You fell asleep just after nine o’clock last night and woke up at 11:53 dreaming that an old high school friend named Lee Rigiero was being beat up by the Japanese police. This was the most vivid of dreams. The only thing odd about it was that this beating was taking place in the little town of Central Point, Oregon, where both you and Lee Rigiero once lived, and waking up you felt completely disoriented. It felt you were waking up again in Central Point, but that didn’t seem odd at all. You felt right at home there. What you couldn’t help wondering, though, was what were the Japanese police doing there?
As if there aren’t enough gaijin for them to beat up over here in Japan?
It wasn’t clear in your mind why they were there, but there was no question about why they were beating up Lee—he wouldn’t stop singing a song. He was singing it for another friend of yours who was getting married. He was singing it over and over. You thought it was a great song, but the Japanese police didn’t like it as much as you did, and they told him to stop. He didn’t, so they beat him up. Bastards!
You rolled over and went back to sleep. Now you’re awake again and wishing you could remember the song Lee was singing in your dream. It has left your mind completely, and all you remember about it is how much you liked it. You wish you had got up then, at 11:53, and made some sort of record of it immediately, the way Paul McCartney did with Yesterday when he woke up dreaming that song. But, oh well. What does it matter? You can’t play the piano. You can’t play the guitar. You can’t play the left handed bass. You can’t even sing. And you’re not good looking either, so in spite of the Sgt. Pepper shirt, you’re no Paul McCartney. But except for that sad series of facts, you feel convinced that one of the best pop songs of all time has just slipped through your fingers and out of your sleepy mind while your old friend Lee Rigiero was getting the shit kicked out of him in his own back yard by a bunch of uniformed foreigners screaming at him in a language he didn’t understand. You understood it. They were calling him a Mexican. It didn’t seem to make any difference to them that he isn’t one.
You like Ofunato better this morning than you did last night. But not a lot better. The mountains still hang over the edge of the town like gargoyles on a medieval castle, and they’re still smothered in thick globs of fog. The harbor side, however, is prettier than the city side if you can manage to overlook the long row of small industrial operations lining the far edge of the inlet, but you can’t.
You hurry to the station and get on your train with less than 1000 yen in your wallet after you’ve bought your ticket, and you unceremoniously leave this town having learned almost nothing about it, except that they make a mean pumpkin salad, and now in the morning light, you wish you hadn’t been so rude to the woman at the restaurant last night.
You’re an asshole. You have issues.
The woman’s not even the one who was laughing at you.
In fact, no one was laughing at you. The boys were laughing, yes. But they were laughing simply because they were embarrassed. They were embarrassed because they can’t speak English. They can’t speak English because they never studied it. They never studied it because they didn’t have time to. They didn’t have time because they were too busy at school everyday studying that unfathomable nonsense the Japanese Bureau of Education calls English, and that unfathomable nonsense doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with actually learning to communicate in the language. And if those kids only understood that fact maybe they wouldn’t have been so embarrassed. But like all Japanese people, they’re under the government-sponsored illusion that they actually studied English in school. So of course they’re embarrassed, beaten down, frustrated and fraught over the inescapable fact that they can’t begin to function in the language. They feel stupid. What they don’t realize is that their government wants them to feel that way. The Japanese government is slow, and often it’s heartless, but it’s certainly more efficient than many governments, and if it actually wanted a population that could function in English, sooner or later, no doubt, it would have one.
At least until very recently, however, the process of learning English hadn’t even begun, and what they’ve been teaching in Japanese schools isn’t English. Yet the nation has dedicated millions of man-hours to abusing their citizens with this process, which doesn’t teach anybody even the rudiments of English. It seems impossible that there can be absolutely no method to such national madness. They must be doing this on purpose.
They must be.
So what exactly is it that they’re doing, then? And what exactly have the schools been teaching in English classes here for the past 60 years if it isn’t English?
You personally think all that effort the country has poured into this absurd excuse for English education is not to teach anybody English at all, but merely to teach everybody how different the English language is from the Japanese language, and by extension, how different white people are from Japanese people. Both aspects of this myth, of course, are ridiculous. Still, this appears to be what’s happening here. You see evidence of it every day. In fact, you’re a part of it. You’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. You’re a goddamn English teacher, after all. You have a lot to answer for!
Looking out from your seat on the train, you see the bay scattered with marine farming operations. They consist of orange or blue baskets floating in rows just below the surface of the water. And just out of curiosity you ask a boy sitting near you if he knows what they are. He says “wakarimasen.” This, on the surface, means simply “I don’t know anything about it.” But many times it includes the additional message, “I don’t care either,” and this is definitely one of those times.
“Are you from around here?” you ask him, though you already know he is. He’s wearing a high school uniform—he probably thinks he’s studying English every day.
He says, “Yes.” And, as if to prove your point, he says this in English. And that marks the end of that conversation. He has more important things to worry about than what people can do for a livelihood in the town where he lives. He has enemies, after all. He has the entire Japanese Bureau of Education and all of the Sadists who earn their livelihood there to deal with all day every day for the next few years, if not for the rest of his life, and you can hardly blame him for his unpleasant attitude. You leave him alone. But when the train attendant comes by you stop him and ask him if he knows what they’re growing out in the bay. He doesn’t seem to have much of an idea either, but at least he tries to answer. “Scallops and seaweed and maybe oysters,” he says but his answer has the intonation of a question more than a statement of fact. He’s made the same guess you’d already made. The same guess anybody would make—anybody but a high school student, that is, because high school students spend all day everyday memorizing things that don’t matter, and being taught never to think about those things in any logical ways, though that isn’t likely anyway since nobody has ever taught them any logical ways of thinking about things in the first place, at least not here in Japan—and for about the bazillionth time in your life you wish you were one of those people who lacks all curiosity about things. How much easier your life would be. Not to mention the lives of people who find themselves sitting near you on trains. But the fact is, you do have a curiosity in things, and looking this up later you’ll find to your surprise that they’re raising squid out there as well. Scallops, seaweed, oysters and squid. All of these are foods you have learned to eat only after coming here, and they’re all foods you now love.
You disembark at Wakinosawa Station in the small city of Rikuzen Takata. There is no turnstile here and nobody to take your ticket. In fact, there isn’t much of anything here and you have no idea what to do with the ticket. Usually there’s at least a box to put it in. Not here. And of course there are no coin lockers anywhere nearby either. There is a small, covered seating area on the platform and you consider leaving your bag there on the bench while you walk to Fumanji, your next temple—your next pagoda. If you do, there is almost no chance that it will be stolen, but you recall the big uproar you caused at Juo station in Ibaragi when you left your bag sitting on the grass there, and it occurs to you that if you leave your bag in the waiting area here there is a good possibility somebody might contact the police about it, which is about the last thing you need. You have neither the time nor the energy to deal with the Japanese police, especially after what they did to Lee Rigiero in Central Point, Oregon last night. You walk around behind the platform and hide your bag under a bush. You do this quickly. You doubt very much that anybody will notice your green bag at the base of a green bush next to the platform once you’ve left it there, but you’re a little worried that somebody may catch you in the act of hiding it there. There is no chance that your presence will go completely unnoticed here, after all. Some harmless citizen could be staring out through a window at you right now, and saying to himself “Fuck a duck!”
You walk across the two-lane highway in the cool, quiet morning and climb up a ladder to stand on one of the highest seawalls in Japan. It’s six and a half meters above the shore. This, you understand, is because the area has a history of huge tsunamis. The largest earthquake ever measured struck southern Chile on May 22, 1960, and 22 hours later tsunami waves as high as 10.7 meters hit this area of Japan, 17,000 kilometers away from the epicenter, killing 142 Japanese people and destroying both the railroad station you just disembarked from and large parts of Ofunato where you stayed last night.
That 1960 tsunami also destroyed the life of a five-year-old boy in an isolated area of southern Peru where villagers gathered on higher land to watch a series of waves rush relentlessly through their homes and fields on the coastal lowlands. Looking out on this destruction, a local religious man named Juana Mamuncura Anen demanded the sacrifice of a neighbor’s grandson in order to calm the earth and settle the ocean. The sacrificial child had his arms and legs cut off by the religious man and his neighbor, the child’s own grandfather, and was planted in the sand on the beach like a stake, to be washed away into the great big blue. The whole story sounds like something from the legends of the Incas, but it happened during your lifetime. In fact, this boy was born a year after you were. And the only party unsatisfied by his brutal death, apparently, was a young man from whom two horses were stolen and cooked up to feed those who attended the ritual. When the stolen horses were reported, local authorities learned of the sacrificial murder and arrested the two men who had done it. The men pleaded guilty then recanted, but were ultimately convicted. They were released after two years, a judge ruling that those involved had “acted without free will, driven by an irresistible natural force of ancestral tradition.”
This is a little story you have learned to keep in mind for those occasions when religious minded, if well meaning, people question your atheism. You may, in fact, be wrong about god, you tell them, but so what? You will gladly choose that over being wrong about almost everything else.
You’re looking out upon the calm waters of the Pacific Ocean. There are a few small boats down on the shore, and scattered around are all the signs of a fishing community. They are all so far below you that you’re afraid to walk the wall. Talk about your life as Humpty Dumpty!
You would hate to take a fall.
You stand in one spot for a few seconds then climb back down the ladder and spend the next few minutes photographing a beautiful stack of effervescent blue fishing nets folded up neatly and placed in rows along the inside of the sea-wall. These are another of the kinds of things that catch your photographer’s eye—patterns and colors; colors and patterns. As long as the light is right, almost anything can fall before the focus of your lens, and one of the photos you get here will make you very happy when you get home and get a chance to work on it.
You’ve taken the map from here to Fumanji Temple out of your bag, and with that in one hand and your camera bag in the other you finally set out to see your 104th pagoda. It’s supposed to be 40 minutes away by foot, and you look forward to the walk more than the pagoda itself. The air is cold and damp. You walk fast. If you miss the next train you’ll be here till late afternoon with nothing to do, and you don’t want that. There’s a nice beach here, you understand, and according to the pamphlet you found at Ofunato station last night, it’s flanked by a lovely row of ancient pine trees, but you grew up in Oregon, for crying out loud—you’ve seen enough pine trees flanking the ocean to last a lifetime, and you don’t want beaches. You just want to get to the end of this long pagoda road. You’re restless and rushed. You’ve been traveling too long and you’re tired to the bone.
You go north a couple hundred meters past the lumber mill and turn left. You grew up in a little mill town yourself. Your father worked in the mill there. He was the sawyer. He came home everyday smelling of sawdust, and the smell of cut wood reminds you of your childhood. It’s one of the most beautiful smells in the world. It makes you feel suddenly younger and lighter. You feel happier. You walk faster.
You come to a junior high school, but there is no junior high school on your map. Normally this would be fine. Lots of things get left off of maps here. There are just too many roads and too many buildings to include everything on every cheap little map. But it so happens that there is a grade school on the map, so you can’t help but wonder if the map isn’t mistaken. You can’t help but wonder if the junior high school you’re standing in front of right now isn’t the same building as the grade school on the map. It wouldn’t be the first time your maps had let you down.
You stand at a crossroads in front of the school, trying to compare the streets on the map to the streets you see before you. You’re convinced that this is not the school on the map, but there are five different directions you can take from here and you can’t figure out which one of them leads past the school on the map and on to Fumanji. A boy comes by in a crew cut. He stops in front of you and bows. This is strange. It’s like a scene out of a movie. He smiles. He says “konnichiha.”
“Do you know a temple named Fumanji?” you ask him.
“Yes. I know it.”
“Do you know which of these roads leads to it?”
He looks around. He points one way. Then he points another. “I’m nervous,” he says.
This, you have already noticed. “Don’t worry,” you say. “I’ll ask somebody else.” As if there was anybody else around to ask.
“It’s either that way or that way,” he says, indicating the two directions he had pointed to earlier.
“Okay. I see. I think I’ll be able to find it. Thank you.”
“I’ve never met a foreigner before,” he says. But because Japanese works the way it does, he’s able to say this without using either the word gaijin or its more politically correct form, gaikokujin. A direct translation of what he actually says would be “I met for the first time.” But you know what he means. Clearly it isn’t you, as an individual, he’s talking about. It’s true that he has just met you for the first time, of course, but that fact is obvious to both of you, and just like in English, it goes without saying. It’s somebody like you generally that he’s just met for the first time, and that’s what he means. He’s a twelve-year-old kid, maybe eleven, and he’s purposefully trying to avoid using a word that might offend you, so he’s simply omitted it.
You want to hug him.
“This is the first time for you to meet someone from another country?” you ask him.
He nods and says, “Shake hands?”
“Okay,” you say and extend your large rough hand to him. He can barely get his own hand around your fingers.
He says, “Thank you.” He’s polite, typically formal and thoroughly Japanese. You take his photo. He barely smiles. Since he’s the only student in sight, you ask if he’s late for school, though it seems unthinkable. Kids are rarely late for school here. They either go regularly and on time, or they don’t go at all. Until they get into college, that is. College students regularly saunter into class late. College teachers do too. He says, “There is no school today. It starts next week.”
Of course it does, and this gives you an idea you should have thought of minutes ago. You ask him, “Which way is the grade school?”
He points up one of the roads he had pointed out earlier and smiles. He’s proud of himself. You say, “thank you.”
He bows again. He’s a cool kid. You want to invite him along with you. But, of course, you can’t. And, of course, you don’t.
Fumanji is a pretty little temple in a grove of big evergreen trees. It was founded here in 1241. The temple ground is larger than most and everywhere it has the sweet and sour smell of green quince, though you can’t find a quince tree anywhere. You can’t find a person anywhere either. There’s nobody here but you. The three-tiered pagoda is set in a garden with a reflecting pool at its base that’s placed so poorly it doesn’t really reflect anything. The pagoda was built in 1809. At that time it had wooden shingles on the three roofs, but they were replaced with copper shingling in 1962, and of course, the copper has turned green. The 12.5 meter pagoda is one of the smallest you’ll see on this trip, but it’s lovely. It has several unique aspects to it. The three roofs become both successively smaller and steeper. The chambers between the roofs become successively narrower. The bottoms of the lower and upper tiers are almost the same, though different sizes, and they’re little different from what you normally see, but the middle one is like none you’ve ever seen before. It doesn’t have the normal slats—or at least the slats aren’t visible. Instead, what you see is a ceiling of circles, curls, and curves carved into heavy wooden planks. All in all, it’s not a grand beauty like so many of the five-tiered pagodas you’ve seen, but it’s petite, cute and coquettish, and you spend most of an hour walking around it, trying different angles with your camera. It’s a difficult pagoda to photograph. Finally you find a view with a statue of the Buddha and a small Shinto torii in the foreground. It’s not a great photograph, but most photographs aren’t great anyway, and this will do. You have to get back to the station. You need to get money. You could use a bite to eat. And there’s a train to catch.
There’s a small post office not far from the station and there you are finally able to get your hands on some cash. You have about an hour till your train comes, and you ask the clerk there if there’s anyplace nearby to eat.
“Not really,” you’re told.
“How about a convenience store?” This is Japan, after all. There are convenience stores everywhere. You can’t throw a rock without hitting one.
“Not really,” you’re told. Then the clerk who has told you this has a sudden brain-storm and turns to another clerk for support. She walks a few steps away, and after a three-minute pow wow she comes back with the information that there is one about a kilometer to the south, but informs you that it’s too far to walk.
“I can walk a kilometer,” you tell her. “Easy.”
Normally, a kilometer would take about 15 minutes to walk. And you can do that easily. You head out. Then 20 minute later you come to a fork in the road without having seen the remotest sign of anything that resembles a convenience store. You turn into a gasoline station and ask the attendant there where the convenience store is.
“Convenience store? There’s a convenience store about two kilometers that way,” he says, pointing at the fork to the left. “But it’s too far to walk,” he adds. And he’s right. Your rain will arrive in 40 minutes. You’ll never make it to the convenience store and back, so you turn around. You know there’s a small dry cleaning shop back the other way, near the lumber mill. You’ve already walked by it twice, and you know there are some cheap pastries there to be had. They look about as healthy as jumping in front of a train, and they promise similar but slower results, but nonetheless, you have to eat something you figure. It’s been at least 12 hours since the pumpkin salad, and you’re starving.
When you get there you buy an ice cream bar, a blueberry muffin and some kaki-pi. These three items have the combined nutritional value of cow dung, though they may not taste as good. You’re not entirely sure about that, of course. You’ve never actually eaten cow dung, but you suspect that if somebody only packaged it up in a high tech wrapper and set it on the shelves of a Japanese convenience store—or a Japanese dry-cleaners—a lot of people would eat it, especially if they put blueberries in it and called it a muffin. And before you’ve proceeded 200 meters back towards the station the blueberry muffin has made you want to vomit. You feel an urgent need for a bottle of water. That has no nutritional value either, but at least it won’t kill you. You change directions again, and start back towards the dry cleaners.
You’ve gone about forty meters when a woman comes running across the road saying in English that’s structurally correct but lacking in confidence, “Are you looking for something. Can I help you?” And your first instinct is to ignore her the way you instinctively want to ignore all Japanese people who speak to you in English, including sometimes those who actually pay you for the privilege. But two quick observations prevent you from doing this. First, you’ve walked in front of her house already four times this morning and currently you’re making your fifth pass, which even you have to admit could look a little bit suspicious, and second, she’s sweet—it seems her true intent is only to help. She’s about 40. She has perfect skin and great posture. No makeup. Doesn’t need it. Slip on shoes. Simple clothes. A striped t-shirt and a simple skirt. Hair as black and shiny as a Halloween cat. Simple, pure, smiling, innocent, curious and kind. The backcountry here is full of women like this.
She wears no personal advertising whatsoever. She doesn’t need that either. The truth speaks for itself, and this woman doesn’t need anything that isn’t a true part of her. She has the natural beauty of a happy housewife, not that you’ve known very many happy ones, mind you. And the truth is she’s probably very lonely. Her name is Kayako, her husband owns the lumber mill across the street, and she’s studying English on the Internet. She walks with you to the dry cleaners while you draw a slow, careful English picture for her of how hard it is to find anything that resembles food around here.
She says, “You can’t get real food at the cleaners, but there’s a convenience store about three kilometers from here. Not that convenience stores have real food either.”
You laugh.
You tell her, “You should work at the post office.”
She says, “What?”
You say, “Never mind.”
They don’t have bottled water at the dry cleaners so you buy some green tea. This is supposed to be one of the best foods on the planet, and it’s probably the secret to the longevity of the Japanese populace, but unfortunately you don’t care for it much. It still tastes better than the muffin. You ask Kayako if she wants anything to drink. She doesn’t.
You tell her you feel like throwing up. You’re still holding the remnants of the inedible blueberry muffin in your hand and she takes it from you. She makes a face like she wants to vomit too—the sympathetic response, possibly—and crams it back into its plastic wrapper, then she drops it into a trashcan near the counter. You can’t help getting the feeling that she and the old lady at the cleaners don’t get along very well. She tells the old lady that you have come from America to see the pagoda at Fumanji, and you’re hungry. You figure that’s a reasonably accurate assessment of the situation. Anyway, it will have to do, because it turns out to be the whole sum of the conversation between them. The old woman doesn’t even grunt.
“Come to my house,” Kayako says. “I’ll make you some food.”
“I can’t let you do that,” you say, but you know you’re lying.
She lives in the biggest house on the street. It’s a huge stone structure. She tells you it used to be the office building for the lumber company when times at the company were good. She also tells you that times no longer are. You ask her what she does all day in Rikuzen Takata. She studies English and keeps the house clean. Does she ever work at the mill you ask her. Almost never she says. They have more people working there now than they have work to do, she tells you, and indeed you notice that the house is absolutely spotless. You get the feeling she rarely leaves it.
In 20 years you have been invited into a number of family homes in Japan, but the number is so low you can count them with your fingers. Kayako’s house has just become the tenth Japanese family home you’ve been in. And you can’t resist adding that the first seven of those homes you were welcomed to during the first year you were in Japan. And you don’t think it’s a coincidence that during most of that year you couldn’t really communicate in Japanese. Nor do you think it’s a coincidence that once you learned a modicum of the language you abruptly stopped being invited to visit people. Japan is a funny country. And Japanese have some serious issues when it comes both to English and to English speakers who can function in Japanese. Maybe you’ve already mentioned these things. Maybe you’re beating a dead horse. Or maybe the dead horse is beating you. Anyway, you’re speaking English to Kayako. You’re going into her house. And she’s going to make you lunch. This is one of the most surprising things ever to happen to you. Japanese people simply don’t invite strangers into their homes. Not sober people, anyway.
Her entryway is huge—about the size of a typical bedroom here—and it’s lined with beautiful black wood. She leads you into the dining room. You sit down at a thick, heavy table big enough to seat ten, and she steps into the adjacent kitchen where she begins making you two large rice balls. It’s a simple process. She drops a big glob of sticky rice in her hand. She smashes it into a ball. She pokes a hole in the middle of the ball and stuffs a sour plum in it. She forms the glob of rice into a triangle about two and a half centimeters thick. She wraps the whole thing with nori—dried seaweed—possibly the same stuff growing out in the bay at Ofunato. It takes her less than a minute to make two of them, but in that time a man from the mill comes to the house. He sticks his head in without knocking. He calls “Owada-san, are you available to come to the mill. Owada-san needs your help.”
Now, never mind the two Owada-sans in this sentence, because Owada-san means both Mr. Owada and Mrs. Owada in Japanese. Also, in Japanese, “Owada-san, are you available to come to the mill. Owada-san needs your help,” means “Fuck a duck, Owada-san! What the hell is this huge gaijin doing in your house and let’s get him out of here this instant!”
You aren’t the least bit surprised by this. It’s not near as surprising as the fact that you are here in the first place. In fact, you would be surprised if something like this didn’t happen. Kayoko calls the man into the kitchen and introduces you to him, explaining again that you’ve come from America to look at the pagoda at Fumonji. And, of course, that you’re hungry. The man is very polite to you, naturally. He’s Japanese, after all. He bows several times and you bow back, uttering all the set Japanese pleasantries, then he mentions once more to Owada-san that Owada-san needs her at the mill immediately. She says, “I’ll be there in two minutes,” and the man slips out the door with a couple more bows.
Kayoko wraps the two rice balls in kitchen wrap and shoves them into your hands. “I’m so sorry,” she says, “I have to go to work at the mill.” And suddenly she’s speaking her native language. She has become the perfect Japanese housewife again, and she says this like it’s merely a matter of course. Never mind that she’s just told you she almost never works over there. You understand that she has no choice, and of course, so does she.
You are standing in the big black entryway again, putting on your pathetic shoes, when she suddenly grabs the empty tea bottle out of your hand and scurries back into the kitchen. She’s gone for 30 seconds, and when she gets back to the entryway your PET bottle is full of hot homemade tea.
You want to get a photograph of her in front of her house, if only because it’s the biggest and sturdiest private residence you’ve entered in 20 years here. That only makes it the biggest out of ten, of course, but still, it’s a pretty grand place to live. You say, “I know you’re in a hurry to get to work,” though you know she really isn’t, and you’re pretty sure she’ll only be there long enough for you to get your own big ugly white ass out of the way before she gets sent back to clean the house again and study more English, which she’ll rarely get to use. But you’ve been here a long time. You follow protocol like everybody else. “But,” you continue, “Could I receive the honorable favor of being allowed to photograph you in front of your spectacular home.”
She demurs for a shy moment, but soon relents, standing like a tiny princess in front of her castle. She flashes you the peace sign. You ask her not to and she peacefully obeys. After you photograph her, you thank her many times. And you promise yourself that you’ll send her a thank you note as soon as you get back to Nagoya. Of course, you never will.
And the next time you come here, after the 2011 tsunami, you won’t be able to find her. Her big beautiful house, standing before you now like a fortress on a rock, will be long gone. This entire city will be gone. It will be wiped off the face of the earth, swept away by forces of nature that you and everybody else in the world will find almost unbelievable. Rikuzen Takata, and several other little cities just like it along this coast will be devastated, destroyed, trampled, trashed. Every square centimeter of Rikuzen Takata will be broken. So will be every square centimeter of your already unstable and faltering heart. And so will be every square centimeter of everybody else’s. Nobody in Japan will survive the onslaught unscathed.
