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Exactly thirty years ago, I left Japanese land for the last time. Standing on the gloss of the Tokyo Airport’s slabs and looking absentmindedly at the impassive crowd around, it is not known for whom dressing up Japanese fashionistas and curiosity of local design, I involuntarily wondered that every Russian who visited Japan: what will happen if the Japanese and Russians, these ice and flame, will come together together? What will win: Japanese discipline or Russian, as it were to put it more in a vigorous, free will?

Alexander Kozhev claimed that it was the Japanese who would become a model for the future global world, because only they are still capable of “disinterested negative”, Negativite Gratoute, but life around me has experiments. In those golden days of Gorbachev’s perestroika, when the world rushed to us enthusiastically (who now remembers this?), One Japanese ethnographic museum decided to replenish his exposition with an original Nenets plague. The Academy of Sciences acted as an intermediary, and the deal under the laws of that time was barter: the Japanese pledged to put computers with boat engines for the plague and adopt three Soviet ethnographers. So I got to Japan, the authorities in Salekhard received computers and boat engines, and a bunch of poles and matter, representing the plague, arrested customs in Moscow, where they disappeared without a trace. That ended, as the time of the flowering of Sakura, the love between the Japanese and the late Soviet scientific community ended.

And now I am again standing on the Kansai airport torn to the shine, heading for the city of Okayama to a small conference. It is not true that the Japanese are similar to robots. Not without pleasure, picking out of memory like raisins from a roll, Japanese words, I turn to them with questions, and I am cordially answered. The train with the fervent name "Haruka" takes me from the basement of the airport to the bridge over the wide Strait. And here, due to the flights of the bridge, under the feverish knock of the wheels, “the monster of the filad” rushed towards me: an unimaginable pesh of reinforced concrete and glass, stretching along the shore of the strait. Materialized Meon. I know that the last word of technological progress is approaching me, life, reasonably arranged and, moreover, is not devoid of cordiality. I just touched her at the airport. Where does such a metamorphosis come from? Why does the triumph of rationality, so understandable and convenient in particular, create in the aggregate something so unimportant and even sinister?

The train immediately crashed into the mosaic body of the monster. At a frantic speed, barriers, wires, streets, signs, cars rushed in front of his nose. The giant depot swam past, bristling with poles of power lines. With thick snakes, transport overpasses took off and fell outside the window. Three times, among this chaos, the Ferris wheel flickered. It was clearly felt: in this adhesion of engineering and material mass, an electrified life and surprisingly plastic substance there is its unshakable principle, some kind of deep truth. Perhaps the truth of the heart. But hearts ... stone.

From the window of my hotel on the seventeenth floor, half a city is in the palm of your hand. Drawn with narrow streets on neat squares, the space is filled with faceless buildings. Nothing clings to the gaze, except for advertising shields, whose catchy inscriptions look all the more grotesque against the background of this concrete desert. Far below, a stream of almost invisible passers -by leaky. At a distance you can see the same wheel of the review of what is unknown. But outside the city, picturesque hills go into the distance.

On the streets a measured, reliable life of the Japanese semi -prophet. People are calm and friendly. They work skillfully and conscientiously. The owner of the restaurant all evening masterfully cuts the fish in front of the clients, without finding signs of fatigue. The daughter of goodbye to a foreigner gives a souvenir to him.

On the local sacred grief in the temple of the Kurodzumi sect, which is, so to speak, the renovation of synthoid, are preparing for the holiday of worshiping the sun. Escalators are installed along the stairs leading to the top of the mountain to facilitate the ascent of the weak. The janitor at the temple, having learned that I was Russian, enthusiastically telling something about Russia: his father was sitting there in prisoner of war camps. Inside the temple, ministers in traditional clothes are sedately, silently prepare for tomorrow's holiday, but they warmly explain the simple rules of their cult. The altar has a board with five commandments of a sect, nothing sectarian, however, do not contain. The most common Japanese wisdom: sincerely pray, sincerely honor parents and raise children, sincerely thank, sincerely thank, sincerely think ... "Sincerely" clearly means to maintain proper relations with others. They say that the best Japanese entrepreneur of the twentieth century, K. Matsusita, gained authority just his Japanese sincerity: an impeccable performance of a traditional bow. Far from our desire to reveal the soul wide open.

Behind the temple, the three nameless mound standing in a row indicate the burial place of the founder of the sect, its ancestors and descendants. The fullness of the birth being is represented here in a wave -like movement - either downward, or ascending, or diverging from the center, like circles on the water.

But it's time to deal with these impressions. The best about the Japanese character, G. Kaiserling said a hundred years ago. The Japanese, recorded Caiserling, “not creators or imitators. They exploit the moment, achieving instant penetration into the empirical value of each gesture and as a result they get an advantage just thanks to their partner. ” Yes, the Japanese are capable students. They diligently studied with China culture. We studied with Portuguese and even Russian religions. We studied at the Third Reich of suicidal nationalism. After the war, America studied with technical progress and management. Now the Japanese or, more precisely, an eternal student in every Japanese, they want to be ahead of the planet of all over the technical innovations, guided by more practical considerations: the technique gives dominance and all sorts of brand new things, to which the consumption society is so hunting. But it’s not enough to say that the Japanese are in their souls. They are students of Bona Fide. The student who does not want to surpass the teacher is bad. But the Japanese are devoted, so to speak, the very state of student. And, even surpassing their teachers, they still remain students who are looking for even greater perfection and secretly thirsty for recognition.

Here is the main conflict of the Japanese mentality: on the one hand, in order to be a great student, you need to develop aggravated susceptibility, spiritual sensitivity, and such qualities really enter into the circle of fundamental life values ​​of the Japanese, who really honor the atmosphere of the heart consent in the family ( Amae ) and the female virtues associated with it, without the birth fullness of life (in the west about this relatively closed closed The side of Japanese life is known little); On the other hand, the desire to adopt other people's knowledge and skill brings up iron will and unshakable self -confidence. The student’s psyche has its gaps and strange clutches: in it a timid imitator gets along with a ruthless dictator and is somewhere inseparable from him. How is it possible and what it means - a special topic that does not fit into the format of these notes. But one cannot fail to notice that, while remaining a student, the student cannot give himself freedom just to know or be able to, all the more not to know freedom. He is doomed to rationalize his knowledge and justify his efforts by their practical result. The teacher is not obliged to do anything like that. The credo of all teachers was expressed by an Orthodox ascetic, saying that evidence was insulting the truth. Teacher's privilege - leave. The student’s duty is to grab.

To seek a “instant understanding” of the situation or, as Caiserling is expressed in another place, “to enter into an organic attitude with the subject of study” involves the ability to make consciousness a clean sheet of paper, return to the origins of perception, and this means: contemplate contemplation, listen to his ears, give will will, feel sensuality, etc. In this case, the purpose of the teaching is to fix your experience, the impeccable verification of the gesture, which itself organizes reality. The task of human self -knowledge here is the task of experience, the “stubborn fact” of being, represented in the very presence of things. For the Japanese, the subject environment is primary and real than ideas. Japanese culture does not have its “metaphysics”, which, we note, does not exist without a sovereign subject. However, it would be more accurate to say that for the Japanese, it is valuable primarily an essential attitude. For them, a thing is valuable and significant, present (in essence, opened) at the right time and in the right place. Such discoveries cannot be banal. The “Japanese world” is nothing more than a set of things, and fetish things-rare and exquisite. Is it not because of the prices in Japan that bite? And is it not from here the absurd Japanomania of the West stems?

Here is the code of Japanese world know: in the system of radiated things, technical rationality converges with aesthetic sensuality, the cult of mental communication hides the most soulless management, everything catchy, even exotic indicates totalitarian unity. The Japanese "soul" is doomed to be something else and a stranger. Diligence, erected to the peace of an inconsistent presence, merged simultaneously with instinct and bliss - this is the composition of the "Japanese heart."

The verification of gestures generates, of course, a feeling of complete uniformity. There is no nation on Earth more close -knit and homogeneous in their spiritual discharge than the Japanese. There is no nation, with the greater clarity of demonstrating the belonging of all its members to the Leviathan state, although the Japanese-and this is also a symbol of their “brilliant apprenticeship”-pronounce it to their manner almost unrecognizable for the European ear: Rabiafuan. The ethereal body of this giant is growing not from ideas, but from a completely different source for which I do not find a better word than the instinct of matter.

Normativity, outlining the absence, can only be perceived under the sign of the game, cannot but be a mask that is the more skillful, the more successfully hemulates “reality”. The Japanese truly know what they are doing. Their diligent articulation of their obviously unattainable dream is nothing more than a caring grinding of a mask. For Europeans from the world of cyborgs, he blows “petrified insensibility”, and for the Japanese it is different and attractive to his novelty, life after life. And in it the Svida is just the smallest of Japanese. The creators of anime - perhaps the greatest gift of Japan to the global world - argue that with their appearance the characters of their cartoons are most reminiscent of the “persons of Caucasian nationality” widely known in Russia, since the latter express the universal type in the best way.

The world of electronic simulators has unexpectedly close consonance in Japan in the "Streetings of the Old Star." The phantoms of information technology hide the emptiness of the inconsistent, and the ancient cults of the Japanese return objective images to pure materiality of the world. In the vicinity of Okayama, I examined the prehistoric sanctuary: several mysterious boulders standing around the shedschik-Kumirny. In the shed - a stone from which the human face clearly appears. The sanctuary has been discovered recently. It is a part of the modern Japanese consciousness, for which the spirit as a pure presence, the “heart of the stone” covers the extremes of personal and property, allowing different degrees of facial sequences from the material element. Here is the root of the vast eastern treasurer. In this perspective, media signs turn out to be a parallel to an archaic totem.

We will not judge the Japanese face-shock frivolously. The game, when it does not break into reality and does not break away from it, there is a true embodiment of sociality. In Japan, it was precisely the empty-three doll (the statues of gods and actors in the east) traditionally acted as a common denominator who balances the spirit and matter, living and dead. And in everyday life, the Japanese always carefully play the social role that life prescribes to them. I would say that through the ages of life they pass playfully , i.e. With complete seriousness.

Two conclusions follow from the foregoing.

Firstly, in the Japanese worldview, relations between things are primarily and more important than the things themselves and, secondly, in the Japanese tradition, this absolute correlation ( Kotsa ) or compatibility, the consistency of things itself receives objective being, and national-specific forms. The Japanese does not know the world through himself, but himself through the world. Truth in Japanese as a “direct attitude to things” is comprehended by “non-thought” and is an boundless “field” of action, its infinitely complex “place” and u-place ( ba ). In Japan, it is the place that pains a person, i.e. Determines his appearance, manners and even facial expression. Education in Japanese means nothing more than the development of the intuition of the convergence, the meeting of a hollow (more precisely, always devastating) substantive and all-proper functionality. Such insight can be designated only as an irrational “sudden insight”, a kind of internal revelation of life, in which everything is revealed only in order to hide. The Japanese adore the ghostly element of illumination and flickering screens. The phantom world of electronics returns to the primary fantasy of the psyche, which disappears in the light of reflection. It is not surprising that, with all their enchantment, the Japanese are characterized by the strongest and, moreover, carefully cultivated nostalgia with new horizons of life. This is strikingly different from young nations of Southeast Asia and even Chinese. To sympathize with the Japanese is unnecessary. Their commitment to the symbols of tradition is perfectly consistent with the commodity fetishism of the capitalist structure.

The idea of ​​the ailment of symbolic and functional measurements of reality came to the Japanese from China and is the general property of the civilization of the Far East. The Chinese themselves, faithful to the premises of their symbolic worldview, never tried to make reality the object of meaning, preferring to follow the involuntary displacement, the game of meaning in the elements of speech. Cunning, but also innocent Chinese sages. They are always satisfied with life, for they live in its pure immanence, expressed only allegorically. They have no responsibility to know or even create something, but are likened to happy babies feeding from their mother in her womb (image of Lao Tzu). The Japanese with their straightforward apprenticeship and the need to reduce this truth to the technical scheme, but they mask their omission with conversations that they “developed” made more “effective” the insight of Chinese genius. Actually, the Japanese specificity is manifested only more obvious just in the desire to highlight and find the dynamics of life. The Japanese gave Chinese symbolism a conceptual or practical interpretation and projected it to the outside world. The Japanese spirit is tightly attached to the material being of Japan. And in the philosophical plan, the “culture of apprenticeship” did not allow the Japanese to solve the problem of mediation between “substance” and “function”, “void” and “phenomenon”. Its heirs had to rely on the frankly irrational ideal of the Buddhist “sudden enlightenment” - more than a weak consolation for the student, seeking just a rational justification of their ideas.

The riddle of the Japanese sphinx: to be, you have to not be.

Task of Japanese thought: do not predict, do not call the thing, miss, to mis-name, mis-pais, mis-take.

And if this error should become an accurate gesture, if absolute will should be poured out of their own non -existence, then suicide by the rules will be the best embodiment of this ideal. The most unattainable dream!

One Western biographer of the writer Misima Yukio, who committed life with ritual, but by coincidence, not so much tragic as gloomy-comic suicide, called this Japanese passion “the nobility of failure”.

So, Japanese objectivity does not apply to things and not to ideas, but to paradoxes that lie at the foundation of meaning. Everything is truly just as false. The mask should be reality. And therefore, the Japanese garden should show the impeccable illusion of wildlife to the point that the looted sand in it depicts something directly opposite: waves on the surface of the sea. This desire to “identify” manifests itself in the modern architectural design of Japan, where buildings can get a pseudo -auristic shape of a flower, shell, etc., is even more frank. Such metamorphoses are like the points of intensification of the imperial rhythms of emptiness, musical cadans in the cacophony of Japanese life. Similarly, in the theater, the mask is flaunted: the emphasis on the illusory of the performance reminds of the reality of the game itself, i.e. total work of Japanese behavior. For the theater in Japan, in accordance with the attitudes of the Japanese tradition, represents, rather, the conditions of the presentation itself: it reveals the decisiveness of the visible, but certifies the reliability of acting.

Что же циркулирует в сверхплотном, ставящем себе свой собственный предел пространстве рарифицированной вещи, которая образует японский мир? Нечто недостижимое в своем совершенстве, которое оказывается, подобно идеальному самоубийству Мисимы Юкио, неудачей всякий раз, когда мы пытаемся его совершить. Эта реальность – самый желанный товар для потребителя и потому бесконечно тиражируется, хотя не может осуществиться. Достаточно того, что она показывает себя.

Жизнь идет вперед катастрофами. В своем первичном фантазме, несравненно более глубоком и властном, чем самые смелые фантазии, японцы добровольно умирают, чтобы… не-вольно жить.