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

“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

“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

“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