Lost Japan (24 page)

Here, you stop. Looking around at the thousand-year-old cedar forest, you drink deeply of mountain air. You are standing at the heart of a mandala.

Like many countries, Japan is bipolar. In China, power has swung periodically over the millennia between the north, the center of government, and the south, source of the nation's wealth. In the USA, the clear divide between the East Coast and the West Coast is so strong that at the Oomoto seminar, the biggest culture shock is not when Americans encounter Japanese, but when Californians meet New Yorkers. In Japan, the two poles are the Tokyo area (known as Kanto) in the east, and the four cities of Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto-Nara (called Kansai) in the west.

While Tokyo, as capital, draws the choicest international events, it is considered politically important to give Kansai its due. So, after the 1964 Olympics, when Japan announced to the world that it had recovered from World War II and intended to become a global industrial power, it hosted an international event in Osaka: Expo 70, held the summer I hitchhiked around Japan and discovered Iya Valley.

The Expo fairgrounds outside Osaka were centered around sculptor Taro Okamoto's ‘Tower of the Sun'. The tower took Japan by storm, and its image on posters and on TV followed me everywhere that summer. It was a concrete and metal construction, with a cone-shaped base, two outstretched flipper-like arms and a round Picasso-esque head; it looked like a giant creature from outer space put together in a kindergarten art class. The statue can still be seen as you drive along the Meishin Expressway between Kyoto and Osaka. Once as I was driving past it with David Kidd, he remarked, ‘There is the ugliest thing ever made by the hands of man.'

Welcome to Osaka. Few major cities of the developed world could match Osaka for the overall unattractiveness of its cityscape, which consists mostly of a jumble of cube-like buildings and a web of expressways and cement-walled canals. There are few skyscrapers, even fewer museums and, other than Osaka Castle, almost no historical sites. Yet Osaka is my favorite city in Japan. Osaka is where the fun is: it has the best entertainment districts in Japan, the most lively youth neighborhood, the most charismatic geisha madams and the most colorful gangsters. It also has a monopoly on humor, to the extent that in order to succeed as a popular comedian it is almost obligatory to study in Osaka and speak the Osaka dialect.

Osaka people are impatient and love to disobey rules; in that spirit, the best way to approach the city is to dispense with preliminaries and go straight to the heart of the mandala, which in Osaka's case is Tsutenkaku (the ‘Tower Reaching to Heaven'). Tsutenkaku is another of the towers which, like Tokyo Tower and Kyoto Tower, were built in every major city after World War II. Wartime bombing had almost completely obliterated Osaka's old downtown area, so the city redrew the streets in a huge burnt-out district, and built Tsutenkaku in the middle of it. The tower stands in the center of a rectangle covering about twenty square blocks called Shinsekai (‘New World'), which is filled with
restaurants, shops and theaters. Roads radiate from the arches under the tower like the avenues emanating from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. However, all resemblance to Paris, or even the amusement districts of other Japanese cities, ends here. Once the mecca of laborers, such as the farmers of Iya who flooded the cities in the decades after the war, Shinsekai has become a slum. In clean, organized and law-abiding modern Japan, this is an exceptional phenomenon.

Most people visiting Shinsekai enter via Janjan Yokocho, an arcade stretching from Imamiya Station into the district's interior. The minute you get out of the train station, you realize that you are in another country: drunks and homeless people stagger by, and young men are more likely to be wearing wide laborer pants and boots than the latest fashions from Tokyo's trendy Harajuku area. You pass a street market where you can buy second-hand underwear or a single shoe. Janjan Yokocho is dark and dingy – you see the occasional rat scurrying across from one building to another – but it is crowded with people. They are coming to eat at the
kushikatsu
restaurants lining the street, which feature cheap meals of pork, chicken, onions and eggs, deep-fried on wooden skewers and washed down with plenty of beer and
shochu
(vodka made from rice). Interspersed among the
kushikatsu
restaurants are
shogi
halls, where people sit in pairs playing Japanese chess, watched through open latticed windows by knots of people gathered on the street outside.

When I visit Shinsekai, I go to the barber before heading off for dinner. He offers a haircut for 500 yen, about one-fifth of the going rate elsewhere, and uses buzz shears, which are considered unfashionable in Japan nowadays. This was very convenient when my cousins Edan and Trevor were staying with me. They were very particular about their hair: Trevor liked his shaved up the sides, with a long Mohican strip at the top, and the fancy barbers in Kameoka and Kyoto never seemed to get it right. When I asked the barber in Janjan Yokocho if he thought he could handle
hair like this, he replied, in English, ‘Okeydokey. I cut the hair of the American soldiers after the war. I know exactly what to do.' He whipped out the buzz shears, and the work was over in a minute. The effect was exactly what the boys were looking for. The theme of Shinsekai is Cheap and Easy; in other words, this is not Japan.

Not far from Tsutenkaku is a small theater with a sign outside saying ‘Japan's Cheapest Theater!' It's also one of the best. Entrance is 200 yen (50 yen extra for a cushion), and traveling troupes of popular Kabuki perform here. These troupes, centered around one or two families, are the remnants of the hundreds of troupes that roamed the country before World War II. After the war, most of the smaller troupes went out of business, and the better known performers were consolidated into the Grand Kabuki we see today in Tokyo. But a handful of these families survived by adapting Kabuki to modern tastes. They dance not to
samisen
and shoulder drum, but to
enka
(modern pop songs). Their kimonos are made of pink gauze and gold lamé, and their wigs may be red, purple or silver.

First, there is a love-and-loyalty play, and then some dances. The audience show their appreciation by placing cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes on the stage or stuffing five-or ten thousand-yen notes into the sashes of the performers. Then there will be an announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we introduce the sexy, curvaceous Baby Hanako!' And with a roll of drums, a little girl of about four steps up to the microphone and belts out a song at ear-splitting volume. The children of these troupes start singing and dancing before they can read or write. My favorite at the moment is a boy of eleven named Bakudan Yuki (Yuki the Bomb), who can sing and dance better than any of the coddled children of the families of Grand Kabuki. In Grand Kabuki it is no longer necessary to appeal to the hearts of the public, but Yuki the Bomb immediately knows the effect he is creating by the amount of money stuffed into his sash. At the end of the
performance, the troupe gathers outside on the street and waves good-bye to the audience.

A few blocks away from Shinsekai is Tobita, Japan's last
kuruwa
. In Edo days, prostitution was strictly regulated, and the courtesans lived in small walled towns within the cities, which had gates and closing times. These cities-within-the-city were known as
kuruwa
(enclosures). In Kyoto, the old gate to the
kuruwa
of Shimabara still stands, although Shimabara itself is defunct. The largest
kuruwa
was Yoshiwara, near Uguisudani Station in Tokyo. Within the walls of Yoshiwara, there was a lattice of streets lined with pleasure houses, a scene familiar in the Kabuki theater, where such streets form the backdrop of many love plays. The entrance to each pleasure house featured a banner with the name of the house on it; inside, women wearing gorgeous kimonos were on display. Today, Yoshiwara is still in business, but the boundaries, the street grid, the houses and the banners have been replaced by a jumble of streets sprinkled with love hotels and saunas, with the result that it looks not much different from most of the other places in Tokyo. If you can't read the signs, you might not realize the nature of the neighborhood. Tobita, however, survives almost completely intact. There are no walls, but there is a precise gridwork of streets lined with low tile-roofed houses. In front of each house is a banner, and inside the entrance a young woman and the madam sit side by side next to a brazier. This is as close to Kabuki in the modern age as you can get.

A word of caution: it is best not to stroll around Shinsekai or Tobita without a Japanese friend if you are a foreigner, as you might be accosted by a gangster or an unfriendly drunk. I usually go there in the company of an Osaka friend, Satoshi; he looks so tough that once, when he was on his way to a wedding dressed in a black suit and sunglasses, the police picked him up on suspicion of being a gangster. Many Japanese are afraid to enter the downtown neighborhoods of Osaka. There is one area in particular that taxi drivers will not go into at all because of the
atariya
(‘bumpers'), who make a living from bumping into your car and then screaming that you have run over them. The whole neighborhood rushes out to support the
atariya
, threatening to act as witnesses in a lawsuit against you until you pay up. Even so, this pales in comparison to what can happen in New York and many of Europe's large cities. The gangsters of Osaka and Kobe, known as Japan's most vicious, keep largely out of sight, and in general, violent crime is rare. One of Japan's greatest achievements is its relative lack of crime, and this is one of the invisible factors that makes life here very comfortable. The low crime rate is the result of those smoothly running social systems, and is the envy of many a nation – this is the good side of having trained the population to be bland and obedient. The difference in Osaka is only one of degree; the streets are still basically safe. What you see in Shinsekai is more a form of ‘misbehavior', rather than serious crime. People do not act decorously: they shout, cry, scream and jostle one another; in well-behaved modern Japan, this is shocking.

Osaka does not merely preserve old styles of entertainment, it constantly dreams up new ones. For example, Osaka premiered the ‘no-panties coffee shops' with pantyless waitresses, that later swept Japan. In other places, the boom remained limited to coffee shops, but in Osaka they now have ‘no-panties
okonomiyaki
' (do-it-yourself pizza) and ‘no-panties
gyudon
' (beef-and-rice bowls). The latest, I hear, is ‘breast-rub coffee', where a topless waitress, on delivering coffee to the table, rubs her customer's face in the way the name would suggest.

The entertainment is by no means limited to the sex business. Osaka pioneered a new type of drive-in public bath at Goshikiyu, near the Toyonaka interchange on the expressway. In general, public baths are slowly dying out in Japan, as the number of homes with their own bath and shower increases. However, an Osaka bathhouse proprietor of an entrepreneurial bent promoted the idea that an evening out at the public bath was the
perfect family entertainment. He built a multistoried bathhouse with a large parking lot to service Japan's new car-centered lifestyle. Inside, he installed restaurants, saunas and several floors of baths with every type of tub: hot, cold or tepid; with jacuzzi, shower or waterfall. On a Saturday night you can hardly get into Goshikiyu's parking lot; the place is jammed with families with small children.

Fashion in Osaka is not like fashion elsewhere. Tokyo is the home of trends: all the businessmen wear the same blue suit, housewives wear the same Armani, artists wear the same pastel shirts with high collars, and the young people hanging out at Yoyogi wear whatever the latest craze happens to be. Kyoto people are afraid to do anything that might make them stand out, so they dress rather drably – like Tokyo on a bad day. But Osaka is a riot of ill-matched color, tasteless footwear and startling hairdos. Satoshi puts it this way: ‘In Tokyo, people want to wear what everyone else is wearing. In Osaka, people want to shock.'

Japan's national problem is homogeneity. The school system teaches everybody to say and think the same thing, and the bureaucracies restrict the development of new media, such as cable TV, the information superhighway and even movie theaters. As a result, no matter where you go, from Hokkaido to Kyushu, all the houses look the same, the clothes look the same, and people's lives center around the same humdrum activities. With everyone so well behaved and satisfied with their mediocre lives, Japan specializes in low-level pleasures.
Pachinko
is the perfect example. Why has
pachinko
swept Japan? It can hardly be the excitement of gambling, since the risks and rewards are so small. During the hours spent in front of a
pachinko
machine, there is an almost total lack of stimulation other than the occasional rush of ball bearings. There is no thought, no movement; you have no control over the flow of balls, apart from holding a little lever which shoots them up to the top of the machine; you sit there enveloped in a cloud of heavy cigarette smoke, semi-dazed by the racket of millions of
ball bearings falling through machines around you.
Pachinko
verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the education system.