by Bruce Feiler
The sempai code varies from school to school and within each school according to the clubs. For example, while the color and style of each shirt was closely regulated by the school, the way to wear the shirt was left untouched. The upperclassmen at Sano Junior High leapt at this chance to teach their juniors, or khai, the value of respect. Seventh-grade girls in the volleyball club were required to wear their top buttons bound, while the ninth graders kept theirs unbuttoned. Seventh-grade boys in the karate club were ordered to keep their sweat suits zipped up to their chins, while the ninth-grade boys unzipped theirs to the waist.
The ninth-grade boys also declared that underclassmen could not make alterations to their uniforms, a common way of defying the code. Any seventh grader caught with a purple lining in his pockets or a red lining in his jacket would be punished—not by the principal but by a ninth-grade tribunal. Several months before I arrived, an eighth-grade student was caught with an embroidered dragon on the inside of his uniform. He was summarily taken to the bathroom by a band of ninth graders and beaten up. His jacket was confiscated and secretly passed around the ninth-grade floor.
But by far the biggest source of controversy in recent years has been the regulations governing hair. Among most students, hair is the measure of fashion. Many high school boys like to get “perms” or spike their hair with gel, while many girls tint their hair with orange or purple dye. To avoid this type of behavior in junior high school, the school code tried to be very explicit. Boys must have a bzu cut, it said, meaning each hair could be no longer than five millimeters from the scalp. For girls, the code said the ideal type of cut was not too fashionable. “Girls’ hair should be junior-high-school-like,” it said. This directive caused enormous problems because the school did not indicate what “junior-high-school-like” meant or who would make this decision.
Naturally, the sempai code stepped in where the school code left off. Ninth graders declared that underclass girls must keep their hair above their shoulders and should not alter their hair color in any way: only straight black hair was acceptable. For girls in Tochigi, this was a particularly touchy subject. Japanese lore holds that only girls in the old capital of Kyoto have “pure” black hair, and the farther away a girl lives from Kyoto, the less black her hair becomes.
“The girls upstairs come down here during lunch,” a seventh-grade girl griped to me during lunch one day. “They pull our hair and demand to know, ‘Is your hair natural?’”
For those whose hair was truly off-color, this rule meant certain abuse. “My hair really is this color,” said one girl with a reddish tint in her hair. “I think it’s unfair that everybody’s hair must be the same color. Coke changes color from can to can, so why can’t hair change from head to head?”
For students, the message is clear: Conform. What the teachers do not patrol, the upperclassmen control, until every collar, cuff, and curl is covered by convention.
“You may think we are too severe,” Sakamoto-sensei said to me after the emergency council, “but it’s the little things that keep everyone in check. If we start to let the details slide, everything will get out of control. If we relax, all the students will become outlandish.”
This is the maxim that guides school life and breeds the strict school code: If you give students an inch, they will take a mile; if you give them a choice, they might all dress up in designer socks or shave parts in their shortened hair.
8
INSIDE THE CIRCLE: MAKING HOSPITAL ROUNDS
Every city and town placed upon its porch, where it could be seen by the eye of the Lady Moon, a tiny table laden with treasure balls. There were rice dumplings, chestnuts, and two circular sake vases. Everything had been carefully selected as being the nearest a perfect round in shape, for “round” is the symbol of perfection.
—Etsu Sugimoto, A Daughter of the Samurai, 1926
THE NOONTIME SUN gazed down from its crest and the wind sliced through the sky as I crouched alone on the green clay court awaiting the start of a tennis match against Mogi-sensei, one of my fellow teachers from the Board of Education. For several weeks the members of my office had placed bets on this match. Surely Mogi-sensei’s overpowering forehand would prove too strong for me, Mr. C insisted. Surely my serve—from its outlandish height—would sail right past his arms, Arai-san countered. Finally, on this mild November Saturday afternoon, we set out to settle the score.
At first my size served me well, and I quickly jumped out to a lead. But Mogi-sensei, a former science teacher with a passion for sports, soon changed his strategy, employing wicked short shots and topspin lobs to throw me off course. I was lunging for one of his deadly dropshots late in the first set when I tumbled head first over my knees and landed atop my left foot. Having sprained my ankle in the past, I expected to rest about five minutes, get up, and continue with the match. I could not have been more wrong.
Ten minutes later, without the aid of a dictionary and without the comfort of my mother, I was wheeled feet first into the emergency room of the Sano Kosei Hospital, with sirens blaring and a gaggle of nurses running by my side, rummaging through forms and spitting out comments in rapid Japanese.
“Wow, your toes are so long,” one said.
“And these legs,” said another, “so hairy.”
Fearing that they would not stop at my lengthy toes and hairy legs, I managed a slight yelp of pain and was escorted down the hall to the x-ray room.
The black and white picture of my leg showed no splinters in the bone, but there was a small black pocket where white ligament should have been. Momentarily the doctor arrived, a young, disheveled man with heavy sideburns, tennis shoes, and a slight, worried smile. As he entered the room, the nurses took two steps back, bowed deeply, and asked for his gracious protection. Turning toward me, he began his diagnosis in Japanese. But after realizing I was having difficulty understanding his technical language, he took a deep breath and started again, this time in English.
“Ligament. Rupture. Cast…Shall we?”
He breathed an audible sigh of relief and gestured for the nurses to prepare the plaster.
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, moving back into Japanese, “can’t we discuss this a little more?”
Stunned, he sank back into a chair.
What followed was a rather arduous conversation as he repeated the same finding. “Ligament. Rupture. Cast…Understand?” I had the uneasy feeling that he knew about six words of English and was adjusting his diagnosis to fit his vocabulary. “You have cancer; we must amputate; have a nice day.” Soon he stopped talking altogether, pulled on his plastic gloves, and declared, “Let’s go.”
“Yes, let’s,” the nurses cheered, lifting me to the table.
“But wait,” I pleaded, “aren’t there any other options?”
All the people around me—the doctor, nurses, and Mogi-sensei—were convinced that they should go ahead and wrap my leg in a cast. But I felt uneasy, mostly because the diagnosis had been so brief. (Later I learned that the Japanese have a special word for such diagnoses, sanpun-kan shindan, the three-minute treatment.) Should I submit to the will of everyone around me or follow my instincts and ask to speak to another doctor who I knew could speak English? Ironically, here I found myself inside the circle of a Japanese group, and all I wanted was to get out.
“Excuse me,” I whispered to Mogi-sensei, opting for prudence over harmony, “perhaps we could call Dr. Endo.”
Dr. Endo, the head of the Sano Public Health Department, was an elder statesman in the local medical community. I had met him on my first round of greetings in August and since that time had visited his home several times. He speaks fluent English, having lived and worked in the Philippines, Malaysia, and the United States, and has an affable charm that cuts through the formality of even the stiffest situation. But none of this seemed to matter at the time. To the people gathered in the hospital, Dr. Endo was first and foremost just another doctor.
“Why do you want to call Dr. Endo?�
� Mogi-sensei whispered back. “After all, this doctor is a bone specialist.”
“But don’t you agree…,” I said with a resolute smile.
During my early months in Sano, I had made the mistake of taking my problems directly to the person who I thought could fix them—my section chief or the director of my office. If I needed to change my schedule at school or arrange a meeting with my fellow teachers, I would issue my request in person and wait for an immediate response. But such direct communication rarely worked. Instead, I had to learn to make my wishes and opinions known more subtly—after hours at a bar with my boss, indirectly through the secretary, or simply up the chain of command. Like a seventh grader trapped by the strict rules of a sempai, I had to follow this code of hierarchy.
Having stated my case about a second opinion, I waited quietly for it to wend its way through the system. Mogi-sensei served as my proxy—the go-between in this arranged marriage—and relayed my request to the nurses. When the nurses informed the doctor, his face drooped and his eyes turned away. I felt my stomach sink. I had offended etiquette before in Japan, but never had I seen a faux pas register so vividly on someone’s face.
Without meaning to, I had violated the sanctity of the teacher-pupil relationship by appearing to question the wisdom of the doctor. In most cases, the doctor decides and the patient accepts. Realizing that I had disturbed not only the doctor but also my hosts, I hastened to mend the rift. “In my country,” I tried to explain, “we often seek the advice of two doctors.” For good measure I added that Dr. Endo was not just any doctor but a friend of mine, and that I had been to his house for dinner just the previous week. Perhaps if they did not understand the need for a second opinion, they would see that Dr. Endo was part of my extended family.
A tense moment followed as they looked pleadingly at me to rescind the request, but I remained quiet, trying to convince myself that this was a time to withstand the pressure—to be Greek among Romans. Eventually the circle relaxed, and I was allowed to make the call.
If Japan had a national shape, it would surely be the circle. Not only does the circle appear on the national flag and on all currency (en, the symbol for money, actually means circle), but the circle comes closest to defining how the Japanese think about themselves. “We like round things,” Mr. C once explained to me. “We want things to run smoothly with no sharp edges. Japan is an island nation, surrounded by seas and enemies, so we must depend on each other.”
As an American in Japan, I continually felt a mix of wonder and respect at the way those around me made decisions, with one eye focused on themselves and the other on the groups to which they belonged. Although I met many strong-willed individuals, the majority of people I knew accepted the fact that their lives were controlled by the circles in which they lived and worked. That acceptance was not always wholehearted, of course: teachers complained of not being able to take Sundays off because they were forced to supervise volleyball practice at school; women told me that they wanted to continue working into their late twenties but were forced to retire at twenty-five when their bosses suggested it was time for them to marry; friends complained that they were not told when a parent developed cancer because the doctor felt the stigma of the disease would be too great for them to handle. As I lived in Japan, I struggled with this question: how much should I follow the unwritten rules that controlled the society around me, and how much should I remain attached to my own customs?
Many Japanese who have lived in the United States have experienced the same dilemma in reverse. Since Japan reluctantly opened its doors to the outside world over a century ago, a large number of people have ventured abroad to explore life in the West. Almost all who have written of this experience have expressed the same combination of surprise and unease at the “freedom” of life in America.
Takeo Doi, a psychologist and author of the 1972 best-seller on Japanese behavior called The Anatomy of Dependence, described a visit to a cocktail party in America at which the host asked him an interminable list of questions about his preference for a beverage. Would the guest prefer a soft drink or a cocktail? Would he prefer bourbon or Scotch? How much liquor would he like, and how would he like it prepared? “I soon realized,” wrote Doi, “that this was an American’s way of showing politeness to his guest, but in my own mind I had a strong feeling that I could not care less. What a lot of trivial choices they were obliging one to make, and I sometimes felt as if they were doing it only to reassure themselves of their own freedom.”
In Japan, the dream of personal freedom is not the Holy Grail that it is in the West. People aspire instead to drink from a cup that is well-worn and has first been passed around the room. Just as I struggled to accept the doting presence of the group in Japan, so my Japanese hosts struggled to appreciate the frustrating independence of this American. For the members of my office, this adjustment proved to be enlightening. Several weeks before I was impounded in the hospital, I was asked to make a trip to Tochigi’s capital city of Utsunomiya to meet with other foreign English teachers. Mr. C came over to my desk at the Board of Education a few days before the meeting with a briefcase overflowing with maps and directions for making the one-hour train ride.
“Are you sure you understand?” he said with grave concern. “Do you need me to go with you?”
“I came from Georgia to Tochigi all by myself,” I assured him. “I think I can make it safely from Sano to Utsunomiya.”
Mr. C thought for a moment, then began to giggle like a boy. The whole office—ever listening—soon followed.
“Ah, he sure is an American,” Mr. C said as he shuffled back to his desk. “He really has the Frontier Spirit.”
Dr. Endo arrived promptly at the hospital, bowed to the teacher, used honorific speech toward the doctor, joked with the nurses, and generally loosened a tense situation. After conferring with the doctor he assured me that the cast was necessary. Then he smiled and relayed the doctor’s recommendation that I be admitted to the hospital.
“The hospital,” I gasped, “for a sprained ankle?”
“Yes,” Dr. Endo answered. “You’ll be unable to walk on your cast.”
“Unable to walk?”
“Yes,” the other doctor added, “but only for a week. Then I’ll give you another cast.”
Despite protestations, I knew I was trapped. Having placed all of my hopes with Dr. Endo, I could hardly have convinced my doctor and my colleagues that a third opinion was in order. Within seconds they had pulled a cotton sock above my knee and wrapped my leg in plaster strips. When they finished, I was allowed one telephone call, sent home, and told to return posthaste with a towel, a change of clothes, and a pair of chopsticks. This was a bring-your-own-flatware type of place.
Room 306 of the Kosei Hospital in midtown Sano looked like most other six-bed hospital rooms I had ever seen, complete with white tile floors, beige walls, and faded orange curtains across the window. When I arrived later that night, four other patients lay in various states of convalescence, with their wives and, in some cases, their children at their sides. When the excitement over my arrival subsided, I settled into a corner bed, and presently a nurse brought dinner. Pausing at the end of my bed, she looked first at me and then at the plate of rice and meatballs she held in her hand.
“Can you use chopsticks?” she asked.
I smiled at the question I had heard so many times.
“I sure can,” I told her. “I even brought my own.”
I had made it about halfway through the tray when another nurse appeared at the door, grabbed the tray, bade us good night, and turned off the lights. It was nine o’clock. For the rest of the evening I lay flat on my back with a lump of rice in my stomach, my left leg suspended in the air on a giant lime-green foam pyramid, and my head on a beanbag pillow. I spent my first night dreaming of escape.
Just as I wafted into fantasies of a daring breakout—catapulting to freedom from my third-floor cell or leading a platoon of one-footed convalescents�
�the curtains around my bed screamed open and a nurse appeared at the foot of my bed. “Ohay gozaimasu, good morning,” she chirped. “Did you have pleasant dreams?” I glanced over at the digital clock beside my bed: 5:55.
“Excuse me,” I grunted. “I’m still sleeping.”
“Oh no you’re not,” she chimed. “It’s time to take your temperature.” With that announcement she ripped aside my blanket, reached down my shirt, and stuck a cold thermometer underneath my arm. Then she promptly disappeared. I lay back on the bed and tried to resume my escape fantasies when suddenly the metal rod in my armpit started beeping like a smoke alarm. I jolted up, and the nurse came scampering over. “Gomen, gomen, sorry,” she said as she reached into my shirt and extracted the high-tech digital thermometer. “Just right.”
Then she pushed me back on the mattress, took my pulse, and started running through a list of questions in Japanese. I responded to each one in turn—no, I had not eaten all my dinner; yes, I had slept well—until she reached a final question, which I could not understand.
“Could you please repeat that,” I said.
Off she went again. “Something, something, yesterday. Whatsit, whatsit, how many times?” Again, a blank stare from me. Not to be denied, she looked around the room, pulled the curtain closed, and carefully enunciated the word “TO-I-LE-TO,” pointing to her rear end for clarification.
“Ah, got it,’ I announced. “Twice.”
Then the nurse stripped back the covers again and pointed to my crotch. “Weeelll…?”
Now fully awake and concerned that she had plans to probe me once more with her singing thermometer, I answered quickly, “The same.”
Every two hours for the duration of my stay in the hospital, a nurse would appear in my room, stick one of those thermometers down my shirt, take my pulse, and ask me how many times I had been to the toilet since my last checkup. Despite pleas that I was admitted for a twisted ankle and that perhaps we could relax this austere regimen, the nurses never slacked off.