Confessions of a Japanese Temple Gardener: (P.S – Who's from London, England)

by Ben Stevens

  She’ll – perhaps – end up going somewhere with this guy, and it just won’t be good…

  For her, for Japanese-gaijin relations – for anything…

  Then, suddenly, I hear Paul quietly say, ‘Kare wa… chotto…’

  Eh? How does he know how to say that?

  Or rather – with his very limited Japanese – does Paul get the real implication of this otherwise short and simple sentence…?

  Yes, I think he does. Perfectly. Good one, Paul – I would never have thought to say that…

  Because what Paul’s just said translates literally into English as ‘He is a little…’

  Of course, the obvious response to this apparently unfinished declaration would be: ‘He’s a little… what?’

  Not so in Japanese. Because it’s one of those delightfully ‘vague’, ambiguous sentences which the listener has to realize is in fact loaded with meaning.

  It’s one of the reasons why the Japanese can communicate with each other almost by telepathy, with absolutely minimal words being spoken.

  Take, for example, the following ‘conversation’:

  Person A: ‘Uh?’

  Person B: ‘Uh.’

  “ A: ‘Honto?’

  “ B: ‘Uh.’

  (Translation:

  Person A: ‘Hey, how about dinner tomorrow evening, at that new restaurant that’s just opened up? You know – the Italian one, near the station?’

  Person B: ‘Yeah, that sounds great. I tell you what, though – it’s on me. I’ve not got you anything for your birthday yet, after all.’

  “ A: ‘Are you serious? I mean, that’s really kind of you, but it looks expensive, you know? Why don’t we just go Dutch?’

  “ B: ‘No, no – my treat. I insist. I’ll see you there at about eight tomorrow evening; I’ll try to get us a table by the window. Oh, by the way – that blue shirt you’re wearing really suits you.’)

  So, what Paul has just said could have any number of possible meanings. These might range from ‘Todd gets a little boisterous after he’s had a few drinks, but he’s basically harmless’ right through to ‘Go back home with that sicko, and no one will ever see you again.’

  Evidently, Yukiko decides that Paul has given her some sort of warning. Perhaps she was already beginning to suspect that Todd is, in fact, not the nicest of men.

  In any case, she suddenly says to me (in Japanese): ‘Can you please tell him I had to go and meet a friend?’

  And then she’s gone.

  Another couple of minutes pass before Todd exits the toilet. My guess is he had a bit of trouble locating his penis. (Maybe he thought it was dangling from his forehead.) Or has perhaps just emptied his brains.

  ‘Wha – ’ he gasps, noticing that his intended is no longer in the vicinity. All that remains is her half-drunk glass of beer on the bar.

  ‘Where’d she go?’ demands Todd, giving Paul and me a fierce look.

  As Paul gave the information which led to Yukiko giving young Toddy the slip, I guess it falls on me to answer Todd’s angry question now.

  ‘She said she had to meet a friend,’ I reply – which is literally true, anyway.

  Todd quickly dives out of the bar, and looks up and down the street. But Yukiko is apparently nowhere to be seen.

  Todd comes back in again, but says little. Just fiddles with his phone – trying to contact his alleged harem, perchance – while shooting me the occasional, indignant glance. I think that he somehow blames me (another Japanese speaker) for Yukiko’s disappearance.

  Then, finishing his beer, he mutters a farewell to Paul before exiting back out into the sweltering August evening.

  Paul and I resume our earlier chit-chat. Nothing’s said about what just happened, and nothing will be said. But I know Paul feels the same way I do about it – and it’s a feeling of quiet satisfaction.

  ‘We’ (well, strictly speaking just Paul) just saved a nice, still slightly naive young woman from a genuine, Grade-A asshole.

  I think that qualifies as a ‘good deed’.

  秋

  Pavlov’s Koi

  One of my jobs each morning is to feed the temple koi carp. (Actually, in Japanese, koi is ‘carp’.)

  The koi pond is at the back of the temple, and can be got to via the ochashitsu or ‘tea-room’. This is where my mother-in-law, ‘Okaasan’, sometimes performs Japan’s legendary tea ceremony, but which for most of the year remains just an empty room with tatami mats and bamboo walls and sliding wooden-shutters for windows and doors.

  The door-shutters open directly onto the pond, with the small wooden ledge outside barely a foot above the water.

  It’s just under this ledge that the orange, red, gold, yellow, white and black (and sometimes all these colors together) koi gather: a Pavlovian response to the sound of the shutters being opened. They know that this means chow-time.

  They thrash and slide over one another in order to get at the fishy-smelling, tiny green balls I scatter into the pond. Once every weekday in the summer – when the koi move a lot – and every two to three days in the winter, when the koi prefer to lie morosely at the bottom of the large pond, and not really do very much at all.

  They’re such a beautiful sight to observe, especially on a summer’s morning when the sun is glinting off the water. Usually I relish the scene for a few moments, then close the shutters behind me and commence sweeping leaves outside the front of the temple.

  Occasionally, I open the shutters only to discover that one fish has died, and so is now floating belly up in the water.

  This doesn’t happen too often – koi are hardy buggers who (according to my boss, Unki-san­) can live some thirty or forty years. Occasionally, even fifty. The ancient Chinese believed that any koi which successfully swam all the way upstream eventually reached heaven, where they were transformed into dragons.

  The Japanese belief in the general ‘toughness’ of koi is best reflected in the banners that are flown on Kodomonohi (‘Children’s Day), on May 5. These banners are koi-shaped, and are intended to instill in children such character traits as courage and perseverance.

  …Anyway, I was talking about when one of these great and noble koi finally goes to that great fish heaven in the sky. So, it doesn’t happen too often… But when it does, the deceased fish is quickly retrieved from the water, wrapped in newspaper and also several thick plastic bags, and deposited with all due ceremony in with the temple garbage.

  This is fine in the winter, when it is nice and cold… But in the height of summer – especially if the fish has died over the weekend, when the koi are not usually fed or even seen – retrieving the bloated body from the water, and then trying to discreetly get rid of it, is one of the most unpleasant jobs there is.

  (Periodically, ‘baby’ koi also appear in the pond – something that means the total number of fish always stays roughly the same.)

  As I say, the koi are not usually fed over the weekend. But on this Sunday morning, something compels me to check on my charges.

  Good job I do, really: I slide open the wooden shutters to discover that the twenty-odd koi are thrashing about in just a few inches of muddy water.

  For some reason, the pump that usually feeds the deep, rock-lined pond nice, fresh mountain water has been working in reverse – it’s sucked almost all the water out of the pond.

  Emergency. The koi are basically a symbol of this temple; several of them have been swimming in this pond for as long as my brother-in-law and his late father before him have served as priests.

  I use a long stick to ‘herd’ the koi into the deepest part of the pond (about five foot), which retains the most water, and then stick in a hose which I turn on full.

  Unki-san is summoned from home. He arrives about half an hour later. He dismantles the pump, smokes two cigarettes, scratches his head. A technician is called out. He doesn’t smoke, but does scratch his head as he also stares at the innards of the pump. It’s the most complicated type he’s ever seen,
he informs us.

  Finally – several calls to head-office having been made – he works out what’s wrong, informs my boss, makes the necessary adjustments, puts all the bits back together and turns it back on.

  Reassuringly, water again starts to flow from the two pipes.

  Word has already got around that it was me who ‘saved’ the koi. Purely by chance, of course, but still I have been sincerely thanked (in fact almost ‘formally thanked’, with accompanying bowing) by several people including my brother-in-law, Okaasan, and two of the temple monks.

  Now my boss takes me to one side.

  His face is shaking slightly, I think from emotion. He is extremely fond of the koi: he sometimes talks to them, when, with a big net, he fishes out the leaves and twigs that have fallen into the pond from the overhanging trees.

  ‘Ben, sometimes you make a mistake,’ he tells me. ‘OK, no big deal, next time you’ll do it right. But with living things – no mistake! Do you understand?’

  ‘Y-yes,’ I stammer slightly.

  I don’t understand. Am I somehow being blamed here for the pond’s pump having gone haywire?

  ‘If… this… were ever to happen… if all the koi were to… die… and it was somehow your fault, then no use just saying “Sorry”. No use at all – you should just go, go away. Understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I understand.’

  Unki-san nods and walks away.

  And I do now understand – understand that I’m not being blamed at all.

  But still; he’s using what happened today as a way of letting me know that there’s not the slightest room for error, when it comes to dealing with living things at the temple.

  Cats, dogs, koi and the like.

  We nearly had a major disaster occur here: he’s grateful to me for having (inadvertently) averted it, I know that, but still he wants me to learn – to realize – something from what’s taken place, as well.

  And I do.

  The Typhoon Cometh… and Food Porn

  …It’s fast blowing in from Okinawa. Already, the tops of the hundreds of trees in the cemetery are starting to sway. Time to tie open the two massive doors of the san-mon (temple gate), so that the wind just blows straight through and exhausts itself against the hundred stone stairs that lead up to the temple.

  The windows in the temple kitchen are also secured. They are very old, and don’t close properly, so rope is tied around the rusting handles and then looped around a long piece of timber, which is in turn ‘braced’ against the wall on either side of both windows.

  It’s evening and dark by the time the typhoon properly strikes. I’m sat with my wife and members of her family (mother-in-law and grandmother) in the temple’s private ‘living area’. Having just had dinner, we are now watching television. My two daughters are asleep in the room just next door.

  The windows of the kitchen-living-room rattle and bang with the wind. There seems to be a real threat that at any second they will just shatter into pieces. My wife’s grandmother suggests in a musing tone that maybe we should all seek shelter in the temple basement. It’s hard to tell if she’s being serious or not. I doubt it.

  My wife’s grandmother – ‘Obaachan’ – was working in an underground factory when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The fact that she was underground undoubtedly saved her life.

  She and the other workers surfaced from the factory some time later to witness a scene from hell. One of the first things she saw, she once told me, were scorched and blackened bodies floating down a river. Rain was falling – a rain black and sooty with radioactive dust. There was a massive shortage of umbrellas; those available were selling for many times the usual price…

  So Obaachan is not easily rattled. She is one of those people who – to translate the common Japanese saying – ‘has hair on her heart’. In other words, she’s tough. Hence, I don’t think she’s being altogether serious when she says we should go and hide out in the temple basement.

  Although, I was down there just the other day. One of the things about working at a 16th century temple is just how much maintenance and repair the place continually requires. The floors often ‘sag’ in places, requiring a trip into the cellar where screws and timber are used to brace the problem area.

  You have to walk in a crouched squat in the basement. There are old notices and stone statues down there – even the remains of a boat. In places this basement is nothing so much as a time-capsule, containing objects untouched since they were put down here well over a hundred years ago…

  The windows in the kitchen continue to rattle and bang. This results in the volume of the television being turned up. I repress a sigh.

  Because it’s one of those awful, weepy dramas that commonly involve lengthy scenes of a young, good-looking male/female actor lying in a hospital bed as they slowly expire of some mysterious ailment (which still manages to leave their elaborate hairstyle somehow unaffected), all the while accompanied by a screeching violin soundtrack.

  As always in such dramas, everything is in complete emotional overload. People shout and cry – a lot. In fact, basically all the time. Every other second, there’s a close-up of a tear-stained face.

  I sometimes wonder if, by watching this type of program, the Japanese (culturally programmed from a young age to always keep a calm and stoic face in public) can somehow release their emotions by ‘proxy’, as it were.

  Just the other day, I saw a scene of one program that (I swear) basically went like this:

  (Beautiful young woman in a luxurious apartment picks up her phone and dials a number with a somewhat ‘intense’ expression…)

  (Woman, in frantic voice): ‘Hello? Hello? I want to place an order for a pizza…’

  (Calm, ultra-polite male voice on the other end of the line): ‘I’m extremely sorry, honorable customer, but due to the high volume of orders, we are currently experiencing an approximate thirty-minute delay on all deliveries…’

  (Beautiful young woman drops phone, and hugs cushion to her chest as she collapses sobbing on the floor. Cue yet more ‘dramatic’ music.)

  See what I mean?

  …But if there’s one thing that really puts me off television, it’s the ‘food porn’. There are exceptionally pointless and irritating entities known as tarento (literally ‘talent’ – a misleading title if ever there was one) who are paid vast sums of cash to appear on TV and pull orgasmic expressions as they put some food in their mouths.

  They will then shout ‘Oishi!’ (‘Tasty!’) very loudly, and maybe even dance a curious little ‘jig’, as though this best conveys just how good the food really does taste.

  Alternatively, such tarento might be paid just to sit on a panel and watch someone else eat some food. They will then pull longing expressions, and shout ‘Oishi-so!’ (‘Looks tasty!’) and ‘Tabetai!’ (‘I wanna eat it!’), in a manner that suggests their brains stopped developing at around five years of age.

  And that’s about it, basically. I mean, that’s all they do.

  There is one rather ‘large’ gentleman who – so far as I can tell – is famous chiefly for his ability to wear a ludicrous, purple-spotted baby-style ‘jumper’ costume, all the while licking his lips and making groaning noises (I don’t believe I’ve ever heard him actually speak – possibly he just can’t) as he watches someone else eating something.

  And the drinks… Always a commercial for beer, canned coffee or something of the sort involves a close up of a person’s throat as they take a swig, accompanied by a horribly exaggerated ‘gulping’ sound.

  Calm me sensitive, but I’ve always believed that it’s best not to be a noisy eater – or in this case, drinker.

  And the almost laughably formulaic advertising for any brand of canned coffee… A worn-out salaryman takes a sip from a can containing an overly-sugared, caffeine-laden beverage, and is instantly transformed into a slickly-suited alpha-male with immaculately coiffed hair, waving his clenched fist aloft (and with several attrac
tive young women giving him admiring glances) as he declares ‘Fight-o!’

  (‘Fight’ – commonly used by the Japanese to mean something like ‘I’m going to give whatever it is that I intend to do maximum effort!’ Slightly disconcerting for any newbie gaijin to hear, when they have it shouted in their face for the first time…)

  The salaryman – that dependable, ever-working soldier-ant of the Japanese economy…

  As you may have already deduced from my ranting, I don’t really ‘do’ Japanese television. And this evening, as the hurricane howls and moans outside, sickly-weepy dramas and ‘food porn’ adverts for some reason abound.

  So when the noise of the storm finally wakes up my baby daughter in the room next door, I instantly go to attend to her. Obaachan compliments me on being a ‘dutiful father’.

  Little does she know that between a crying baby and Japanese TV, give me the crying baby anytime…

  Pig Sick

  I’m walking past the cherry blossom tree that grows just outside the temple office, and which flowers so beautifully when it is briefly in season, when I’m suddenly aware that it seems to be emitting a rather unpleasant smell.

  When Unki-san arrives for work just before ten a.m. – he works from ten until six o’clock, whereas I work from eight-thirty to four-thirty – I alert him to this fact.

  He takes one sniff, and grimly says the same word that occurred to me –

  ‘Drains.’

  (Incidentally, if you’re eating while reading this, or just have something of a delicate stomach, then you may want to stop now. Just sayin’…)

  We lift the manhole cover that’s located close to the cherry blossom tree, and…

  Oh, my life. It’s wide inside, and almost six feet down to the actual drain run – and it’s full virtually to the brim with…

  ‘Oh, shit,’ I sigh. This is one sight I just did not want to see, ever.

  We lift more manhole covers, situated at various points along the temple car-park. It’s the same story in every single one.