Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  “What actually caused the boy to kill himself?” the master asked Denver from behind his cash register when we came to pay the check. He tabulated the bill on a wooden abacus, then punched it into the register.

  “He was a member of the basketball club,” Denver said. “Some of the boys had been teasing him, beating him, even asking him to steal. He wanted it to end.”

  “Ijime,” the master sighed. “Just as I suspected.”

  The ijime pattern of student-on-student violence has become fairly well established. It begins with minor taunts—“You stink,” “You’re a germ,” “You don’t belong in this school.” Then it moves on to petty crime—forcing a student to steal candy from the 7-Eleven or a pack of cigarettes from the railroad station. And it often escalates to the level of physical abuse—cigarette burns on the arms or punches to the head. Much of this goes unseen by the teachers, who know it exists but do not actively try to stop it. Most of the victims never speak out. Instead, they learn to live with their torture as just another price for being different from their peers. Occasionally, however, a victim will lash out, and the consequences are dramatic: a seventh-grade student beats himself to death with a hammer; an eighth-grade girl hangs herself in her home; a ninth-grade boy jumps off the balcony of his third-floor homeroom class. These children could think of no way to escape, so they finally decided to join the others and persecute themselves.

  “There is something else you should know,” Denver said as we walked out of the restaurant into the moonless night. The warm, moist air seemed to drip from the trees like molasses from a spoon. The breeze had died down again. “What is it?” I asked.

  “You should know that the samurai spirit still exists in Japan.”

  “You mean in companies, and offices…”

  “I mean in schools,” he said, pausing to lean against the hood of his car. “In each class, students are like a group of retainers who join beneath the banner of a lord. When one of those students dies like this, someone must take the blame.”

  “A student?” I asked.

  “A lord,” he said. “The leader must always bear the shame and seek an honorable end.”

  22

  P’S AND Q’S AND ENVELOPE BLUES: A JAPANESE WEDDING SPECTACULAR

  A wedding, be it large and elaborate or small and simple, is one of life’s most important occasions—beautiful, meaningful, and traditionally a couple’s day of days.

  —Emily Post, Etiquette

  ONCE, DURING MY EARLY MONTHS in Sano, I wrote a letter to some Japanese friends while I was at my office. When I had finished, I put the letter into an envelope, copied the address of my friends on the front, and gave it to Arai-san, the affable “office lady” who daily gathered the mail.

  Several days later, Mr. C approached my desk with my letter in hand. “Mr. Bruce,” he said in a low voice, squatting beside my chair as he did when he had important matters to discuss, “I’m afraid we cannot mail this envelope.”

  “Why not?” I asked in a similar hushed tone. I assured him that the letter contained important office business.

  “It’s not the letter,” he said, “it’s the envelope. You have not prepared it correctly.”

  “But the address is accurate on the front,” I protested, “and I wrote the return address of our office on the back. Can you not read my writing?”

  “Oh no, your writing is very beautiful—more lovely than mine,” he said in one of those fatuous compliments that usually warned of something harsh to come. “But you have forgotten a very important detail. You left out the character for sama [a more formal, written version of the honorific san]. I’m sorry, but we cannot mail this letter without it.”

  Was this a joke, I wondered—a parody, perhaps, of the Japanese obsession with detail? Would the authorities in this office really not mail my letter without the Japanese equivalent of “Mr.” or “Mrs.” scripted on the front? Did they really check every letter that passed through the mail bag to make sure that all the names were anointed and all the kanji were crossed? The truth, I realized, was that this was no joke. The senior secretary of the Ansoku Education Office of the Tochigi Prefectural Board of Education had delivered my mislabeled letter to her section chief, who had conveyed it in turn to my section chief, who had passed it finally to my boss, who had dutifully come to inform me that the Japanese government refused to spend sixty yen to mail any envelope that did not contain the proper appellation of respect.

  I thanked Mr. C for his advice, apologized for the inconvenience, and told him I would solve the problem. But instead of just adding the missing character, as any humble civil servant would have done, I vowed to prove that my officemates had grossly overreacted. I took the errant letter to the post office, purchased a stamp, and mailed the envelope myself—sans sama. Any friend of mine, I thought, would not be offended by this trivial lapse of etiquette.

  The next time I visited these friends—a middle-aged couple in Osaka whom I had known for some time—I related this story to them, expecting us all to share a hearty laugh. But when I reached the end of my story, my friends didn’t laugh. They didn’t even titter.

  “Mr. Bruce,” they said with utter sincerity, “your boss was right. We always know when we get a letter from you, because you never address an envelope in the proper way. Form is very important, you know.”

  Envelopes, as I learned the hard way, are more than mere packaging in Japan. They are more than simple wrappers that protect a private letter and are later thrown away. As a school uniform defines a student or knickers a mountain hiker, an envelope actually becomes a part of the message itself. “In Japan, the package is a thought,” wrote the philosopher Roland Barthes. Within minutes of reprimanding my poor form, my friends led me to a special drawer in their home which they reserved exclusively for new envelopes. Inside they kept containers for every occasion—from births to deaths, from New Year’s gifts to mortgage payments. Some were wrapped in ribbons of red, while others were garnished with silk cherry blossoms. They even had a special envelope for the tooth fairy.

  The last, and most elaborate, package they drew from their drawer actually consisted of two wrappers in one. On the inside was a white sheet of paper, folded twice to conceal its secret contents, and on top of this slid a thicker slip of paper which was sheathed in red and white twine, knotted around the midsection, and adorned with sprigs of pine.

  “This is the most precious kind of envelope in Japan,” my friends said as they handed me this paper bouquet that seemed more suited for framing and hanging than licking and stamping. “We put a crisp yen note in the inner fold, tuck this into the outer sheet, wrap both sheets inside a silk handkerchief, and give it to a bride and groom on their wedding day. This is our Japanese custom.”

  In early June I got the chance to put my new envelope expertise to a test and spend a Sunday afternoon away from the tensions of Sano: I was invited to attend the wedding of my new friend Hara, the banking tycoon from Tokyo, and his bride, Emiko, from the “Up River” Real Estate Company. Cho and I drove together to Tokyo and arrived several minutes before noon at the canopy-covered entrance to the Mikado Hotel, across the tree-shrouded moat from the estate of the Japanese emperor. Upon arrival we were obliged to give a present—in cash. This courtesy contribution, currently running at 20,000 yen (or $150), defers some of the cost of the ceremony, but mostly pays for the gifts that the couple is obliged to give the guests. For my gift I got to witness the marriage ceremony, have my picture taken, savor a five-course meal, and—according to the complex calculus of gift-giving in Japan—receive four presents in return: a chocolate cake, a bag of rice, a pair of crystal goblets, and an economy-sized bag of dried fish shavings. Later I also received a box of macadamia nut chocolates from the couple’s honeymoon in Hawaii.

  After registering at a table in the lobby and handing over our envelopes, we were hurried up a winding staircase and ushered into a cramped waiting room where the two families sat facing each other in resolute silence,
like rival diplomatic delegations across a negotiating table. The groom’s family sat to the right in three even rows of ten people each, and the bride’s entourage sat directly across in a similar, formal phalanx. Like most modern couples, Hara and Emiko held two ceremonies: a private religious service for family members, followed by a large reception for friends, colleagues, and obligatory guests. Cho and I, the only friends invited to the private ceremony, were placed between the two families on a third side of the square, directly across from the bride and groom.

  Hara, his face somber, wore a black silk kimono with embossed family crests, wrapped by a pure white sash, while his bride wore an ornate white kimono with winglike sleeves embroidered with peacocks and birds of paradise. Her usually beaming face had been powdered over with white cake make-up and quieted with a submissive smile drawn with red lipstick. On her head Emiko wore a crowning, boxlike white hat that rose ten inches from the top of her hair and hung out over her eyes like a Greek pediment. This elaborate headgear, known as a tsunokakushi, is designed to hide the “horns of jealousy” that all new wives are expected to sprout.

  “Would both the mothers please stand,” the hotel attendant announced from the front of the room, “give your name, and your place of birth. Would the grandparents please rise…” I felt as if I was on jury duty, watching witnesses being sworn in. Ten minutes later, with the formal introductions completed, we moved two doors down the hall to a more traditionally appointed Japanese room for the nuptial ceremony itself. Black wooden chairs lined three sides of the room, spaced evenly across the lustrous wood floors that shone like melted butter. Narrow screens with charcoal strokes of bamboo leaves leaned in from the ivory walls. The guests took their places along the outside of the chamber; the bride and groom stood on virgin tatami mats in the middle of the room before a miniature Shinto shrine. The freestanding mahogany shrine had all the poise and strength of an antique armoire, with a carved frontal piece, several shelves holding gems and fruit, and a mirror that reached up from behind the altar and was trimmed with garlands of green summer leaves.

  A white-robed priest emerged from a door behind the shrine, made some opening remarks, and then removed a white sheet from atop a large straw keg of sake which was resting before the altar. Moving slowly, he blessed the couple with his hands, waved streams of white paper over their heads, and poured some clear sake into a cup at their feet. The bride knelt down, lifted the scarlet cup to her lips, then offered it to the groom. When he had finished, the priest refilled the cup. The groom drank first this time and tendered the cup to his bride. Finally, each of us in the wedding party retrieved a cup from under our chair and waited for the priest to fill it with rice wine. The priest returned to the altar and clapped twice to summon the gods; we all bowed as one, then drank from our cups. What wine has joined together, let no one put asunder.

  Throughout the short ceremony, the priest gave no indication of having met the couple before. He read standard prayers from a photocopied sheet of paper, and at each stage of the ceremony he leaned over and whispered instructions into the groom’s ear: “Put on the ring…Bow! Start walking out…Now.” The Shinto element to Japanese weddings is relatively new, added only after Christian missionaries poured into Japan a century ago and introduced their religious ideals of marriage. Before that time, marriage was viewed as a secular union between two families. Nevertheless, the ceremony itself seemed devoid of any religious ambience. There was no music except for a few tape-recorded reedlike sounds piped in over scratchy speakers, and no prayers were uttered by the bride, the groom, or either of the families. The only other people who participated in the ceremony were an older couple who sat behind the wedding pair for no apparent reason.

  “What were they doing in the middle of the room?” I asked Mr. River Up after the ceremony had ended and we were having a group picture taken.

  “They played the part of the nakdo,” he said, “the formal go-between.”

  “But I thought Hara and Emiko met through friends,” I said. “They didn’t have an arranged marriage. They were a love match.”

  “That’s right. But the hotel told us we had to have a nakdo, so we asked the neighbors to sit in.”

  After the modest ceremony, we moved back downstairs for the reception and joined 150 of the couple’s assorted friends and co-workers in the grand ballroom of the hotel. Far from the refined elegance of the Shinto chapel, this room was about as understated as the palace at Versailles. Mauve velvet curtains swooped like condors from above and draped the sides of the gilded shutters that covered nothing but wall. Buxom chandeliers bobbed from the ceiling like frilly hoop skirts at an antebellum Southern ball. The round tables were heaped with twinkling topiaries; satin ribbons tied to the top dribbled over the edge of the linen tablecloths and dragged along the floor. Cho and I found our assigned seats, along with Hara’s other college mates, and sat in front of silver platters brimming with cold meats, sliced fish, and pickled vegetables—all covered with plastic, so we could look but not touch.

  The reception itself was so elaborate that it required a five-page printed program and a rented emcee to narrate the show. In the beginning was the word—speeches, to be precise. The happy couple, now changed from their ceremonial garb into a less regal but still formal pair of kimonos, marched down the center of the room and took their places on a raised platform for everyone to see. The acting matchmaker then assumed the microphone and proceeded to recapitulate the life story of the groom. “Hara-kun was born in a small wooden house on…As a boy, he obeyed his parents and worked long and hard at…He attended elementary school at…In junior high school he was a member of the…His favorite class in high school was…” The only thing omitted from this exhaustive resume was a list of his former girlfriends. The matchmaker’s wife then did the same for Emiko, followed by more character testimonials from the groom’s boss, the bride’s sister, several high school friends, and even Emiko’s junior high school homeroom teacher. Cho, in his capacity as honored university elder, gave a short address about the virtues of traveling with long-time friends and the difficulty of traveling with Hara, who always came away with the girls. The audience applauded politely, like white-gloved guests at high tea.

  After the last formal toast, “To the wedding of Toshiaki Hara and Emiko Kawakami,” we were finally able to open the wine and remove the plastic wrapping from the food, which had been growing steadily more appealing on the table before us. With the start of the meal, tuxedoed waiters hurried to our sides, dishing out portions of French onion soup, Caesar salad, and lobster not-quite-Newburg made with processed cheese, since the Japanese don’t care much for fromage verité. The real show, however, was on the stage. After a pause long enough to admire the meal but not long enough to eat it, the lights were dimmed and a movie screen descended magically. Through sips of soup and sweet German white wine we watched a slide montage of childhood pictures of both the bride and the groom, set to the rueful tune of “Time in a Bottle.”

  When this high-tech montage was finished, the emcee called for the lights to be blackened completely, and his band of loyal retainers rolled out a small computerized machine about the size and shape of a grocery cart. As the speakers whined with Lionel Richie singing “Endless Love,” tiny beams of red, white, and green light burst from the box with a shower of brilliance and began to dance in the dark. “It’s the Mikado Hotel’s Laser Light Extravaganza,” the emcee wailed as the light beams outlined frolicking butterflies and dancing hearts on the wall in the back of the room, “TOSHIAKI AND EMIKO—TOGETHER HAPPY ECSTASY,” the laser scripted in classic Japanese-English. “LOVE IS 4-EVER.” The crowd shrieked its approval. “Isn’t it spectacular!” said a woman at a nearby table. “It’s better than the Magical Light Parade at Tokyo Disneyland.” I thought for a moment I had found the ultimate trophy of Japanese technological ascendancy: a portable electronic box that painted multicolored sea gulls on hotel walls to the squealing delight of hundreds of guests.

  But
we were not through yet. Just as the laser show drew to a close, a spotlight reached out from the darkness like a shining sword and revealed the bride and groom, now dressed in chiffon wedding dress and tuxedo, being lowered into the room inside an eight-foot-tall white-picket gazebo suspended from the ceiling. As this Cinderella-like coach touched the ground, the crowd oohed and aahed and two dozen children wearing pinafores and sailor suits stepped forward to greet the newlyweds with pink carnations in hand. Emiko kissed the children on the cheek; Hara shook their hands; and my go-con companion Prince Charming, in his capacity as cameraman-at-large, rushed forward to capture the scene on his portable video camera. Moving back toward the front of the room, the happy couple mounted a small round stage alongside a three-tiered pink wedding cake, which was festooned with lacy icing, supported by plastic Ionic columns, and topped with a Caucasian wedding couple underneath a canopy. The lights dimmed. The crowd hushed. The master of ceremonies announced into his microphone, “This is the climax.” The bride and groom brought down the knife together with all the ardor of an aspiring samurai, and suddenly the stage began to rotate, the cake began to shake, and pink smoke came billowing out from beneath the lowest tier. As the tape-recorded violins soared to the crescendo of “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” white spotlights drowned the stage and the entire platform began to rise on the shoulders of three hydraulic beams, like a UFO taking flight. I held my breath, thinking for a moment that the cake was going to lift into the air on a web of red and white laser beams. Yet the crowd could contain itself no longer. Roaring their approval, the guests jumped to their feet in riotous applause and swarmed the swiveling cake with an arsenal of flashbulbs and dessert forks.