Wrong About Japan Read online

  “Watch head,” she said, a little out of breath.

  The low-ceilinged corridor presented many reasons to “watch head,” as we turned left, then right, past the communal bath and into our room which, if spacious in comparison with the lift, was very small indeed. A single bed had been made up on the floor.

  “Ah,” said the maid, seeing my unhappy face. “So sorry. We thought one person only.”

  I had sent so many faxes asking for a big room that I am almost certain—and of course I may be wrong—that this was as large a room as two people were going to be allowed. Any bigger and they would’ve squeezed in three mattresses. Back in the days of travelling salesmen, this is how hotels accommodated them, and you see the economic sense of it. Now that there are no travelling salesmen the hotel stages cultural performances, traditional songs, little plays, big parties, fifty empty beer bottles after breakfast!

  “One more mattress, yes?”

  “Yes. Where do we put our suitcases?”

  “Ah, so sorry. Japanese room.”

  Yes, that’s exactly what the faxes had demanded: a Japanese room, tatami, very minimal. We’d seen it in the movies. Now we resolved to keep it neat, except there was nowhere to hide the luggage, never mind. I never saw a suitcase in the movies.

  We had no sooner begun to drink our green tea, sitting cross-legged at a little table that would be pushed to one side at night, than Charley asked me to call Takashi—the first salvo in what would become a constant battle to have me talk instead of him.

  “You call,” I said. “He’s your friend.”

  “Dad, I have to go to the toilet.”

  As he closed the door behind him, I resolved that I would not give in this time. He would have to talk himself.

  “Come!” he called from the bathroom. “Come now. Quick!”

  Whatever he had seen in the bathroom, I knew immediately, was very strange. He’d already seen weird Japanese stuff on the way here—the white-gloved taxi driver, the extraordinary neon-lit shop of pink and orange and blue flowers, a newsstand filled with countless manga with spines two inches thick— but the strangeness he was now negotiating was of a different magnitude.

  “Everybody with a taste for traditional architecture,” Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in 1933, “must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfection.” He then lamented the cost of traditional construction and described his own compromise between cost and custom. “I at least avoided tiles, and had the floor done in camphour wood. To that extent I tried to create a Japanese atmosphere, but was frustrated, finally, by the toilet fixtures themselves. As everyone knows, toilet fixtures are made of pure white porcelain and have handles of sparkling metal. Were I able to have things my own way I would much prefer fixtures—both men’s and women’s—made of wood. Wood finished in glistening black lacquer is the very best; but even unfinished wood, as it darkens and the grain grows more subtle with the years, acquires an inexplicable power to calm and soothe. The ultimate, of course, is a wooden ‘morning glory’ urinal filled with boughs of cedar; this is a delight to look at and makes not the slightest sound.”

  “Dad, come now! Look!”

  God knows what Tanizaki would have thought, but I was certainly as startled as my son, for the toilet in our traditional hotel looked like a contraption designed for a science-fiction comedy. Its arrays of yellow, red, and blue buttons beside the seat might, as one could guess, lower or raise the device, convert the toilet to a bidet or—surely this must have been my misunderstanding—a shower. However, it was not immediately clear how one would flush it. Finally I pushed the blue button and the toilet indeed flushed, but then water started gushing from a faucet into a triangular basin in a corner of the room.

  We burst out laughing.

  It was at just this moment, before we had time to discover that the seat was electrically heated, that the telephone rang.

  “Please come,” a woman said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Front desk. You come now, please.”

  “That will be Takashi,” said my son, slipping into his shoes in the vestibule.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked the woman on the phone.

  “Yes. Please come now.”

  Charley was convinced it was Takashi, though I was equally certain there was a problem with my MasterCard. We bickered amiably while proceeding down the narrow stairs. In the tiled reception, the two young women who’d welcomed us so warmly were still smiling, though differently now, with a sort of grimace of embarrassment. Credit card, I thought, credit card for sure!

  The elder, she was no more than thirty, did not speak. Instead she made a gesture that foreigners are taught is more polite than pointing: not one finger, but all five digits together like a slap. Looking in the direction this indicated, I saw, by the wide doorway to the lane, in front of the antique calligraphic banner and beside the picturesque sake barrels, the most singular boy. It was not just his hair, or his eyes, or his clothes that distinguished him. There was a certain quality of light he seemed to have brought in with him, one quite distinct from the deep shadows and glowing gold tones of the ryokan, something more like that clean white, almost hallucinogenic illumination in a Tokyo department store. He literally shone.

  I looked at Charley. How happy he seemed.

  This must be Takashi, I did not doubt it.

  In Tokyo’s Harajuku district one can see those perfect Japanese Michael Jacksons, no hair out of place, and punk rockers whose punkness is detailed so fastidiously that they achieve a polished hyper-reality Takashi had something of this quality He had black hair that stood up not so much in spikes but in dramatic triangular sections. His eyes were large and round, glistening with an emotion that, while seemingly transparent, was totally alien to me. He wore a high-necked Cambridge blue jacket with what might have once been called a Mao collar, and which glistened with gold buttons. His trousers were jet black, his boots knee high. No one could doubt his pride, or his sense of dignity.

  “Charley-san?” he asked, and bowed.

  My son also bowed.

  The women in kimonos looked straight ahead as if none of this was happening.

  “Perhaps we can take tea,” I suggested.

  I had earlier noted a little salon just beside reception. Here, I assumed, such meetings might be held, but there was something about Takashi that— so sorry—made this salon temporarily unavailable. The three of us were ushered back up to our room, and tea was brought to us in this fine and private place.

  When the maid left us, Takashi said, “You have cable here, Charley-san?”

  They turned together to evaluate the very small television set beside our two suitcases.

  “I guess so,” Charley said. “We just got here.”

  I invited Takashi to inspect the television. “Very nice,” he said, even though there were only three channels and we were reduced to watching a demonstration of a device sucking wax from a man’s ear. There was a close-up of brown material in a bowl.

  “Very clever,” said Takashi. “You have a very nice hotel. Old style.”

  “Difficult to keep neat,” I said. “We have nowhere to put the suitcases.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Everyone owns many things. In the old days, the rich families, they would have a storehouse for their stuffu.”

  “Stuffu?”

  “Stuffu,” he said again, then turned to Charley. “You know, stuffu.”

  “Stuff, Dad,” Charley said. “Worldly goods.”

  “The merchants got so rich, but it was against the law for them to be higher than the samurai. Still, they have lots of stuffu. Dangerous for them to show off, I think. Cut their head off if they get too high. So nice they build a simple house, looks simple, but very expensive to make. And they show just one expensive thing at a time, here in the tokonoma.”

  This was the only time I heard this intriguing suggestion, that the origins of the tokonoma lay in the old sumptuary laws.

  “These days everyone has stuffu.
I show you.”

  And he produced from deep inside his coat a little photographic book called Tokyo: A Certain Style, whose hundreds of untidy teenage rooms turned out to be the apartments of Tokyo designers, musicians, software inventors, Swatch collectors, publicists, editors, not one of them displaying anything like what you would call a Japanese aesthetic. They looked more like Charley’s bedroom in Manhattan and my son fell hungrily upon the thick square volume, identifying everything, item by item, brand name by brand name—Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy—stuffu.

  “Dad,” he said, “this is so cool. There are things here I never saw before.”

  “Very Japanese,” said Takashi. “This is what I said I would show you and your father, Charley-san. This week you will see the real Japan. You saw pictures of temples?” he asked me.

  “One or two,” I admitted.

  “Yes, rocks, gravel, nice Japanese room, so simple. Houses with rough timber?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very beautiful.”

  “Real Japanese people not like that.” Takashi smiled.

  I made my polite open-palm gesture toward the atomic toilet. “I understand,” I said. “More modern.”

  Takashi got up and peered into the bathroom. “No, this is American.”

  “But we don’t have these toilets in the United States.”

  “Perhaps you are from Australia? Soon you will go to Macy’s in New York. You will see. In any case, I will show you these toilets here, in Akihabara Electric Town. But now you are tired. We can meet at Akihabara.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Everyone will know it. Akihabara on the JR line. At the station go to exit three.” He then produced a small gift-wrapped box and handed it to Charley. “Something you use in Tokyo,” he said. “You find me anywhere.”

  We all stood, bowing in the little room. He stepped off the tatami and somehow managed to slip into his tall boots as easily as if they were a pair of slippers. Only when he’d left did we discover what his gift was: a wafer-thin iridescent orange object which, when opened, revealed itself to be a phone with a skittishly active little screen.

  My first thought was that this was far too expensive, but Takashi’s carefully handwritten note explained he was simply lending it to us for our visit.

  “You see this, Dad?” Charley was holding up a little string of luminous beads attached to the bottom of the phone. “You know what this is for?”

  “No.”

  “It stops cancer.”

  “Charley!”

  “Dad, you don’t know. It deflects the microwaves from the phone.”

  “Oh, I see. What else does it do?”

  “Sends text.”

  “In Japanese?”

  “In English. If you want to send in Japanese it’s harder.”

  “How do you know this?”

  But he was busy already with his thumbs.

  “Okay, that’s enough. We’re going out to eat.”

  “Can I take the cell?”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No, you’ll fiddle all through dinner.”

  “Can I leave it in the tokonoma?”

  “Yes. Yes, yes. Now let’s go.”

  2.

  On the Internet, I found this blurb for the anime Blood: The Last Vampire: “On an American military base in Japan, a new kind of vampire emerges: Teropterids, monstrous shape-shifting creatures that can only be killed by special swords. A mysterious girl named Saya is the last ‘original,’ the only person capable of dealing with the menace. Posing as a student at the base’s school, Saya races to hunt down the beasts before they turn an ordinary Halloween bash into a bloody massacre. Production IG, known for their pioneering digital effects, describes Blood: The Last Vampire as a full digital animation movie, which means that even though many sequences were animated using pencil and paper, the artwork was digitally scanned. Inking and coloring were completed by computer, as were several other special effects. Hiroyuki Kitakubo was chosen to direct the project because of his digital experience.”

  I had never been the tiniest bit interested in vampires, nor did I have any taste for blood seeping, squirting, or splashing, not even the high-culture blood of Medea’s children. Yet Kitakubo’s Blood: The Last Vampire held an eerie attraction for me. This was partly to do with its unusual style, the result of juxtaposing a densely realistic world with graphically animated characters; but what really made my heart beat faster was a story packed full of coded Japanese attitudes toward controlling foreigners. Here we have an American base on Japanese soil, and most importantly, that “special sword” which Saya wields so passionately. Aware that Westerners were commonly thought incapable of understanding the Japanese sword, I asked my Japanese translator’s assistant, Jeremy Hedley if he could contact Kitakubo, and arrange a meeting.

  Jerry wrote back: “Just a quick note to see if you want to take this any further. Got in touch with the studio that made Blood: The Last Vampire (Production IG) to see whether it’s possible to meet Kitakubo, the director. Spoke with a PR rep there and received confirmation that the triumph of business over art and kindness is now complete: they want to know what’s in it for them….”

  Well, nothing—except that I could perhaps tell the story of the film.

  When we first see her, Saya is a very solemn young girl, perhaps sixteen years old, sitting all alone in a subway car. The visual effect of this scene is startling, the surroundings rendered in realistic digital detail, the girl drawn loosely, seemingly illuminated by multiple light sources—overhead fluorescents, luminescent bulbs in the subway tunnel which strobe across her. Her clothes are black, her skin white, lips red, and there is a steely withdrawn yet hostile aspect to her. She has stiffened up the sinews, disguised fair nature with hard-favoured rage. She is obviously a warrior.

  At the far end of the same car is a sleeping man, or perhaps (and this remains tantalisingly unclear) an alien life form, a Teropterid, who has assumed the body of a man. Now Saya rises, sword drawn. As she rushes down the carriage I think of The Seven Samurai, but also of the novelist Yukio Mishima, who used his sword to commit ritual suicide by disembowelment. I recall also the camera panning across the devastation of firebombed Tokyo in the opening scenes of the anime Grave of the Fireflies. An officer standing in the middle distance cries “Long live the Emperor!” before plunging his sword into his belly, although the camera gives him no more attention than any other landmark of a country apparently dying in agony. Such is the power of the Japanese sword to fascinate me, creep me out. How not to be repulsed by the blood splattering across the windows of the subway car?

  At Asakusa Station, a five-minute walk from our hotel, Saya meets with her American handlers who might be military or CIA. She tells them her sword is not sharp enough. We see them not listening, not understanding. It is so clear, even to me, that these Americans are ignorant about swords. In desperation, Saya then steals a sword that shows every sign of being a great Japanese antique, but she is not a connoisseur and not until the sword breaks in battle with the Teropterids does it reveal itself a counterfeit. The sword Saya wanted, Charley and I would soon discover, could have been forged only in a long and complicated process in which molten steel had been divided and refolded hundreds of times. Hard steel would then be wrapped around a soft steel core. Finally, its edge would be hard and sharp enough—believe me, I’ve seen the illustrations—to cleave a man from left shoulder to right hip. A true Japanese sword has a flexible inner core and would not have betrayed Saya in battle.

  All this, and many other things, I wished to discuss with Mr. Kitakubo. My son desired the meeting just as badly, but for a different reason: he wanted to be photographed next to an anime hero. How cool would that be? Kitakubo would become a trophy hanging on a Manhattan bedroom wall.

  That first night in Tokyo, this carefully orchestrated plan was threatened when a fax arrived from Jerry Like me, Jerry is Australian and fifteen years in Tokyo have left him blessedly profane. �
�This PR at Production IG is being a real dickhead. Earlier he told me that Kitakubo would determine the location for your meeting. Now we’re being told that, no, we must do that. Suggested a cheesy American-style ‘family restaurant’ but can’t confirm the damned thing until the PR hears back from Kitakubo and then makes contact to say this location is okay. Very good news however, the sword maker will see us tomorrow morning. Will call you early to confirm where we shall meet.”

  As the train carrying Saya and the corpse of her victim arrives at the station, an announcer declares it Asakusa, the last stop. This, as it happened, was where we agreed to meet Jerry and his wife, Etsuko.

  When, the night before, Charley and I stepped out into the warm blue Asakusa night, he asked where we were going.

  “We’ll find something nice to eat,” I said.

  “Have you got a map?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know where we are?”

  We wandered blindly along lanes so narrow that the driver of a Toyota had to move parked bicycles in order to pass through. Meanwhile, I realised I couldn’t tell the difference between a restaurant and a house of ill repute. Nor did I know that we were staying in the heart of Japanese pop culture, of Kabuki, kodan, manzai, rakugo, kamishibai, all the hundred forms of Japanese storytelling, several of which were directly connected to the birth of manga and anime.

  Entering the wide street we would soon name “Drunk Street,” we walked between the pachinko and off-track betting parlours and discovered a large covered arcade with many restaurants. Here we stood, staring at the plastic food in the window. Not a word of English in sight.

  “I don’t think this is a good area, Dad.”

  I did not doubt him, but we were hungry. “It’s fine,” I said.

  “This is not a good area.”

  Heedless, I led him inside a restaurant. Immediately we were sent back to the window to study the plastic food. Then we were joined by a raffish gentleman, roughly sixty years old, with grey slicked-back hair, baggy light-coloured trousers, a pair of very loud yellow braces, and a tie of equal volume. His face had a smooth, rather pampered quality.