Pragyaa Jain

“Until moving to Japan, I’d tended to feel that if my interlocutor didn’t talk, she was expressing her boredom. But I was coming around to becoming cautiously appreciative of what, to a talkative Indian like me, was the ‘peculiar’ Japanese ease with silence.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“The country came across like an upper-class spinster from a historical novel with impeccable manners who spent her days dabbing the edges of her mouth with a linen napkin while internally tutting at the uncouth dining etiquette of today’s upstarts, id est: the Chinese.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“Unlike other methods of repair, like welding or glueing, kintsugi’s power was in its refusal to disguise the brokenness of an object, he said. It did not aim to make what was broken as good as new, but to use the cracks to transform the object into something different, and arguably even more valuable.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan

“OK, so more fascinating discoveries. This one thanks to Yujiro Hashi. There was a time when the Japanese equivalent for ‘the whole world’ was ‘the three countries.’ So, instead of saying ‘You are the most beautiful person in the whole world,’ they would have said, ‘You are the most beautiful person in the three countries,’ although the import would be the same. The fascinating part is that the three countries referred to are Japan itself, China and India. That was the whole world according to the Japanese mental map of the time. The phrase (now antiquated) is: san goku ichi no xxx, i.e. ‘the best xxx in the three countries (whole world). San goku ichi no hana-yom or the most beautiful bride in the world, is an expression still used at weddings.”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan