American Obsession

Happy to be back home in New York briefly after four months in Paris.

There was a time when I felt strangely uncomfortable living in a house in an American suburb instead of an apartment in the city. When I was younger in Tokyo, I imagined my future somewhere surrounded by concrete — minimalist architecture, sharp lines, outdoor spaces paved in cement like some early Tadao Ando architectures. A garden with a lawn was something I truly couldn’t care less about.

And yet, somewhere along the way, that changed completely.

A few years ago, we had to dig up almost the entire yard to install a long underground dry well. For months, the garden looked less like a garden and more like the site of a small disaster — a big mountain of dirt, patches of mud, and then suddenly an invasion of weeds. Crabgrass spread aggressively in every direction the moment the weather turned warm. It was shocking how quickly nature could make something feel abandoned. What surprised me even more was how much it bothered me. By my standards, which were never exactly “suburban lawn enthusiast” standards, it became unbearable to look at.

Long story short, it took nearly two years to bring the yard back to a point where it felt peaceful again. Fighting weeds became a strange obsession. June through August now feels less like summer and more like a quiet war.

People in other countries often criticize the United States for lacking culture, but having grown up between Japan and America — and having been married to a French woman — I’ve come to feel the opposite. American culture simply expresses itself differently. Sometimes through music, cars, diners, motels, films, or suburban rituals that people elsewhere overlook because they feel too ordinary or too commercial to be considered “culture.”

The American obsession with the perfect green lawn is one of those things. To me, it carries enormous visual memory. It represents a certain postwar moment when America projected optimism so powerfully that even kids growing up across the Pacific absorbed it.

I was probably around ten years old in Yokohama. After school, I would head straight to the yard of our American military neighbors whose kids were around my age. We ran through the grass, wrestled, rode bicycles across the lawn, and dodged water spraying from the sprinklers under the summer sun. Looking back now, those afternoons — simple, suburban, ordinary American afternoons — were some of the happiest moments of my childhood.