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:
“Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 14:28,29.
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)