Japanland: A Year in Search of Wa is a 2004 documentary television series (broadcast in late 2005) and book by American documentary filmmaker and travel author Karin Muller, who spent a year in Japan searching for wa, the Japanese concept of harmony (it is also the oldest recorded name of Japan).
Japanland was written and filmed by Muller, an American judoka who traveled to Japan in 2001 to improve her art and realized she could not succeed without understanding Japan itself, so she set out on a one year solo trip around Japan to see what she could.
Muller's adventure took her to live with a pre-Buddhist mountain ascetic cult, join a samurai-mounted archery team, and complete a 1,300-kilometer pilgrimage around Shikoku. Muller found Japan was more like a living entity, a person, than a country, and very complex and almost contradictory.
She took no camera crew or companions, or even much money. She went on foot and emerged profoundly changed and informed, concluding that as a "typical" American she could not really become Japanese. The journey became a three-hour set of documentaries shown on U.S. television channel PBS and a book.
Japanland has even been shown on Japanese TV, rare for a U.S. program, especially one on Japan.
Famous quotes containing the words year and/or search:
“You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.”
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“There’s a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: “Where was I before I was born.” In the beginning was ... what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.”
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