Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan

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More About This Book

Overview

Learning to Bow has been heralded as one of the funniest, liveliest, and most insightful books ever written about the clash of cultures between America and Japan. With warmth and candor, Bruce Feiler recounts the year he spent as a teacher in a small rural town. Beginning with a ritual outdoor bath and culminating in an all-night trek to the top of Mt. Fuji, Feiler teaches his students about American culture, while they teach him everything from how to properly address an envelope to how to date a Japanese girl.

Since its publication, Learning to Bow has been heralded as one of the funniest, liveliest, and most insightful books about the clash of cultures between America and Japan. Now in paperback, this hilarious and revealing book demystifiesde the world's most heralded school system. Map.

Editorial Reviews

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A refreshingly original look at Japan…this book is a revelation.”
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
“An engaging book, Learning to Bow earns higher marks than the usual scholarly analysis.”

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780060577209
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 5/11/2004
  • Edition description: Reprint
  • Pages: 336
  • Sales rank: 199,029
  • Series: Harper Perennial
  • Product dimensions: 5.31 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.75 (d)

Meet the Author

Bruce Feiler
Bruce Feiler
Both funny and intellectually rigorous, Bruce Feiler has applied his investigative spirit to religion, Japan, the circus, country music and assorted other topics. His personal accounts of various cultural forays are always illuminating, if you can keep up.

Biography

Bruce Feiler has turned his curiosity into a career, writing on topics from clowning to Christianity with a sense of wonder, humor and inquisitiveness. Most recently he has become known as both theological tourist and tour guide, exploring Biblical history and its physical and cultural roots in the 2001 bestseller Walking the Bible and in 2002's Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths.

Feiler had begun his career writing about another culture with Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan, a funny and enlightening account of his year as an English teacher in a small Japanese town. The book continues to be embraced by those who want a better understanding of Japanese culture, one spiked with the humor of its alien gaijin observer. Feiler depicted another hallowed educational system in Looking for Class: Days and Nights at Oxford and Cambridge, an account of the author's experiences as a graduate student at Cambridge. Feiler's books educate, but their appeal also lies in the discoveries he makes as someone entering a new situation with natural preconceptions, then having those ideas upended by reality.

Kicking the fish-out-of-water theme up a notch, Feiler joined the circus for Under the Big Top: A Season with the Circus. Here, Feiler showed the journalistic enterprise and mettle that would later figure into his bold journeys through Biblical territory. Spending a year performing as a clown on the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus, Feiler provides a surprising look at the show, its performers and the often seamy underside that accompanies circus life.

Feiler jumped into yet another milieu with his look at the country music industry, Dreaming Out Loud. Presenting an insider's view of Nashville made possible by his access as a journalist to stars such as Garth Brooks and Wynonna Judd, Feiler puts together of picture of starmaking -- including in his profiles a young talent named Wade Hayes -- and the machinery that runs modern country music. As with his other books, Feiler describes how his notions (he hated country music before Brooks made him a fan) have evolved along with his subject.

Feiler is also an award-winning food writer and journalist who has written articles for major publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the New Republic. But he gained a larger audience when he took on his biggest topic yet: the Bible. "Over more than a decade of living and working abroad I found that ideas, and places, became more real to me when I experienced them firsthand....In the Middle East, the Bible is not some abstraction," Feiler wrote in an essay on Barnes & Noble.com about the origins of Walking the Bible. "It's a living, breathing entity unencumbered by the sterilization of time. That was the Bible I wanted to know, and almost immediately I realized that the only way to find it was to walk along those lines myself."

In taking that walk, Feiler vastly expanded his audience and found himself a subject he would stick with. He was already working on a sequel to the book when September 11 redirected him toward one aspect of his earlier studies: the religious father figure of Abraham. He set out to find hope in this binding tie among Judaism, Christianity and Islam; but found, again, a different picture than the one he anticipated painting. Feiler's education is ours; without him asking the questions, we might not have new insights on cultural fixtures that already seem so familiar.

Good To Know

How he wrote his first book: Feiler appropriated sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov's self-description as an "explainaholic," then explained in an interview with a country music web site how he came to write his first book: "I wrote a series of letters home [from Japan] of the ‘you’re not going to believe what happened to me today' variety. When I came back home, everywhere I went people said to me, ‘I really liked your letters,’ and I would say, ‘Do I know you?’. It turns out that these letters had been passed around. I thought, well, if this is as interesting for me and my family and all of you, I should write a book about [my experiences]."

Feiler, who grew up Jewish in Savannah, Georgia, says that an early encounter with the legend of Abraham was part of a watershed moment for him. The Torah passage he read for his Bar Mitzvah was Lekh Lekha, the story of Abraham going forth from his father's house. He told BeliefNet, "The defining moment of my life was the night of my Bar Mitzvah, when my father pulled me aside at this family gathering, poured me a drink, and said, 'Son, you're a man now, you're responsible for your own actions.'"

Feiler's exploration of the Bible has been confined to the Hebrew Bible, leaving out much in the Old Testament and the entirety of the New Testament; but he told readers in a USA Today chat that he hopes to do a sequel that would take him through the events of Jesus' life.

Feiler is also a contributing editor at Gourmet magazine and has won two James Beard Awards for his food writing.

Feiler says he has traveled to over 60 countries and sprained his ankle on four continents.

    1. Also Known As:
      Bruce S. Fieler
    2. Hometown:
      New York, New York
    1. Date of Birth:
      October 25, 1964
    2. Place of Birth:
      Savannah, Georgia
    1. Education:
      B.A., Yale University, 1987; M.Phil. in international relations, Cambridge University, 1991

First Chapter

Learning to Bow
Inside the Heart of Japan

Chapter One

He drew a circle that shut me out --
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.

-- Edwin Markham, "Outwitted," 1915

I dropped my pants and felt a rush of cool wind against my legs. Slower now, I slid off my remaining clothes to stand naked on the stone path, which felt warm below my feet. The smell of pine from the nearby hills lingered in the air. The sun had just set. It was a midsummer evening, my first night out of Tokyo, and standing bare on this mountain, I soon realized how quiet a body can be.

Unsure, I kept my eyes down, shifting first from my feet now white with the chill, to my clothes, which lay in a shy heap on the grass, my pants still clinging to the shape of my body. Then suddenly I saw the other feet, and the legs. They too were bare. And as I watched them shuffling in my direction, my eye told me what my mind had not time to know: these feet were looking at me.

Stepping back, I met the eyes that the feet belied and for a moment felt locked in a frozen stare. There were twenty-four eyes in all -- open, agape, peering! -- and despite all I had heard about Japanese eyes being narrow, these eyes seemed remarkably wide. As I stood on this mountain path, face to face with the twelve men who would be my hosts for a year as a teacher in their rural town, the only difference I noticed between them and me was that they were all wearing towels and I was not.

To my relief, one stepped forward. "Mr. Bruce," he said, offering a slight bow and a nervous laugh, "we are going to take a bath now. Perhaps you would like a towel."

I had never taken a towel into a bath or, for that matter, taken a bath with other people, but under the circumstances I agreed. "Thank you," I managed, trying to bow discreetly while drawing the small hand towel across my body.

As soon as I stretched it halfway across my waist, the others cheered, rushed forward, and with all the glee of a band of ten-year-olds parading a captured mouse, led me to the mouth of a nearby cave and the steaming, pungent fumes of a hot spring bath. As a newcomer in Japan, I would be welcomed into my office as I was welcomed into the world; with a bare body and a fresh bath.


Inside the cave, the bodies of other bathers emerged from the steam. They seemed to move slowly at first, as if muted by the weight of the thick white mist. Bare arms cut through the air drawing handfuls of water to splash over shoulders; heads bobbed in the murky liquid like croutons in a gray broth. Some of the bathers -- all men, I now realized -- stood half submerged in the round pool, nodding their heads intently and speaking in echo; others floated quietly by, suspended by shadows of steam that lingered above the surface. From above, the pale evening light sifted through the air, giving the space the eerie feel of a Roman bath. But instead of wearing a toga, each of the men wandering outside the water held a small white towel over his private parts. As I watched these men clutching their towels while splashing and chatting and strolling about, I wondered if I had discovered the secret reason behind bowing in Japan; to shake hands at a time like this and release the towel would mean a certain loss of face.

As we approached the water, the teacher who had earlier offered me the towel, a short, squat man with wiry black hair, cherubic face, and a waddle that rocked him from side to side like a penguin, pushed the others away, put his arm around my shoulder, and led me forward.

"I ... Mista Burusu boss," he said, tapping first himself and then me on the nose. "My namu ... izu ... Sakuragi. I Iamu Mista Cherry Blossom."

At this early stage in our relationship he spoke in English. Though my Japanese was far from fluent, I had the facility to understand most things when necessary and the ability to pretend not to when prudent. Both of these skills would prove vital to my survival.

Mr. Cherry Blossom led me to the wall of the cave and row of men seated with their backs to the water. We sat on two round stones facing the wall and, with our towels draped over our knees, proceeded to douse ourselves in warm, chalky water from a shallow trough at our feet.

"In Japan," he said, this time in his native tongue, "we clean ourselves before entering the bath. Then we just soak in the water. This is our Japanese custom."

After pouring water over our shoulders with buckets and wiping our bodies with our hands (no soap), we were ready to step into the bath. Moving from the wail to where the water splashed at the edge of the pool, we walked slowly down the steps, slid up to our necks in the warm liquid, and for the first time removed the towels from below our waists and placed them -- dripping wet -- atop our heads.

"Doesn't it feel wonderful?" he said, closing his eyes stretching his arms, and flashing a dreamy, self-satisfied grin.

"The water seems ... alive," I said as I struggled to keep myself afloat while pushing away the flotilla of bugs swimming past my head. Then slowly my feet began to sink, and I realize, that instead of being in a stone cavern, we were standing in an open mud basin with hot spring water bubbling up from the ground. With each burp from the earth, I would slide down further, until chalky liquid lapped at my mouth from below and dripped down my nose from above ...

Learning to Bow
Inside the Heart of Japan. Copyright © by Bruce Feiler. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating 3.5
( 8 )

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  • Posted January 23, 2010

    An inside look at Japan

    Feiler goes to Japan to teach English for a year and tells about his experiences in a Tokyo suburb out in the country. The Japanese have a different view of many aspects of life than we do and it is interesting. It's a good book for those interested in other cultures, different perspectives.

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  • Posted March 26, 2009

    Dated but interesting

    I was a little dismayed to discover that the events in this book are over 20 years old, and indeed, the book is a little dated. The author's ability to speak Japanese and insert himself into everyday Japanese life gave valuable insights unobtainable elsewhere. However, while it was quite interesting to read the descriptions of Japanese schooling, the author seemed to ignore many aspects of Japanese culture, such as the emphasis on beauty, ritual and perfection.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 15, 2009

    this book is awful!!

    i had to read this book for school and it was so boring!!!! it took me almost 2 months to read because i couldn't focus because it was so boring!!! this book is awful. save yourself the misery and do not read this book ever!!!!!!!!!

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 26, 2006

    it was good.

    Learning to Bow was an inspirational book. It really made me want to go across seas to Japan and learn as much as I could. It's funny, informative and interesting.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 9, 2006

    the Japanese myth

    Interesting and funny, but very good book for beginners, even though it is far from revealing much about Japanese society and culture. To gain more insights, two other books should be read (1) Japan: Who Governs? (2)China's Global Reach: Markets, Multinationals, and Globalization. Both books take very serious look at Japanese economy and society in general, while (2) pinpoints what is behind the current Japanese economic and business mess.

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    Posted February 28, 2011

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    Posted February 18, 2011

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    Posted November 7, 2011

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