A few years ago, when I started working in our garden, there was a tree I had almost written off.

Part of it appeared to be dying. Much of the tree looked unhealthy, and I cut it back heavily to see whether whatever remained could recover.

It was only when I got close to the tree and started trimming it that I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.

There was vigorous young growth making its way through the old, dying structure.

It almost looked like another young tree growing through the old one, climbing around the deteriorating trunk toward the light.

I decided to leave it and see what would happen.

Nearly three years later, the tree is still there.

Except it doesn’t look like the tree I first encountered.

The Same Tree

The young growth continued upward and formed a new canopy.

Some of the old wood died. Some of it remains part of the trunk. New branches appeared. Existing branches became thicker. Every year the leaves emerged, eventually fell, and returned again after winter.

Storms passed through.

Hot Japanese summers came and went.

I occasionally inspected the tree and removed branches that had died or become rotten.

The tree kept changing.

Yet during all those years, something never occurred to me.

I never looked at it and wondered:

Is this still the same tree?

Of course it was.

The tree had been there all along.

That seems obvious when looking at a living tree.

It becomes much less obvious when we start talking about ourselves.

How Much Can Something Change?

Recently I returned to an old blog post I wrote in 2024 about American influences in Japan.

At the time, I was fascinated by how many of them I could see.

Fashion.

Music.

Fast food.

Hollywood.

Technology.

English.

Business practices.

Sports.

Even celebrations such as Halloween and Valentine’s Day.

And yet, despite all these influences, Japan remained unmistakably Japan.

I noticed the apparent contradiction.

I didn’t investigate it much further.

Now I find myself asking a different question:

How can something change so much and still remain itself?

Japan Has Always Been Changing

American influence is only one recent layer in a much longer history.

Long before America became influential, Japan absorbed ideas, technologies, writing, religions and institutions from elsewhere.

Chinese characters entered Japan.

Buddhism arrived through the Asian continent.

Later came European knowledge and technologies.

During the Meiji period, Japan deliberately looked abroad for knowledge that could help it modernize.

Baseball arrived from America.

Western food arrived.

Western clothing arrived.

Jazz arrived.

And Japan didn’t simply become China, Europe or America.

Something else happened.

Japan absorbed, adapted, rejected, transformed and combined.

Imported things became Japanese things in ways their original cultures sometimes wouldn’t even recognize.

Western-inspired food became yōshoku.

Baseball developed its own Japanese traditions.

English produced distinctly Japanese expressions.

Even celebrations imported from abroad acquired customs of their own.

Perhaps the surprising thing isn’t that Japan changed while remaining Japan.

Maybe changing is part of how Japan continued being Japan.

A Culture Is More Like My Tree Than a Museum

I think I used to imagine cultural identity a little like a collection.

These things are Japanese.

Those things are American.

If more American things enter the collection, presumably the culture becomes less Japanese.

But my tree makes me question that way of thinking.

A living tree isn’t defined by maintaining the same branches forever.

Some branches grow.

Some die.

Some break during storms.

New ones emerge.

The trunk thickens.

Leaves disappear every year and return.

The tree responds continuously to whatever happens around it.

If I tried to preserve it by preventing all of those changes, I wouldn’t be preserving a living tree.

I’d be trying to freeze one moment in its life.

Perhaps cultures are similar.

Preservation and Continuity Aren’t the Same

This distinction has become important to me.

Preservation tries to keep something as it is.

Continuity allows something to keep becoming.

There are certainly things worth preserving.

Old buildings.

Crafts.

Languages.

Knowledge.

Stories.

Traditions.

But a living culture cannot remain exactly as it was.

Every generation inherits a different world.

Technology changes.

Work changes.

Families change.

Foreign ideas arrive.

New problems appear.

People encounter other cultures.

They respond.

What gets passed to the next generation is therefore never completely identical to what was received from the previous one.

That doesn’t necessarily mean continuity has been lost.

It may mean continuity is still alive.

Sometimes the Old and New Exist Together

This is what my tree showed me especially clearly.

The old tree didn’t die completely and then get replaced by a new one.

Decay and renewal were happening at the same time.

Part of the old trunk remains there today.

Fresh growth developed around it.

For years, old and new have belonged to the same living organism.

Culture seems to work like that too.

Old traditions can remain while new practices emerge.

Some customs gradually disappear.

Others change their purpose.

Something imported can become so familiar that eventually nobody gives much thought to where it originally came from.

Several generations can even carry different versions of the same culture simultaneously.

There isn’t necessarily a clean moment when:

old Japan ended

and

new Japan began.

One grew from the other.

My Garden Has Been Doing the Same Thing

Looking through my old gardening posts made me realize I’ve observed this process repeatedly without connecting it to identity.

Years ago, I cut several shrubs almost to the ground because they looked woody, brittle and beyond saving.

I later learned that they were rhododendrons and azaleas.

Then they surprised me.

Fresh shoots appeared.

Eventually they flowered.

I had mistaken their condition for their identity.

What looked finished still contained the capacity to regenerate.

My own way of gardening changed too.

Initially, I became fascinated with Japanese karikomi and imagined carefully shaped shrubs.

Later I encountered Masanobu Fukuoka’s ideas about reducing unnecessary intervention.

Living in rural Japan also made me increasingly interested in growing food.

Those influences didn’t replace one gardening philosophy with another.

They accumulated.

I tried things.

Made mistakes.

Kept some ideas.

Abandoned others.

Combined things that seemed useful.

Eventually I found myself gardening in a way I couldn’t neatly give a name.

Yet I never thought:

I’ve stopped gardening like myself.

It was still my garden.

I had simply changed with it.

Maybe We Do This Too

I’ve lived in several cultural environments during my life.

Switzerland remains part of me.

So do decades spent in the Netherlands.

My mother’s Thai background has always been part of my experience.

Now Japan is changing me too.

But these aren’t separate compartments.

They interact.

A snowy mountain in Japan can bring back childhood memories of driving through Switzerland with my father.

Lake Biwa can remind me of Lake Lugano.

Something I experience in Japan can make me understand something from my earlier life differently.

New experiences don’t simply pile on top of old ones.

Sometimes they change the meaning of what was already there.

And yet I don’t wake up wondering whether I’m still the same person.

I am.

Just as that tree is still the same tree.

But Not Everything Has to Remain

The tree taught me something else.

Sometimes I have to prune it.

A branch dies.

Another becomes rotten.

Something grows in a direction that creates a problem.

Removing it changes the tree.

But keeping every branch merely because it once belonged to the tree wouldn’t necessarily preserve it.

It could harm it.

That seems relevant to people and cultures too.

Not every habit needs to survive.

Not every belief needs to remain.

Not every tradition must continue forever merely because it is old.

Sometimes letting something go is part of continuing.

But gardening has also taught me to be cautious about deciding too quickly what is dead.

I once cut plants down because I thought they were essentially finished.

Then they returned and flowered.

I simply hadn’t understood what I was looking at.

Perhaps we need the same humility when deciding what should be discarded from ourselves or from a culture.

Before cutting something away, it helps to look closely.

The Past Doesn’t Have to Disappear

The dead portion of my tree is still visible.

It no longer grows as it once did, but it hasn’t vanished from the tree’s history.

I like that.

Because something doesn’t necessarily need to remain alive in its original form to remain part of what we have become.

An old belief I no longer hold may have led me toward something I understand today.

A place I no longer live can continue shaping how I experience another place.

A tradition can disappear from everyday life while leaving traces in language, architecture or customs.

Even this blog works that way.

When I read some of my earliest posts, I can see things differently now.

Sometimes I made assumptions I would question today.

Sometimes I noticed something but stopped before reaching the deeper question underneath it.

I don’t want to rewrite those posts.

They show what I could see at the time.

The difference between what I wrote then and what I can articulate now isn’t something I need to correct.

It shows that something grew.

A Living Thing Doesn’t Stay the Same

Perhaps this is where my old question about American influence in Japan went wrong.

I was surprised that Japan could absorb so much from elsewhere and remain recognizably Japanese.

I was unconsciously treating identity as something that had to resist change in order to survive.

My garden suggests almost the opposite.

A living thing cannot remain alive without changing.

It responds.

Adapts.

Grows.

Gets damaged.

Recovers.

Loses things.

Produces new things.

Sometimes someone intervenes.

Sometimes nature decides.

And somehow, through all of it, continuity remains.

Maybe identity isn’t the part of us that never changes.

Maybe it is the living relationship connecting what we were, what happens to us and what we are becoming.

The tree outside has changed enormously since I first started gardening.

Part of what it once was is dead.

Part remains.

Much of what I see today didn’t exist then.

Next year it will look different again.

And I still don’t have to ask whether it is the same tree.

It has been the same tree all along.

Perhaps remaining ourselves works something like that.

We don’t remain ourselves by staying the same.

We remain ourselves by continuing to grow from what is already there.

23 December 2023

26 August 2026