Video Night in Kathmandu (51 page)

AND IT WAS
here, I felt, that the two sides of Japan, the lyrical and the mechanical, the frenzy of the video revolution and what Kawabata called “the deep quiet of the Japanese spirit,” came together. The mechanical smoothness that I saw all around me was, in its way, just the secular equivalent of the garden, a profane counterpart to that exact geometry of the spirit. The items laid out in the department-store racks were no less perfect in their man-made arrangement than the rocks in the raked gravel of the temples; the rides in Disneyland were no less precise than the empty spaces of Kyoto. Both worlds were governed by the same aesthetic clarity, the same delicacy of suggestion, the same will for harmony. Both, in fact, arose from the same perfectionist ideal: not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but unity, discipline and the pursuit of purity.

Thus the one thing that seemed to run like an electrical current through every aspect of Japan, linking its computers to its temples to its ballparks to its offices, was an impatience with all limitation. The Japanese did not see why everything should not be made perfect. Whatever can be, they seemed to say, shall be. And the people had not only the vision to see what was wrong but the discipline to correct it. Thus everything was made flawless, and no draft was rough. Between the idea and the reality, between the construction and the creation, there fell no shadow.

Everything, in fact, approximated to its Platonic image: every
Zen garden was a picture-perfect image of what a Zen garden should be; the Emperor disappeared within the idealized role of an Emperor; and every geisha corresponded exactly to the prototypical model of a geisha (a Tokyo rose was a Tokyo rose was a Tokyo rose). Everything not only conformed, but conformed to the ideal (and I often wondered whether this in part explained the much-remarked Japanese fondness for photography, the art of suspended animation which composes the chaotic world into tidy pieces, reduces 3-D mess to 2-D order, and not only transfixes the evanescent, but also domesticates life into still life). Calligraphers in Japan would devote themselves to making just a single stroke, and making it perfect; gardeners would cultivate one flawless chrysanthemum a year. In Japan, I had little sense of wasted hope or rusted ambition: everything—including the future—could be programmed; everything—including humanity—could be perfected.

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.

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 typically 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.