was never locked. The idea that someone with bad intentions might slide in and make off with the family silver apparently isn’t a concern.

I am visiting an old friend and his family in Japan. Peter teaches English and lives in Gifu with his Japanese wife Miho, who is also a teacher, and their two daughters. I brought my bike with me from Canada with the idea of doing some touring in the region, however, I quickly found the prospect of venturing out onto the highway without firm plans of where I’m going, how I’ll get there (beyond just pedalling) and where I’ll spend each night, very daunting. Not the least barrier is that English is not widely spoken and generally not shown on building signage – which is to be expected. But the Kanji script of the Japanese language means I can’t even recognize common, useful words, like restaurant or hotel.

Taking advice from Miho, I decided on a three-day trip to the town of Hikone on Lake Biwa – Japan’s largest lake. Hikone is only 80 km from Gifu and involves a fairly simple route. As long as I pay attention to highway markers I won’t get lost. But if I do, there’s always the GPS on my i-Phone.

I recently wrote about Canadian efforts to get the world to acknowledge us as different from Americans. Faced with abysmally low global awareness about Canada in the 60s and 70s, any kind of recognition was welcome. (Yes, there are igloos in Canada. But most of us live in houses – just like you!)

In Turkey the national obsession is not about simple recognition – it has too much history and geopolitical heft for that. What the Turks want is respect. And especially the respect of Europeans.

Since the end of the First World War and the fall of its Ottoman Empire, Turkey has been striving to become a western-style democratic nation. It has a secular constitution and is a rising industrial power with the second highest GDP growth rate in Europe. But both those achievements come with asterisks. The current government is more autocratic than democratic and has changed the constitution to support its preferred modus operandi. (One hallmark of an autocratic regime is to control access to independent sources of information. In Turkey, the government has made Wikipedia “unavailable” to anyone in the country.) And in spite of its economic growth, Turkey still lags far behind Western European countries on GDP per capita.

For the past 30 years Turkey has been trying to gain entry into the European Union but has failed to meet key criteria. In response, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan now thumbs his nose at the idea of joining the EU, in effect saying, “If they don’t think we’re good enough to join their club, it’s not the kind of club we want to join” – the transparent response of someone feeling the sting of rejection.

Turkey just can’t get no respect. And one result of that is a sort of national/cultural inferiority complex – an affliction familiar to Canadians of a certain age. There was a time when nothing we did ever seemed as big, good or impressive as the comparable thing produced by our neighbour to the south. Especially TV programs.

Turkey’s response to its feeling of cultural inferiority is evident in Istanbul’s museums. The clunkily-named Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam for example, goes to embarrassing lengths to proclaim the worthiness of scientific achievements in the Islamic world 500-plus years ago, a time when Europe was wallowing in the Dark Ages.
The museum parades reproductions of ancient instruments (used in astronomy, cartography, chemistry, physics, medicine, etc.) designed by Islamic scientists, by way of saying: “Look how clever we were!” To underscore the point, the museum’s walls are decorated with quotes from obscure 17^th-19^th century European scholars acknowledging the discoveries of Islamic scholars.

The museum proudly shows there was a time when the Islamic world was open to new ideas that challenged accepted notions of truth, and that Islamic scholarship flourished with that freedom. But that time was long ago. In present day Turkey, the authoritarian regime of President Erdogan has expressed its view on freedom of thought with brutal crackdowns on peaceful protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Even on the street in everyday conversation, when talking about politics Istanbullus are reflexively cautious, lowering their voices before saying anything that might be overheard.

Respect is difficult to earn and easy to lose. For an authoritarian like Erdogan (or Vladimir Putin, or even Donald Trump if he could have his way) intimidation and brutality are effective methods for instilling fear, suppressing opposition and maintaining control. The behaviour of people under such regimes might appear respectful, but it’s just an act. Those who don’t act “respectfully,” like demonstrators, are punished. If you don’t want to feel the crack of a police baton on your head, it’s better to stay quiet.

Like every autocrat, President Erdogan craves respect. And like autocrats throughout history, he uses blunt force on his people to gain it. However, I doubt Turkey will ever gain the respect of Europe or entry into the EU by flouting democratic norms and acting like a thuggish police state.

In 1967 as part of Canada’s centenary celebrations, Montreal hosted the
world exposition. I was eleven years old living in Vancouver, thousands of miles away. Montreal was an abstraction, no more real to me than New York City or Paris, but I remember the pride I felt in having the world’s attention focused on my country. At the time, Expo 67 was the biggest event ever held in Canada, only to be eclipsed by the Montreal Olympics nine years later.

Those were heady times for Canada. In Pierre Trudeau we had a dynamic prime minister who broke the mould of the fusty political leaders we were used to. We took pride in the international (US) success of musicians like Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. And we celebrated the rising stardom – always in the US – of performers like Donald Sutherland, William Shatner and Christopher Plummer, as evidence that we were as good as our American neighbours.

On the strength of these and other examples of national success it felt as if we were finally emerging from the shadow of the cultural and economic behemoth to our south. And with increased exposure to sunlight our national identity took root and was encouraged to grow through CanCon policies to promote Canadian cultural industries and through public institutions like the CBC. Although to people around the world Canadians talked and acted in ways that seemed indistinguishable from Americans, we insisted on our fine points of difference until we finally won the international recognition we always craved: that Canada is not the same as America.

More recently, especially since the election last year of Donald Trump, we seem to have risen even further in the eyes of the world, to the point where Canada is now seen as better than the US. Our top cities rank significantly higher than US cities on international lists of the most desirable places to live. Our national statistics on such broad measures as crime, literacy, longevity and infant mortality are all more favourable than those for the US. Even Americans now look to Canada for examples of how they might improve their society in areas like healthcare and urban planning.

Just over a hundred years ago Canadian Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier declared the 20th century belonged to Canada. Clearly he got that wrong – the US was the dominant nation of the last century. And in spite of efforts to “Make America Great Again,” China is probably the strongest contender for the current one. But then, where would you rather live? For that matter, those Chinese who have a choice have  shown where they want to live. And it isn’t in the motherland.

A recent Guardian newspaper article about efforts to expand Saudi Arabia’s economy identified one of the obstacles – the disinclination of young Saudis to work hard. This is due in part to the country’s oil wealth and its ability to hire foreign workers for jobs Saudis would rather not do. But I am inclined to think an indifference to work is also rooted in the culture. Not just of Saudi Arabia, but of the entire region. The protestant work ethic of northern Europe does not, as far as I know, have an historical equivalent in the muslim culture of the Middle East.

I can’t say the virtue of work is unappreciated in the muslim world. I don’t know about that. An antipathy to hard graft seems evident in many of the world’s hot climate regions. On the other hand, in Turkey I discovered an appreciation for idleness that is utterly foreign to “western” culture.

In Istanbul I was invited to a Nargile cafe. A nargile, or shisha, is a hookah pipe. Smoking shisha is an everyday pasttime for many Turks. The tobacco used for shisha is flavoured – in our case apple-flavoured – and each smoker is given a removable plastic mouthpiece to use for their turn at the pipe. I haven’t smoked tobacco since I was ten and at that time found it too foul-tasting to endure. Shisha, however, is not like that at all. I inhaled deeply and felt a warm, gentle infusion of apple enter my body. Reclining on cushions in the shade of trees at an outdoor cafe with people all around; it was an entirely pleasant experience. We spent most of an afternoon talking and smoking and enjoying the social scene of others doing the same. It felt decadent and somehow wrong to my protestent sensibilities to spend an afternoon doing nothing but lounge about. I had to resist the temptation to look at my watch and to think of other, more productive, things I could be doing. Eventually I just ignored the little voice in my head and gave in to the simple pleasure of it all.

The Turks have a word for this kind of pursuit: Keyif, the art of idle relaxation. Making an art form of idleness is definitely not part of my cultural heritage. But when in Istanbul… do what the Istanbullus do.

Part of the seduction of Keyif is the refinement that has been brought to such idle pleasures as smoking shisha. It comes from a culture many hundreds of years in the making, developed in a pleasant place with a gentle climate where many generations of people have lived, loved, and had families. The patterns of life here are stamped into the cobblestones of the ancient alleyways and etched in the faces of the old and the merchants of the bazaars. There is a depth and richness to daily life in an old city like Istanbul that is missing in North American cities. With our fixation on economic growth, productivity and efficiency we have lost the ability to appreciate the simple pleasure of idle relaxation.

As one of the most visited cities in the world, it should be no surprise that Istanbul has a lot of hotels.  On the main avenues are all the usual big chains, but the narrow, winding and cobbled side streets of the touristy areas offer something different – an incredible range of little hotels and hostels.

 

Alternating with these in equal number are the carpet shops. And that brings me to Ahmed.

I met Ahmed as I was leaving Hagia Sophia, the massive Byzantine basilica-turned-mosque-turned-museum. This is perhaps Istanbul’s most famous tourist location, and a perfect spot for enterprising young Turks to engage foreign visitors in a quick bit of lively conversation as a prelude to offering a visit to their carpet shop.

But Ahmed was different from the other touts. When he saw I wasn’t going to take up his offer to look at carpets he surprised me by asking, “Are you interested in philosophy?” And then, “Who’s your favourite philosopher?”

We spent the next half hour walking and talking philosophy. Ahmed left school at 12, but has read widely and is a self-taught “scholar” on the subject. (His favourite philosopher is Spinoza.)  I was utterly charmed, and when he asked again about visiting his shop it seemed churlish to say no.

At the carpet shop I was offered tea and lunch while Ahmed and I carried on our conversation about the big questions of life. After lunch he led me to the shop’s carpet expert who spent the next hour educating me about carpets in general and the unique qualities of Turkish carpets in particular. We looked at many carpets.

After making my purchase – yes, I bought a particularly fine, hand-knotted runner that will (I trust) look perfect in the front hall – Ahmed rejoined me and offered to take me to a place for tea and Nargile, or “shisha.”

Ahmed has a warm, easy-going and charismatic personality. As we walk through the touristy Sultanahmet district he is constantly greeted by shopkeepers at storefronts along the way.

Sitting at an outdoor café under the shade of a great leafy tree Ahmed told me his story. He was born in the Anatolia Continue reading “Ahmed the carpet tout”

I have been reading a book about Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s Nobel laureate. Pamuk has lived all his life in the city. In fact he lives today in the apartment building he grew up in, which was built with his grandfather’s money to provide gracious housing in one of the city’s best neighbourhoods for the extended Pamuk family.

Pamuk’s perception of Istanbul takes in the long decline and eventual fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s and the subsequent dereliction and decay of its many former glories. He describes the city and its inhabitants as drenched in huzun – a Turkish word meaning deep melancholy – for the lost stature of their once proud and powerful city and its many storied inhabitants.

Pamuk wrote Istanbul in 2004, and it seems evident to me the city was quite different then from how it is now. He describes a place where, after decades of neglect and disinterest, nothing works properly and all has been left to rot. The majestic ancient fountains are dry, the ornate mansions of pashas and viziers are crumbling and being torn down for banal new concrete apartment buildings, and the Istanbulus have lost their pride.

From my brief time in Istanbul I don’t see much of Pamuck’s huzun in the city or its people. In fact it appears to be a quite prosperous place. In the city’s squares the public fountains are indeed working, the metro system is modern and efficient, the museums are excellent and the people certainly don’t look downcast or unhappy. A tourist brochure boasts Istanbul is the eighth most visited city in the world, although European tourism has declined signficantly since last year, when ISIS set off a bomb in Taksim Square in the centre of the city.

Istanbul today is obviously very different from the city it once was. In Napoleon’s time, for example, the great French general ventured that if all the world were one nation Istanbul would be its capital. I don’t know if Pamuk today still finds his city and its citizens infected with huzun. To my eyes it seems much too dynamic for that.  As a visitor from a cold climate city where half the year is lived under the dreary gloom of slate grey skies, I’m well acquainted with melancholy. But I don’t see much glumness in the faces of the Istanbulus.

It’s hard for a Canadian to wrap his mind around a place like Istanbul. In Canada we have a few hundred years of recorded history and little of monumental significance to show for it. Does the CN Tower qualify? For that matter, will it even exist 100 years from now?

The contrast between Vancouver and Istanbul couldn’t be more extreme. Istanbul has been the capital for two of the world’s most powerful empires – the Roman and the Ottoman – and the evidence of that deep history is everywhere. With its strategic position on the Bosphorus, the channel separating Europe from Asia, it’s also been a staging ground for epoch-defining events, like the Persion invasions of Greece (550-ish BC), the eastern military conquests of Alexander the Great (320 BC), the capture of Roman Constantinople by the Muslims (1453), and the many military forays into Europe of the Ottoman Turks.

With a population of 14 million, Istanbul straddles both sides of the Bosphorus, and its East-meets-West geography is evident everywhere. The streets are filled day and night with masses of people. Women in full burkhas (not many), women wearing Niquab headscarves (quite a few) and many women who would not look out of place in Vancouver. The men look European, albeit more swarthy than Euros from the north. But wherever you go in this city, you are reminded of its strong Muslim roots five times a day when the call to prayer is “sung” by the muezzin through loudspeakers on the minarets of the city’s many Mosques.

Hitler once derisively called Britain a nation of shopkeepers. I doubt he ever came to Istanbul. This city has more shops and keepers than anywhere I’ve seen. Standing at the crossroad of Europe and Asia it’s always been a trading hub. So Istanbulus, with hundreds of generations of trading experience, really know how to sell stuff. I speak of this from very recent experience.

The streets are lined with small stores and cafes, but to really intensify the shopping experience there’s the Spice Bazaar (built 1497) and Grand Bazaar (1463). Both are completely indoors, offering a warren of enclosed alleyways and narrow side streets with tiny shops jammed into every crevice. The bazaars are covered by a brightly painted domed roof stretching into the distance. Kind of a Byzantine version of West Edmonton Mall. Except none of these shops can fit more than 2 or 3 customers at a time. And there’s no skating rinks.