As I mentioned in my previous two columns I have been in Japan on a residency in Kanazawa where I am to have an exhibition in 2007. The idea is that I get to experience the local culture, meet the people and make a little work. On my first day there I met the head of the art college, the director of the museum and the mayor. Each meeting was a little ceremonial; we exchanged business cards, drank green tea and chatted, watched over by a dozen or so attendants and local media. Like most people I met in Kanazawa they were warm and gentle and liked a joke. I would use the translator as a kind of buffer and would try out a quip on her, on which she might choke with laughter, sometimes I thought she used diplomacy in the translation. I would then wait for what seemed an age for my host’s chuckle while she relayed my casual banter. I had to be satisfied with about a 30 per cent joke-to-laugh ratio.

Despite wearing a nice crisp dress and mary-janes I felt like a blundering, hairy bull in a china shop, continually worried about causing offence by some unwitting transgression of their social codes. I wondered what they made of this emissary from the land of Johnny Rotten and Beatrix Potter.

Another Briton who loved Japan and who loomed large when I was learning ceramics was Bernard Leach. The potter scholar saw parallels between traditional English slipware and the brand of studied rusticity favoured by the Japanese tea masters. These aesthetes are to me the first conceptual artists, initiating the idea of “readymades” seven centuries before Duchamp by elevating particular examples of Korean peasant pottery that they felt embodied their philosophy. These often crude vessels, with their distortions and subtle dribbles of glaze, hovered between the manmade and a piece of nature. Their choices were so prized that a mere fragment of a famous broken bowl was a worthy reward to a general from his master for winning a battle.

Japan has long had an influence on European art. The Impressionists and post-Impressionists fell for cheap woodblock prints which were used as wrapping paper for cargoes of porcelain. The lively cropping of the image, bold mark-making and sparse asymmetric compositions were hugely influential on artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler and Van Gogh. Today the doe-eyed stylings of manga comics can be seen in our computer games and hip graphic design. I was continually on the lookout for modern manifestations of the classical Japanese aesthetic. It would occur in the unlikeliest of places. There is a very popular chain of 100-yen shops, a bit like our pound shops except that you actually might want to buy something, and 100 yen is only 50p. Rack upon rack of charmingly packaged, often quirkily designed, products.

Kanazawa has harsh wet cold winters and one of the first things that strikes you on entering the city is that nearly every branch of every tree is supported by a temporary arrangement of poles and ropes to protect them from the wind and snow. These mollycoddled cherries, pines and maples are for me a good illustration of the Japanese mindset. Enormous care is taken in the humblest task. I saw no litter, vandalism or graffiti. To me, coming from noisy, grubby, sometimes scary London, it seemed heavenly and also slightly eerie. I wandered through this almost crime-free, considerate, ultra-modern yet traditional culture and I wondered what is the downside of all this, where is the darkness in the heart of the chrysanthemum?

I think of all the rules that hold this society together. In the UK we seem to need more and more laws to control the anarchic individualism for which we pride ourselves — many of us have lost a natural sense of what is decent behaviour. In Japan in ten days I never saw one policeman. I guess their laws are internal, every citizen carrying quite a burden of shoulds and shouldn’ts. I never caught a glint of the brutality that fuelled their disastrous imperialism but I did see a sentimental cuteness that often masks cruelty. Girls in the street, despite wearing short skirts and stilettos, still often walk with toes pointed coyly together, a hangover I am told from the traditional stance while wearing a kimono. The nearest I saw to threatening behaviour was some bikers roaring through a red light, but their overpreened, perfectly rehearsed cool made their transgression seem almost sweet. Even teenage rebellion has the cosseted quality of those trained and pruned trees in the exquisite Kenroku-en garden.