Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  So much for the myth that Japan is a land of understated elegance.

  When I went with Hara on our failed go-con in January, he told me about a new era of love in Japan—or at least in Tokyo—in which sex comes first and then comes marriage. In this new romantic age, he said, boy meets girl, propositions girl, then takes her home to bed, “just like in America.” The apogee of this modern love is the modern wedding. More than any other event I witnessed, this reception showed how material wealth is changing the lives of the “way out, but classic” generation. In the past, weddings were more sober affairs, befitting the kejime of moving from one stage of life to the next. Mr. C, for example, was married in the shrine I had visited on New Year’s Eve. But weddings today have become showcases for wealth and gadgetry. The average Japanese couple spends $53,000 to get married—about half from the cash contributions and the rest from the parents of the bride and groom. The high cost of tying the knot includes not only the price of the wedding and reception but also $1,000 as a finder’s fee to the real or stand-in nakdo, $2,000 for photographs, and an estimated $10,000 in dowry money exchanged between the two families. Since a wedding is a milestone for an entire community, many families are willing to splurge to enhance their position among their friends and neighbors.

  As I witnessed the parade of these high-priced toys, from laser-light moonbeams to hydraulic-powered cakes, it occurred to me that some money-conscious Japanese may have fallen victim to their own brand of “conspicuous consumption”—spending enormous sums of money for extravagant tokens of wealth and status. If anything, money has allowed the Japanese to explore their wildest fantasies, especially of romantic love. Magazines like Seventeen and Jump!—modeled after prototypes in the United States—have saturated Japan with their dreamy tales of Western love. Comic books, soap operas, and bubble-gum pop music all urge young people to spurn the formulaic methods of courtship which their parents pursued and set out to find the perfect match for themselves. Young people have taken this foreign custom and carried it to extremes. The Japanese imported Valentine’s Day from the West, for example, and promptly added a parallel holiday one month later called White Day. On February 14 girls give boys gifts of chocolate, and on March 14 boys return the favor with batches of homemade cookies. Hikaru Genji—a popular musical band of beatific roller-skating teenage boys named after the gallivanting hero in The Tale of Genji—received an astonishing eighty tons of chocolate one year from weak-kneed junior high school girls all across Japan. Even though marriage is still primarily an institution in which the wife is expected to show duty toward her husband, a glitzy wedding can provide a temporary escape from this reality. On its wedding day, at least, a couple is elevated from the bonds of obligation to the realm of romansu.

  Yet in the course of the entire reception, no speaker made any reference to the future happiness of the bride and groom. No person even mentioned their “love.” Besides exchanging rings—another Western adoption—the couple did not touch and, as far as I could tell, did not even look at each other throughout the entire four-hour ceremony. Not until the end of the day, after we had all filed out of the hotel with our shopping bags brimming with chocolate cakes and crystal glasses, did the newlyweds emerge, in their fourth change of clothes, to reward us all with their official “first kiss.” As I watched, I remembered Hara telling me on the evening of our go-con that he would ask his wife to quit her work as soon as they were married. He wanted modern love, all right, but with a traditional wife. Despite all the bells and whistles, the new age of love imported from the West has been unable to bridge the age-old gap that separates men from women, even those who are married to each other. The wedding itself was simply an “event,” with little spontaneity, little emotion, and, despite the laser valentines and sentimental soundtrack, little heart. After all the excitement was over, the wedding reminded me of its own envelope—an elaborately crafted package stuffed with brand-new money.

  23

  A PASSAGE TO DISNEY: THE ANNUAL SCHOOL EXCURSION

  Mickey is the natural leader and the smartest of all the Disney crew. He is cheerful, sensitive, warmhearted, and generally likes people.

  —A quote on my office trash can

  JUNE BROUGHT FRESH WINDS INTO SANO. In my neighborhood, baseball season began in earnest. The boys across the street decided after great consultation to place home plate just in front of my mailbox, which meant that home runs landed in the cemetery behind my building and foul balls in my kitchen. Around the corner, the Hotel Sunroute was so swamped with guests that it began valet parking in the evenings and put a concierge with a walkie-talkie in the lobby to direct guests to the French bistro on the ground floor, the outdoor beer garden on the roof, or the main ballroom upstairs to the right, where the surge of lavish weddings on weekends had increased to three or four a day. Just down the street, the Jusco Department Store sponsored a week-long sidewalk sale featuring cotton sheets and “towel-kets,” lightweight terry blankets popular during humid summer months. And across town at the Cherry Blossoms’ home, Mr. C spent several weeks taking down the thick metal shutters from the windows and placing corrugated plastic over all the doors, while Mrs. C stored the wool kimonos in cedar chests and began burning incense in every room to reduce the dampness inside the house. The reason for this flurry of activity was the coming of the rains, which arrive every year at the end of June to sadden the children, hearten the farmers, and rekindle the grain of the gods.

  In school, students marked the change of seasons by doffing winter jackets and donning short-sleeved shirts, but their minds were focused on a coming attraction of a different sort. Classes plotted for weeks; teachers fretted for months; the television news anchors even announced on the air when the season officially arrived. Every year just before the midsummer rains, junior high schools from coast to coast load their students onto trains and buses, read them their rights as apprentice citizens, and send them out into the world for the annual rite of passage known as the school excursion.

  At Sano Junior High, each class took a trip. The seventh graders visited Tokyo Disneyland; the eighth graders made an overnight hiking trip; and the ninth graders took a three-day excursion to the ancient capital of Kyoto. Even though these trips were great fun for the students, the teachers emphasized that they were also educational experiences—a sort of itinerant classroom. To make sure that students understood the purpose of the excursions, the school published a special booklet for each grade. The ninth-grade book, the most extensive of the three at sixty-two pages, cited three wide-ranging objectives:

  By working together with teachers and each other in an unfamiliar environment—let’s develop lifelong memories.

  By visiting various historical places directly—let’s deepen our studies and understanding of our heritage.

  By working together within a group with good health and safety—let’s learn about public manners and have a positive experience.

  The book went on to list the places to be visited, the time allotted to each location, and the mode of transportation between sites.

  Like the dress code, the guidebook left nothing to chance—it provided rules right down to how to take a communal bath in the hotel’s tub. “All students should bathe in shifts,” the book insisted. “Fourteen students at a time; ten minutes per group.” To ensure that this schedule was followed, the guide indicated that a teacher would be stationed outside the bathroom door every evening, logging students in and out of the tub. Also, like patients being admitted to a hospital, each student was advised to bring a pair of slippers, a towel, and a bar of soap. Shampoo, however, was forbidden, since washing hair would be too time-consuming. In addition, the students were admonished to follow these rules when bathing en masse:

  Before entering the bath, wash yourself thoroughly.

  When entering the bath, do not take your towel with you.

  Upon leaving the bath, do not forget your underwear.

  Ironically, these instructions contradicted my ow
n experience with public bathing in Japan, since all of the men in my inaugural bath carried tiny towels into the water with them to shield their dignity. But for students the rules are more strict.

  The family bath, or furo, is the hallowed yolk of most Japanese homes, a secluded sanctuary where weary servants of the state can wash away the dust of everyday life and renourish their ties with the past. Most parents take their children into the tub with them at night as soon as they are old enough to walk. Many families, like the Cherry Blossoms, drop fresh fruit or flower petals into their bathwater on special occasions throughout the year.

  Like eating, dressing, and bowing, bathing is considered so central to Japanese culture that Sakamoto-sensei did not trust parents to teach their children the proper form. The school, he felt, must take an active role. I could only imagine the reaction in America if a school administrator set out to teach fifteen-year-old students the “official” way to take a shower. “First take off your clothes. Then turn on the water. Don’t forget to wash behind your ears…” The secret to Japanese schools, I had come to realize, is their pledge to leave no towel unturned in pursuit of an orderly world.

  In the weeks before the start of trip season, students heard in meeting after meeting that their behavior reflected not only on themselves but on their class, their school, and their community as well. Then, two days before the trip to Kyoto, all the ninth-grade classes gathered in the gymnasium for a rigorous uniform inspection. The students stood at strict attention as teachers marched down the lines, scrutinizing the width of collars, the length of hair, and the placement of nametags on jackets and shirts. The teachers stretched rulers to the girls’ hemlines and measured the distance from the cuffs of boys’ pants to the floor. Any student whose uniform showed deformities was sent to the stage and ordered to strip off the delinquent garment, which was then laid on the floor alongside the prototype that Sakamoto-sensei had pulled down from outside his office. Following this operation, the students were asked to hand over their prepackaged luggage so that teachers could search for contraband. No Walkman radios were allowed. Chewing gum was strictly outlawed.

  Thinking of the dissension at the sports festival, I pulled some boys aside to ask them which illegal items they planned to stow away.

  “I’m bringing popcorn,” one whispered, “but please don’t tell my teacher.”

  “I have a tape recorder,” said another.

  “I’m bringing comic books,” said a third.

  “No cigarettes or sake?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” one boy said with a gasp. “Too dangerous. Didn’t you hear that one student got sent home by a teacher last year for bringing a video game? Candy is okay, but nothing serious like hair spray or beer.”

  In the mood of vigilance that prevailed after the suicide in May, Sakamoto-sensei balked at the idea of sending me to Kyoto with the ninth graders. Instead, after lengthy deliberations with my office elders, he decided that I could accompany the seventh graders on their trip to Tokyo Disneyland and help chaperon Denver’s homeroom class.

  On the morning of the big day, the students began assembling at school before six o’clock. The school had tried to anticipate every possible problem, beginning with the coordination of two hundred students and five rented luxury buses. This potential bottleneck was considered so severe that on the day before the trip, the teachers set up chairs in the gymnasium in the shape of a bus to allow students to practice getting in and out of their seats in an orderly fashion. This rehearsal was followed by another, in which students practiced running in and out of formation for the class photograph when they heard the sound of a whistle.

  Once on the bus, however, the teachers went off duty and the tour guide took over for the ride. While schoolteachers regularly talk down to their students (“Now, children, let’s hold our bags tightly as we board…”), the young bus hostess, dressed in a pink polyester uniform with a navy vest and cap, used florid and servile speech to the students as if addressing an honored group of executives (“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, we are privileged to have you on board our bus today for your trip to Disneyland. Please fasten your seat belts and we’ll be on our way…”).

  The students, however, were unimpressed.

  “Sensei, sensei,” one screamed at Denver from the back of the bus, “can we switch seats?”

  “Sensei, sensei,” called another, “is she your girlfriend?”

  Finally the guide gave in to the pressure and offered the microphone to the class. A buoyant boy with a devious grin sprang from the back of the bus to seize the proffered prize. He whispered something to the guide and handed her a cassette tape, which she popped into a tape recorder at her feet, flooding the bus with the synthesized sounds of Hikaru Genji. Without missing a beat the boy stood atop the purple velour seats of the bus, bowed to the cheers of his rowdy classmates, and began to sing along—“Here I am in par-a-dise.” Welcome to junior kara-oke, the teenage mutant version of the adult drinking game.

  As we neared our destination, the soaring spires of Cinderella’s castle peeked over the congested mesh of freeways and factories like a mirage of fantasy in an industrial desert. The guide retrieved the microphone and asked the students to return to their seats. After she reached for a button beside the driver’s chair, two doors magically parted above the students’ heads, revealing a television set suspended from the ceiling. “Mick-ey, Mick-ey!” the students cheered, and within seconds a tuxedoed Mickey-san appeared on the screen to lead us on a Magic Kingdom tour full of song and dance and Disney trivia. “Tokyo Disneyland opened five years ago…The park welcomed five million people in its first year…We’ve sold two million T-shirts and three million hot dogs since our opening day…” At the end of the tour, Mickey asked everyone to join him in a round of “It’s a Small World,” the anthem of Disney diplomacy.

  Disney. The name itself conjures up images of magic and spectacle, of a world where reality succumbs to fantasy and hope conquers fear. Step inside this rainbow-colored paradise where music fills the air and candy grows on trees and leave your worries behind. Disneyland defies time. It legitimizes escape. In essence, it is the opposite of school.

  The teachers freely admitted that Tokyo Disneyland served no educational purpose, but they still viewed the trip as more than fun and games. Chief among their objectives was for students to design a plan for the day with several other classmates in a small group, or han. Each han was required to stick together for all four hours and incorporate ideas from each of its members, thus ensuring that students experience the actual give-and-take of group decisionmaking. One of the primary rules for the class trip, for example, was that all students be prompt. But the rules insisted that only one student per han was allowed to wear a watch. The teachers wanted a diary, so one student in each han was elected scribe. The class wanted pictures, so one student per group was allowed to bring a camera. The students wanted souvenirs, so each group collected a kitty and elected a purser to tend it. Dependence on other people is not a genetic trait that the Japanese pass down through the blood, it is the logical outgrowth of deliberate pedagogical policies like these. The management of this trip, more than any other single event in the school year, revealed the skill with which the Japanese schools transfer abstract goals into concrete educational practices.

  “Remember our objectives,” Denver said as the students gathered for one last time in front of the bus. “Have fun, but do not get lost. Today we want everyone to make good memories. Let’s cooperate, and let’s be prompt. Be back at the bus by three o’clock.”

  Tokyo Disneyland is almost identical in style and layout to its cousins in California and Florida. The park has manicured shrubs in the shape of cartoon characters, pink sidewalks that curve around peacock-colored flower gardens, and speakers hidden in all the trees which sing like the birds and the bees. Each area of the park glitters with memorabilia from its chosen theme: Frontierland has wooden storefronts, split-rail fences, and gold sheriff stars e
tched on every door; Tomorrowland boasts large metallic buildings, UFO-like hot dog stands, and aerodynamic trash cans straight out of a twenty-year-old vision of the future. (Frankly, these futuristic gimmicks pale in comparison to the high-tech gas stations and computerized toilets twenty minutes up the road in downtown Tokyo.)

  One major distinction between Tokyo Disneyland and its American forebears is that the Japanese version has no Main Street. Instead, the main shopping strip is called World Bazaar and is covered with a giant glass roof to protect park patrons during busy and drizzly summer months. The lack of Main Street USA, in many ways the epitome of the Disney charm, hints at a larger difference between the two worlds. What is lacking in Tokyo Disneyland is a sense of nostalgia. In the United States, Disneyland aims to divert its guests from the present to a fond, misty memory of some make-believe golden age in America’s past. But in Japan, the main street never had soda fountains with large bay windows or bakeries with gingerbread trim. What for Americans represents the romance of the past, for Japanese symbolizes a charmed vision of the future. Instead of a sense of loss, there is a sense of longing.

  “Do all streets in America have jazz bands?” one student asked me as we walked by a three-piece ensemble wearing candy-striped jackets and white skimmer hats.

  Denver hoped that his students would not only get a taste of sugar-coated Disney but also come away from their excursion with a better sense of foreign culture. With this in mind, he gave each of his students an assignment: find a group of foreigners somewhere in the park, ask them for their impressions of Japan, and secure an autograph as proof of the exchange. When I first became a teacher in Japan, I hated this type of assignment because it seemed to promote the idea that singling out foreign faces on the sidewalks or the trains could somehow promote international exchange. Surely, the dozens of people who had my photograph on their mantelpiece were no less “internationalized” than they were before they ran into me at the laundromat or the supermarket. At school I refused to sign autographs, pleading—sometimes on deaf ears—that I was a teacher, not a celebrity.