Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  “It’s really very easy,” Ishikawa observed. “No problems at all.”

  The rooms in a love hotel come in assorted shapes and sizes, with decorations based on taste. They offer everything from beds in the backseats of Benzes to nests atop artificial golf greens, from marble Jacuzzis in the bathroom to “sense-a-round” body massage in the mattress. Many rooms are equipped with an extensive bank of stereo, video, and kara-oke equipment, as well as an audiotape library that contains everything from country-and-western ditties to Zen Buddhist mantras. These music boxes also have a special selection labeled “ALIBI.” The alibis are tape recordings of sounds from public places such as a street corner or bowling alley and can be used as background music for a hurried telephone call back home: “Sorry, honey, I’m afraid I’ll be a bit late tonight. Stopped off at the club for a round of golf with the guys.” Like any good service industry, love hotels also provide a guest book in each room, complete with spaces for lovers to inscribe pet names for themselves, describe where they went on their date, and circle any of two dozen diagrams that depict various lovemaking positions. Finally, for convenience, a condom is included in the price of the room and is located, Sato noted, “just under the pillow.”

  To help an anxious couple make the proper room selection, photographic slides depicting each room are displayed on a lighted board at the check-in counter. For choosy lovers, this board serves the same function as the flavor chart inside a box of Whitman’s chocolates. This way for creamy nougat; that way for cherry bonbons.

  “Choose a room with good feeling,” Sato recommended. As an example, he noted that Japanese girls around twenty years old like Disneyland, so perhaps a room with Mickey Mouse sheets would help the cause. “Atmosphere makes her want to do it,” he observed.

  Having led me this far, these two men were not about to leave me stranded. After offering me a plate of potato chips and a glass of peach-flavored milk, they began to advise me on the proper way to make love to a Japanese girl.

  Begin with the skin, they advised. It seemed somehow fitting that sex, like so much else in Japan, would begin with attention to surface detail. “Japanese skin is very soft,” Ishikawa explained with a misty gleam in his eyes, “just like Japanese mochi rice cakes.”

  Starting with the head, the gentle lover should proceed downward, he said, paying special attention to the ears, the neck, and the breasts. Arriving at the waist, though, the wise one skips to the toes and eases up the smooth, sheer legs to that special spot, “like Gold Finger, with a soft, soft touch.”

  As these two married men with young babies leaned over the bar, leering at their hands as they traced luscious images in the air, suddenly their eyes lost their sparkle and their arms went limp. They dropped their hands to the counter and looked first at each other and then at me.

  “Oh no,” Sato wailed. “You can’t do it…You won’t fit!”

  “What are you saying?” I protested.

  “Japanese girls are too small,” Ishikawa declared, “especially in that important place. For Japanese men it’s okay, but for foreigners…”

  Was I, in biological fact, being denied access to this secret sanctum of Japan, or was this just another artificial trade barrier? After all, if I could use chopsticks, then surely I could handle this challenge.

  But Sato and Ishikawa were deadly serious. Sato reached across the counter and grabbed a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

  “You see this?” he said, waving the bottle in front of my face. “This is your average Japanese man—about ten to thirteen centimeters long. You are longer, right?”

  “Uh, well…”

  “It’s true,” he burst in. “But although yours may be longer, mine is harder. Japanese men are short but strong. American men are soft.”

  While I pondered this new cross-cultural theory, Sato disappeared briefly into the kitchen and emerged brandishing an empty teakettle that he proceeded to fill with water. With great flourish and bravado, he held the Tabasco bottle to his crotch and suspended the teakettle from the neck of the bottle. Ta-dum.

  “There,” he shouted, as if he had just pulled a rabbit from a hat, “I can do that…Can you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know,” I replied humbly, hoping he would resist the temptation to test my virility right there in the middle of the Potato. “I never tried. But does this really mean I can’t go to a love hotel?”

  “Let’s just say,” Ishikawa remarked, “that it would be difficult.”

  Just then Sato had an idea. “You know, Japanese girls can give birth,” he said, by now grossly inflating the size of foreign men. “Maybe you can do it. You just have to be careful and make her relaxed.”

  “That’s why atmosphere is so important,” Ishikawa added, his hopes inflating again. “You must have a good room, with mirrors on the wall, a round bed, and a see-through shower. That will help.”

  “Of course, don’t talk to her,” Sato added as an after-thought. “Keeping silent is not so difficult, I think, and it’s a lot more fun. Just think of it as a kind of exam.”

  For a moment the two men disappeared into their own memories, flashing faint smiles of recollection and nodding intently. Ishikawa was the first to break the silence. He leaned forward, slapped his friend on the shoulder, and said, “You know, we should know better at our age.”

  “We should,” his friend conceded, “but…”

  “You,” Ishikawa said, turning back toward me. “For you to know Japanese girls is important.”

  “Indeed,” Sato agreed. “By getting to know many girls, you will become a good man. You will have a warm heart, a strong body, and eventually…a better mind.”

  It was comforting to learn upon arriving at the end of this odyssey that all this plotting and maneuvering would lead not only to carnal knowledge but also to the loftier end of personal enrichment. The inexperienced outsider could only wonder if one could learn the wabi-sabi—peaceful enlightenment—by traveling down this road.

  But short of that, Sato had one more piece of advice before sending me out on my own into the jungles of Japanese dating. “Don’t worry if you don’t succeed at once,” he said with a conspiratorial wink. “If you fail, you can always use your hand. When I was a young man, my lover was my right hand.”

  18

  POMP AND CONSEQUENCE: GRADUATION DAY

  May thy peaceful reign last long:

  Beyond ten thousand, years.

  Until what are pebbles now,

  Into mighty rocks shall grow,

  Which graceful moss doth line.

  —“Kimi Ga Yo,” the Japanese national anthem

  ON THE DAY BEFORE GRADUATION, during a blustery mid-March storm, all the students of Sano Junior High assembled outside the gymnasium in a seemingly endless single-file line. At the sound of a shot from a starter’s pistol, the students began a silent procession through the double doors of the gym. As the brass band rehearsed patriotic music under the basketball hoop and teachers draped red and white bunting from the walls, the students made their way down the center aisle, pivoted left or right per instruction, and assumed their assigned seats. When all the classes were finally settled, the principal took to the stage.

  “Kiritsu,” he shouted, and the students rose to their feet.

  “Rei” he said, and they bowed in silent submission.

  “Tomorrow is graduation day,” Sakamoto-sensei boomed into the microphone, “the most important day in the year. Tomorrow our school must shine.”

  The average Japanese student will graduate four times in the course of his or her education—from elementary school through university—but none of those graduations is more important than the junior high school ceremony, which marks the end of compulsory schooling. Until this day, students have attended the school closest to their homes, but with the onset of high school, academic performance becomes more important, competition increases, and neighborhood groups are forced to dissolve in the face of society’s selection process. The ninth graders at Sa
no Junior High, having recently passed their entrance exams, would soon be dispersing to ten different high schools, ranging from the topnotch all-male school in neighboring Ashikaga to the agricultural trade school a one-hour train ride away in the hills of central Tochigi. With this separation looming just over the horizon, graduation day from junior high formally closes the era in which the school has served as the unconditional haven and protector of all.

  “The way to shine,” the principal admonished his students, “is to work as one school. If one of us is out of line, all of us look bad. Listen closely to your teachers; watch your classmates carefully; and stand together as one. Today we will polish, so tomorrow we can shine.”

  With so much importance focused on the ceremony itself, schools go out of their way to ensure that their legions are fully prepared. Although students at Sano had been bowing together for close to ten years—in every class, at every assembly, before and after every lesson—they would spend this afternoon reviewing for one final time the basic marks of social punctuation: how to sit, how to stand, and how to bow.

  “First, put your legs together and rest your arms on top of your knees,” the principal instructed. “Now move to the end of your seat…

  “Don’t wiggle in your chairs. Remain still until you are called to stand…

  “When you bow, remember to count to yourself—one, two, three—then lift your head and look toward the front of the room…”

  Learning to bow is a continuous process that students must practice from their first day in school—along the highway—to their last—in the gymnasium. Bowing, derived from the Confucian custom of showing trust toward strangers by dipping the head in respect, is far more than a mere social greeting: it is the prime ingredient in the syntax of Japanese life. Students learn that by adjusting the depth of their bows, they can express themselves as effectively with their bodies as they can with words. In this vernacular, a friend rates only a slight nod of the head, while the principal merits a full-body bend in which the hands rest lightly on the knees and the head dips down below the waist.

  “You seventh graders are not together,” a teacher called from the catwalk above.

  “Hirohashi-san, don’t smile when you bow to the front.”

  “Look straight ahead at all times.”

  For two hours the students repeated these maneuvers, working methodically, retracing steps, honing their execution. Although the practice seemed endless, the legions did appear to be making progress, and by the end of the afternoon the entire student body was able to stand and sit without flaw. Upon command, they would rise in silent union, bend with the supple ease of swaying wheat, and return to their seats in effortless grace like a spent wave sliding back toward the sea.

  “If you can bow like this tomorrow,” the principal declared when the practice was over, “your parents will be proud, your teachers will be proud, and you can be proud of your school.”

  At eight A.M. the following day, hundreds of adoring parents crowded around the double doors of the gymnasium, all vying to be the first to fill the folding chairs that had been laid in even rows across the recently revarnished basketball court. Before entering the hall this Thursday morning, they tucked their shoes into tiny plastic bags and donned slippers brought from home. The sight of over six hundred mothers in silk kimonos and a half-dozen fathers in black tuxedos sitting expressionless in tiny metal chairs, with their feet inside pink and yellow slippers dangling just above the floor, will always be one of my fondest memories of Japanese schools. In addition to the parents, special representatives from the mayor’s office, local businesses, and the PTA all joined with the brass band at the start of the ceremony to hum the year’s theme song: the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”

  After the students had marched down the center aisle and bowed in unison toward the empty stage, the first person to address the gathering was Mogi-sensei from the Board of Education, the teacher who had sent me tumbling into the hospital six months before with his lethal forehand dropshot. He walked to the center of the cavernous stage, stopped before the freestanding microphone, and began to read from a handwritten scroll.

  “I come today to the most outstanding junior high school in our community to extend to the honorable parents, the hardworking teachers, and of course the bright and cheerful students, my sincerest congratulations on the occasion of your graduation…”

  The speech continued like this for almost ten minutes as Mogi-sensei recounted the educational odyssey that the students had completed, extolled the virtues of hard work that the school had instilled in them, and waxed poetic about the outstanding citizens they would soon become in selfless devotion to their country. At the conclusion of his speech Mogi-sensei offered a deep and gracious bow, tucked the scroll into his jacket, and marched quietly down the stairs. The students nodded their heads in respect. The teachers beamed with pride. Several mothers began to cry. Unbeknownst to them, Mogi-sensei would deliver this same address at no fewer than twenty-five schools during the coming two weeks.

  Following this salutation, the chairman of the PTA, the assistant principal, and the chief of the Fire Department each marched to the identical spot on the stage and delivered almost identical speeches. The audience seemed transfixed. From the front row of ninth-grade students in their black uniforms to the last row of parents in their black and white kimonos, no one moved throughout these proceedings: the mothers never smiled; the students never laughed; the audience never applauded. With the conspicuous silence, the mourners’ clothing, and the grim demeanor, the ceremony felt more like a requiem to lost youth than a celebration of life to come.

  To add to the solemnity, each person who marched across the stage, including the graduates who went one by one to receive their diplomas, partook in an elaborate ritual: students bowed to teachers; teachers bowed to guests; guests bowed to parents; and everyone—absolutely everyone—bowed to a five-by-seven-foot Japanese flag, which stared at the congregants from the back of the stage like a Cyclops come to life. After remaining invisible for most of the year, the “circle of the sun,” or hinomaru flag, suddenly emerged in all its glory on graduation day.

  A national flag is a relatively new invention for Japan. Banners showing the sun were used by some samurai clans, but the current design was not adopted until 1870, after Commodore Perry arrived from the United States and forced Japan into the international community. Almost since its adoption, however, the flag has aroused controversy. Across Southeast Asia the hinomaru flag quickly became the symbol for Japanese aggression. For centuries Japan was isolated and did not need a national emblem, but less than fifty years after hoisting its first banner, the country began terrorizing its neighbors. Many Japanese feel as negative about their flag as other Asians do. Since Tokyo’s defeat in the war, both the flag and the national anthem—a dreamy tribute to the emperor adopted around the same time as the flag—have been an undying source of bitter memories for some citizens, especially those on the southern island of Okinawa who suffered the country’s only direct invasion by Allied troops. As a result, the striking red sun on a plain white field, which the rest of the world has come to associate with Japan, has been virtually locked out of sight in the nation’s schools for most of the last forty years.

  Recently this mood has shifted, and the flag and the anthem have been staging somewhat of a government-sponsored comeback. While protests and flag burnings still occasionally occur, new regulations require schools to raise the hinomaru flag and play the Kimi Ga Yo anthem at all school ceremonies. Critics complain that the policy will prompt a return to Japan’s military past, but the government claims that learning to respect the Japanese flag is the first step in respecting the flags of other nations. In effect, the government is only making explicit in schools what has been implicit all along—that students must learn to bow not only to their teachers but to the state as well.

  After the preliminary speeches and the distribution of diplomas, the final person to address the students was the p
rincipal himself. Standing erect before the flaming sun, his black suit sharply creased, his black tie clipped to his starched white shirt, his gray hair slicked back like polished grain in marble, Sakamoto-sensei seemed to embody all the power and dignity of the state. For a moment he surveyed the scene below him: the long rows of students like beads of oil on water, each one glistening independently, but also melding with the others in a common glossy bond; the parents seated quietly behind their children, flushed with pride at the solemn charge being given their sons and daughters. For the school, as for the principal himself, this was the high mark of the year. He was “one-man” in control.

  “Winter is over,” he said in a booming voice, waiting for his echo to bounce off the walls before he spoke again. “Spring is coming. Soon the cherry blossoms will brighten our neighborhood and remind us how fragile we are. This is the season of change…”

  In the days leading up to graduation, I had learned how obdurate the state can be on the subject of change. About a week before the ceremony Denver asked me if I would like to deliver a short speech to the school. Several students had suggested the idea, he said, and many of the teachers had agreed that it would be a wonderful opportunity to add an “international” perspective to the occasion. I began preparing what I would say. But two nights before graduation Denver came to my apartment long after midnight and told me I would give no talk.