Anniversaries rarely serve to remember.

More often, they serve to legitimize a discourse.

The 160 years of diplomatic relations between Italy and Japan do not call for yet another protocol celebration, nor for an edifying chronology of exchanges, treaties, and official visits. That history already exists, and it is easily accessible. What is missing, rather, is an attempt to understand why two countries so distant in language, geography, and social structure continue to recognize one another with a familiarity that goes beyond diplomacy.

Italy and Japan are not bound by a community of abstract values, nor by a shared colonial history, nor by geopolitical proximity. And yet, for over a century and a half, they have regarded one another with a mixture of curiosity, respect, and fertile misunderstanding. It is precisely this misunderstanding — not full knowledge — that has generated some of the most persistent and problematic cultural images in our imagination.

Among them all, one continues to endure: Cio-Cio-San.

The Name That Is Not a Name

In Madama Butterfly, the protagonist does not, strictly speaking, have a proper name. Cio-Cio-San is not a civil registry entry: it is a poetic designation, a symbolic nickname, a sonic reduction. “Butterfly” repeated twice, sweetened, made singable, made memorable.

This is not an innocent detail.

In theatre, the name is already destiny.

A real name, even before being spoken, resists: it carries with it a language, a genealogy, a community. A nickname, by contrast, is light by definition: it floats, allows itself to be shaped, does not demand reciprocity. It is the perfect name for someone who does not intend to stay.

That the young woman from Nagasaki is called Butterfly is not a lyrical concession, but an act of power. She does not choose that name for herself. It is assigned to her. And she — and this is where the tragedy begins — takes it seriously.

Kyōko: The Name That Remains Beneath

It is difficult today not to think that this woman might have been called Kyōko.

Not as a retroactive correction, not as an ideological rewriting, but as a critical intuition. Kyōko is a plausible, inhabitable, sober Japanese name. It can be written with kanji that evoke respect, inner cultivation, moral discipline. It is a person’s name, not a figure’s.

To think Kyōko is to perform a precise gesture: to remove exoticism and leave the structure.

Cio-Cio-San is the name of the role.

Kyōko is the name of the woman.

The opera cannot afford to pronounce it, because doing so would mean assuming guilt from the outset. The tragic mechanism of Puccini — lucidly constructed by Illica and Giacosa — functions only if the audience accepts, at the beginning, that linguistic lightness. Only in this way does the final blow strike when it is already too late.

Japonisme as a Shared Code

Cio-Cio does not arise from nothing. She is the daughter of a precise, historically determined taste. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe experienced a phase of intense fascination with Japan: ukiyo-e prints, fans, kimonos, lacquers, floral motifs, orientalist diminutives. It was the age of japonisme, a fashion both cultivated and popular, producing masterpieces and caricatures without interruption.

In this context, Cio-Cio is perfectly functional:

– it sounds Oriental to the European ear

– it is immediately memorable

– it is singable

– it requires no real competence

It is a word-image. It does not describe Japan: it evokes it.

Today, however, that japonisme is fully audible. Not because it is “offensive” in a contemporary sense, but because it no longer coincides with our real experience of Japan. Anime, manga, cinema, literature, travel, language: Japan is no longer a decorative surface. It is an interlocutor.

And when the interlocutor becomes real, names cease to be interchangeable.

The Western Ear and the Fate of Names

The problem of names does not concern Butterfly alone.

It also concerns Turandot.

Turandot is an artificial name, constructed to “sound Chinese” according to a European imagination mediated by French and Persian literary sources. It is not a plausible Chinese name, and precisely for this reason it has become phonetically unstable. For decades, spurious pronunciations have circulated: Turandò, Turandó, Turandòt.

Here the phenomenon is even more revealing.

Everyone sings Turandòt. Always.

Not out of ignorance, but out of musical necessity. Giacomo Puccini’s writing imposes the final stress: the vocal line requires it, the melodic arc demands it. Music bends the name without resistance, because the name offers no resistance.

A real name defends itself.

A symbolic name does not.

No one would sing Violettà or Toscà.

But Turandot, yes — because it has never been felt as someone’s name.

When Music Prevails over Language

The fact that Turandot is sung with a “wrong” stress is, paradoxically, a confirmation of its allegorical nature. The name does not belong to a living linguistic community for the Italian audience; it belongs to the theatre. It is a scenic sound, not an identity.

The same holds true, in a different form, for Cio-Cio.

In both cases, the East does not speak: it resonates.

And this is where the distance between yesterday and today becomes evident. Today we are more attentive to names because we are more aware of languages. Not because we are more “sensitive,” but because we are more competent.

Anime, Manga, and the End of Decorative Orientalism

It is impossible to address these issues today without acknowledging the role that anime and manga have played in reformulating the Western imaginary of Japan. Contemporary Japan no longer reaches us filtered through objects or fashions, but through complex narratives — often tragic, often silent, deeply structured.

The heroines of serious — non-caricatural — anime do not have symbolic names. They have sober, realistic, often common names. They are not reduced to metaphor. They are called by name, and that name carries weight.

And this is perhaps why Cio-Cio today sounds ridiculous to many cultivated listeners. Not because the opera is weak, but because the code has changed.

An audience familiar with Kyōko, Aiko, Yuki, Misaki struggles to accept Cio-Cio as anything other than a historical mask.

Italy and Japan: A Structural Kinship

And yet, beneath these masks, something endures.

It endures because Italy and Japan share the same deep idea of form.

Both are civilizations that are:

– artisanal

– founded on craft

– on repetition

– on discipline

– on beauty as responsibility

They do not love pure abstraction.

They distrust improvisation without foundation.

This is why Japan welcomed Puccini without rejecting him, even while recognizing his inaccuracies. And why Italy welcomed serious manga and anime without reducing them to mere entertainment.

Calling by Name as a Mature Gesture

To think Kyōko today does not mean rewriting Madama Butterfly.

It means reading it to the end.

It means distinguishing:

– between fashion and structure

– between wrapper and core

– between the imposed name and the erased person

After 160 years of relations between Italy and Japan, perhaps we can allow ourselves this gesture: not to erase the past, but to name it with greater precision.

Not to correct Puccini.

But to avoid automatically repeating his time.

Misunderstanding as a Form of Knowledge

Every profound dialogue between cultures is born from a misunderstanding.

Not from a superficial error, but from a structural misreading that forces both sides to expose themselves.

Italy and Japan have never understood one another “well” in the ethnographic sense of the term. And yet they immediately recognized one another on the level of something more essential: the centrality of form as the locus of truth. This is why Italian opera found in Japan an extraordinarily receptive audience, and why Japanese narrative culture found in Italy a reception less provincial than elsewhere.

The misunderstanding was not corrected. It was inhabited.

Melodrama as the Art of Waiting

One of the deepest points of contact between Italian melodrama and contemporary Japanese narrative is time. Not the time of action, but that of waiting.

Puccinian melodrama does not rush.

It suspends.

The most celebrated arias do not serve to advance the plot, but to dilate an emotional instant until it becomes unbearable. The audience is not called to know what will happen — often it already knows — but to remain inside a feeling that finds no resolution.

This is profoundly Japanese.

And profoundly distant from more recent Western narrative realism.

Serious anime and manga — those that have truly shaped the global imagination — do exactly this: they subtract action, accumulate silence, force the spectator into a form of presence that cannot be consumed quickly.

It is here that Madama Butterfly ceases to be an orientalist document and becomes something more uncomfortable: a work that demands to be endured, not merely understood.

Fidelity as an Irreversible Gesture

One of the great Western misunderstandings in reading Butterfly is interpreting the protagonist as naïve.

She is not.

Cio-Cio-San’s fidelity does not arise from ignorance, but from inner coherence. Once she has assumed a pact — even if unbalanced, even if imposed — she carries it to its extreme consequences. Not because she fails to see the alternative, but because she does not recognize as legitimate an escape route that saves only herself.

This is a trait that the European audience of the early twentieth century struggled to understand, but that the Japanese audience has always recognized as authentic. Not out of moral approval, but out of anthropological familiarity.

And this is where Kyōko reasserts itself as a ghost-name.

Not as a replacement, but as an interpretive key.

Kyōko as a Modern Tragic Figure

To think Cio-Cio-San as Kyōko means placing her no longer within the sphere of the exotic maiden, but within the far more demanding one of the modern tragic heroine. A figure who does not die from naïveté, but from an excess of rigor.

Rigor is a dangerous virtue.

In Greek tragedy, in nō theatre, and in Italian melodrama alike.

It is no coincidence that many heroines of contemporary anime who most strike Western audiences are not “strong” in the current sense of the term, but irreducible. They do not negotiate their ethical core. And when the world around them does, the conflict becomes irreconcilable.

Butterfly belongs to this genealogy far more than her decorative surface would suggest.

The Audience as Accomplice

Another rarely addressed aspect concerns the role of the audience. Madama Butterfly does not accuse Pinkerton alone. It accuses those who, seated in the stalls, accept its language.

The coy nickname, the initial lightness, the non-binding promise: all of this is rendered acceptable because the audience consents to it. It laughs, relaxes, recognizes a familiar theatrical code. Only later does it realize that that code was already a form of violence.

This mechanism is refined and ruthless.

And it still works today, precisely because Cio-Cio continues to seem “harmless.”

To call her Kyōko, even only mentally, breaks this pact.

It renders the audience immediately responsible.

Turandot and the Limit of Allegory

If Butterfly allows for this critical operation, Turandot does not.

And this must be stated clearly.

In Turandot, the main character is not a person disguised as a symbol, but a symbol that uses the body of a woman. Turandot is not conceived to be “brought back” to a real name. Her function is allegorical from beginning to end.

For this reason, the problem of pronunciation, though revealing, does not open onto a possible restitution. Turandot does not ask to be called better. She asks to be understood as a figure.

Butterfly, instead, allows one to glimpse a person beneath the mask. And this is why the discomfort is greater.

Competence as a Form of Respect

Today we are more competent. Not better, not more just, but more competent. We know languages, we recognize names, we distinguish between sound and meaning. This competence does not impose retroactive censorships, but new interpretative responsibilities.

Continuing to call her Cio-Cio without thinking is not a fault.

But beginning to feel the need to think Kyōko is a sign of cultural maturity.

And this is where the anniversary of the 160 years ceases to be a commemoration and becomes a threshold.

From Japonisme to Dialogue

One hundred and sixty years ago, it was enough to evoke Japan.

Today, one must listen to it.

This does not mean renouncing the legacy of japonisme, nor erasing its forms. It means recognizing them for what they were: a first attempt, inevitably imperfect, to look elsewhere.

Mature dialogue does not arise when misunderstanding is eliminated, but when it is recognized as such and overcome without destroying it.

To think Kyōko alongside Cio-Cio-San is exactly this: not a substitution, but a stratification of meaning.

The Voice That Remains

In the end, what endures is not the name, but the voice.

The voice that sings, that waits, that breaks.

This is why Madama Butterfly continues to be staged, discussed, loved, and contested. Because beneath the japonisme, beneath the catchiness, beneath fashion, there is a vocal truth that does not age.

And that truth does not belong to the East or the West.

It belongs to those who recognize that form — when carried through to the end — can become a moral responsibility.

A Dialogue That Has Moved Beyond Exoticism

The cultural relationship between Italy and Japan has undergone a slow but decisive transformation. It has moved from exoticism to competence, from fascination to familiarity, from surface to structure. This passage did not occur through diplomacy, but through the arts, narratives, taste, and shared time.

Today Japan is no longer, for cultivated Italy, a decorative elsewhere. It is a real place, complex, contradictory, layered. And above all: it is a place that speaks. Not in the sense of immediate communication, but in the rarer sense of coherence between what it shows and what it is.

This explains why manga, anime, and Japanese cinema have found in Italy not only a broad audience, but an attentive one. Not a superficial consumption, but a critical reception, often surprisingly mature.

Manga and Anime as a New Aesthetic Literacy

The success of manga and anime in Italy is not an adolescent phenomenon, as some still tend to dismiss it. On the contrary, it is a new aesthetic literacy, which has taught generations of Italian readers and viewers something that recent Western culture had partly lost: the value of time, silence, and form.

Serious manga does not explain everything.

Quality anime does not simplify.

Both demand attention, memory, fidelity to the gaze.

It is no coincidence that many Italians shaped by these narratives develop a sensibility akin to that of melodrama, great European literature, and auteur cinema. The bridge is not thematic; it is structural.

This also explains why Japan is today perceived not as an “other” culture, but as a sister culture in discipline.

Japanese Cinema and the Ethics of the Gaze

Japanese cinema, from Ozu to Kurosawa to more contemporary expressions, has exerted on Italy a silent but profound influence. Not through clamor, but through persistence.

What strikes the cultivated Italian spectator is not cultural difference, but the seriousness of the gaze. The refusal of emotional shortcuts. The idea that a story does not necessarily have to console, but must hold.

This is a lesson that Japan has given Italy without proclamations. And that Italy, when it has been true to itself, has known how to recognize.

Kyoto and Rural Areas: The Value of Continuity

Visiting Kyoto — or Japan’s rural areas — is not a tourist experience in the ordinary sense of the term. It is a direct confrontation with a civilization that has not severed the thread between past and present, but has made it inhabitable.

Kyoto is not a museum.

It is a city that lives as if time were stratified, not linear.

Japan’s rural areas, often ignored by mass tourism, show this principle even more clearly: respect for place, maintenance of the landscape, care for everyday detail. Nothing is spectacular. Everything is necessary.

For an attentive Italian, this experience is often destabilizing. Not because Japan is “better,” but because it shows what Italy could be if it stopped betraying itself.

Japan as an Example, Not a Model

Japan is not a model to imitate.

It is an example to observe.

The difference is substantial.

Imitation produces caricatures.

Observation produces self-awareness.

Japan shows that:

– modernity does not require the erasure of tradition

– efficiency does not exclude slowness

– respect is not an ideological fact, but a practical one

– beauty is not entertainment, but daily responsibility

These are lessons that speak directly to Italy, not as a country in decline, but as a country that has forgotten that it once already possessed these virtues.

Italy Seen from Japan

The dialogue, however, is not one-way.

Italy enjoys in Japan a consideration that goes far beyond the stereotype of the “beautiful country.” Art, music, design, craftsmanship, cuisine: everything that in Italy risks being trivialized is taken seriously in Japan.

Not as folklore, but as know-how.

This Japanese gaze upon Italy is often clearer than the one Italians have of themselves. And this, once again, is not a compliment, but an invitation.

Returning to Butterfly Without Becoming Its Prisoners

In this broader context, Madama Butterfly ceases to be a problem and becomes a document. Not of Japan, but of the Europe that looked at it.

Recognizing the japonisme of Cio-Cio-San does not mean dismissing the opera. It means placing it historically, in order finally to traverse it without being unwitting accomplices.

Thinking Kyōko alongside Butterfly is a critical gesture born precisely from this mature dialogue. Not from rejection, but from knowledge.

A Mutual Education

One hundred and sixty years of relations between Italy and Japan have not produced perfect harmony. They have produced something better: a slow mutual education, made of errors, corrections, and listening.

Italy taught Japan certain forms of representation.

Japan taught Italy a discipline of the gaze.

Today, perhaps, we can allow ourselves to take a further step: not merely to admire, but to learn to recognize what works, even when it challenges us.

Calling Things by Their Name

In the end, all of this discourse always returns there: to names.

Calling correctly is not a linguistic act, but a moral one.

To call by name means to assume responsibility for the relationship.

If today, thinking of Butterfly, we feel Kyōko emerging, it is not because we want to correct the past. It is because the dialogue has reached a level at which the past can be looked at without indulgence or removal.

And this, perhaps, is the clearest sign that those 160 years have not passed in vain.

Discipline as a Form of Freedom

One of the most persistent misunderstandings in the Western gaze upon Japan concerns the relationship between discipline and freedom. Too often discipline is read as submission, rigidity, renunciation of individuality. In reality, in Japanese culture — especially in its finest expressions — discipline is what makes freedom possible, not what denies it.

This idea is surprisingly close to an Italian tradition today partly forgotten: that of workshops, conservatories, art schools, crafts handed down through imitation and patience. The idea that one cannot “express oneself” without first having learned how to inhabit a form.

Japan does not idealize the isolated individual.

Historical Italy did not either.

Both cultures have always known — when they were healthy — that freedom does not arise from the absence of rules, but from their internalization.

Education of the Gaze and Rejection of Urgency

Visiting Japan, especially outside the loudest tourist circuits, means confronting a civilization that has not made urgency a value. Things are not accelerated to demonstrate efficiency, but accomplished in order to be right.

This applies to daily gestures, social relations, spatial organization, but also to the arts. Manga and anime, once again, are revealing: they are not afraid of slowness, they do not fear emptiness, they do not fill every silence.

For an Italian accustomed to increasingly shouted communication, this experience can be almost physical. It is not a question of order or cleanliness, but of perceptual education. Japan teaches one to see less, but better.

And this is where the comparison becomes uncomfortable. Because it shows that much of our haste is not necessary, but merely noisy.

Japanese Countryside and Moral Landscape

Japan’s rural areas represent one of the highest examples of continuity between landscape and community. They are not “postcards,” nor folkloric reserves. They are places inhabited according to a logic of constant maintenance, silent respect, attention to the smallest details.

The landscape is not a backdrop.

It is a shared responsibility.

Here the comparison with Italy becomes inevitable. Italy possesses an equally rich rural heritage, but one that is often abandoned, neglected, emptied of meaning. Japan demonstrates that it is not modernity that destroys places, but the loss of an ethic of care.

This does not make Japan morally superior.

It simply makes it coherent.

The Idea of Beauty as a Duty

One of the most radical teachings that Japan offers Italy concerns beauty. Not as subjective pleasure, but as a civic duty.

In the Japanese context, beauty is not separated from use. An object must function and be beautiful. A space must be practicable and balanced. A form must be right before it is expressive.

This conception is surprisingly close to the one that guided centuries of Italian art and architecture. And it is equally distant from the superficial aestheticization that today dominates much of European cultural discourse.

Japan reminds Italy of something Italy has forgotten: that beauty is not a luxury, but a daily responsibility.

Popular Culture and High Culture: A Separation That Does Not Hold

Another deep point of contact between Italy and Japan is the fragility of the distinction between popular culture and high culture. Italian melodrama was born as popular entertainment. Manga was born as an accessible form. Both, when they are serious, refuse to be confined within a rigid hierarchy.

In Japan, this continuity is still evident. A manga can address complex philosophical themes without losing readability. An anime can be popular without being superficial.

In Italy, this continuity has been broken multiple times. And precisely for this reason, the encounter with Japanese culture has been, for many, a revelation: one can be rigorous without being elitist.

Respect as Practice, Not Rhetoric

In Japan, respect is not a word. It is a practice embodied in gestures, timing, distances. It does not need to be proclaimed because it is taken for granted.

This strikes deeply those who arrive from contemporary Italy, where respect is often invoked precisely because it is lacking. The comparison does not produce imitation, but questioning. It forces one to ask which forms of respect we have stopped practicing without realizing it.

Once again, the dialogue is not consolatory. It is demanding.

The Italy That Japan Sees

From the Japanese point of view, Italy appears as a civilization of extraordinary form and fragile management. A place where talent coexists with approximation, beauty with neglect, genius with improvisation.

This perception is not caricatural. It is often painfully lucid.

And it is precisely for this reason that Japan continues to esteem Italy: not for what it has become, but for what it could return to being. Japanese admiration for Italy is not nostalgia, but expectation.

Returning to Names, Once Again

In this broadened scenario, the question of Cio-Cio-San and Kyōko takes on emblematic value. It does not concern only an opera, but the way one culture chooses to name another.

At the beginning of dialogue, names are approximate. They serve to evoke, not to recognize. Over time, if the dialogue is authentic, those names become insufficient.

The fact that today Cio-Cio sounds like japonisme is not a fault of the past. It is a sign of the present.

A Dialogue That Demands Maturity

One hundred and sixty years of relations between Italy and Japan do not ask for celebration. They ask for maturity. The maturity to recognize what was necessary and what is no longer so. The maturity not to repudiate works, but to read them with tools adequate to our time.

Thinking Kyōko alongside Butterfly, visiting Kyoto without seeking postcards, watching anime without condescension, observing the Japanese countryside without idealizing it: all this belongs to the same gesture.

It is the gesture of those who no longer seek the exotic, but the demanding.

Silence as Cultural Infrastructure

One of the most difficult — and at the same time most fertile — aspects of Japan to understand is the role of silence. Not as absence of communication, but as the invisible infrastructure of meaning. Japanese silence is not empty: it is a shared space that allows things to happen without being continually named.

This has profound consequences for cultural life. In cinema, literature, music, but also in everyday conversation, the unsaid is not a lack: it is a form of respect. Not everything is made explicit because not everything must be made immediately available.

For contemporary Italy — which tends to confuse transparency with total exposure — this represents a radical lesson. It is not a matter of speaking less, but of speaking only when it is necessary.

Community Without Rhetoric

Japan is often described as a strongly communal society. This is true, but with a fundamental clarification: Japanese community is not founded on identity proclamations, but on shared practices. No one must declare that they “feel part” of something; one is part of it insofar as one respects the minimal gestures that make coexistence possible.

This idea of community, devoid of rhetoric, is surprisingly close to the one that sustained Italian cities for centuries before their transformation into tourist scenarios. There too, belonging was not an abstract feeling, but a set of non-negotiable reciprocal obligations.

The comparison with Japan makes evident how much Italy has lost not the sense of community, but trust in the practices that make it real.

Modernity Without Iconoclasm

One of the great Western misunderstandings concerns the relationship between modernity and rupture. In Europe, and in Italy in particular, modernity has often been experienced as an iconoclastic gesture: to be new, one had to destroy what came before. Japan followed a different path, more complex and less spectacular.

Japanese modernity did not erase the past.

It incorporated it.

Temples, historic districts, rituals, behavioral codes coexist with highly advanced technologies without this being perceived as a contradiction. Not because Japan is “harmonious” by nature, but because it chose continuity as an operative value.

For Italy, which possesses a similar historical heritage but often experiences it as a burden, this is a crucial point of reflection.

Kyoto as a Formative Experience

Visiting Kyoto is not an aesthetic experience, but a formative one. Not because the city offers “beauties” in a museum sense, but because it forces one to measure oneself against a different idea of time. Streets, neighborhoods, daily rhythms do not ask for attention: they demand it.

Kyoto does not offer itself to a distracted gaze. It penalizes those who seek the quick image and rewards those who accept slowing down. In this sense, it is a profoundly anti-touristic city, even when crowded.

For an attentive Italian, Kyoto functions as a mirror: it shows what happens when a historic city is not reduced to a showcase, but continues to be lived as a place of responsibility.

Japanese Countryside and the Ethics of Maintenance

If Kyoto teaches long time, Japanese rural areas teach maintenance. Not in a technical sense, but a moral one. Every element of the landscape — a road, a field, a building — is cared for not because it is “beautiful,” but because it is necessary.

This ethic of maintenance is perhaps the point of greatest distance between Japan and contemporary Italy. Italy possesses enormous territorial wealth, but often treats it as a guaranteed inheritance, not as a daily task.

Japan shows that nothing preserves itself. And that care is not an exceptional act, but a routine.

Culture as Continuity, Not as Event

Another substantial difference concerns the way culture is understood. In Japan, culture is not primarily an event, but continuity. It does not need to be continually celebrated because it is embedded in daily life.

In Italy, by contrast, culture is often transformed into spectacle, into extraordinary occasion, into emergency. This produces visibility, but weakens structure. The comparison with Japan highlights this fragility without the need for polemic.

It is not a matter of having “fewer events,” but of rebuilding a stable cultural fabric that does not live only on exceptions.

The Art of the Limit

A profoundly Japanese trait — and profoundly instructive for Italy — is the art of the limit. Knowing when to stop. Knowing when not to add. Knowing when a form is complete.

This applies to the arts, architecture, writing, but also to public life. The limit is not experienced as frustration, but as a condition of precision.

Italy, which has an equally strong formal tradition, has often betrayed this principle by yielding to excess, emphasis, overabundance. Japan reminds us that rigor is not austerity, but clarity.

Mutual Admiration Without Idealization

It is important to state this clearly: Japan is not a paradise. It has deep contradictions, social tensions, problematic rigidities. But what makes it interesting for Italy is not its perfection, but the coherence of its attempts.

Likewise, Italy is not a failed country, but a country that struggles to recognize the value of its own forms when they are no longer guaranteed by tradition.

Cultural dialogue between Italy and Japan works when it renounces idealization and accepts complexity.

A Relationship That Does Not Ask for Celebrations

At this point, the 160 years of relations between Italy and Japan appear for what they are: a duration sufficient to stop telling each other fairy tales. There is no need to celebrate. There is a need to continue looking at each other attentively.

Italy has much to learn from Japan in terms of discipline, care, continuity.

Japan has continued to look at Italy as a place where form can still be generative.

This exchange does not need proclamations.

It needs competence, respect, and time.

Remaining Up to the Task

Ultimately, Japan does not ask Italy to become something else. It implicitly asks it to remain up to what it once was when it knew how to take care of its forms. It is a silent but demanding request.

Accepting it does not mean imitating gestures, rituals, or social models. It means recovering an ethic of precision, of limit, of daily responsibility. All things Italy knows well, even if it often pretends to have forgotten them.

Remaining Worthy of the Dialogue

Perhaps the point is no longer to ask what Italy and Japan have in common, nor how different they are. After one hundred and sixty years of relations, after decades of intense and often silent cultural exchanges, the question has shifted elsewhere: are we still worthy of the dialogue we have opened?

Japan, with all its contradictions, has shown that a civilization can pass through modernity without destroying its backbone. That one can be technological without being iconoclastic, efficient without being cynical, rigorous without being inhuman. Not always, not everywhere, not without costs. But with a coherence that strikes.

Italy, by contrast, often seems to oscillate between pride and removal. Between the celebration of its past and the inability to inhabit it in the present. It is here that the comparison with Japan becomes precious not as a model, but as a demanding mirror.

Admiration as Responsibility

Admiring a culture is easy.

Taking seriously what it implies is more difficult.

Italian admiration for Japan — for its manga, its films, its cities, its rural landscapes, its daily discipline — risks remaining sterile if it does not become interrogation. Not about Japan, but about ourselves. About what we have stopped caring for. About what we have taken for granted. About what we have turned into spectacle instead of practice.

Japan does not ask for imitation.

It implicitly asks for attention.

A Different Idea of Progress

In a time that confuses progress with acceleration, Japan continues to suggest a different idea: that progress can also consist in not breaking what works, in improving without erasing, in maintaining without stiffening.

It is an idea Italy knows well, at least in its own history. And that today it struggles to recognize as still practicable. Cultural dialogue between the two countries may still be alive precisely because it is played out on this fragile ground: the possibility of a non-self-destructive modernity.

Traveling as a Moral Act

Visiting Japan — Kyoto, the countryside, minor cities, places not designed to be consumed — thus becomes something more than a cultural experience. It becomes a moral act. An exercise in attention. A training of the gaze.

It is not about “seeing things,” but about learning how to stay. To stay in silence, to stay within limits, to stay within a form that does not offer itself immediately, but demands respect.

For an Italian willing to question himself, this journey does not end upon return.

An Anniversary That Does Not Ask for Celebrations

In the end, the 160 years of relations between Italy and Japan do not ask for rhetoric. They ask for continuity. Not events, but practices. Not slogans, but competence. Not exoticism, but precision.

The dialogue has long been open.

The question is whether we are still capable of sustaining it without trivializing it.