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A Year In Japan (Nihon no Ichi Nen)
By Kate T. Williamson (Author's Name)
Princeton Architectural Press
2006
Rare, it seems comes a book simply celebrating culture. It is all too common in the literature or memoirs of Americans returning from abroad to portray their host culture through an often unfavorable screen of comparison or judgment. However, culture, as many know who make it their passion, is not definable within the constructs of another culture. When subject to comparison, all cultures suffer from apparent absurdity or, worse, irrelevance within foreign constructs. It is this unintentional but naïve perspective that I despair of when reading most “foreigner in Japan” accounts.
And that is precisely why “A Year in Japan” is so refreshing. The author, or more aptly illustrator, of the memoir is Kate Williamson. Like thousands of other young Americans, Williamson spent a year teaching English in a rural prefecture in Japan. Through the course of her trip she kept a journal and sketchbook, sketching various images of her new life, along with a few sentences to sum up her observations. The sketches illustrate whatever caught her attention that day, or perhaps even that moment. She draws everything – from the most mundane, an electric blanket or 2 pages of socks, to elaborate color illustrations of Geisha, street scenes, or images of nature. Each drawing emphasizes something that Williamson found enduring, surprising, or even irritating about her foster culture and her relationship to it.
In the book she neither sings the praises of Japan nor dismisses it’s irrelevancy. She merely observes as unjudgmentally as possible. The subjects of her drawings will be familiar to most who’ve spent some time in Japan, but she never draws to mock or diminish her mundane subjects, nor to glorify those subjects for which she has an appreciation.
I don’t mean to say she is writing without opinion or purpose. Indeed she has a clear purpose in sharing with us her vision. She wishes for us the same sort of discovery she experienced upon her first encounter with each subject. She does not necessarily intend to write free of all cultural bias either, and, on occasion it is inevitable, but the pureness and genuine wish to share her fascination and curiosity with the not yet understood makes this book almost like visiting Japan again for the first time.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book of this nature on the subject of Japan. It seems that most of us like to outdo each other with our own astute understanding and interpretations of the culture. Yet cultures are indefinable even by anthropologists, and our ability to see into foreign cultures is hampered by an interpretation of our own. This book does nothing lofty, offers no solutions for business interaction or theories of behavior. However, after spending a few minutes in Kate T. Williamson’s world you may learn a little something you never knew about Japan, or about yourself.
