Wrong About Japan

by Peter Carey

  It had been a grey overcast day in the sword-smith’s suburb. Now my inability to even break the skin of this culture became somehow entangled with this melancholy light and also my feelings about my son, who was slouching slowly towards the train station with his head bowed over the cell phone. Naturally it did not occur to me that he was already adapting to a certain Japanese language; that is, he could do thumb-talk in a way that would forever elude his clumsy father.

  “Look around you,” I said irritably. “See where you are. You’re not on Bleecker Street now.”

  “I am looking,” he said.

  At the screen, he meant.

  “Takashi wants to know,” he said, “can we go to Sega World?” He held up the iridescent orange instrument. Cut into its seething sci-fi screen was a text message. “He says they have really cool games there.”

  “We didn’t fly for eighteen hours to go to a video arcade.”

  “Dad, you forget. Sega World is at Akihabara.”

  “Akihabara?”

  “Electric Town—remember? You read about it. You wanted us to go there. It’s in Little Adventures in Tokyo.”

  He was right. According to Rick Kennedy the author of this handy guidebook: “The place spills over with raw commercial energy and off-the-rails electronic wizardry. It is gaudy and jarring, exhausting and exhilarating. It is the world’s most high-powered bazaar, with everything always on sale, from voltmeters and logic analyzers to miniature washing machines for miniature apartments … [from] tea-serving robots to solar-powered ice cream makers and pogo sticks with battery-operated digital readout of time-hopped.”

  “It was your idea,” my son said indignantly. “You said it was filled with cool stuff, Dad. We could buy a Japanese toilet and take it home for Mom. Just joking.”

  “We haven’t even seen a sword yet. Wouldn’t you like to go to the sword museum first?”

  But of course I knew the answer. Throughout my failure of an interview with Mr. Yoshihara, Charley had waited politely just as I myself had once waited as my father sold GM cars to farmers. Now it was my son’s turn to enjoy the trip he had been promised.

  “Give me some change,” he said. “I’ll get the tickets for Akihabara. Please …”

  I gave him a handful of coins, and by the time Jerry Etsuko, and I caught up with him, Charley was feeding a very alien-looking ticket dispenser as if it were a Vegas slot machine. Now he was alive, engaged. The machine whirred at his command, spitting tickets out into his waiting hand.

  “How do you know how to do that?”

  “I’m going to live here,” he said, “after my band fails.”

  The Tokyo subway is big and complicated. The lines are owned by different companies, some of whom accept each other’s tickets, some of whom don’t. Of course I should take Charley to Akihabara—this was his trip after all—but now I saw that he was somehow taking me.

  “You are a different species,” I told him.

  “We mutated,” he corrected.

  Even on the JR Yamanote Line he showed no interest in what was outside the window. Instead, he studied the map, running his fingers along the dense-coloured lines as if reading a circuit in braille. He led the transfer of subway lines at Asakusa and again at Ueno. At Akihabara he slipped our tickets into a machine marked “Fare Adjustment,” and I gave him the two hundred yen he asked for. He then located exit three, where his strange friend was waiting for us.

  Takashi bowed to Etsuko, Jerry, and me, but his greeting with Charley was a complicated handshake ending in a shoulder slam.

  “Carey-san,” he said to me, “we will see toilets.”

  Hearing this news, Etsuko excused herself. She had a job to go to.

  Walking a little ahead, Charley and Takashi presented a clear contrast. Charley, tall and twelve years old, wore rumpled New York street clothes. Takashi was perhaps fifteen but a head shorter. His black Japanese hair, even in its wild dishevelment, was crisp and clean as knife blades. There was not a spot or wrinkle on him. Every detail of his tunic was pristine, pressed, as if just released from a polythene wrap.

  “Who the hell is he?” I asked Jerry “What is he?”

  As the two boys pushed through the crowds beneath the railway bridge on Chuo Dori, I remembered Charley’s joke. “We mutated.”

  “First,” Jerry said, “he is a character from anime. All that romantic military stuff, the boots and the coat—I’d say he was out of Mobile Suit Gundam.”

  Of all the thousands of anime series, this one I actually knew about because it was Charley’s favourite. In Mobile Suit Gundam the kids fight endless, politically complex wars from inside giant robots. In fact, Charley and I had an appointment to interview Yoshiyuki Tomino, who originated the series, as I now reminded Jerry.

  “Well”—he smiled—“doesn’t he look like a Tomino character to you?”

  “He does rather.”

  But Jerry had already moved on. “He is also what is called a visualist. You think Japanese are great conformists. Remember, though, that this was a country which once had strict laws about what you wore, where you lived. God help you if you acted like a samurai when you weren’t. Can you imagine what it feels like to wear what you damn well please? You want to be a robot pilot, that’s your choice. I was in Mitsukoshi, the department store, and there was this extraordinary transvestite. He had that same crazed sense of detail—an amazing hat, stacked high with fruit like Carmen Miranda’s. And he was just standing in the middle of the store with everyone walking around him, pretending he wasn’t there. But he was perfect, in every single detail. That’s what a visualist does. My friend’s neighbour likes to dress up as a traditional carpenter—the flared trousers, the two-toed socks, the whole kit. By day he’s an accountant working for a conservative newspaper, and he goes home on the subway looking like a conformist. But then he’s not only got the clothes, he’s got a bloody carpenter’s truck and he goes out cruising.”

  “Where does he go cruising?”

  “No place we could take Charley.”

  “And?”

  “He picks up girls. Carpenters have lots of money. Also: go to Harajuku Station and see the kids round there. Elvis, Michael Jackson, Perfect Reproduction Punks. But this is not just a modern thing. Stuff like this was going on in the seventeenth century when it was much more dangerous. In 1600 young men with fuck-you clothes began appearing in the big cities. They were called Kabuki Mono, Kabuki meaning ‘crooked’ or ‘deviant and licentious.’ Reading about them, they seem exactly like punks. Some of them wore imported velvet collars, short kimonos, with lead weights in the hems. I guess you could say they were visualists as well.”

  By now we had come to the bustle of Kuramaebashi Dori, and with the kids walking quickly ahead, I was anxious not to lose them. As we pursued them, I asked Jerry what he could tell about Takashi.

  “Not much.”

  “Well, can you tell his class?”

  “Japanese don’t really have class-differentiated accents.”

  “Is he well educated? Educated at all?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Is he gay do you think?”

  “Who would know?”

  By now we were in Akihabara, the true belly of the beast, entering a six-storey maze, every floor and corner of it bursting with that neon light Tanizaki so abhorred. Not for nothing is this Electric Town. White and silver and candy-coloured manufactured surfaces glowed in the dustless, conditioned air. Price tags hung from the ceilings in fluorescent orange and red and green and blue. Actually, they may not have been price tags, but the names of fish or the days of the week. We wandered from floor to floor. Stuffu everywhere—plasma screens, cell phones as thin as credit cards with guerilla war playing on their screens, those crazy science-fiction toilets, fifteen models at least.

  But had we come to Japan to look at such mundane appliances? In search of stronger stuff, we entered a labyrinth of lanes, arcades where it was not always clear where one business ended and another began. L
ike Luke Skywalker and Han Solo looking for spare parts on the planet Xenon, we browsed in dusty little shops selling mammoth radio valves, tiny black items identified only by the number on the box and sometimes by a small yellow stripe like a vein of candy sandwiched in a block of licorice.

  There was plenty of noise, but nothing like the barrage that awaited us in Sega World: five floors devoted to terrifying arcade games where kids with guns shoot men like fish in a bucket. This was before Iraq made the doubling of war and fantasy so ominous. But war had been much on my mind before we came to Japan, and I was searching in every cultural artifact for echoes of the atomic bomb, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the American occupation, the manner in which a proud and isolated society had waged war, suffered war, emerged from war.

  In New York, Charley had broken his NO MUSEUMS rule to visit the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a show called My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation. There we encountered the work of Kenji Yanobe, sculptures created on a carlike scale. According to the catalogue: “Yanobe’s playful atomic cars are a cross between robots and Volkswagen Beetles, but deal with the horrific idea of surviving a nuclear holocaust. Bold colors and shiny surfaces display Geiger counters, flashing lights, radiation penetration counters, heating stems, and disposals. Both science fiction and cartoon, the cars encapsulate their drivers and provide for their survival.” The cars are cute and funny, but also terrifying and claustrophobic. You cannot look at them without thinking of both the poisoning of the earth and the isolation of the individual in urban postindustrial society.

  To my mind, there was a distinct parallel between Yanobe’s work and the Mobile Suit Gun-dam anime that, thanks to Charley, I was already familiar with. Originally televised in 1979, this phenomenon features giant robots, popularly known as Mobile Suits, “piloted” by young soldiers in the throes of an intergalactic war. Before leaving New York I had already begun a correspondence with Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gundam’s creator, with whom I brashly shared many of my opinions: “It is immediately obvious that one of the emotionally satisfying aspects of Gundam is the way in which children pilot these huge and powerful mechanical warriors. Therefore they can deliver to children what many other successful children’s books and films have done—feelings of power.

  “But the feelings that are produced in your work are far more complex. I think of the way in which individuals are cut off from society, isolated within these suits. Do these readings of the imagery make any sense to you?

  “Naturally, I think of children and trauma of war, of their inherent powerlessness. One then can see these suits as offering a protection that is never available in the horrors of real-life war.

  “I look at the sculpture of Kenji Yanobe and see individuals enclosed within postapocalyptic survival vehicles. I wonder if you know Mr. Yanobe’s work and if you feel any connection with it? You were both children when the atomic bombs were dropped, when Tokyo was firebombed. Could you comment on this?”

  By the time Charley and I got to Japan, I was also coming to see the Mobile Suits as a metaphor for a curiously elusive personality type called an otaku. An otaku is often described as someone who lives alone in a small room and connects with the world only via computer. Of course, this touched on my own concerns about my son and the cell phone, my son and the ticket machines, my son and the Destructor Simulator, please insert two tokens.

  As it happens, the first time Charley and I encountered the term was in the glossary of the show at the Brooklyn Museum: “Otaku: an anime fan. The term literally means ‘you’ in a very formal sense. In Japan, it has come to mean people who are obsessed with something to the point where they have few personal relationships. The nature of the obsession can be anything from anime to computers. In Japan otaku has the same negative connotation as nerd. In America, however, it refers specifically to hardcore anime fans, without any negative connotations.”

  Yet no definition of otaku was ever completely satisfying and by the time we left Japan, I had asked perhaps twenty people to define it for me; few of them agreed, and some answers were more disturbing than others.

  This is an excellent example of how perplexing Japanese culture can be, and a reminder of why Kosei Ono’s warning is worth heeding. Better to know nothing than a little, for the more you try to pin down otaku, the more wriggly it gets. Lawrence Eng, the author of The Politics of Otaku, comments that otaku means, literally “your house,” and more generally is a distant, formal way of saying “you.” Later he suggests the term originated amongst the collectors of animation pictures. “The basic idea,” he writes, “is that the word is used to explicitly indicate detachedness from who you are speaking to. For example, a dedicated and experienced collector of eels [the transparent plastic sheets on which animators paint] will have a vast network of connections to aid in his or her search for rare eels.” These contacts would be at once familiar and far from intimate.

  But as so often is the case in the Japanese language, just when you think you may almost understand a word, hopeless complications destroy it anew. In the late eighties a man named Tsutomu Miyazaki kidnapped and murdered four little girls and the police found his apartment crammed with anime and manga and videos, some of them pornographic. From this time the word otaku became associated with sociopaths, serial killers.

  In an article written with his colleague Timothy Blum, my New York friend the sculptor Jon Kessler complicates it further: “Otaku are the generations of kids raised to memorize volumes of context-less information for university entrance exams. Somewhere a glitch occurred and they are stuck in information mode, hoarding and exchanging information about the seemingly useless obsessions of otaku, such as the bra sizes of idols, to information about Levi’s 501 jeans, as well as secrets about their mischievous break-ins to data-banks…. Otakus are socially inept information junkies who rarely leave their homes, preferring to interface with the world via data-banks, modems and faxes.”

  And what about my own dear son? Well, back in Sega World his face was washed by flashing red lights as he let off another twenty rounds, fighting street to street.

  “Enough,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  But he was stuck to the machine. “One more, please.”

  “No. You need to rest. You’ve got Kabuki tomorrow.”

  “No, you promised! No Real Japan!”

  “This is not the real Japan. This is something else.”

  “What is it then? You don’t know,” said Charley desperately. He nodded to Takashi who, it seemed, had been standing behind me all this time. “Ask him.”

  “Can I help you, Carey-san?”

  “I was trying to explain to Charley about Kabuki.”

  “Ah,” he said, “yes, my grandmother likes Kabuki.”

  Later I understood: he was dying of embarrassment for my son, but at the time I could not read the curious rictus on the Gundam pilot’s face.

  4.

  Charley squirmed and whined. He had no idea what Kabuki was, only that he’d hate it, and it was not only Kabuki that produced this visceral response but the whiff of culture in any form. To see his face that night in our hotel room, you would’ve thought I was commanding him to drink molten lead. In both New York and London, he had happily attended shows of contemporary Japanese art, and we’d found ourselves, amazingly in agreement about what we liked. But Kabuki was in another category and that it meant “crooked” or “deviant” failed to calm him down.

  “Last night,” he said, “you told me it meant the song-and-dance art.”

  “Well, that’s another meaning.”

  “Dad, you don’t really know. Stop pretending that you do.”

  “Okay but we’re still going. Now go to sleep.”

  He woke me at 3 a.m., pleading to be spared, even offering to do chores at home to pay me back for the tickets.

  In the spooky light from the street I could see his contorted face, the Gundam figures standing guard all around the room, the glowing face of the cell phone.
r />   “Kabuki,” I said, “is like the manga of its time.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Then go to sleep.”

  There was so much more I might have said, but it was pointless. It certainly wouldn’t have helped to quote to him from Alex Kerr’s sad and celebratory book, Lost Japan, where, in his chapter on Kabuki, he writes: “Focus on the ‘instant’ is characteristic of Japanese culture as a whole. In Chinese poetry, the poet’s imagination might begin with flowers and rivers, and then suddenly leap up into the Nine Heavens to ride a dragon to Mt. K’un-lun and frolic with the immortals. Japanese haiku focus on the mundane moment, as in Bashō’s well-known poem: The old pond, a frog leaps in, the sound of water.”

  You can see this as a frame from a manga.

  And there are other connections and parallels. In Kabuki, he writes, “There might be a scene where two people are casually talking; then, from some detail in the conversation, the characters suddenly comprehend each other’s true feelings. In that instant, action stops, actors freeze, and from stage left wooden clappers go battari! The two characters resume speaking as though nothing has happened; however, in the instant of that battari!, everything has changed. While most forms of theater try to preserve a narrative continuity, Kabuki focuses around such crucial instants of stop and start, start and stop.”

  Just like manga!

  But none of these amazing insights would ease the anguish of my son, who, at one o’clock the following afternoon, made his way through the crowd of straight-backed grandmothers, many of them dressed formally in kimonos. He was a miserable American boy with leather bands around his wrist and a homemade T-shirt that read GEORGE BUSH, NOT MY PRESIDENT. He entered the auditorium of the famous Kabukiza as cheerfully as Gonpachi, a character in one of the plays we were about to see, was delivered to his own execution.

  “Sit up.”