There is a thread running through Japanese culture that I became increasingly aware of while I was there, from temples, shrines and traditional imagery through to Studio Ghibli, Pokémon, gaming, anime and contemporary music. Seeing Ado at Summer Sonic and then spending the following couple of weeks travelling around Japan made me think about those connections far more than I had before. I'm 57, so I didn't grow up with Pokémon and I've never played the games. My route into this world has been different. I've become increasingly interested in Studio Ghibli, Japanese film and, inevitably, Japanese music. Perhaps that's why some of the connections struck me so strongly. Rather than growing up with Pokémon and later discovering the culture behind it, I've almost done it backwards. I've spent time in Japan looking at temples, shrines, landscapes and older imagery and then started recognising echoes of those things in the contemporary culture around me.
I took the Shinkansen north from Tokyo to Aomori, travelling at nearly 200mph while rural Japan flew past the window. Mountains, forests, fields, small towns and villages. A few days earlier I'd been in Kamakura, surrounded by temples and shrines and standing in front of the enormous Great Buddha, experiencing a very different Japan again. What struck me was that none of this felt particularly disconnected. Ancient, rural, modern and technological Japan aren't neatly separated into different boxes. They constantly sit alongside each other, and perhaps that's part of what makes Japan so fascinating to me. You can be travelling on one of the world's most advanced railway systems and looking out of the window at landscapes that seem a world away from the technology carrying you through them.
Ghibli is probably the most obvious example of this for me. Watch Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke or My Neighbour Totoro and the boundary between the human, natural and spiritual worlds is constantly moving. Forests aren't simply backgrounds, rivers aren't just water, and animals, spirits and humans inhabit overlapping worlds. Nature isn't passive either. It has a presence and sometimes demands respect. These are modern films, but they draw on ideas and imagery with much older roots in Japanese culture. Visiting the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka really brought that home to me. I found it genuinely moving to stand in front of the original artwork and see the physical work that went into creating those worlds. On screen you experience these places as though they somehow exist, but there in front of me were the paintings and drawings, made by human hands, that created those forests, skies, houses, streets and landscapes. They're beautiful works of art in their own right. Seeing them close up made me appreciate how much of the emotional atmosphere of a Ghibli film is there before a character even moves or speaks. The backgrounds aren't just scenery, they create the world. Having travelled through some of the Japanese landscapes that seem to sit behind that visual language made seeing the artwork even more affecting.
Japan also has a long spiritual and folklore tradition in which humans, animals, nature, objects and the supernatural aren't always kept in completely separate categories. Shinto has its kami, Japanese folklore is full of yōkai, and Buddhism has had a profound influence on Japanese ideas about impermanence, death, attachment and renewal. I'm wary of drawing too straight a line from those traditions to modern popular culture because obviously it isn't that simple, but once you've spent some time in Japan you start noticing how often similar ideas and images reappear. Pokémon suddenly became much more interesting to me from that perspective. I have no childhood nostalgia for Pikachu and I couldn't name most of the characters, but I can now see things in it that I wouldn't have appreciated before visiting Japan. Children move through forests, mountains, caves and towns encountering creatures with individual personalities and powers. Some are associated with fire, water, plants, rocks, electricity or ice, and they evolve and transform. Some have very clear roots in Japanese folklore. Ninetales, for example, draws on the nine-tailed kitsune fox, while Shiftry has obvious similarities to tengu imagery. Then there are Pokémon based on ghosts, household objects, swords, food and even rubbish. It doesn't mean Pokémon is simply modern Shinto or folklore in disguise, but the ease with which everyday objects, animals, nature and supernatural beings coexist feels much less surprising after spending time in Japan.
You see similar things throughout anime and Japanese gaming. Transformation is everywhere. Spirits inhabit ordinary landscapes, characters move between worlds, identities change, civilisations disappear and return, and beauty is often accompanied by sadness. The Japanese idea of impermanence, mujō, feels relevant here too. Things can be beautiful partly because they don't last. Cherry blossom is the obvious example, where the beauty and its disappearance are inseparable. Nobody watching an anime or playing a game needs to be consciously thinking about Buddhist philosophy for that sensibility to find its way into storytelling. Culture doesn't always announce where it came from, and some ideas survive precisely because they've become so familiar that nobody needs to explain them.
Seeing Ado at Summer Sonic made me think about some of this in relation to music as well. She's completely contemporary, digitally native and in many ways futuristic, yet the way her identity works is fascinating. Illustration, animation, character, mystery, theatricality and that extraordinary voice are all part of Ado. Her physical identity isn't presented in the way we normally expect of a Western pop star. She performs with her face concealed, often appearing largely as a silhouette, while her illustrated identity has become central to the way people recognise her. Watching tens of thousands of people respond to that at Summer Sonic was extraordinary. Music, character, image and story didn't feel like separate things, they were all part of the artist. It made me think differently about some of the other Japanese artists and music I encountered on the trip too. The visual world around an artist can carry as much meaning as the music. Illustration, clothing, animation, characters, choreography and storytelling aren't necessarily bits of marketing added afterwards, they can be part of the work itself. Coming from the British music industry, where we still put a lot of importance on authenticity and the supposedly "real" person behind an artist, I find that fascinating.
Obviously there isn't a straight line from the Great Buddha at Kamakura to Totoro, Pikachu and then Ado. That would be far too simplistic. Japan has absorbed huge influences from America, Europe and elsewhere, particularly since the war, and Japanese popular culture itself has been constantly changing and feeding back into global culture. But older ideas and imagery keep resurfacing in new forms. Folklore influences illustration and manga, manga and illustration feed anime, anime feeds gaming, fashion and music, and all of those things now travel around the world before returning to Japan carrying another generation of influences with them. The surface continually changes while some of the ideas underneath remain remarkably persistent.
I think this is something we sometimes miss when we consume Japanese culture in the West. My generation largely encountered Japan through cars, electronics, cinema and eventually games and animation. Generations after mine grew up knowing Pikachu almost from infancy. Younger audiences now move between anime, gaming, Japanese fashion, J-pop and artists like Ado without necessarily thinking of them as separate worlds. What we often receive is the culture without necessarily knowing much about the history underneath it. Japanese creators don't have to consciously reference that history either. Ideas and ways of seeing things can survive because they've become so embedded that nobody needs to explain where they came from.
That's probably the biggest thing I've brought home from Japan. One of the reasons contemporary Japanese culture can feel simultaneously futuristic and ancient is that those things aren't necessarily opposites there. Sitting on a bullet train travelling at nearly 200mph through mountains and forests captured something of that for me. So did standing in front of the Great Buddha at Kamakura, seeing the hand-painted artwork at the Ghibli Museum and watching Ado at Summer Sonic. On paper they're completely different experiences, separated by centuries of culture and technology, but being there they didn't feel entirely disconnected. Once I started noticing that thread, I began seeing it everywhere. It's added to my love of Japanese culture and, more than anything, deepened my respect for the history and traditions sitting underneath the things I've come to love.
