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:
“Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“You that do search for every purling spring
Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flows,
And every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows
Near thereabouts into your poesy wring;
You that do dictionary’s method bring
Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows;”
—Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)