NOW YOU LOVE IT. ..

GETTING TO KNOW Japan can be a profoundly emotional expenence.

At first it enchants, living up to its storybook reputation. It bewitches with its manners and traditions, its muted colours, balanced asymmetry, poetic shadows. It affects with the single flower in a tea-room vase, the autumn leaves on a stone path, the half-glimpsed interior behind a summer's bamboo screen.

The thoughtful modesty of its women entices you, as, sometimes, does the studious introversion of its men. You are taken with the emphasis on polite circumlocution, avoidance of confrontation, implied trustworthiness. You learn to appreciate the concepts of honour and duty and obligation that underpin this ancient society.

Before you’ve learned to say chikusho! (damn!) Japan's ways have inveigled themselves into your value system. Without realising it, you have become an apologist, defending native delicacy, taste, integrity against the presumptuous crassness of Western civilisation. While sipping tea or listening to the bullfrogs’ croaking by a lotus pond, you realise that you have fallen in love with this country and want to live here always. You do not want to return to wherever you came from. You’ve found your true home.

But however genuine and deep your affection, it is not destined to last. Sooner or later the doubts creep in. The enchantment breaks. The scales may suddenly fall from your eyes — or the process may be gradual, reluctant, disconcerting. You may suppress your new-felt suspicions for a while, resolved not to betray your adoptive homeland as you did the country of your birth. But if you stay on you may eventually turn into a grumpy old-timer or a cynical critic. You will have gained tenure but lost the faith.

Unless you’ve caught yourself in time that is, and managed to let common sense prevail over sycophancy, sober assessment replace romantic involvement. You may still decide to stay, but you’ve stopped idealising the country.

There are those, of course, who never have to go through any of these phases, either because they decide early that they do not like the place and make sure they get out fast, or because they belong to the kind that, while enjoying what enjoyment is on offer, have their heads screwed on rigbit and never wonder where they belong. They are the lucky ones, perhaps: they avoid entanglement — though at the price of foregoing an early exotic thrill.