9nGQluzmnq3M gave some reasons why we shouldn't trust the article based on the author's history, I'll give some reasons by comparing English, Japanese, and some other languages. The author presents several examples from their reflections and observations in Japan, themed around "Japanese silence"; unfortunately, they speak more to the author's commitment to their colored perception than to any genuinely universal "Ja…
> It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are said to be 20 ways of saying “I.” See formal "you" and informal "you" in European languages for a related phenomenon. It's ironic that English "thou", the informal, singular "you", became so impolite that it fell out of general use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou . > Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not…
This is true everywhere, and not exceptionally more true in Japan than anywhere else. Perhaps Japanese are raised in a way that they have more good listeners.
> A couple that got married in Nagasaki soon after the bomb was dropped on the city, Susan Southard reports, would mention the transfiguring event once, and then never again.
I think this refers to a specific couple from this book? (https://www.amazon.com/Nagasaki-Life-After-Nuclear-War/dp/01...) It's a stretch to say that this is indicative of a general attitude toward silence.
> “If you think, ‘I breathe,’ ” said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, “the ‘I’ is extra.”
Zen is just about as reflective of Japan in general as the Amish are of the US.
> Perhaps the most celebrated poem in Japan is Basho’s gasp of delight at seeing the island of Matsushima.
The author overstates its high-brow-ness. It's just fun to quote. There are a lot of haiku that are primarily funny.
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I can go on, but it's more of the same. All these observations are isolated from various contexts and loosely tied together into a theme of Japanese silence. It's fun and doing something like this helps organize things into something readable, but for the theme to reflect something innately Japanese and more than an ad-hoc organization of prima facie similar thoughts would require a proper argument.
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> One sign that Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a Japanese movie is the fact that the audience never hears its last, and presumably most important, sentence.
Surely this is satire?
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> A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer is now available from Knopf. Featured with permission of the publisher, Knopf. Copyright © 2019 by Pico Iyer.
Presumably this article consists of excerpts from the book. In terms of literary form, it's very fun, reminding of epigrams and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. But the person who picks up this book based on its title expecting some nuanced reflection on Japan would find the author's dogmatic ignorance most discernible in it, and nothing remotely hinting at the wisdom behind Meditations. Note that I find that Meditations suffers similarly; the observations do not exhibit blinding ignorance as some do here, but they are terribly lacking in context for many to be more universally useful than just "notes to oneself".