Learning to Bow

by Bruce Feiler

  The following Tuesday morning, I stood in the hushed gymnasium and prepared to take my turn before the entire school. A year had passed since I first stood fresh from my bath before a roomful of teachers in my Lilliputian cotton kimono with the dark blue bamboo print and answered questions about my resilience to Japanese wine, women, and thunder. During that time I had learned how to deflect unwanted questions from eager Japanese interrogators, how to blend with the seasonal winds, and how to charm an audience with the subtleties of indirect speech. This was my opportunity to speak to my students in their own metaphor.

  When my name was called, I walked to the center of the darkened stage, now stripped of its hinomaru sun, bowed to the teachers along the wall and then to the students in rows on the floor, and began speaking in my best Japanese.

  “It’s summer,” I said. “In summer, I like to take walks.

  “The other day I was walking through Sano when I came upon a doll store on a small side street. From the window, all the dolls in the store looked the same. They had the same costumes, the same posture, the same faces. But I decided to go inside.

  “Once inside the store, as I watched the shop master work with his dolls, I realized that they were not all the same. Each doll was different. Their costumes were different; their faces were different. Each had its own character and story to tell.

  “In the past year, I have visited many schools. From the outside, all the students in these schools looked the same. Their uniforms were the same, their bicycles were the same; their haircuts were the same. But I went inside and talked with many of you. I found that all of you are not the same. Each of you has a different character and a different story to tell.

  “Next year you will have another foreign teacher in your school. At first this person will look like all other foreigners to you. But please don’t point at him, and please don’t stare. Instead, talk with this teacher, as you talked with me. Ask questions and try to discover his character and the stories he has to share.

  “This, I believe, is the best way for different people to understand each other. This way we can all be friends.

  “Thank you very much.”

  The students were silent when I had finished my speech. I stepped back from the microphone, bowed, and turned to leave the stage. As I moved toward the stairs, a young girl came hurrying onto the platform with a bouquet of yellow roses. She laid the flowers in my arms and unfolded a piece of paper from her pocket.

  “Dear Mr. Bruce,” she began in soft, clear English. “You have visited our school for a year, but now you must go home. We are sad to be parted.

  “When you came here first, you shook hands with all of us and said, ‘Nice to meet you.’ We can never forget that. And I’m sure it will become a nice memory for us. Thank you for visiting our school, and please come back to Japan.

  “Finally, let’s part without saying ‘Good-bye.’ I would rather say ‘See you again…’ Well, see you again.”

  EPILOGUE:

  IN SEARCH OF THE JAPANESE DREAM

  As I turn and look at the Plain of Heaven,

  The light of the coursing sun is hidden behind it,

  The shining moon’s rays can’t be seen,

  White clouds can’t move, blocked,

  And, regardless of time,

  We’ll tell, we’ll go on talking

  About Fuji, this lofty peak.

  —Yamabe Akahito, “Looking on Mt. Fuji,” c. 744

  MY AMERICAN FRIENDS wanted to take Kentucky Fried Chicken; my Japanese friends wanted to take rice balls. We took both, plus a bottle of champagne, and headed for the top of Japan.

  It was a hot and humid summer Sunday evening. August had come. The rains had stopped. My term had ended at the Board of Education. But before I moved away from my windswept home, I persuaded my friends Ben and Emmett, visitors from Georgia, and Cho and Hara to join me for an all-night trek to the peak of Mount Fuji—the tallest mountain in Japan and the symbolic heart of this symbol-sensitive land. In a country where the flag still causes riots and the national anthem is rarely played, Mount Fuji, with its flawless, silent silhouette, conical features, and razor-sharp ledges, has become a welcome substitute as a national totem. Fuji—the kanji characters mean prosperous man—is such a popular emblem that it has been used to name everything from TV stations to banks, from restaurants to photographic film. In every logo the image is the same: two sheer sides rising symmetrically from the ground, topped by a flat, volcanic plateau, and crowned with a cap of white snow that drips down the sides like vanilla icing on a storybook birthday cake.

  For over ten months of the year, Mount Fuji is draped in snow and ice and is virtually impassable. But from the middle of July to the end of August, the snow melts, the bald head of the mountain emerges, and climbers are allowed on the trails. Because it is such a cultural landmark, over three hundred thousand people make their way to the top of the mountain every year during the six-week hiking season. As a result, climbing Mount Fuji, like taking a bath, is a communal experience. “You’re a fool if you don’t climb it once,” the Japanese say. “But you’re a fool if you climb it more than once.”

  At seven-thirty in the evening we loaded our fried chicken and rice balls into backpacks, tied raincoats and sweaters around our waists, and boarded a bus that would take us from the heart of Tokyo to a designated starting point halfway up the mountain. The trail to the top of Fuji is divided into ten stations, and most climbers start at the fifth level around ten P.M. and hike through the night in order to arrive at the two-mile-high summit (3,776 meters) just before dawn the next day.

  At the fifth-station gift shop each of us purchased a plain walking stick with a rising-sun flag and a ribbon of bells attached to the upper end. Before starting, Hara insisted that we take off our packs, remove our rain gear, set down our flashlights, and follow him through a routine of warm-up calisthenics like the ones he performed at his office every day. Just as we started our stretching and chanting an American woman came rushing over to our group.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “do you know which direction to go?”

  “No,” Cho said. “Up, I think.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “You just looked so professional, I thought you knew what you were doing.”

  We eventually found the trail ourselves and set off up the mountain. At first the path was wide and the hikers sparse. The moon was full, but it faded at times behind sullen clouds that threatened from above. In the distance the orange lights of Tokyo flickered in the night, hurried and frantic like a pinball machine. As we walked, we kicked stones along the path, slapped bugs on our arms, and traded blame for agreeing to this trip. We talked about Hawaii, where Hara had just been on his honeymoon and where Ben and Emmett would have preferred to have been that night. Still we marched, like lemmings, heavenward.

  After little more than an hour, we passed through the sixth station, a small resting zone with a cluster of wooden cabins where several old women peddled warm milk in bottles, dried squid in bags, and spots along their futon-laden floor for travelers too tired to continue. Out front, two young men with bandannas on their heads and tattoos on their arms sat before an open fire and charged one hundred yen (about sixty-five cents) to burn hot-iron stamps into the walking sticks of suckers like us. The stamp showed that we were 2,400 meters above sea level.

  After the sixth station the path grew gradually thinner and the crowds suddenly thicker. In no time we were surrounded by families with young children, small bands of businessmen, and the ubiquitous octogenarian tour group.

  “The Japan Travel Association Mount Fuji Hiking Group will now begin walking toward the next station,” boomed a tiny lady with a pink cowboy hat and a baby-blue bullhorn. “Let’s make sure everyone is together and not separated from our group. Please count off…”

  Some of the hikers seemed to have spent weeks preparing for the expedition. Most of the men over fifty, for example, came dressed in the same outfit: a red plaid shirt, dark
wool knickers, and an olive-green Robin Hood hat. They looked like miniature porcelain dolls from a Swiss chalet gift shop. Hiking gear was not required. Most of the younger men wore sneakers, and I saw more than one woman in heels. Yet everyone, absolutely everyone, carried a stick. These sticks were not actually necessary. The path was fairly smooth from the constant tread of feet, and the crowds had grown so dense that we had no place to fall. The reason we all had sticks was that we had fallen for a scam. The fifth-level shop had sold the sticks dirt cheap, and the sixth-level stop had offered stamps at cut rate. But the higher up the mountain, the more elaborate the stamp, until, by the eighth and ninth stops on the trail, each new seal was priced at twice the rate of the last. Hara—the businessman—cursed himself for not thinking of this idea first; the rest of us—the pushovers—waited dutifully in lines for our Fuji proofs of purchase: 2,700 meters; 3,100 meters.

  By early morning the stations seemed to be getting farther apart and the bites of chocolate less effective in stemming the waves of fatigue. As we made our way up the mountain, we could always tell when we neared a station, because each one had its own bouquet of septic air. With ten thousand people climbing every night and only several makeshift latrines at each level, the stations seemed to loom over every horizon, disabling those below with the burden of their stench. By the ninth station—3,400 meters—the smiling faces had given way to scowls, the lines at the outhouses had become longer, and the piles in the sleeping cabins had grown larger. The only group of climbers who seemed not to tire were the children. One class of elementary students marched up the mountain in shorts; a junior high group wore bicycle helmets to protect against falling rocks; and at least one club of high school students carried bicycles to the top for a giddy ride down the back side of the mountain, like freedom-seeking graduates after their rigorous climb through school.

  “Hey, Cho,” Ben called when we stopped for a rest in between stations, “would you like to try some chicken?”

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I prefer Japanese rice.”

  “You know we eat rice in Georgia,” Emmett said. “Except ours doesn’t turn sticky like yours, because we put butter on top.”

  “Sounds good,” Cho said, lying.

  After five hours of straight climbing, our bodies were drunk with exhaustion. We stopped speaking. It began to rain. Now far above the tree line, I stopped to take a time-exposure photograph of the mountainside at night. Up above, blinking flashlight beams wove their way toward the quilt of clouds, and the whimpering bells attached to every stick filled the air with their plaintive song. The scene was both enchanting and eerie, like a massive funeral dirge. With the sleepy foot soldiers, the stench, the stations, and the thickening mist, I thought of Dante’s famous tour and wondered whither this path would lead.

  Twenty minutes later, after we passed through the cover of clouds, the top of the mountain came into sight, and with it a solid mass of people clogging the trail between us and it. There we were, 3,600 meters above sea level, the ninth station behind us, three layers of winter clothing on our backs, trapped in the absurdity of a predawn traffic jam. As far as the eye could see, people filled the path, and the trail looked more like a stadium ramp after a football game than the face of a mountain at four o’clock in the morning.

  “Come on,” Ben shouted, “let’s be American.”

  Determined not to have come all this way only to see the sun come up from the side of Mount Fuji, we sneaked along the edges of the path, tiptoed over the slouching bodies, and even—in a fit of nonconformity—stepped outside the ropes, to the gasps of the crowd. It was a race, of sorts, against the oldest clock in the world.

  Finally, at 4:55 A.M., dragging our soggy chicken and sodden rice balls, sprinting to the end, we reached the top of the mountain. Never mind that we ran smack into a virtual mall of souvenir shops; never mind that there was no place to sit down without buying a can of coffee or a cup of tea; and never mind that the final branding station wanted two thousand yen (about fifteen dollars) for the ultimate Fuji stamp. We overlooked all of this, plus the smell, the crowds, and the freezing rain, because of what we saw. Standing on an isolated spot atop this ancient volcano, far removed from the crowds of Tokyo and the clogged slope of what surely must have been the most congested mountain in the world at the time, at several minutes after five o’clock on an early-August Monday dawn, looking down on other mountains ’round on all four sides, we popped open our bottle of imported champagne and beheld the sight that has inspired a nation since the gods of heaven first descended the bridge to the Land of the Central Plain: the caress of the Rising Sun.

  Later that evening, as we sat around Hara and Emiko’s apartment in Tokyo, soaking our worn feet, drying our wet clothes, and eating Domino’s pizza, I called back to Sano to make arrangements to drop by the Board of Education to say good-bye. First I called Mr. C’s house, but no one answered. Next I telephoned Kato-sensei and learned the reason why: Mr. C’s mother, who had struggled with an illness and had been in and out of the hospital all year, had died over the weekend. The funeral had been held that morning, Kato-sensei said, but perhaps I could pay Mr. C a visit the next day.

  On Tuesday morning, with Ben and Emmett content to wander around Tokyo seeking Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts and Dunkin’ doughnuts, Cho and I headed back to Tochigi.

  “It seems I have spent most of the last year in the passenger seat of your car,” I commented as we headed out on the Tohoku Expressway back toward the countryside.

  “NIKKO—80 KILOMETERS,” a sign said.

  “Have you ever been to Nikko?” Cho asked, and we both laughed. The question had come to symbolize not only the precarious joys of teaching “Living English” but also the mixed blessing of living in Tochigi, where the best, and perhaps only, place to visit is this famed national park. Cho had been there five times in the previous year; I had been four.

  We had managed to find other things to do besides traipsing around Nikko every season. We had gone hiking, and swimming, and even golfing—in the snow. In June he had driven me to the prefectural museum in Utsunomiya on a Sunday afternoon so that I could see the four slivers of bone that constitute the “Oldest Man in Japan.” After he broke up with his girlfriend, we had talked, plotted, and planned, but we had actually never gotten around to trying nanpa. Cho had even had his hair permed to improve his chances. (This hair style was so popular among young Japanese men that one week later Denver appeared at my apartment to show me his new perm. His hair was so wavy, in fact, that he no longer looked like John Denver.)

  “I’ve decided,” Cho said as we neared Sano that afternoon.

  “Decided what?” I said, remembering his abrupt announcement that he had broken up with Chieko.

  “I’ve decided that I’m going to take the test to become an overseas teacher for the Ministry of Education.”

  “That sounds great,” I said.

  “I think it is important for people to live in a foreign country,” he said. “I think it is important to understand foreign people. If I go, I can become a better teacher and make many friends. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a wonderful idea,” I said. “Where will you go?”

  “Anywhere,” he said. “But they usually send female teachers to Europe or America. So I will probably go to the Third World. I think that sounds more interesting.”

  As we pulled into town, Cho stopped his car at a stationery shop just blocks away from Mr. C’s home.

  “We must each give a small remembrance when we arrive at the house,” he said. “Not very much is required—several thousand yen will be fine. But we must put it in the proper envelope.”

  Inside the store I faced the familiar bank of envelopes, with their various ribbons and decorations sprouting from every fold. We picked a plain white model with a black ribbon knotted solemnly in the front, traded our old bills for new ones at the cash register, and scripted our names on the front. Now we were ready to pay our call.

  Mr
s. C ushered us into the living room, where her husband was seated on the tatami floor with five or six other men from the office. When we entered, the group rose silently and bowed deeply, first to us and then to our host. Mr. C stepped toward the door and led me by the arm to the front of a shrine that took up most of one wall in the room. Huge pine branches stood like sentinels on two sides, flanking a three-tiered wooden structure draped in black and white fabric, covered with bowls of fruit and nuts, and topped with a large framed photograph of Mr. C’s mother.

  Following Cho’s lead, I walked to the front of the elaborate memorial, bowed, laid my envelope in a brass bowl on the floor, and clapped my hands twice.

  “Thank you very much for coming,” Mr. C said as I returned to the center of the room and took my place around a table with the other men. “You are very polite. Your bowing is very beautiful. You even brought an envelope…”

  “I was very sorry to hear of your loss,” I said, using the formal expression that Cho had taught me in the car.

  Mr. C paused to acknowledge my comment, then continued his previous thought. “You have become just like the rest of us,” he said. “You talk like us. You sit like us. Even your face now looks like ours.”

  The others leaned forward to examine my appearance and nodded in consent.

  “I agree,” said one of the men, who was still staring at me. “His face has changed in the last year.”

  “His eyes are more narrow,” added another.

  “His nose is less high.”

  “Yes, I think you have become Japanese,” Mr. C concluded. “But there is one thing you must know.”

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “You should never clap out loud at a funeral. Just bring your hands together, but never make a noise.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” he responded. “It’s a simple mistake. Cho-sensei did the same thing.”