by Anna Sherman
He would have stood behind her, his fingers over hers, his chin almost on her shoulder, his cheek next to her hair.
Wind it this way.
I don’t know what I’m doing!
… You will.
The clock ground to life and the bells jangled, shrill. The room wavered, its air churned up like the surface of a pond.
When we stepped outside, it was like breathing after too long underwater. Mrs. Kamiguchi locked the door behind us.
In the final analysis, Guro wrote, we humans are slaves, slaves to machines and to time. We get home every day after being harassed by clocks. But when you come to this place, don’t remember time! If you can forget what hour it is, your life will be long.
* * *
In London, I heard a rumor. In all Japan, there was a single clockmaker who still made clocks the old way. Clocks that told the time by when light rose, and when dark came, instead of in fixed, unchanging numbers.
I was at the Japanese embassy to see the Myriad Year Clock, a huge golden timepiece built in the mid-nineteenth century just before Japan’s traditional clocks were abandoned. A man called Suzuki Kazuyoshi was escorting the clock around Europe. He had a neatly clipped beard and was bald. Without his rimless spectacles, Suzuki might have passed for Ebisu, the god of fishermen and good luck.
‘Everyone in Japan uses the modern clock now: it’s a great shame,’ Suzuki said. ‘We never think about Edo time anymore. The temple Kanei-ji is the only place where the hours are still rung out the old way, like they were before Tokyo was Tokyo.’
The Myriad Year Clock has six faces. It shows not just the twenty-four-hour day of modern time, and the twelve-hour day of Edo time, but the phases of the moon, the twenty-four Japanese seasons and the days of the week. Another dial shows the ancient Chinese system, which combined the Zodiac animals and the elements: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. The monstrous golden clock can run for almost an entire year without rewinding.
Along with the Myriad Year Clock, Suzuki had brought a doll that served tea. It was about as tall as my knee, and after winding could glide in a straight line and stop, coy. The doll had a shaved head with a single glossy forelock, and the otherworldly, suffering face of a boy. While Suzuki and I talked, the doll moved back and forth as the embassy crowd drank champagne and clapped at its antics. It seemed to wince when its white and gold hakama skirt was removed and the red silk happi coat stripped away so everyone could see the gear trains that made it run. Despite its nakedness, the doll still carried tea on its tray, back and forth between spectators. It was stoic.
‘But,’ Suzuki said, speaking loudly over the applause, ‘we are still less bound by clocks than people in the West. And we don’t express ourselves the way you do. You come right out and say, “I love you!” In Japan, we never do that. We might say, “The moon is beautiful,” instead. Which means you’re seeing the other person in the moon. For us, the individual isn’t central to anything. But because we believe that we are one with nature, we say, “The moon changes!” Which means, our feelings are changing, too.
‘… Or think about how you consider stillness. Here, because originally you thought that God controlled nature, when everything is quiet, you feel peaceful. In Japan, it’s quite the opposite. We feel happiest when there’s a commotion, a racket. But when things are still, we get nervous, because quiet means danger. If it’s quiet in England, that means your monsters and ghosts are sleeping. But for us, when we hear crickets or birds, we can relax. Our ghosts come out when everything is silent.’
‘Like in 2011, before the earthquake,’ I said. ‘I knew someone who was in a park, and everything went quiet. The birds stopped singing. Nothing moved. She said, “Oh God! God! Here it comes!” And then everything started to shake.’
‘… Yes. In Japan, silence can be sinister.’ Beside us, the doll took someone’s tea cup and then veered away in a stately arc. Everyone cheered.
‘But there’s one man who still makes clocks the old way,’ Suzuki said. ‘His name is Naruse. Go talk to him. He lives in Nagoya.’
* * *
I’d expected Naruse Takurō to be old: a wizened craftsman. He wasn’t. He was young. Small and graceful, like the tea-serving doll I had seen in London. He would have been another kind of doll, though. An archer, perhaps.
‘What modern people don’t understand about wadokei – old Japanese clocks – is that measuring time wasn’t important,’ Naruse said. ‘Of course those clocks weren’t accurate! The point is pleasure, pleasure in the mechanism. Those clocks are all about delight.’
Naruse flipped open the side of a three-hundred-year-old tower clock so I could see its inner parts: the escapement, the striking train, the gears. ‘Even when you fiddled around with the clock, you’d just be showing off for your guests, not actually fixing something. You’d be showing you knew how to run it.’
In the broad alcove where other people might have displayed scrolls, or art, Naruse had hung a profusion of wall clocks. They all read different times.
‘We’re really into pleasure in this country. The advantage of the old Japanese clocks was, they go off time, not that they keep it. Who needed clocks? Most people were farmers, and the sun was their clock.’
Naruse worked in a factory just after finishing school, where he learned to weld metal brackets. He invented a composting machine.
‘That’s like a clock?’ I said, thinking of minutes and hours, shredded, crushed.
‘Oh, the mechanism isn’t so different,’ Naruse said, his face straight. ‘But the factory was dire. The work was so boring. I wanted to make music boxes and toys and I wasn’t allowed to. But then I happened to go into a junk shop and I found this—’ Here Naruse crossed the room and lifted a heavy 1960s Seiko radio clock off a low shelf. It was squat and gold and its weight rested on short knitting-needle legs.
I took it out of his hands and looked at the face.
‘My grandparents had one like this!’ I cried. ‘… Natsukashii!’ I remembered the clock watching over everything in the flickering half-light of their TV room; the curtains and carpet smelling of the cigarettes my grandmother smoked. The games we would play there, and the plastic washing basket with my toys inside and the old decks of cards that were incomplete.
‘Natsukashii,’ Naruse repeated, laughing: ‘it takes you back. I took the clock home and took it apart and rebuilt it and took it apart again. I felt a rush, just like I had when I was a boy and did the same thing. My father was furious, because after I took his clock to pieces, it didn’t work again. But – I felt that finding that old clock was a sign, a message from the ancient craftsmen: Create. So I quit the factory and started my own company. I bet my life on the clocks.’
‘You learned from old books?’
‘No. I taught myself. I couldn’t believe that no one had made a single wadokei since 1872. That’s just wrong. Making clocks in the Japanese way is a return to identity; a return to who we are. When you copy someone else, even if the quality is good, the feeling is off. The clocks showed me how unique Japan is. Think about food. Compare Japanese and international food. Japanese food is very intricate. It’s colorful, it’s playful. You whiteys just eat hamburgers!’
‘That’s not exactly true.’
‘OK. Potatoes…’ Naruse said gleefully, his face straight. ‘… Coca-Cola…’
‘Maybe your chicken is better than ours.’
‘Nagoya chicken is the best, isn’t it!’
‘Delicious.’
‘We have a long history with chicken. We really are the best, at chicken.’
‘… Chicken and clocks.’
Naruse led me upstairs to the rooms where he assembles his clocks and hair-line polishes their parts, like a jeweler. The workshops were luminous white, and a pendulum and cogs and escapement wheels scattered over his work table like tiny silver galaxies.
I told Naruse about the clock museum in Tokyo, the widow who looked after her husband’s things, though she didn’t underst
and them. ‘It’s a strange place. Time has stopped for the clocks but not for her.’
‘I’ve never been there,’ Naruse said. ‘But the clocks will teach you how you should live. A clock is more than just a machine.’
March, 2011
For a few hours after the Earthquake, Tokyo was a carnival.
Birds, which had been quiet in the parks, began singing again. Horses penned up in the Meiji stables calmed down. The trees, which had been whipping back and forth as if tortured in high winds, rested on their roots. The earth had rolled like a flapping sheet, and at last it was still.
In Omotesandō, people quit screaming and stumbled out of shops and stood on the pavement; lit cigarettes; laughed. It was a Friday and we thought the weekend had come early. The trains had stopped. An hour later, the crowds began streaming past, northeast to southwest, walking in their expensive Italian shoes and best suits, from central Tokyo’s business districts toward the satellite towns where they lived.
No one in the capital knew about the vast waves that would break over Sendai thirty minutes later. Our mobile phones didn’t work. We didn’t know what had happened to the north for hours.
That night I watched video streaming of Kesennuma, a small city near the earthquake’s epicenter. It blazed away in the darkness, and the Pacific Ocean reflected the shimmering fires. I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. I thought it was another country, someplace far away.
Before noon on Saturday, the baker’s shelves were stripped almost bare. In the grocery store, instant noodles and flashlights were disappearing. The BBC reported that the Fukushima plant was having trouble stabilizing its reactors.
Fukushima Reactor-1 blew up at 3:36 that afternoon.
I fell asleep and dreamed a thin bubble was blooming north of Tokyo: radiant. Invisible.
On Sunday, a friend called. ‘I’ve got tickets out. My husband couldn’t get anything today or tomorrow…’
I phoned another friend. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, before I’d even said hello.
‘I’m already in Osaka,’ she said. I hung up.
Sunday was a day of rumors and apocalyptic e-mails. You can’t rent cars, or book taxis. The French ordered their nationals out and said to tape up windows and not drink the water. The airport road is damaged. The trains aren’t running. There are long lines for petrol. There’s no more food.
On Monday at 11:15 a.m., Fukushima Reactor-3 blew up. On Tuesday, the BBC announced that the fuel-containment pools might be on fire.
I bought tickets for Hong Kong. One-way.
I wanted to see Daibo before I flew. I’d called him on Saturday to find out if his family in Iwate were all right, but I wanted to meet him. The light was stale and milky and I licked grit off my teeth. Where had the wind come from, I wondered.
Daibo’s was empty except for a man I’d never met before, a sleep researcher named Sasegawa. Like Daibo, his family came from a place the tsunami had wrecked.
Sasegawa was about to light a Cohiba cigar when I came in, but put it down, nodding to me. I stared at him in disbelief. ‘You can’t be worried about second-hand smoke now! What with everything else going on!’
Sasegawa and Daibo talked, but I heard nothing. I stared at objects instead: the little iron bell from Iwate, the battered hand-roaster Daibo used; a camellia in a vase. I wondered if I would see them ever again.
‘The Dutch and the Germans and the French have said their people should evacuate,’ I said. Daibo and Sasegawa looked at me, their faces slack with shock. ‘… The British embassy just says, “Be careful.”’
I wanted to tell Daibo that I would leave the next day for Hong Kong, but how? With what words? So I said nothing.
I knew Daibo would not leave Tokyo, no matter what. It would have been easier to move one of the trees rooted on Aoyama dōri below.
I paid for my coffee, bowed, and went slowly down the narrow stairs. And then I ran.
上
野
‘Ueno’
Sudhana said, ‘Where has that magnificent display gone?’ Matreya said, ‘Where it came from.’
The Flower Ornament Scripture
Translated by Thomas Cleary
Ueno: The Last Shogun
A huge glass box, in an almost empty room.
Inside was a purple costume that had been made in Paris, by the order of Napoleon III, as a gift for the last Tokugawa shogun, Yoshinobu, in 1867. The rich violet silk was stitched in brilliant crimson threads with the shogunal family’s three-leaf paulownia crest. Its cuffs and collars and hem were trimmed with gold piping.
In the absence of any real knowledge of Japan, which had been closed to Europeans since the mid-seventeenth century, the royal couturier had invented an imaginary place of luxe, calme, et volupté. Napoleon’s gift was for the ruler of that dreamed country.
In the 1860s England and France were playing out an East Asian version of the Great Game, with France backing the Tokugawa traditionalists (who fought for the shogun) and England backing the rebel fiefs of the southwest and their would-be modernizers (who fought for the emperor). Though the French and English were allies against Russia in the Crimea, they were rivals over Japan during the country’s brief civil war.
‘Jimbaori,’ the monk behind me said, nodding at the glass box. ‘… War clothes.’
The empty suit hovered behind its glass like an archbishop’s robes. It was nothing to be worn on a battlefield, unless somebody wanted it for target practice.
‘It’s not very Japanese,’ the monk admitted, laughing.
His name was Kobayashi. He handled all enquiries about Kanei-ji, the temple the Tokugawa built to match the great ‘demon gate’ temples in the northeastern quarters of Kyoto and Nara. When the ancient Chinese planned their towns, the northeast was believed to be the region of greatest danger; the zone of bad luck. The Chinese built temples in that direction as spiritual firebreaks. The Japanese borrowed this formula for their own cities, but with Edo, the northeast really was a region of pollution, because that was the direction of Kozukappara and its execution grounds; the outcaste districts; and floods. Kanei-ji was built to keep curses and demons away from Edo.
Kobayashi’s almost translucent black robes were too big for his thin body. Because the fabric was stiff, it floated around his arms and shoulders rather than hanging down off them. We were in the reconstructed apartments of Yoshinobu. Except for the French robes, the rooms were echoingly empty, even by the most austere Japanese standards. There was an incense burner, a lacquered table bearing the Tokugawa crest painted in gold. Nothing else.
‘No one can just – take over Japan! By resigning as shogun when the emperor was restored to power, Yoshinobu helped with the transition. If he’d resisted, there would have been chaos.
‘Yoshinobu resigned as shogun, and then he left Edo Castle for Kanei-ji. He was here for sixty days. He secluded himself inside just three rooms to show complete submission to the imperial throne. Around two thousand Tokugawa samurai gathered in Ueno when Yoshinobu was here. They wanted to protect him. And then, as he left Edo for exile, he told them, “Disband. Go home.” But a thousand or so wouldn’t leave.’
When the shogunate collapsed, samurai rallied first in Asakusa and then near the Tokugawa family temple in Ueno to challenge the Meiji emperor’s soldiers. They called themselves shōgitai, ‘the League to Demonstrate Righteousness’. Most were young, and responding to the anomie of their times. Many came from domains that the imperial forces had already taken over. Almost all were low-ranking retainers from the margins and fringes of Tokugawa society. They signed their names in their own blood to oaths promising to protect the shogun. The oath began, During the past three hundred years, fighting spirit has declined until loyalty and patriotism are mere words …
Ueno had seven gates. On 15 May 1868, the shōgitai massed near the main one, known as the Black Gate, where they faced off against the forces of Saigō Takamori, the era’s most gifted general and – even more ominous fo
r the shōgitai – his five British-built Armstrong cannons. The shōgitai answered Saigō’s fusillade with flaming arrows that missed, soaring past the imperial troops and striking the wooden houses beyond. Despite heavy rain, block after block caught fire. The air turned white with smoke from the guns and burning buildings, and the soldiers could see almost nothing. Woodblock prints record the dense clouds from the bursting shells; the walls of fire.
Kanei-ji’s monks had backed the shōgitai. On the morning the imperial troops attacked, the young abbot – the Rinnoji – was saying his prayers, as if there were no screams and shouting beyond the Main Hall, no gunfire or barrage from the echoing Armstrong guns.
When the Rinnoji finished praying, he walked to breakfast. He drank a cup of tea, and then lifted his chopsticks. His monks – the ones who had not already run away – stared at him. Once he had finished eating, the Rinnoji called for an adviser and requested that he be appraised of events at the gates.
The adviser looked down, and said nothing. The monks begged the abbot to leave Kanei-ji, and eventually he agreed. He dressed in plain clothes and went north with his bodyguards, who wanted him as far away as possible from the Black Gate. It had rained for days and the paths were streams of red mud. The men kept slipping, and the sludge soaked the abbot’s white tabi. Yet the woodblock prints of the Battle of Ueno all depict his socks still white, pristine, as the abbot leaves his temple for the last time.
As the abbot and his entourage fled, an artillery barrage hit the Main Hall. One of the Rinnoji’s companions later wrote about ‘the unspeakable roaring’ as everything inside caught fire, and the ancient wood began splitting and cracking.
At 1 p.m. Saigō’s forces broke through the Black Gate, and by the time the Rinnoji reached the edge of Ueno, the shōgitai had scattered in defeat. The monks’ faces, wrote one observer, went ‘blue with shock’ at the news. No one had foreseen that the shōgitai would lose so quickly. There were no contingency plans, even for an escape.
