by John Higham
Unfortunately, the thrill of huffing four overstuffed suitcases up two flights of stairs in our traditional-style inn left my sense of recollection in a bit of a fog.
“Please,” our host said firmly, “do not wear slippers on the tatami mats.”
Oops. Fatal etiquette rule number one had gone “poof.”
After accidentally wearing my slippers on the tatami mats, I had earned the privilege of getting a tutorial on Japanese etiquette at every turn, as I constantly found our host at my elbow.
“Have you seen Hosono-san?” I asked September when she returned to our room.
“No, why?”
“He’s been following me around. Now that I’m off to take a bath, the last thing I want is for him to follow me in.”
I slipped quietly into the hallway, but Hosono-san had his radar locked onto me. He followed me into the bathing room to give me instructions on the proper procedures. The Japanese are obsessed with the bathing experience.
“The traditional Japanese bath,” Hosono-san explained, “is preceded by first soaping yourself up outside of the bathtub. Then you must rinse off completely by taking this bucket and pouring it over you.”
I knew all this, but smiled appreciatively while simultaneously suppressing the urge to drop my towel and crack it locker-room style to get rid of him.
“Only when all the soap has been rinsed away are you to get into the bath. No soap is allowed in the o-furo.”
The reason for this process is that the water in the tub is shared by the entire family, or if you are at a Japanese inn, by everyone in the inn. This method ensures that the water stays clean. Or at least it doesn’t get revolting.
To facilitate the bathing ritual, the bathing area is much different than it is in the United States. Every bathroom has a drain in the floor so you can pour buckets of water over yourself as you rinse yourself free of soap. A modern Japanese house may have a shower right in the middle of the room, but there is no dedicated stall. The bathtub itself is off in a corner, usually with a cover over it so the water stays warm and nothing nasty, like soap residue, makes it in.
I prefer this to the American system, particularly since a Japanese o-furo has no overflow. You can sit in a Japanese tub and have the water come up to your chin: If water sloshes over the edge, shikata ga nai (Japanese for c’est la vie) because the drain is in the middle of the floor. When we remodeled our master bath back home, we did it Japanese style.
Which is unfortunate. Because even though the master bath back home is Japanese style, the kids’ bathroom is plain vanilla. This meant that Jordan had spent the previous eight and a half years of his life being told not to get the floor wet when he took a bath; in Japan, that’s what you are supposed to do.
So despite being told to be sure not to get soap in the bathtub, Jordan refused to stand in the middle of the bathroom and take a shower (“Mom might get mad if I did that”) and instead hauled the shower hose over to the bathtub, climbed in, and took his shower standing right in it. I suspect Hosono-san resorted to cleansing the tub with acetone. Or maybe he had the tub removed and replaced. I dunno. I do know we are not on his Christmas card list.
• • •
Kyoto is famous for its fall colors and the Japanese will book tours of the area months in advance, hoping to guess the precise week when the colors peak; by luck, we stumbled into the peak autumn colors, which were stunning.
More than its fall colors, Kyoto is famous for copious shrines and temples, which we seemed to be visiting simultaneously with every citizen of Japan. I marveled when visiting to learn that such-and-such sho-gun had a dream here in the year 1152. When we visit historic places in California the kids go bug eyed when something dates to 1852. It casts the term “historic” in a different light.
While visiting the various shrines, Katrina and I were standing on a crowded street corner waiting for the light to change before crossing the street. We were shoulder-to-shoulder with other pedestrians, so per our custom, we held hands so we wouldn’t get separated by a sea of people sweeping us in opposing directions as soon as the light changed.
Suddenly I felt someone squeezing into position between Katrina and me, with elbows in my thigh pushing us apart. Looking down to scold Jordan, I was shocked to see a head of gray hair at about my waist pushing its way between us so it could be in front of the pack when the light changed. No matter that we had been pressed together by the throngs and had been holding hands. With a sharp jab, the gray head separated our hands and was last seen parting her way, Moses-like, through the sea of people in an effort to reach the head of the line.
“I thought you said people in Japan were courteous,” Katrina said.
“They are, but every rule needs an exception, I suppose, and little old ladies are exempt from everything.”
We were making our way to the Kyoto main train station. There was a beautiful Christmas tree at the top of a set of escalators. Japan is completely gadget crazy and perhaps nothing is more revered than the cell phone/camera/PDA/MP3 player. Hours later I was still able to close my eyes and see spots from all of the flashes of wannabe cell phone photographers snapping pictures of the tree as they were going up while I was going down. On the average subway at least fifty percent of the people are furiously working the keypads of their cell phones with their thumbs, smoke curling from the tiny screens.
What’s worse is that they don’t put the blasted things away when they hop off the subway. I had gotten used to seeing people bowing while talking on the phone in the pre-cell phone era. Entering the cell phone into the dynamic was a mistake. Anyone who has a bumper sticker on his car that says shut up and drive should try walking on a sidewalk in Japan while he’s in a rush to get somewhere. Where’s my water cannon when I need it?
• • •
Hiroshima is a huge and bustling city, and apart from the notable exception of the Atomic Bomb Dome, there is no evidence of the destruction that befell this city some 60-plus years earlier.
After arriving on the shinkansen, we celebrated Thanksgiving Day in Hiroshima at the Memorial Peace Park. As we made our way to the museum, Jordan protested most emphatically, “I’ve already done my lifetime quota of museums!” We made him go in anyway. We are such meanies.
After 30 minutes in the museum, I whispered to September, “All things considered Jordan seems to be absorbing quite a bit.”
“Yes, but not as much as Katrina,” September said. The museum was easily understandable by children and Katrina had been studying the captions on every display and was the slowest progressing through the exhibits.
“I suspect that’s because she just finished two books about World War II.” One book had been written from the perspective of a Japanese girl, and the other by a Korean girl—both autobiographies of living through that era. Each painted a grim portrait of the “other side,” and made you sympathize with the main character’s plight. Of course her reading list had been planned that way for a reason.
Watching Katrina for a few moments I said to September, “I’m glad to see this is having such an impact. After Auschwitz, I thought the kids might be too young to empathize.”
Katrina’s Journal, November 24
Today we went to the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, which is a museum that told us all about the atomic bomb, and about what people experienced after it was dropped. Outside there is an eternal flame, a flame that will only be extinguished when all the nuclear weapons in the world are destroyed. After that we went to see a memorial to a girl [Sadako Sasaki] who died years after the bomb was dropped, and during her eight months in the hospital tried to fold one thousand paper cranes, expressing her desire to live. We had studied about her at school.
Out of all the World War II-related museums we visited, from Utah Beach to Auschwitz, the Memorial Peace Park had the most emotional impact on me. Nothing was sugarcoated. Not that anything was sugar-coated at Auschwitz, but this was much more visceral.
The Japanese presented a balanced
viewpoint, even acknowledging that they were the aggressors in the war, used slave labor, and did some bad things to the Koreans and Chinese. It surprised me to see implicitly mentioned that dropping the bomb probably saved lives in the long run.
Also presented was a thorough account of the horrors of being a survivor of a nuclear blast, including the saga of the lives and premature deaths of those who came through the initial blast seemingly uninjured, leaving no question that the luckiest were those who died instantly.
When you walk through the museum, the first exhibit area is about the war itself, and what life was like for people in Japan during that time. A lot of floor space was devoted to Japan readying itself for invasion, and calling on its people for “One Hundred Million Honorable Deaths.” It surprised me to see this in print because it acknowledged that they knew they were going to lose, yet they weren’t gong to surrender. More importantly, it acknowledged that those in power would toss away so many lives to uphold their idea of honor.
This first exhibit area leads into a succession of displays about individual stories of those who died instantly, and those who thought they survived. One of the most memorable was a blackened stone wall that had been brought into the museum. It was an “inverse shadow” of where someone had been standing when the bomb dropped. The intensity of the heat blackened the wall, but where that person had been standing shielded the wall from the heat and permanently created the human form of an “inverse shadow.” It was creepy to stand in the outline of the shadow.
From the creepy to the horrifying were the vivid pictures and the video of the burns that people suffered over their entire bodies. There were also descriptions of melted fingernails and how they grew back black, embedded with blood vessels, which were painful to trim. There were pictures of what looked like melted skin hanging off backs and faces. It was truly horrifying.
On to the heart wrenching, the museum showcased stories of people who came through with no obvious injuries, but who suffered in the coming weeks and years. One of these was the story of a brother and sister, both of whom died within several weeks of the bomb, but who appeared uninjured in the initial aftermath. This description gave a week-by-week account of their deteriorating health, and culminated with the description of how they vomited up what appeared to be their internal organs, dying shortly afterward.
We quietly stepped out of the museum. The cool autumn day pulled us into the present, giving us emotional whiplash. No one spoke as we made our way to the train that would take us to our hostel.
• • •
Western culture has seeped into every corner of Japan from language to movies—it’s even making inroads into the food. It’s enough to make a Yank feel right at home. Yet before you start filling out Japanese immigration application papers, you should know that a gaijin will never be able understand the Japanese mind. For example, there are no swear words in Japanese; if you really want to insult someone, you merely neglect to mention that they are honorable. Continuing with this example, if your boss’s name is Fred, without fail you call him Fred-san (Honorable Fred). Calling him Fred without the san could put him into a murderous rage. Of course, wearing your shoes on his tatami mat or using soap in his bathtub would also do the trick.
www.360degreeslongitude.com/concept3d/360degreeslongitude.kmz
Nuclear Powered Toilet Seats. The Japanese are to be credited with probably the most endearing, yet useless invention known to mankind—the heated toilet seat. But it doesn’t stop there. Oh, no. It doesn’t stop there.
14.
The Cruise Ship of Pain
November 26–December 15
The People’s Republic of China
First impressions can teach you a lot about a person or a place. They can also be terribly deceiving. China was more different from what I had imagined than any other place we visited during our 52 weeks abroad. That impression started upon our arrival in Beijing. I saw a vibrant and modern city with wide streets. Its citizens were dressed no differently than, say, those of Seattle. Perhaps I was expecting a dirty, gray city whose citizens dressed in drab clothes and scurried about going to political party meetings? Despite the cosmopolitan veneer in Beijing and other major cities, by the time I left China I realized it was a world so different from mine, visiting was like interplanetary travel without the inconvenience of leaving Mother Earth.
We had laid out the route for the World-the-Round Trip prior to our departure so we would experience perpetual summer. That was the plan. Later, when we realized we would be arriving in Beijing in late November, September asked, “How cold do you think it’ll be?”
“Probably a wee bit,” I said, “but it isn’t officially winter until the end of December. We should be okay.”
Not. It was bitter cold. “If we’re going to see Tiananmen Square and hike the Great Wall,” September announced after our arrival, “we’re going to need some winter clothes.”
Our hostel in Beijing was in its own little world, known as a hutong: a black hole of a neighborhood. A hutong is bounded by a large city block, but once inside there is an absurd maze of “streets” intended for pedestrian traffic with the occasional car snaking through, simultaneously scraping paint off both sides of the mortar work. Rumor has it that people live their whole lives in a hutong and never leave. Truth is, they just can’t find their way out. A casual visitor to the city may see the wide streets and the dazzling lights, but you can’t understand the soul of the city without stepping inside a hutong. It’s a metaphor for China as a whole.
If you knew the way without getting lost, our hutong was a few minutes by foot from Tiananmen Square. In those few minutes there were no fewer than three KFCs and enough North Face counterfeit outlets to outfit the army of a medium-sized country. Of course that is where the tourists shop and eat. Beijing residents shop and eat in the countless markets and nameless shops that make up the soul of the hutong.
On our way to Tiananmen Square, we filled the gaps in our cold weather gear for about what one would expect to pay for lunch for one. On the flight from Japan, we had a long discussion about, of all things, copyright infringement, intellectual property, and counterfeit products. Yet, while shopping for cold-weather gear it was evident that we simply couldn’t purchase verifiable genuine name brands. Items were priced too low to be genuine. Most were similar in form and function to the name brands, with a slight misspelling of the name.
“We should be warmer now,” September said after our quick shopping trip. We then made our way to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City to pay our respects to Chairman Mao.
The Forbidden City has an interesting past, to say the least. To protect the emperor’s bloodline, aside from the emperor himself only eunuchs were allowed into the inner courtyards of the palace where the imperial family and harem lived. Even the emperor’s male children were exiled once they hit puberty. The life of a eunuch is fascinating in a macabre sort of way. Poor families provided young boys to the emperor as a way to elevate the status of their family. Once accepted, the young boys were castrated and then dedicated their lives to serving the royal family. Since all but the eunuchs were forbidden in the inner courtyards, some wielded great power. This practice began in the 16th and lasted until the 20th century. Sun Yaoting was a mere nine years old when his family placed him into the service of the emperor Pu Yi just months before the Manchu Dynasty was overthrown in 1911, ending the practice. The eunuch era fully died when Mr. Yaoting passed away in 1996.
Tiananmen Square was built in 1420 and opens up to a plaza of over a hundred acres, and has been a gathering place of political and social importance for centuries. More recently it is where the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed a state by Mao in 1949, and 40 years later was ground zero for the student protests where a lone student stood his ground against an advancing tank.
When we visited, the sky was brilliant blue, but a fierce wind and the bitter cold bit our exposed skin. Although we had come to peruse the site, after just a few
minutes we were looking for any place that had four walls and a heater. Suddenly I felt a tug on my sleeve and a whisper in my ear, “Psst. Hey buddy—I have the latest Harry Potter! DVDs. Only eight yuan” (about US$1). The young man opened his ankle-length coat a bit to reveal a decent selection of late-release movies on DVD. Never mind that the latest Harry Potter was still in its debut weekend in local theaters.
“You come my shop. I show you. Very quality! I have very more at my shop!”
September and I cast a wary eye at each other but the icy cold had impaired our judgment, and his shop promised warmth. We started to follow him as he darted into an alternate hutong entrance and zipped off down a narrow alleyway and turned left, right, left, then went straight for a while then left, right, right, then down to the dead end of a dark and narrow alley.
By this time alarms were ringing in my head, “Danger! Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!” If the guy was setting us up to be mugged, he certainly did it right because as soon as we passed over the event horizon, we were lost. In his “shop” there were several harried-looking folks in a small room containing bunk beds, a one-burner stove top, and the smallest refrigerator I had ever seen.
Past the cramped living quarters was a small warehouse with copies of every DVD known to mankind, and some not yet known.
“These movies are COUNTERFEIT!” Katrina protested loudly.
“Yes, they are,” I replied. “So are the winter clothes we just bought.”
“But why are we even here?”
That was a good question, to which there wasn’t a good answer. We had just watched the latest Harry Potter in the theater the night before, but curiosity—and the desperate desire to warm up—had got the best of us, and now we found ourselves in a place we didn’t really want to be.
