Seeing Beyond Form

What Japan taught me about emptiness, identity, and belonging.

Contemplation:

In what ways have you shaped yourself to fit a form — and how can you liberate yourself from letting go of that form, even for just one breath?

Snapshots from my wife and I visiting my nephew in Japan. A few highlights from Yokohama, Tokyo and Kyoto.

I’ve officially been back from Japan for two weeks now — past the jetlag, past the compulsive need to share every photo and detail with anyone who asks. (Shoutout to the friends who sat through my 2.5 hour photo slideshow. You know who you are and I love you!)

When friends ask how it was, I keep landing on the same two words: Surreal and once-in-a-lifetime.

My wife Jess and I took the trip because my oldest nephew is stationed outside of Tokyo, and we saw it as a chance to visit him and explore this island that has long fascinated Westerners — now overrun by tourist bros chasing the weak yen, armed with Google Translate, and hopping budget flights across Asia.

I’ve brought back so much I’m still sitting with, but what struck me most was how Japan holds form — so precisely, so unapologetically — in its cultural identity and its art and how that made me reflect on the many forms I’ve spent my life trying to fit into.

There is a strong sense of national identity in Japan. Of course, it doesn’t take much digging into history books to know that Japan has a long complicated history of extreme nationalism, imperialism and isolationism.

When a dear friend asked me what I was most looking forward to on my trip, this was one of the pieces that I wanted to better understand.

Being a first-gen kid in America, “national identity” is a challenging concept. I have grown over time to accept that I am Asian and American but the gap between those words can widen or narrow depending on the day, what this current (and past) administration is doing, or where I am in our country.

America has long campaigned on the idea that we are a country where all are accepted, yet our history tells another story — from massacring Native American and Indigenous peoples to enslaving African Americans to continuing its violent oppression now by sending masked ICE agents to terrorize the very immigrants who sustain this country.

So I was intrigued to visit a country that has never claimed to stand for an ideal or dream, but instead found power in its clarity of form — a national image that, while has been deeply problematic, is undeniably coherent.

From wedding ceremonies to meals to tea ceremonies to architecture to natural wonders, Japan is beautiful.

There is no denying the culture of Japan; it is simultaneously chaotic and quiet; modern and ancient; orderly and eclectic. It is truly surreal to see Harajuku girls run around in front of capybara cafés while everyone is quietly waiting in line for a donut.

It is also stunningly beautiful — whether you’re searching for Mt. Fuji through the clouds, hiking through a forest refuge in Ohara, writing on detailed stationary, or looking at the handcrafted bowl that your food is being served in. Japan is a feast for the eyes.

Of course it was strikingly different in Tokyo than Kyoto and Yokohama. Tokyo felt like Times Square meets 5th Avenue if it got chewed up by Disney World and spit out into a fever dream; Yokohama felt like a suburban coastal city where everyday people worked and lived; and Kyoto embraced and embodied the relics of its past (shoguns, samurais, you name it) in a way that was infused in all parts of their world — from their food to their dress, sometimes honorably, sometimes for a buck. (I can’t tell you how many white women I saw walking down the street in poorly wrapped kimonos because they were able to rent one for the day.)

Despite the distraction of cultural appropriation, I was struck by the discipline of aesthetic form — how everyone’s clothes fell in perfect, deliberate lines: straight, simple, symmetrical. So incredibly precise.

At one point while waiting in line for the bathroom in silence, I noticed how all the young women in line had the same haircut, specifically the same bangs — just right below the brow line and parted gently down the middle just enough to create a split but to still cover their foreheads. Their hair, slick and straight, mostly long past the shoulders were all down no matter how humid or hot it was. Almost no color unless their whole head was died a bright pink or electric blue.

Just straight black hair with perfectly shaped curtain bangs.

As I stood waiting, I couldn’t help but remember how growing up in Texas I had such an aversion to this type of “Asian” bangs. My mother, who was a hairdresser for a short period of time, was emphatic about giving me bangs.

“Ðứng yên! Cho mẹ làm.” Stand still, my mother would say, let me do it.

For my mother, this was the standard of beauty, the form she knew. As a Vietnamese refugee, she had a different sense of style, shaped by Asian beauty standards and ideals. She had wanted, whether consciously or not, for me to look like one of these Japanese girls when all I wanted was to look like one of the Spice Girls or have the Rachel haircut that was all the rage — voluminous, choppy, layered, a beautiful light chestnut brown.

That morning, Jess had asked my nephew whether we should cover our tattoos in public. (There is a fear and stigma around tattoos because of its association with the yakuza, an organized crime syndicate, that wreaked havoc for decades.) To which my sweet former football-playin’ 6’4 nephew who misses Texas BBQ, shrugged and said, “It’s obvious y’all are American.”

American, he said. Not tourists, not foreigners. Americans. What makes one American I thought? When most of my life, I haven’t felt like I was.

In that moment standing in that long, orderly line for the bathroom, I couldn’t help but wish I had lived somewhere growing up where who I was wasn’t at odds with what everyone aspired to be — white, skinny, straight. What a difference it would have been if my genetic make-up naturally gave way to what was the societal norm. I was envious and also glad that these young girls standing in line in front me — with my balayage-blonde-highlighted bun — would never know that specific pain of subconsciously conforming to and reaching toward white supremacy.

But of course, it made me wonder what ideals and forms of Japanese identity did they have to conform to? How much were they even aware? Were they experiencing the same feeling of being pushed to the margins like I did — and continue to — in a place that oppresses those who are different?

Our tour guide in Shinjuku wound up being a Vietnamese immigrant, now living in Japan, and asked me at one point if there was a lot of discrimination in America to which I laughed too long and hard, I’m sure as a form of trauma response. I asked her the same question about Japan and she nodded quietly.

It left me with the realization that identity, in any form, is complex because of the power dynamics that shape our society. How we reconcile with that, how we heal the parts that have been repressed and oppressed are up to us. The work isn’t to hold onto form, but to see beyond it.

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

I thought a lot about this coming back from Japan, reflecting on identity and how it forms us for better or worse.

Often the argument that “we don’t need labels” is synonymous with dismantling any kind of “woke” thinking.

But one of the deepest Buddhist teachings — emptiness — asks us to do just that. Not to justify racism, but to look deeper into the essence of something, of someone. We are more than our name, our race, our sexuality, our gender. We’re a whole being who is alive and that in itself is a miracle, a gift.

“Form is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form.”

— Heart Sutra

Emptiness teaches that reality is shaped by perception — that nothing truly has form, only the meanings we assign which helps us comprehend the world. But a pencil is only a pencil because we call it that, because we have labeled it that so we can communicate its meaning, purpose. But in actuality it’s simply sawdust and lead, rubber.

A sister at Blue Cliff Monastery, one of the Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh’s Plum Village practice centers, gave a dharma talk¹ on emptiness.

The sister pointed at an orchid during her talk and said that we call this an orchid, but it is so much more than that. It is a beautiful flower, and also it has leaves and stems, it is the sunlight it has absorbed, the water it has drank, the seed it sprouted from, the dirt it grew from, it is everything and nothing on its own all at once. Thầy² called this interbeing — the truth that all things inter-are.

So I wonder: What if we learned to see our identities as the orchid — real, beautiful, but not the whole truth of who we are?

In Japan, there is a philosophy called wabi-sabi, especially embraced in Kyoto, that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and authenticity. As I reflect on what it means to define who we are, what if we embraced this approach?

What if, in loosening our grip on form, we could see emptiness not as void but as the deeper, fuller expression of who we are — the wabi-sabi within us all?

Contemplation:

In what ways have you shaped yourself to fit a form — and how can you liberate yourself from letting go of that form, even for just one breath?

1. A dharma talk is a teaching on Buddhist principles, delivered by a teacher to provide guidance on applying these teachings to daily life.

2. Thầy, meaning teacher in Vietnamese, is what the community lovingly calls Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh.