The Sun Gods

by Jay Rubin

  The Fulbright people got me connected with the University of Tokyo, and I have been attending a seminar there on my specialty, the Noh plays of the fifteenth century. I’ve also been going to the theater a lot to see what Noh looks like in the flesh. Actually, Noh hasn’t got a lot of flesh, it’s so austere and restrained. Let’s face it, at the U.W. I was so overwhelmed with Professor McCracken’s encyclopedic knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject that I was sure it was what I wanted to study, too. It seems that I spent my two years in graduate school living in the fifteenth century, and I’m still trying to acclimatize myself to twentieth-century Tokyo. If I have a few more shocks like the one with the peanut seller, the transformation should be complete before too long!

  A couple of the advanced graduate students at Todai (short for the University of Tokyo) have taken me under their wing. Haruo Nishino, the more scholarly one, knows almost the entire Noh repertory by heart, and he will chant lyrics at the slightest provocation, which usually means at bars. (Yes, I go to bars now. Imagine that! Next time you and I drink together, I might have something stronger than orange juice. Then again, I might not.) The other fellow’s name is Keiichi Tashiro. He is probably the gentlest, kindest person I’ve ever met--until he gets a little alcohol in him. The two of them are so courtly at school, and they turn into feuding sailors when they’ve been drinking. I like them both, though, and we go everywhere together. My Japanese is improving by leaps and bounds.

  I must confess that I have been enjoying all this immensely. The country is neither an Oriental paradise nor is it completely Westernized. (Actually, I shouldn’t be talking about “the country” at all: I have yet to set foot outside of Tokyo, and I keep hearing how much stronger traditions are elsewhere.) Just when you think you might as well be in downtown Seattle (no, that’s crazy, no part of Tokyo could ever be confused with Seattle--downtown or otherwise: you’ve never seen such crowds! The sheer volume of humanity here is probably the biggest shock of all, and, let’s face it, the city is plain ugly. It wears its modern machinery out in the open: viewed from an elevated train or a tall building such as my hotel, it looks like what space you find under the hood of your car--hoses, wires, tanks, nuts and bolts, but, as I was saying before I started this parenthetical detour), you run across some little pocket of culture that has survived from the days of the shogun and the samurai.

  I don’t know how long this is going to last, though. Tokyo is in a fever getting itself ready for the 1964 Olympic Games and you’re constantly hearing about how this or that has to be cleaned up or covered over or gotten rid of before the foreigners start pouring into the country “only” two years from now. There are new subway lines being put in, and every other day the work has to be stopped for some new archeological find. (Sometimes the “archeology” only goes back as far as 1945 when lost air raid shelters are found and people are “reunited” with long-dead relatives.) The amount of construction everywhere is just breathtaking--almost as breathtaking as the amount of destruction accompanying it. Sometimes it feels as if the whole city is being built up and torn down at the same time.

  The government is also pursuing a campaign urging people to clean up certain kinds of behavior before the games start. The Japanese are known for their extreme attention to cleanliness, of course, but you’d be amazed to see what litterbugs they are, casually dropping old newspapers anywhere they happen to finish reading them, discarding lunch wrappings and used chopsticks and empty disposable tea pots on train seats, smearing the ground with gobs of phlegm (no wonder they take their shoes off at home!). One of the most disgusting sights is that of drunks sprawling on the benches of the commuter trains at night or vomiting anywhere the urge happens to hit them--over the edge of train platforms, on the platforms, and not infrequently inside the trains themselves. People usually look the other way. Apparently, drunkenness is viewed as a valid excuse for all sorts of anti-social behavior. One more example of male grossness is acceptable even without such an excuse (though no doubt the drinking contributes to it): urinating in public. You know how energetic the Japanese are supposed to be, and I would say the image is a true one, to the point where I have formulated a rule (call it Morton’s Law): No matter what time of day or night, if you see a Japanese man standing still, he is in the act of emptying his bladder. If this is traditional behavior, then I’m all in favor of doing away with it!

  I am glad to say that most encounters with Japanese tradition are pleasant surprises. I’m still amazed when I’m walking through a fairly modernized neighborhood and I run across a little tatami shop with the owner sitting there cross-legged, usually in a T-shirt and laborers’ pants something like riding jodhpurs, and sewing thick floor mats with a huge needle.

  Speaking of tatami, I am living in a small, two-room arrangement that is half-Japanese, half-Western. The family that owns the house had converted these two upstairs rooms to wood floors, but I paid to have the larger room re-converted to a six-mat tatami room, though I haven’t gone so far as to sleep on futon on the floor yet. I sleep on a bed in the narrow, wood-floored Western room, off of which there is a wash basin and mirror. This is the entire second story of the house, so you can imagine how small the house is. When I’m at home, I spend most of my time in the tatami room.

  The Niiyamas are nice people, but they both studied in the States as Fulbright students (of course, the Fulbright office got me the connection) and speak excellent English, which makes practicing Japanese with them very difficult. For that reason, I don’t see a lot of them. I usually eat at restaurants rather than with them--which must sound very extravagant, but prices at local restaurants are so low that it puts no strain on my budget. In fact, at 360 yen to the dollar, nothing puts a strain on my budget. I’m rich here, living on an American student budget. A ride on the National Railways train that comes out to this rather suburban part of the city costs only ¥10. That’s about three cents! And the most beautifully printed books can be bought for a dollar. My library has expanded dramatically! There’s an amazing section of town called Jimbocho, where you see almost nothing but book stores for block after block. I tend to get lost there for days at a time.

  One small but unexpected expense here is the bath. Rather than try to fit my schedule in with that of the family, I have been going to the public baths, which is where most ordinary Japanese go to get clean. You give your ¥17 to the old lady who sits in her perch overlooking both the men’s and women’s sides, undress right there in a wood-floored locker room, and step through sliding glass doors into a steaming cavern full of naked men and boys crouching on little stools and scrubbing themselves as if they’re determined to get down to the third and fourth layers of skin. After they’re through rinsing off, they soak in scalding hot tubs until they’ve turned bright red. The people in my neighborhood bath have finally gotten used to seeing this big, blond American going through the same routine, and I find I have some of my most pleasant conversations while soaking in the tub. It made me a little uneasy when some of the men I met there offered to scrub my back, but I guess it’s a gesture of friendliness and I see people doing it all the time.

  I’m probably giving you the impression that I spend all my time with Japanese, even to the point of avoiding people who speak English. It’s true, there are Americans living here who never see a Japanese or learn a word of the language, and I would avoid people like that if I had any occasion to meet them, which I do not, since they are mostly in business or the Army and they stay in their little enclaves. I have become very good friends with some Americans who live next door in a house rented out by the Niiyamas. Their name is Green: David and Martha Green and their little son, Peter. They have been here almost three years on a work visa (except Peter, of course, who was born here). David teaches at an English conversation school called ELEC (English Language something-or-other: there are hundreds of these places) and he has become an authentic national celebrity. The rage for learning English is so great in this country that NHK, the Japan Broadcas
ting Corporation, has TV English courses at all levels, and they hire foreigners to appear on them to provide accurate pronunciation models. David’s name even appears in the daily TV listings, and I have been with him when people have come up and asked for his autograph on their textbooks. At 6'1", like me, he is very tall here, and if that weren’t enough, his bushy walrus moustache makes him extremely easy to spot. He has suggested that I go on the show some time to give the audience a little variety, but I’ve been resisting.

  Back to food again. I thought I had gotten to know Japanese food pretty well in Seattle, but the quantity and variety available here is simply overwhelming. I’m now a confirmed raw fish addict. I even went with Haruo and Keiichi down to the Tsukiji fish market at four in the morning to see the day’s supply for the city being delivered and sold. You would be amazed at the sight of the huge, tin-roofed concrete slab covered with sparkling tuna. Haruo and Keiichi took me to one restaurant, though, where I encountered my limits as a Japanese gourmet. The fish was not raw there, though I found myself almost wishing it were. The name of the place is Komagata. It has a long history going back into the Edo period, and it is located in the lively, old merchant class section of the city called Asakusa. (Of course the building itself is not that old. This part of the city was virtually flattened by fire bombs during the war.) Their specialty is a little fish known as dojoh which is not much bigger than a minnow. I looked it up later and found it is called “loach” in English and it lives in mud, which I can easily believe. When they’re cooking at the table, arranged like the spokes of a wheel in round, iron, gas-fired cookers, they look like mud, and even drowned in soy sauce, they taste like mud. There is one method of cooking them that is especially horrifying. The little creatures are served to you live, swimming in an earthenware pot around a cake of tofu floating in cold water, and the pot is set on the fire. As the water heats up, the dojoh become frantic and try to save themselves by burrowing into the cool tofu. Finally, you’re supposed to eat the tofu after it’s cooked through with all these poor dojoh embedded inside. They call this dish “dojoh-jigoku,” which means “dojoh hell.” I absolutely refused to eat it. I felt queasy for two days after I left that place.

  Some of my most successful culinary discoveries have not involved Japanese food at all. Tokyo is remarkable not only for its mixture of new and old Japan but for the availability here of all the world’s culture. I’m eating Chinese, French, Russian, German, Hungarian and Italian dishes that I had never heard of in Seattle. I had to come to the Far East to learn how little I know about the West. I’d guess the average Tokyoite is exposed to more Western high culture than the average American. Sometimes my ignorance of classical music or European history makes me feel like a real country bumpkin.

  I suspect you’re finding this all very frustrating and you want me to get down to business. Believe me, I am just as impatient with myself. It is only now, when I am learning about the real Japan, that I am beginning to understand how I was able to immerse myself so completely in my studies. Noh and the other arts of the medieval period are very otherworldly. Instead of bald realism, they rely on suggestion, indirection and mystery because they are based on a Buddhist belief in the unreality of the everyday “real” world. They suggest that what is real and true is something transcendent. Obviously (it’s obvious to me now, though it was not so obvious when I started graduate school in 1960) these ideas appealed to me as a kind of substitute for the religious feeling I had come close to losing then. When I began to learn the truth about my father, it shook my spiritual life to its foundations, and I am still wondering if I will ever recover. I almost never go to church anymore, and when I do, it’s mainly as a tourist. I’ve been to a Catholic church, a Greek Orthodox, the old Protestant church on Reinanzaka, and a few others, where I mostly sit and look. But the process of discovery has been a painful one for me, and I can see, now, that I have been using my studies not only as a way to realize my goal but also as a way to hide from what I must do.

  To put it simply, I am afraid. The more I learn about this country--the more I learn to find my way around here--the less excuse I have for postponing my search. But what am I going to find? As much as you were able to share with me, it was so little! And it was your experience. How much of that can become mine, I do not know.

  There is also the practical matter of my having almost nothing to go on. I am looking for a woman named Mitsuko and her sister, Yoshiko Nomura. I couldn’t have picked more ordinary names to work with! Once I feel confident of my ability to begin scouring the countryside, how am I to go about it? Of course, I can use the lack of facts as an excuse for doing nothing at all. But I will not do that, I can assure you. When the time comes, I will not hesitate.

  In the meantime, my dear friend, please be patient. It meant a great deal to me to have you see me off at the airport, and you must not think that I have forgotten about you or our search. (I haven’t forgotten about Maneki, either. Please say hello from me to Kumiko and the Bosu-san and to Norman Miki and the guys.) After two months, I am just beginning to get my bearings. I will let you know when I have made any progress, and, if you don’t mind, I will write from time to time simply to share some of my new experiences with you. If you can find a spare moment or two, please drop me a line.

  Yours,

  Bill

  29

  THE RIVER OF JAPANESE people flowed on and on, covering every square inch of the gravel crunching underfoot. The New Year’s Day crowd carried Bill and the Greens down the Meiji Shrine’s broad, tree-lined avenue. The river took a sharp left turn beneath a towering Shinto shrine gate. Far ahead, it made another sharp turn, this time to the right, where Bill imagined the main shrine building must lie. The orderliness of the crowd was remarkable—and indispensable: panic would have been fatal in a situation like this.

  “This is the biggest wooden torii in Japan.” David Green pointed up to the huge wooden cross-pieces towering fifty feet above them as they passed underneath. The gate’s giant pillars straddling the crowd would have been impossible for a man—perhaps even two men—to put their arms around.

  “I believe it,” Bill said, but David was grinning for a woman staring at him, his walrus moustache stretching from side to side. She was another of his TV fans, no doubt.

  Martha, walking between them, was beginning to struggle carrying Peter on her shoulders. Almost six feet tall herself, she held Peter high above the crowd. She had dressed her sandy-haired son in a necktie and wool vest under a brass-buttoned, navy blue blazer. He looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

  “C’mere, Pete!” Bill called, holding his arms out to the boy, whose desperate arm-hold around his mother’s forehead threatened to send her black-framed glasses down to be trampled by the relentless horde. At first, he seemed reluctant to leave his mother, but Martha leaned toward Bill, who caught him under the arms and raised him up until he could straddle Bill’s shoulders. Now Bill had to walk with two short arms wrapped tightly around his head.

  “I needed that,” Martha groaned. “Thanks.”

  “Half of Tokyo must be here today,” Bill said.

  “All ten million!” David laughed. Talk to anybody tomorrow, and they’ll tell you they were here.”

  “But why?” asked Bill. “Is the cult of the Emperor Meiji still so deeply rooted?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s just a tradition. Nobody’s thinking about the Emperor Meiji.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Bill said. Something more than “tradition” had to be behind the turnout of this many people. And if they weren’t thinking about the Emperor Meiji, what were they thinking about? The puzzle only deepened for Bill as he neared the main shrine. People were tossing coins into the wooden grille of the offertory box, clapping their hands together and bowing briefly before the austere wooden building upon which no images were displayed, and in the depths of which could be discerned nothing but gloomy empty spaces. He had heard that the Meiji Shrine was one of the holiest pilgrimage
sites in the country, but the “pilgrimages” being performed here were so swift and simple that there could be no time for what he had always thought of as “praying.” Whatever these people were experiencing, it was wordless. And yet, undoubtedly, it was every bit as real as the elaborate masses he had been observing at Saint Ignatius or the Nicolai Cathedral. It was a moment of reverence—to what, or for what, it didn’t seem to matter. With little Peter on his shoulders, he stepped forward and bowed his head, bringing his palms together and closing his eyes.

  In the few seconds he stood there, the tiny person on his back seemed to grow enormously heavy, as if the power of gravity had suddenly increased or the boy’s flesh had unexpectedly doubled or tripled in density and begun pressing down upon him. He had to plant his feet more firmly upon the earth to support this burden of flesh. And he knew that, if it cost him his life, he must continue to support this infinitely precious burden, this palpably holy child who had been entrusted to him.

  Then everything was as it had been. Casting one last glance into the empty building, he moved away from the railing to follow David and Martha into the broad, stone-paved courtyard, where the press of the crowd relented and people were standing in small groups, taking each other’s pictures or milling about aimlessly.

  “Down!” ordered Peter, who must have spied the other children dashing back and forth among the adults now that they no longer had to fear being crushed to death.

  “Let Daddy take a picture,” said David.