late spring

I started this blog about two and a half years ago, living in a borrowed room at a friend’s house, translating for free room and board, living on about $100 a month, rewriting essays until three or four in the morning. And now I’m sitting down to finish it, living in a borrowed room at a new friend’s house, my life stuffed into a backpack. In one week I'll be on the boat to China, not much sense in keeping a blog about not leaving Japan.

I wish I could write more, or better, about what it has meant to live here for close to five years, but I don’t know that it did mean anything. If my four years of liberal arts education in the states was spent putting the world together into discrete and simple stories, battles of justice and freedom over greed and self interest, then the last few years have been a slow dismantling of that. I’m sitting here in the late spring, having graduated from a life in Japan with a first level certification in Japanese, volumes of stories, a better sense of who I am, and a profound confusion over what kind of world we live in.

In August of 2002, the White House was scrambling for an excuse, any excuse, to invade Iraq. The nation was just entering the screaming session over American lives, Iraqi lives and the right to wage war. I had just moved to a village in the mountains of central Japan, to teach rural Japanese schoolchildren the language of America: the language of the modern world.

It would be easy to give a timeline, provide a list of places I lived, experiences I have had, but I don’t think you or I would learn much from that. I lived these four years outside the reach of television, at the most lazily catching news from the New York Times online or the tabloid ads from the train on my morning commute. When did bother to think about it, I brushed the whole thing off as the noisy clutter of the media. I refused to get the internet installed at my apartment. For close to a year I spent whole days, whole weeks, wandering Tokyo with a film camera, taking pictures and trying to figure out what I was doing, what this meant, what I wanted to see. I read books by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Montaigne. I bought several editions of the Best American Essays series. I renewed my work visa, twice. I wrote in this blog, but not very often.

Last year I began to get very tired. I was working limply at a desk job, every morning and evening coursing through the veins of Tokyo’s commuter rails with millions of other people. People who were born here, people

who feel the tug of this country in their bones, who see America as an abstraction, a caricature. The future, the other, the big, the liberated. Where Conan the Barbarian becomes governor and no one blinks, they’re just shocked to hear he wasn’t born in the US. When push comes to shove their fears are not my fears, I have my American burden, they have their J

apanese ennui.

We shared the life of this city Tokyo, the apocalyptic city. A city whose imaginary death has been played out thousands of times in film and television and my occasional nightmare, and whose real death has been played out twice in eighty years, in earthquakes and firebombings. It is the safest metropolis on the planet, and it feels like it is going to explode.

===

I was hit by three visions of doom in the past month.

The day I finished reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse the world around me looked about as sturdy as a sand castle. Twenty years ago our visions of apocalypse involved the world ending in a single nuclear blaze, mankind killed instantly in a car crash with destiny. Now it doesn’t look like we’ll have it that easy. Things look like they will be slow and painful, trapped on a globe as the elements thrash around us, rising seas and unbelievable storms.

That very night I decided to calm my mind and rent a video. After watching it, Children of Men didn’t seem like the best choice, but now it does. I spent the two hours literally gripping my knees in horror, as I watched a near future world tearing itself apart. This was the only science fiction movie I have ever seen where the future didn’t only seem plausible, it seemed like it could happen next year. Immigrants from crumbling societies scramble to get into the last remnants of peace and civilization, only to be pushed out by a police state desperately clinging to what they have. Far beyond the immigrant holding pens a government official attempts to gather and preserve Western civilizations greatest artworks, sipping red wine beside the screaming bulk of Guernica, happily oblivious to very real suffering all around him.

Also last month, an album was released by a rock band whose lead singer is exactly my age. He has also moved through twenty seven years, but somehow he has moved himself to a place where he, his wife and his friends can make music that echoes the same feelings love and terror in mine and almost makes me weep in pity. There have been all sorts of extreme reactions to The Arcade Fire’s second album Neon Bible, but for me the hardest blow was knowing that this was made by Americans almost identical to me in age and upbringing. And here they are singing songs that seem to have risen out of my unconscious.

“I don’t wanna fight in a holy war.

I don’t want the salesmen knocking on my door.

I don’t wanna live in America no more.

Cause the tide is high,

And it’s rising still,

And I don’t wanna see it out my windowsill.”

I didn’t either, but looking away hasn’t helped. It’s time for me to get out, take a look at the world, and see what needs to be done here.

usa notes

Catching the late commuter train back from New York. Two lily white couples get on at 125th st. Same age as me, but with haircuts and overcoats from income brackets in the stratosphere. One couple grabs the two free seats next to mine. On the commuter train the seats are turned front and back in little two and three seater pods, not the long democratic benches of the subway. On our three seat pod I scrunched up against the window with my brand new hardcover and they talked about people they knew. "Look at that skiht though, just look at your skiht. There's practically nothing there." My eyes flicked over to her skirt; deep blue, clinging toddlerlike to a pair of tanned thighs marked once or twice by birth marks or field hockey scars. His voice was marked by objective observation while his fingers ran circles round her kneecap and little forays higher up. I really tried to just enjoy my book, half of me just wishing they could do this somewhere else and the other half of me glad that these guys had sat next to me and given me such a good story.

The other couple spoke up from the seat ahead of us. "Ohmigod my ass is so big, my ass is so big in this photograph." As far as I could get from the furtive glances the photograph was her drivers license. "Can you believe my Dad told me that I looked liked shit in this?" Still waving around the drivers license. "But whatever, I just told him that he was fucking ugly anyway." Okay, I was ready to move now. The boyfriend next to me turned his voice of objective observation to the voice of objective amusement. "Jesus, that's hor-(laugh)-rible (laugh)."

I settled back into the book, but by the time I'd glanced over again her hand (silver ring on the index finger, silver bracelet on the wrist) had moved between his leg, and looked like it was massaging his crotch through the thin black cotton of his trousers. Oh Jesus. Read the book, just read the book. This isn't happening less than a foot away. His jacketed arm is pressed against my own, her hand is pressing firmly along the folds and creases of his... oh for chrissakes! Just get off at the next stop please.

Maybe I've been out of the states too long, but their conversation was as light and breezy as if she'd been running her hand through his hair. He asked about the ring on her finger that was running the length of his member, she lifted up the hand to look at it. "This? Jeez, I haven't taken this off in like, fifteen years." And maybe she was in love, because she slid it off without a second thought, held it with the edge on her fingertips, all three of us with our eyes on the ring, and the finger it had left.

fuck the bomb

North Korea has the bomb. Most likely they are pointing it a few miles south of my apartment. Recently I’ve had a string of apocalypse dreams. Blinding flash of light, running through burning hulks of concrete and melting steel, silver rivers snaking across pavement. Stuff like that

...

Recently everyone seems to be getting pregnant. Emails from elder cousins arrive with grainy photographs at the bottom. Swaddled infants cradled in someone’s arms, an x-ray of a white creature curled like a shrimp in the big black pond of someone’s belly. People at the office clutter desks and computer screens with pictures of unconscious infants and toddlers grinning like idiots. Yesterday Mori-san was a sensible systems engineer, read the paper at lunchtime, did laps at the pool after work. Today he has pinned a photo of a shrieking bundle of goo next to his monitor. When it catches his eye he’ll sigh for a moment at this thing that has sprouted out of a dab of his semen. His semen.

My boss’ family came to the office the other day, his lovely wife and the scheming little parasite that calls itself his son. What had this thing, barely two years in this world, what had he done to earn our respect? His mother had brought a ribboned box of department store cookies for these men and women at their desks, but the boy just hobbled around with a goofy grin and babbled ungrammatical sentences in this weird squeaky little voice. Yet the girls in research coo over his little hands and his soft hair, the guys in sales quit the dirty jokes and turn their charm on this snotty little creature. His mother handled him carefully, this little goblin that wiggled out of her flesh and into the world. There he is, a Voyager probe launched from her body, and, if their luck holds, into the future.

...

Every Thursday night I bike out to a dull and quiet suburban neighborhood to tutor a lovely couple in their fifties in English conversation. She has left her job as the manager of an organic grocery to start an all organic baking business named after a Swedish cartoon character. He is on the board of directors of Japan’s largest organic produce distributor, and is currently organizing a national organic agriculture symposium and looking to import organic olive oil from Jordan. We’ll sit down to dinners of handmade sausages and homegrown vegetables, then discuss our week and read a short story or an essay. They giggle and laugh and tease each other in English fragments cut down to the essentials. Every other sentence will remind them of a song from the 60’s. “All You Need Is Love! John Lennon. My favorite!”

They have two children, both about my age. Their daughter and their son’s girlfriend got pregnant within two weeks of each other. Everyone lost a few nights sleep, then decided to get married. Their daughter is now in her ninth month, and has come home for the last few months of her term, padding around the house with this basketball hidden underneath her shirt. She sits on a sofa in the corner of the room stitching baby clothes while her parents sit at the dining room table, frowning and giggle over strange words like “lilting” and “superstitious”. “Superstitious? Stevie Wonder! It’s a great song! Ja ja ja ja JA ja ja ja!”

Their daughter is still wearing a basketball under her shirt, but their son's wife ejected her volleyball last week. I stopped by on Friday night to drop off a souvenir I'd brought back from a short trip I'd taken to the highlands. They were sitting in the living room flipping through an album of old photographs and drinking from a bottle of Hatsu-Mago sake. They flipped on a music program on public television station and I sat with the thing in my lap, looking at fuzzy photographs, the colors slowly yellowing over twenty-odd years. There were graduation pictures from nursery school, visits to grandma's house and trips to the shrine, little things running around. A picture of their daughter, five years old in the middle of a temple courtyard pulling the hem of her dress right up to the her grinning face. Her mother looked at the picture and collapsed in a fit of giggles. "Kaya, she always... moh!!" She had taken the picture. They poured me a cup of the sake, and we drank to their first grandchild.

"This sake is... from Yamagata. It's name is Hatsu-Mago. The name means..."

"First grandchild?"

"Gah! Jamie, you... moh!"

…

The other day someone hired two men to sit on folding stools in front of my building and count the pedestrians as they walked by. They were both equipped with a clipboard, a mechanical clicker you depressed with your thumb and a blank stare like the back of a truck. I was off to work, still swallowing the coffee in my mouth, brain straining at the arithmetic I do every morning of current-time + (minutes-to-station,briskly-walking vs. minutes-to-station,flat-out-sprinting) = (train departure time + 50 minutes to get to work?)

If I hadn’t been so preoccupied I would liked to have stopped and asked them a few things. Like, how do you guys divvy up the work? Does one of you count pedestrians going one way and the other the opposite direction or do you guys both just count everyone you see and then they average your numbers together later on? Don’t you guys feel an overwhelming urge to click when the other guy does? Do you wear earplugs to prevent that from happening? What happens if, say, some gangly American walks by you at 8:20 in the morning, then remembers he has left his mobile phone at home, rushes back in front of you to get it, then runs past you again in a frantic effort to make his train? Would you count him once (same guy in five minutes), twice (doublebacked within a few seconds, back again a few minutes later) or three times? How long is a shift for chrissakes? And how much are they paying you to do this? You know, to count of all of us tramping along the pavement. All of us, rushing to work, bumping into each other, having kids, tossing bombs.

monday morning

I was shocked awake by the sound of the sky cracking open. The initial shriek of sound snapped me awake, and I was conscious in a second or two, eyes popping open, brain screaming on, fingers clutching the sheets. Slid open the screen by the futon and the shriek faded into lower grumblings that tumbled across the whole sky, and the city felt tiny beneath it. It had come from the south. Across the river. Tokyo. That didn’t sound like any thunder I’ve heard. And the sky is glowing, deep color, like a ripe peach, not a cloud to be seen.

They say that the day that Little Boy atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, drops of thick inky liquid fell from the sky, raincoats dripping in streams of black rain. They say that when the Aum Shinrikyo cult gassed three subway cars with sarin that it took the EMS hours just to sort everyone out. They say that after Tokyo burned to the ground in the Great Earthquake of 1923 that gangs roamed the wreckage, lynching Chinese, Koreans and any foreigners they could lay their hands on.

I am not generally a paranoid person, but on that morning every one of my senses was screaming that something was very wrong as my brain tried to calm itself down. My brain decided to check what time it was, and when I flipped open my cell, there was the date right beside the “5:31 AM”: September 11, 2006. Fuck. I thought about flipping on the news, but my apartment doesn’t have a TV, a radio, it isn’t connected to the internet. I decided to stand up. I put on a pair of boxers and a t-shirt. I looked out into the streets again. A man with an umbrella and a grey suit was calmly walking towards the train station. I went to the fridge and drank some juice out of the carton. Pineapple juice. Why did I have pineapple juice? I never buy pineapple juice. And what had that noise been? The sky was bright, I didn’t even see rain. A North Korean warhead? An Al Qaeda attack, coordinated all over the world, metropolis’ crumbling? Like I said, I don’t usually think like this.

What if Tokyo was gone, what if it had been bombed? Would the news come at all? Would all the channels go blank? Last month a construction crane collided with some powerlines, and central Tokyo blacked out for three hours at the peak of rush hour, thousands of people trapped beneath the city in dead subway cars. Would friends of mine be able to get out of here? Would I be able to get out of here? Would the airports be jammed? Osaka too? Maybe I could go up to the north coast and find a ship to Russia…

I was standing in front of my kitchen sink with the carton of pineapple juice in my hand when the second explosion hit. I rushed back to the window and searched the sky, which was still beautiful, clear and orange. Was that the sound of thunder? Could thunder sound like that? So sharp, so loud? It sounded like it came from far to the south, but it felt like I’d been jabbed in the chest. Should I call someone? Would they be awake too? Could they have slept through that? Were they injured? I looked out the sky and suddenly felt how tiny I was in this city, how tiny I was without the trains, without the flights home, without the phone, without the power of the city gushing to push me through it. I looked out at the city and wondered if it was dead, if the law had cracked open, who I could trust with my life. The closest I had ever come to feeling like this was five years ago, when I sat alone in my living room in Oberlin, Ohio, listening to NPR, Karl Castle’s voice shaking as he said: “We don’t know what has happened. A plane has flown into the World Trade Center. We don’t know what has happened.” The morning when you didn’t understand a thing, even from a one story house in Ohio.

As you know, Tokyo wasn’t bombed. I almost didn’t write this. It was too stupid, too neat, too perfect, too trite. Waking up to the sound of bombs on the fifth anniversary of September 11. But it happened, and it scared me shitless. I was standing on the balcony in my boxers with the carton of juice and that beautiful peach sky with my brain doubling back on itself, wondering if I was crazy and imagining things, if I should panic or if I should worry about the people I knew who lived across the river or if I should start packing bags and storing water when: the sky cracked again. The sound was a bit softer, and as I listened closely to a sound that was just thunder. There was a light hiss coming from the pavement, and as I stretched my hand out I could feel rain, a very light rain falling. Falling from that stupidly beautiful sky, and there were people walking in the streets, walking to work.

sado-ga-shima

“Oh, this must be a cheap hotel, popular with young people!” Three young Japanese men with their hair dyed strawberry blond sat around a table in the lobby, playing cards. At the other end of the room a few girls sat around looking bored and smoking cigarettes. Niigata City on a Friday night. “No Jamie, they’re not just hanging out, they’re, umm… working.” Chika had to explain this to me.

Steve and Chika had found a hotel that gave a discount to couples, very kindly not discriminating between pure Japanese couples and couples with a bit of American thrown in. Chika and Steve had located their hotel hours before, right after we’d finished lunch at a noodle shop in the mountains. While was finishing my plate of noodles they both furrowed their brows and tapped away at their mobile phones, navigating accommodation sites in a race to find the cheapest hotel. When one of them found something promising they held it out like a trophy: What do you think of this? I was the extra wheel on this trip, so I was on my own for hotels. I wonder; if I’d brought in a paid girlfriend they would have given me the couples discount?

There were no shortages of girlfriends for hire in Niigata City. Just north of the station the neighborhoods were crowded with Mahjong parlors, hotels that rented by the hour and bars where every woman in the place was on salary to pour drinks and laugh at jokes. Kind of like Hooters, except without the healthy American attitude. In Niigata a woman is appreciated for her ability to giggle politely at your worst jokes, and not simply by her breast size. Japan is a more subtle and refined nation than the United States.

After they’d checked into Hotel Green we set out to look for a place where I could stay. It was Chika who spotted the banner running down the side of a building that promised the “9 Hour Pack”. You can spend the night for a little under thirty dollars, provided you’re in after midnight and out before nine. And there were all those nice looking young people in the lobby!

We had a sushi dinner, at a good place, where they keep the counters spotless and slap the sushi right down on the wood in front of you, a few pieces at a time. It is very easy to gauge a sushi restaurant: if the slices of steamed octopus are tasteless and rubbery, it’s bad, if the slices of octopus are almost tasteless and kind of rubber-ish then you’re in for a real treat. Okay, I don’t like octopus, but there really isn’t anything like a proper sushi restaurant, the bouncy old men yelling orders and slugging down protein firecrackers of fish and vinegared rice. The oldsters are as much fun as the slabs of octopus, white meat glistening on the counter.

…

I came back to the hotel three minutes before twelve, and the guy at the front desk looked at me like I was nuts. “Still a few more minutes til twelve you know! Go take a walk around the neighborhood.” Business seemed slow in the lobby, all the same girls were hanging out, and he probably didn’t want me jinxing it any worse. So I took a walk around the block, flocks of girls barking jokes at one another in Chinese, Fillipino and Thai, waiting for the trains to stop running and the lonely men to come pay for their company. When I came back to the lobby the clerk said “hello” like he’d never seen me before, and slid me a piece of paper. “And do you have your passport on you?”

“No, I’m a long term resident, just my foreign registration card.”

“Well, do you mind if I photocopy that?”

“Why?” I let the peevishness creep into my voice. If they found the TV had been chucked through the window the next morning he could always contact the street address or the company I’d written on the check-in form. “Why?”

Everything paused for three seconds.

“Well, I suppose it really isn’t necessary, here’s-your-key-have-a-pleasant-evening.”

…

Steve and Chika were leaving Japan. Steve has decided to take his obsession with Japanese novels up to the pro level and enrolled in a master’s program in Japanese Literature at the University of Washington. And Chika was going along for the ride, putting aside her acting and voice-over career to move to Seattle with this American boyfriend. Here she is in her early 30’s, well past Japanese marrying age, moving to the US with this surprising boyfriend. It’s hard not to love Steve and Chika, his twinkly eyes and enthusiasm, her twinkly eyes and enthusiasm. Steve seems like an average dude, but after a while you start to wonder how the hell he finds the time to know so much stuff, to have an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, pop culture, pro basketball and Japanese nouns. “You’ve never had kawahagi? God, it’s totally delicious.” It’d piss you off if there wasn’t an ounce of pretension in his body. We have a band where I play bass and he sings about symbiotic shrimp-fish relationships and cicada mating habits. Chika is also deceptive, you’d never guess all she knew about history and politics from that thousand dollar smile. Just about every machine in this country beeps at you in a polite and sparkling feminine voice. Chika is one of those voices, narrating over TV specials, acting in bit parts. Her work had brought her to all sorts of weird places in Japan, including Niigata city. She acts in a community theater. On the train up she had her English textbook spread across her lap while I sketched people in my notebook. She was writing a self-introduction essay in English. “I live in Tokyo. I am a member of an acting company. I will do it until I die.” I kind of have a crush on Chika. But I don’t take it personally. It’s kind of her job for people to have a crush on her.

They were spending their last few weeks bumming around the country, taking local trains, seeing friends in Hiroshima, watching TV at Chika’s Dad’s place. I’d decided to tag along for the weekend. We were headed for a taiko drumming festival on Sado-ga-shima, an island just off the north coast of Japan’s main island. Any mention of Sado is immediately followed by the comment that “political prisoners were exiled there for hundreds of years”. The picture of Sado in my head was identical to the cover of a comic book I had read as a kid, The Black Island, where intrepid boy reporter Tintin is navigating an outboard motor boat in a kilt, his faithful dog Snowy perched on the bow, a craggy black island with a castle rising out of the cold, forbidding sea. I couldn’t wait to get there.

We caught a nine-am bus to the ferry terminal, and got there to find we’d missed the ferry by five minutes. Special “Jet-Foils” took half the time and left every hour, but at around sixty dollars they were three times the price, which is just a little too much, even for a super hi-tech hydrofoil. The next ferry was in three hours, so we had plenty of time to kill. We had breakfast at a little cave of a place right inside the terminal, everything made from a dark glossy wood, and the walls crammed with all sorts of weird pagan figurines. The menu seemed unnaturally large, and the pancakes Steve and I ordered came to us in a disturbingly short amount of time, probably just the amount of time in takes to microwave a frozen pancake. I paid six dollars for a cup of instant coffee.

We had a few more hours to kill, and Steve and I decided we were going to see what kind of weird shit we could find around this shoddy little marina! Chika’s job is to get enthusiastic about pretty ordinary things, so she decided to camp out in the waiting room. We soon found the “Nautical Artifacts Room” tucked behind the souvenir shop, a dusty, unmanned little room with models of boats and those nautical steering wheels, mounted. Steve and I played the game where you had to match the aerial picture of the harbor to the correct city on the map; you pressed a little white button and the correct photograph would light up. “Damn, I can’t believe that’s Ogi, that should totally be Naoetsu!” There was a sparkling new convention center right next to the docks, and we walked over to find an ATM. “You know, Chika did the voice on the video tour of this place.”

…

There were three options on the ferry to Sado: 2^nd Class, 1^st Class and “Special Class”. In Special Class you get a room to yourself: a king sized bed with sheets, maybe some drinks in the fridge? The pictures looked very nice. In 1^st class there were open rooms with wall-to-wall carpeting and you got a blanket, a pillow and a futon. In 2^nd Class they still left you the carpet. People poured on the ship, taking off shoes before sprawling out on the carpeting. This all would have made sense if we were spending the night, but this ferry would take just a little over two hours to get there. Most people decided this was dead time, curling up and passing out on the carpet even though it was only noon. You wandered through room after room of bodies sprawled flat over carpets in the middle of the day, like they’d all been leveled by a gas attack.

The top deck was open air, flocks of seagulls hovering around the boat like gnats on a bull, following us as we slowly pulled out to sea. Passengers chucked potato crisps off the side of the boat, gulls catching them in mid-air. One seasoned pro simply held the chips out, and the birds would sweep down to pluck them out of his outstretched hands, literally lining up for the privilege. Walked through steerage, ears and eyes pricked up at the six white girls chatting in the corner. There was an arcade room where Steve and I dropped a few coins into boxes that let us play the same Nintendo games they were selling when I was eight years old. (First Japanese word I knew? NINTENDO!!! What does that mean? I still have no idea!)

We arrived on Sado anxious and happy, despite having failed to save the princess. I was more than a little disappointed that it just looked like a regular Japanese island, abrupt little mountain-hills covered in green, air thick, chewy and hot, nothing cold, forbidding, black or Siberian about it the place. Looks like a nice enough place to serve out your banishment, I’ve seen a lot worse in this country. Or maybe those old Japanese lords were just nice to the enemies whose heads they didn’t lop off. The festival was on the other side of the island, we had to catch a bus to get there. This festival is actually kind of a big deal, as the lady at the ticket counter let me know. “We usually don’t run busses direct from one end of the island to the other, but we’re running temporary busses for the festival.” We got our tickets, piled on the bus. There was an older woman in tight stewardess dress and cap who stood at the front of the bus and gave us a little fifteen minute informational speech where she literally repeated every sentence three times before she moved onto the next. It boiled down to: this is a special temporary bus running for the festival, no stops before we get there. It was mostly non-Japanese on the bus, so it was nice to see her concern for us by with her painfully clear enunciation and incessant repetition, but it wasn’t much help. The six white girls sitting behind me whispered together in a rainbow of accents. “Did she say this bus is headed to the festival?” “What does rinji-basu mean?” “Yeah, she said that a lot.” “I think it means this is a special bus for the festival.” “Oh.” I spent the whole ride working on my eavesdropping skills, listening to these six lovely girls each with their own lovely melody of a voice: Australia, New Zealand, London, middle-America, Ireland, New England.

“Oh isn’t this island just love-ly, looks just like parts of England, you know? The little winding roads and all.”

“Except for the rice fields though, right? Not too many of those in England I bet.”

“S’pose you’re right, probably just be moahs or something.”

“Moah? Oh, a moor, like in Jane Austen, right.”

“What is a moor exactly? Like a field?”

“Oh hell, what’s a moor anyway? I guess it’s uncultivated, like a meadow, but… rougher, you know? Like… a moor.”

I could have listened to these voices talk about this stuff all day but they moved onto talk shop, or however much you could talk shop as a public school English teacher in Niigata. They don’t give you much to do, so the girls mostly talked about all the strategies used to make sure you get all of your vacations days.

…

Christ, this is it? A huddle of booths and vendors in a small harbor town? Hippies selling each other hand made hippie accessories, a woman offering Aryuvedic healing, artists displaying their pottery and calligraphy. Foreigners all over the place, all manner of Japanese hippies. Huh. I should have known from the name: “Earth Celebration”. A Japanese festival with an English name. Earth Celebration.

I tend to rag on hippies, but only because I used to be one, buying the whole package: the fashion, the pot, the music, the silly iconography. I used to get high at jam band concerts, then do readings from “Through The Looking Glass” in the parking lot to very forgiving crowds of people. Gimme a break, I was fourteen. You can say a lot about hippies, but they sure can be nice, so I tend to have a lot of hippie friends. Two minutes off the bus and I ran into one. She was more a hippie in spirit than fashion, had done part time waitressing at a café where I’d worked in the kitchen, I remember her being obsessed with seeds. We saved all the seeds that came out of the kitchen just for her, she took them home to collect and grow, like baseball cards.

She had actually come up with a few more seed geeks, my friends Ai and Kami. They live out in the mountains somewhere, with a stream and a vegetable patch and a little white van. Ai works a few days a week at an organic importing company, Kami has his own business. He sells seeds. Non-GMO, all natural little seeds that come in brown paper envelopes. It’s scary, but there is no one else doing this in Japan. If you want to grow plants whose DNA hasn’t been shaken and steroided up in a test tube, Kami is your only choice, this quiet smiling guy who hasn’t even reached thirty. These guys are great. They don’t really look like hippies. But they hugged me when we said hello, which is a pretty good litmus test for hippies in Japan.

…

All this, and we’d just come for the music.

We met in front of the local shrine about an hour before the concert and some people wearing “Event Staff” t-shirts and little plastic megaphones split us into groups. One by one the groups would disappear behind the shrine. Behind the shrine was a dizzyingly steep paved road that wound up the forest, hippies and little old ladies heaving deep breaths, crawling up the 45 degree slope. The path was lined with hanging paper lanterns, each one individually painted with poetry or calligraphy, brush drawings of devils or spirits or women, or men. Like we’d been invited over for a party and they’d spent time a little extra time on making decorations. How nice.

The music was not very nice. The music was… supernatural. A wide grassy clearing in the middle of the woods, stage at one end, whole string sections of cicadas swelling out in the darkness beyond the glade. When the drumming group Kodo first took the stage at first you could barely make out the sounds of drums over the harsh cicada symphonies going on in the darkness: you just saw a dozen figures on a dimly lit stage, their arms whirring, no sound. Then a faint high pitched whirring, growing a bit louder and louder, until the flickering sound began to meld with the cicada sounds all around us. Something slithered up my back.

The name of Kodo comes from the characters for “drum” and “child”, as in “Children of the Drum”. An explanation of the name is always accompanied by the phrase “they seek to play drums with the pure heart of a child.” That may be true, but I have never seen a child that could drum like this. The drums themselves were massive, some of them the size of small cars, carved from the trunks of giant pines from up north. The group literally threw themselves at these enormous chunks of wood, tiny little bodies scurrying around, whacking them all over with thick wooden sticks. Distorted splashes of hand cymbals, snapping little drums held from the waist. And then there was the grandfather, this elephant of a drum that let out a sub-sonic boom when it was struck. At times the entire group would begin to yell, voices crawling out over the drums. If the music hadn’t been so furious you would have spent all your time wondering at those bodies, marathon runner physiques squeezing every muscle in a supreme effort to coax a sound out of the wooden Volkswagens. At one time they played lying down, legs under the drum, torso angled up in a kind of half sit-up, both arms flailing on the drum-skin, squeezing their stomachs to keep themselves at that 30 degree angle.

Then it was over. You kind of blinked, maybe clapped and realized you couldn’t really think straight for the beating of your heart. I looked over at Steve, whose face was positively glowing. “Oh. My god. I think they just took this thing up to a whole new level.”

…

Kodo is a ball of anachronisms. The group emerged out of a commune that began on Sado Island in the 60’s, and in addition to agriculture and communal living studied traditional Japanese folk music, especially those drums. By the 1980’s they had started performing abroad at various world music festivals. By the 1990’s they were touring eight months out of the year, and had played at the Acropolis and Carnegie Hall. “I’ve played at Carnegie Hall,” Steve said as we were poking around the gift shop, scoping out books and CDs.

“You what?”

“My high school choir. We were kinda well known. Played Carnegie Hall.” He said it in the same voice that some people say “I’ve been to New York.”

…

That night everyone pretty slept on the beach, tents spread out on the sand. Our immediate neighbors had gotten up early to go diving for shellfish, and now the massive shells were sitting on a rack over an open fire, sizzling next to thick cuts of pork and eggplant. Farther down the beach some folks had dug a fire pit and were whacking on drums, the usual mishmash of African djembe, Turkish dumbek, Japanese taiko, the sounds pushed louder and softer by the wind. Three or four people seemed to know what they were doing but the rest just kind of smacked on the skins and maybe figured they’d pick it up eventually. Everybody has a beating heart, everyone is a drummer. But not everybody knows how how to practice.

And not just anyone is a traditional drumming commune where practice sessions go for hours, where the day starts with group runs along the beach through the frigid surf, where every member is allotted their own rice paddy to cultivate and care for, where you eat, drink, sleep, breathe with your band mates. Scrambling after a kind of hyper-awareness, a sensitivity, a better understanding of just what this all adds up to. They’re not trying to be farmers or luddites or full musicians, they’re looking for a kind of honesty: the most honest work, the most honest music, the most honest life. The members submit themselves to that ideal, on stage they disappear into flurries of motion, no center, no focus, just sound of the drums, groaning.

Many of us strive to live honest lives, those of us camped out on the beach here, trying our best with these drums and these bonfires, these cans of beer and plastic bags of potato chips to make us simple, happy, satiated. I suppose these guys I see, egging each other on before leaping over the bonfire, they want to be honest, but they also want something else. Kodo plunges after honesty like an army, here on the beach we tumble after it like toddlers grasping at shoelaces. But no matter how many rice fields they tend or sit-ups they do, could Kodo ever match the desperation that made this music? When those brown knotty bodies came out from the rice paddies, the muscles hard from whole lives of bent backs, bitter winters, dead babies, when they came out to dance the summer solstice, came out to dance the harvest festival, did they ever doubt the music? Did they ever doubt it’s truth, their own truth, or were they left wondering that there was something missing? Did they ever think that, maybe, this wasn’t all real enough?

…

The next day we sat by the harbor among the booths of fried noodles and vegetarian burritos. There was one skinny old maniac with dark red-brown skin, sunglass and a top hat, making mango cocktails in a blender. His hoarse voice scraped out over the terrible sounds of ice and juice bouncing off the metal blades. MangomangomangomangomangoMANGO! OK! Sreee! Tsu! Wan! MANGO! It’s a MANGO! Please. We drank beers from plastic cups and watched the scheduled acts that wandered on and off the grass stage. Some guy played a guitar and sang an original composition about peace that sounded like the mango man’s blender. A man who looked tanned down to his kidneys played a few songs on his mouth harp. He was selling them over at his tent if anyone was interested. I especially enjoyed the display from the local karate dojo. A rainbow of belts stood in straight lines, punching and kicking the air in unison. They lined up first graders and hard them break pine boards. When the boards wouldn’t break on the first or second try the sensei would run over and guide the kid’s foot through the board with his hands. The girls who had played the lovely madrigal of accents on the bus the day before sat to our right in pretty smiles and sandals and sunglasses, talking about nothing.

…

Kodo played again that night. Well, actually, Kodo and special guest “Urban Tap” played that night. Well, actually, Urban Tap had played the night before, with special guest “Kodo.” The thing is, Urban Tap is not very interesting, and I don’t want to write about them, I want to write about Kodo. So I’m changing parts of the story. I will say this: Urban Tap is a tap dancer with some drummers and a trumpet player and a saxophone player and this guy who breakdanced and this girl who dances, but I didn’t really want to see them. I wanted to see the Japanese drummers with the fabulous abs.

Steve bought a bottle of local sake, “They had some really dope junmaishu, this shit is gonna be awesome”, we sat in the dark with our knees up to our chest, taking swigs from the brown bottle and watching the miracles on the stage. There were two or three encores, I don’t really remember. I think they ran out of material and played the same song twice.

Steve and Chika saw me down to the docks, down to my bus. I was riding overnight to Tokyo, off to work in the morning, they were still on vacation. We hugged and nodded, skin thick with sun and sand heads thick with drink, waving our goodbyes. The bus rolled onto the ferry, and off the island.

…

A week later Steve and Chika came to Tokyo for a farewell party. People started to give speeches. Here is my speech at Steve and Chika’s loosely translated from the Japanese:

Steve is… I haven’t even known Steve for a year but… Steve… is…. There were lots of friends. We were going to hot spring town, Christmas! It was hotel. Steve. Because… one night, Christmas Tree! We stole many things on Christmas Eve! The next day everyone wakes up! But… the night before, Steve and I make Christmas Tree! And… steal… things. It is Christmas. Steve is a... Santa Claus.

And then everyone clapped.

a golden week (III. a)

III.

I awoke somewhere around three or four in the morning to the whispering sound of rain. It was demure and polite, barely making a sound as it tiptoed across the ground and over my sleeping bag, and I liked the thought of drifting back to sleep on this misty river bank.

I changed my mind a few minutes later when the rain turned from Romantic to Biblical, fat drops falling like bullets and flashes of lightning detonating on the horizon. My poor loyal sleeping bag was hastily stuffed away, dejected and sopping, and I made an idiot dash across the rugby field, jumping through waterfalls and praying there wasn’t a thunderbolt up there with my name on it. I sprinted into the first shelter I could find, a little concrete tunnel shot straight through a hill for pedestrians, cyclists and sopping morons who think tents are for sissies.

It wasn’t exactly the most auspicious way to start my trip, but I had plenty of momentum in me. I changed into a dry set of clothes, confident that I was the only one stupid enough to be outside at four in the morning in a lightning storm. Like most spring storms it had the demeanor of a two year old, screaming hysterically for half an hour then fading into whimpers and forgetting about what the big deal was. So by five we were back where we started, in a transparent drizzle that instead of getting you wet was merely decorative.

The night before Takasaki had seemed atmospheric, otherworldly, and I had enjoyed the shock of wandering a city with no people in it. But in the dull drizzly morning the city looked about as romantic as my sleeping bag, wet, gray and getting moldy. I tromped into a convenience store for a cup of coffee and spooked the clerk stocking the shelves, gaping at this lanky white man who had materialized at five in the morning in a rain storm. I walked around the remnants of Takasaki castle, which was now a public park. The remaining fragments of the castle were weird little non-sequiters, carefully buffed and labeled. A single corner of the outer wall, the central gate, opening onto a playground, a two story public library sitting quietly where a towering keep had once ruled the landscape. An old man was taking his dog for an early morning walk, the mutt eagerly sniffing out traces of his medieval ancestors, then peeing all over their scents.

…

I had planned to hitchhike out of Takasaki, but the sky continued sniffling, and still threatened to break out into tears at any moment. The night before I’d decided to head for the mountains of Nagano, but without a car the only way in was by bullet train, which was a lot less badass and infinitely more expensive than freeloading rides off of strangers. Come to think of it, the ticket was just about the same price as a night in a reasonable hotel in Takasaki.

We slid through a craggy volcanic landscape, through mountain passes, in and out of tunnels and into misty valleys that plunged straight down, then disappeared before you could spot the bottom. The ghostly sleek train sliced through the landscape so cleanly it scarcely seemed real. Sharp cliffs and raging spring rivers that had swallowed centuries of travelers flicked by in bursts and flashes as petite women in suits and scarfs pushed carts of beer and coffee down the center aisle.

In Nagano city the clouds hung so low you could reach up and pluck them out of the sky. I switched to a hobbly little two car train, munching on an apple as we chugged through vegetable gardens and people’s backyards. We passed a station where every square inch of the platform was covered in screeching six-year olds in matching red hats. The whole train breathed a collective sigh of relief when they stayed put. The sign of one stop said Ba-sute, which at first I thought was funny because it sounds just like the Japanese pronunciation for “Birthday”, but when I looked closer I noticed the characters meant “Grandmother” and “Throw Away”. The nine year old sitting across from me asked her grandfather what it meant.

“In the old days when the people grew too old to work they would run them out of the villages and into the wilderness, because there wasn’t enough food for everyone.” The little girl nodded, fully satisfied and apparently undisturbed by this answer. “But,” he added, watching her nervously, “That was a long time ago.” She nodded, unconcerned.

“A long time ago…” he repeated, just to make sure.

paying for it

The girls and I have a running joke now. They see me stamping home through the neighborhood and press the hostess club flyers on me with an exaggerated sales pitch, helpfully translated for my benefit."Fun garls! Come on! Come on!" The standard response to this is the zombie shuffle, but after an hour on the trains I've had enough of the living dead, and want to infuse a little humanity into the evening. So I’ve been working on this special smile. My Mom’s father used to be able to catch my eyes from the other side of the party and just by twinkling his eyes he laughed at everything in the room. You and me man, we know better. Those twinkly eye genes have to be in me somewhere, so I’ve been trying this with the hookers. In my mind the eyes are twinkling out "You gotta do what you gotta do, huh. Thanks but no thanks" and I grin at our private joke, people walking around in these silly bodies, at these funny ways the world works on us.

So all they get for their trouble is a weird American who is taking the time to leer at them but not the trouble to stop and spend some money. But he might stop by tomorrow, so they grin back and hand him a flyer.

None of the girls are past twenty-five, but they all have deep voices that scrape out of their throats, clanging on potholes and debris on the way up. There they are every night, teetering on pencil thin heels, cocktail dresses swallowed up by big, blobby rayon overcoats, gnawing on a stick of gum and trying to snag some interest from the rivers of suits rushing through the neighborhood. The sports bar across the street with its skewers of roasted chicken isn’t exactly competition, but they both fight for the same few seconds of attention from the suits. I have to say I’m weirdly relieved whenever I see one of them snagging a customer: her skin parlor-tanned to the color of roasted peanuts, his moist and gray from the office lamps and whiskey. Now she can stop bothering

I’m pretty sure there are laws out there somewhere that cash for handjobs means fines or a night in jail, but somebody forgot to tell the commuters, the girls on the corner, the local cops and the proprietors of Jungle Pub, who have a painted van that idles in front of the station, color headshots of a dozen glassy eyed girls grinning over the spray painted palm tree design. Okay, so, technically it isn’t a whorehouse, just a bar where a fella can sip a few whiskeys and enjoy a nice chat with a few high school dropouts in one-piece dresses cut for maximum boobage. Or so I’ve heard.

The fact is I’m in the minority here. I had an ex-girlfriend once who refused to believe I’d never paid for it. “Come on, I’m not gonna get mad. Every guy does it; it’s like getting a period for guys, right?” She grew up in a mountain village where the only immigrants for 100 kilometers were the three Fillipina girls “hostesses” at a second story club downtown, so I wrote it all off as bumpkin delusions. I’d heard the guys down in the sports promotion section of the town government snickering over the bra sizes of the girls down at Good Times Pub, that was one thing. But when a good friend of three years, a vegetarian and an animal shelter volunteer with sweet puppy eyes, a soft voice, a young bride and a ten month old son starts gushing about living single and whooping it up with the girls down at Good Times Pub, well, now we’ve entered the realm of the profoundly weird. It’s almost like I was living in a foreign country.

=

I used to sublet from a portly and middle aged South American man named Pepe who moved here in the late eighties with his young American bride in tow. She gave up on him a few years ago and went back to the US with their daughter, he stayed here with his teaching jobs and the rural Japanese home he rented for practically nothing. Propped between school portraits of his eleven-year old girl and woodblock prints of Argentinean peasants was a study was lined with worn and considered paperbacks by writers a generation or two away from myself. Sitting confidently among serious and nutritious volumes by Thomas Wolfe and Doris Lessing was a slim little number by a forgotten press: The Pink Guide to Tokyo. Since it looked like the thing hadn’t been used in a few years I probably should have swiped it for the sake of anthropology, but for all I know it’s still there, pages yellowing around black type and conveniently labeled street maps. So it looks like we’ll have to go on memory. Which – as my mother and all my ex-girlfriends know – is a fairly approximate instrument, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

Without a little biographical blurb on the back cover you had to guess at the life of the author of “The Pink Guide to Tokyo”, but he smeared himself all over the book. You couldn’t move ten pages without tripping over something about “a depravity only rivaled by the Foreign Press Club in Tokyo” or “something this reporter has never seen before.” He clearly loved the life of the foreign journalist, but unlike Hunter S. Thompson he wasn’t published in Rolling Stone and didn’t have a decent sense of humor. The book reeked of a failed marriage, a midlife crisis, a desperate need to impress the guys back at the press club. But for anyone with a personal, professional or academic interest in paid sex in Tokyo in the early 90’s the book was worth all ten dollars.

The author of “The Pink Guide Guide to Tokyo” and I do have one thing in common: we are both fascinated by the fact that the Japanese sex business doesn’t seem to be worried about hellfire or damnation, just turning a profit. Its not that being a hostess is respectable here, it’s just a fact of life. You may not want your kids to be garbage collectors, but somebody’s kids are gonna do it. Like my ex from the mountains, Japanese girls just seem to take this in stride: in the morning you scrape the ice off the windshield, in the evening boys are out paying for it.

The question, I guess, is why pay for it? Why sell it? This isn’t like selling grilled chicken skewers or giving English lessons, I hear it’s something closer to massage. I just finished Paul Theroux’s “Dark Star Africa” where he spends a surprising amount of time defending prostitution to its critics. Randy old Paul sees it all as simple economics, quoting a former factory who said she got wise when she realized that “the whole time, I was sitting on a gold mine.” If you trust my memory, I remember reading a syndicated newspaper article where a high-profile madame in Amsterdam responded to anti-prostitution proposals with the weird comment that “my girls are too lazy to do anything else! What do you expect them to do?!” The argument to decriminalize money-for-booty is pretty much the same as the cry to legalize dope: remove the stigma, cut out the organized crime and the violence, regulate it, make it safer for the working girls, the working guys, the johns, hand out licenses, spot inspections every few months.

I found a discarded copy of “Weekly Playboy” on the train the other day and picked it up: out of curiosity. The funny thing was, I did read it for the articles, and they were kind of interesting, but not the least bit edifying. Hef’s sophisticated liberal sensibilities kind of got lost in the Japanese syndication; instead of being padded with witty and intelligent articles by the nation’s foremost writers the cheesecake photos were supplemented by detailed reviews of Tokyo red light districts (a regular feature apparently) a pretty puritanical expose of urban teens doing club drugs and surprisingly detailed interviews with adult video stars on their earliest sexual experiences. It was this last part I actually found the most intriguing, and not merely to find out that Aimi-chan’s second boyfriend was a salaryman whose penis wasn’t quite as large as she’d hoped. For one thing, by some kind of weird censorship the magazine had to blank out the middle syllables of the words d*ck and p*ssy. Right next to a photo of Aimi-chan tied up with clothes pins on her nipples. Turn the page and you get a comic where two secretaries seduce some shlub in a Laundromat.

What was really interesting was reading about two people get really excited talking about sex that seemed so guilt-free, so perfectly ordinary, so, well, un-sexy. “I really liked him a lot, but after I moved to Tokyo it was hard to keep up the relationship running long distance, so we decided to break up.” “How did you take it?” “Oh, he seemed more upset than me. I was so busy with work and everything.” “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Whenever I’m back in the US I see “Porn Star” logos flashing from t-shirts and backpacks, sparking out “Sexy! Dangerous! Confident! Rebellious!” If only they could all read Japanese Weekly Playboy and learn that the love lives of Porn Stars doesn’t beat that of your average CPA. Same d*cks and p*ssies as the rest of us.

Walking home from work I can hear the hookers and their Johns talking about her student loans and his gambling debts. She wonders about a career in beauty salons and he comforts her with the slim confidence of thirty more years experience at navigating planet earth. She’s got it, he’ll pay for it, and there they are, grinning at themselves walking around in these bodies that want to do the strangest things.

Idleness

January 1999

The first thing I did when I got back to campus was to tack an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper to the inside of my bedroom door with the following message printed in
36 point Impact font:

Concentrate!
You are here to educate yourself
intellectually, physically, and emotionally!

While my roommate and best friend at the time just nodded and went back to his pre-med track biology course reading, Stephen, the good-looking 20 year old who was one of the nominal counselor/advisors for our co-op dorm, took a different tack. “Umm, don’t you think some people might find that a bit intimidating?” His soft chocolate eyes were dashed pink from the bong hits we’d been taking in my dorm room. Getting high had not exactly been part of the “Concentrate!” game plan, but before I took the first drag I’d probably justified it under the “emotionally” category of the sign. Granted that category left a lot of wiggle room, but it was my sign’s attitude that mattered, not its specific wording. I don’t remember my reply to Stephen (my marijuana-ed head was trying to snap itself from the Neil Young riffs tangled in my frontal lobe), but I think I mumbled something about not wanting to waste my time.

Stephen and I were some of the few still holed up on campus during the January self-study “Winter Term”, the few and the weird who enjoyed spending a few weeks amid the great gray collegiate buildings huddled like dying dinosaurs in the snow drifts. The ice age never really ended, it just decided to retire to the North Pole, commuting down to Ohio every December to spend a few months pummeling the citizenry and remembering the good old days. There was something raw, monkish and intellectually sexy about toughing it out on the ice bound campus, scarf wrapped faces, armfuls of books trudged along stone paths slick with ice and studded with footprints.

My game plan for the month was both concrete and maddeningly vague. I had about two dozen hardbound books out from the library, having basically grabbed anything thick and ponderous looking. Thomas Pynchon, histories of American business and the Ottoman Empire, feminist film criticism, Marxist music history, Camus, Sartre, Marx, Engels, Heidegger, all complaining about something, biographies of Mahler and Debussy, dissertations on Chinese calligraphy, Japanese prints, Surrealism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Post-Post Modernism... Anything that looked intellectual, heavy, packed with vitamins.

For the physical part of my manifesto I set aside an hour before dinner when I would bundle up and shiver to the far side of campus to the indoor track clocking my times on 35 consecutive laps, trying to keep each one to a nice flat, round sixty seconds. Running was the one sport I’d ever felt aptitude for; given my hopelessness with footballs, basketballs, table tennis racquets and baseball bats, running was pretty straightforward. The more you put into it the better you did. I remember once watching a marathon on TV where the announcer talked about the thousands of vertical yards traveled by a head that bobbed too much, so I tried to keep my pace forward and not up and down. Other than that it was close your eyes and go.

The emotional part was by far the vaguest condition in this contract with myself, and in hindsight the weirdest as well. This project, lacking a specific goal was more of a life overhaul than approach to any one goal. The point, of course, was that I had this furious, monkish to be intellectual without a specific outlet for it. Basically I was taking the elements of my life up to that point, scraping away the dust and grit that had collected around them and ramping up the energy by a level of two or three. I was hoping my outer flesh would burn away to reveal a raw lean Rimbaud underneath mind glimmering in a kind of literary nirvana.

It also encompassed my rather fuzzy ambitions to get myself a girlfriend.

=

The dorm I lived in that January was a three story brick boarding house with a broad concrete porch, dull brass doorknobs for every room and a labyrinth of damp rooms in the basement. The newer dorms on campus looked like grubby alpine green legos that had been scrounged from the bottom of the bin and snapped onto free space in the center of campus, but my first year dorm seemed to squat on the mushy Ohio soil, it’s bulk pressing out in every direction. Its rooms were known as “the shoeboxes”, stacked along the narrow corridors and hacked into odd shapes to cram them all in. Each one had a fat white radiator that was plopped awkwardly against the wall and sat there burping all winter. When I moved in it was like a third roommate that had arrived first; it sat parked right between the windows as we tried to maneuver our college issued dressers and bed frames around its stubborn little bulk. (Asshole.)

Each radiator was heated by a grumpy pre-war boiler that lived in a damp concrete cell in the basement. One particularly frigid day that January it groaned and died, the greedy Ohio winter drinking up the heat and leaving our rooms stark and icy. The administration woke up from hibernation and scurried to find us temporary shelter in unused rooms around campus.

I was given a six by twelve foot single occupancy cell in the “East” dorm, named not for a college benefactor but for the side of campus it lay on. To birds and airline passengers passing overhead it would glide along as an upper case E, but the design was utilitarian, not clever. It was built during the 60’s, when dormitory design was primarily based around repressing student takeovers of college facilities: an E shape meant plenty of entrances and exits for riot cops to charge and a minimum of public gathering spaces. This prison style design concept continued to the rooms, where the concrete block walls were glazed dull white. My room had (1) desk, (1) frame bed and mattress, (1) dresser with (3) drawers, the faintest whiff of disinfectant and looked like a blank sheet of printer paper. I loaded the desk with books and my bulky 1998 laptop, piled the bed with winter blankets and left the older newspapers fluttering at the bottom of the dresser drawers. Even after the central heating was fixed I kept the place for three more weeks as my office, a stark little temple to my new religion of “Concentrate!”

=

I woke up every morning with a pin under my heart, pricking me out of the covers to shuffle over to the laptop and try to tap out the last wisps of my dreams into black-and-white rows on an LCD screen. Once I reached a dead end I'd dive into the books. It probably would have been healthier or more productive to have an overall plan, but I would plunge into the stinging cold water of the books with my eyes closed, thrash around for a few hours and come up for air only around lunch time.

After a quick lunch at the dining hall I'd repeat for a couple of hours and then head to the music library to immerse myself in Mahler symphonies, one after the other in numerical sequence. If anything their currents were stronger, their waters darker than the stupidly thick novels I was attempting. I would doze at the listening station, score spread in front of me on the desk, pages and overleafs threatening to tumble to the floor. Melodies tumbled and cascaded through waves of chords, time signatures shifting, occasionally the whole thing surging to a right angle at a key change. I was as lost here as anywhere else, stumbling out of the library at closing time, bleary and a bit dizzy. Thirty five laps around the track, dinner, then back to the cell to face off against the laptop and wrestle with my writing.

Out of that long month I can barely recall a single one of those books I read or the torturous stories and essays that I agonized over. I had hoped that by keeping up a rigorous “artistic” pattern that inspiration and goals would rise and wait bobbing on the surface for me to swing by and pick them up. I would keep myself in a state of constant awareness: voracious, trained, and alert for inspiration. The only thing my project was lacking (besides a specific goal), was a sense of humor. I was a grim little bastard, running around smacking my head against the heaviest books I could find without the faintest idea why I was doing it.

By the end of the month my monkish enthusiasm had dribbled out and I slumped back to my original building on the other side of campus. While I had been howling around a dark little room in the riot proof walls of East the other folks in my dorm had been quietly pursuing projects in the day and then curling under blankets to smoke grass, play hearts and watch 80’s high school flicks in the evening. After my experiments in isolation I realized this was probably the only sane response to an Ohio winter, snuggling in to watch Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure with a joint and half a dozen other bodies squirming and tingling with the weird head rush of being nineteen and away from home.

marrying people

"So, have you ever been a priest before?" the gnome asked me over a cup of coffee. Miwa-san and I had met in Shinjuku to go over the details of the job the next day. "I would have liked to have you come down and see Terry do a service yesterday, but we'll just have to do with this." He pulled a videocassette out of the pocket of his Zippo windbreaker. "The order is a little different, but words are all the same."

My Japanese is apparently now at the point where I am qualified to conduct wedding ceremonies.

I'd been hearing about the faux-Christian wedding industry for years, but it wasn't until this morning that I actually took the plunge. The set-up is simple: put on a priest's outfit, read a mixed Japanese and English script for twenty minutes with appropriate gestures to throw around the power of God, walk out with $130. Miracle on earth.

One of his Miwa-san's regular priests had cancelled at the last minute and he'd had to scour his phone book for Japanese speaking foreigners. A friend of a friend came up with my name and I got a call on Tuesday night. Meeting him Friday afternoon I had expected a sweaty little man in a suit, but was surprised to find that Miwa-san was actually a gnome: hunchy and twinkly, grey hairs bristling out from a shiny dome, gold spectacles, wisp of a beard and a smile like a five year old. After we'd gone over my scipt I asked how he'd gotten into the business of managing clergy.

"Oh, I've been doing this for ages, maybe eight, nine years now? I have a lot of other stuff going on: setting up sound systems, managing nuns. (just kidding, ed.) I'm also a musician: sax, piano, you know. Would do a lot of wedding gigs, and met a guy through that to see if I knew any foreigners who would be willing to do a wedding service. Originally I worked with Americans and Australians who were involved in the Tokyo music scene, now this has ended up becoming the main thing. As long as there's people, there'll be work in weddings," which is when he flashed the twinkly little smile that got him into gnome college. We waved our goodbyes and trotted off in opposite directions.

There is a scene in Lost In Translation where Scarlett Johannsen, wandering Kyoto, stumbles upon a traditional wedding procession. A dozen ethereal figures in Edo-era dress move slowly through the temple grounds, a white cloth headdress perched on the bride’s head like the wings of a bird, her face serene, wise, eternal. They drift out of the frame, a stunning wordless image, complete of itself. It is a lovely moment, signifying nothing other than its own radiant calm. Most Westerners have probably never seen anything like it. And I would be one of them.

Japanese, on the other hand, have seen hundreds of marriage scenes in Hollywood films. Beaming brides layered in white lace, bright soaring churches, hurled corsages, bells pealing celebration: the Christian wedding is glimmering, giddy, and most of all romantic. To this end Japanese weddings, while remaining secular at heart, have taken on more and more Christian trappings. Trains are lined with posters selling the romance of a wedding abroad in a real chapel. Canada's Prince Edward Island is a particularly popular location; Anne of Green Gables took place there. For those without quite enough cash for the foreign wedding, local churches, hotels and massive wedding service halls lure in engaged couples with photos of gleaming pews and stained glass windows. The Anglican church as brought to you by Walt Disney.

While a lot of people out there may be screaming that this is a total perversion of a Christian wedding ceremony, in my mind the Japanese have pretty much hit to the core of the Christian wedding, which is in their elaborate trappings: the dress and tuxedo, the rings and the tossed bouquet.


Given the poverty of ordained and native English speaking clergy in Japan, wedding planners filled in with the next best thing: throwing a minister’s robe on any old schmuck with a smattering of Japanese and tell him to smile. Besides, you think God has anything to do with this? Miwa-san put it pretty succinctly. “So I guess you’re familiar with how weddings are in America. Forget that, this has nothing to do with it. Make gestures, be animated, think of a scene from a movie. It’s a performance.”

Despite hailing from a country where 90% of the population believes in a higher power, I was raised in a staunchly agnostic family in suburban Connecticut, where Jesus coughs on the SUV fumes and outlet shopping. Our local churches were peeled off the pages of Martha Stewart Living, white New England chapels that accessorize the local neighborhoods. A church was once a source of pride to the local residents, but a proposal to build a new one down the road from my grandparents’ house was stopped dead by squeals from local residents: what about all the traffic? He may have made the world in seven days, but in Connecticut the Lord is just another prospective buyer in the homeowner’s market.

I only stepped into churches for weddings and funerals, where calm voiced men in robes earnestly spoke of death, marriage and God’s love to a family of agnostics who had better things to do with their Sunday mornings than sleep through Bible readings and gargle their way through a few stale hymns. For funerals we would stand up one by one to memorialize the deceased in anecdotes and recounting of family lore, but only after the minister had gotten in some biblical passages. My family wasn’t hippy enough to scrap the Christ garble altogether, it was just part of the show, a word from our sponsor, (God).

Which didn’t leave me with too many scruples about imitating a man of the cloth for an hour or so.

The organist and the choir ladies were a bit nervous during our rehearsal the next day, as I unknowingly slipped in conversational interjections into the stately formalized flow of the Japanese script. “Alrighty, would you mind stepping over here to sign the marriage certificate?” Miwa-san himself hovered around the empty pews in a thin gray suit that rumpled onto his body in the same shape as the windbreaker from the day before. “That was good, but try to speak a bit more slowly, dramatically.” The entire ceremony was give or take twenty minutes, the bulk of which was on me, intoning Bible passages in English and Japanese, raising hands and bestowing rings, and projecting a benign and stately presence.

Ten minutes before the ceremony I donned the robe, smoothed out my hair, finished off my thermos ginger tea and stepped out to meet the bride and groom. The chit-chat was kept to a quick exchange of names before we launched into a run through. The bride’s father had a sweet little pinched face behind a pair of spectacles large as a set of biscuits, and the lead choir lady rushed them through the basics of stepping in synch down the aisle while the bridegroom fidgeted next to the pulpit. I kept my face as bemused and stately as possible with my flock. I examined their faces and tried to imagine which one had decided to shell out the extra money to have me as part of the little show, but the image didn’t come to me, the bride and groom looked too terrified to mutter their “I do’s.”

We did a simple run through of the vows, “I do.” “Amen.” “I do.” “Amen.”, mimed the rings and then hurried to get ourselves ready before the curtain rose at 11:30. “Just don’t drop the rings!” the lead choir lady whispered before the doors opened and the guests filed in. Smile, nod, if you believe it they will.

Twenty minutes later vows, rings and saliva had been exchanged, and the guests were packed out into the rooftop garden for the reception. The doors closed and the singer, the organist, Miwa-san and I packed back into the locker room shedding robes and exchanging congratulations. This being my first time as a priest they’d all been a bit nervous but I’d even nailed the timing for the applause during the conjugal kiss. They did have a few comments for me though. “Just try not to be so… heavy the next time, okay? I dunno, more peppy or something.” I was about to hang my robe on a bar of choir outfits before Miwa-san stopped me, “That’s a different company, ours are over here. So who wants to get some lunch?” The four of us slipped through lobby and past the wedding reception just beginning to germinate in the courtyard. The newlyweds were too busy blushing their way through the guests to notice us leave, so we hunched by in our winter coats, leaving our audience to their cake, champagne and matrimony.

when the circus comes to town

1.
A. called at the same instant his face emerged from the photo paper. We hadn’t spoken since he’d moved back to the states to chase grants and scholarships to fund his perpetual art addiction. Both A. and darkrooms have odors of the occult about them, and the fact printing his picture had summoned a phone call from across the globe had a strange symmetry to it. Best not to ask too many questions about these things. Dark powers fuel A., keeping him in a state of perpetual crackling focus. The photograph was taken a few years ago, as he reclines in the corner of his solid white apartment, a slashing ink painting of his uncurling above him like the smoke from the invisible fire behind his eyes. His hair was long back then, tangled in the same obsidian blacks of the scroll. I cradled the phone against my shoulder as I slid the photo into the stop bath and listened to A. speak. Conversations with A. move with the same sharp strokes as his artwork, bristling braids of abrupt impulses twisted to a single focus.

Turned out wasn’t A., but a friend of his I was to talk to. It was Tuesday. The friend was coming to Tokyo with a band and a documentary film crew the next morning, they needed a translator on Thursday and Friday, I would get money and meals and my big crack at show biz. On Thursdays I coach adults skills relating to the capture and taming of the English language, so Friday it would be.

In a society that feeds on images, a film crew is a safari hunting the choicest bucks in the herd. It is an amoral and self contained unit that picks up stragglers like a conquering army. It hews individuals down to caricatures of their roles: the egomaniac director, the technically oriented camera-man, the benevolent producer that counts the pennies and soaks in the energy of the expedition, the flurry of gophers that haul tripods and tiptoe around the general. I had met all these characters before in movies and novels, and suddenly here were half a dozen American males my own age slipping into these eternal roles with their own particular variations. The director’s arrogance solidified into a metrosexual wardrobe and a smile that he hadn’t been used innocently for years. The crisp clean black shirt and baseball cap of the cameraman suggesting the one quiet, confident kid in middle school who could land consecutive three pointers but didn’t gloat about it. The producer was the veteran of close to eighty Phish shows, which explained several things: his rabid fanboy enthusiasm for the project, his tendency to rate everything in grades of hyperbole (“the fucking greatest”, “the shit”), and his self-consciously atrocious dancing that married white-boy funkiness to an epileptic fit. Somehow the squirts, prudes, jocks and obsessives I’d known all my life had brought their quirks into adulthood intact, inflicting them on girlfriends and coworkers, Tokyo and documentary films.

The actual subject of the film mystified me. It was ostensibly about this rock band I’d never heard of (“the 26th largest touring act in the US” according to the producer), but the director described a massive social critique in sweeping op-ed page phrases like “Post-modern consumer society”, “Me Generation vs. We Generation” and “Society of Excess Imitation”. The list of questions I was supposed to fire at our interviewees looked liked they’d been penned somewhere over the Pacific between the third and fourth micro-bottle of scotch against the spine of a historical background section of the 1993 edition of Lonely Planet: Japan. “How does the concept of Bushido apply to the modern Japanese corporation?” “Does Japan imitate the West too much?” “Would you characterize Japan as an excessive consumer society?” The director didn’t actually have any questions about Japan, he’d simply rearranged the grammar on a few simple statements and thrown question marks on the end.

I was here to help them speak with the natives. I was that strange lonely figure whose white skin shone out beneath the war paint, who was torn between the simultaneous desires to both protect and shelter his adopted people and display their wonders to his fellow white men. I had been living in this country among friends and neighbors but suddenly they became but “the Japanese people.” I felt myself getting sucked into the reckless momentum of the film crew, their brazen tribal confidence. They were paying me to give them the real Japan, but somehow I wanted to shelter the Japanese innocence from the marauders. Navigating the train platforms and labyrinthine neighborhoods, I led the white men to the watering holes, where we picked our prey carefully before shooting indiscriminately.

A group of males wandering with a battery of heavy shooting equipment exudes a morbid fascination just about anywhere on the planet, even in a city as saturated with camera crews as Tokyo. I had taken them to a university campus, where small flocks of undergraduates eyed us from courtyards and staircases. After getting a small orange press badge from the public relations department we began the interviews. Aside from the initial ping of fear I took to interviewing pretty quickly. All these years of coaxing conversations out of thin air from reluctant English students suddenly showed their merit. The crew looked on with glazed eyes as I guided the conversations through the tundra’s and valleys of “generation gap”, “relevancy of art” and “mass consumerism.” A pair upperclassmen just off studies abroad navigated the questions with easy aplomb, a couple pimply freshmen still looking for the library hacked at them with nervous enthusiasm, and two coeds aiming to be public servants answered the questions like true bureaucrats, deflecting any bite or conflict and letting everything settle into a lukewarm consensus. As we were interviewing them a male friend of theirs walked by with a wary look on his face. “Are you guys being scouted or something?” In Japanese, being scouted has much narrower connotations than the English: it almost always means porn.

By the end of the day we were back in their hotel in downtown Shibuya and the cameras had turned on me. Three years in this country and suddenly I’m the local expert. Hopefully I got through it with only a two feet dangling from my lips, but we’ll have to wait for the final product. For all I know they could edit my forty minute of words down to the sentence “this...Country...is...insane...Get me...out?...of...here!” I ducked out at half past eight, had to meet a few friends for a farewell party across town. Close to a dozen other Japan hands crammed around a table in a Shinjuku izakaya, the talk peppered with whole chunks of Japanese, jokes and gestures colored years among the natives, the roar from our party dissolving in the clattering din of a score of other tables.

2.

Living abroad as an ex-pat is just like any other drug: the initial effects are disorienting, frightening, maddening, exhilarating. Some folks put away the experience and only bring it out in idle conversation (“I tried that once!”), some flit on and off, returning for weeks or months at a time, and not a small number get into the habit of it. To live in Japan as an ex-pat is to know that some part of you will always remain outside this country, that the way you make your living will almost always revolve centrally around your nationality and not your individuality. We are language teachers, hustlers, prostitutes, translators, announcers, DJ’s, importers, exporters, cooks of exotic foods, sellers of exotic wares, entertainers, and usually a few of the above. We might be factory workers, but we are never cops or firemen or judges.

Translation between individuals may just be the most direct experience of this; putting yourself directly between both worlds and watching them try to speak to one another. I must enjoy the experience, because I signed up again for nothing more than a free concert ticket and a backstage pass.

The club occupied the entire fifth floor of an unremarkable Tokyo department store. I had to weave through a few racks of imported hip-hop apparel to get to the stairs, and then suddenly I’m inside and several hundred people are milling about waiting for the show to start. The V.I.P. area was a wobbly partition and a plastic braided rope on the left side of the stage. I shook hands with the documentary crew like old friends. The producer bought us all beers. A handful of photographers shouldered blocky black cameras, a few American girls I took to be girlfriends of the band furtively handled a dark green Ziplocked brick, sound engineers and roadies scurried in and out of a backstage door. If the documentary film crew is a safari, the rock band is a conquering army: Alexander’s host and Genghis Khan’s cavalry, Sherman’s divisions sweeping through the South, a train of grunts, cooks, refugees and tagalongs trailing in their wake, every single one pricked by the sickening exhilaration of sweeping through border, law and reason.

Backstage after the show people lounged in footstools and chairs, nicking complimentary beers and orbiting the five band members, who shook hands and smiled and kissed their girlfriends (if they had them) and batted around plans for their last night in Tokyo. I suppose we all have cartoon sketch ideas of the backstage of a rock concert, culled from legends of the Who and the Rolling Stones presiding over night after night of Dionysian orgies of virgin flesh and psychedelics, and for all I know they may be true, but this was so much simpler and human than all that. Just a bunch of folks lounging around after work in the tingling aftershock of electric sound, nothing more radical than an undergraduate party, some of us just barely managing a handshake, some of us just thinking of a warm meal, and a few of us flicking glances at that short guy with the steely bronzed arms who had just been pounding the drums for a few hours. Oh, I thought to myself, those girls over there are groupies. But the thought didn’t stick or even ring very true, the word had reduced a human impulse to a caricature. Wasn’t I also back here out of some curiosity about the whole process? Were my interests here purely anthropological? Didn’t I also end up at the neighborhood restaurant chatting with the keyboardist and his girlfriend amid a few dozen other roadies and hangers on? I stick by my army metaphor, our minds buzzing on the collective rush of bodies crashing through our caution and daily morality. We were the whole world, given the right situation we’d have been stealing livestock and sowing fields with salt, our brain chemistry was already primed and ready.

It was in this frame of mind that the director sallied the crew into a midnight attack on the Shibuya crowds, our minds loosened by beer and rock and roll. A few days before I had deflected and padded the cannonball inanities he was throwing at undergraduates, but now we cut straight to the bone, fans of the band musing on the present and future of Japan, the veiled hostility of the director’s questions unmuffled, all hearts racing on the same electric pulse charging the neon fireworks all around us.

There was more beer and wranglings and karaoke and then there was a few hours sleep in a hotel room with two members of the film crew and a poor girl who had been swept up in the whole thing and suddenly found herself without a train to ride home on or a bed for the night. Maybe if it had been Mick Jagger’s party we would have woken up to streams of cocaine dribbling off the busted frame of a ravaged table, but it was just four bleary mortals in a moderately messy hotel room.

The various grunts and career officers trickled down to the hotel lobby in twos and threes, all military banter and talking shop, a few girls hovering at the edges of the conversations. Oh, I thought absently, these are the groupies. And this time the thought did stick, and it made me ill. Last night they had just been curious folks like me, but this morning the talk had turned to departure times, layovers, Hawaiian tourdates and German shooting locations, and they were left adrift and ignored. I watched astonished as the director and crew who just last night had been haranguing against Japan’s hyper-consumerism compared the plunder from their shopping excursions that morning. They ooh-ed and aah-ed like pygmies in front of a radio as the producer showed them the two hundred dollar pair of limited edition Japanese-market only Adidas he had discovered.

Hotel clerks and baggage handlers were dispatched in curt, hungover voices. Roadies and band members boarded different buses for the airport, and I saw the documentary crew off in the chilly October air to a stream of goodbyes and promises of more translating work in post-production. I headed home to whip up a meal and wash up before work in the afternoon. The white men had left with their trophies, but I had to get back to living among the natives, selling my talents and living a quiet life.