Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  This legacy of parochialism is nowhere more evident than in the problem of “returnee” children, students who return to Japan after living abroad for a time and attending foreign schools. These students, with their superior foreign language skills and firsthand knowledge of the outside world, might be expected to be in the vanguard of the kokusaika movement. Instead, many are ostracized because of their limited knowledge of Japanese and their perceived “foreign” tastes.

  At the beginning of the second term in Sano, a girl who had lived for seven years in Peru returned to school to take her place in the ninth grade. Mrs. Negishi was concerned about how this girl was adapting to her new surroundings and asked if I would speak to her in Spanish, which I had studied briefly in college. Many of the students in school, Mrs. Negishi said, were treating the girl as an alien because her Japanese lagged behind the others’ and her accent sounded strange. The following week, without warning, Mrs. Negishi called the girl to the front of the class one day.

  “Mr. Bruce will now speak Spanish with you,” she announced to the girl.

  The entire class turned to watch the girl as she made her way to the front of the room. I felt uncomfortable that this spotlight was being thrust on her, but I managed to offer a short greeting. The girl balked at the sight of my outstretched hand and stopped short at the first row of desks. Her fingers whittled at the hem of her jacket. Her head dropped to her chest.

  “Gamman,” the teacher encouraged, but the girl refused to move. Tears rolled down her cheeks. The pressure of being alone proved to be too great for her to accept. After standing in the center of the room for several seconds, she returned to her seat in silence.

  This episode struck me as symbolic of the difficulty of blending cultures in Japan. Obviously few of the students in that room had adjusted well to the new girl in their class. Few had accepted this outsider in their kumi, even though she looked, dressed, and even acted the same. “The Japanese are good at absorbing foreign culture,” a leading newspaper editorialized soon after this, “but decisively lack the capability to coexist with it.” The students I taught had yet to learn that it takes all colors on the color wheel to make a perfect circle. What they needed most was a new folk hero to lead the way of their growing international movement, a figure less threatening than a foreign giant and more open-minded than a provincial child: in short, a cross between Paul Bunyan and the Peach Boy.

  13

  KEEPING THE FIRE ALIVE: TWIN WINTER ESCAPADES

  Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,

  And merrily hent the stile-a:

  A merry heart goes all the day,

  Your sad tires in a mile-a.

  —Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

  THE FIRST TIME I PLANNED to visit Tokyo, back when the autumn leaves were still aflutter and the wind was sweeping through Sano, I asked Mr. C how to get there.

  “It’s too far,” he said, wrinkling his nose, squinting his eyes, and twisting his face in concern. “You must change trains. I can’t go with you. I’m not sure you can do it alone.”

  Next I approached Arai-san.

  “Tokyo?” she gasped, staring down at my leg, which was still wrapped in its cast. “You’ll get mugged. They’ll hit your leg. In the subway they’re really mean.”

  Finally I gave up and called Cho.

  “It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll draw you a map. I’ll ask my friend Hara to meet you.”

  Tokyo is a fountain of youth—a rich, commercial paradise brimming with juvenalia and overflowing with tides of voracious young adults with a seemingly insatiable appetite for consumption and mirth. For older people, like Mr. Cherry Blossom, Tokyo is a modern-day den of iniquity, but for younger types, like Cho and his college pal Hara, the city is a mecca of fantasy, offering escape from social pressure within its neon lairs of pleasure tucked away in the maze of skyscraping towers.

  Hara, who was born in Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, first came to Tokyo for college, where he joined the same club as Cho. After graduating, he spent two years working for the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Cairo and then returned to Tokyo—literally, the “Eastern Capital”—to work for a major industrial bank. He was younger than Cho, and taller, with blow-dried hair, a clipped mustache, and a sizable beer belly. He had a fondness for seersucker suits.

  “Ah yes…Georgia,” he said to me over dinner one night in an English rich with the lilt of a British country baron.” ‘Georgia on My Mind’…Gone With the Wind. Yes, I like the South. Did you know my bank is thinking about buying some property down there? Of course we would only buy the best hotels; that way we know the return would be high.”

  “Why the South?” I asked.

  “Real estate is so expensive in Tokyo, so we have to look elsewhere now. In the South, the food and the culture are more like they are in Japan. The people are also more polite.”

  He poured beer into my glass; I did the same for him, and he downed his draft in one gulp.

  “By the way,” he said with chopsticks poised to take another bite of fish, “do you like Japanese girls?”

  “Are they different from American girls?” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. “They’re better. They are pretty to watch, and they don’t talk back. The next time you come to Tokyo I’ll find you a Japanese girl. I’ll take you on a go-con.”

  According to custom, there are three ways for boys to meet girls in Japan. The most traditional method is to have an arranged meeting, or omiai, in which both sides investigate each other before sitting down to tea. The most romantic method is to fall in love, a route that is fashionable among younger people but still considered flighty by conservative types. The most renegade method is for boys to hang out in bars and pick up girls, in a popular pastime known as nanpa. These three techniques, however, proved not to be enough for the thousands of young people like Hara who first moved to Tokyo for college and then decided to stay for work. For these people a new form was needed: one that would unite people accustomed to proper introductions, get them out of their one-room apartments, and exploit the advantages of Tokyo’s thriving nightclub scene.

  What they created is called a go-con. Go is an abbreviation for the Japanese word for “meeting,” and con is short for the English word “companion.” The go-con, like its name, is a cross-cultural hybrid that resembles a group blind date. The rules are quite simple: a boy and a girl who are friends, but not lovers, agree to host a soire. The boy brings two boy friends; the girl brings two girl friends; and the six—or eight, or twelve—go out to paint the town red and pair themselves off. The go-con preserves the security of the arranged meeting while introducing the added element of choice, which has seeped into youth culture from the West. In mid-January, on the day after the national holiday when ancestors return from the afterlife to claim their New Year’s mochi treat, I got a chance to venture down this modern “Way of Meeting” with Hara and some of his friends.

  I arrived at the appointed street corner in the ritzy Roppongi district of Tokyo a little after eight o’clock on Friday night. In addition to me, Hara had invited his friend Azuma, who worked as a cameraman for one of Japan’s major television networks, a highly respected and well-paying job that boasts a higher than average glamour quotient. Accordingly, Azuma came dressed for our go-con in tapered leather pants and a tight, zebra-striped sweater. His hair was greased back against his head and a small, provocative curl hung down over his forehead, sort of like Michael Jackson, but macho. Call him Prince Charming.

  Hara and Azuma seemed ideal for the go-con game, except, as I soon learned, neither one was playing. Azuma already had a girlfriend, who would be our hostess tonight, and Hara was engaged. The night was only ten minutes old, and we were off to an unpromising start.

  We made our way to the first site, a second-story restaurant with dark benches and thick tables, and sat down to wait for the girls. (In using this term I defer to the linguistic customs of the country. In Japan, a girl is a “girl” until she get
s married, at which point she becomes a “mother.”) After almost an hour the girls’ team finally arrived from work. The first to sit down on the bench was a slim, regal goddess with black satin hair that tickled her waist, a black silk dress, and deep cinnamon eyes. Her name was Reiko, but call her Sleeping Beauty. She tucked her purple shoes under the bench and began chatting across the table with Prince Charming. I assumed she was his girlfriend and felt a tinge of regret.

  Next, an icy woman sat down with scarcely a hello, drew a cigarette the size of a chopstick from her bag, and began punctuating her comments with a cocked, smoking wrist. Kana was her name. When she mentioned that she worked for the Tokyo office of a large Wall Street bank, I asked her what she thought of her American colleagues. She turned toward me and said, “I don’t think I am going to tell you what I think of them until I decide what I think of you first.” Call her the Wicked Stepmother.

  The last girl to sit down at the table was the one person whose name I never learned. In fact, in the course of the entire evening, the only thing she said to me was, “Wow, you’ve lived in Japan only six months. You speak Japanese so well. I lived in America for two years, and I can’t speak a word of English. Gee.” Call her Dopey.

  Once all the players had gathered around the table, our troubles began. I was speaking with Azuma across the table when suddenly he turned red and shouted for everyone to stop. Turning to Sleeping Beauty beside me, he said, “Reiko, you talk to Bruce. Kana, you sit next to me. And Hara, you talk to her,” the unnamed woman at the end. As soon as this shuffle was complete, Azuma began screaming at Kana. “Why were you late?” he demanded. “We sat here for forty-five minutes waiting for you to come. Who do you think you are?” Unconcerned, she stared quietly into the room and blew smoke into his face.

  Meanwhile, I turned to talk to Reiko, now encouraged by the revelation that she was not the object of Prince Charming’s affection.

  “Is this a fight?” I asked her.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, “I’ll find out.” She leaned across the table and tapped Kana on the arm. “Excuse me, is this a fight?”

  “Yes,” said the Wicked Stepmother.

  “How long will it last?” asked Sleeping Beauty.

  “About twenty minutes,” said Prince Charming.

  “Okay.”

  Sure enough, they continued this heated discussion for the next twenty minutes, while the rest of us drank beer, sampled salted shrimp and spiced cabbage, and pretended not to notice them. When the appointed time arrived, I looked at Reiko, she turned to Hara, and he spun toward Azuma and asked, “Are you finished?”

  “For now,” he replied. “We’ll continue later.”

  And with that, we all returned to our original seats.

  Like its cousin the enkai, the go-con has an established agenda. First, the guests meet at a bar for food and drinks, then they move to a disco, and finally they stop off at a late-night coffee shop before breaking up for the night. In addition to having a poorly matched clientele, our go-con suffered from an unfortunate choice of locales. At our first place we received unusually brusque service. The waiter had told us when we arrived that we would have to leave within two hours. After the forty-five-minute delay and the twenty-minute fight, we barely had time to slip down some raw fish before we were forced to move out. Our second stop, an underground disco called Lexington Queen, was equally uncordial and even less conducive to chitchat.

  The inside of this subterranean pleasure palace was filled with rotating mirrors, fish-eyed video screens, and computerized lights that descended from the ceiling, blinked nervously, and spun around in circles. For all the hydraulic histrionics, however, the room had no empty tables for sitting and no vacant corners for standing. We could not even lean against the green velvet walls because they were covered with photographs of all the famous people who had once visited this place: Huey Lewis, Billy Idol, and a local group, the Twin Devils. With no place to linger, we sought the dance floor.

  If the first stop of a go-con is for getting acquainted, the second stop is for staking claims. In normal go-cons, Hara explained, the men huddle early in the evening to divvy up the girls. At our go-con, however, no such coordination occurred. Left to my own devices, I decided to make a small advance toward Sleeping Beauty. Unlike in erstwhile days, when the subtle suitor could send his sweetheart a letter—“It’s winter; the nights are cool; my body warms for you”—the savvy suitor of today must make his intentions known through suggestive and alluring gyrations on the public stage. With this in mind, I tried to position myself directly across our tight dancing ensemble from Sleeping Beauty to maximize visual contact. Unfortunately, just as I had maneuvered myself into the perfect flirting position, two young teenage nymphs came writhing up to me, practically bursting out of shrink-wrapped dresses that clung to their bodies like milk to a spoon. They winked at me, dropped their eyes in contrived shyness, and intercepted my provocative gestures, mistaking these advances as directed toward them.

  Within moments our go-con circle had begun to disintegrate. Azuma, by now fighting again with Kana, disappeared into the swarm of people and began dancing with other girls. Hara, somewhat removed from the various intrigues, disappeared into the men’s room to telephone his girlfriend. This left me alone with our troubled trio of bachelor girls—one thwarted lover, one silent beauty, and one nameless girl who danced by herself. Our go-con had gone awry.

  After two hours of crisscrossing the disco like characters in a Chekhov play—“Have you seen Kana?” “Is Reiko still here?” “What was that girl’s name?”—we finally managed to assemble at the door and make our way outside. The marquee above our heads said, “WELCOME TO THE LEXINGTON QUEEN: GREAT MYSTERY IN THE EFFEMINATE WORLD.”

  Our final stop was a tiny Art Deco coffee shop with plastic lilies on the table and gray vinyl tile on the walls. For a moment we seemed poised to forge order out of our chaos. Azuma sat next to Kana; Hara sat next to the unnamed woman; and Reiko sat next to me. Unfortunately for all, the conversation took a turn to the West.

  “Now, Kana, you have to tell us what you think of Americans,” Hara said after we had placed our order.

  “Do you really want to know?” she asked, glancing in my direction.

  “I think I can handle it,” I replied.

  “Okay,” she said, “you asked for it.” She pulled another cigarette from her bag, and Azuma lunged to light it. “I think they are lazy. These smart young men come here from Wall Street, and all they do is complain about us. They have no manners, and they show no respect. They don’t even try to understand Japan. All they talk about is sex and money.”

  “What don’t they understand?” I asked.

  She took a drag and tapped the ashes in a tray. “They don’t understand that while they are out playing, we are all working. They go out to nightclubs around Tokyo, and they think that’s the real Japan. It isn’t. Do you know why I was late tonight? Because my boss—my Japanese boss—said I had to work. The Americans had all gone home.”

  “But you’re always late,” Azuma said.

  “Be quiet,” she snapped back. “At least I’m not rude.”

  “Why are you so angry?” Reiko asked, coming to my defense.

  “Japan used to be a poor country,” Kana continued. “After the war, we were the slaves of America. But we’re not poor anymore, and we don’t have to be slaves of anyone. Now we are rich, and soon it may be your turn to be working for us.”

  “Okay, enough,” Azuma interrupted. “Don’t listen to her. She’s just drunk. She doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.”

  “He asked me what I think,” she said. “All I did was tell him the truth.”

  The “truth,” in this case, landed like a wet towel on our love circle, but I was happy not to get submerged in a debate on the relative virtues of Americans abroad. Ten minutes later, long enough for me to spill my glass of raspberry liqueur all over the oyster pizza, we decided to end our go-con. We left the café and hea
ded toward a deserted side street in search of taxi cabs. Hara and Azuma immediately walked ahead, leaving Kana behind with her friends. I walked in the middle, alone, until Reiko appeared at my side.

  “Why is it that Japanese men always walk ahead?” she asked.

  Should I tell her that most American men aren’t like that? I thought to myself. Should I tell her that I’m not like that? Should I tell her that I’m one of those “Sensitive Men” who care only for the feelings of others? Or should I defend myself as a man?

  “I don’t know,” I said meekly. “Japanese custom?”

  “I think it’s stubbornness,” she said.

  Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a jolt of boldness struck me. “By the way,” I said, “do you agree with Kana?”

  “About what?”

  “American men.”

  “Some of them. Most of the Americans we work with don’t care about Japan. They don’t want to understand our hearts. But I think there are many Americans who do care about how we feel. I hope you are one of them…” For the first time all night, a spring of hope.

  At the corner we faced the final task of dividing ourselves into couples for the ride home. To my surprise, Hara took up my cause with Reiko, encouraging her to take me home. “Your apartment is much bigger than mine,” he said. “And he is so tall. Why don’t you invite him home?”

  She didn’t answer, content to let the request stand for a moment more.

  The first cab came. Dopey got inside but left the door ajar. With great dramatic flair, the Wicked Stepmother marched to the open door and waited for a sign from the Prince.

  A second cab came. Sleeping Beauty got inside, but again the car did not drive away.

  A third cab came, and Hara stepped toward it.

  For a moment, three of us stood waiting at this fork in the woods—Prince Charming, the Wicked Stepmother, and the tall, dark stranger from across the sea. The first to act was Hara, who called from the last taxi cab, “Bruce-san, you’re coming with me.” I moved toward his car, and Sleeping Beauty drove off into the sunrise without even waving good-bye or telling me her telephone number. Meanwhile, Prince Charming and the Wicked Stepmother were still locked in their trance.