Naples: Hot Mess

Spaccanapoli at dawn

Italy is one of the most visited nations on earth. But when it comes to Naples, the country’s third largest city by population, even seasoned travelers go wobbly. “It’s noisy. It’s dirty. And it’s full of crime,” declare the Neapolitanophobes. Even my dear departed grandmother, who sailed to Europe solo before women did such things, who regularly faced the challenges of Palermo, and who joked about rubbing shoulders with capos in Corleone, drew the line at Naples. 

The city’s heritage of endemic corruption is one reason for the bad taste. Another, undoubtedly, is its position as Italy’s major seaport. Many migrants from other parts of the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries either embarked from or transferred to trans-Atlantic vessels at Naples. To men and women from rural areas, the place must have typified all the dangers associated with waterfronts: sin, crime (organized and otherwise), godlessness, tumult. Many of these transient rubes may well have been preyed upon, cementing the city’s legacy in oral tradition. “By all means,” they advised later, “see Rome, Florence, Venice. But stay the hell out of Naples.” And their children and grandchildren passed on the wisdom.

Part of my motivation to finally spend a chunk of time there was borne out of sheer contrariness. No place with such a sun-kissed setting, with close to three millennia of history and a deep patrimony of culture and art, could be entirely without interest. Anyplace so strenuously avoided simply had to be investigated. 

In fact, my interest was piqued first during a one-day glimpse I had of the city in 1994. There, walking down a street whose name I can’t recall, I saw a woman use a rope to lower a basket from her window to the street. There, a peddler took her money and filled the basket with groceries. Then she hauled her purchases back up to the fourth floor. The transaction was quick, silent, and routine as we use an ATM. This was exactly what my grandmother had described as once common on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. In other words, things you’d need a time machine to see in New York now, they still do in Naples. To someone who has made a career of portraying the past, this was irresistible stuff —I need to go to there stuff.

I went there, dragooning an old friend for company. He’s a classical historian who knows Italy well but has always skirted Naples in favor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. (“A dangerous shithole,” he called it). His preconceptions were not dispelled by the neighborhood I picked for our stay: right in the center of the Centro Storico, the bustling core of the old Greek city of Neapolis. The buildings there seem to hunker together, rubbing grimy shoulders. The streets are like paved corridors, crowded with a mix of merchants, tourists, and university students. The cobbled strip of Naples’ most infamous byway, the Spaccanapoli (“Naples splitter”) runs through it. Nothing seems to be given its proper space here, neither the churches (of which there are many lovely examples) nor the vehicles, nor the businesses. Everything is thrown together and expected to find a way. Indeed, in this old, unpicked knot of humanity I felt what it must have been like to walk an ancient city, far more than in the relatively broad esplanades of modern Rome, or the preserved carcass of Pompeii.

There is a much-debated word that describes this Naples: authentic. I use it not in the sense that everything there has been passed down intact from the past, or untouched by tourism. It is authentic in the sense of not pretending to be anything it is not. Is it dirty, graffitied, and a touch overwhelming? Maybe so. But it is also full of casual beauty, of baroque edifices that bestride the streets like misplaced pieces of bedroom furniture. Of sweet and savory smells wafting from overwhelmingly Mom & Pop businesses (no Starbuck’s here, and the closest McDonald’s is miles away). Of faces that you’ve seen before, in some Dino Risi or Antonioni movie from your college days. And reclining in the center is a marble personification of the Nile, now fashionably bearded, seeing it all unfold since the 2nd century AD…with a sphinx for a pillow.

There’s a proximity here between the elegant and the ghastly that is reminiscent of Mexico City. This is apparent in places like Cappella Sansevero, an architectural gem that was founded in the late 16th century, but reached its final form in the late 18th under the direction of Prince Raimondo di Sangro, polymath and mystic. The baroque sculptures in his chapel, including a veiled Christ rendered in marble, are magisterial, exquisite—the kind of masterpieces that generate lines in Rome or Florence. On this level, di Sangro belongs to that particular intellectual species, the Enlightenment gentleman-scientist, typified by Jefferson or Franklin.  

But in a chamber below the art is displayed something else entirely: di Sangro’s so-called “anatomical machines”. These are life-size figures of a man and a woman with every detail of internal anatomy laid bare, down to the capillaries. For centuries it was suspected these were actual preserved bodies, “plastinated” by some secret process of di Sangro’s invention—perhaps not entirely with the subjects’ informed consent. There was once even an infant “machine”, since disappeared. 

Recent microscopic examination has proven that the figures are not preserved tissue at all, but made of fabric and wire. Still, the Chapel’s combination of beauty and creepiness, and the esoteric symbolism that run through the place, makes it feel uniquely Naples. These eerie, skinless “machines” are just a few yards off the Spaccanapoli, where you get your gelato and tea-towels. 

Plastinated capital

The other Naples—the plastinated remainders of its time as capital of “The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”— isn’t hard to find. On the the heights of Capodimonte, for instance, with its splendid palazzo, now art museum. From the royal gardens, views extend to the double hump of Vesuvius, the apron of development spread to the Bay, and the distinctive profile of Capri beyond. Or in the monumentality of the Piazza del Plebiscito, embraced by the grandiloquently named Basilica Reale Pontificia San Francesco da Paola, otherwise discernible as Naples’ answer to the Pantheon in Rome, with maybe a little Vatican too. Posh, “official” Naples is there, yet it still has the feel of overripe grandeur, of a dusty library of books long since digitized, but with the finger-smudges and pressed blossoms of books that were used and cherished by human beings.

For the descendants of those who shipped out of here, the legacy is more bittersweet. These green hills, this mountain that disgorged such fertility, once seemed to reject whole generations. To them, the bay was not a simmering picturesque, but a way to sluice away the trash. The view I climbed the Capodimonte to see was the same one my ancestors turned their backs on. And as they slid by the yachts and villas and playgrounds of emperors on Capri, they wondered if they would survive the voyage ahead. For some, that anxiety went on clear over an ocean and a half, until perhaps they saw the low hills of Staten Island, where no emperors ever played. 

Now the trash washes back. Not with any sense of vindication, but with trepidation. After five days in Naples my friend and I went to the Piazza Bellini. A relatively calm, leafy space, prowled by cats who eye the pigeons who eye our crumbs, the piazza is a good place to nurse a prosecco in view of Naples' full profile, from the exposed walls of the Greek polis to the tarted-up townhouses around it. After we’d drunk a little, I asked if our visit had changed his opinion of the city. He thought for a moment, taking in the swath of time around us, the contained physical chaos, and said, “A beguiling shithole.”

© 2019 Nicholas Nicastro

The Republic of Entropy

Modern Havana is an egalitarian dream trapped in a faded, peeling gentility. Whole quarters are lined with colonnades of every style and color, most teetering on the edge of catastrophe. There is dust everywhere as a thousand renovation projects unfold. And yet a hundred thousand more beckon, maybe hopelessly. 

Posted on every third building are hand-scrawled notices of work permits. But there is hardly ever anybody actually working. Just vans standing open, wheelbarrows idle in gardens of dust, full rubbish bins waiting to be carted—as if the contractors just stepped away for breaks that never end.

The place it reminds me most of is Palermo. The Sicilian capital and Havana share a similar island climate, geography, a baroque distress that add up to what writer Mark Kurlansky calls a “subtropical delirium”. In both cities, the marble scat of recently extinct oligarchs. It’s easy to imagine an aged Burt Lancaster strolling out of sight behind some peeling facade in Vedado, as Luchino Visconti envisioned the end of aristocracy in The Leopard. 

Except here, the economic war never ended. No EU money— nor Mafia money, for that matter—pours in. But the pride is similar, whether it be in the shattered grandeur of a capital city, or in the way the locals never accept a tip unless it is subtly given, with no air of implied inferiority.

Or in the cars. Visitors talk about the American Fairlanes, Bel Airs, Champions and Roadmasters, circa 1950-1961. And they are remarkable—painted like tropical birds, dagmars engorged, V-8s rumbling, they process down the avenues like plus-size runaway models, ribbons fluttering from antennae, drivers giving each other knowing nods. It must have been much the same, this street-pride, when the smart vehicles of colonial Havana were horse-drawn volantes with man-sized wheels. For most tourists arriving in the city, these are the first things they notice.

But it’s not all ancient Americans or charmless Russian Ladas. Havana is a car-spotters paradise, with old Triumphs, Mercedes, Peugeots, Fiats, Jeeps, VWs, Volvos—whatever happened to be on the island the day Batista fled. All of them are kept on the road with ingenuity and determination, jerry-rigged with custom parts, spit, and love. There seems no reason that ‘55 Ford Victoria with the two-tone paint and whitewalls can’t be around in twenty years. Yet we all know it has to end sometime. Even steel has its limits. 

Stone and steel break down, but people don’t. For all their material distress, the Cubans themselves are a constantly renewable resource. To us, visitors from a land long hostile, they offered nothing but friendliness, kindness, familiarity. Cubans may lie off the mainstream, but the mainstream isn’t everything. As evidence of their fundamental civilization, of their rationality and decency, I need only submit one fact: their children are safe to play in the streets. 

Yes, their buildings may be falling down, their cars nursed and cajoled into another year of life. Their future is untold. Yet the Cubans do not grow up afraid.

© 2018 Nicholas Nicastro

The March That Was Left Behind

As a resident of northern Virginia, I've had the opportunity to watch DC's latest museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC) take shape on the National Mall. Witnessing the long construction phase has been like seeing a thought form in the mind of the nation--a collective utterance that promises much, yet is still fraught with ambivalence. 

Upon visiting the finished Museum, I can say that while the thought is still not settled, the promise is fulfilled. The African-American experience is represented over galleries that spiral up from the gloom of the lowest level, from displays on the onset of race-based chattel slavery in the 15th century, into the comparative light of 2017. The history is presented mostly as text, illustrated by carefully selected objects, like Nat Turner's personal Bible, Harriet Tubman's shawl, and an airplane flown by the Tuskegee airmen. The cumulative effect is dignified and powerful. If the greatness of a nation is like individual genius--able to entertain two incompatible ideas at the same time--then the NMAAHC (and its sister institution, the National Museum of the American Indian) provide essential counter-narratives to the white marble monuments that surround them.

And yet, it wasn't the Bible or the plane that stuck in my mind when I left. Instead, it was a simple placard that describes the human toll of the slave trade: out of every 100 people enslaved in Africa, 39 died on the march from the interior to the coast, 4 or 5 died in detention, and another 9 during the voyage to America. The exhibit leaves implicit what is broadly understood, that the genocide of African people began when native potentates with business ties to Europeans brought their captives to slave trading stations on the coasts. The point is arguably left too implicit: NMAAHC never comes out and says "Both European-descended whites AND African blacks were implicated in the crime of slavery." Yet based on the Museum’s own information, that is manifestly true.

Interestingly, the forced Long March was far more deadly than the other, more popularly known part of the journey, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. The fatality rate at sea was horrific, but still less than half as large, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the total loss of life, as on land. So why are we all taught about the journey by slave ship, but not about the March? Why is the European slave ship, stuffed with its human "cargo", emblematic of the horror of the slavery, but not the more deadly trip that preceded it? 

Part of this can probably be blamed on the surviving evidence. Period posters advertising the human contents of slave ships are relatively easy to find. Woodcuts of slaves chained in ships' holds are in every US history textbook ever published. Slave ships physically presented themselves at American ports, and some famous Americans, such as John Paul Jones, actually worked on them.  Records of captive deaths during the passage were not necessarily complete, but they exist. According to the best known estimates, some 10-15% of African captives died at sea.

By contrast, contemporary depictions of the Long March are rarer. It's probably just as well, as the spectacle of men, women and children chained over journeys of hundreds of miles, whipped and starved and raped and collapsed from exhaustion, their limbs swollen and festering in their bonds, could not have been pretty. Nor is the written evidence much better. In 1839, British historian Thomas Fowell Buxton reported on a particular slave caravan: “Many of the unhappy victims, who could be no longer urged, by the whips of their drivers, to further exertions of their drivers, had their ears cut off while yet alive, and were then left to await the agonies of the last moment in the Desert.” (The severed ears were used for record-keeping.) Buxton goes on “the number of those who die, merely on the journey from the interior to the coast, [is] five-twelfths of the whole” (more than 40%; emphasis in original).

It's hard not to suspect another reason to forget the March. Just as every good story needs a hero, every good historical narrative needs a villain. And the villains of the Middle Passage are easy to point to: they were the men who owned the ships, the men who sailed them, the men who kept the death tallies, and the men who provided the market for their services. In a word, they were racist, mercantile whites. 

The Long March was more deadly than the Middle Passage, but the faces of its perpetrators offer no such clarity. In the web of relations that made the slave trade possible, it was overwhelmingly native Africans who fulfilled the demand. Without their help, rounding up millions of captives for export would have been far less practical--and far less profitable. Depicting it would present a more morally ambiguous picture, with powerful black chieftains and war profiteers among those who sold their neighbors literally down the river. 

The Museum makes a point to explain how servitude became racialized in colonial America, changing from a temporary legal condition affecting blacks and whites to a hereditary status applied to blacks alone. But it leaves unspoken how the moral onus of slavery has come to be racialized too—applied only to the "demand" side of the trade. In fact, the trade and its crimes were not just consequences of white racism, but critically dependent on African partners. This isn’t to minimize or dismiss the role of Europeans and white Americans. It is merely to acknowledge the truth: slavery was a global institution that was bigger than racism.

On its website, the NMAAC describes the “four pillars” on which it stands. Number 2 is “[helping] all Americans see how their stories, their histories, and their cultures are shaped and informed by global influences.” Insofar as the Museum underemphasizes the Long March and all it implies for slavery as an institution, it is not only failing to remember its many victims. It is also failing place to US slavery in its proper context among the globe’s other “slaveries”.

  Places like NMAAHC are powerful shapers of public perception. When the casual visitor reads something at a museum--especially one as iconic as the Smithsonian--it becomes tantamount to God's own truth, chiseled in tablets of stone. Naturally, then, how the history is packaged becomes as much a political product as a scholarly one. Forthrightly acknowledging the role of Africans in perpetuating the slave trade might, for instance, complicate the argument for reparations for the descendants of slaves, as it would pose the question: “So what reparations do native Africans owe?”

     I like to think of the NMAAHC as an ongoing project--as a still-incomplete thought in the mind of the nation. Which of its roles in our “national conversation on race” should come first? To inform? To celebrate? To atone? To challenge? The newest museum on the Mall will have a long time to sort out these priorities. Let us all hope it finds the best balance.

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

The New Victorians

Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman keep the fires burning.

The theme of this blog is geographical travel, not necessarily history. But my meeting this week with Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman, a remarkable couple living in Port Townsend, WA, blurs that distinction in the most interesting way.
    The Chrismans might be called “lifestyle antiquarians”. Or “anthrochronologists”. Or “practical archaeologists”—I’ve struggled with phrases to describe them exactly. They are fascinated by the latter Victorian period, and have decided not only to study it, but to live like people of reasonable means in the years 1880-1900. And so, they reside in a 128 year-old house in Port Townsend, a town with much surviving Victorian architecture. They wear Victorian clothes, and read Victorian literature (high and low) by the light of Victorian oil lamps. They sleep on a feather bed, and keep and prepare their food with Victorian appliances, using recipes gleaned from period sources. And so on.
    They make concessions to practicality. There’s an old Isuzu truck parked in front of their house; Sarah pursues her writing career with a steel-nibbed fountain pen, but is still reachable by email. They have a PayPal account. “No one understands better than us that we can’t completely recreate the past,” says Gabriel. The vast infrastructure for that—the gas works and the ice deliverymen and the parts to repair their period machines—no longer exist.
    So why do they bother? There’s been a lot of chatter about them on the interwebs, reacting to their project with varying degrees of fascination, incredulity, and scorn (e.g., see here). The word “twee” comes up a lot, as in “those twee hipsters”. As much as most people bother to process it, the Chrismans’ lifestyle is dismissed as a particularly rabid form of nostalgia—a Masterpiece Theatre obsession run amok.
    The reality is far more interesting. Sarah is trained in cultural studies, Gabriel as a historian and archivist. As they conceive it, the Victorian period was not a superseded style obliterated by progress. It was literally what novelist L.P. Hartley called the past—“a different country” where things were done differently. It was a place where real people lived, with a real culture that was not at all “twee” to them. And so, like any good pair of cultural anthropologists, the Chrismans became “participant observers” in this different community, immersing themselves far beyond the reading of monographs and the attending of scholarly conferences.
    Is their immersion complete? Of course not (see above). What they mostly have left to participate in are the processes of material culture: what’s it like to light a period oil lamp? (Answer: it’s easy, but there’s a knack to it.) What’s it like to wear a corset all day and all night? (Answer: it’s not as uncomfortable as you’d assume.) What’s it like to visit the ladies’ room in a full-length Victorian outfit? (Answer: Victorian undergarments are more hygienic, and more friendly to female anatomy, than their modern equivalents.) What’s it like to keep time with a period watch? (Answer: difficult, because the electromagnetic fields we moderns live in tend to gum up the components.) The Chrismans have, through their experiential studies, recovered knowledge of the past that is simply invisible to conventional historians, because the written sources don’t bother to discuss such mundane, everyday things.
    Alas, contemporary attitudes have become a drag on their project. Due largely to the BBC and Hollywood, most people have a vaguely pleasant sense of Victorian aesthetics, but a hostile one to its politics. The very word “Victorian” is often used as a pejorative, synonymous with classism, racism, sexism, and sexual prudery. “The past is garbage” is an attitude that can be voiced in polite society, even though, as Sarah argues, “saying that would never be OK if it was about some foreign group.” Folks who abhor ethnic stereotypes think nothing of stereotyping millions of people who lived in the past— people who, as Gabriel notes, “can’t defend themselves now.”
    Complicating the picture is the fact that Victorian times are perceived as the heyday of worldwide colonialism, genocide of American Indians, and Jim Crow. Few formerly marginalized people (and their white allies) have much nostalgia for times they view as irredeemably repressive. To them, the Chrismans’ vigorous defense of their era sounds tone-deaf.
    But this isn’t exactly fair. First, because not all Victorians supported the old sins, and in some cases pioneered resistance to them. Second, because few deserve to have their lives defined by the worst excesses of their times. Imagine a person from 2016 waking up in 2116, and immediately saddled with blame for Bangladeshi sweatshop labor and the flooding of southern Florida—despite the fact that they personally strove to buy American and drove a hybrid car. Indeed, the very notion that Victorian times were inherently more evil than modernity is at least debatable, and perhaps laughable. They may have had children working bobbin machines in 1880, but they didn’t fill the oceans with plastic or drop barrel bombs on civilians.
    It’s unthinking and unfair, but progressivist arrogance takes its toll on the Chrismans. Sarah, who is mercurial and expressive, finds she must summon up the energy to step outside her door, even in hip, liberal Port Townsend. “It’s like running a gauntlet. I don’t know what I’ll find when I go out there.” Reactions to her hand-sewn wardrobe and corseted waist range from dewy admiration to white-hot anger—as if she is personally trying to undo a century of feminism. (She has written a book, Victorian Secrets, on what she learned wearing that half-desired, half-detested garment.) Gabriel, whose day job is in a bicycle shop, comes off as the prose to Sarah’s poetry—a mechanic and rationalist. He faces less hostility for looking different, perhaps because men’s fashions haven’t changed as much.
    To a historical novelist like me, several of whose books as set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a visit to the Chrismans is a tour of Candyland. Their restored wood-burning range, with its jet-black skin and nickel warming racks, is like a polished locomotive. Sarah’s high-wheel tricycle (alas, a reproduction) has a cleverly asymmetric design—the Millennium Falcon of bikes. When seen through the Chrismans’ eyes, Victorian times don’t seem twee or repressive as much as more immediate, a place one could actually visit and learn from. If the past is a foreign country, they are ready to be your guides. May their 19th century go on forever.

© 2016 Nicholas Nicastro

The Last Castle

The castle from the valley.

If there's anything most people think they know about Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, it's that it was the inspiration for the Magic Castle of Walt Disney. If they know anything else, it's that Neuschwanstein ("new swan stone") is the brainchild of King Ludwig II, the so-called "Mad King" who was completely disinterested in statecraft, but spent huge sums on realizing his romantic fantasies. This castle is his crowning achievement: a mammoth tribute to his friend and inspiration, Richard Wagner, embodying in stone the great Ur-legends that became the glorious past of a newly unified Germany. Or at least Wagner's versions of them.

That's all I knew when I arrived there yesterday, at what is still the #1 or 2 top tourist destination in the country (1.3 million visitors a year). I picked up some notion somewhere that Neuschwanstein was little more than a garden folly on a grand scale--great for viewing at a distance, but with not much to see within. Tastemakers deplore it as kitsch. The masses of unwashed surging in the town below, Hohenschwangau, did nothing to dispel these impressions.

But I was pleasantly surprised by Neuschwanstein. It goes without saying that it is spectacular from afar: situated on a high perch above the valley, its profile in white stone beckons in any season. On the day we visited, it was shrouded by tendrils of cloud, as if emerging from--or spinning--the mists of prehistory. 

Actually, though the interior was never finished, there's plenty to see inside. The interior is replete in the way we never see anymore, with every square inch painted, gilded, or carved. The style is 19th century Romantic, like a Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life. Photo-taking is verboten, but pictures are easy to find on the web, and worth looking at. It is certainly the only palace I know with a grotto--an actual cavern, with stalactites-- located directly off the master bedroom. 

How Ludwig II tops a staircase.

Of course it's kitsch. And yet, the Disneyfication of its profile has the paradoxical effect of making Ludwig's pastiche "original" seem more authentic than it would otherwise. Instead of the prehistory of Germany, Neuschwanstein has become the ur-source of a far larger empire: the Wonderful World of Disney. 

Despite its transgressions against conventional good taste, there's something else that's real about the place. It stems directly from Ludwig himself, who did not play at nostalgia or the faux antique, but actually lived for and in the world he created. For him, modernity was nothing much to celebrate, and the past was not an attitude to strike, but a kind of utopia. Knowing the human costs of that modernity, who's to say he was wrong? 

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

The Terrible Angel

It's a feeling I've had most often in a good bookstore, when faced with the sheer number of books I'll never have time to read. Or my first time in Italy, when the sudden superabundance of antiquity and beauty pitched me into a strange kind of despair. After my first exposure to Kyoto, I finally feel I have travelled to a truly different place -- though I've been an ocean from home for more than a week. Imagine spending a day smelling nothing but essential oils, and then imagine that happening to all your other senses too.

There have been many moments today when the beauty has simply wrung something out of me involuntarily, a little mortal "oh". My first glimpse of Kinkaku-ji, the so-called "Golden Pavilion", shining in the morning sun, seated in glory over its own reflection and retinue of fading irises. Or dappled sunbeams piercing a still pond at Ryoan-ji. Or an astonishing wooden screen at Nijo-jo's palace, carved from a single piece of wood, that somehow depicts peacocks from one side and peonies from the other. Or the particular "clacking" sound tall bamboo makes in the wind -- something I discovered right outside the door of my room at Myoshin-ji temple.

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure," said Rainer Maria Rilke, "and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible." I am not destroyed today, and I am temporarily relieved to be back in the world of plywood and linoleum and internal combustion. But there's still time for me to disappear tomorrow. 

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro

Tokyo Drift

When my friends learn I'm in Japan, their first reaction is "great!"-- followed usually by "um, why?" I know what they mean by this, as in "why now?" or "are you there on business?" Unfortunately, I have no such excuse. One of my books, Empire of Ashes, was translated and published in Japan a decade ago. Whether it sold or anybody read it is a mystery to me. But that's not the reason I'm here.

Interest in Japan-for-its-own-sake is harder to justify today than it was a generation ago. Back then, it was the Land of the Rising Sun that was the focus of American anxiety, as Japanese "export champions" like Toyota, Sony and Fugitsu stood poised to bury their American competitors. In the 1980's and early '90's, it was widely expected that the Japanese economy would leapfrog the U.S. both in size and clout, with America reduced to nothing more than a colony for natural resources like coal, lumber, grain, and penurious blondes for Japan's pleasure sector. (See the 1993 Sean Connery movie Rising Sun for more on that. Or on second thought, maybe don't...) On TV, we watched Richard Chamberlain in Shogun. If America had a future, it looked increasingly Asian in character, as famously depicted in Blade Runner. Smart parents prepared their children to serve their new overlords by teaching them Japanese. 

Obviously, stuff didn't work out as expected. As Japan sputtered, and dominant American tech companies "disrupted" the world economy, nipponophobia receded -- to be replaced in due course by anxiety over the rise of China. Time will tell if the latter is any more of a mirage. (Spoiler alert: it probably isn't, but the West will change China far more than China will change us.) Our political debates rarely hinge now on what we can learn from Japan, and those prep classes have long since been replaced by sleep-away immersion camps in Mandarin. Being interested in Japan therefore has the feel of arriving at a party that broke up twenty years ago.

I can't quit the place so easily. Part of this must lie in my own experience as a person-of-a-certain-age, with Japan looming larger my rear view mirror than it does through the our collective windshield. Men of my generation will always be a bit like Blade Runner's Rick Deckard, rumpily out of place and looking askance at his Asian future as he wrestles with his bowl of udon.

But in another sense, Japan is even more relevant now than it was as the locus of chatter over superpower rivalry. The Japanese economy stumbled, expectations had to be reduced--and there lies the real lesson. For in a future where efficiency will be as valuable much as consumption, where making the most out of a smaller footprint will bear the greater rewards, Japan will be more relevant than ever. If I am to be watched over in my old age by a domestic robot, my future will arrive first in Japan. If my daughter or granddaughter loses all interest in marriage or childrearing, she will be more like her Japanese sisters already are. America's Great West Coast tsunami of 2037, caused by an earthquake combined with sea-level rise, already happened in Japan back in 2011. If my great-grandchildren own a condo on Mars, that off-world pied-à-terre will likely include elements of compact, highly-refined Japanese design, not Chinese or American glitz.

Traveling to Japan, therefore, is a little like time-traveling to an era I'll barely see, if at all. Though this isn't a business trip, I can imagine no more important business.

© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro