[ed. See also: Japan: some impressions.]
The most generally satisfying experience of foreignness—complete bafflement, but with no sense of rejection—probably comes still from time spent in Japan. To the foreigner Japan appears as a Disneyland-like nation in which everyone has a well-defined role to play, including the foreigner, whose job it is to be foreign. Everything works to facilitate this role-playing, including a towering language barrier. The Japanese believe their language to be so difficult that it counts as something of an impertinence for a foreigner to speak it. Religion and morality appear to be reassuringly far from the Christian, Islamic or Judaic norms. Worries that Japan might Westernise, culturally as well as economically, have been allayed by the growing influence of China. It is going to get more Asian, not less.Even in Japan, however, foreigners have ceased to function as objects of veneration, study and occasionally consumption. Once upon a time, in the ancient and medieval worlds, to count as properly foreign you had to seek out a life among peoples of a different skin colour or religion. They were probably an impossibly long distance away, they might well kill you when you got there, and if you went too far you might fall off the edge of the world.
At the dawn of the travelling age, writing an imaginary legal code for a Utopian society that he called Magnesia, Plato divided foreigners into two main categories. “Resident aliens” were allowed to settle for up to 20 years to do jobs unworthy of Magnesians, such as retail trade. “Temporary visitors” consisted of ambassadors, merchants, tourists and philosophers. Broaden that last category to include all scholars, and you have a taxonomy of travellers that held good until the invention of the stag party.
To be foreign got much more straightforward from the 17th century onwards, when Europe adopted a political system based on nation states, each with borders, sovereignty and citizenship. Travel-papers in hand, you could turn yourself into an officially recognised foreigner simply by visiting the country next door—which, with the advance of mechanised transport, became an ever more trivial undertaking. By the early 20th century most of the world was similarly compartmentalised.
The golden age of genteel foreignness began. The well-off, the artistic, the bored, the adventurous went abroad. (The broad masses went too, as empires, steamships and railways made travel cheaper and easier.) Foreignness was a means of escape—physical, psychological and moral. In another country you could flee easy categorisation by your education, your work, your class, your family, your accent, your politics. You could reinvent yourself, if only in your own mind. You were not caught up in the mundanities of the place you inhabited, any more than you wanted to be. You did not vote for the government, its problems were not your problems. You were irresponsible. Irresponsibility might seem to moralists an unsatisfactory condition for an adult, but in practice it can be a huge relief.
by The Economist | Read more:
Image: C. Corr
