July 10, 2023
Dreaming of Japan (and Other Imaginary Lands)
Japan is obviously not imaginary; it’s a real country, it exists – if you’re looking for countries that don’t exist, Finland is the one you’re looking for 😛. But my Japan is imaginary. I’m dreaming of a Japan that simply is there only in my imagination, being an entirely subjective, partial, and factually extremely flawed version of the realWe’ll come back to this later; it’s intriguing. Japan.
My Japan is no more (or less?) real than the afternoons of my childhood, smelling Greek coffee, and overall constructing a version of a reality that is, shall we use the term, questionable.
Whenever I’m reading about Japan, seeing photos or videos from there – including its huge cat culture, one must admit – I immediately feel calm. I feel a sense of longing for something that, again, isn’t there. More still, it never has; it’s not like I used to live in Japan and now I miss it.
So what does dreaming of Japan – and other imaginary lands – reveals to us about the way our mind wanders?
Dreaming of Japan Is a Dream of Creativity
To be sure, dreaming of Japan as some sort of archetypal oriental land – purposefully ignoring the multitude of its other factual dimensions – is both widespread and not new as a practice. For critical approaches, I’d start with Orientalism by Edward W. Said. In a nutshell, what we discuss is the idea of a romanticized, mostly imaginary version of “the Orient” as seen from a Western perspective.
However, my personal dreaming (are there any other kinds?) is of a different flavor.
In my (symbolic) dreams, Japan is about cherry blossoms slowly drifting downward, about a red torii gate with Fuji in the background, about a peaceful garden against a pink sunset.
Dreaming of Japan, I dream of creativity. Imagination and creativity are two distinct processes, where we form connections between categories of concepts that, under “normal” (=non-artistic, prosaic) circumstances, are separate: subjective and objective, individual and cultural, conscious and subconscious.
If the process of merging such separations sounds familiar, you’ve read about it in my post on the sublime.
“My” Japan Is a Creativity Prompt
Whenever I’m dreaming of Japan, I allow myself to enter a world that is neither quite real nor entirely imaginary. Doing so, I let myself imagine possibilities – all the what-ifs of life. By being in neither solid reality nor complete fiction (if such a thing exists), my creativity is informed by both processes.
“Why Japan?” one may ask, and to that I have no real answer. I don’t know… I like the colors?
But an even better question one could ask is this: “What on earth is ‘solid reality’ anyway?”
Dreaming of Japan Is a Metaphysical Process
Too fancy a title to basically say: “Dreaming of Japan makes me wonder about what is ‘real'”. I mean, how exactly do you define the “solid reality” I so casually mentioned above? If the Japan I’m dreaming of isn’t real, what is the element that makes the ‘real’ Japan, real?
The answers largely depend on your philosophical leanings, common agreement, and all sorts of human peculiarities.
Deep down, there is a “real” Japan, that has nothing to do with photos of gardens or kawaii cats in cafes – the Japan of the same social problems you find in Finland, Argentina, or South Africa. Yet that reality is also problematic to define.
And so, I continue to dream of a Japan that doesn’t exist, because I can afford to. Talking about distorting reality, huh?
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I read an article once – might have been in National Geographic – about how much human effort goes into beautiful elegant Japanese restaurant cuisine, including the supply lines way back to farms and fishermen – and realized that only the FEW in Japan can enjoy the fruit of all that labor. It is so time- and human manual labor-intensive that there is no way everyone Japanese can ever have these perks, and it cured me of romanticism toward Japan.
I still love the beauty – but I also realize what a huge luxury some of it must be.
There is always, in everything, a gap between reality and expectations. It’s just that some gaps are greater than others. Recall that post inspired by the map you shared with me, showing the dream job of people around the world. The reality/expectation gap for someone wanting to be a writer is greater (for reasons we could ponder on) compared to wanting to be e.g. a supermarket cashier.
Similarly, the gap between dream/reality of “Japan” is far greater (again, for reasons we could talk about) compared to e.g. “Ghana”.
Aaaah. I share this dream. I’ve loved the /idea/ of Japan since I was eight years old and watched The Samurai religiously every afternoon when I got home from school. To my eight year old mind, the depiction of honour and integrity I found in that half hour show became /the/ definition of honour and integrity. And it’s stayed with me ever since. I studied the language and history at uni. and the Tokugawa period is etched in my mind as /the/ Japan I love.
I’ve never been to Japan, and I know the reality would disappoint me if I every did manage to get there, but my heart continues to yearn for a Japan that only exists in my imagination. -sigh-
I think being aware that it’s a fantasy, a “personal Japan” justifies it. In other words, being aware that it’s a dream is what makes the dream, ironically enough, real
Finland not existing was an internet fiction that began in 2015. A similar fiction exists about Ukraine in the Kremlin.
No wonder Finland joined NATO after decades of neutrality
Ah, the internet; where all facts – cough, cough – reside!