We bought sheets, towels, and cotton yukatas at a super-modern multistoried department store. My mother also bought me a plaid thermos—I couldn’t figure out why. Later I’d see her purchase was incantatory: if she could prevent me from going thirsty, I would be protected from all dangers.
When the dreaded moment arrived, at the genkan my mother said, “Oh Sara!” gripped me madly, then, forcing herself to be a good soldier, left me, mopping at her eyes. The lump in my throat was the size of an egg.
Girding myself, I mounted the steps to my room. Seeing the daisies my mother had given me as a last gift, I fetched some water from the bathroom down the hall and placed them, one by one, into the thermos. Then I organized my desk. I put my pens at the top, placed the thermos of daisies just right of center at the back, put my copy of Siddhartha on the left-hand side, and a notebook in the middle.
I am ready, I thought. I can do it. Everything is fine. There was no reason this shouldn’t have been true.
Half an hour or so later, a blue-eyed girl with straight blond hair hanging to her shoulders appeared at the door with a disheveled pile of sacks and cases. My roommate, Gretel, as it would turn out, was sweet like grass and honey, slow-calm, and a dispenser of simple truths—the one surety on which I would be able to depend during a year when lightning struck.
Dumping her luggage and plopping down on the bed across from mine, she opened a crackly cellophane sack and offered me what looked like a snag of shaggy yellow string. “Want to try some dried squid?” she asked. “I love it. I eat it like potato chips.” She giggled. A waft of fishy sweetness flowed into the room.
In the evening, after dinner in a building next to the boys’ dorm, Gretel and I went down to Mrs. Elliot’s lounge for evening snack. The room, furnished with a couch and a jumble of stray chairs, quickly filled up with an exuberance of yukata-clad girls—who flopped on the chairs and the clean but spotted carpet. Mrs. Elliot was seated in an overstuffed chair like a presiding Humpty Dumpty, and some of the girls fluttered over to her and hugged her hello, saying they had missed her during the summer recess.
Mrs. Elliot was out of an English novel: one of those strayed, solitary Englishwomen who fashion for themselves good, solid lives far from their original homes in Dorset or East Anglia. She was short and round, and wore faded flowered dresses, and, as I’d soon sense, she was fierce.
“Okay, girls.” She clapped her chubby hands. “Time for introductions. We have some new girls. One of us has come all the way from Borneo!” she said. The girls all looked at me and smiled. In a blur, they introduced themselves. “Hi, I’m Charity. Hi, I’m Jane. . . .” They waved their fingers or giggled.
I looked around the room at the mélange: a gorgeous Asian American girl with pool-deep, dark eyes like the raggedy girl’s; a blond and chap-nosed girl, with a voice as sweet and quiet as that of a wood thrush; a tall girl with chestnut hair who carried herself like a Masai queen. . . . The other girls were a tumble of messy hair and nighties with legs and feet sticking out. At this point, I couldn’t sort them but, in the dorm, just before lights out and on weekend afternoons, their hidden secrets, worries, and delights would tumble out like junk and treasure from beat-up steamer trunks.
After one of the girls handed out cookies—still, in my experience, the best oatmeal cookies in the world—everyone flopped out on the floor, perched on the arms of each other’s chairs, and the room filled with chatter. I heard, in a mix of Japanese and English, breathless boys’ names, shrieks of laughter, and over and over again, the word gaijin. For ten minutes or so, it was as though we were one big family of girls, like in an English book.
On the way back upstairs, I asked my roommate what the word, gaijin, meant. Gretel said, in her blithe way, “Oh that’s the Japanese word that means ’foreigner.’ We’re all gaijin,” she said, like this was a basic fact of life. Japan, as I’d soon discover, was not an assimilative culture, and even these missionary kids, brought up in Japanese villages and towns, who were for all intents and purposes Japanese, lived in a separate category. Japan had a long history of eschewing foreigners as uncultivated people who didn’t bathe often enough. Living as a gaijin here would afford me much food for thought as to the nature of my own country as well as that of Japan itself.
The teachers at CA were another motley crew like those at The American School of The Hague. My French teacher was a fastidious man with impeccable clothing from which he brushed off invisible bits of lint with his manicured fingernails. My chemistry teacher was an elegant, eloquent African man. He wore a white lab coat and had a twinkling smile with a glint of mischief in it. My English teacher was a hearty Canadian in old tweed. And my history and religion teachers were the two halves of a couple: the Meads from the University of Chicago.
Plunked at CA, I felt far from America, from Borneo, from everywhere. It was as though I’d stepped through a crack in the atmosphere—but into a surprisingly welcoming and homey world. Thirty years on, from the safety of greater age, I would reflect on the fact that this school was not an American school, and how that had made a difference.
A girl named Nancy and I wandered down a twisting-narrow street in the heart of ancient Kyoto. Nancy, a five-day boarder at CA, had graciously invited me to her missionary parents’ home for the first weekend. The doors to the shops along our way were diminutive and narrow to match the street, and made of aged, dark, beautiful wood. Tiny signs with elegant brush characters invited us into tea shops with twiggy teas in a variety of green-grey hues displayed in wooden canisters; shops with hand-woven obis and bolts of exquisite kimono brocade in watermelon, sherry, and iris; shops with strange, geometrical arrays of bean paste sweets in pale rose, lime, and lavender; shops with triple-size strawberries and apples nestled in the crackly straw of beautiful handmade boxes; shops with window displays of carved folk gods with high, bald heads erupting out of tree stumps. I was enthralled: I seemed to be strolling in a village that had been transported to earth from some faraway Tolkien place in the clouds: a village, it seemed, of people who possessed sensitive, nimble fingers; myopic eyes able to examine cloth and wood with the closeness of a microscope; and a sense of color so subtle as to almost slip away into the air. I would only find anything near its match decades later, as I gazed into Parisian shop windows. Deep in my body, I felt a slowing down in the face of such a sublime sense of detail, such fineness, such perfection.
As a shopkeeper wrapped the beautiful, lopsided raku pot with which I’d fallen in love—making an exquisite piece of art out of precisely folded brown paper and rope tassels—I could sense the Japanese reverence for taking time and care, their worship of craft. “Japanese potters,” Nancy told me, “have to apprentice for seven years before they are allowed to make a pot.”
In this dusky shop filled with subtly beautiful teapots and plates I was being infused with the power of another culture. Culture enters through the pores, and foreign places where you don’t speak the language are even more powerful than those where you do because all you have are your senses—and the senses register a place more viscerally than cognition. My appetite was whetted. I wanted to know more of this place of my birth; I sensed that important secrets were to be had, if I could just discover them. Gradually, Japan would reveal itself to me, like a fan, fold by fold.
Nancy and I ducked now into a tiny, dark tea house. At our tiny table, Nancy ordered our snack: bowls of sweet red beans cradled on crushed ice.
At CA, for the first time in my life, I was in a school where the majority of the students were not wealthy. There was a sprinkling of kids from the Kobe consulate, a kid or two whose parents worked at Vicks and Kodak, and at Iranian oil concerns, but the majority were the offspring of American and Canadian missionary parents. The school had been founded to educate these children and they hailed from small villages all over Japan, and beyond. They came from the little island of Shikoku, the big island of Kyushu, and the snow monkey island of Hokkaido, and included among them Southern Baptists, Luthera
ns from the Midwest, Episcopalians from New England, Methodists from Toronto, as well as representatives from multiple other denominations and locales.
Perhaps something tilted when I changed hemispheres, for the world was different, or maybe my perspective had altered. In any case, among these missionary kids, I perceived no monolithic culture. There were lots of little twosomes and threesomes but I didn’t pick out a shiny clutch to be envious of. For some reason, perhaps because I lived with them in the dorm, here I could see those not in the limelight. Rather than an indistinguishable mass, they seemed, rather, a hodgepodge of approachable, quirky kids—some boarders and some day students—each of whom seemed to me unique, beautiful, and fascinating, like a character in a fairy tale. A boy, for example, with the beginnings of a soon-to-be full beard wore a Japanese-sleeved cotton jacket and a cloth band of cotton, like a sumo wrestler’s, around his head every day. A girl with gleaming, bottom-grazing black hair carried a large milk can for a purse. Another girl, blue-eyed and fluffy blond, wore the red and white sweaters of a Norwegian travel poster.
In contrast to Sidwell, where the kids seemed burnished and fast, these kids were of an innocent and natural bent. For fun they went to Japanese temples and ate noodles in little shops. Even the rule-defying behavior that took place seemed more wholesome, unglazed by sophisticated double-talk. The kids who acted out were transparently troubled, searching for something obvious, like love. As with anything, I’d discover, there were squabbles between the various denominations and a missionary upbringing had heavy baggage, but there was still, to me, something refreshingly unpretentious about this batch of people. And among them—released from the noose of privilege—I felt both comfortable and unique. Elitism is seductive like an expensive meal in a fine restaurant, but this felt nourishing in a daily way like chicken and mashed potatoes.
Maybe because I couldn’t possibly belong—I couldn’t metamorphose into a missionary kid raised on a Japanese island—I felt freed. No one here was like me. Few of them were impassioned like I was about the Vietnam War, but I felt like I could be myself. How odd that here, among these half-American, half-Japanese missionary kids I was among my kind. Or perhaps it was no mystery at all.
One day during the first month, I was sitting in English class in the middle of the school day when one of the school’s administrative staff summoned me from the doorway. Andy was standing by his side. The staff member muttered something to us about “registration,” and we were shuffled into a car containing two uniformed policemen who spoke only Japanese, and whisked down the hill away from the school. Andy and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. Neither of us had a clue what was going on.
At police headquarters half an hour from the school, we were seated in an interrogation room when three Japanese policemen came in. They bowed to us and we bowed back, but they did not have kind looks on their faces. The three men sat around the big desk and, for what seemed like hours and could well have been three, asked, over and over again, the same two incomprehensible Japanese sentences, within which the word “gaijin” kept being uttered, emphatically, again and again.
The men were increasingly annoyed at our lack of comprehension, and I began to feel worried. Why were they keeping us—a couple of kids—talking to us like this for so long about being foreigners? Did they think we were spies or something?
At one point, a lady in a kimono came in with a tray of tea.
Andy whispered to me, “You know in Japan, I’ve heard, they always serve you tea before they send you to jail.” I really wished our father were here. He could have cleared this all up in a trice.
Finally, when a Japanese man named Mr. Fukuda was called from the school to translate and help out, it became clear that, although the dependents of U.S. embassy employees stationed in Japan did not need to have alien registration cards like other gaijin, which was what the embassy had told my father, we needed them since our parents did not reside in the country. Once this was understood—that we must get our cards immediately—there were many more bows and head nods all around, and we escaped.
But now the driver took us across town in another direction, again on an unspecified mission. In a district of low apartment buildings and shop fronts, he double parked, got out, and directed us into one of the buildings. He issued a few words at the woman who greeted us, pushed us into her inner chamber, and removed himself to wait in the car. The woman, hunched down in a kimono, bowing and with exquisite politeness, beckoned us into what looked like her living room, and then into a little room beyond where a camera was set up. Finally we understood that we were there to have our photos taken. We smiled to the woman and she nodded and said a lot of Japanese back, and the job was soon done.
At this point, Mr. Fukuda rejoined us in the shop—but now he had a look of annoyance on his face. He pointed to our shoes and said, “You know, here in Japan, we don’t wear shoes in the house.” We looked down at our feet in mortal embarrassment.
We had known about this custom from the time we were weaned—we’d always prided ourselves on our cultural sensitivity—but somehow that inbred knowledge had been lost in the afternoon’s shuffle. So the chagrin and mortification of the day were now complete. Not only had we broken the Japanese immigration law, but we had also literally trod on one of the most basic of Japanese rules of decorum.
Now I felt not only a status-less and distinctly unsuperior American, but like a bona fide dumb gaijin. One of Japan’s first lessons, that of humility, had been conferred.
Outside the dorm, I said good-bye to Andy—in his old, baggy corduroy sport-coat that had been our father’s. Thank goodness he was here with me. He was my reflection.
On the mid-September eleventh-grade bus trip to a beach called Tottori, I wound up sitting next to a girl named Annie, with hair the color of wet wheat and heavy as a bolt of velvet, from Rochester, New York, who’d been at CA for a year. Immediately we realized we had a lot in common, partly because, unlike most of the other kids, our parents were not missionaries, and because we had recently arrived. Since Annie had participated in the antiwar movement too, with her I felt like I could make assumptions, express my provo self.
Annie was funny and all the kids flocked around her as she tossed sand at them, teased the boys, and raced people into the water. After a while, we went off together to pee behind a dune and suddenly a man rose up from a hillock of sand, pulling down his pants. He had pink polish on his fingernails. We dashed away, bonded by breathless, giddy laughter.
After that Annie and I were fast friends. We were very different—I was a shy poet and she, an outgoing artist and an actress—but there was a mutual feeling that we were complements. Annie was inimitable. With her large personality and her instinctive inclusiveness, she enfolded everyone in class in her embrace. A party girl and a clown, she could be sad and funny at once.
Sitting in her living room in a vast, modern apartment a few train stops from school, eating her mother’s brown-sugar cake, we talked about Vietnam—and then Japan. Annie had lots to say. “America is a warmongering heap . . . and it’s so plastic. Japan has much better values. The Japanese have a highly developed sense of beauty and the arts. Japan is outasight. . . . Have you seen a temple yet?” Annie said. Thus, my new friend floated out to me the idea that Japan, rather than America, might be the country to admire.
We were a mixed herd of antelopes, buffalo, and zebras galloping toward the station. A bunch of kids from school, led by Annie, were going this Saturday to visit a Shinto temple a couple of train stops down the line. Buoyant and boisterous, we clambered onto the train and plopped into seats. Japanese ladies in kimonos wagged their heads and shushed us for our noisiness, but we were irrepressible tickle and bounce and high spirits.
Once at our destination, and having passed under the temple torii gates onto the raked gravel path, my Japan-bred companions turned quiet and reverent. At the broad temple entry, they met the monk with prayerful hands and soft murmurs. I folded my hands and
bowed in imitation. Like birds, we sprinkled ourselves through the dark, hallowed space.
Monks in brown robes were gathered before the altar, chanting droning prayers. The sound filled the entire quarter—a soothing, deep-pitched humming only broken once in a while when a designated monk clacked two pieces of wood or rang a wooden bell.
After a time, the monks stopped chanting and filed out, and silence resounded through the high, wood-timbered building. Now I felt flowing into me something utterly new, a sense of peacefulness unique to Japan I dubbed “the hush.”
I had begun to notice this hush in many places in Japan. In the ubiquitous tokonomas I’d by now glimpsed in odd walls and corners, in the graveyard behind school, in tea shops shadowed by soft, white paper shoji walls. It was there, lingering, a possibility, everywhere I went: the Japanese penchant for places of repose, for the soft voice, for reticence. Into my veins was trickling the power of a quiet country.
Japan’s implicit support for inwardness—something natural to me—ironically let me open outward. Or perhaps it was not ironic: a clinical supervisor I would have as a budding social worker would teach me that if you wanted a client to develop a particular side of herself, you should emphasize and support the opposite trait.
Some Americans I would come across would seem impervious to the Japanese hush, to the whispering beauty of Japan. They would feel restrained by the quiet, straitjacketed by the ritualized, stiff politesse. Some of them would ram themselves down the Japanese streets, talking loudly and devil-may-care, blasting out to the Japanese what freedom was. I would sometimes feel this urge too. Instead of bowing, or being tactful and polite, I would long to yell and misbehave. But mostly, Japan suited me. Something in me sang to the crisp formalities. The rules and boundaries were clear. There was a rail to hold on to if the ship pitched.
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