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Do you think of Old Japan as an orderly or disorderly place? My gut reaction is to think of orderliness: the constant cleaning of already spotless houses, the exquisite presentation of shōjin ryōri (精進料理: vegetarian Buddhist food served at temples, meticulous + to offer + cuisine (last 2 chars.)), the dainty washi wrapped around purchases, and the minute attention to detail in the tea ceremony.

And yet kanji calligraphy tends toward chaos! Only highly trained practitioners can read the flowing lines. And there’s the matter of twisting, narrow roads in Tokyo and how easy it is to get lost there, with the unclear or nonexistent indication of streets and building numbers. As Donald Richie wrote so beautifully in A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan, plots of land follow natural topography, rather than grid lines:

One … sees this from the air, a good introduction to the patterns of a country. Cultivated Japan is all paddies winding in free-form serpentine between the mountains, a quilt of checks and triangles on the lowlands—very different from the neat squares of Germany, or that vast and regular checkerboard of the United States. The Japanese pattern is drawn from nature. The paddy fields assume their shape because mountains are observed and valleys followed, because this is the country where the house was once made to fit into the curve of the landscape and where the farmer used to cut a hole in the roof rather than cut down the tree. (19–20)

I can only conclude that Japan, old and new, presents an enticing combination of order and disorder. The following picture (which reminds me of a circuit board) is of Tokyo. On Flickr, the photographer’s caption says, “Japanese have a way of making even disorder neat, somehow.”

Neat Disorder
Photo credit: Poagao

We saw last week that 混 (KON, ma(jiru), ma(zeru), ma(zaru)) can mean “to confuse” and “to mix.” As ma(jiru), “to be mixed or blended,” 混 shows up in several terms that remind me of cooking, seeming to contain a dash of this word, and a dash of that word—true mixes! Take, for example, this word:

混じり気 (majirike: a dash of (something), impurity, mixture)
     to mix + a trace

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