Graveyards And Heated Floors: Faulty Memory Japan, Part Two
In which our hero attempts to recall being welcomed into a Japanese home and being screamed at by schoolchildren in (probably) unconnected incidents.
Japan is a country of islands. Look it up. I did.
The second-smallest of the four main islands is Kyushu. This makes it the third-largest island in Japan, and, according to Wikipedia, the 37th-largest island in the world. Also according to Wikipedia, it is slightly larger than Taiwan, to give you a sense of scale.
Kyushu is home to about 12 million people, 1.6 million of whom live in Fukuoka, a city famous in my family as being the place you catch the fast ferry to South Korea, as was my eventual goal for here. The primary goal was to visit my friend Erin, who had been the managing editor at the University of Ottawa newspaper while I was its editor-in-chief and who was now teaching English in a tiny town called Kunimi, which at the time I believed called “Kumini,” a typo I evidently make to this day. The closest airport to Kunimi/Kumini is in Nagasaki City, which is where Erin was waiting for me on a rainy December night with her car. (Editor’s note: a comically small car.)
As often happens, Erin and I have since fallen out of touch for the most part. Life took her to France sometime after Japan, where she lived with another university friend in Nice. She went back to Canada for a while, I think, then back to Japan and now lives in Thailand. We follow one another on Instagram, and I’m always happy to see what dog she is dogsitting in a given month, or which pantsuit she is trying on and considering buying. She is brilliant, possesses both a gift for languages and for sarcasm, has a kind of Ontarian cynicism she was born with and wears proudly, and is a wonderful cook and an exceptional host, though only the last of these was relevant for my purposes today.
Her being in Japan was half of the justification for my trip. She left Ottawa a few months before me, and her leaving was an important trigger in my leaving. She was in the JET program, one of those acronyms that was clearly written before words were found to stand for it (Japan Exchange and Teaching) because it sounds like a cool, familiar word and is fun to say. There were interviews at consulates, and then you were assigned a random school somewhere in Japan in what the JET website proclaims promotes “grass-roots international exchange between Japan and other nations.” In this case, it promoted high-school students in a rural area with a variety of opportunities to laugh at a foreign teacher and all the friends she invited to visit. Or, in the case of one student, an opportunity to scream, drop the musical instrument she was carrying on the way to class, and run in the other direction. As far as I know, this “exchange” involves no teachers or students from Japan going to other countries, and so it’s one of those famous one-way exchanges.
Erin was living the impossible for me. When she entered JET, I was dragging out a long-term relationship with my high-school girlfriend, who I was living with in Ottawa along with another woman from our home town. Life was stagnant. We watched endless re-runs of Friends and thought ourselves sophisticated by hosting dinner parties in our large apartment, where I subjected people to early Joanna Newsom albums to appear edgy and artistic. The relationship was a few years past its best-before date. I remember stating my determination to visit Erin in Japan as soon as was possible at one of these dinner parties, and my girlfriend laughed in my face. “Who cares what Erin is up to?” she shrieked. “Who cares about Japan?” Something became dislodged in me, almost instantly. Here was a choice to be made: this group of judgemental shut-ins on their paths to suburban lives or friends who had an interest not just beyond their apartment door, their neighbourhood, but beyond their own country’s borders.
Visiting Erin in Japan was a defiance, a deliberate choice to live a life more interesting, more open, freer than the one I had. Loading my too-heavy suitcases into her ridiculous car was a triumph. I had won.
For those who are interested, this is what winning looks like: being in the smallest car on a dark, rainy road, with a driver who shouts “Oops!” when changing lanes or missing an exit. Winning looks like making a U-turn on the freeway (“Oops!” as a car honks and passes angrily). It looks like jungle roads on the side of an active volcano, like a narrow driveway across rice paddies reflecting under a suddenly clear night sky and a full moon, like a small house in a field, like Erin unlocking the door to her home and the sudden warmth of the underfloor heating hitting your tired face, like dropping onto a tatami to drink beer with delicious snacks bought from the 7-11, like laughing past midnight and sleeping deeply in a room with a sliding door made of rice paper like in a goddamn samurai movie.
I hadn’t really understood why Erin had bought a car after only a few weeks of living in Japan. I remember she had emailed me photos of it or maybe posted them on Facebook, and I’d laughed and thought, how ridiculous. Both the car itself, it coming up just past Erin’s hips, and the need for a car in a country like Japan.
In the morning, the need became clearer. Kunimi is a watery farmland, the houses set amongst low hills and greyish-brownish rice fields stretching in all directions. Erin’s driveway, by the light of day, was revealed to be a harrowing strip of concrete barely six feet wide and raised above water, which partly explained the narrowness of her car. My daylight, I admired her driving skills in a way that I hadn’t the previous night.
She went to work, leaving me to explore. I went for a walk, but it was a half an hour before I saw other people. On a rise above the tiny town sat a small temple with a cemetery of perfectly polished stones clustered around it. An obese elderly couple tended to the graves and eyed me with suspicion as I approached the temple, their size and the scrutiny both unusual. I poked around among the tombstones, marvelling at the orderliness that seemed endemic in Japan, even here in rural Kyushu. Some of the graves were adorned with fresh flowers in identical vases either side of the headstone, and once the elderly groundskeepers had grown bored of my presence, they set about swapping out dying flowers for fresh ones. Dead flowers lay in neat piles in the rows between the graves. The woman was picking them up delicately, so as not to scatter any petals. Did they do this every day? What else did they do? What was their life, beyond this tiny plot beside the modest temple in the smoky hills above a remote town? I idled happily, taking advantage of a pair of vending machines to have a hot can of coffee (the single simplest pleasure in the world, as far as I’m concerned) and to watch this tidy couple work. Eventually, the pair acrobatically arranged themselves onto a scooter and, bowing as they drove away from the temple, left me alone in this quiet, beautiful place. I spent a long while there, watching cars pass in the town below, watching the smoke from incense rise then hang in the muggy air. Was this the first moment I had ever had like this, alone and content in a strange place? Twenty-four hours earlier I had been marvelling at all of the Tommy Lee Jones posters around a small public square in Tokyo, and the week before had been freezing in a small bedroom in Ottawa. The world seemed so huge and so small, all possible and within reach and all so far away all at once.
I don’t know how long I stayed, but know with certainty that the reason I eventually left was that the ever-growing rumble in my stomach became impossible to ignore. I needed to eat. I walked slowly down toward the town, admiring more neatness and tidiness. I saw few people, but those I saw bowed politely and shyly. One braved a timid wave. I was so charmed by it all that I began to feel invincible, the kind of traveller’s high that comes with feeling in control. This was easy. I was crushing this.
The confidence lasted all of 10 minutes, when, firmly in the center—if such a place existed—of Kunimi, I tried to find food in a place where no English is spoken and where no English appears on signs. The first challenge was to decipher what was a restaurant. In Japanese cities, restaurants are often marked with huge glass displays featuring plastic recreations of every dish offered within. This also makes translation as simple as bringing the waiter out to the street and pointing at the thing you wanted to eat, a language trick I employed often the first few times I visited Japan. But in Kunimi, I saw no plastic moulds of food. I saw no signs with a list of words and corresponding prices. I saw nothing, in short. Every building looked the same.
The night before, we had stopped at the 7/11 on the way home, and Erin had selected a range of steamed buns from a heated cabinet beside the cash register to go with onigiri from the refrigerator section. It seemed too easy to repeat on my first full day alone in Asia, so I plodded on, tracing the few streets for any sign of food. Kunimi has a train station even more modest than its temple—famously part of a route featuring Japan’s shortest train, an adorable yellow single carriage that trudges up and down this quiet stretch of coast. Train stations in Japan famously have fabulous food, but the Kunimi station had no kiosk. It did, mercifully, have a very Japanese answer to my hunger: a fried chicken vending machine. The mechanics of this baffle me to this day, and while I would love to recount a story of a steaming hot plate of karaage and some delicious, crispy fries emerging from this machine, the truth is that the machine was out of order. Or possibly in Kumamoto, and not in Kunimi at all. You can never trust what you read on the Internet.
I wandered for another half an hour, and signalled my surrender by eating a near-identical 7/11 feast of steamed buns and onigiri, then and wandered back to Erin’s house to have my first adventure in a Japanese bathroom.
I’m not going to talk too much about Japanese bathrooms, as I feel these are deserving of their own separate story but also because I’ve just finished reading David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and have decided no one needs to ever write about the pleasures of a good bathroom again. The cannon of English literature has an admittedly small section of Toilet Writing, but Foster Wallace’s descriptions of the water pressure and vacuum toilets on a luxury Caribbean cruise are sufficiently wonderful for an entire culture’s output on the subject.
Still, Japanese bathrooms! Ignore the high-tech toilet with its various cleaning hoses and built-in dryer. Ignore the heated seat and the white noise machine (or music player, in high-end department stores). If we’re going to talk about the toilet, let us say only this: it’s made of the same slightly course plastic material that the sink, the floor, the shower cabinet—the whole damn bathroom—is made of. This is the magic of a Japanese bathroom: the weird coarse plastic. Everything is designed to get entirely soaked every time you shower. There’s a door between the shower area and toilet area in most Japanese bathrooms, unless they are truly, truly microscopic, but the door is kind of decorative as it gets soaked and then you open it and the other room gets soaked too. Some Japanese bathrooms have a kind of tall, skinny bathtub that’s like a plunge pool for one person and that takes about two hours to fill with water, and then when it does fill you have to sit with your knees tucked up to your chin, which is kind of fun because you feel like a giant. The tub of course overflows and spills, but it doesn’t matter because the plastic floor has a drain in it and in half an hour everything is somehow dry. This is engineering and design at their pinnacles. This is genius to be celebrated.
The hostel in Tokyo, catering more to foreign tourists, had standard changing-room-style shower and toilets in little cubicles, like an any drab office building. Erin’s toilet was my personal waterpark. And if she’s reading this today, I’d just like to say to her: no it wasn’t. I was very clean and respectful of it the entire time.
Having successfully drenched half of Erin’s home, feeling sated on convenience-store grub, I felt fully prepared for my first cultural interaction in Japan: dinner at Erin’s student’s house.
I say “student,” but Erin’s student was a woman in her late 20s or early 30s, a fellow teacher (probably) who was taking private English lessons from Erin. To say they weren’t exactly working is to be extremely generous. But the student, who for the purpose of this story shall be called Himiko, had mastered the art of non-verbal communication, not to mentioned speaking rapidly in Japanese and assuming we’d just figure out what she meant, which for the most part we managed to do.
On the drive to Himiko’s house—on second thought, I think her name was Kimiko—Erin coached me on a single phrase in Japanese: hajimemashite (“nice to meet you” or “thanks for having me in your home”). It took me the better part of an hour to memorize these six syllables, and infinite courage to summon them up upon entering Kimiko’s house.
An absolute truth about east Asian cultures—having lived in South Korea and China, and travelled extensively in Japan—is that a little linguistic effort goes a very long way. Upon stumbling through my hajimemashite, Kimiko raised a hand to cover her mouth and screamed. She stumbled over as though shot, or stricken with sudden stomach cramps. She gasped, recovered her composure, and proclaimed that I spoke perfect Japanese. Erin laughed in my face, and Kimiko looked slightly betrayed and embarrassed. But the job was done, the goodwill earned, and we carried on.
(On a recent trip to China, I memorized the Chinese equivalent of hajimemashite, and each time I said it, Kimiko was there. She was there in the bowled-over businessman, in the shocked cousin twice removed, in the child whose mind had simply been blown. The smiles and laughs, the slaps on the back, the sly smile that follow the badly uttered phrase, the honest attempt, are priceless.)
My supply of Japanese phrases was now exhausted, and it was over to Kimiko to drive conversation. She had a her fair share of nice to meet yous up her sleeve, and was proud to ask Erin how have she been doing, before we began a tour of her lovely home. Like Erin’s, the house was a traditional Japanese design, lots of dark-wood-and-rice-paper sliding doors, floor heat blasting. Each stop of this tour involved a lot of talking, and even more hilarious gesturing. For example, what did this button do? This was not a question asked by either Erin nor myself, but by Kimiko. She would point at some complex panel on the wall with 15 labels in Japanese and then shrug her shoulders and pull a quizzical expression like Charlie Chaplin, then proceed to pantomime the result of pushing said button, all the while narrating with almost-whispered Japanese and not the supposedly excellent English she’d been learning. She showed us a couple of rooms. She showed us the kitchen. She showed us the bathroom, where I had to pretend to be unimpressed. Before long, we settled onto the floor, sitting cross-legged around a low table, while Kimiko spoiled us with home-cooked food.
The pattern of the week was set. Erin would leave me to explore the tiny town in the mornings while she taught, then in the afternoons we’d meet and go on silly adventures to nearby towns. One afternoon, I met her at her school and she gave me a tour: this is the hallway, this is a classroom, here are some lockers, this way to the music room. On that last leg, a group of students were coming down the hall lugging instrument cases—big things, brass section I think—and chatting quietly amongst themselves.
A girl bowed nervously at Erin and then made eye contact with me, promptly screamed, threw her instrument to the ground, and turned and ran the other direction. The other students burst out laughing, bowed a bit, dropped some nice-to-meet-yous and shuffled away in slippered feet. No one picked up the instrument case, which we must assume remains in that hallway to this day.
“That’ll happen,” offered Erin by way of explanation. “Let’s go look at a castle!”
Of all the lessons I learned on this first-ever trip, this is perhaps the most valuable, the one that prepared me for years of living in Asia and the Middle East, and for a life-away-from-home in general. The strange, often hilarious, sometimes offensive reaction to the way you look and how you stand quietly smiling or wave or whatever, hasn’t stopped happening since. It could be so easy to get bogged down in negative feeling because of it, but the easier and more fun thing to do is to laugh about it and then go do something fun and new. Go have a look at the castle.
Shimamura has a castle, so we went to look at that for a bit. Another day we went for a hike on a steaming, stinky volcano, then ate eggs that were cooked in the sulphur pools and sat around in a public foot bath in a town square. We took a ferry to another castle and ate fried chicken out of a vending machine (finally!). We took Japan’s shortest train, one gleaming car that putters along the coast. And finally, by way of a farewell, we went to Nagasaki.
Read about Tokyo in part one of Faulty Memory Japan: Adrift in the World’s Largest City.
Despair when reading part three of the series: That Bell No Longer Tolls.
Lovely entry, I can’t wait to read part II 🌞