Why Japanese Are Angry with Foreigners On Tokyo Train

The Japanese People, like Bertie Wooster's Dragon-Aunts, are impossibly civilized. Their mildest overt censure is beyond severity, revealing a witches' cauldron of suppressed fastidious revulsion at the barbarity of "foreigners"--reminding one, for all the world, with its tone of sniffy distaste, of the periodic sumptuary edicts that were issued by Tokagawa Shogons against the display of too-fine fabrics in mere townspeople's kimonos.

It is to remember that, while Japan withdrew in upon itself, Louis XIV was being the opposite of restrained elegance in France. The creation of Tokyo (with an efficient waste-disposal system!), I think, has the same éclat as the creation of the palace at Versailles. The difference, I imagine,  must be something like underlying Japanese Confucianism and Zen Buddhism--Bushido.

But, as an aesthetician (funniest word I ever coined for myself), and of course a Buddhist, while I know it to be my moral duty to hand the palm to Basho, Ryokan and Ihara Saikaku, I can only grant them, barely, equal status with Fontaine, Molière and Couperin.

 ¿And koto Vs. harpsichord? Be real.