Covering Up Books and Trees

 
Before iPhones, most Japanese read books on the subway.  Some still do.  (This is a country with 100% adult literacy.)  Interestingly, men and women alike cover their books using fancy paper, obscuring book titles.  If it were just men, I might suspect they were hiding something.  (More on popular reading materials later perhaps.)  If it were women only, I might suspect that they wanted something showy and pretty.   Perhaps the purpose is to preserve the books from wear and tear?  Or maybe it is just tradition and societal pressure exists to do so?   At this time, I am not sure what the precise purpose is.  But the books' covers and content are intriguing.  

Japanese books are typically smaller and shorter than books in the West.  They are read from back to front and down columns from right to left.  I am aware that we do not read in a smooth, constant progression.  Rather, our eyes jump and pause as we move across the text.  Depending upon word predictability and length, we skip words and linger on others.  This is how it works with Roman letters.  But how does it work with Japanese (and Chinese) characters?  The answer is:  I don't really know.  I suspect that since a singe character or ideogram represents an idea, not only are Japanese books shorter in length, but a reader's eye movements might differ from ours because of the language structure.  I suspect that the Japanese cannot skip ideograms or they would miss entire ideas.  I want to investigate that question further.  Take a look at the photo (above) that compares  Japanese and English-translation brochures of the famous Tokugawa garden we visited yesterday.  While the writings contain the same information, which is longer, the English or the Japanese?  The brochure is the same length.  Notice that the Japanese characters are much larger than the small English language font. 

Inside each of these straw structures is a tender tree.  Notice how carefully they have been wrapped for protection from the winter's cold?  Unlike our Western culture where nature reflects the Divine, at the heart of Japanese culture is the belief that nature IS the very embodiment of the Divine.  According to Shintoism, kamis are spirits that reside in the trees, rocks, water, and in all parts of nature.  Thus, when a precious 800 year-old tree dies, the nation's top horticultural specialists are called out to coax one of its off-shoots to life lest the enshrined kami no longer have a dwelling place.