Learning to Bow Read online

  The first questions came slowly.

  “Can you eat Japanese sushi?”

  “Can you drink Japanese sake?”

  “Can you use Japanese chopsticks?”

  They came in Japanese in rapid succession, first from one side of the room, then the other, and I answered them in English, assuring the crowd that, yes, I could eat Japanese food and drink Japanese wine. Then, as everyone became a little more relaxed, the questions took a different tack.

  “Do you like Japanese girls?”

  “Do you want a Japanese girlfriend?”

  “Who is the prettiest girl in this room?”

  These questions came faster and faster and I bobbed through the blizzard, feeling a bit like an amateur host of Dr. Ruth Does Japan, when suddenly a question in English came floating from the back of the room.

  “Do you like sex?”

  I was stunned. Surely I had misheard. But no relief came, and I stood still on the mat, silence creeping across the room, ten inches of my leg showing between my robe and the floor, a microphone in my hand. Mr. C glanced at me with a puzzled look on his face, and I realized that he had not understood. Taking this as a cue, I turned back toward the audience, smiled, and said, “Yes. I like sushi very much.”

  Every room I entered in Japan I entered through the same door—one that led from the outside in. Every time I entered a home, a school, or a classroom, I was treated as if I had just walked through that door for the first time. To those inside, my world seemed exotic and far away, so they assumed their world was strange and exotic to me. When I first went to Japan during the previous year to study for six months at a university, I knew I would be an outsider, an American in Japan. But when I returned to teach in Tochigi, I imagined that the longer I stayed in the country, the more I would be welcomed into every room as if I were an insider.

  Others who have written about living in a foreign land have described the shifting moods of affection and disaffection the foreigner feels—one day enamored with the host culture, privileged with the secret access to the heart of another world; the next day dismayed at always being kept away from its inviolable core. I too felt these swings in emotion, yet those around me had no idea that my feelings about Japan were evolving. To them I remained a newcomer, and long after they ceased being exotic to me, I remained exotic to them.

  Several weeks into my stay, Mrs. Cherry Blossom, a plump, jolly woman who taught home economics to junior high school girls and raised two junior high school boys of her own, hosted a welcome party for me along with some of her friends. As the party began, spread across the table at the center of her living room floor was a marvelous assortment of traditional Japanese party fare: heaping trays of sushi; bowls of pickled vegetables, tofu, and potatoes; plates of salads and compotes. In front of me, however, she had discreetly placed a small plate of egg salad sandwiches with a knife and fork tucked beneath a napkin. Moved by her thoughtfulness but by then quite accustomed to dining with chopsticks, I plucked a pair from the center of the table and joined with the other guests in prying nuggets of food from the trays and putting them into my mouth.

  I had not lifted the first bite of raw fish halfway to my lips when the whole conversation stopped dead and everyone turned to marvel at my unimaginable skill.

  “That’s amazing,” swooned the lady to my left as she focused her glasses on my fingers.

  “So skillful,” said another.

  They were so generally impressed that they beckoned our hostess from the kitchen to witness this display of manual dexterity by the foreigner. She came rushing to my end of the table, dripping her serving spoon into my lap, and exclaimed, “Can you use chopsticks?”

  I heard this type of question nearly every day I lived in Japan. Can you drink Japanese beer? the teachers asked me. Aren’t you afraid of Japanese thunder? And, in a devastating irony that was repeated every time I took a drive with someone, Can you fit into a Japanese car? Most people assumed that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how long I lived in Japan, I could never tolerate Japanese customs. The longer I stayed in Japan, the farther I moved into the room and away from the door, yet I never escaped the penumbra of that door frame, which seemed to follow me wherever I went.

  Over time, I came to feel that the problem lay in a simple misconception: most Japanese believe that only they can understand Japan. Near the end of my stay, a time of great political scandal in the nation, I was the guest of a seventy-five-year-old retired English teacher and political activist, Gunji-sensei.

  “Japanese politicians never speak straight,” he said with great conviction as we sipped tea and ate rice wafers one Saturday afternoon. “Just the other day a member of parliament appeared on television, mentioned something about an illness, and announced that he would retire. He didn’t say that he stole money. He didn’t say he was corrupt. He said only that he was ‘ill.’ I bet you can’t catch the meaning of what Japanese people say. You don’t understand how they think or how they speak.”

  I reminded him that I had been a sensei in Japanese schools. I had stood alongside teachers in classrooms. I had eaten school lunch with students and joined in sports days and school excursions, where Japanese boys and girls learn how to behave in a group and how to speak indirectly.

  “But we are one race,” he insisted. “We are unique. Only a Japanese person can understand the heart of another. You can’t figure us out because you are a foreigner.”

  “That isn’t true,” I maintained. “It is only a myth that Japanese children learn in school. Japanese can understand their politicians because they know how to interpret their words. After being in school in Japan I can do the same. Sometimes I even think like a Japanese myself. It’s not magic, it’s government policy.”

  The widespread myth of Japanese uniqueness—part old wives’ tale, part cultural obsession—plays two ways. The pleasant surprise that people proclaim when they discover a Westerner using chopsticks often becomes arrogance when they insist that Japanese rice—or beef, or beer—is better than that in other countries. This issue of uniqueness has become the number one cultural dilemma facing Japan today. Some argue that the country should overthrow its legacy of isolation and speed up its integration into the rest of the world, while others believe Japan should resist the influx of Western values and stress its own distinctive heritage. The chief battleground in this debate lies in public school classrooms and in the minds of the next generation. Should Japanese schoolchildren eat bread or rice for school lunch? Should they eat with a fork or with chopsticks? Should textbooks contain less or more information about Japan’s militaristic past? Should students be allowed to wear Mickey Mouse emblems on their socks at school?

  While the means may be debated, the primary goal of Japanese schools remains essentially unchanged: to produce good citizens, those who are committed to thinking beyond themselves and to advancing the needs of the country. From the opening day of elementary school to graduation day from junior high, students hear of the opportunities and obligations of being members of the Japanese nation. To understand Japan—its work ethic and its strong identity—one must understand these lessons as they are taught in schools. By the time students have finished ninth grade, the end of their compulsory education, most understand the sacrifices they must make to fit into society and are willing and able to make them. Most of these students will enter the system and become, in time, other well-qualified cogs, “Made in Japan.”

  At the end of the party, the new teachers disbanded into smaller groups, dispersed into various rooms in the lodge, and gathered around whiskey bottles and sushi plates for less formal initiation parties. Mr. C, now scarlet from the flush of the beer, led me from room to room, to a myriad of new chances to test my resistance to liquor and my ability to perform under stress.

  Each group had new topics to discuss—“Do all Americans smoke marijuana?”—and new stunts to perform—“Can you drink an entire shot of whiskey in one gulp?” After several hours of this inaugural pro
tocol, Mr. C retired to his room and left me in the hands of one last group of teachers, who were determined to see me dance. They had in mind the perfect stunt for a new teacher—to sing the most famous children’s song in all Japan, “Mount Fuji.” And so it came to pass that at two-thirty in the morning in the mountains of central Japan, on the third floor of a lodge closed for the night, I stood in my bare legs and bathrobe, waved my arms, danced, and sang the song that Japanese youth have sung for a thousand years:

  With its head held up so high,

  way above the clouds,

  Looking down on other mountains,

  ’round on all four sides,

  Listening to the god of thunder,

  way above the land,

  Fuji is the number one

  mountain in Japan.

  I ended the song with my hands clasped above my head in a triangle that vaguely resembled Mount Fuji, and I suddenly felt like the mountain itself, “looking down on other teachers, ’round on all four sides.” I thanked those left standing, bowed, and made my way into the hall toward the room I shared with Mr. C and the other teachers from my office. Arriving at the door, I saw that bedrolls had been laid across the padded floor and the men from my office lay sprawled amid twisted sheets and pillows like teenagers at a slumber party after a game of strip poker. I tiptoed through the mass of bodies to the last empty roll, against the far screen wall. Slipping off my robe, I slid between the sheets with a sense of great anticipation, until, to my great despair, my feet came popping out the other end of the bedroll. Realizing that nothing would cover me tonight, I lay on my back, closed my eyes, and in a moment of peace, dreamed that I was in Japan—surrounded by teachers, wearing no clothes.

  2

  RED LIGHTS AND GREEN TEA: DRAWING THE LINES

  Each ancestor, while travelling through the country, scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and these lay over the land as “ways” of communication between the most far-flung tribes.

  —Bruce Chatwin The Songlines

  THE TOHOKU SUPER EXPRESSWAY stretches eight lanes wide and reaches over eight hundred kilometers north from Tokyo into the hinterlands of central Japan. From its start near the heart of the city, the road winds its way through the bustling urban sprawl of the capital, spans two colorless rivers hurrying toward their dénouement in the depths of Tokyo Bay, then heads inland toward the vast provincial region that the Japanese call inaka, or what people from my home in Georgia would refer to as “up the country.” Soon the clamor of neon fades from view and steel girders cease piercing the sky. The endless queues of cramped apartment blocks and towering concrete factory walls slowly back away from the advancing road as if to make room for the tile-roof buildings and moistened rice fields that will soon take their place. Several hours down the road, a small city rises from the grassy lowlands where the Tohoku bends toward the north. In the parking lot just off the highway, a towering sign salutes the new arrival: “WELCOME TO SANO. PATIENCE AND HUMILITY PREVENT ACCIDENTS.”

  Sano is a city—a shi. In Japanese, places are separated into categories by size and then labeled with identifying tags, not unlike socks in a well-ordered drawer. The classification is based on population—up to ten thousand is a village, ten to twenty thousand is a town, and above that is a city. Thus the city of Sano becomes Sano-shi, and the town of Kuzu, Kuzu-machi.

  For the newcomer such names are helpful. That is especially true in this community, where one might never guess from its surface that Sano—whose two Japanese characters translate somewhat forebodingly into English as “left field”—could actually qualify as a city. Although it has a population of close to fifty thousand people, one train station, two department stores, and more than its share of stoplights, Sano has no curbs. Downtown, buildings seem to melt into streets, and residents step out of their homes in the morning into lines of oncoming traffic. In summer, when people in cars roll their windows down and people at home leave their doors ajar, a driver can sit in his car at a red light and watch a baseball game on a TV set in a house by the side of the road.

  Leaving my two-room second-floor apartment each morning, I would stop to admire the delicate Japanese garden that my landlady had tended for over sixty years. Short-leaf pines and persimmon trees hunched over the tiny courtyard, a pale green moss shrouded the ground, and three aging carp mingled quietly in the still, black waters of a homemade pond. Retrieving my bike from astride her stone fence, I would pedal down the narrow lane, past the barbershop and the lean stone pillars of our neighborhood Shinto shrine, and head toward the shadow of the Hotel Sunroute, an eight-story beige concrete box that was the tallest and ugliest building in Sano. As I crossed the railroad tracks every day heading away from town, the same women would be gathered outside the same stores, having, it seemed, the same conversations—“Sure is hot today.” “How is your daughter doing?” “Did you hear the mayor is having an affair?” These women would bring out their burnable garbage for collection on Tuesdays, their bottles on Wednesdays, and their used batteries in small plastic bags every other Saturday morning. Most of them had probably never been to the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the other side of town or the Mos Burger Store just around the block.

  Before coming to Japan, I had often heard that Japan is the wealthiest country in the world. I had read stories about toilets that talk and robots that answer the telephone. I had seen pictures of fancy buildings all over the world which the Japanese recently bought. With this introduction I half expected to find an island paradise overflowing with expensive cars, spiral escalators, and extravagant buildings that the Japanese already owned. But in Sano I found a world quite different from the polish and poshness of Tokyo and far closer to the disheveled tin-roof towns I remembered from my childhood in the American South. Although Japan has the highest per capita gross national product in the world, the lives and homes of most Japanese people do not reflect this statistic. My apartment, for example, had no heating, no insulation, no hot running water in the sink, and no overhead lighting. My toilet had no seat. Still, my Japanese friends told me I had the nicest apartment they had seen in town. My American friends, meanwhile, had a different name for this lifestyle: they called it creative camping.

  After a ten-minute ride through the traffic, I would arrive on the outskirts of town. Here, away from the crowded downtown alleys and narrow single-lane streets, away from the faded plastic hydrangeas that drape the main street in summer, away from the gray tin aura of old-town Sano, a shining new building appears along the road. The five-story hall is wrapped in whitewashed stucco and gray metallic windows. Along with the other trophy towers in town, the Hotel Sunroute, the Jusco Department Store, and the “Happy Home” Wedding Palace, it has one of the few elevators in Sano. On the top floor of this government building, the elevator doors open directly across from the Ansoku Regional Branch of the Tochigi Prefectural Board of the Japanese Ministry of Education.

  It was here, on a Monday morning in August, fresh from my inaugural bath, that I first reported for work.

  According to legend, when the American army moved into Japan at the end of World War II, they brought their own desks—large, solid, U.S. government—issue, gray metal desks. Perhaps because of their durability, perhaps because of the Japanese custom of adopting things foreign, perhaps because of mere fashion, these desks have remained ever since. To this day, these indestructible desks are the staple of government, and many non-government, offices across Japan. On my first day as a government employee in Japan, I too was given my very own gray metal desk, with a hard-back gray metal chair to match.

  “This is Mr. Bruce’s desk,” Mr. Cherry Blossom said as I arrived, using his junior high school English in front of his colleagues and plopping down a sign that said, indeed, “MR. BRUCE’S DESK.”

  The crowded room had three groupings of desks spaced evenly across the white tile floor. My desk was in the middle section of nine, along with Mr. C’s. Our group was arranged in tight format
ion, with four desks lined up end to end like football players in a line of scrimmage, facing four others directly across. The section chief, like a referee, was perpendicular at the top. Since all the desks in this double-file line were touching, they formed what amounted to a giant tabletop that stretched from the door to the plate-glass windows overlooking downtown Sano. In this huddle, every conversation and every minor memo became the business of the whole group. Every four desks, moreover, shared one telephone.

  As soon as Mr. C had introduced me to my seat, two women came rushing over with hot rags to wipe off the top of the desk.

  “This is Arai-san,” he said, pointing to the older of the two secretaries, whom the Japanese call “O.L.s,” office ladies. She was a middle-aged woman with a tapered neck, an elongated face, and black hair pulled back from her face.

  “How do you do,” she whispered shyly, drawing her hand to her mouth and grabbing her assistant for protection. The younger woman, in her mid-twenties, was taller, with straight hair that hung down her back and a timid gaze across her face like that of an animal frightened from sleep.

  “This is Eh-chan,” Mr. C said, resisting what seemed like the temptation to pat her on the rear. “She is not yet married.”

  Slowly, allowing for bows and handshakes, Mr. C led me around the phalanx of desks and formally introduced me to each person.