by Bruce Feiler
“Let’s go,” Mr. C said, putting his arm around me and leading me away from the altar. “Now, we drink.”
The start of the year, like the start of a party, was marked with a toast as well as a prayer.
“This is special shgatsu-sake,” he said, pouring a dose of sweet, warm liquor from a wooden bowl into my mouth. “There are gold flakes in this sake. From this night on, you will always have a bit of Japanese gold flowing in your blood.”
We left the shrine after several more cups of gold sake and walked over the valley and through the woods back to the Cherry Blossoms’ home. Having arrived back at the house, the five of us piled into Mr. C’s Nissan Gloria sedan and headed toward the hills west of Sano. After a short drive we approached a gathering of red-and-white-striped tents bathed in a magical yellow glow from a string of paper lanterns. Lazy smoke serpents from vendors’ grills wound their way through the light toward the empty black sky above. A festival was under way.
Although it was close to two A.M. when we arrived, the crowd still throbbed with delight. Children pushed their way through the crowd of coats to ogle at candied bananas; a balding man with a two-day growth of beard slapped a slab of squid on a grill and doused it with soy sauce; a grandmother eased her chopsticks into a plate of amber noodles and made a fearsome slurping sound. The glob of noodles disappeared in an instant, leaving two pieces of pink pickled ginger dangling on her upper lip until her tongue came to the rescue. Mr. C bounded from booth to booth, occasionally bursting into song or giggling as he greeted old friends and bowed cheerfully to former students. His sons, with their teenage reputations to uphold, were more somber, but even they drank a cup of warm sweet sake.
We made our way through the crowd and began to climb a narrow stone staircase that spiraled away from the din of the festival to the ponderous seclusion of a decaying temple poised on a cliff above. Having prayed for the future at a Shinto shrine, we would now pay homage to the past at a Buddhist temple.
“Here we must be quiet,” Mr. C whispered in my ear. “We do not want to disturb the spirits of the past.”
Like many other things Japanese, Buddhism first came to Japan via China. A Chinese priest visiting Japan in the sixth century first explained to Japanese nature worshipers the ideal of reaching a personal salvation in paradise. Buddhism offered individuals a way to escape human suffering by transcending the endless cycle of life and death. By following the teachings of Buddha, any person could achieve a painless state of transcendence, or Nirvana. As Buddhism grew, it split into two divergent streams. An orthodox wing, which stressed the original teachings of Buddha, spread across Southeast Asia, while a new branch, which introduced a pantheon of smaller gods to help individuals reach paradise, spread north through China. This second current, known as Mahayana or “Greater Vehicle” Buddhism, found its way from the Middle Kingdom of China, through the Korean peninsula, to the islands of Japan.
The Japanese never took to the idea that people should adhere strictly to one set of beliefs. Buddhism, like Shinto, proved through the centuries to be quite tolerant and malleable. As Buddhist temples appeared in towns that already had Shinto shrines, and as local farmers who worshiped Shinto gods attended Buddhist funerals, the two beliefs underwent a sort of Darwinian evolution in which they adapted to fit the needs of their environment. Just as tigers developed stripes to meld better with their surroundings, so Buddhism developed such rituals as prayer before a statue—an act not native to the religion—to suit the traditions of its target audience. Today, the twin ideologies stand side by side in the lives of many Japanese. According to one popular saying, eighty percent of the population say they are Buddhist, eighty percent say they are Shinto, and eighty percent say they believe in no religion at all.
“We have to buy a charm,” Mr. C said, pulling my arm and dragging me toward a vendor’s window. “This is the Year of the Dragon.”
In their potluck creed, the Japanese still abide by the old Chinese calendar cycle, in which every year is named for one of twelve different beasts: snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, boar, rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, and the ultimate lord of the zodiac, the dragon.
“Now,” he said, “we pray.”
We took our charms and stood before a dark wooden altar, more somber and foreboding than the Shinto shrine had seemed. The columns were thick and gray with age; the wooden floors were splintered with an uneven grain. The air was spiced with burning ash. We clapped our hands twice, as before, and bowed our heads. But instead of throwing money, we lit the wick of a small white candle and placed it on the altar.
“This is for your ancestors,” Mrs. Cherry Blossom said. “We want them to know you remember.”
“Now,” Mr. C said when the flame had risen to its peak, “we have one last thing to do. We must ring the New Year’s bell.”
For a small fee we entered a small covered arcade and took turns pulling a wooden clapper the size of a baseball bat into the side of a cast-iron bell, sounding a chime that when rung 108 times would clear away the 108 devils that had darkened our souls during the foregoing Year of the Rabbit.
The Year of the Dragon was barely three hours old and already we had pleaded twice at two separate altars, drunk purified liquor laced with gold, toasted the new year and rung out the old, eluded the wrath of Japanese ghosts, and expunged a corps of demons. One would have thought that our chances for success in the coming year were pretty much guaranteed. But Mr. C’s boys had another idea.
“Let’s go see the first sunrise,” Takuya said.
“Ooooh,” his brother hummed in eerie, sci-fi tones, “the goddess of the Sun.”
“What happens at the first sunrise?” I asked.
“It’s the most important time of the night,” Mr. C said. “It determines your fate for the year.”
“My fate?”
“You’ll see.” He turned to his wife for approval. “Shall we go?” he asked.
“Yes, let’s,” she said.
“Baka yaroo!” the boys screamed in concert. “This is totally awesome.”
An hour later, after a brief stop at home for supplies, our four-door Nissan Gloria pulled into a crowded parking lot at the top of a small mountain overlooking the town. It was a little past four in the morning. Most people below were already sleeping, but in a clearing on this rocky peak, about forty revelers had gathered together to witness the first breath of the Dragon Sun.
The worshipers were huddled around a makeshift campfire, chatting excitedly as they held freshly pared sticks over the fire with what appeared to be marshmallows dripping in the flames.
“What’s that?” I asked Takuya.
“That’s mochi,” he said, drawing a similar white block from a plastic bag and plopping it into my hand. “We have some, too. They’re like rice balls, but special for New Year’s.”
He scurried away to pick some sticks as the rest of us took our places around the circle, where all eyes were trained on the tips of the skewers. Just as one of the white cubes began to dangle from the end of a stick, the roaster would plop the mochi into his mouth, howl at the heat, hiss with pain, and finally stretch the blob, taffylike, from his teeth.
“It’s hot, it’s hot,” shouted a woman wrapped in an Indian scarf as she pinched her earlobe with her burning fingers.
“Here, why don’t you try some?” a man said, handing me a melted lump.
Moving slowly to avoid the heat, I pulled the puttylike ball to my mouth and sank my teeth into the center. As I chewed, the crowd leaned closer to watch. By this time quite accustomed to such attention, I smiled and waited for their surprised reaction when they discovered that I too could enjoy this treat.
But as soon as the mochi reached my tongue, I knew I was in for trouble. This gelatinous paste tasted more like plastic dental x-ray tape than toasted marshmallows. “Be a good Japanese,” I thought to myself. “Gamman—suffer with dignity.”
“Well…,” Mr. C said, plopping a block into his mouth and swallowing it as
a frog would eat a fly—in one gulp. “How do you like it?”
“It’s fine,” I mumbled, trying to swallow but feeling the weight of the ball swelling inside my throat. I wondered for a second if this was what a snake felt like after eating an entire rat. But then I reconsidered: a rat seemed oddly appealing.
“This is what Japanese ghosts eat,” Takuya chipped in.
“Very funny,” I said.
“I’m not kidding,” he said. “We put mochi in our family shrines at the beginning of every year. Then our ancestors come several weeks later to enjoy our celebration.”
“And in Tochigi,” his mother added, “we mix tochi nuts into our mochi.”
“It’s tochi-mochi,” Mr. C sang out with a cheery grin.
I smiled through the pain.
Some of the children around the fire had dozed off, and several of the parents began talking about what they hoped to see later when they went to sleep.
“Remember,” said a man with a white cloth wrapped around his head like a warrior and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, “if you dream of a snake, it’s bad luck. A fish without scales is worse. But the best dream of all,” he said, now turning to address me, “is to catch sight of Mount Fuji.”
“Sooo, desu neee,” they all chanted, closing their eyes as if trying to call the mountain’s face into sight.
“Do you know Mount Fuji?” the man asked me.
“I sure do,” I told him.
“Well, if you see Mount Fuji in your first dream of the year, then you enjoy the luck of the goddess of the Sun for the entire year. But don’t tell anyone what you see. We Japanese don’t tell our dreams.”
It was only fitting, I thought, that the goddess Amaterasu should play a leading role in Japanese New Year’s lore. The two characters in the name Japan—“Nippon”—literally mean “origin of the sun,” and this image is at the heart of the country’s interdenominational culture. Although Amaterasu was originally a Shinto goddess, Buddhism responded to her popularity by creating a solar god of its own, Dainichi-nyorai. Over time, these two deities, like their religions themselves, came to be seen as one. Such cross-pollination has led to a set of beliefs—partly inspirational, partly superstitious—that guide the lives of most people.
“Japan is a small country,” Mr. C had said to me many times. “Japan is one race,” the old man said when explaining the custom of dreaming. “This is the Japanese way,” Takuya said about the custom of eating mochi on New Year’s Eve. According to this gospel, Japan—as a land—is in some ways charmed, in some ways cursed, basically different from others, and ultimately one unto itself. One commentator has called this code “Nipponism.” To me, it is simply “Made in Japan.”
“The sun! The sun!” someone shouted from the other side of the clearing, and we all rushed to the edge of the hill. As the first ray lipped over the rim of a cloud, the singing and hurrying stopped, and people stood still on the mountaintop to pray.
There was a moment of adoring silence, and then someone behind me shouted, “Banzai!”
And everyone answered, “Banzai!”
The solitary search for the first dream gave way to the ensemble joy in the first sunrise as cups were raised to the reigning Sun. As I looked out over the sky at this little city tucked away in the mountains of rural Japan, someone tapped me on the shoulder and started to speak in English.
“Excuse me,” said the man with the white headband who had spoken earlier of the dreams. “Are you American boy?”
“Yes,” I said, “I come from Georgia.”
“Me,” he said, tapping his finger on his nose like a schoolboy bursting with pride, “made in Sano.” He smiled, tipped his cup to mine, and together we turned to face the sky: Ray of mirth and rapture blended, Goddess to thy shrine we come.
12
PAUL BUNYAN AND THE PEACH BOY: THE JAPANESE COLOR WHEEL
In the summer of 1945 Japan had two visitors. They came from the United States of America. One of them was “Little Boy” and the other was “Fat Man.” Who were they? I think it is very difficult for you to answer this question.
—Two Visitors, ninth-grade English textbook
THE MORNING BELL sounded at 8:10 A.M. The teachers rose together from their desks, bowed in unison, and issued a brief salutation: “Onegaishimasu. Please do me the favor of working hard today.”
After nearly six months of making this greeting every morning, I had grown so accustomed to this ritual that I, too, craved the order—the short, unimposing gesture that united the teachers to one another, reconfirmed their dedication, and established a tone of courtesy to begin the day. The teachers, like the students, renewed their pledge every day.
Sano was somber in the new year, like an Old West town boarded up before a fight. The first snow of the season had long since fallen and been melted away by the sun. The tiny yellow lights that trimmed the main street before the shgatsu holiday had been taken down and stored away. At the train station, the manager had constructed a light blue wooden screen around the front door to shelter passengers from the wind as they warmed themselves in front of vending machines that sold hot Georgia Coffee in a can. Fewer people lingered in the streets in the morning, except for several older men who huddled around the red steam pipe of the sweet potato cart parked at the mouth of the nightclub alley. In the crowded cemetery behind my apartment house, the stone mantles overflowed with small pyramids of mandarin oranges and mochi rice balls awaiting the return of ancestral spirits on the fifteenth of the month.
In school, students ran around less between classes, and teachers stayed late almost every day, answering calls from anxious parents who were nervous about the upcoming entrance exams. In Sano, January was a time for crucial studies. In the seventh grade, the time had come for students to learn about the United States.
On the way to class on the second Tuesday of the year, Denver asked if I would give his students a warm-up speech about America. After months of trying to replace fear in the hearts of students with a spirit of adventure, I had mastered this sort of pep talk. Once in front of the class, I drew a map of the United States on the blackboard and began to drill students with the wonders of American Pop Geography: The United States of America is twenty-five times the size of Japan. New York is the largest city in America. Chicago has the tallest building in the world. The president lives in Washington, and Madonna lives in L.A. Chicken is fried in Kentucky, but coffee is not grown in Georgia.
After my speech, we moved on to a review of time, drilling some phrases the students had learned before their New Year’s break: “I get up at…” “I eat lunch at…” “I go to bed at…”
Finally we advanced to the text. All three English teachers at Sano Junior High used textbooks from a series written by a Japanese professor of English in Tokyo and approved by the National Ministry of Education. The last chapter of the seventh-grade book introduced America. “The United States of America is a large country between two oceans. There are fifty states in this country. There are many races. Three of them are American Indians, Blacks and Whites. They all speak English.”
Denver knew that race was a confusing subject for these students, so he asked me to deliver a short address on the subject. “Use easy English,” he warned.
I began with a subject close to home. “In Japanese junior high schools,” I said, “there are only Japanese people. Japanese, Japanese, Japanese.” I wandered out into the class and plopped my hand on each student’s head as if playing a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. “Everybody comes from the same country.” Back in the front of the classroom, I faced a sea of blank looks.
“Bruce-san,” Denver whispered in my ear, “the students don’t understand that word.”
“What word?”
“Same.”
“Oh.”
I started moving about the class again. “Same, same, same,” I sang. “Desk, desk, desk: the same. Hair, hair, hair: the same. Jacket, jacket, jacket: the same.”
Slowly recognitio
n began to dawn on the students’ faces, and finally a boy called out, “Onaji.”
Everyone smiled. The class had learned a new word.
“In Japanese junior high schools,” I continued, “all the students come from the same country. But in American junior high schools, they come from different countries. We have European people, Indian people, even Japanese people. These people come from different races.” As I arrived back at the front of the room, Denver watched with an amused look on his face. “sensei and I are different races. His hair is black; my hair is brown. He is short; I am tall.” The students giggled at this observation. “But,” I added with great emphasis, “we are both people.”
For a moment I struggled to think of a way to explain the idea of human equality using the limited one-hundred-word vocabulary of first-year students of English. It came to me in a flash.
He gets up at seven, and I get up at seven. He eats lunch at twelve; I eat lunch at twelve. He goes to bed at eleven; I go to bed at eleven. We are different races, but we live the same.”
Anxious to see how the students comprehended this speech, Denver opened the floor to questions. He made a rare exception to accept them in Japanese.
A young girl rose to her feet. “I hear there is racial discrimination in South Africa,” she said. “Is this a problem in America?”
I was stunned. After all, she was only a junior high school student…
“Yes,” I said, “we have this problem in America, but it is not as bad in the USA as it is in South Africa.” Again looking for a way to illustrate this problem, I caught sight of the blackboard.
“When my father was a junior high school student in Georgia, there were only white people in his class.” I drew two school-houses on top of Georgia: one I colored white; the other I left dark. “But when I was a junior high school student, there were many kinds of people in my class. Black people, white people, Hispanic people, even Japanese people.” I drew two arrows and joined the schools as one. “Now we study together.”
