Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  One of my favorite examples of pidgin English (though in Japan it might more fittingly, perhaps, be called “dove English”) was the helpful sign put up in every tiny room in my humble Kyoto inn to explain the workings of the shower. “You are adjust able to likely temperature,” it advised gnomically. Only after a while did I realize that “likely” in fact meant “likable.” And only after a longer while did I recognize that the slip—like everything else in Japan—was absolutely perfect. For in Japan, so it seemed, the “likely” and the “likable,” the probable and the desirable, were one and the same. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.

  These images of perfection were often wonderfully inspiring. But I also found them a little suffocating. Where, I wondered, was the room for change, the opportunity for improvement? Where were the country’s ragged edges, and where its loose ends? Where, above all, was the life in this perfection? The bonsai tree was lovely, but it knew no natural exuberance, no element of caprice or surprise. So much in Japan was exquisite, agreed a longtime American resident, “but it is always hard to feel passion here, or fire.” Whenever I listened to a Japanese speaking English, I could not tell whether he was saying “order” or “ardor.”

  And if their remarkable sense of refinement had made the Japanese, in many respects, the most aesthetically sophisticated people in the world, the same high pitch of sensitivity, when applied to matters of the heart, resulted often in perversity. And if the people’s enlightened gift for bringing silence and harmony to perfection gave Japan a transcendental loveliness more exalting than anything I had ever seen, the country’s determination to impose that same perfection on all that was meant to be changing and breathing and imperfect—emotions, relations, people themselves—made for its coldest horrors.

  IV

  This strain of chill perfectionism was most alarming to foreigners, of course, when it came to their social relations with the Japanese. For it is almost axiomatic that the Japanese are absolutely peerless in their equanimity, unerring in their courtesy. Through the dutiful performance of ritual, they present a face to the world that is always flawless and always idealized. They are always polite. They are always hospitable. They always smile. They always have their act very much together.

  But an act it always seems to be. And their unfailing correctness seems often to be a way of keeping the world at a distance. Just as the chic young girls of Tokyo seem to decorate their porcelain faces with the conscientious, impersonal precision that they might otherwise bring to folding paper or arranging flowers, many of their compatriots display themselves with the impeccable polish and impossible finish of a lovely lacquered screen. The surface is as exquisite as it is opaque.

  One sign placed in my Kyoto inn begged of its guests: “Please have friendly relations with foreign people at meals.” That, I thought, was a peculiarly Japanese request: friendliness was something to be planned and fashioned in advance. And that is exactly the impression that disconcerts many a foreigner in Japan: every gesture of hospitality seems rehearsed, every kindness studied. A sign outside the Tootsie Men’s Club in Roppongi, Tokyo’s foreigners’ ghetto, announced that a table cost 1,000 yen. “Service charge” was another 400 yen. “Charm” cost another 400 yen.

  Japanese hospitality was so innate, the tourist brochures maintained, that the word for “customer” was the same as the word for “guest.” But did that not also mean that guests were no better than customers? Perfect hosts in every way, the Japanese were always perfect strangers.

  However much they gave away, they seemed to surrender nothing. And the regularity of the kindness was made the more unsettling by the sense that one could hardly be perfectly polite to someone one genuinely liked or trusted. It was no coincidence, I thought, that T-shirts and discos and magazines in Japan habitually took on the names of clubs; the Japanese seemed to love these free-masonic units, which served at once to band the elect together and to keep out the rest of the world. The biggest, and most exclusive, club of all was Japan itself.

  And so, for all the familiarity of many of its surfaces, I had to admit that I found Japan quite the most alien society I had ever visited. And though the standards of convenience and smoothness and efficiency were higher here than in any other place I knew, I often felt lost and bewildered in Japan. I made contact with none of the expressionless eyes I saw in the street, I never managed to orient myself in its maze of electric possibilities. I could find few signs in English, and still fewer Japanese willing to speak a less than perfect English. Yes, I could skate along the culture’s bright surfaces, but Japan, at heart, seemed a secret society.

  Many of the foreign residents I met in Japan seemed equally shut out. They had found there all the purity and stillness they sought, they said, but still they had never really made their peace with the contemporary culture, or with its people. For that matter, the Japanese seemed decidedly pleased that the majority of foreigners, or gaijin (the word itself means “outside person”), could live in their country for years without ever mastering its intricate code of nuances and resonances—as oblique and precise as in some No drama. The French, a shrewd Australian once told me, despise anyone who cannot speak their language; the Japanese suspect anyone who can.

  “There is nothing more dangerous,” an American who had recently begun working in Japan announced one morning at breakfast in my ryokan, “than a Japanese who visits America for one year, maybe two. Instantly he thinks he knows everything. But actually”—and here he whooped most heartily—“he doesn’t know a goddam thing.” The irony of this assessment was, I think, quite lost on its speaker.

  FOR ALL ITS famous aloofness toward the outside world, however, Japan could not shut it out altogether. Indeed, the Japanese seemed often to be training an uneasy eye over their shoulders in the direction of the West. Even the lordly Oh, who protests again and again that he never tried to compete with his American counterpart Hank Aaron, admits to being driven by the thought of eclipsing Babe Ruth; at the end of his English-language autobiography, a lofty testament to humility, he cannot resist including two appendices. The first consists entirely of testimonials to his skill offered by Americans (to the effect that he would have been a superstar even in America); the second pointedly lines up his statistics, on a year-by-year basis, against those of Aaron and Ruth. Anything you can do, we can do too, the Japanese seemed to imply. And better.

  In a sense, then, Japan reminded me of a nervous beauty, who constantly needs reassurances from something other than the mirror. Thus foreigners were welcomed in Japan, up to a point, but mostly so that they could give external confirmation of the glory of Japan. Like many gaijin, I soon discovered that the Japanese I met almost never asked me about England or America or India, as other Asians might; but invariably, and anxiously, they asked me how I found Japan.

  The Japanese, in fact, seemed touchingly eager to introduce a foreigner to their national treasures, willing to go to any length to give him a better picture of their land (“We must work harder to educate the world about ourselves and our way of life,” ran the stern admonition in a TV ad for the Japanese Overseas Telephone System). In the same way, the Japanese preserved their own traditions with a care and deliberation one did not find among the Egyptians, say, or the Indians or the Greeks, not least perhaps because the Japanese romanticized their past as much as did any wistful admirer from abroad. When I told the owner of my Tokyo minshuku that I was off to Kyoto, he begged me, with much more sincerity than the occasion seemed to demand, not, please, on any account, to miss Nara; by the same token, when I told him, upon returning from Mount Fuji, that it resembled the paintings of Hokusai and Hiroshige, he was so delighted that he rewarded me with the ultimate compliment—calling me “half Japanese.”

  Another evening, I enjoyed an even more endearing example of this eagerness to please. A California friend and I had gone to the Mariachi Mexican restaurant in Kyoto. We were sitting in our booth, minding our tostadas, when, without a warning, our waitress, a t
ypically demure and decorous matron in her early forties, suddenly began racing around the room, yanking castanets and tambourines down from the wall, and handing them out to us, and to the three diners at the next table. As she did so, a mariachi singer, bearing a guitar, casually strolled in. Instantly, the ever-surprising waitress whizzed back across the room, dragged out a pair of congas and began thumpin’ out a beat, with considerable conviction, while the mariachi man began strumming. Before we knew it, our neighbors—a trio of amiable, and decidedly sozzled, department-store workers—were belting out “La Bamba,” “La Cucaracha” and a host of other South of the Border favorites, and we were joining in, jumping up at intervals to fling castanets to them across the table, receiving extended tambourines in return. And by the time the revelry had subsided, the five of us had become bound together in an unlikely fraternity.

  The minute the singer retreated, therefore, our bleary partners diligently set about trying to show the visitors from America a Japanese good time. They offered us beers. They wished us many, many fantastic times with Japanese girls. Apologizing profusely, they insisted on taking us to a Japanese bar, and introducing us to some local delicacies. And they concluded with a brief seminar on how to bewitch Japanese womankind. After delegating one of his cohorts to make a peace offensive call to his waiting wife (“a Superwoman,” he gloomily reported), a salesman with the soft face of a fourteen-year-old coached us in reciting a line of indeterminate obscenity. Then the ringleader of the group, a cheerily rumpled fellow with the round red face of a Japanese Jackie Gleason, solemnly gave us the ultimate open sesame: “Say, ‘I am from California,’ “he suggested, “and Japanese girl will say, ‘I love you.’ “(And the other way around? “Ah,” he sighed with infinite glumness. “We are shy. To Japanese men, every California girl look like Hollywood model. We are too afraid to speak.”)

  I was treated to the same kind of slightly worried hospitality, to more sorrowful effect, when I went to a ball game between the Taiyo Whales and the Yakult Swallows, both among the Central League’s least accomplished teams. For the first six innings, I sat in complete isolation. Then, in the middle of the seventh, an affable middle-aged worker in spectacles left his seat and came over to me. “Have you ever seen no-hit, no-run game?” he asked, pointing to the scoreboard with undisguised pride. I had not. He beamed. “I am glad you can see this pitcher at his best condition.” I forbore from asking whether the pitcher’s best condition was assisted in part by an opposition that was sixth in a league of six, and able to win barely 30 percent of its games. We returned to watching the game.

  In the eighth inning, the first batter fouled out. The next one came up to the plate and, with scant respect for posterity, smashed a clean single down the line. My disappointment was keen; my neighbor’s, I feared, was almost terminal. I was sorry to have narrowly missed a moment of history; he was clearly devastated, not that he had missed a moment of history, but that I had—and, with it, a show of Japanese perfection. Nonetheless, he took the loss philosophically. “Is difficult”—he shrugged after a long silence—“to complete no-hit, no-run game.”

  In all my travels, I had never encountered a race so desperately keen to make its sights available to the foreigner (while at the same time so determined to keep its real features concealed). In other Asian countries, national pride seemed to take the form of smiling at all compliments from foreigners, affirming a fervent loyalty to the motherland and then proclaiming an equally fervent desire to leave it. In safe and spotless Japan, however, the locals had no desire to hustle susceptible foreigners. Nor did they betray any keenness to migrate. Their ulterior motives lay further back. They were not interested in selling postcards or antiques or local girls; they simply wanted to sell Japan.

  ONE WEEK BEFORE I arrived in Tokyo, the New York Times had chanced to run a front-page story on Japan’s National Intercity Amateur Baseball Tournament, in which fifty of the country’s leading companies annually field teams to fight it out for baseball supremacy. The corporations, said the article, take these games very seriously: they sign up the finest amateur players in the country and subject them to eighty games a season and eleven months a year of practice. This year, the finals of the competition were to be held before a sellout crowd at Korakuen Stadium on August 2, only four days after my arrival. Clearly, this was something altogether different from the intramural Softball leagues that bring Manhattan professionals out to Central Park on lazy summer afternoons for halfhearted swings and barrels full of beer. Clearly, this was something I had to see.

  On August 2, therefore, I made my way to the stadium. As soon as I arrived, at four o’clock, my heart quickened. Brown boxes were lying along the walkways, piled high with Toshiba cowboy hats. Regulation businessmen, in ties and glasses, were marching around in platoons, jackets slung over their shoulders and, in their hands, matching bullhorns through which they could shout out the verses of their company song. In one spot, twenty-five Nissan cheerleaders had gathered in a circle, and were dancing, dervishing and chanting in a whirlwind show of team spirit. Players were being tossed into the air by their fellows. All about, there was shouting, singing, pep-rally frenzy. The tension was palpable, the excitement mounting. Both teams were clearly ready to go.

  And so indeed they were. As I stood around the Nissan circle, scribbling frantically, a man stepped over to ask what I was doing. Auditing the pre-game excitement, I replied. He looked a little embarrassed, and I went back to writing. After a few more moments, we exchanged more pleasantries, and then our business cards. Miyaoka-san, I discovered, was a Special Planning Division Manager of the stadium. But when I asked him to explain the niceties of the pre-match routine, he looked almost inconsolable. Well, he began reluctantly, to begin with, the game had finished. The final had started at one o’clock, Nissan had won by a score of 4-3 and they were now in the process of celebrating their victory. The stadium was empty. The tournament was over.

  I felt a little like Wordsworth, in Book 6 of The Prelude, when he learns that the crossing of the Alps, the highlight of his trip to Europe, has come and gone without his noticing.

  Yet my new friend seemed ready to do almost anything to assuage my disappointment. Abandoning the boss who was waiting to take him home—a breach of duty that could, I imagined, lead to ritual suicide—he led me briskly into the stadium. We passed through Gate Number I, the Oh Gate (in which Oh’s achievements are inscribed in English, and only in English: 868 home runs! Not just a Japanese, but a worldwide record! Take that, America!). Then he led me onto the hallowed turf itself, the most sacred ground in Japanese baseball. He urged me to join the stadium workers enjoying a picnic on the tarpaulin. He offered me a glass, and poured out some beer. He offered me some more beer, and then some more (half Japanese, perhaps, I did not have the heart to tell him that I didn’t drink). Then he hurried off to get a schedule. Please, he said, would I tell him which team I would like to see the Giants play? Naturally, all the games were sold out months in advance, but I could have tickets to any one of them I chose. He himself would be away next week (inspecting stadia in America), Miyaoka-san explained, but he would organize a free tour, a VIP seat, anything I wanted to make up for my loss today (caused, after all, by nothing except my own inefficiency). With that, he bundled off to tend to his (doubtless furious) boss.

  It was, I thought, a typical show of Japanese kindness beyond the call of duty, a routine extension of hospitality the likes of which I had never found anywhere else. But at the same time, I was sure, the charity was prompted by another conviction—that this bewildered gaijin should not on any account leave Japan without seeing the Giants, Japan’s team, in action. Foreigners must see Japan in its best condition.

  V

  At the heart of Japan’s relations with the outside world, then, stood a paradox as large and implacable as the Sphinx. The Japanese might study and imitate all things Western, but they did not really like Westerners (in much the same way, perhaps, as they had liberally borrowed from th
e Chinese during the Nara period without ever acknowledging much fondness for the Chinese people). In answer to a 1980 poll, 64 percent of all Japanese had claimed that they did not wish to have anything to do with foreigners. In ancient times, people who committed the crime of being foreign were beheaded; nowadays, they were simply placed before the diminishing eye of the TV camera (entire shows were devoted to portraying the stupidities of gaijin). In the Japanese context, imitation was the insincerest form of flattery.

  For all that, however, the Japanese were still determined to impress gaijin, and they still coveted the foreigners’ lifestyles. In the flesh, gaijin might strike many Japanese as freakish, foul-smelling and crude; but as symbols—of prosperity and progress—they possessed a glamour to which few Japanese were immune. Thus blue-eyed blondes were still much sought after for commercials and regarded almost as trophies—walking advertisements for the Good Life—to be shown off to the neighbors, even as they were giggled at by schoolgirls and inspected by toddlers with fearful fascination.

  When it came to baseball, of course, this already vexing double standard grew even more vexed. For the Americans, as the creators of the sport, were generally assumed to be its masters; yet the Japanese could not, would not, be content with being number two—they were determined to try harder and try harder and try still harder until they were the best. Unlike, say, the Filipinos, who play basketball, or the Latin Americans, who have taken up baseball, the Japanese refused to accede to Americans the home-team advantage.