Trends in Japan is featuring interviews with notable foreign residents of Japan. Our current interview is with award-winning journalist and author Elizabeth Kiritani. She also serves as an announcer for bilingual programs on NHK.

As a young girl, Elizabeth Kiritani would visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston every week, losing herself for hours in front of masterpieces of Japanese art.

Drawn by the prospect of learning the tea ceremony and flower arrangement, she took a year's leave from a Harvard-affiliated hospital, where she worked as a blood specialist, and came to see the country for herself. Now, 22 years later, Kiritani continues to be fascinated by the simple beauty of life in Japan, particularly the old Shitamachi district of Tokyo where she makes her home.

"One of the things I was really impressed with at first was how visually beautiful Japan was," recalls the newspaper columnist and author of several books on the rapidly vanishing aspects of traditional life in Japan.

"The habits of most people were so neat and orderly. Nobody was eating or drinking in public places. People swept in front of their homes when they got up in the morning and watered down the streets in the summer. There was beauty in the organization of the community and the city. Even the subway was clean and quiet!"

A Small Village in a Big Town
These impressions have been reinforced through the 18 years she has spent living in a traditional nagaya, or row house, where she did without many modern conveniences.

"We didn't have hot water," she notes, "and no bath. Going to the public bath was an adventure, but I got to know so many people there. And when it got cold in the winter and I got frostbite, my neighbors gave me special gloves. A simple life without any machines was a wonderful and positive experience for me."

This sense of community, though, was the one thing she found lacking during her first few years in the country, when she lived in the northern city of Sapporo. "I had a problem with large apartment complexes. I moved several times in search for a neighborhood where you got to know people around you and greeted them on the street, but I couldn't find a place like that.

"After I got married [to artist Itsuo Kiritani in 1983], I said to my husband, 'I love Japan except for one thing: I can't understand how people can stand living so isolated from each other with no personal connections with the places they live.'

"After I complained, he said, 'Oh, we'll move to Shitamachi. There, you'll have too much of a community, and I'm sure you'll change your mind!' Well, on the day I moved here, I was walking around and an elderly lady came up to me and said, 'Who are you? What are you doing here?' I knew then that this was going to be a fun place. It has all the convenience of a big city, but it's like living in a small, warm village."

Return to Simplicity
Forgoing modern conveniences in a nagaya has allowed Kiritani not only to get to know her neighbors better but also to enhance her awareness of the four seasons.

"We have four seasons in Boston too, but now I have a completely different feeling for them. I know the chirping of insects and know that when the pine crickets stop, another kind of cricket starts up. I'm aware of the different flowers that are in bloom - the amaryllis around the autumnal equinox, and so forth. These have become a major part of my life."

"You gain a different focus. When it's cold in winter, just having a cup of tea and holding it in your hand and feeling its warmth is wonderful. I've had a lot of tea and coffee before coming here but never appreciated or felt that kind of pleasure. Our lives have become so mechanized and complicated that we've lost the ability to attain a lot of the joy we could be having from simple, everyday things."

Traditional Solutions to Modern Problems
Kiritani believes that restoring such simplicity can make a big contribution toward solving many of the problems we confront today, not only in Japan but also around the world.

"I think Japan has many things that could be promoted more - ways of doing things and making things that don't harm the environment.

"One would be a revival of the furoshiki [wrapping cloth]. Just think of all the paper that's wasted every time you go shopping, with everything being double wrapped and triple wrapped. If the revival could be enforced by law, the department stores would make their own furoshiki cloths, and this would visually bring back Japan, too.

"When you see a woman dressed in a kimono with two plastic shopping bags, it looks like she's carrying the trash. It's so ugly. If she had the things in a cloth furoshiki, though, it would be much more beautiful. Plus, the old traditions of wrapping and folding would come back."

Sadly, far from being revived, the old lifestyle seems to be disappearing day by day. "This neighborhood is one of the few places left like this, and it's being disturbed by tall buildings and the lack of city planning. Everything is being planned so that companies can reap economic benefits.

"Restoring the old look would take a great deal of foresight and require that politicians and bureaucrats no longer try to make money off construction projects." It could be done easily, though, she contends, if a ban were enforced, say, on the construction of buildings over two stories high.

Another positive change would be a revision of the inheritance tax. "Many of the remaining big pieces of land in the city, like the old daimyo estates, have just one house on them. When the owner dies, these plots have to be cut up into small sections to pay the inheritance tax. So one very easy solution would be to say, 'No inheritance tax until you rebuild.'

"You could then keep some of the old houses for generations. If an owner three generations later wants to tear it down to build a tall building and make some money off of it, you can levy the tax at that point. Many people don't want to tear down their old houses or cut up the land; they just can't pay the tax."

Source of Stimulation
Kiritani has no plans to leave her adopted home. "I want to stay in this neighborhood. My husband keeps wanting to move to New York or Germany or Italy, but I've been here for 19 years, and I don't want to move. It's like a big family, and without my community I would not be able to manage as well. Most of the fun in my life - even my new hobby of ballroom dancing - comes from just being with and talking to my neighbors.

"Through the neighborhood, I continue to have new interests and to meet new people, and that's what I call a happy life. A life without a neighborhood would be a horrible idea."

Elizabeth Kiritani
Born in Boston, Massachusetts. Graduated from Wheaton College and studied at Harvard Medical School. Came to Japan in 1979 and now lives in the Yanaka district of Taito Ward, Tokyo. Is an announcer for bilingual programs of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corp.), a freelance journalist, and the author of Vanishing Japan: Traditions, Crafts, and Culture and other works. Received the Nihon Bungei Taisho award for journalism in 1998.