Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  If the party had ended there, I would have returned home laden with flowers and aglow with a queasy yet warm feeling. As it turned out, my boss had other plans. He intended to serenade me long into the night and take me deeper into the “floating world” of Japanese after-hours clubs. As the guests piled into cabs in the parking lot, Mr. C whisked me into a separate taxi. (The most impressive feat of the evening proved to be the extensive precautions exercised to avoid drinking and driving.) Having ditched his boss and the office ladies, Mr. Cherry Blossom pulled closer to me on the linen cover of the backseat, put his arm around my neck, and declared, “Now, we drink.”

  The car stopped in the center of town, and we proceeded by foot to the mouth of a narrow lane teeming with flashing lights and neon: “GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!”; “PLAYBOY”; “SEE A SHOW.” Even the porn was in English here. We dodged a cluster of dubious women who surged forward calling my boss—“sensei, sensei”—and walked past the Playboy club to enter a quaint little kara-oke bar, bathed in a fog of artificial candlelight and unfiltered smoke. Kara-oke, a hybrid term meaning “empty orchestra,” is to the Japanese what epic poetry was to the Greeks. The name refers to the prerecorded music without words that provides background for bacchanals to sing themselves silly in bars and backyards all across Japan. Kara-oke pubs, which are more numerous in Japan than everything but rice paddies, combine the love of singing with the need for nightclub recreation.

  Although the bar was tiny, about the size of a large Toyota, it boasted a giant-screen television suspended from the ceiling, a five-component stereo system, and an exhaustive video and tape library containing over eight hundred songs. The wall behind the bar was lined with dozens of half-empty liquor bottles known as “Bottle Keep” whiskey. For around $100, the faithful customer could purchase a twenty-six-ounce bottle of American whiskey, which would bear his name and be used to fill his guests’ glasses when he came to visit.

  “Mama,” Mr. C called to the hostess behind the bar, “pour this man a drink.” He mounted a stool at the bar as the kara-oke mama turned on her charm. She was older than Mr. C and dressed in coquettish style, with her hair pulled tight in a bun, thick make-up on her cheeks, and lime-green eye shadow catlike around her eyes.

  “I am so honored to receive you,” she said with a smile. The mama took a special interest in the newcomer. “Oh, the honorable foreigner speaks Japanese so weeelll,” she said with a subtle flutter of her eyelashes. She followed this with a steady stream of food to test my dexterity: here some sliced ginger, there some fermented soybeans, finally some radish pickles. “Oh, the honorable foreigner uses chopsticks so weeelll.” Unlike my admirers at the enkai, she took my hand with this last comment to caress my honorable foreign fingers, which she said must be so tired from using chopsticks all day. As she served the food and fondled our egos, the hostess paused intermittently to refill our glasses with whiskey. She performed the entire routine with a grace and flourish rivaling that of any three-star-restaurant maitre d’ in Paris. This mama was clearly a seasoned professional.

  The eating and drinking soon eased into singing, and the kara-oke came alive. The hostess got out three large pink notebooks that contained the title, the opening line, and the musical key of every song in stock. A man at the end of the table, who had been silent until then, suddenly perked up when the microphone was offered. Ever watchful, our hostess had chosen him first. As his voice echoed in the artificial acoustics of the stereo, Mr. C came alive as well. “Hey, Mama,” he called, “let’s dance.”

  The two met at the center of the floor, and he took her by the waist for a slow spin, resting his head on her shoulder and pulling her close. Everyone eyed the dancers intently as Mr. C squeezed her on the rear and ran his hand up under her dress. When the song was over he returned quietly to his seat. He winked at me through his whiskey glass.

  After several more songs, the microphone was passed to me and the video screen was kindled. Welcome to kara-video, the Japanese nightclub version of Follow the Bouncing Ball. The mama selected “Love Me Tender,” and before I had time to protest, the lyrics appeared on the screen, superimposed on a picturesque scene of two lovers, very blond and very American, strolling on a sunset-drenched beach. Making my way into my best Elvis baritone, I was increasingly distracted by these two lovers as they moved from the beach into the bedroom. Suddenly they stripped off their clothes, fell naked on the floor, and began making love—right there in the middle of the bar. As their bodies writhed with pleasure and pain, the men at the counter started cheering, and I was left standing bewildered, trying desperately to concentrate on the lyrics that kept crawling casually by.

  At the end of the song, Mr. C suggested that I take a spin with Mama, but I apologized and insisted I must be getting home. Disappointed but dutiful, he followed. The bill for two people, for under two hours, came to $125.

  I said good-bye to Mr. C at the door of a taxi; his voice, still droning “Love Me Tender,” echoed through the empty streets. As I walked home with my bouquet of roses, past the barbershop and the vegetable stand that I passed every day, the storefronts appeared different in the shadowy light, as if somehow unreal. I wondered if these buildings, like the men in my office, had faces that altered from day to night.

  For several weeks after the enkai I was haunted by the people I had met that night, the unrestrained men lurking behind my courteous colleagues at work. I longed to know which were their true faces and how they balanced these dual lives. When they bowed at me respectfully in the morning, did they still hear me shouting “Bow! wow! wow!”? When they humbly addressed a woman in the office, did they visualize her making love on the beach?

  I sought answers from friends. Denver, an enkai enthusiast himself, suggested that these two faces were necessary devices to preserve a common group. Private behavior, he said, remains in the realm of the private and rarely reflects on one’s public persona. There is no shame in making a pass at a kara-oke mama or insulting a co-worker at an enkai, he said, because no one “remembers” at work the next day. In many cases the company or school will even foot the bill for this kind of group release to guarantee peak performance during the day.

  Morality, as I was learning, is set primarily by society as a whole and not by individuals in Japan. If a group condones a behavior, such as drinking or having an affair, then individuals are allowed to indulge. In this world shame is more powerful than guilt, because people’s actions are tempered less by fear of internal torment than by the threat of group disapproval. I marveled at the way in which my colleagues could easily separate public conduct, known as tatemae, from private desires, known as honne. Co-workers who were rude to one another in the bar would be civil the next day at work; men who had been open and relaxed in the bath would be formal and rigid when behind a desk. Although I tried, I was unable to make this separation. When I saw my boss every day, I remembered.

  5

  PINK HATS AND HARDENED HEARTS: THE SPORTS FESTIVAL

  The child’s soul should not learn to feel pleasure and pain in ways contrary to the law, but feel pleasure and pain in the same things as the aged. But since the souls of children cannot bear earnestness, efforts to achieve this are spoken of as “play,” and practiced as such.

  —Plato, The Laws

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW the students of Sano Junior High School practice their mass dance for the annual October und-kai, or sports festival, I thought I had discovered the secret to Japanese group harmony. There before my eyes were 690 students dressed in matching white uniforms with pink and blue hats, dancing, chanting, and marching in perfect unison, in what seemed like the ultimate expression of group cooperation and togetherness. The students formed elaborate human constellations and shifted in and out of formation quietly, efficiently, and without complaint. As I watched in awe from the roof of the school, the principal next to me glowed with pride. I could already hear him boasting to the PTA, “Oh, the foreigner was so impressed.”

  Japanese schools have been
widely chided in the West in recent years for raising a population that works too hard and plays too little. In one sense this is true: Japanese children attend school an average of 240 days a year, compared with 180 in the United States. But the real difference between Japan and the West is not that Japanese schools teach their students how to work but that they teach them how to play as well. From teaching calligraphy after school to giving swimming lessons on Sunday, schools fill the daily schedule of Japanese students with a panoply of activities that teach social and cultural skills. Classes that would be considered extracurricular in the United States are thought to be quite curricular in Japan.

  Sano Junior High School sponsors at least two major events in each of the three terms of the year—a sports festival and a culture fair in the fall; a basketball tournament and a graduation ceremony in the winter; a volleyball tournament and a school trip in the spring. The und-kai, which coincides with National Sports Day, is the centerpiece of the fall trimester. Every October, over two thousand parents and community leaders gather on the school grounds to witness the spectacle of the mass dance that inaugurates the day. After the show, parents join in an afternoon of relay races and games, such as the egg toss, the tug of war, and something called the eight-legged run, in which four students stand one behind the other, tie their left legs together with one sheet and their right legs with another, and then run together as one. Over the years Sano Junior High has developed an outstanding reputation in the region for its well-manicured campus and its well-choreographed mass dance.

  Early in the week, as I watched students practice for the show, entitled “Time Travel,” I marveled at the precision and beauty. The students marched around the field in a maze of geometric formations and intersecting braids that would have been worthy of any Big Ten marching band or Super Bowl halftime show. In one number, the students thundered their feet on the dirt and folded their hats inside out in a flurry of pastel shimmers as they moved into a three-dimensional replica of the emblem of Tochigi. The square design included a pointed leaf to stand for the thick chestnut forests, a circle for the famed Lake Chuzenjiko in Nikko National Park, and two diagonal stripes for the prefecture’s two most notable achievements: the Tohoku bullet train and the Tohoku Super Expressway. The climax of the show came as the students formed a set of concentric circles in the center of the field to symbolize the cycles of time. The youngest students sat on the ground, linked their arms, and swayed like trees in the wind; older students stood behind waving red hula hoops in a circle; and ten of the star female athletes, dressed in shimmering blue and yellow leotards, ascended a twenty-foot scaffolding tower, leaned backward over the rail, and jiggled fluorescent pompoms. Over the loudspeaker a souped-up version of “Let It Be” blared across the town.

  The boys and the girls often performed different actions in the course of the show. In one routine, the students moved into an enormous drill formation to demonstrate the physical skills they had honed over the previous year. The boys stripped off their shirts, snapped into and out of aikido martial arts positions, and jumped from one another’s shoulders. Meanwhile, the girls stood meekly behind waving maroon and gold banners. Next, boys from each class built a magnificent six-person-high pyramid. At the sound of a large bass drum, all twenty-one pyramids crashed down at once in an impressive display of synchronization. As the boys tumbled into a massive heap, the girls bent slowly at the waist like wind-up dolls and touched their flags to the ground. The rhythm was striking, but I wondered about the segregation. Turning to the principal beside me, I asked in my best naive, inquisitive tone, “So why do the boys get to build pyramids and the girls only wave banners?”

  “Well,” said Sakamoto-sensei, the man who had earlier suggested that wives in Japan were like slaves in Georgia, “the boys must learn to be powerful and strong, and the girls must be pretty and graceful.”

  “I see.” I hesitated but decided to plow ahead. “But can’t girls be strong too, and can’t boys be graceful?”

  “Oh no,” the principal said with obvious shock. “Girls must be girllike, and boys must be boylike. That’s the only way.”

  After observing the dance rehearsal from afar, I moved down onto the field to talk with the students directly. As they milled around the dirt field, waiting for the music teacher to fix the tape or the choreographer to make a correction, I asked a group of ninth-grade girls how they felt about the pyramids.

  “We hate this part of the show,” they said without hesitation. “All we do is dance, while the boys get to show off.”

  “The pyramids look nice,” one girl said, “but we want to build them, just like the boys.”

  “Can you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she insisted. “We have to make them in gym class, but we aren’t allowed to make them when the parents come to visit.”

  Startled by their frankness, I moved to a group of boys to ask how they felt about the mass dance.

  “It’s very beautiful,” they dutifully answered.

  “Yes,” I said, “but do you enjoy it?”

  After checking over their shoulders to ensure that no teachers were in earshot, the boys drew closer together.

  “We don’t really like it very much,” one confessed. “We have to practice every day for four months.”

  “When the pyramids fall down, we get hurt,” said another. “I broke my arm during last year’s festival.”

  I asked both the boys and the girls what I assumed to be the next logical question, “Did you tell a teacher how you feel?” and I received the same definitive answer: silence.

  Plato once wrote that boys and girls should dance together while they are young so they can understand their gender roles before they become adults. In a curious way, the modern Japanese und-kai serves the same purpose. It offers up traditional values of “boylike” boys and “girllike” girls, as if the mere act of planting these ideals on the playing field would guarantee that they take root in the students. But the children on that playing field had different ideas.

  Paradoxically, women were once venerated in Japan: legend holds that the Japanese imperial line was descended from a woman, the Sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami. But feudal lords over a thousand years ago overturned the legacy of respect and developed an exacting set of laws that subjugated women to men. Confucian teachings adopted later dictated that a woman should obey her father in youth, her husband in maturity, and her son in old age. While women were restricted to the home, men were allowed more freedom—both social and sexual. In time a dual image of women took hold in society as men sought stability and status with the woman they married while acting out their sexual fantasies with pay-as-you-go women tucked away in illicit neighborhoods, known colloquially as the “water trade.” Men looked at women as just another part of their segregated public and private selves.

  This schism remains in force today. Even though occupying Americans included an equal rights amendment in Japan’s postwar constitution, equality never took hold. The Japanese school system for the last fifty years has essentially tried to produce girls who will serve as successful wives and mothers for working men. In the classroom, boys’ names are always called first when attendance is taken; outside of class, events like the sports festival ensure that boys and girls follow different paths. The results of this gender training are dramatic. In institutions of higher education, men outnumber women two to one, with the vast majority of the women in less prestigious two-year colleges. Fields of interest vary greatly as well. Ninety-nine percent of engineering majors in universities are men, as are ninety-four percent of law students and almost ninety percent of scientists. Conversely, the most popular subjects for women are home economics and literature.

  But times are changing. Polls show that three quarters of women still view a good husband and successful children as the most important goals in their lives, yet these same surveys also show that more women are staying in jobs longer and even continuing to work after marriage. Among younger girls, like those I me
t in junior high school, the differences are becoming even less defined. Girls rarely use the more polite, softer speech expected of women, even when speaking to teachers, and they use some previously male-only vulgarities when teasing the boys in their class. One of the problems these girls face is meeting the expectations of older teachers whose opinions were formed a generation ago. But these days, as a mark of the evolution, an equal number of girls and boys are willing to stand up in the middle of English class and announce with some conviction, “In the future, I want to become a doctor.”

  The day after my conversation with the students, as I was talking with Denver in the teachers’ room, the principal stopped by my desk to ask my impression of the show. I told him honestly that I thought the mass dance was beautiful but that many of the students seemed not to enjoy it.

  “Well, the students don’t like English much either,” he snapped. The und-kai is like a test for physical education class, he said, just like a math test or an English test. “Therefore, students are not expected to enjoy it.”

  “But you don’t invite parents to watch a math test,” I protested.

  He paused, and a smile came over his face. “Mr. Bruce,” he said, “I think you are very curious about our Japanese school. You want to help the students very much. So do we. But students cannot always do things that they enjoy. If Japanese students don’t like something in school they must learn to gaman.”

  This word, which can roughly be translated as “endure” or “persevere,” is one of the primary pillars of education in Japan. “If you want to learn how to be a good Japanese,” junior high school students are often told, “you must learn how to suffer.” Students are coached to gaman through difficult tests, long lectures, even an occasional bad lunch. It seemed only natural that the teachers considered the biggest festival of the year a prime time to teach the value of perseverance. The fact that none of the students actually complained demonstrated how much they had already had their rebellious instincts dulled by the endurance training of gaman.