Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (29 page)

“When I see young people make a mistake,” Hayashi continued passionately, “I don’t scold them. I don’t punish them. I just point out what they have done. I don’t think it’s right to hit people. Do you? What would you do if you were me?”

Immediately I thought about my grandfather. Along with his brother, Jitsuo, my grandfather had gone to university in Taiwan, a Japanese colony before World War II. According to family lore, Jitsuo had been sent home from Taiwan because he had developed tuberculosis; this was what eventually killed him. But over the years, reading through family letters, my mother was able to glean the real reason for Jitsuo’s “failure” at school. While my grandfather had thrived at university, Jitsuo had spoken out against the practice of corporal punishment employed by the teachers and encouraged among senior students. His challenge to the system had not been acceptable. He was not allowed to return. My grandfather, on the other hand, had gone on to be a successful teacher who whipped his students when he felt it was necessary.

I didn’t express any of this. Instead, I asked if there wasn’t someone Hayashi could talk to at S
jiji. He had tried that, but the older priests had just told him that things would get better, and that they were already better than they had been in previous decades. He had to learn to be patient.

“Why don’t you just leave?” I asked.

“If I leave now, I will not only hate S
jiji, I will probably not become a priest at all. Then these past three years will have been for nothing. I am waiting for a turning point.”

Here, I began to talk about Semp
and how he had stayed in Iwaki during the crisis with the damaged nuclear reactor. At first, Hayashi was surprised to learn that I came from a Japanese temple family, but he was intrigued and asked me to tell him more. I explained that Semp
spent a lot of time with his parishioners, listening to them and caring for them. Perhaps Hayashi, too, could be the best priest possible for his own hometown without worrying about S
jiji’s approval. If Hayashi admired his father so much, then why didn’t he try to learn to be a priest at home?

We drifted back through the hallways, stopping to look at a garden and some of the meeting rooms where high-ranking guests were received to drink
matcha
, powdered green tea. But the romance of the visit had taken on a somber tone for me. Now I felt worried for Hayashi—and the other young men I had seen that day. Daisuke, Semp
’s oldest son, had studied here. Had he been bullied too?

We worked our way back to the visitors’ center, where yet a third young monk was waiting to take me to lunch. He was very young and very nervous—he had been at S
jiji for only two months, though judging by the way he looked, either he had been underweight before arriving to study or he had shed his weight very quickly. Before I followed this new guide, I gave Hayashi my business card and asked him to write me. He slipped the card inside a fold in his robe, and then he smiled. “I think, at the end of this year, I will come down off the mountain.” I watched him go into the gift shop, where the shop girls flirted with him, and he flirted back.

The third guide took me up to the guests’ dining room to eat
sh
jin ry
ri
, a term that roughly translates in Japanese to “the way of enlightened eating,” but which Westerners usually refer to as “vegetarian.” Serious monks and priests in training eat
sh
jin ry
ri
every day.

In the bamboo shoots, a signature dish in springtime, I tasted a gentle sweetness mixed with a trace of salt. A pale flavor. I had
taken a few cooking classes at the 350-year-old Pure Land temple J
k
kuji in T
ky
, and my teacher, Asano Masami, had told me that the Japanese had a flavor in their food that Westerners did not know about. This was called
awai
, and it meant, roughly, that which is pale but has depth. Each time we finished a dish and tasted it, she asked me if I could discern its
awai
.