In which I am possessed by a devil.

Yes. Right now a very sudden storm with heavy rain and as much lightning as you’ll ever see in Hiroshima is passing overhead. This means that two kilometers away at least five of my homeroom girls, waiting in their colorful yukata with thousands of others for tonight’s fireworks, are now squealing and fleeing for cover with their tiny spiky-haired boyfriends. On the condition that no one is actually hurt, I confess that this brings a repellent sort of smile to my face.

Summertime in Hiroshima

In Hagoromocho, our local shrine is Sumiyoshi, consecrated to the god of seafaring and sailors. This week they held their summer festival, and we went over to get our takoyaki and goldfish and see the fireworks. When Keiko was a child, the festival was a bit more exciting, with kogitenma boat races to the open sea and back. A number of factors have led to a slight slump in attendance and moneys paid to the shrine. These days it’s still a lot of fun, though, and my favorite thing (aside from the takoyaki) is the little stage where the shows are held. This year as always there was kagura, sacred dances performed to entertain the god as well as any lesser creatures who may be loitering nearby. But before the kagura, this guy came out and did impressions and sang.


He was great. All fat men are my brothers, but any guy who will strap on a suit and stand in the spotlight on a July evening in Hiroshima to entertain the unwashed is a hero. Note the sandals, a nice touch. If you don’t have sandals, rise from your chair and buy some forthwith. Invite anyone who raises their eyebrows at your sense of style to get down on all fours and plant a gentle smooch on your delicately formed backside.

Tonight is the big fireworks show down at Ujina port. We’ll be watching from the fifth floor garden of a friend who lives nearby. Ema loves fireworks now, and is a big favorite with our friend’s parents, so it should be a nice evening. Any good fireworks going on elsewhere in Japan this weekend?

Getting ready to go to Wisconsin on Monday, and I looked at Madison from above, courtesy of Google Earth. It actually looks quite beautiful, with big lakes and ample green space. Then I clicked on the dining button, and a gooey little lump of perfect joy formed in my throat at the sight of all the pizza parlors scattered around town. With a good bar, a couple of poorly organized used bookstores and at least one homely coffee shop I should be all set. The only cloud on the horizon is a threat from my sister-in-law to buy me a bathing suit and take me to a waterslide park, but I’m hoping I can squirm out of it, maybe fake a sudden attack of polio or something. Barring that, it might turn out to be one of those deals like whale watching that you dread in advance, but then turns out to be great fun. Actually, a weekend trip to a Wisconsin water park may well be exactly like whale watching. I’ll let you know.

Thinking-East, very promising.

I just found Thinking-East, a great little site devoted to middle eastern and central asian concerns. The writers and editors are all very young academics, perhaps too young to bring a very broad perspective to bear. On the other hand, of course, the freshness and optimism apparent here is itself an asset. The editors have worked in Kyrgyzstan and in the only Arab-Jewish cooperative village in Israel. They're still assembling their core team of writers, and have so far recruited correspondents in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. If you are even passingly interested in this region, the site is well worth a visit.

Getting a Japanese Driver’s License

It’s time. I had an International Driver’s License, but that expired years ago. Since then, on the few occasions I’ve been behind the wheel I’ve been breaking the law. I love riding my enormous bicycle around, but I’d like to get out of town more on the weekends. And right now my wife does all the driving, which isn’t ideal for any of us.

I’ll come right out and say that I think they should just give me a license as a free love gift. I started driving when I was 15, and I don’t mean circling the Safeway parking lot with my father in the passenger seat. And although strictly speaking that wasn’t legal either, there were no accidents, no one was harmed, no dog ever skipped yelping to the curb through any fault of mine. I’ve driven more miles than most Japanese will ever dare dream of. And as an American, a driver’s license is my birthright. It’s in my DNA, right next to the bits directing me to eat too much pork fat. Not allowing me to drive is a sort of sickness, really. But apparently no one else is willing to come over to my point of view. So I’ll play along. I’ll vault prettily through your blazing hoops, O Ringmaster, but I expect my treat at the conclusion of the show.

And I feel ready, ready to fall in love with a car again. I have room for that in my life now, those heady early days when the two of you are still a little shy, when you still haven’t learned to please one another. When you are still so dazzled by her that you don’t want her to change, ever, and you park straddling the line so that no one else will pull too close, running a towel lightly over her dash each time you enter her.

My dream car would be a little two-seater K Truck, painted deep purple, with flames down the side, a pair of Texas longhorns mounted on the grill, and a rifle rack in the rear window. But I suspect that might be grounds for immediate divorce, so I’m willing to compromise, maybe trade the longhorns for a horn that plays the first two bars of ‘Dixie.’

But before all that I need to get the license. This may prove a bit tricky because my U.S. license has also expired in the time I’ve been here, and I’m not sure if renewal by mail will help me. If they put a new date of issuance on the license it will be clear that it was granted while I was living in Japan, which puts the kibosh on exchanging it for Japanese documentation.

So I’m looking at going through the whole process the same way a Japanese citizen would, possibly beginning with driving school. I’d rather not, of course. Has anyone else done this? Any thoughts on streamlining the procedure? I’ll post anything useful that I find.

Culture, Fatherhood, Springsteen

So where the hell was I? I started with a passage from a novel, mentioned in passing a nagging worry about my daughter, and moved straight on to my feelings about Japanese comedians, finishing with a cannibal joke. Not a promising start. Indulge me for a moment while I take another running leap at this thing.

The Bellow quote kicked off the last entry because it had precipitated a drowsy mid-afternoon daydream about the submersion of unmediated identity (not that I have any evidence at all that such a thing exists) under the detritus of culture. Not an especially original thought, but these sorts of irritating questions take on a certain urgency when they begin buzzing around your little girl’s head.

When I first got here, I had a friend named Ben. Ben was born in Seoul and came to Washington DC when he was 9 years old. He spoke no English and moved into a house with a father who had left Korea when he was about 3, a stepmother he’d never met, and a baby half-brother. In the years that followed, Ben became so convincingly American that I was shocked when I learned at what age he’d left Korea. But of course he was also Korean. Several times I was with him when he was with Korean exchange-students from one or another of the local colleges that he had met in some restaurant or bar. It was clear that not only was he accepted as “authentically” Korean rather than just some Korean-American, but that they even looked up to him. He was our local alpha-Korean. What was fascinating to me was watching Ben shimmer back and forth between two fully formed identities. His voice changed, his body language was different, he even seemed to have two separate repertories of facial expressions. There didn’t seem to be any available middle ground that he might occupy. There were only two very distinctly different channels. I wondered sometimes what Ben was when he was alone.

More and more recently I see the effects of culture sifting down like a fine snow over my two year old daughter, softening some features of her personality and emphasizing others. Or like the aluminum wire my father in law twists around the branches of his little pines to force them into the desired position. Perhaps part of my concern is just a petty father’s sense of not being in control. How long do I have before the die is cast? If I took her to America now, she would become American. Ben went to America at the age of 9 and managed to construct an American identity alongside the Korean. At what age are such possibilities lost?

To what extent are these concerns self-serving? I tell myself that I value my culture, and want my daughter to be a full participant for her own sake. But I also acknowledge being threatened by watching the little Japanese identity being erected brick by brick, building a wall that will eventually stand between us. Not that I will love her any less, or that I think she won’t love me, or even that we won’t be able to communicate effectively. But there will be something missing.

You can read a poem in your own language and feel it in your body. You bite down on the words and taste them, lifting your shoulders involuntarily against the wind coming down from them. A single line from a silly pop song incites a sudden riot of impressions, half remembered pieces of your life from 30 years ago are kicked loose from the dust of mind, mingle with other fragments, and you get the little tingle up the spine. Springsteen sings “And hear your sister’s voice calling us home across the open yards” and you are, for a moment, lost in a cascade of such memories, lawns with the little paths up to front doors, slap of screen doors, dog shit hidden in the grass, bikes, an upturned bathtub painted blue and half buried to serve as a niche for a plaster statue of the Virgin, angry emasculated fathers bellowing rich nonsense, the fine edge between dusk and full night, shouts of “allie allie incomefree” and sprinklers and the open window through which you watched your best friend’s sister undress.

My daughter won’t know any of these things. And I won’t really get her things either. And in time, when she needs to hurt me, I know that culture is one of the stones she’ll lift and sling, straight at my heart.

This whole train of thought also arises in part from my sense of the limitations of fatherhood. Pardon my whining, but it’s not easy being the sole voice of the West in a household of five, gone for half the day and trying to foist off Mother Goose in the little hour between dinner and bathtime. And mothers, more often than not, run the show. We are mostly, for better or worse, our mothers’ children and only provisionally our fathers’. Jewish tradition has always seemed especially honest on this point. Despite its reputation in some dreary quarters as a primary source of the Patriarchy, Jewish identity is the exclusive gift of the mother. If your mother is a Jew, you’re a Jew. No further elaboration necessary. If she’s not a Jew, then it doesn’t matter if your father was the Rambam himself, you’re just some clown named Maimonides with a shiksa mother.

Ah, we’ll all be fine. I worry too much, right? I always have. If anyone in a similar situation actually wades through this tripe and has something to say, please leave a comment.

My Catastrophic Failure to Amuse

I’m reading Humboldt’s Gift at the moment, and this morning came up short on the following. Charlie Citrine is listening to the night-voice of the dreaming Demmie Vonghel.

"It was low hoarse and deep almost mannish. She moaned. She spoke broken words. She did this almost every night. The voice expressed her terror of this strange place, the earth, and of this strange state, being. Laboring and groaning she tried to get out of it. This was the primordial Demmie beneath the farmer's daughter beneath the teacher beneath the elegant Main Line horsewoman, Latinist, cocktail-sipper in black chiffon, with the upturned nose, this fashionable conversationalist."

Reading this passage I find myself, perhaps strangely, worrying about my daughter. Saul Bellow is playing a little riff here on a theme that recurs throughout the novel, the way in which the unseen original can be crushed, suffocated beneath its attendant phenomena. He is not talking about childhood, but that is where the scene takes me.

It’s an oversimplification, but not altogether untrue, to say that children are the same everywhere, while adults are not. To put in its most absurdly basic formulation, little girls like the color pink, and little boys think boogers are devastatingly funny. I believe that anyone who has lived (or even traveled) in a culture very different from their own will have found that it is very easy to relate to children, to communicate with them and make them laugh. Adults are very different, shaped and tumbled and polished by whatever river they are born into.

I had the opportunity to watch culture exert itself after I came to Japan. I arrived with no knowledge of the language, no Japanese manners, no exposure to popular culture, and a foreign education. I didn’t even know what food I liked. I was an infant again. I used to watch TV, through the horribly mistaken belief that it would improve my Japanese. I especially enjoyed comic variety shows. I had literally no idea what anyone was saying, but I would just sit and laugh along with them like an idiot, like a child, just happy to see other people enjoying themselves. I imagined the comedians were fantastic. Within two years I understood some of what was going on, and I rapidly lost interest. Today, I hold Japanese comedians in roughly the same esteem that I extend to pulsating bits of bioluminescent goo adhering to the sides of underwater volcanic vents. That’s not their fault, of course. My wife loves them, and thinks most of my jokes are terrible, true stories. I tell Japanese people my favorite jokes, and the most common reaction is, “Oh, that’s so sad!”

Me: Two cannibals are chatting over dinner, and the first one says, "I can't stand my mother in law!" And the second one says, "Well, just eat the vegetables."

Japanese student/friend/spouse: "You mean they're eating her? Oh, how awful!"

I need to stop here and get on with some other things. I’ll finish this tonight if I can remember what I wanted to say. If not, I’ll tell you the most heartbreaking joke you ever heard. It includes Polish people, two clowns, and a train with no destination.

Safety Tips for Japanese in the UK

The Japanese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday warned all Japanese nationals traveling or residing in the United Kingdom to maintain a state of alertness in the wake of last week’s deadly bomb attacks. That the warning comes a scant six days after the incident is a dramatic display of recent streamlining of Ministry procedure. Unfortunately, in their breakneck haste Ministry officials overlooked practical advice. Because I love you all, and seek only your happiness and continued well-being, I would like to offer ten timely tips for those of you staring down the barrel of a British holiday.

1. Should you find yourself seated next to a terrorist on a bus or subway, arrange alternate transportation at your earliest convenience.

2. Sew a small Canadian flag to all articles of clothing and luggage. In all the history of the world, no one has ever deliberately terrorized a Canadian, except other Canadians.

3. To enhance alertness, drink coffee frequently throughout the day. Occasionally slap yourself, while repeating the phrase, “Gotta stay awake!”

4. There is safety in numbers. If you are lucky enough to be traveling with a tour group, link arms and legs until you form a giant human ball. Roll about from one destination to the next, uttering terrifying shrieks. That’s psychology, babies.

5. Remember to deploy all five senses at once. Stand in an open area and open your eyes as wide as you can, swiveling them left to right and up and down. Listen carefully, attempting to separate out the terrorist noises from friendlier, non-terrorist ones. Extend your fingers slowly to the front and to the back. Do you feel a terrorist? If so, walk away. Sniff the air, in quick, huffing breaths through the nose. While doing so, stick out your tongue as far as you comfortably can and waggle it to and fro. If you catch a ‘weird vibe,’ take cover immediately.

6. While on holiday, minimize risk by avoiding all high profile tourist attractions. If you restrict your sighteeing to suburban post offices, dental clinics and stationery stores, you have an excellent chance of surviving.

7. Consider traveling with your dog. Some breeds can smell explosives, and are very cute.

8. If cornered by a terrorist, shelter between two large stones and expand your rib cage to wedge yourself securely in place. Hiss loudly, while displaying your throat crest. If necessary, lash out at the terrorist with the venomous spikes on your tail.

9. Should you be caught in an explosion, do not attempt to retrieve any limbs that have come loose. Crawl toward the light. Unless the light is an ominous, flickering orange and seems to be generating intense and painful heat. In this case, crawl toward the darkness.

10. If you can’t beat the terrorists, join them by pumping your fist in the air and chanting “Allah hu akhbar!” If convenient, seize and behead a nearby British citizen.

That’s the rundown! Adherence to these simple guidelines will ensure that your holiday in Brave Little Britain will be pleasant and safe. And if you run into the Queen, tell her I said “Luxembourg, the yellow beads of morning.” She’ll know what it means!

My Little Girl Has Crabs!

My daughter loves dogs, as any right thinking two year old does, and sometimes asks specifically to go to pet stores where she can get up close and personal with a puppy. She hasn’t yet figured out that it’s different from the zoo, and that if daddy simply takes the puppy to the register and gives the lady money, we can bring the puppy home. I am in no hurry for her to make this connection, either. I don’t want a dog right now. They’re expensive, time-consuming, and make travel difficult. Further, one could piece together a rough but fairly accurate picture of my own personal history by a contextualized accounting of my too numerous dog-bite scars. And a dog is the only animal I would even consider keeping, left to make the decision on my own. Everything else in the pet store is unclean.

But how often is the honest working father left to make decisions like these on his own? We talked briefly about getting Ema some fish, but shelved the idea, at which point I regarded the pet issue as more or less resolved for now. But yesterday I came home and found these little horrors scuttling about the bottom of our wooden salad bowl.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are not pets. They are arthropods. Hermit crabs. A full discussion of hermit crabs will not include frolics in the park, games of Frisbee, or a warm nose nuzzling you awake in the morning. One will instead be talking about the use of the fourth and fifth pairs of limbs to cling to the central column of a dead snail’s shell. One will use the adjective “chitinous.” There must, eventually, be mention of molting.

But other than saying I thought they were a bit disgusting, I kept my mouth shut. I know when I’m beaten. The crabs had already moved into my salad bowl. Well then, let’s roll with the blow and make the best of things. I got online and found far too many websites devoted to hermit crabs. What my wife doesn’t know is that I’ve already had hermit crabs, when I was about nine years old. They died, and before I realized it my room was suffused with the unforgettable funk of rotting crab. I don’t want to put my daughter through that.

As luck would have it, they’re finicky little bastards. Humidity and temperature requirements alone will call for more than a salad bowl. And the websites are written by, well, by people who are really, really into their ‘hermies.’ Opening one page, my eyes fall on the question, “So then how can they make that noise?” I don’t really want to know what the hell this means, so I ignore it for now. On the same site I find this: “His exoskeleton was soft with body secretions.” Leaving aside the bits that make me want to run far, far away, my real question here can be summarized in one word. His? You sexed your hermit crab, lady?

But my last refuge was the certain knowledge that, with hermit crabs, my wife wouldn’t indulge the Japanese mania for making pets super-kawaii. No little sweaters, or tam-o-shanters, or Yuletide reindeer antlers for the crabs. Surely, I was safe on that score.

Then today I came home and found these. Scroll down a bit.

These are hand painted, varnished seashells, especially for hermit crabs to live in. Live and learn. That's all I really care to say about this tonight. My strength has fled me.

Three Birthday Haiku

Morning, cool breeze off
the river. I say goodbye.
Sleeping, they don’t hear.

Midday memory,
Keiko bends to gather
acorns in the park.

Her voice, calling our
daughter, carries out to me
on the dark street. Home.

The Prodigal Jackass Orders a Lager

It’s more or less decided. In a few weeks I’ll be returning to the U.S. for about ten days. This will be only my second time back in five and a half years, and the first time I was in charge of 36 Japanese high school girls, so I couldn’t really strip to the waist and howl at the clear blue sky, as it were. I had to spend too much time glowering and snapping at the swarming vermin that a large group of Japanese high school girls inevitably attracts. You know who you are, dirtbags.

This time I’m staying with my youngest brother, who’s in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but I understand they maintain a large stock of cheese, which is a favorite of mine. I’m pretty sure I won’t starve, but we are still left with the question of drink.

My brother works part time in a bar, and I look forward to a number of happy hours at the trough. But I like lager, and I may be the only American left who is comfortable saying that out loud. Lager is maligned now as being too broadly appealing, too international. I myself have always felt that lager couldn’t have become the standard global beer if it wasn’t such a wonderfully stirring companion.

But Americans now, especially hip, youngish Americans who pretend to a life of the mind, won’t drink beer unless it sufficiently dark to absorb all light in the room, is double fermented over a bed of Bhutanese plums, and has a thin layer of organic Scottish steel-cut oats floating on top. So here’s my question:

What if they laugh at me?

If it was just me, I wouldn’t give it a thought. I’d order the lager and damn the silly bastards. But my baby brother works there, and I don’t want to trample his hard won reputation. So I throw the question open to anyone who happens to pass by. What should I order? What will reflect well on my brother?

Jiji, home of Jiro

Where I'm Writing From, Continued

I live in Hagoromocho, part of the central ward of Hiroshima, lying along the west bank of the Motoyasu river. Years ago, most of the land around our house was occupied by Banshouen, a garden which had been constructed by the Asano family, rulers of Hiroshima under the Tokugawas. The river was lined with pine trees and residents, many of them employed in the garden, would drape their laundry on the branches to dry. Visitors were reminded of the magical shawl hung on pine branches in the old story Tennyo no Hagoromo (the Shawl of the Celestial Maiden), and soon the little neighborhood acquired the name Hagoromo Town.

The pines are all gone now. The riverbank, which was still natural when my wife was a child, isn’t anymore. The last piece of Banshouen survived until just a year and a half ago. One of largest trees I’ve ever seen in a city stood next to a pond. At night, the wind through that one tree sounded like waves on a shore. Herons and other birds nested there. I sometimes heard owls from our balcony. At the base of the trunk was a tiny, old Inari (fox) shrine, and when plans were made to take down the tree some of the old people around here said that terrible misfortune would come to whoever wielded the saws, and that the whole neighborhood might be subject to the baleful presence of an evicted fox spirit. A small petition went around, and phone calls were made to local television stations. But in the end the tree came down and the pond was filled in to make space for an apartment/nursing home complex. I want that tree back.

Hagoromocho was destroyed by the a-bomb. Whatever structures weren’t flattened by the initial blast, burned in the fires that followed. By one o’clock in the afternoon of August 6th, 1945, the entire neighborhood was in flames. Most of the surviving residents fled to Yoshijima, a little farther from the hypocenter of the nuclear detonation. Keiko’s aunt, who lived around the corner until she died last year, escaped the fires by carrying a futon to the river’s edge. She soaked it, wrapping it around her head and shoulders, and waited for someone to come for her as she watched the corpses of thousands wash past to the sea, then back again as the tide turned.

Today, Hagoromocho is an older neighborhood. Houses went up after the war, but many of the children raised in those houses left the city and as the old people passed away much of the land along the river was bought by love hotels. We proudly count the Alfa Pia, the Hotel France, the Tomato, the Banana and the Parsley among our neighbors. Cars roll in and out of the garages, vans pull up to drop off or pick up vacant looking call girls. Sometimes I’ll find a man lurking in the shadows on the riverbank at night, eyes trained on the exits of one of these places, waiting for the faithlessness of a wife or lover to be exposed. These days, though, the love hotels aren’t faring as well as they once did, and at least two have been replaced by apartment buildings since my arrival.

As the hotels and apartment blocks went up, sometimes they entirely surrounded older houses. This leads to the startling and very Japanese phenomenon of peering down a narrow alleyway between two buildings and finding a little tile-roofed house, with a high wooden gate in its wall, shut away and entirely forgotten by the world.

Hagoromocho is an old place, with few young people left. It needs a lucky break, and many of us are hoping that the prefecture will move its offices to the large, empty tract of nearby land that was the campus of Hiroshima University before it moved out to Saijo. For now, if my neighborhood sang, it would sing the old enka songs of drunkenness, lost love, suicide.

Stop, stop. That last bit may very well be bullshit. This is a great place, and even the most maudlin enka tune ever written still makes folks feel good. But let’s go check it out. This is the part where a much more sophisticated blogger would offer you a sound sample from his bedroom window. In the case of this blog though, I’m afraid you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Wandering around the streets of Hagoromocho tonight, I find no enka at all. There is the steady background hum of traffic on Route 2 two bridges north of the house. A heron squawks overhead. There are the shrill hiss and dispirited little popping noises of convenience store fireworks coming from the riverbank. The small houses have flower boxes in front of them. Nothing fancy, just the frank, guileless sort of flowers you buy for 80 yen a pot in front of the hardware store. An old woman is feeding cats.

As I turn left down a small side street and head back to the river, I come upon the only actual music I hear tonight, coming through a sliding wooden door left half open to admit the breeze. I know you won’t believe me, but it’s the Electric Light Orchestra, singing Twilight. “Am I awake or do I dream? The strangest pictures I have seen. Night is day and twilight’s gone away…” I fall in love with Japan all over again for a second or two, lingering there outside the door.

Then I come to Jiji. I’ve never been in this joint before, so I wander downstairs and meet the owner, Jiro. I’m the only customer in here, and Jiro has the TV on, so no music. But he pours me a beer, sits down at the bar with me and tells me a story about taking two college girls and a forty year old drag queen to the Peruvian disco in Nagarekawa. It’s a very good story. I told you, Hagoromocho is cool.

All Phone Calls Are Obscene

I said I’d tell you more about Hagoromocho tonight, but I find that there is a more pressing weight on my mind, a sharper, more poisonous thorn piercing my side. There is a telephone, friend, in the school smoking room. And it rings, while I and my fellows are trying to smoke, an activity which when properly undertaken requires far more skill and concentration than many people will admit.

The smoking room doesn’t offer much to a first glance, but is in fact a shadowed grove, a sanctuary for the weary and persecuted soldier of secondary education. Here are no students, no teetering stacks of homework to be graded, not a trace of chalk in the still, poisoned air. Between each class half the men in the school stand shoulder to shoulder, silently handing round cigarettes. Lighters appear and are struck. 18 men inhale, nod appreciatively to one another, and release. The air instantly turns that perfect 20th century blue, the color only of television in strangers’ homes and dense tobacco smoke in narrow rooms.

The walls, last papered in the 80’s, are lustrous amber. A late history teacher’s still-life hangs near the door, a thick gloss of tar lending it the gravity of centuries. There is one machine for coffee and one for tea, both of which frequently work. There are two scruffy tables, across which two couches and six chairs face off. One couch is so soft that you are really, if we were to be absolutely honest, sitting on the floor. The other has boards beneath the thin cushions; sitting on it is like perching on a window ledge while the crowd below urges you on. The tables are set with four cut glass ashtrays, one smaller wooden affair with buxom native dancers carved around the rim, and one with beach sand and discolored seashells trapped in glass. The last two are souvenirs of K. Sensei’s Oahu wedding.

“My God, it sounds magnificent,” I hear you murmur among yourselves, and so it is but for one thing, a lone serpent fouling our Eden. The telephone.

It broods in the corner on a tall pedestal, its plastic-sheathed tail lashing menacingly, the sticky push-buttons and reeking mouthpiece making quiet threats. So long as that is all it does, we are content to overlook it, as we might ignore a fellow commuter fondling himself on a late-night streetcar.

But that is not all it does. It also rings. Or rather it bleats, it yawps, it sometimes quacks, in tones devised by some soulsick practitioner of psych-warfare. At the sound 18 men flinch, jitter a few inches across the scarred linoleum floor, and the game begins. The game, of course, is to decide who will answer the phone. In theory, the job belongs to whoever is nearest the thing when it commences its shrill gabbling. In practice, however, the room’s geometry allows several men to be equidistant from the phone. And so a fascinating calculus comes into play. Who is junior? Who was the last call for, and how likely is it that this is a follow up to that call? Who is junior? Who last answered? Who is junior? Do we really think it’s for one of us? No one has called me on this phone, for instance, since November. Am I obliged to pick it up if I feel reasonably certain that the desired party is not present? What constitutes reasonable certainty? At any rate, isn’t someone here my junior? Eventually, often around the fourth ring, a determination is made and a trembling hand goes forth. The receiver is lifted, showering damp bits of bean cake from the last conversation.

“Yes, this is the smoking room. You want N. Sensei? He’s not here. No I don’t know where he is. That’s alright.”

Everyone relaxes. Everyone but the 24 year old PE teacher with the hunted look, who’s thinking, “Goddammit, I knew it wasn’t for me. Why the hell do I always have to answer the damn thing? What am I even doing in this room? I teach gym.” Worse, though, is when the recipient is present, but on the room’s far side. This requires a nimble hop over tables, a sliding step between chairs and around the corners of couches, a careful dance performed with 17 partners, each clutching a tiny, white-hot blowtorch in his hand. It’s an operation that demands rock-steady nerves and a fairly outlook on the state of your necktie.

Our smoking room is also, during classes, a retreat for contemplation, for quiet downgrading of ambitions and spiritual certainties, and of course for deep, restful slumber. This is especially true for several older teachers.

I am thinking now of one man in particular, who is in his last year of teaching. He is old. He is peevish. He is tired, a special kind of fatigue reserved for slightly smelly, out-of-touch old guys who spend their days in girls’ schools. Don’t judge him too harshly. You’d be smelly too if you napped in our smoking room, or simply moved through it at a dead sprint. The consolations of teaching are lost to this man. He is waiting out the clock. His personal life is a disappointment too, perhaps. His only child, a daughter, lived under his roof until she was 36, when she very abruptly (it seemed to him) married a foreigner and moved to Sydney. Now he spends three minutes a week on the telephone with a five year old grandson who doesn’t speak Japanese. Lately he’s discovered his wife is stashing money away, in large sums, and he tries not to dwell on her possible plans for it. She’s stopped cooking his favorite meals, and no longer airs out the futons as often as he’d like. This time next year it will be just the two of them, together day and night, locked in a terminal staring contest across the tiny kitchen table.

I don’t anticipate much argument if I suggest that this guy needs the nap. And in fact it seems to do him a world of good. Not after he wakes up. He reverts to form more or less immediately upon waking. But if you were to watch his sleeping face, it would be clear he’s somewhere else entirely. In his father’s home, perhaps, in the mountainous north of the prefecture. It’s late autumn and he and his older brother, whom he loved very much, are sitting at the garden’s edge, shelling peas while they talk. A beautiful child runs out of the house, calling him grandfather in flawless Japanese. They play ball, the boy missing more than he catches but throwing well, very well. When the sun is down behind the pines, they enter the house, a newer house now, in the city, where his favorite dishes are laid on the broad table. Later he creeps into his own fresh, well beaten futon. His wife, young and bedwarm, stirs...

The phone rings. He reels up out of sleep with the kind of snort you mostly hear in zoos. He’s alone in the room, but it might be for him. Tottering around the tables to the pedestal where the thing lies mooing at him, he picks it up just as the other party disengages, and in the instant before the dial tone comes up he hears the chill whispering of a million kilometers of dead line.

The class bell. The tumbling entry of half the men in the school. The dance, as the saying goes, begins anew. Cigarettes out, the flare of lighters, the hiss of intake, the nod, the release. No one looks at the phone.

Where I'm Writing From

All sorts of vicious, heartless nonsense on the BBC tonight. Let’s blow the bastards off for a moment, and have a story instead. Tennyo no Hagoromo, or the Shawl of the Celestial Maiden. It’s an old Japanese story, a mukashibanashi, the inspiration for the most popular of all Noh plays, and for the name of my town. Like all old stories, this one has a number of possible tellings, suited to different temperaments and times of day. Here is my own retelling, faithful in spirit if not in every detail.

Long, long ago, so long ago that the mountains still steamed like cakes and the rivers had not yet found the sea, a young fisherman was walking wearily home, his nets torn and his hands empty. Walking by the banks of a winding river, he spied something shining from the low branches of a pine tree. As he came closer, he saw a beautiful woman bathing in the river and singing to herself in a strange tongue. Though the young man had little experience of the world, he knew at once that she was one of those celestial maidens who sometimes made their way to earth, and that the faint gleam in the branches of the pine was her hagoromo, the enchanted, feathered shawl which conferred on its wearer the power of flight.

The fisherman took the shawl, hiding it among his nets, and quickly vanished down the path toward his small house at the foot of the hills which rose like ranked and ancient warriors along the boundary of the plain where the little river sought the sea. The fisherman concealed the magic shawl high among the soot-blackened rafters of the house, then gathered some old clothes and made his way back to the river.

When he arrived, he found the maiden kneeling among the trees, sobbing piteously. The young man offered her the clothes, saying that he had seen her from the path and had hurried home to bring her something to wear. The maiden accepted the clothes gratefully, and while the fisherman turned his face away she quickly covered herself. As she was dressing, though, a suspicion came to her. She turned on the fisherman, watching his face carefully, and demanded, “Did you steal my shawl?”

The young man exclaimed, “How could you think such a thing of me, when I have come to give you my help?” The maiden relented, bowing her head and saying, “I am sorry to have offended you, but without my shawl I cannot return to my home in the sky.”

The fisherman helped the maiden search for her lost shawl until the last daylight fled the plain, and then he offered to let her stay the night in his little house. Unhappily, she accepted, and they walked along the path to the house at the foot of the hills, where the young man made a simple dinner for the two of them, then gave the maiden his bed while he lay by the dying fire wearing his straw raincoat for warmth.

Many days came and went. The fisherman would leave early to work long hours casting his nets over the river, and the maiden spent her days wandering the pines in search of her shawl until she knew each needle by name. The young man soon began to make certain entreaties, and when winter came the maiden agreed to abandon her search and marry him. They had a daughter, and not long after, a son.

One day, the children were playing in the rafters where their mother kept silkworms, suspended high above the room where the warm air from the hearth collected. The boy saw a glimmer in the darkest corner of the house. Investigating, he found the shawl which his own father had hidden, certain that no one would ever climb quite so high. Delighted with his find, he showed it to his sister. Something about the shawl, the way it glowed dimly and seemed without weight, frightened the girl, and she insisted that they must bring the queer thing to their mother.

When they descended from the rafters, and laid the stained and rumpled shawl at their mother’s feet, the celestial maiden gave a cry of joy and deepest pain in equal measure. Kneeling by the little fire, she made three large rice balls for her family’s supper. Her daughter’s contained a pickled plum, her son’s a piece of smoked fish, and in her husband’s she placed the buttons from the clothes he had given her by the river so long ago. Kissing her children goodbye, she walked out of the house, wrapped the shawl close about her and rose into the clear morning air. The children rushed out into the little yard, not believing their own eyes. Their mother smiled down on them, dancing and singing the songs of her people until she was out of sight. They never saw her again, not in this world or any other.

My town, my neighborhood in Hiroshima, is named Hagoromocho. Hagoromo town. I’ll tell you why tomorrow, but now I’m going to sleep. Blessings tonight on all my British brothers and sisters. May calm hearts and cool minds find the way forward.

A Father's Shame

My 2 year old daughter is in love. Not with me, either, and don't think I'm not pissed off about it. She's gone prematurely goofy for this vile little Johnny's boy, Takizawa Hideaki.



Oh for fuck's sake, just look at it. This is my daughter's first crush? He's currently playing Minamoto Yoshitsune on NHK's annual historical drama, and Ema actually sits and watches the damn thing. She'll even walk up to the screen and kiss him. Today I came home from work and she was toting around a grubby brochure cover of him pimping Olympus cameras. I'll level with you, I don't get it. He's not hairy, he's not bald, he's never once given any indication of being able to belch a tune or break up old patio furniture with his bare hands, so what exactly is the attraction?

Waitress, I'd like 49 hot dogs, please.

This is part of my father-in-law's garden, just off the living room. As we are sunk deep in the rainy season now, it is a secret paradise of moss, rain-slick stone and maple leaves dripping water. Tiny river crabs the size of 10 yen coins, brilliant blue dragonflies and an occasional golden lizard make regular appearances. Sometimes I like to sit here thinking and dozing while my daughter splashes in the little waterfall or blows soap bubbles. Today I was thinking about Takeru "The Tsunami" Kobayashi, who traveled from Nagano to Coney Island and, just yesterday, ate 49 Nathan's hot dogs in 12 minutes to win the world hot dog eating championship at Coney Island. Although it was the fifth year in a row that The Tsunami has defeated all comers, he was grievously disappointed at not besting his own record of 53 and a half frankfurters, set last year. The International Federation of Competetive Eating (oh hell yes!) profiles him here, where we learn that he has also eaten 20 pounds of rice balls in half an hour and, incredibly, 57 cow brains (17.7 pounds) in just 15 minutes.

I am both humbled and deeply moved. Mr. Kobayashi, God bless you. If you read this, and ever come through Hiroshima, please look me up. And save room for dinner, compadre, 'cause I'm buying.

American and Japanese Exceptionalisms

I will not usually write about politics. I am not especially interested in politics, and am consequently unqualified to offer much in the way of informed commentary. However, from time to time, if something strikes me as obvious but unnoted, or for some reason I feel I do have something to say to a particular issue, I’ll throw out an idea or two.

To me, the most consistently infuriating line of argument coming out of Washington is not that America has a right to pursue unilateral, preemptive policy abroad, or that we must commit ourselves as a citizenry to the idea of perpetual, multiple front war with any state that may or may not have terrorists within its borders, or even that George W. Bush might not be as thoroughly dense a man as he sometimes seems. What bothers me most is the insistence, sometimes explicit, at other times already so well incorporated into certain lines of reasoning that it no longer needs open acknowledgment, that America is uniquely positioned to bring peace, democracy and prosperity to a benighted world.

A number of reasons are put forward in support of this position, traversing a bafflingly broad territory. I’ve heard arguments drawing on a perceived special history of the United States in creating itself out of nothing more than an idea, and unburdened by hereditary, cultural enmities. The fact that other peoples’ One Big Idea may differ substantially from our own, or that there are conflicts between certain neighbors that have lasted for longer than the United States has existed, don’t factor into these discussions as much as one might expect. Wherever Americans look, we see a mirror reflecting other, less perfectly formed Americans badly in need of a makeover.

I’ve heard, and even occasionally understood, economic arguments, but not often enough to comfortably venture an opinion. There are the military arguments, which seem in the main to turn on the idea that while we are not obliged to actually care about other peoples, it may be in our best long term interest to transform them into Austrians. If we can make them rich, peaceful, irrelevant folk who will pursue lofty ideals in the sphere of pastry while leaving us the hell alone, we won’t have to spend so much of our time shooting into their cars at checkpoints. Not a bad idea, I suppose.

But the most troubling argument is that the U.S. is under a moral obligation to remake the entire world in our own image. One hardly need add the words ‘by any means necessary’ to see where such an obligation leads us. Under Bush, especially, we have been asked to assent to the proposition that God Himself wanted a Bush administration, and is working His will through the actions of the American government abroad. I won’t comment on that, and I’m not interested in discussions about its status as a truth claim. If you believe that George W. Bush was conceived in the mind of God before all time to act as His instrument on earth, well hey...that’s fantastic. Have a cookie. Your mommy will be here soon.

I would, though, like to offer Japan as one possible model of where such ambitions can lead. Like the present U.S. administration, the Japanese government in the years after the Meiji Restoration peered out at the world and saw a mass of threats to their established way of life. They weren’t wrong, of course. Perry hadn’t shown up to invite them to a softball game, and the Western powers repeatedly treated the Japanese with absolute contempt right up to and through the opening of hostilities. But the Japanese response was, in some ways, uncomfortably similar to that of Bush and Co.

Proclaiming divine sanction through the person of the emperor, and the manifest superiority of the Japanese race and mode of life over those of other East Asian cultures, the Japanese set themselves to the task of making the world safe for Japanese via the curious vehicle of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This was to be a bloc of nations, led by Japan and strong enough to face the Western powers on equal terms. Again, this was not in itself a bad idea, and in fact the present ASEAN is attempting to do much the same thing, with the obvious difference that the Western powers are no longer a colonial presence.

Fatally, though, the Japanese decided that the quickest way to achieve the desired effect was through military action and colonization. Colonization having in some measure succeeded, local puppet regimes were set up under Japanese control and were treated with far more contempt than the West had ever shown Japan. Many (though of course not all) Japanese saw themselves as having a clear, unchallengeable right to such a role. After all, the Japanese were a unique, divinely appointed people and in the end, however messy the means might be, the rising tide of Yamato destiny would lift all boats.

Needless to say, from the vantage point of many here in my adopted city of Hiroshima, things ended rather badly. Now, sixty years later, Japan’s relations with her neighbors remains poisoned. The countries that should be, by virtue of shared history and culture, Japan’s closest friends instead loathe the Japanese. As a recent example, click here for some expressions of Korean children’s feelings about the Japanese, posted publicly by their parents and teachers. They include my favorite, a Japanese creation myth involving an giant, defecating bunny. Although the issue in this particular instance is the Liancourt Rocks, at the bottom of all these ongoing squabbles are unhealed wounds stemming from Japan’s actions between 1868 and 1945. Japan may never in my lifetime win the good will of the rest of East Asia.

I understand that the parallels between the Japanese situation and the American one are limited. America is not colonizing the Middle East, no matter what some may say. The countries we find ourselves in conflict with are not those with which we share strong historical and cultural links. And none of our present enemies has anything like the power to deal the sort of decisive, retaliatory blow that America struck against Japan.

But certain correspondences should ring alarm bells. At any rate, they do with me. The idea that we are in some sense a chosen people, that we sail under the wind of destiny, that we offer the world a panacea so uniquely precious that really, in the end, it will be better for them if we just hold them down and make them take it, and that even after they’ve done so they will still not be full participants in the Power and the Glory, but mere imitators, not one of these ideas is new. We are minute by minute losing the good will of good people, and are oddly indifferent to the fact. Some of my countrymen seem even to regard the increasingly uniform hostility of the international community as a sign that things are going as planned. Perhaps they’re right. I’m afraid, though, that things may end rather badly.

How is it that a country that celebrates itself as a nation of immigrants is so singularly unable to remember and value all the places and peoples we come from? I’ve no doubt that we can do whatever we will, at least for the moment. We can go it alone. But really, why on earth would we want to?

Anyway, this is way too long for something no one will read. Happy Birthday, America. See you in four weeks.

Man Ass: A Meditation

All of us who do not die young are fated to live into a time in which we no longer recognize the world around us as our own. This is true even for those who are celebrated in old age. At best they become a sort of living shorthand for another age, looked on with longing and a sense of loss. Think Jimmy Stewart, and we’ll all be on the same page. At worse they become a camp, retro conversation piece to prop up in the corner at an especially loathsome kind of party. The last days of Timothy Leary come to mind.

Man Ass. These two words, leering out at me from the pages of the New York Observer this morning, mark my own passage behind the veil of cultural obsolescence. I have lived long enough to see my Uncle Mike's plumber’s crack elevated to a savagely sexy fashionista assault, and thus am I undone.

Apparently, and I quote now, “man ass is suddenly everywhere.” Ass cleavage, the deliberate exposure of one’s crack, is the new look among young men on the streets of Manhattan, both gay and straight. Heterosexual men are shopping in women’s boutiques because they can’t find men’s jeans that ride low enough to display their man cleavage to its full advantage. Naturally companies have responded, even stalwart Levi Strauss, by bringing to market lines of men’s denims which (a great weariness of soul settles over me as I approach the gloomy conclusion of this sentence) are cut to offer better man ass exposure.

I’ll be the first to admit, before anyone else points out the obvious, that part of my absolute detachment from this particular sartorial statement may stem from turbulent relations with my own man ass. My ass resembles, if anything, a sort of fleshy pink retaining wall. A gluteal El Capitan, towering sheer above the valley floor to catch the last of the day’s light. The crack of my man ass is not a cute man cleft that might be trusted to grin vertically at approving passersby. It’s more a Great Rift Valley kind of man crack. Its topography includes cratered highlands and deep, arid gorges lying in perpetual shadow. One imagines the Leakeys tramping tirelessly through my man ass with a team of eager young grad students, scanning the ground for the molars of long dead australopithecines.

But enough of my own man ass. What of others? Most of the offenders quoted in the article seem quite young (no surprise there), so one might safely assume that this fad will give way as they get older, attain real employment, and their firm man asses begin to subside. But what if one were mistaken in this assumption? Imagine that the whole man ass misadventure survives long enough to become not merely acceptable but a standard, even conservative, convention of male style?

The time: a few years hence. The scene: a courthouse in any major American metropolis. Two lawyers in their early forties, old friends, meet in the vast, echoing foyer. As hundreds of other lawyers swirl around them, a galaxy of man asses winking soberly from beneath elegant, short-cropped jackets, this is the conversation we overhear.

“Tom! Missed you out on the links Sunday, buddy.”

“Yeah, I was pumped to try out that new driver, but my man ass-hair was really getting out of hand, so I decided to take care of it.”

“Really? Turn around, let me get a look at that man ass. Whoa, buddy! That’s one sharp man crack! You wax that sucker?”

“Nah, dude, that costs like 200 bucks now. I just threw down a scotch and had Dee Dee really get in there good with a pair of tweezers.”

“Dee Dee rocks, man, you got lucky with her. Sue won’t go near my man ass anymore, not since I got the stomach virus down in Cancun and we had that accident while she was giving me a quick run-over with the razor.”

This could happen. It really could.

If, like me, you feel the need for a drink coming on, let me leave you with a last suggestion. As you may imagine, doing a Google search on the words ‘man ass’ is not an undertaking for the timid or devout, but it did turn up this recipe from Barmeister.com.

Hairy Man’s Ass

One ounce vodka
3/4 ounce Bailey’s Irish Cream
3/4 ounce lime juice
One glass club soda

Pour vodka, baileys, and lime juice into a mixing glass. Now shake that ass, baby, shake it all around! Add club soda. Drink with straw and enjoy.

Yeah...Can I get a beer?