IT'S THE END of May, one of those days that makes me grateful to be alive. That's happening pretty often.
We're entering the rainy season. I step out of the sentō (Japanese bath-house) into the warm and stormy night.
The street is dimly lit, and the sound of rain drums on the tin roof above the walkway. This scene may mean little to you. It means everything to me.
I try to illustrate the feeling, the essence of the country which, like a thread, will forever weave through the fabric of my being, no matter where I call home.
But words can only do so much.
Still, try to imagine the moisture in the air; listen to the pattering on the tin roof, the sound like a typewriter; feel the wind blowing across your face; watch the shadowed navy street, where reflections of blinking neon lights dance on the surfaces of puddles.
This to me is the feeling of Japan: Melancholic. Hopeful. Vibrant. Wise. Feelings that, when threaded together, fashion an overall style.
I'm in my neighborhood, Nakano, on the outskirts of Tokyo, across the street from my apartment. Yes, I live across the street from the sentō, and it's glorious.
Sentō differs from the well-known onsen, natural hot springs found all over Japan. The sentō is a public bath-house, perhaps less attractive than the onsen, although that's part of its charm.
With the first one being built in Tokyo dating back to the sixteenth-century, think tiles and tubs, with perhaps a mural of Mt. Fuji adorning the wall. In the lobby, there's usually a vending machine doling out milk, a ritual to replenish the body after a good soak.
Sentō is an aspect of everyday life for locals in the city rather than a quaint getaway for tourists. The one in my neighborhood is literally in the basement of what looks like an apartment building. I didn't know it was there for weeks until I saw the little sentō emblem on Google Maps.
Hitting the sentō in the evening has become part of my routine. Sauna, cold plunge, hot tub, repeat. Baseball or a variety show — very popular in Japan — plays on the small TV in the sauna. A handful of locals and me, bare-naked, sweating it out, relaxing.
There's something about the sentō experience which transcends time. This can be said for much of Japanese culture.
And what is culture? If the geography, mountains, infrastructure and topography of a place are the hardware, culture is a country's software. It's how it works.
Still, there's something missing. Composed between the hardware and the software, for something to feel alive, there's gotta be some magic.
Style is the magic of a place.
My great-grandfather Max Lerner wrote about what he called the style of a civilization in his book, America as a Civilization.
I must get my profound interest in style from him, as this concept lights my soul on fire like little else. Max writes:
Style isn't understood from moving, doing, and seeing. The magic is most profoundly perceived through experiencing.
You could sit on a bench on a busy street in Rome, Beijing, Miami, Tokyo or Buenos Aires, and learn more about that city's style than if you checked every item off of a must-see list.
Japan's style captivates me endlessly. It's the spirit unseen which gusts as the wind, carrying the faintest scent of earth through the moonless spring night.
It's the sounds of the convenient store. Style is how you'll see a spectrum of color as dyed hair nearly every time you leave the house, sometimes on elderly ladies in kimono, sometimes on gents training at the gym.
Style comes with time, molding our own, and recognizing it in a place. That's why I live here. Yes, I do have blonde-dyed hair.
And yes, I do rock some particularly baggy pants these days. But style is something else. It's what makes Japan Japan, and it's what makes me, me, and you, you.
Your style is something nobody can ever truly know but you. Nobody can take it from you. Nobody can force it upon you. It's something which we alone determine; which we alone sense as it changes through the course of our lives.
My style will forever be influenced by my time in Japan, and I think that's pretty sweet.
Japan has enchanted me since I was young. Years ago, before coming here for the first time, my current situation would have been unimaginable. All I knew about it came from the magazine articles I'd read, the TV shows, movies, and books.
The movies made Japan seem otherworldly, untouchable; articles portrayed it as so refined and distinct; Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon, the TV shows I watched, were more implicit representations of Japan, something I realized when I moved here.
And the books — well, the book, Shogun — made it seem like no other place could match the depth of its traditions and culture.
Still, like Max says, these are parts of the whole. Together, they paint a pretty picture, but a picture is static.
A place is alive, more than the sum of its parts. Style is what they don't show you on the travel sites.
And to me, nothing captures the style of Japan more than sitting in the sauna at the sentō with a couple of other blokes in our birthday suits, towels around our heads, watching baseball on that little TV in a glass box.
It's something you just gotta experience yourself to understand.
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