Junge Gesellschaften misstrauen allem Künstlichen; ältere – und nur wenige sind erfahrener als Japan – wissen, dass uns, in einer Welt, in der Schmerz nie fern ist, womöglich nur das Künstliche bleibt.

Old World cultures cherish grace in defeat because they know we all lose in the end; New World cultures remain confident they can keep destiny at bay, perhaps forever.

"I just mean that people don't feel the need to smudge every moment with their signature. When it's hot, they don't say, It's warm enough to roast a chipmunk in the streets!' or 'Phew! It's hotter than a squirrel on a barbecue!' They just say, 'Hot, isn't it?' in exactly the same words and exactly the same tone, so that it might be the air itself speaking, or the day. It might be no one at all."

In a Confucian world, human relations are the closest thing people have to God. So manners become a kind of sacrament. They are the way you pray before the common altar.

In war, the Japanese readiness to follow every order to the last degree—and beyond —can make its people as brutal and inhuman as, in the 7-Eleven, they're unendingly sweet and obliging.

Amazon Japan will send Buddhist priests to your door--the service is called "Obo-san bin" or "Mr. Monk Delivery" -to perform funeral chants and other postmortem services at a third the going rate. (They'll also offer you a Buddhist name for the deceased at a fifth the usual price.)

"Take care of things, as the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said, "and things will take care of you.”

Even the murderous Aum Shinrikyo cult, which killed thirteen people by planting sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, had its own "Anime Division."

Returning from our trip, I noticed that the photos Hiroko had taken of stuffed animals were far more full of feeling and poignancy than the pictures she took of friends and family. The humans, after all, always flashed peace signs and put on smiles, as if to render themselves generic.

"Consistency," Wilde declared in an essay, "is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

"You Europeans think it disgraceful to expose your bodies," a Japanese host explained to a visiting writer in the 1920s, "but you shamelessly expose your minds. Everyone knows how men and women are made, so we have no shame in uncovering our bodies. We think it improper to uncover our thoughts."