Beauty and Truth

If the American vice of choice is overeating, the Japanese vice is smoking. Smoking is still permitted in most public places. All restaurants have smoking sections. The locker rooms of sento bathhouses are always full of smoke. By contrast, eating or even drinking in non-designated places is frowned upon. The Sogo department store’s basement food stands are full of treats but there’s nowhere to eat them. They wrap your orders in several layers of plastic with the clear expectation that you will bring them home or at least elsewhere. Something as messy as a “food court” is unthinkable in Japan; many older people still cannot get their heads around “fast food.” My friend Nagao often discusses a former protégé of his, a friend’s son who became an academic and spent some time teaching in the U.S. Among the unsavory habits that marked him as no longer quite Japanese was his habit of carrying a drink with a plastic lid and straw everywhere he went, which he would sip periodically. Nagao compared him to a baby sucking a bottle.

Eating is treated with moderation and discretion in Japan; there are times and places for it. Though most Japanese rarely exercise, they stay slim by eating only at appointed times, by refraining from eating before they’re hungry and after they’re full (and by smoking). Slimness is a token of physical beauty in Japan, and their obsession with beauty far exceeds our own. Food itself is not fit for consumption unless it is beautiful, and everyone from the sushi chef down to the housewife preparing her kids’ bento boxes slaves over the food to make it beautiful. Good-looking people fare better in Japan. It would be unthinkable in Japan to sue an employer for discrimination based on appearance, not only because the society is so much less litigious but because the advantages of good looks are considered natural. Even the foreigners who visit (at least those who get on well) tend to be good-looking foreigners. Ugly and overweight people are openly and commonly stigmatized. When I told people I was swimming with a particular female professor, they teased me about the prospect of having to see her in a swimsuit. A story recently appeared in the newspaper regarding the subway cars. Japanese subways have all-female cars (marked with pink arrows on the platform) to prevent groping, yet some (presumably older and less attractive) women have been protesting the arrangement, as they claim the younger and prettier girls on the all-female cars taunt them by saying that no one would want to grope them anyway.

A cynic would say that beauty is skin deep in Japan, though a more neutral spin would suggest that the Japanese are more inclined than Americans to read character from outward signs. In Japan, people look their parts. Young women wear flowery skirts and tight black leggings; salarymen wear blue suits. There are no jean days or Hawaiian shirt days at the office; the government recently had to start a public service campaign just to get men to wear short sleeve dress shirts (to save energy on air conditioning). Most Japanese men would not be caught walking down the street in t-shirts, shorts, and sandals. (I felt like a pariah doing so, and expanded my wardrobe shortly after arriving so I could wear something presentable each day.) Beauty is like grace in Japan, which is why the Disney movies are so popular. As my former student Elyse Vigiletti discussed in her thesis, beauty is virtue in the world of Disney, even for supposedly “feisty” heroines like Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine.

In the U.S., we push inward for signs of character, confident that there is virtue behind ugliness and fearful that there is vice behind beauty. America is the land of film noir, where the upright citizen might always be the moral reprobate and vice versa. Thus our “tyranny of intimacy” (Sennett), and our tabloid obsession with the peccadilloes of successful and outwardly virtuous public figures. In Japan, the inner self is less violable, and the outward self is what is put on for the show of character. So obesity is profane in Japan, whereas in the U.S. obesity is just more padding for a possibly virtuous core. Conversely, in the U.S. bad teeth is a vice, while in Japan bad teeth are common (again, largely due to smoking). While Japanese facial expression is stoic, in the U.S. we are expected to smile; we emit and gauge character and virtue less through clothing and grooming, still less through physical attractiveness, than through facial expression, which is considered a window on the soul. Japanese young people who hang out at international bars in Osaka and Kyoto are relieved to be able to wear jeans and t-shirts; they are less aware of another sort of tyranny of smiling and laughing that takes hold in these places.

Japanese need not worry so much about smiling because in Japan the mouth is relatively inviolate; it is relegated to the private self. Most Japanese (especially women) cover their mouths with their hands whenever they are forced to speak while chewing and often whenever they laugh. The Japanese keep their mouths to themselves and manage others’ impressions of them in other ways that can be prepared at home. Kissing is rare and tongue kissing unheard of except among the closest intimates; single friends have told me how Japanese girls who are perfectly willing to dirty dance in nightclubs and exchange massages in love hotels will draw the line at kissing. For Americans the ritual of exchanging saliva is homologous with our striving for a meeting of minds and souls. The Japanese are perfectly happy with the outward contact of their beautiful bodies.

Btw, if anyone is still reading this, and if it is not clear from the confused tense and sense of place above, I might mention that I been home for several days now. So as far as the blog goes this is a "wrap" or, as C. W. McCall famously put it, "We gone, bye bye!"

Mosburger

Readers of my previous post are probably wondering how we got on the subject of catch phrases from 70s TV shows while sitting in that restaurant in Kyoto. The triggering event was when Daniel said something ridiculous, and Amy responded, “What you talkin’ ‘bout?” I added, “Willis,” and it went from there.

Cut to several evenings later, when I launched into an equally pointless dinnertime spiel at the Mosburger in Tokushima. We had rode our bicycles from the university to the beach and then to the Mosburger. The Tokushima Mosburger is on what they call the “bypass” road, the sort of sprawling artery that is killing off Japanese downtowns as it did in the U.S. decades ago (the decline of Japanese cities is also often blamed, like all of the country’s woes, on the low birth rate). The bypass road has sidewalks and tunnels through overpasses for bikes, making it by U.S. standards hardly a bypass road at all. But the speed of the traffic, the girth of the road’s three lanes in each direction, the relative infrequency of traffic signals and absence of pedestrians make the road uninviting for bikes as well.

Anyway, we made our way there, and I launched into another yet another dinnertime discourse. This time the triggering event was the arrival of the Fanta melon sodas that we all ordered with all our meals at the Mosburger (we dined at Mosburger in three cities). Along with Coke and Canada Dry ginger ale, melon soda is ubiquitous in Japanese fast food settings, whereas some standard U.S. pops (such as Diet Coke) are quite rare. As we sipped the dayglo green elixir (from real glasses, I might add), the children once again insisted that it was identical in both taste and color (though characteristically less sweet) to the apple soda they’d enjoyed at Ed Debevic’s in Chicago. This led to a discussion of the people with whom we’d recently dined at Ed Debevic’s (Joe and Liz Mason), our family history at Ed Debevic’s (our first wiseguy waiter there said “I’ll speak slowly then” when we told him we were from Michigan), my own first visit to Ed Debevic’s (with my cousin while attending the blues festival in 1985), my cousin’s mispronunciation of “Debevic,” my cousin’s habit of mispronouncing words and names he’s only encountered in print, Amy’s father’s same habit, etc.

Something else I spoke about at dinner was the sento at the beach. I had been saving that story for dinner but it was preempted by the melon soda discussion. The sento was easily the most impressive of the four I visited in Tokushima. It had a great many spacious baths of varying temperatures, two hot rooms, long banks of well-equipped showers, and a natural hot spring set among beautiful blue stones. I showered and went into one of the hot rooms, and there was a huge vat of chunky white powder in the middle of the floor, which of course I proceeded to taste and discovered to be salt. A smallish, older, rugged-looking gentleman entered the room and started vigorously rubbing the salt all over his body, so I did the same. Once we were both thoroughly cured I squinted at him through one stinging eye (I’d rubbed the salt on my face too) with a coy look as if to ask, “What now?” He rinsed himself by a spout in the corner, and I did the same. Then he left the hot room and took a more thorough shower, and I followed him. He went in the cold pool, I went in the cold pool … I just figured I’d follow him everywhere. (“Then he called the police,” Amy guessed. “And you called the police,” Charlie added.) Eventually I lost him, and cleaned up and left the sento, pleased to find that, like all the best sentos, it had a machine outside with little glass bottles of whole milk and sweetened coffee milk. The next morning my skin felt smooth as silk.

But back to the Mosburger. Amy wanted a beach ball, and I wanted a “Hamburger is My Life” plate, but they don’t sell stuff like that at the Mosburger. First, you have to buy a “set-o,” or set meal (a term that in Japan encompasses everything from the standard, burger/fries/pop fast-food combo to the 10,000 yen kaiseki banquet). Then you get a scratch card and if you’re lucky (which is not often) you win a beach ball. I had the same problem on an earlier, solo trip to the Tokushima Mosburger in trying to acquire a little Mosburger guy figure. My usual strategy of smiling, offering money, and standing there hopefully until they offered me one did not work. At the moment, on eBay, there are a couple of little Mosburger phone strap figures shaped like burgers and hot dogs but no beach balls as yet.

Things went downhill from there: after leaving the Mosburger we tried to visit the nearby entertainment complex (billiards, ping pong, karaoke, etc.). I lamely tried to ascertain how much it cost to purchase “ka-dos” (entrance cards) and to stay by the “owah” (hour), and not only was I unsuccessful but Charlie stormed off, claiming I was racist. We made our way home and watched a movie to bond, “I Am Legend,” another flimsy-scripted action thriller that fulfills a great thought experiment (deadly zombies overrunning Manhattan, everything else dead but a few wily species and Will Smith) much more effectively than the original “Omega Man.”

Amy retired to bed, and the kids to their computers. They’ve been staying up all night. I don’t know which is worse, the Japanese or U.S. childrearing system. Japanese kids are occupied with some activity every moment of their lives. A friend of mine at Shikoku U. says it reminds him of Plato’s Republic, where kids are stripped from their parents and raised collectively. They end up with many talents but none they have chosen. American kids are relatively idle and free to choose their diversions and typically move through a series of half-hearted projects. Both end up in cyberspace.

Sunday in Kyoto

I’m not sure why I chose to bring this particular family to Kyoto, which surpasses San Francisco in the subtlety of its expectations for travelers. Parading U.S. junior high school students before 400 year old temples and trying to turn them on to Tokugawa era art while they discuss the latest “Smosh” videos on YouTube is truly an exercise in futility.

We stayed at the Grand Prince Hotel about eight kilometers north of central Kyoto. It was built in the mid-80s but had the look and feel of an American luxury hotel from the 1950s or 1960s; an over-the-top assertion of economic hegemony, however brief and illusory. It was donut shaped with three hundred rooms and half a dozen restaurants. This was a “Western-style” hotel, meaning that you could wear your shoes in your room and stand up in the shower. There was a Christian wedding in the lower lobby Sunday morning with three Japanese beauties singing hymns like nightingales. I could not discern if we were expected to walk on the left or the right in the lobby. We got a good price from hotels.com and then got bumped up to what seemed to be a business suite. For 28000 yen a night we got two bedrooms, each with two queen-sized beds, as well as two huge common rooms: one with sofas, the other with a meeting/dining table that seated twelve. The place seemed to measure about 1500 square feet. There was a kitchenette, three TVs, and three bathrooms, two of which had bathtubs, showers, and bidets. This was not the first time I’d been bumped up to a suite; it happened when I first arrived at the airport in Osaka. My sense is that hotels here are so desperate to fill rooms at the moment that they are practically giving away suites to families. It is a weird benefit of traveling in depressed times. Rooms that used to be filled with visiting Western businessmen paying fealty to the Asian Tiger are now filled with schleps like us. Everyone looks at you with chips on their shoulders that they have to beg for your tourism.

We got a fine night’s sleep in our suite Saturday night and started off Sunday at the Nijo castle, where Tokugawa kept his Kyoto digs to meet with regional warlords. I tried to read Charles and Daniel the guidebook patter about the significance of the painted screens and ceilings but they were far more fascinated by the “No Scribbling” signs. These were meant to admonish visitors against sketching the interiors (presumably as it would hold up foot traffic), but at first we took them as warnings against graffiti, thus leading to an endless series of jokes (“Does that mean you’re allowed to write neatly?” “Write ‘OK’ after it,” etc.). We proceeded to Kiyomizu-dera despite signs of bad weather, and when the rain came down torrentially the children insisted on gallivanting around without umbrellas. It was wonderful to watch them flail about in the rain while Amy and I huddled with the other tourists under the temple’s hanging roofs. But Charlie got a rash afterward from the chafing of his wet denim shorts and was soon miserable, so we had to head back to the hotel.

The hotel restaurants were way too pricey for us so we made our way to the humble business district down the street, with a list of local eateries kindly provided to us by the concierge. My Michigan friend Dave Finzel claims that everyone has one superpower and that mine is choosing restaurants, so I want it on record that I chose the restaurant at which we dined Sunday night on the name alone—“Indofasia”—and it was heavenly (the name, and the food). In retrospect it was probably only short for “India of Asia” (it was an Asian fusion place that leaned toward Indian) but for me it conjured “Fantasia” (an edible fantasy of color), “aphasia” (food so good it leaves you speechless), and maybe even “euthanasia” (once you eat here you can die in peace). There was some resistance, but having made dietary concessions ever since these other people’s arrival (we ate at the Japanese fast food chain Mosburger our first night in Kyoto) I stuck to my guns on this one. Charlie decided to bow out, went back to the hotel and had his own dream dinner: he dined in Ritz crackers and Toppo chocolate pretzels and played Toon Town on the computer. Meanwhile back at Indofasia, Amy and I had our usual debate about whether we were ordering too much food or too little. I admitted that my tendency to order too much food was attributable not only to family history but to mortality fears. (“This is not your last meal.” “Yes, but it is my last meal at this restaurant.”) Eventually we ordered a Thai kabob for Daniel while Amy and I shared the banana chicken, chana masala, curry of the day, some Nan bread, and a kiwi lassi (they forgot my Nepalese soup, which Amy reminded me of later after we left and which, miraculously, did not keep me up all night).

Having my loved ones here to open up to after such a long stretch of having practically no one to talk to in English has driven me to a bit of delirium. My children only recently pointed out to me the habit I developed before their arrival of saying ridiculous things to waiters, taxi drivers, etc., when I know very well that I am speaking to myself. As my colleague at Shikoku, Mark Fennelly, says, you do a lot of living inside your own head here, which can be unhealthy. For awhile I considered carrying around a volleyball with a face drawn on it, though Amy suggested I might just converse with my own hand. It’s when my hand itself starts speaking to me in Japanese and I begin choking it at the wrist as it screams “Dame! Dame!” that I will know I’m in trouble.

Anyway, at some point during our meal at Indofasia I launched into a lengthy analysis of catchphrases from 1970s TV entertainment and commercials. I was aided by the food’s anesthetic effects and by the fact that Charlie was not on hand to bang his head on the table as he usually does when I start into one of these things. I turned it into a guessing game: regarding my favorite commercial catchphrase Amy guessed “Where’s the beef?” which was a decade off. The correct answer was a tie between “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” both of course from Alka-Seltzer ads. As for TV entertainment, Amy guessed my favorite catchphrase was Vinnie Barbarino’s “up your nose with a rubber hose,” again wrong. The correct answer was, “Woooo-wee!” as exclaimed by Junior on “That’s My Mama.” After building up a great deal of suspense I finally revealed this by rather loudly demonstrating Junior’s, “Woooo-wee! I got news, I got news!” while doing the obligatory pimp roll across the floor of Indofasia. I described Junior as having been “played by the same guy who played Isaac on ‘The Love Boat,’” whose name I couldn’t recall at the moment. For the record it was Ted Lange, and this is all entirely germane because Lange also played a prominent role in the early 1970s R&B concert film Wattstax, which is pretty popular in Japan: translated editions of NYC magazines like waxpoetics and 212 Mag have helped turn Japan on to current and past black street culture.

As we left the restaurant, the kind Indian manager said, “See you again,” and I did not disabuse him of that notion.

Tokyo, briefly

Amy and the boys arrived here in Japan just in time for the "rainy season." This is the term for the long period of alternate days of torrential rain and humidity so thick you feel as though you'll have to remove your clothes with a power sander. We managed a trip to Tokyo last weekend -- all expenses paid at least for me as I presented at the "Inter-Asia Cultural Typhoon" (yes that was the title) conference. People here in Tokushima had warned me to avoid the more chaotic areas but as erstwhile New Yorkers I thought we'd have no problem negotiating Tokyo. I was wrong: we spent a good deal of the weekend holding up foot traffic by standing dumbfounded before the city's many Kanji subway maps (it ends up only the Yamanote loop line stations have maps in English). Still, we got to see I good deal and the city's organized disorder was itself a miracle to behold. The crosswalks alone are worth the price of admission: in Shinjuku (the de facto city center of late) they measure about 40 feet across and not without reason, in Shibuya (think the West Village cubed) they cross each other in crazy patterns in a huge polygonal plaza, as the lights turn red all at once and everyone somehow manages to get where they're going. Watching the dance of thousands of umbrellas as this occurs is better than any Super Bowl halftime show.

The signal moments of the weekend were the displays of honesty and generosity by the people here. My eldest dropped his electronic umbilical cord (a.k.a. Nintendo DS) on the subway and bummed about it for a couple of days until we passed a lost-and-found office in one of the stations and stopped in on a "hail Mary" whim ... within minutes they located it at another station, within an hour we had it back. On another occasion Charlie was crouched on a sidewalk in Rappongi Hills nursing a blister on his foot when a strange looking young man with a severe speech impediment stopped and, in broken Engrish, provided us with bandages and some kind of miraculous numbing salve he had on hand. He insisted on us keeping the bottle of medicine and it pretty much saved our day. Our boys are slowly but surely drawing lessons from all this ... at one point Danny offered the comment, "Pretty much everything is better here, except the escalators are the same."

Kyoto Protocol

Kyoto and Osaka are only 50 kilometers apart but they have reputations as polar opposites. While Osaka is a casual and friendly mess of a city, life in Kyoto follows a regimen of manners that mystifies even fellow Japanese. I’ve been told that if someone asks you over for tea there, you have to wait for the third offer before accepting; only then do they mean it. Even restaurant workers must have written references for employment in Kyoto. Osaka cuisine consists of street food well prepared: specialties include okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes) and takoyaki (octopus balls), the Japanese equivalents of barbecue, pizza, or cheese steaks. Kyoto, by contrast, is all haute cuisine. Deciding where to eat there is a momentous and intimidating task. As a rule I don’t like to go out too hungry when looking for a restaurant, as I tend either to jump at the first thing I see or to grow weak from hunger and fail to enjoy my meal. Having caught a last minute bus into Kyoto, however, I was famished when I arrived. After checking into my hotel I walked around Pontocho, the district of narrow streets lined with pricey, set-menu restaurants just west of the Kamogawa. I settled on Bistro Zuzu, a casual place with two young chefs and a pretty hip looking crowd. The menu evoked a Western tapas place, passing over traditional Kyoto cuisine for a diverse selection of small, cheap dishes. I was a little afraid the place would emphasize style over substance but I needn’t have worried. The beef stew with tongue of cattle was outstanding, as were the Caesar’s salad and the grilled fish and cheese spring rolls with sea urchin egg sauce. I topped it off with a rice ball stuffed with Japanese apricot that cost me all of 190 yen.

Later in the evening I ended up at the Hub, a pub where union jacks cover the walls and Japanese deejays spin Britpop and punk records. I met a 35-ish Swiss guy and we got drunk and traded Japanese swine-flu paranoia horror stories. Eventually we got on the dance floor, which was crowded with a nice mix of Western and Japanese guys and girls (mostly Japanese and mostly guys) and bounced our feet and our beers to a mix that ranged from XTC and the Jam right up to the Hives, the Libertines, and the View. Amazingly, the deejay managed to cue up the Clash’s “Police on My Back” right in time for the arrival of the Japanese cops, who had presumably arrived to quell the noise spilling out to the street at all hours but got distracted posing for pictures with several of the foreign visitors.

Too tough for the tourist bus, I spent my days in Kyoto trudging between landmarks. I learned that warlords like to build temples, though I could have told you that by driving past the mega-churches on I-75 in Ohio. I imagine it is a hazard of life here that its manifest beauty goes to your head. Pretty much all of Japan’s young people want to visit America, but while Osakans fantasize about going to New York, Kyoto’s youth pine for the West coast. Among the dizzying array of youth subcultures in Japan, one that looms large in Kyoto is “kogal,” the young girls with blonde-dyed hair and artificial suntans who seem to reside in a Southern California of the mind. An exception was the Tranq Room, about the coolest place I’ve been to anywhere in Japan, where I had dinner and drinks my second evening in town. Their nama-yuba rice bowl and apple-ginger iced tea were mighty rejuvenating after dragging my ass up the Philosopher’s Trail to the Temple of the Silver Pavilion in 30-plus (Celsius) heat. The place also had a Serge Gainsbourg record cover on the wall, a faded Vincent Gallo signature on one of their vinyl sofas, an excellent sound system playing steel drum renditions of Burt Bacharach hits, and a friendly staff that flouted Kyoto’s stand-offish reputation.

On Sunday I made my way to the International Manga Museum (which ended up being more of a manga library) and eventually to Kyoto Station. I almost found myself stranded in Kyoto for another night; the first clerk I spoke to told me all remaining buses for the day were sold out. After scrambling across the station to another desk they issued me a ticket on a later bus, and I spent the interim eating free samples of pickles and bean jelly at the train station gift shop and getting a haircut. Predictably, everything is done just so at the Japanese barber shop. Don’t bother telling the barber how short you want it, he’s an artist and he’ll do it his way. For an extra 1000 yen he threw in a rigorous shampoo and a shave that included every inch of skin from my forehead down to my neckline. It was heavenly, but on the hot bus back my aftershave and hair lotion began to melt and I felt firsthand the female fear of runny makeup.

goodwill tour update

Interpretive dancing to Weezer's "The Good Life" at the Crowbar in Tokushima (photos by Taro).

Escape to Osaka

A big, international media studies conference was to take place in Tokyo this week. Several friends of mine were scheduled to attend and I figured it would be a triumphant highlight of my trip. But when the flu landed ashore here, the Japanese government imposed a battery of ill-conceived and futile restrictions on foreign travelers. Most of those from outside the country who were scheduled to attend the conference canceled, and then the conference itself was canceled outright. That night I had a dream that the little red ink pad within my signature seal case was running dry, and I was trying unsuccessfully to draw out enough ink to stamp my time card. I woke up and caught the first bus to Osaka. Ever since I arrived here people have been badgering me to visit Kyoto. They don’t know what a crass, know-nothing pleasure-seeker I am at heart. Osaka is the perfect city for me. There is very little sightseeing to be done there, only restaurants, bars, and shops winding through streets as circuitous as a yakuza’s tattoos.

The three staples of Osaka street cuisine are okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes), takoyaki (balls of dough with bits of octopus), and gyoza (Chinese-style dumplings). There is plenty of okonomiyaki available in Tokushima and they are perfectly palatable, so I was under the mistaken impression that I had experienced this delicacy. Wandering the Shinsaibashi arcades Friday night I came upon a place that looked good: it was small and crowded and there was 60s-era free jazz playing, the latter a surprisingly reliable signpost of good food in Japan. I was ushered to the one empty seat at the counter and watched the chefs work their magic. Under paper-thin pancakes they pressed mounds of cabbage, eggs, kimchi, leeks, pickled ginger, powdered seaweed, even udon noodles, along with a variety of meats and fish, all topped with a sweet brown sauce and crisscrossing lines of mayonnaise. There were a dozen or so varieties of these things on the menu and the slender young gals next to me seemed determined to try every one, helplessly seduced by the chefs’ handiwork.

Later at the international bar Sam and Dave’s I drank cassis and soda (a break from umeshu) and talked to a 22-year-old Italian designer on his third trip to Osaka. Fashion here is defined by catch-all bricolage. The same kids wandering among the noisy boutiques of Amerikamura can be spied later in Shinsaibashi combing the racks of the Disney store for Mickey Mouse earphone winders and cell phone chargers. And for a tightwad like me the vintage clothing shops here measure up to those of any U.S. city. Wandering the Amerikura district I’m more convinced than ever that the medium is the message. Though the streets of Japanese cities have teemed with American popular culture for a century and a half, the frictionless flows of the Internet have allowed them to definitively triumph over us on any measure of hipness. Time Bomb Records has an exhaustive, pristine collection of girl groups, ska, bubblegum, psychobilly, and pretty much every other obscure and essential genre. Standard Books has a stunning array of works both authored and translated into Japanese: biographies of Eminem and Lee Scratch Perry, tomes on the movie Wild Style and the My Bloody Valentine record Loveless, the full runs of 212 Mag and Waxpoetics, whole shelves devoted to dog and cat photography and to album cover art, and pretty much every volume ever published by the mind-blowing German art-book house Taschen.

Osaka’s nightlife carries on without pause all weekend. Bars are open till 5 or 6 am and from there you can go to the after-hours places. You can still spy black-clad kids stumbling home in the late afternoon. I spent Friday night getting oriented at the Sam and Dave’s near my hotel in Nagahoribashi; somewhat like a Japanese Hard Rock, there are three outlets of the popular establishment in Osaka alone. Saturday I had a great burger at the ostentatiously American-themed Captain Kangaroo bar and several stouts at the Blarney Stone in Umeda. Sunday is a quiet night in Osaka; the bars are only open till 3 or 4. I finally made it to the intimate little karaoke bar Kama Sutra in Shinsaibashi (not much bigger than a karaoke room), downed four house beers and wailed through XTC’s “Mayor of Simpleton” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow.”

I met a lot of the city’s famously friendly natives at these places, practically all of whom had either visited the U.S. or were planning to do so (mainly Las Vegas and NYC), as well as quite a few ex-pats, mostly Australians, Brits, Irish and Yanks. Cool, young Japanese girls flock to the international bars; they can dress sexily without having anyone assume they’re hostesses or, better still, they can wear jeans. Learning that I was based in Tokushima, the natives offered patronizing quips about the Awa Odori dance (pretty much the only thing Tokushima’s known for), just as people in Detroit or Chicago start in about Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland when I tell them I’m from Saginaw. I returned to Tokushima on Monday with a sudden, stupid feeling of insecurity: do I live in a Japanese hick town? Shikoku has only been linked to Honshu by bridges for about twenty years; some Osakans were still unaware they could get here by car. After 15 years in New York and Philadelphia earlier in my life, I seem destined to spend the rest of it on the margins, even here. Having put a few days between myself and Osaka, though, Tokushima is again offering up the small pleasures I discovered when I arrived a month and a half ago, and starting to feel a little more like home.

conversation and food, mostly food

I have a pretty jaded sense of humor but Nagao never fails to crack me up. He giggles his way through the story of his Japanese student who, with typical difficulty teasing out the phonemes /r/ and /l/, recited the first line of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” thus: “I wandered lonely as a crowd.” In his own days as a student Nagao benefited from an English instructor who drilled him with tape recordings of the phonemes: “rice, lice, rice, lice …” Nagao’s mnemonic for the distinction: “We live on rice; we are lived on by lice.”

My pleasure in Nagao’s company seems mutual, as I too manage to put him in stitches at least once every conversation, but this is easy when you’re an American in Japan. He was especially taken with a story from my first visit to the sento. I was about to enter one of the baths when an older gentleman called out to me, “Ereki, ereki!” while pinching his lower arm demonstratively. “What?” I asked. He repeated, “Ereki!” This charade went on for awhile until I finally pointed at the bath and said, “I’m going in there,” and he gave me a kind of “it’s your funeral” wave-off. I dipped a foot in and was shocked, literally, as the bath was equipped with steel plates that emitted a mild electric charge. (I’ve since ventured further into the “denkiburo,” literally “electric bath,” and found it quite relaxing.)

What amused Nagao was the man’s exhortation of “ereki,” a coinage that combines “electricity” and “denki,” the Japanese word for electricity. The term is more commonly used to describe a musical instrument (electric guitar) and genre (post-60s electric rock), but by using it to describe the bath the guy actually thought he was speaking English. Japanese borrowings from English are always a bit tortured, mostly because of the phonetic rule that every syllable consist of one consonant and one vowel. Sometimes the result is a lengthening of the original term: the three syllable “credit card” is doubled in length to “kurejito kado.” Other times, apparently when people couldn’t be bothered to work out all the consonants and vowels, the result is a shortening: “electricity” becomes “ereki,” “family computer” becomes “famicom,” and “orchestra” becomes “oke” (as in “karaoke,” or “empty orchestra”). Still other times, the neologisms are wonderfully creative hybrids, as when young people here describe their culture’s relatively rare moments of physical intimacy as “skinship.”

To the degree that I’m learning anything about the language here, it’s mostly from fellow foreigners. Ironically, given how much is done for my benefit, among natives I’m almost always a non-person in conversation. My companion Hideki, though a stellar Man Friday, is a less effective translator: he talks to others present in Japanese and to me in English, and gets so engrossed in conversation at both ends that he neglects to play go-between. This works surprisingly well for me, as I’ve always been a daydreamer and never very good at following conversations even in English; here, I have an excuse to zone out.

My ignorance of the language becomes especially propitious at meal time as it allows me to focus on my food while others yammer on. Staples here include sashimi, yakitori (little skewers of meat and vegetables), yakisoba (noodles and vegetables), and okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes). Food is typically doled out in a cavalcade of small portions from a common platter or grill or Lazy Susan. This plays havoc with my eating habits since, like a dog, my stomach has always failed to send signals when I’m full and I therefore rely on my sense of sight to regulate my intake. At restaurants at home I’ll often mentally allocate a part of the oversized American serving to a doggy bag before I even start eating, yet here despite the dainty little plates I end up overeating. I’ve been especially profligate with the sushi and sashimi. Good fish is so taken for granted here that it’s common for a forlorn plate of kampachi and squid to sit unfinished or untouched while people gather around the grill slavering over skewers of the most routine wieners and chicken nuggets. The upshot is that I'm engorging myself on pretty much a nightly basis. I tell myself that I'm prepping for my role here like De Niro in Raging Bull and do my best to maintain my ignorance of metric weight conversion (I only weigh 86 kilos!). But in Japan one squats on a low stool to shower, and in front of the shower there is always a mirror, so I’ve had the privilege of watching my body grow in a very special way.

thoughts on teaching

The putative focus of my classes here is communication and culture, but my colleagues have made it clear that the most important thing is to interact with students in English. People here are always endearingly grateful whenever anything comes out of my mouth resembling their native language, even though the average snack bar hostess knows far more English than I know Japanese. Yet I’m almost discouraged from trying to meet the students halfway. There has been a stronger push than ever for English education here, with a prevailing sense that Japan will not take its rightful political and economic place in the world until its population becomes fluent in English, which is so radically different from Japanese in its vocabulary and grammar.

It’s a little too heavenly to be told you’re doing your job by speaking your own language. The intersection of language and power permeates my interactions in a way that’s hard to ignore. “You’re lucky,” says one colleague, “You can go anywhere in the world and people understand you.” The Japanese professors who visit SVSU are expected to speak English (or whatever it is we speak in Michigan), whereas I can go happily along in my own language and it’s the students’ job to adapt. For the majority of our time in the classroom to be spent vaguely understanding each other is expected here; at home, it’s a cause for complaint. Listening to the students here fumble along in broken English, I’m filled with admiration for their halting attempts to reconcile themselves to the closest thing to an international language – and embarrassment at some of my own students’ abuse of it as their first language.

I’m told that the students here find me gratifyingly easy to understand. My naturally slow speech, which tries my own students’ patience, works to my advantage here. The students are still pretty quiet but we’re starting to develop a rapport. I find their questions often focus less on particular words or verbal constructions than on everyday idioms, especially those conveying emotion or relation. Why would someone say “Don’t mention it” after being thanked? Why do Americans say “You shouldn’t have” after receiving gifts? (Do Americans not like gifts? Are they ungrateful?) People are especially preoccupied with the small pleasantries that grease the wheels of interaction. Japanese is full of these: not just the endlessly repeated “sumimasen,” “onegai shimasu,” “arigato,” etc., but the polite prefixes and suffixes so often used to dress up verbs and subjects. My favorite Japanese stock phrases: “gochiso sama” (“thanks for the wonderful meal”), “otsukare sama” (at the end of the workday, “thanks for your hard work”), and “yoroshiku onegai shimasu” (upon meeting someone, “please be kind to me”).

One of the DVDs I brought from home is Ozu’s late-1950s gem Ohayô (Good Morning), in which two young brothers stage a sort of civil action against their parents by refusing to talk for days on end. Their immediate gripe is the parents’ refusal to buy them a TV set, their larger gripe that so much of what passes for talk between adults seems pointless. Soon enough the children’s small gesture turns the social world of the neighborhood upside down: a woman down the street takes their silence personally, she strikes back with malicious gossip about the kids’ mother, and a neighborhood feud nearly ensues. The message is clear enough: even as we seek new information (via television, a new medium in a newly prosperous Japan at the time of Ozu’s film), we often neglect the functional importance of communication in just keeping the peace. In the end the kids call off their protest and get their TV, and mostly use it to partake in that most redundant and reassuring pastime, watching baseball.

some new colleagues and friends

The cast of characters here at Shikoku is colorful. My closest friend so far has been Hideki, the young man from the Office of International Programs who was assigned to help me acclimate. He has taught me to make yakisoba and Japanese-style curry and provided entrée to the school’s touch rugby team. On weekend evenings Hideki and I get together and debate about what movie to watch: I want to watch Japanese movies, he wants to watch American. I’ve also become close with Okada sensai, the head of the OIP office, who is as warm and gracious a host as one could ask for. She is cut out perfectly for her work, never letting a conversation lag even in her second language. It has been said that embarrassment is contagious so we all have an interest in avoiding it; this is especially true in Japan. Okada sensai is thankfully magnanimous when faced with potential embarrassments. When we eat together she studiously ignores my awkward deployment of chopsticks, even when I resort to pulling apart chicken wings with my fingers American-style. The office next to my own is occupied by Tanaka sensai, a Blake scholar and martial arts expert who coaches the school’s kendo team. Tanaka is sixty five but looks forty five, with a full head of jet black hair and a naughty glimmer in his eye. Charismatic to the point of being almost certifiable, Tanaka likes to humbly remind newcomers of his age and then challenge them to grab his wrist (the tighter you hold on the more it will hurt). He brought me out for dinner and drinks (a lot of both) and I eventually found myself eating raw horse meat and other unmentionables.

Then there is Nagao sensai, a Shakespearean who joined Shikoku’s faculty after reaching the retirement age of 63 in his previous post at prestigious Hokkaido University. Nagao has a keen sense of humor that is shot through with Anglo-American influences even as it turns back upon his own culture and upon himself. His laughter focuses on two principle objects: the physical pratfall, and the momentary social death of collective embarrassment. For the latter he turns to the late-19th century British humorist Jerome K. Jerome. “A German Comic Song,” Nagao’s favorite set-piece from Jerome’s classic Three Men in a Boat, tells of British partygoers who are led to believe that the dirge sung by a visiting German musician is actually a comic song; in short it’s a tale about the risks of laughing without knowing what one’s laughing at. “Japanese people do that a lot,” Nagao tells me. He notes how when he recites English classics by Sterne or Swift in the classroom, his less fluent students often laugh in a rhythm that follows his own laughter rather than anything in the book. Nagao admits to having carried on the same pretense while studying at Cambridge in his younger days, before he’d mastered English. The fear of having one’s polite reactions exposed as false—or worse, as utterly impolite—seems to loom large in the Japanese psyche. It points to the possibility that their sacred social rules to behave politely and to avoid embarrassment might run headlong into one another.

The other primary source of Nagao’s laughter is physical comedy, and for this he resorts to Chaplin. He takes particular pleasure in the factory scene from Modern Times where Chaplin is rigged up with a feeding machine in lieu of a lunch hour, which Nagao takes as an allegory for the creeping domination of workers and bodies via scientific management. “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing,” wrote Henri Bergson (whose philosophy happens to be the expertise of Taniguchi sensai, a young professor who earned her Ph.D. at the nation’s top university in Tokyo and who occupies the office directly below Nagao’s). The Chaplin factory scene is iconic in the U.S. and has been imitated endlessly, most famously in the role-switching episode of “I Love Lucy,” where Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance hopelessly try to keep up their wrapping duties on a candy factory’s assembly line. Nor can it fail to resonate in Japan’s service economy, where “bowing machines” are used to train department store employees to bend their bodies to the exact number of degrees when bowing.

The behavior of consumers can seem as regimented as that of the workers who serve them, yet it’s hard to complain about such regimentation when one is so patently benefiting from it. Saginaw really seems to get the better part of its sister-city deal with Tokushima. To take one instance, we don’t have a decent bakery at home, yet here in a culture that I’d always assumed got its carb fix from rice and noodles, there are several excellent bakeries with all manner of breads and pastries. It’s striking just how smoothly the gears of consumption turn here; it must be awfully hard being a Marxist in Japan. This can get a little oppressive, as they seem to emulate and even surpass us nowadays in terms of compulsory consumerism. Japan has a sort of potlatch mentality to begin with; there is definitely status in who can spend the most on himself and others (which presents a challenge to my own deeply ingrained propensity for freeloading). As this mentality dovetails with a more modern brand of consumer-driven hyper-capitalism, the result is a pervasive pushiness to eat, drink, and spend more than the next guy. The other night after eight or so hours of imbibing and engorging I headed home in a taxi with Tanaka sensai and he proposed a stop at the ramen shop. I am usually the first to jump at a 2 am snack but I politely refused, fearing it would put me over the edge. “But you are American!” he protested, as if this endowed me with superhuman powers of expenditure.

photo

The view from my office window with the bridge and Tokushima city in the distance. The guest house is barely visible, the closest in the row of houses on the right.

week 1

When I told a much younger colleague I was going to Japan she suggested I should keep a blog. Those who know me are well aware how easy it is for me to write, the words just shoot right out of my fingertips (not). But it does seem like a good way to update people and to keep a record of my impressions. Don’t hold it against me if it is unpolished and seldom updated.

I flew out of Michigan last Sunday and arrived here in Tokushima on Tuesday. We were stuck on the airplane in Detroit for four hours before taking off. Evidently a gasket on one of the air conditioners was leaking and a replacement part had to be flown in from Minneapolis. The loquacious pilot gave us constant updates, always giving the impression that our departure was just a few minutes away. When we finally left I spent the twelve hour flight wondering if I’d make my connection from Tokyo to Osaka. As it happened we missed it by just a few minutes. Some nice young ladies gathered all the Osaka passengers as we deplaned and whisked us to another gate, where a small plane was brought in for us within the hour. Detroit and Tokyo: there’s a study in contrasts. As compensation for our troubles we were given $10 vouchers , which bought me precisely three pieces of salmon at the airport sushi bar.

I stayed at the airport hotel in Osaka overnight. The highlight here was the “washlet,” a toilet with built in seat warmer and bidet (apparently something like 40 percent of Japanese homes have them). I took the bus to Tokushima in the morning and was greeted at the bus station by Okada sensai, head of the Office of International Programs, and Rob Luxton, a Canadian who teaches English here. We went out for lunch – I had oyako-don, which translates to parent and child bowl, chicken and raw egg over rice, along with a bowl of udon noodles. Then I was shown to the guest house. It’s a charming little place with a living room, kitchen, dining room, small office, and two bedrooms upstairs. In real estate ads here the size of rooms is measured in tatami mats (which measure about 3 x 6 feet). The living room is 9 1/2 mats, the dining room is six mats, the master bedroom is six mats and the other bedroom is 4 1/2.

We stopped by the OIP office, where I was introduced to Junko, my contact here before arriving, and Hideki, a sharp and courteous young man who I was told would be my “slave.” I was then shown to my office. I will be housed in the English department. To one side of me is Tanaka sensai, a William Blake expert, and to the other is Nagao sensai, a Shakespeare expert and fan of Charlie Chaplin. My office overlooks the Yoshino River and the Yoshinogawa Bridge and, across the bridge, the city of Tokushima.

Hideki and I have already spent a lot of time together. He has shown me around the neighborhood: there are some restaurants and bars around the university, and a little farther afield the Fuji Grand plaza, a supermarket and mall. Among the shops is a youth-oriented, faux-hipster place (along the lines of Spencer’s Gifts or maybe Hot Topic in the U.S.) called the Village Vanguard. Evidently it is a big chain – when I explained to Hideki that the name came from a 70-year-old jazz club in New York he was amused. My kids will happy to know that the Fuji Grand food court houses a KFC, McDonalds, Haagan-Daz, and Mister Donut.

Okada sensai was good enough to bring me out for food and drinks downtown on my second evening here. She introduced me to her friend, a nurse who I am hoping will be able to give Amy a tour of a Japanese hospital when she arrives. We also made plans that in early May, Okada sensai’s friend and her husband would bring me to the Osamu Tezuka museum in Kobe (creator of Astro Boy and Gigantor, here called Tetsujin 28-go). I also met the higher-ups last week: President Fukuoka and Chairman Satoh, each of whom I gave an SVSU desk set and a copy of my karaoke book.

There is a shed with two bicycles by my guest house. Over the weekend I rode to the Fuji Grand to buy groceries and ventured across the river and into the city a couple of times. For whatever reason I was led to believe this area was a backwater before arriving. I was mistaken: it is a nice-sized city, small enough to navigate very easily by bicycle but large enough to accommodate a great variety of food, shopping, and nightlife.

I am already settling into a pleasant routine here. I have tried my hand at Japanese cooking a couple of times with Hideki’s guidance. I bought a nice pair of brown velour shoes with no laces, the better to slip off and on when entering the house. I’m getting used to taking a shower while sitting on a stool and separating my garbage into 17 categories. I get to watch Japanese baseball games in the evening and American games in the morning. The TV networks here broadcast U.S. games in which Japanese players are playing. U.S. baseball is the reference point for renown and excellence. The attitude was brought home to me when Nagao sensai came into my office and glanced at a newspaper on my desk with a picture on the front page of Baltimore Orioles hurler Koji Uehara pitching to the Yankees’ Hideki Matsui. He got very excited then let out a disappointed laugh when he realized it was the Daily Yomiuri, an English-language Japanese paper, and not some American paper that I had brought with me. The notion that a faceoff between these former Yomiuri Giants teammates would be front page news in the States was wishful thinking on his part. (I have endeared myself to Nagao with my Columbia English degree and full year of Shakespeare. I’ve already clocked several hours in his office talking about this and that and enjoying the wafting smoke of his pipe.)

Cycling through Tokushima, I find myself succumbing to nostalgia that’s tinged with a little sadness. The city has an ethos akin to a long-ago America I barely remember, confident and vibrant yet also humble and workaday. Yesterday I explored Sogo, the chic eight-floor department store located across from the train station along Tokushima’s bustling central square. The salesgirls bow and chant “irassahimase” as you walk through the door. It reminds me of the effortless glamour of America’s old downtowns, of what Hudson’s in Detroit must once have been like, or even Sullivan’s near my old hometown in Liberty, New York. At the sushi bar Hideki and his girlfriend brought me to, the piped-in music consisted of 60s-era standards by B-list nightclub acts. Little plates of sushi came around on a conveyor belt. We took what we wanted and the waitress later surveyed the empty, color-coded plates piled in front of us to tally our check. It was as ingeniously “Fordist” and efficiently gratifying a meal as I’ve had in some time. To a Westerner Japan’s cities can seem pleasantly reposed in a time warp of high modernism and infinite optimism.

Right now my big challenge is to keep my euphoria in check and do the things I have to do. I still have about 50 papers to grade from back in Michigan and I’m finding it awfully hard to concentrate on them. And of course I also want to put my best foot forward in classes here. I have only had one class so far. Predictably, the students didn’t volunteer much. When my entreaties of “Do you understand?” were met with silence, it was hard to know if they didn’t understand or if they were just afraid of me. I am getting some good advice from others here on dealing with the students. Hopefully I’ll be able to report more success on that front soon.