by Bruce Feiler
“Hush now,” his mother said, then turning toward me she added, “He’s been very negative lately. I can’t understand why.”
“I think we had better be leaving,” he said.
As we made our way down the hill, Cho began talking. “You know what they’re going to do this summer? They are going to build a large replica of the Kuzu Genjin made entirely of fireworks. I can’t believe it. It’s going to be ridiculous.”
He was silent for a second, then started to speak again.
“I want you to know that this isn’t just Kuzu’s problem, it’s Tochigi’s problem as well. Many people say that rural prefectures like this one will become more powerful in the future. The Age of Tochigi’ will come in ten years, these people say. I’m afraid I don’t agree.”
For the first time in the many months that I had known him, Cho appeared to be getting angry.
“We have fast trains and fast highways in Tochigi, but we don’t have any money. We especially don’t have the spirit. Recently the head of a big company in Utsunomiya said that Tochigi was a backward place. The people are too easily satisfied,’ he said, ‘and until Tochigi gets a university that will produce workers with the right spirit, companies will not succeed.’ I agree. Everyone with any sense is moving to Tokyo and taking our future with them…
“Look at Hara-kun,” he said. “He was from the countryside and he moved to Tokyo. Now he has a wonderful job, a high salary, even a beautiful fiancée. In Tochigi we have nothing. Some men on farms have to import girls from the Philippines, just to find someone to marry. It’s embarrassing.”
“But Hara complains that Tokyo is too crowded,” I said. “He can’t buy a house because they’re too expensive, and he can’t even afford to look at a piece of land within two hours of his job. His salary does no good because everything costs too much. He wants to move away.”
“Well, he shouldn’t come here,” Cho said, stopping at the door to his car and fumbling with the key. He finally managed to unlock his door, then tossed his keys to me. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I like Tochigi. I just don’t like Tochigi people.” A sly grin flickered on his face. “When I’m governor, I think I’ll get a new population.”
Tochigi falls just outside the golden crescent of prosperity that stretches south from Tokyo, through the regional centers of Nagoya and Osaka, to the southwestern port city of Kobe. This stretch of land, once known as the Tokaido Road, remains the most densely populated and developed region in the entire country, similar to the Boston-Washington corridor in the United States. As this zone has sucked in more and more investment over the last thirty years, many rural areas have stagnated because of their inability to satisfy the upwardly mobile ambitions of new generations.
Even schoolchildren know that life in the tokai, or big city, is different from their routine in the inaka, or countryside. Several junior high school girls in a nearby town approached my friend Jane one day while she was teaching at their school.
“Miss Jane,” they asked, “have you ever kissed a boy?”
“Yes, I have,” she replied, “have you?”
The girls blushed and covered their mouths in shock.
“Of course not,” one squealed.
“I don’t even have a boyfriend,” said another.
“I’m only going to kiss the boy that I decide to marry,” a third girl insisted.
“But I’ll tell you a secret,” one of the girls whispered in a conspiratorial tone, drawing the others in tight. “In Tokyo, they start much earlier. Some even kiss at thirteen.”
For Cho and others like him, the differences between the capital and the countryside are more momentous than the age at which teenagers have their first kiss. To them, Tokyo drains away valuable resources and thus quality of life from the rest of the country. While Americans over ten thousand miles away complain that Japanese companies are overinvesting in the United States, residents of Tochigi, less than one hundred miles from downtown Tokyo, protest that they are not feeling the benefits of Japanese investment at home. The tension between the invigorated cities and the enervated hinterlands, though fresh in the minds of people in Kuzu, Sano, and other rural communities, is one of the least told stories of modern Japan. Tochigi may never achieve the level of development that surrounds greater Tokyo, and may even be better off because of it. Yet for over a century this area and others like it have struggled to move forward while resisting the plight of wholesale exploitation.
This struggle is still celebrated today by honoring the most famous defender of rural lands in all of Japan: Tanaka Shozo, a prominent nineteenth-century parliamentarian from Sano, who led the nation’s first grassroots environmental movement against a large mining company for polluting the rivers of Tochigi. After mass demonstrations and national legislation failed to quell the pollution, Tanaka made a special trip to Tokyo in 1901 to appeal directly to the emperor. This effort also failed, and Tanaka was forced to give up his fight.
Today, Tanaka Shozo is to Sano what the Genjin is to Kuzu. Just as Kuzu tries to coax tourists with the sex appeal of the “Oldest Man in Japan,” so Sano tries to do the same with statues and a new museum to honor the fearless Tanaka and his environmental dream. But as Cho suggested, tourists alone cannot revitalize these areas, and straw heroes cannot keep young people at home. Many in Tochigi have come to realize that they will not flourish again until they are able to reverse the flow of people—and profits—that continue to trickle away, leaving behind a fertile land that has long since blossomed and begun to fade away.
20
BEATLEMANIA AND ALL THAT JAZZ: A TALE OF TWO STUDENTS
If you would form a tree, do so while it is young.
—A Japanese proverb
“DO YOU LIKE THE BEATLES?”
I was startled when Takuya, Mr. C’s younger son, asked me this question during my first visit to his home. We were eating dinner on a Tuesday night in September, and Takuya was eager to show off his knowledge of Western pop culture.
“…I love them,” he said through a mouthful of rice, not waiting for me to reply. “Sergeant Pepper. Yoko Ono. John Lennon. Pete Best.”
“Pete Best?”
“Yes, he was the first drummer for the Beatles, before Ringo Starr. I have an album with his songs on it. Do you want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
“But, Takuya,” his mother interrupted, “look at the time.”
“I know, I know,” he said, setting his bowl on the table and gulping down the last of his milk. “I’m afraid I can’t play it for you right now. I am late for my juku class. Maybe I’ll have time later.”
He didn’t have time that night, and it wasn’t until three months later that he finally got around to playing his bootleg album of the former Beatle and showing me Pete Best’s picture in the latest edition of Beatles Monthly Japan. Takuya was a Fab Four fanatic. He owned two dozen albums, belonged to three fan clubs, and had posters of John, Paul, George, and Ringo on all four walls of his room. But during the many months that I visited his home, I rarely saw Takuya listening to one of his albums or reading one of his Beatles comic books. He simply didn’t have time.
Takuya began his day at 7:15 every morning when his Mickey Mouse alarm clock blared from its perch on a speaker above his futon. Fifteen minutes later he would emerge from his room dressed in a clean shirt and shorts from his school uniform, rub his eyes for ten minutes over a breakfast of steamed rice, soy sauce, and raw egg, then hop on his bike for the twenty-minute ride to school, arriving just before the 8:10 bell. For the next six and a half hours, with only a brief break for lunch, he would sit in the second row of his ninth-grade class and listen steadfastly to a series of teachers expounding on everything from calculus to calligraphy, syntax to syzygy, until the clock rolled around to 2:30 and he took his turn cleaning the classroom floor with a rag, stood by his chair for a farewell bow, then dashed downstairs by 3:00 for the start of soccer practice. At 6:30, finally arriving back home, he would rush through
the house shedding books and dirty clothes, shovel down some rice with soup and salad, then head out again at 7:00 for an evening of juku review. After two more hours of math proofs and pop tests, he would reappear at home after 10:00, dip into the bath when his father and brother were done, then retreat to his room to do school homework and, if he could manage to stay awake, indulge in a spin of his favorite CD.
One Tuesday afternoon in early May I visited Mr. C’s house after school and found Takuya lying prone on the living room floor. He was not seriously ill, his mother explained, only exhausted. In an effort to lighten the mood, I decided to perform the nurse’s routine I had learned in the hospital. I pushed a thermometer under his arm and asked him various prying questions: how much sleep was he getting (six and a half hours a night), how much homework was he doing (five hours a night), how much television was he watching (an hour a week). When I had finished my examination, I presented him with a small get-well gift of a thousand yen (about eight dollars) and suggested that he take a vacation. He got up off the floor and went instead to study for a social studies exam.
About a week after this episode, I received an envelope in the mail from Takuya. In it he had placed a snapshot of me ministering to his health, with a brief thank-you note attached. “I am feeling much better,” he wrote in English. “I am no longer sick. But I am a little unhappy, because I am a Japanese student preparing for an entrance exam.”
Takuya’s single-minded commitment to school is not unique in Japan, where adolescence is less a time for children to break away from their parents, and more a time for them to accept the burdens that their families—and their schools—place on them. Compared with their counterparts in the West, Japanese teenagers mature slowly. Teachers, for example, call their students kodomo, or “children,” until they graduate and get their first job, at which point they become shakai-jin, “members of society.” Parents, meanwhile, allow their children little free time, and push their teenagers to keep their eyes trained on upcoming entrance exams.
The next time I visited the Cherry Blossom home, I decided to find out more about Takuya’s private life beyond the public school. I brought a list of questions which I was planning to give to all my students, and at 10:30 one Monday night in mid-May, I sat down with Takuya on the floor of his room and plunged into my survey. Since I already knew about his family life, I skipped the part about his home and jumped to the section on love.
“Which do you prefer, an arranged marriage or a love marriage?” I asked, adopting my best nurse’s tone.
“Love marriage,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because I want to know the person I marry.”
I noted his answer on my clipboard, then proceeded down the list. “Have you ever had a girlfriend?”
He thought for a moment, then answered, “No.”
“Have you ever held hands with a girl?”
He thought some more, then repeated, “No.”
“Have you ever kissed a girl?”
“Of course not,” he said without hesitation. “I live in Tochigi.”
Takuya’s answers proved typical: only fifteen percent of my students, aged twelve to fifteen, said that they had ever had a boyfriend or girlfriend. Less than five percent said they had ever held hands with a sweetheart, and only two out of a hundred said they had ever kissed, or been kissed by, a person of the opposite sex. In the United States one third of teenagers have lost their virginity by the time they turn fifteen.
To be sure, this lack of experience among Japanese is not the result of a lack of interest. Boys and girls love to talk about each other; their music and magazines are full of tales of puppy love and teen romansu. It is also not the result of a lack of information. Sex education begins early in Japanese schools, and sixty percent of high school students in one poll said that it is acceptable for teenagers to engage in sex as long as they use contraceptives. For Takuya, however, this day was far away.
“Japanese boys are in love with girls, just like American boys,” he said when I asked him why he had never kissed a girl. “But we can only become good friends because everyone else will talk. Frankly, I’m sorry about that.”
After sex, we turned to drugs. “Have you ever smoked a cigarette?”
“No.”
“Have you ever drunk a beer?”
“No.”
“How about sake?”
“Yuk.”
“Have you ever sampled drugs?”
“Drugs?” he said.
“You know, marijuana or cocaine.”
“Oh no, never. Some friends of mine once told me they smelled paint thinner in a bag, but I don’t think that counts.”
“Have you ever broken the law?” I asked.
Here Takuya paused to think. He looked over at his stereo system stacked with his collection of Beatles music, then looked back at me. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve broken the law.”
“How?” I asked.
“I dubbed a cassette for a friend.”
“Is that all?”
“No.” He glanced at the floor, twisting his face in apprehension. “I once was really late for school and I ran a red light on my bike.”
He wrung his hands in shame at the thought of this major transgression, and I thought to myself: Like father, like son.
With no sex and no drugs, little television and few movies, Takuya’s main source of escape was rock-and-roll. But the message of defying authority, so important to the success of rock music in the West, has never caught on in Japan. The musical tastes of my students ranged from the cute to the cloying, from dainty female singers with bows in their hair to clean-shaven boys with skates on their feet. Even popular Western artists, like Madonna and the Beatles, are admired more for their glamorous personalities than for the darker messages their lyrics may contain. I once visited the street in Tokyo where punk teenagers gather on Sunday mornings to “hang out” and “express themselves.” These punks sported signature black leather pants, greased hair, and metal-studded shoes, but they didn’t seem to flaunt the bitter, antiestablishment slogans of their counterparts in London or New York. Instead, they had formed small troupes, dressed in matching costumes, and were dancing in synchronized routines for assembled out-of-town tourists. Punk had lost its political philosophy and become nothing more than a tame side show to the otherwise bland sounds of Japanese conformity.
Takuya knew this conformity well. After asking him what he would do with a twenty-fifth hour in the day (sleep) and what he would buy with one hundred million yen or $650,000 (a new stereo), I posed the final question in my survey.
“What is your goal in life?”
I expected him to pause and consider his answer. I thought he would think through all the messages he had learned in his life—the hopes of his parents, the advice of his teachers, the signs that hung on the walls of school like the Ten Commandments of youth. In fifteen years, he had learned to be hard on himself and soft on others; to defer to his elders and assist his juniors; to go on green and stop on red.
But Takuya didn’t pause at all. As soon as he heard my question, he looked up at me and said, “My goal is to go to high school.”
The voice of prudence: a rising son.
I knew a girl in Sano who didn’t like the Beatles. She hated Madonna as well. Her name was Aya, and she preferred jazz. Aya’s dream was to pursue her love of music and sing solo someday in a Tokyo nightclub. Aya also did well in school—especially in math and English—and her teachers were urging her to choose a more conventional career path. “I really love music,” she told me with a sigh, “but my teachers say I should do something more secure, like teaching or nursing.”
Almost every day for several weeks in the spring, Aya came by my desk at school with new questions that she had thought about the previous night. “What is the life worth living?” she asked. “Is death final for us?” She seemed eager to make a decision.
In some ways Aya was a traditional, “girllike” girl. Her fath
er was a tailor, her mother a housewife. She too wanted to get married, have children, and start a home. Aya prided herself on her formality. “You don’t know how to pour a cup of tea,” she told me bluntly one afternoon. “I will teach you.” And she did, instructing me how to grip the teapot with my thumb and middle fingers, freeing my index finger to hold the top in place.
“I bet you like to cook,” I said when we had finished.
“I cook very delicious,” she said. “My mother is a good cook, and she taught me.”
Yet Aya knew she would not be happy pouring tea all day in her father’s shop or tending patients in the Welfare Hospital. “I want to have children,” she said, “but is that enough? I want to know what makes people happy.”
Over the next several weeks Aya came to the preliminary conclusion that there were two kinds of happiness in the world: “universal happiness,” in which people fit in with a larger plan, and “detail happiness,” in which they follow a personal plan. The question she faced was how to balance these conflicting goals. “I want to have a husband,” she said, “but I am not very beautiful. Maybe I will not make a good wife.
“I want to sing on television,” she countered, “but maybe I am being too selfish.
“My parents tell me to ask questions, but my teachers tell me I should just study for the tests.”
Instead of encouraging the Ayas of Japan to go in search of their dreams, Japanese teachers tend to put students—especially girls—in their place, and teach them to keep their expectations in check. As a result, most children know by the end of junior high school what direction their lives will take. My students were surprisingly unromantic about their future plans. When I asked them what they wanted to be in the future, several students wrote down truly “dream jobs” like professional soccer player or film director, but most made prosaic choices like bank teller, bus driver, or beautician. For all the talk in schools about merit and equal opportunity, most Japanese students have an air of fait accompli about them. Even though Japan has increased its standard of living dramatically over the last forty years, less than half of my students said they expected to earn more money than their fathers. Clearly these children were not being taught to reach for great challenges; instead, they are taught to get ahead by going along. Like miniature bonsai trees, Japanese children are pruned while they are young so that when they ripen later in life, they do so in harmony with the world around them.
