10 feb

Reading ‘Bending Prosperity’. A book by FT-journalist David Pilling about the way Japan dealt with the aftermath of the tsunami in 2011. A fascinating book, which lifts a few of the veils of this mysterious, and because of that, fascinating country.
One of the examples Pilling writes about is of the Bonsai trainee who has to wait three years before he is allowed to start pruning trees. He doesn’t clarify what had to, or could, be done in the meantime – I would assume that the Bonsai culture is all about pruning – but rightly assumes that the sense of wonder this kind of behaviour causes is explanatory in itself.
There are several reasons for my fascination with Japan, but it was culminated in reading the book Moesasji, a tale about a samurai annex artist by the writer Kurosawa, and I am not sure I am spelling these names right. A great book, a kind of Japanese Odyssey.
It was a long time ago that I read the book, middle eighties, way too long for me to remember much of it, but I still get excited thinking about the difficulties Moesasji had to overcome to learn the three real samurai skills; fighting with two swords, calligraphy and bowl making.
I somehow remember the bowl making part best. Moesasji was learning this skill from a master who created dozens of bowls every day. In Moesasji’s eyes those bowls were perfect, every single one of them. The master would glance at them at the end of the day, and would always find some kind of imperfection in them and break them and throw them away. Every single year he would keep just a few bowls, so close to perfection that the master felt obliged to respect his own attempts and keep them.
I was awed by this behaviour. I cannot say it influenced my life very much in the sense that good (in my opinion) should be considered good enough, but it has always been creeping around in the background of my mind, reminding myself I should try harder and push myself more. Satisfaction has become a very thin layer of varnish around my behaviour. Deep down almost everything that I have done in the past should have been thrown away at the end of the day. This is of course what makes journalism the perfect profession for me. It is worrying that with all the electronic transformations of the industry the products of journalists get more short breathed (twitter, blogs) and at the same time have an eternal storage time in the world wide web.
Moesasji was different. He became the master in each of the skills that he devoted himself to. I am not sure it made him happy. I am not sure it really mattered what he found, in a way. I am sure it mattered what he was searching for.
The book has such a fondness for me that I do not dare touching it again. Recently I lent it to a friend. He found the Dutch translation so horrible that he could not get through to the end.
I comfort myself with the beautiful memory of someone seeking perfection, and the knowledge of myself never achieving it.