Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  Red meat was the first of many foreign foods to capture the hearts of Japanese youth and make its way into the national diet. By the early twentieth century Japanese people were growing fat on American beef and getting drunk on European whiskey. But in the 1930s and 1940s wartime austerity and trade restrictions brought these indulgences to an end. During the height of the Pacific War, when Japan was almost completely cut off from the rest of the world, the Japanese diet dwindled to its lowest level in terms of calories in nearly a century. In 1945 the average daily intake of a Japanese adult consisted of only 1,200 calories, less than is found in an average junior high school lunch today. Older Japanese still talk about those months as a time of overwhelming hunger. The American commanders who entered Japan in August 1945 quickly realized the severity of the situation and overlooked their wartime hostilities to airlift food into the country. “Send me food,” General Douglas MacArthur said, “or send me bullets.” This single act by the Americans toward their erstwhile enemies did as much as anything else to secure friendly postwar relations between the two countries.

  In addition to bringing in short-term supplies, the occupying Americans also introduced a nutrition program into the schools, promising every child one glass of American-made powdered milk every day. After the Americans left in the 1950s, the Japanese passed a school lunch law of their own which guaranteed that students would have one meal every day. As a sign of increased prosperity and friendship with the West, beef was included in the official menu. This program has been so successful that today it serves over sixteen million lunches a day.

  I first realized the importance of school lunch when I was a patient in the hospital. Dr. Endo explained that the menu in the hospital would be good for me because it was modeled after the one used in schools. This menu, he explained, which includes milk, beef, and other ingredients not part of the traditional Japanese vegetarian diet, was the single most significant factor in improving the physical make-up of the population. Japanese children have grown dramatically taller in the last half a century. In 1950 the average fourteen-year-old boy was four feet, ten inches tall. In 1988 a boy the same age had surged half a foot to five feet, four inches tall. The average girl has grown from four feet nine to five feet two. Students weigh more as well. The male student today weighs twenty-eight pounds more than his counterpart of 1950.

  While the typical school lunch menu has come a long way from its meager beginnings—now including such delicacies as shredded beef, shrimp stew, and fried squid—the program has not been without controversy. Menus in recent years have been criticized as being too high in calories and fat. As a result, national guidelines now limit fat to no more than thirty percent of total caloric content and have set new goals for protein, vitamins, and minerals. These eating patterns, combined with a general tendency to eat less red meat than in other industrialized countries, ensure that a Japanese junior high student can expect to outlive his or her peers in every other country in the world. A girl born today can expect to live to be eighty-two years old and a boy nearly seventy-six.

  Another debate has centered on the question of what the staple of the meal should be. Rice has long been the main ingredient of the Japanese diet, and until recently it was eaten three times a day. Gohan, the word for cooked rice, is also the word for meal. But because of rice shortages after the war, bread was introduced into school lunches and soon became the norm. After twenty-five years of sandwiches, buns, and cinnamon rolls, the country’s rice lobby complained. As a result, schools in the 1970s began serving rice twice a week from the huge store of surpluses that the government maintained in order to subsidize farmers.

  In the meantime, students had gulped down so many doughnuts and hamburgers that they had forgotten the right way to eat rice. Parents noticed with horror that their children were not using chopsticks, or hashi, with the proper technique. Errant youngsters were shoveling their rice, stabbing their meat, and crossing the tips of their sticks in an X, the culinary equivalent of walking bowlegged. Like other lapses in manners, this one was blamed on the schools. In the late 1970s the Japanese Ministry of Education conducted a survey and found that less than ten percent of all schools were providing their students with hashi. Suddenly chopsticks, those little tapered slivers of wood adapted from Chinese ivory prototypes over a millennium ago, found themselves at the forefront of an all-out national effort to reclaim the lost art of eating. The cultural push to preserve good eating habits coincided with the political drive to bring back rice to the schools, and the result was a new national slogan of sorts: “A pair of chopsticks in every hand; a bowl of rice on every desk.”

  By the late 1980s this trend seemed to be holding, and ninety percent of all schools reported that they used chopsticks at lunch. But this study must have ignored the students in Tochigi. In Sano, chopsticks were the exception, not the rule, and students were clearly more comfortable using their hands or their sporks. Part of the problem for children may be that schools distribute short, stunted sticks made from cheap plastic. Some experts claim that Japanese children have actually outgrown traditional hashi. A study by a university professor in Tokyo concluded that the length of hashi should properly be about fifteen percent of a person’s height. But with typical classroom chopsticks only seven inches long, the contemporary model had failed to keep up with the rapid growth of its target constituency. Using this formula as a base, the boy from the seventh grade who invited me to lunch would be more comfortable with sticks that were nine inches long, almost twenty-five percent longer than the ones he was using. Denver would need ones that were ten inches long; and I, the lofty foreigner who had already stunned so many with his chopstick proficiency, should rightfully have been using sticks that were similar in length to an American classroom ruler or, perhaps, a Japanese hospital crutch.

  After finishing their beef stew and wiping their bowls with a tissue, the students of 7-4 hurriedly stacked their trays, deposited their orange peels in the trash, and put their milk bottles in racks. As they returned to their seats, Denver took his place behind the teacher’s desk.

  “Well, boys and girls,” he said, leaning forward and scanning the room with his eyes, “how were classes this morning?”

  Nobody answered. A stack of bowls fell to the side of the metal milk crate.

  “How about sports class…Was it cold?”

  Several students nodded, but still no one spoke out.

  “Math class?”

  “It’s too hard,” a boy in the back of the class whispered under his breath, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “What did you say, Doi-san?” Denver called out. “Speak up so we can all hear.”

  A young girl in the front row raised her hand. “sensei, tomorrow we have a test in both math and Japanese. Two tests in one day. That’s not fair. All we do is study these days.”

  After lunch every day, Denver held a brief meeting with his homeroom students to discuss their classes and their behavior that morning. These noontime sessions, like spiritual revivals, were designed to renew the students’ faith in their kumi and strengthen their commitment to one another. The meetings also served as an initiation into conflict resolution, the foundation of Japanese law. On this day, after a slow start, he calmed anxieties about upcoming tests and, more important, uncovered a minor class scuffle.

  “sensei,” a pug-faced boy said from the middle of the room, “Nakajima stole my pencil today and broke it in half.”

  A jolt seemed to pass through the class, and several people looked to the back of the room where Nakajima sat with his chin to his chest.

  “Is that true, Mr. Nakajima?” Denver asked.

  “Yes sir,” he grumbled.

  “Can you tell us what happened?”

  The boy spoke quickly, without looking at the teacher. “Suga pushed me over the chair, so I picked up his pencil off the ground and threw it against the wall. It was no big deal. He started it anyway.”

  “Liar,” someone hissed from the far side
.

  “Am not,” Nakajima shouted back.

  “Did anyone else see this incident?” Denver asked, now rising to stand in front of the class with hands drawn across his chest.

  “I did,” said a girl seated in the back next to the accused. “They were arguing about some dumb comic book. I didn’t understand, but I did see Suga-kun push him down. And then Nakajima-kun broke his pencil.” She used the title kun, in place of san, to show familiarity.

  “I see,” Denver said. “Mr. Suga, Mr. Nakajima, please come to the front of the class. I don’t know what you were fighting about, but I do know that it was not very important and that it was not a very good idea. In my view, both of you were wrong. I want you to apologize to each other right now and then apologize to the rest of the class. This is not appropriate behavior.”

  There was a pause as the two boys made their way to the front of the room, bowed meekly to each other, and then uttered a barely audible “Sumimasen. Excuse me.”

  “Now everyone listen to me,” Denver said, putting his arms around the two boys and returning to his friendly voice. “This is a minor incident, but we want to avoid this sort of thing in the future. It doesn’t help our class image.”

  The students listened quietly.

  “This afternoon, as you go through class, I want you to remember our motto, ‘Always be courteous. Always be kind.’ I don’t want to hear about this sort of thing in the future. Now go and enjoy your break.”

  The students scrambled to their feet and rushed through the open door. Nakajima and Suga hesitated for a moment and then went running after the pack. They had fifteen minutes of recess left before the fifth-period bell.

  11

  MADE IN JAPAN: NEW YEAR’S EVE AND THE RISING SUN

  Praise to Joy, the God descended,

  Daughter of Elysium,

  Ray of mirth and rapture blended,

  Goddess to thy shrine we come.

  —Friedrich von Schiller, “Ode to Joy,” 1785

  THE TELEVISION SET was already singing at full volume when I arrived at the Cherry Blossoms’ home a little before midnight on New Year’s Eve. On the screen, the Tokyo Philharmonic and its background choir were climbing toward the climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mrs. C and her two teenage boys were rocking back and forth on the floor, waving their arms and clapping their hands in perfect time to the music.

  “Ssshhhh,” they whispered when I walked through the door with Mr. C. “This is the best part.”

  Beethoven’s Ninth is to Japan what “Auld Lang Syne” is to the West. This soaring, romantic opus was played in Japan by triumphant American soldiers at the end of the Second World War and has remained ever since as the symbolic music of closings. It is such a perennial best-seller that the Japanese inventors of the compact disc system designed the CD to be seventy-two minutes long so it could hold the symphony in its entirety. In the several weeks leading up to the end of the year, the closing movement of Beethoven’s Ninth was performed no fewer than twenty-five times in the Tokyo area alone, and it was played on countless other occasions over the public address system during cleanup hour at Sano Junior High.

  At the end of the piece the Cherry Blossom family cheered and the television turned suddenly black. Then, at precisely midnight, a small group of gray-suited businessmen appeared on the screen, standing in the straits between Honshu and Hokkaido—Japan’s two largest islands—and proceeded to dedicate the country’s newest tunnel. With great earnestness the men raised a toast of sake and drank to the long life and prosperous future of their underwater pass. Next, the cameras cut to the scene of a recently completed bridge between Honshu and Shikoku, hailed as the longest bridge in Japan, where a similar group of men toasted their overwater pass. With this tribute to technology complete, we pulled on our coats, tucked in our scarves, and headed into the woods for our own end-of-the-year celebration.

  No holiday captures the tradition, the revelry, and the hybrid spirit of modern Japan better than the five-day midwinter festival of shgatsu, or New Year’s. Like Carnival to the Brazilians or Midsummer to the Swedes, shgatsu is a national holiday when workers stay home from work, students go home from school, and city dwellers return to their ancestral homes in the country. For two days before the new year, families scrub their houses and prepare special holiday cards; for two days after, they visit relatives and take gifts to friends and colleagues. But the high point of the celebration, when all the land’s afire, begins just after midnight on January 1 with the striking of the New Year’s bell.

  As one of the few occasions in the year when work stops and families spend time together, the New Year’s festival brings out some of the latent religious traditions that still color Japanese life. Our first stop, a fifteen-minute walk from Mr. C’s home, would be at a small Shinto neighborhood shrine.

  “Have you ever seen a Japanese ghost?” asked Takuya, Mr. C’s younger son, an eighth-grade junior high school student. “We might see one tonight. They are really scary.”

  “All the ghosts dress in white,” said his older brother, Yuji, waving his arms toward the porcelain moon, “and they float in green smoke. But they don’t have legs, so you can outrun them.”

  “I’m not worried,” I assured them as I teetered along on my infirm leg, now finally released from its cast. “They are probably afraid of gaijin, just like other Japanese.”

  Mr. C pointed to an old house set apart in the trees. “My mother was born over there,” he said, “and my sister still lives in the house next door. This is my family’s land, and we are going to visit my family’s shrine.”

  “Does your family own the shrine?” I asked.

  “No, but my ancestors have lived in this neighborhood for centuries, and my cousin still serves as the priest. His daughter will probably dance tonight.”

  Shinto shrines, ranging from sprawling estates in major cities to tiny shelters along rural highways, still proliferate in Japan, reflecting a not-too-distant past when state-sponsored Shinto worship dominated the spiritual tenor of the country. Shinto is a native Japanese cult that honors natural spirits living in trees, rocks, and other objects. It provides no code of ethics or rules about the afterlife but instead stresses a respect for nature and natural phenomena of the earth. Over the years, Shinto evolved to fit its surroundings, developing new rituals for the rice harvest, the fish crop, or other customs important to the towns where it thrived.

  About a hundred years ago, when Japan began to reassert its national power, Shinto was heralded as the native theology of the Japanese people. At a time when many people were cutting off their topknots and eating beef in an exaggerated attempt to become Western, Japanese students were learning in school that they had descended from the goddess of the Sun, through the emperor, into an enlightened race. Shinto was used to prove the uniqueness of Japanese culture and justify the country’s imperialistic moves into neighboring countries. This recipe of Shinto beliefs mixed with military power formed the ingredients for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and, later, the Pacific War.

  The Allied victory in the war soon ended this scheme and with it the theocratic aspirations of the state. Occupying Americans took control of the government and legally separated church from state. But like many other things the Americans introduced, this separation lasted in name only. A half century after the war, Shinto shrines hold a lingering appeal as the primary havens for neighborhood and family spirits. To this day, from the busiest district of Osaka to the tiniest hamlet in Tochigi, no shgatsu holiday would be complete without a hatsu-mde, a “first visit” to a Shinto shrine.

  “There it is,” Takuya said, tugging at my sleeve and dragging me down the road. “That’s the shrine.”

  “Ooh, oooooh,” Yuji cooed, as if a ghost might descend from the trees.

  The vermilion wooden pavilion stood submerged in a grove of pines at the crest of a tiny hill, silent and austere in the faint glow of the moon. The path up to the face of the shrine began beneath the
ceremonial gate known as a torii, or bird perch, a post-and-lintel structure with upturned edges.

  “Take some small coins,” Mr. C whispered, “no more than five or ten yen, and follow me to the entrance. It must be your own money. If I give it to you, it won’t work.”

  We walked under the eaves of the shrine and peered inside at the sacred altar, a scarlet niche decorated with smooth stalks of bamboo, clipped pine branches, and threads of white rice paper.

  “Toss the coin into the trough, and pull the bell—hard.”

  As the coin ricocheted in the wooden hollow, I clanged the copper bell to summon the kami, the patron god of the shrine. Following Mr. C, I clapped my hands twice, bowed, and offered a wish for the new year. As we prayed, a white-robed priest shook white paper above our heads, and a teenage girl in a silken white dress danced silently in her bare feet.

  This ritual purification—the blond bamboo, virgin white paper, and freshly cut pine boughs—is part of the enduring appeal of this creed. Shinto endures because it celebrates life. Despite a general lack of enthusiasm for formal religion among younger Japanese, most still visit a shrine to mark special, life-cycle occasions—the birth of a baby; the third, fifth, and seventh birthdays of a child; and the ascension of an adolescent into adulthood at the age of twenty. These rites of passage are marked in Japan not by appealing to an abstract, extraterrestrial god but by summoning strength from the spirits of nature, ever present in the trees, the stones, and the land.