Now that we're back here in Mexico, many of you ask us about the differences with Asia, and specifically with Thailand (where we lived for a year and a half). Although we've already covered a lot of that in this blog, particularly about Thailand and Malaysia, I want to share an article by Agustín Basave Benítez that we came across in a book called "Soñar no Cuesta Nada" (Ediciones Castillo, Monterrey, México), which struck us for how closely his perceptions and analysis of Asia matched our own.

A Glimpse at the East (Japan and China).

By Agustín Basave Benítez.

"More than a region, the East is a worldview. It is not another world so much as, fundamentally, another way of seeing the world. The relationship between human beings and nature, the meaning of life, the idea of the divine, so many things have been conceived in these lands in ways very different from the West. It is another mode of thinking altogether. The Eastern mind turns inward, binds itself to the supernatural, and, like a spiral, folds back upon itself. Here, time is not linear, nor is causality unilineal. Hence the mysticism, the philosophy that seems deliberately oblique and unsystematic, and the general tendency to encode a practical ethics in abstract counsel."

"Beyond realpolitik, on the axiological plane, I think I can perceive a fundamental difference between East and West. Western intelligentsia has tended to view conflict as the propeller driving the engine of progress, while in Eastern thought the central concept has been harmony. These currents have, of course, placed their emphases differently: in the first case toward the collective (with a long list of proponents in the "conflictivist" school of social sciences) and in the second, curiously, toward the individual (with an extensive moralist literature). But neither the religions of the West have posited the harmony of the soul as something fully attainable in this world, nor have the political sociologies of the East proclaimed the clash of interests as the determining element of how society functions. In any case, let us say that from both perspectives the harmonic ideal is the aspiration, only that Easterners tend toward it as a point of origin and Westerners as a destination. With their respective exceptions, one side privileges the stability of equilibrium, inner peace, and concord; the other, the dynamism of imbalance, internal struggle, and the collision of opposites."

"You don't need to travel very far across this continent to notice that peculiarity. Whether through the parliamentary route and the State-Business symbiosis as in Japan, or through the centralized party-government and market socialism of China, the fact is that Asian countries tend to be governed by a culture of consensus. And what to say of Japanese syncretism, which does not arise from antagonism but from a smooth interweaving of Shinto and Buddhism, or of the frequent overlap of Buddhism and Taoism in the Chinese example, all of it blended under the ecumenical influence of Confucius. What strikes the outside observer as ambiguity, polytheism or pantheism?, or as haziness, the absence of a structured liturgy, strikes the man of the East as simply natural."

"Japan deserves its own paragraph. Despite its supposed 'Westernization,' I see the Eastern imprint in every fold of its being. The departure from the straight-line mentality gives it a very characteristic touch of delicacy. The exquisiteness of its artistic expressions and the refinement of its courtesy are, in my view, a reflection of a subtlety in abstraction capable of distinguishing every kind of nuance. A village, a house, a garden, especially a garden, reveals the tight bond between the Japanese and nature, and their vision of vital order: dialectical relation gives way to prolongation. Perhaps that is why one doesn't sense any dilemma between continuity and rupture, originality and imitation. The persistence of a large part of its cultural past in the midst of a prodigious technological modernization constitutes Japan's answer to the age-old question of how much tradition is healthy and how much modernization is necessary for a country. A balance that is, by any measure, well worth taking into account."

"And if all of that weren't enough to make Japan a magnetic place, add to it the softness of its landscape. Staying at a provincial ryokan is the best way to experience the measured succession of everything: food, rooms, rivers, plants. This is not a country of sudden jolts. Its beauty is not the kind that shakes or startles, but the kind that soothes and relaxes. I still debate with myself which country has the most beautiful women, but I have the impression that it is in Japan where there are the fewest unattractive ones. Because despite Western aesthetic prejudices, which I readily admit have shaped me, it is impossible not to notice the low incidence of physical disproportion among the female population. She too, like the lakes and the valleys, evokes serenity. Nothing assaults the visitor, neither the surroundings nor the customs. It is not easy, not even for the tense inhabitant of a megalopolis, to feel harassed in a society where bows and smiles are plentiful and tipping does not exist."

"Even so, to understand Japan and the East, one must know China. Here are the roots. It is the mother culture, the point of departure not only for Asia but, in more ways than one, for all of humanity. Its dimensions and its complexity make it a universe within the universe. It seems as though the earth has not slipped from its orbit only because its surface is pressed down by millions of Chinese carrying on their shoulders the weight of an enormous cultural wealth. And there they are, teeming in the fields, in the factories, in the markets, holding the threads of a vast and singular social fabric that keeps an entire subcontinent remarkably whole. Eastern order and discipline have undoubtedly helped, because despite the image projected by the daily vehicular chaos in which bicycles and automobiles tangle together, it is obvious that only a disciplined and orderly people can remain united around its own diversity."

"If any nation is fertile ground for the seed of historical particularism, that nation is China. The magnitude of its geography and its population, its cultural inheritance, and the attachment of the Chinese to their land make them keenly receptive to the idea of a project of their own, one suited to their singularities. Perhaps only they can still afford that luxury today. What's more, their potential is so vast that one might ask whether China must open itself to the world or the world must open itself to China. And that vision seems to reproduce itself in the microcosm of each household, especially among the peasants, who in a country that is still predominantly rural make up the overwhelming majority. The men and women of this land carry the world in their heads. Especially the women, who, as Mao would say, are the other half of the sky, the more beautiful half, I would add, and who seem to keep the secret of the first half of China's coming century."

"With its essentially visual culture, the East has as much future as it has past. Those who underestimate its chances in the arena of international competition make the mistake, in very poor form, of citing its supposed lack of pragmatism. They fail to see that when they set their minds to it, Easterners can be as pragmatic as anyone, if in a different way. A Westerner can grasp the difference when he encounters in a Tokyo shop a soft drink whose slogan promises to quench 'not only your thirst but also your heart,' and, after smiling at the incorrigible Asian mysticism of it, falls for the marketing trap and buys the thing. Or when he realizes that only a profoundly practical human collective could ideologize itself (and de-ideologize itself) as intensely as China has. The fact is, the East does not fit into Western labels. To judge it, to pigeonhole it according to the rigid parameters of Eurocentric origin, is to lose sight of it entirely. If classical Greece inaugurated the practice of distinguishing, separating, and classifying, Asia has maintained the practice of confusing, mixing, and interweaving. And that is how it must be understood, if we ever hope to do away with the dichotomies that divide humanity and that, for that matter, reflect neither its polychromy nor its tendency toward the mutual enrichment of cultures."

All of this, incidentally, is quite applicable to Thailand, at least in our experience.

Sanuk