What a stranger taught me about Japan
I find Pico Iyer's writing insufferable and this is a good example why: how, exactly, do random interactions with the Japanese equivalent of a spoiled trust-fund kid who can afford to spend his life noodling about with haiku and abstract painting show the "living heart of traditional Japan"?<p>Then again, given that Iyer can't read Japanese despite living there for several decades and he seems to take perverse pride in being illiterate [1], he's not going have a lot of other local sources for insight...<p>[1] <a href="http://m.dailygood.org/story/1092/the-art-of-stillness-pico-iyer/" rel="nofollow">http://m.dailygood.org/story/1092/the-art-of-stillness-pico-...</a>