Monday, May 12, 2008
An American woman is both isolated and embraced on a summer stay in Japan.
Jul 23, 1999 | The first morning I woke up on a futon resting low on tatami, I had an acute sensation of falling. Everything was too high and my head too low, the air too thick to breathe and my limbs unresponsive after the 14-hour flight from Los Angeles to Osaka. At the end of the futon my toes poked out from a blanket that had good intentions but couldn't deliver. On my first morning in Suzuka, Japan, I was -- as I would be for the entire summer -- a poor fit.
Suzuka is several hours south of Tokyo along the east coast of Japan's main island. It has about 150,000 people spread out in small, sensible houses along the shore and for several miles inland. Not many foreigners penetrate to this place where the biggest attractions are a racetrack and a small amusement park. Little English is spoken, and that's why I came: to teach English classes for the summer at Suzuka Kyokai, the local church.
The first half of the summer I spent with a family of three: Takashi, Atsuko and their small daughter, Mari. They welcomed me to breakfast the first morning with miso soup, rice, green tea, daikon radish slices, a Tupperware container of smoked fish and a packet of miniature dry fish and seaweed to shake onto my rice. When I couldn't identify the smoked fish, Atsuko smilingly looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary.
"Eel," she announced -- it would give me energy in the sledgehammer heat. She watched approvingly as I transferred a chunk of eel to my rice bowl with slippery lacquered chopsticks: The first morning was no time to be a squeamish gaijin, or foreigner. "Gaikoku-jin" -- "gaijin" for short -- are literally "outside people" in a society where to be an insider is the goal of all social interaction. Cautiously I imitated my 5-year-old hostess and obeyed her imperious directions about how to hold my chopsticks.
The first real test came that night when the family graciously took me to a very nice sushi restaurant and insisted that I consume every tentacled, raw, unidentifiable item on a vast tray of sushi and sashimi while Mari giggled and mimicked the faces I was trying not to make. I had been a vegetarian for two years prior to that day, but suddenly nothing in the world could have persuaded me not to follow willingly wherever my hosts might lead.
I bowed, I smiled, I knelt, I ate and it was remarkably good. In these entirely foreign surroundings, no generosity could be refused, no shocking peculiarity (the ubiquitous Turkish toilets come to mind) complained about, lest I shame all of America before these kind people who would know America best through me. I had fallen into the deep arms of Japan's saltwater embrace; there was nothing to do but drift with her warm tide.
That summer, the tide took me wholly. With my new companions I walked the secret chambers of a ninja castle and the singing "nightingale" floors of an ancient imperial palace. I left my offering to Shinto ancestors and sat with Buddhists while we performed the tea ceremony in an open-walled room far above a misted valley town, surrounded by shades of green I thought existed only in Ireland. At home I drank so much chilled green tea that eventually I was required to brew it myself to replenish the supply. I was introduced to the quiet arts of flower arranging and calligraphy by elderly women and men who had seen the horrors of the great war and were still capable of bending their bodies around a young American to teach me the right postures and perspective. Their touch was dry, soft as parchment, excruciatingly gentle.
"Breathe," they would say to me, then sit quite still and wait for silence to rain into us.
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