by Bruce Feiler
Yet I was still unsatisfied. I explained to Denver, the principal, and a growing horde of teachers that I understood the value of teaching discipline and cooperation, but why couldn’t they just build four-person-high pyramids so that the boys didn’t have to fall so far? And why couldn’t the girls have a chance to show off their skills as well? Sakamoto-sensei shook his head in resignation and mumbled a brief reply.
The other teachers nodded in agreement and hurried back to work as if the principal had revealed a state secret.
The annual fall sports festival, he had said, was not the tribute to harmony or hard work that I had originally imagined, but the “primary wing” of the school—in short, an elaborate propaganda display. When measured against the favorable opinions of two thousand PTA members and the chief of police, all of whom adored watching girls wave banners and boys tumble from atop human pyramids, half a dozen broken arms and some disappointed hearts were trivial. The students were forced to gaman, I thought, while the aged basked in the glory.
As the principal walked way, he abruptly turned and shouted back at me, “Don’t you have such things in America?”
“Sure, we have festivals,” I said, “but not ones that the students don’t enjoy.”
He thought for a moment and replied, “Well, that’s the difference between Japan and America.”
Perhaps he was right. Japanese teachers seemed more willing to overlook the possible discomfort of their students if the school felt an activity worthwhile. The students, in turn, learned early to squelch their true feelings.
Still, I had learned that the students did not always submit mindlessly to such reduction. Away from the teachers, alone among themselves, this generation was already nourishing the seeds of discontent that might flourish later on. Though they had chosen at this time to keep their mouths shut, I could hear them whispering that this would not always be true. Underneath the veil of harmony lay a bunch of scraped knees and a host of budding souls.
6
GOING INTO THE COUNTRY: FALL IN THE CHESTNUT BASIN
In the blasts of wind
chestnut burrs
skitter over the ground,
burr-headed village boys
hot in pursuit.
—Kanko Akera, “Autumn Wind,” c. 1780
TOCHIGI PREFECTURE is famous for wind.
When I first arrived in Sano, in late summer, the mercury hovered around 40 degrees Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) and almost everyone greeted me by saying, “Welcome to Tochigi. We have strong wind.” At first I thought this a joke. After all, was the most interesting thing about Tochigi its wind? But as the mercury began dipping toward zero and the leaves started tumbling from the trees, I learned quickly that wind is not a subject for joking in Japan—especially not in autumn.
Tochigi, which is named for the horse chestnut trees that blanket its hills, is the Iowa of Japan. It sits in the geographic center of the country, near the crease of mountains that divides the main island of Honshu, and halfway between the northern island of Hokkaido and the southern island of Kyushu. According to the governor, Tochigi boasts the average population, the average income, and the average “easygoing” lifestyle of Japan. In a country where blending in is at a premium and where ninety percent of the people call themselves middle class, being the middle of the middle, the most undistinguished, seemed to be something worth bragging about.
“Of course Tochigi is quite backward,” a friend of mine from Tokyo told me when he learned of my new home. Indeed, to most people who live in urban Japan, any place outside of Tokyo, Osaka, or several other large cities is considered to be inaka, roughly “way out” and “way behind.” Tochigi, which is fifty miles and fifty years from Tokyo, is far enough away from the capital to be considered inaka, but close enough to be part of the region surrounding Tokyo known as the Kanto Plain.
Japan’s original capital was located in the Kansai, or Western Region, but in 1603 the Tokugawa shogun moved his royal court to the Kanto, or Eastern Region, to be nearer his military base of support. This shift brought the capital for the first time under the shadow of Mount Fuji, the cultural equivalent of Mount Olympus, Mount Sinai, and the seven hills of Rome all rolled into one. Woodblock prints from less than a century ago show Mount Fuji clearly visible from the capital city of Edo, later renamed Tokyo. In these images the silent, pale face of the mountain looms over the crowded shops and teeming alleys of the pleasure districts, where merchants and peasants sought private diversion in sake shops and geisha salons. As feudal Edo evolved into modern Tokyo and the shallow wooden storefronts gave way first to concrete and stone façades and later to soaring monuments of glass and steel, Fuji was gradually obscured. These days, all one can see in any direction from the heart of Tokyo are silhouettes of high-rise buildings and the silent beacon of neon—the new symbol of Japan—flashing, selling, alluring, warning.
Today, Tokyo’s urban bulk fills most of the Kanto Plain, stretching outward from its hub in Tokyo Bay in a dense mesh of highways, railways, industrial haze, and commuter angst. On the outer reaches of this basin, the buildings become shorter and the houses farther apart. Pine trees and chestnut forests line the hills once again. Here, at the gateway to the northern mountains, Tochigi begins.
And so does the wind.
Every year, about the time of the autumnal equinox, a great Siberian bear dons his winter cap, yawns, and exhales an enormous swell of cold, dry air that comes sweeping across the Sea of Japan, through the mountain pocket known as the Snow Country, over the alpine spine of Honshu, and into the valley of Tochigi, igniting the trees of autumn. Tochigi, with its abundant trees, varied terrain, and famous wind, is the essence of autumn in Japan, a time so significant that its beginning is marked by a national holiday. Above all, autumn is a time for excursions. This tradition, which goes back more than a millennium, is described in the eleventh-century romantic novel The Tale of Genji and, in the seventeenth century, by Japan’s most legendary classical poet, Matsuo Bash:
Bidding farewell,
Bidden good-bye,
I walked into
The autumn of Kiso.
As with other things Japanese, an excursion into the mountains to view fall colors has a proper form and even a proper name, momijigari. In Kanto, and perhaps in all of Japan, the ideal place to seek this communion with nature is Nikko National Park, a cultural landmark and famed retreat perched in the northern mountains of Tochigi. The Tokugawa shoguns thought so much of this place that they built an elaborate mausoleum shrine here to honor the founder of their clan, and made their retainers around the country pay for its upkeep. Nikko—which literally means sunlight—ranks near the top of the wonders of Japan and is a cultural mecca of such importance that thousands of students from hundreds of schools make an annual pilgrimage to the park. On the second Sunday in October I made this trek with my new friend Cho and his girlfriend, Chieko, and learned a local saying, “Never say kekko [I’m satisfied] until you’ve seen Nikko.”
Although my boss had called several days before we were to go to Nikko to warn of the crowds and to urge us to get started well before six A.M., Cho arrived at my apartment close to seven. His girlfriend was already in the car. “I hope you don’t mind if I’m late,” he said, “but I know a special short cut.”
Cho is an altogether autumn person—warm, colorful, and calm. He is also independent. After our first meeting during my opening-night bath, when Cho rescued me from the circle of middle-aged men all trying to develop a meaningful “relationship without clothes on,” we had become fast friends. Cho, whose name means chief—as in kach, section chief—taught elementary school in Tochigi and lived with his parents in the musty granite hills of Kuzu, a small mill town just north of Sano. Like Denver, he is short by Japanese standards, with straight charcoal hair that hangs over his eyes, a dark complexion, and a broad, toothy smile. Arai-san, the head secretary in my office, once described Cho as having a “warm heart,” a high compliment in Japanese used to
describe someone who displays an unusual peace of mind and sensitivity. His warm heart blends with a cool insight, which he applies to others as well as to himself. “I was afraid to talk with foreigners before I went to college,” he admitted on one of our first meetings, “but I had little confidence then. Now I have more.”
University offered Cho, like most Japanese young people, a rare reprieve from academic and societal pressure. Coming after a childhood of rugged preparations for entrance exams and before a lifetime of commitment to a job, college for most is a time of leisure. “We Japanese don’t study in college,” he explained. “We don’t do homework or go to the library. We only play.”
After going to high school in Sano, Cho attended a prestigious private university in the heart of Tokyo and “played” with other students in the international exchange club. This group of global savants held drinking parties in chic bars in Tokyo; they jetted to Manila, Cairo, and Paris to meet with other student groups; and they hosted visiting Americans in their tiny dorm rooms at night. As a reminder of these years, Cho came dressed for Nikko in blue jeans, penny loafers, white socks, and a cardinal-red sweatshirt embossed with the emblem of his university club.
With his golden academic pedigree and family background—his father was the principal of a local elementary school—Cho could easily have gained access to the upper echelons of some company or government bureaucracy. He chose instead to become a teacher. At first I wondered why he returned from the fast track of Tokyo to the foothills of Tochigi, but over time I realized that the answer was simpler than I had imagined. As the first son in his family, Cho inherited the responsibilities of filial duty, which all but required him to tend to his parents after his father retired. But Cho had positive reasons for returning home as well. He wanted to bring what he learned from his university and from traveling abroad to the children of the inaka. Although his salary from the state was less than half of what most of his college friends earned, Cho liked being with students and encouraging them to dream of the larger world. I once asked him if he found it difficult being an elementary school teacher in the same town as his father. Didn’t the old teacher ever take his son aside and say, “Well, son, let me tell you a few things about teaching…”?
“He does,” Cho said, “but I don’t listen. I want to develop my own way.”
This desire to find his own way in the face of an established tradition was the central struggle in Cho’s life. In returning to Kuzu he had given up much of his personal freedom, but he was not willing to give up his independence of mind as well. Cho and I often discussed this dilemma. Could he live in conservative Tochigi and still act in a Tokyo way? We deemed his personal quest “Cho-d,” in search of the “Way of Cho.”
The trip from Sano to Nikko lasted a little over two hours. We followed the Tohoku Super Expressway north for about fifty minutes, then switched to bumpy rural roads to cut time and save money from costly tollways. Unlike the monotonous industrioscape that surrounds present-day Tokyo, Tochigi is softened by rural charms. Along backwoods highways on this mid-October morning, children picked sweet pears while old women and men with rounded shoulders and pointed hats tied sheaves of rice on six-foot poles to dry in the midday sun. Every twenty minutes, a small town would interrupt the farmland, and a cluster of one-room textile mills and food processing plants would appear along the road. This mix of family farms and lightweight industries feeds most of the people in Tochigi but keeps them always one step removed from the prosperous path of the nation.
“Tochigi has more cars per person than any other prefecture in Japan,” Cho said as we drove through a particularly bumpy town. “We also have more accidents.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because our roads are so bad. Just look at them. If I were governor of Tochigi I would repave all the roads and make them safe for cars.”
Just before ten o’clock we finally passed through the last country town and arrived at the entrance to the park. Though we had succeeded in beating the tidal wave of tourists from Tokyo, we did run into a flock of early-bird leaf-seekers from the countryside. The true cause of congestion, however, proved not to be the cars but a bumper-to-bumper battalion of motorbikes. Lured by the famous alphabet highway of Nikko—a treacherous mountain pass with four dozen hairpin turns each named for a letter of the Japanese alphabet—hundreds of bikers had gathered at the base of the mountain for a mass ascent. The riders were all perfectly suited in his-and-her leather outfits—pink and yellow for the ladies, black and red for the gentlemen—with matching helmets and monogrammed saddle bags. Not every member of this crew could ride a motorcycle, and still fewer would manage to make it all the way through the curves from ah to un, but at least everyone looked the way a biker was expected to look.
Just as the bikers all conformed to a dress code of sorts, I noticed a pattern among some of the more conventional nature-lovers we met. Many of the men sported finely tailored tweed knickers buckled just below the knee, along with an English hunting cap and a carved walking stick. Birdwatchers with telescopes on tripods were decked out in camouflage jumpsuits. I could understand the need to make a distinction between work clothes and play clothes and the emphasis placed on the proper equipment, but a person no more needed a hunting cap and knickers to view the leaves around Nikko than I needed a kimono and samurai sword to visit a feudal castle. The importance of costume, of extending the limited experience of viewing leaves or riding a motorcycle into a complete personal transformation, is part of the larger commitment to form which permeates Japanese culture. Viewing leaves is something to be done not casually but carefully, according to plan. This tradition—like the wind—dies hard.
The legend of the wind in Japan goes back as far as the allegory of the sun. In the beginning, legend says, there was chaos. Through a gradual shifting of particles, heaven and earth were created and various deities came into being in what was known as the Plain of High Heaven. Two of these deities, the brother and sister Izanagi and Izanami, briefly descended a bridge to earth and begot the Central Land of Reed Plains, which later became the islands of Japan. After Izanami died in a fiery accident, Izanagi tried to purify himself and in the process spontaneously gave birth to a daughter through his eyes and a son through his nose. The daughter, Amaterasu, became goddess of the Sun and ruler over heaven. Her brother, Susano, became god of the Wind and sovereign over the sea. But the stormy Susano was jealous of his sister’s appointment as leader of all the gods, and in an act of vengeance he wreaked havoc on her territory with storms that ripped through the fields of heaven. The Sun goddess was so distraught that she sought refuge in a cave, thereby eclipsing the world into darkness.
The older deities gathered outside her cave and devised a scheme to lure her out. They placed a mirror and a jewel in the branches of a sacred tree and erected a perch with a cock on top (this simple post-and-lintel perch, known as a torii, later became the principal symbol of the Shinto faith). One of the goddesses performed a ribald dance that the others applauded boisterously. Roused by the noise, Amaterasu peeked her head out of the cave, caught sight of the jewel and her own reflection in the mirror, and emerged from her seclusion. Light once more filled the world.
As punishment, Susano was expelled from heaven and banished to the western shores of Japan; thus the Wind god and his descendants are considered to be the country’s first inhabitants. But despite this distinction, they are not given credit for beginning the imperial line. That honor belongs to the Sun. The Sun goddess, after receiving a guarantee from the other gods that the descendants of Susano would submit to her rule, sent her grandson Ninigi to seize control of the Central Land of Reed Plains. In 660 B.C., a great-grandson of Ninigi successfully completed an expedition across the country and was rewarded with the title of emperor of Japan. (The current emperor, Akihito, who ascended the Chrysanthemum throne in 1989, traces his heritage back over twenty-six hundred years in what is claimed to be an unbroken line to this man, the emperor Jimmu, and thro
ugh him to the goddess of the Sun.)
The jealous uncle, the Wind, has been fuming ever since.
After motoring our way up the alphabet road, we broke for lunch at a spot overlooking Kegon Falls, a three-hundred-foot waterfall that cascades over a sheer rock face. Cho’s girlfriend, Chieko, began setting out a lunch of chicken strips, rice balls, and broccoli spears which Cho’s mother had prepared. Chieko’s servility surprised me at first. Like Cho, she was an elementary school teacher. She had hair that brushed her shoulders and short bangs that hung down over her forehead in curls. Her skin was pale, her smile slight, her voice barely a whisper. Nearing twenty-six and the end of her narrow window of eligibility for marriage, Chieko had clearly set her sights on Cho. But the two had known each other only for several months and had been boyfriend and girlfriend for less time than that.
Cho and Chieko, who had met through work, were what the Japanese call a love match, as opposed to an arranged set-up. In the more traditional style of courting, still used by about half of all couples today, a go-between sends glossy photographs and genealogical data to both sides of a proposed match, and then chaperons a meeting between the man, the woman, and both of their families. After this meeting each party decides whether to proceed to a formal courtship, which usually leads to engagement. In love marriages the procedure is considered less strict, although in most cases the courtship is not much changed. In this relationship, Cho would eventually decide whether to propose. Chieko, meanwhile, tried to be pleasant, attractive, and attentive to show that she would make a good wife and companion. Accordingly, she came to our leaf-viewing dressed in a green miniskirt, a white silk blouse, and a blue scarf, and she wore red lipstick and pink blush on her cheeks. This was her uniform, no less fastidious than the bikers’, and she looked as if she had just stepped off the pages of a woman’s magazine from under the headline “HOW A YOUNG LADY SHOULD LOOK IF SHE WANTS TO CATCH A MAN.” She had achieved the look but did not seem to be having a good time. Through the course of lunch, the sights, and the drive to and fro, Chieko said almost nothing.