Pragyaa Jain

“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

“That toilets in Japan were objets d’art has already been established. But their true awesomeness lay not in their gadgetry so much as in their cleanliness and easy availability. As a woman on the move, a decent toilet was manna. We had smaller bladders than men, we had monthly periods, and those of us who had given birth had urinary tracts that were as capricious in the timing of their needs as the annual blooming of the cherry blossoms. The simple fact of being able to use a toilet with confidence in public spaces – parks, metro stations, highway pit stops – enhanced the quality of life enough to make toilets my number one favourite thing about Japan.”
― 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

“Suzuki concurred, positing that Japan’s particular character in intellectual life did not lie in ‘the richness of ideas, or brilliance in articulation’, but in staying ‘quietly content’, feeling ‘at home in the world’.35”
― Pallavi Aiyar, Orienting: An Indian in Japan