Shoe Dog (3 page)

My head swimming, I decided to take a break, to visit a very un-Zen landmark, in fact the most anti-Zen place in Japan, an enclave where men focused on self and nothing but self—the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Housed in a marble Romanesque building with great big Greek columns, the Tosho looked from across the street like a stodgy bank in a quiet town in Kansas. Inside, however, all was bedlam. Hundreds of men waving their arms, pulling their hair, screaming. A more depraved version of Cornfeld's boiler room.

I couldn't look away. I watched and watched, asking myself, Is this what it's all about? Really? I appreciated money as much as the next guy. But I wanted my life to be about so much more.

After the Tosho I needed peace. I went deep into the silent heart of the city, to the garden of the nineteenth-century emperor Meiji and his empress, a space thought to possess immense spiritual power. I sat, contemplative, reverent, beneath swaying ginkgo trees, beside a beautiful torii gate. I read in my guidebook that a torii gate is usually a portal to sacred places, and so I basked in the sacredness, the serenity, trying to soak it all in.

The next morning I laced up my running shoes and jogged to Tsukiji, the world's largest fish market. It was the Tosho all over again, with shrimp instead of stocks. I watched ancient fishermen spread their catches onto wooden carts and haggle with leather-­faced merchants. That night I took a bus up to the lakes region, in the northern Hakone Mountains, an area that inspired many of the great Zen poets.
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself,
said the Buddha, and I stood in awe before a path that twisted from the glassy lakes to cloud-ringed Mount Fuji, a perfect snow-clad triangle that looked to me exactly like Mount Hood back home. The Japanese believe climbing Fuji is a mystical experience, a ritual act of celebration, and I was overcome with a desire to climb it, right then. I wanted to ascend into the clouds. I decided to wait, however. I would return when I had something to celebrate.

I WENT BACK
to Tokyo and presented myself at
Importer
. The two ex-GIs in charge, thick-necked, brawny, very busy, looked as if they might chew me out for intruding and wasting their time. But within minutes their gruff exterior dissolved and they were warm, friendly, pleased to meet someone from back home. We talked mostly about sports. Can you believe the Yankees won it
all again? How about that Willie Mays? None better. Yessir, none better.

Then they told me their story.

They were the first Americans I ever met who loved Japan. Stationed there during the Occupation, they fell under the spell of the culture, the food, the women, and when their hitch was up they simply couldn't bring themselves to leave. So they'd launched an import magazine, when no one anywhere was interested in importing anything Japanese, and somehow they'd managed to keep it afloat for seventeen years.

I told them my Crazy Idea and they listened with some interest. They made a pot of coffee and invited me to sit down. Was there a particular line of Japanese shoes I'd considered importing? they asked.

I told them I liked Tiger, a nifty brand manufactured by Onitsuka Co., down in Kobe, the largest city in southern Japan.

“Yes, yes, we've seen it,” they said.

I told them I was thinking of heading down there, meeting the Onitsuka people face to face.

In that case, the ex-GIs said, you'd better learn a few things about doing business with the Japanese.

“The key,” they said, “is don't be pushy. Don't come on like the typical asshole American, the typical gaijin—rude, loud, aggressive, not taking no for an answer. The Japanese do not react well to the hard sell. Negotiations here tend to be soft, sinewy. Look how long it took the Americans and Russians to coax Hirohito into surrendering. And even when he did surrender, when his country was reduced to a heap of ashes, what did he tell his people? ‘The war situation hasn't developed to Japan's advantage.' It's a culture of indirection. No one ever turns you down flat. No one ever says, straight out, no. But they don't say yes, either. They speak in circles, sentences with no clear subject or object. Don't be discouraged, but don't be cocky. You might leave a man's office thinking you've blown it, when in fact he's ready to do a deal. You might leave think
ing you've closed a deal, when in fact you've just been rejected.
You never know.
”

I frowned. Under the best of circumstances I was not a great negotiator. Now I was going to have to negotiate in some kind of funhouse with trick mirrors? Where normal rules didn't apply?

After an hour of this baffling tutorial, I shook hands with the ex-GIs and said my good-byes. Feeling suddenly that I couldn't wait, that I needed to strike quickly, while their words were fresh in my mind, I raced back to my hotel, threw everything into my little suitcase and backpack, and phoned Onitsuka to make an appointment.

Later that afternoon I boarded a train south.

JAPAN WAS RENOWNED
for its impeccable order and extreme cleanliness. Japanese literature, philosophy, clothing, domestic life, all were marvelously pure and spare. Minimalist.
Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing—
the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai's sword, or the stones of a mountain brook. Spotless.

So why, I wondered, is this train to Kobe so filthy?

The floors were strewn with newspapers and cigarette butts. The seats were covered with orange rinds and discarded newspapers. Worse, every car was packed. There was barely room to stand.

I found a strap by a window and hung there for seven hours as the train rocked and inched past remote villages, past farms no bigger than the average Portland backyard. The trip was long, but neither my legs nor my patience gave out. I was too busy going over and over my tutorial with the ex-GIs.

When I arrived I took a small room in a cheap
ryokan.
My appointment at Onitsuka was early the next morning, so I lay down immediately on the tatami mat. But I was too excited to sleep. I rolled around on the mat most of the night, and at dawn I rose wearily and stared at my gaunt, bleary reflection in the mirror. After
shaving, I put on my green Brooks Brothers suit and gave myself a pep talk.

You are capable. You are confident. You can do this.

You can DO this.

Then I went to the wrong place.

I presented myself at the Onitsuka showroom, when in fact I was expected at the Onitsuka
factory—
across town. I hailed a taxi and raced there, frantic, arriving half an hour late. Unfazed, a group of four executives met me in the lobby. They bowed. I bowed. One stepped forward. He said his name was Ken Miyazaki, and he wished to give me a tour.

The first shoe factory I'd ever seen. I found everything about it interesting. Even musical. Each time a shoe was molded, the metal last would fall to the floor with a silvery tinkle, a melodic CLING-
clong
. Every few seconds,
CLING
-
clong,
CLING
-clong
, a cobbler's concerto. The executives seemed to enjoy it, too. They smiled at me and each other.

We passed through the accounting department. Everyone in the room, men and women, leaped from their chairs, and in unison bowed, a gesture of
kei
, respect for the American tycoon. I'd read that “tycoon” came from
taikun
, Japanese for “warlord.” I didn't know how to acknowledge their
kei
. To bow or not bow, that is always the question in Japan. I gave a weak smile and a half bow, and kept moving.

The executives told me that they churned out fifteen thousand pairs of shoes each month. “Impressive,” I said, not knowing if that was a lot or a little. They led me into a conference room and pointed me to the chair at the head of a long round table. “Mr. Knight,” someone said, “
here
.”

Seat of honor. More
kei
. They arranged themselves around the table and straightened their ties and gazed at me. The moment of truth had arrived.

I'd rehearsed this scene in my head so many times, as I'd re
hearsed every race I'd ever run, long before the starting pistol. But now I realized this was no race. There is a primal urge to compare everything—life, business, adventures of all sorts—to a race. But the metaphor is often inadequate. It can take you only so far.

Unable to remember what I'd wanted to say, or even why I was here, I took several quick breaths. Everything depended on my rising to this occasion. Everything. If I didn't, if I muffed this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn't really care about. I'd be a disappointment to my parents, my school, my hometown. Myself.

I looked at the faces around the table. Whenever I'd imagined this scene, I'd omitted one crucial element. I'd failed to foresee how present World War II would be in that room. The war was right
there
, beside us, between us, attaching a subtext to every word we spoke.
Good evening, everyone—there's good news tonight!

And yet it also
wasn't
there. Through their resilience, through their stoic acceptance of total defeat, and their heroic reconstruction of their nation, the Japanese had put the war cleanly behind them. Also, these executives in the conference room were young, like me, and you could see that they felt the war had nothing to do with them.

On the other hand, their fathers and uncles had tried to kill mine.

On the other hand, the past was past.

On the other hand, that whole question of Winning and Losing, which clouds and complicates so many deals, gets even more complicated when the potential winners and losers have recently been involved, albeit via proxies and ancestors, in a global conflagration.

All of this interior static, this seesawing confusion about war and peace, created a low-volume hum in my head, an awkwardness for which I was unprepared. The realist in me wanted to acknowledge it, the idealist in me pushed it aside. I coughed into my fist. “Gentlemen,” I began.

Mr. Miyazaki interrupted. “Mr. Knight—what company are you with?” he asked.

“Ah, yes, good question.”

Adrenaline surging through my blood, I felt the flight response, the longing to run and hide, which made me think of the safest place in the world. My parents' house. The house had been built decades before, by people of means, people with much more money than my parents, and thus the architect had included servants' quarters at the back of the house, and these quarters were my bedroom, which I'd filled with baseball cards, record albums, posters, books—all things holy. I'd also covered one wall with my blue ribbons from track, the one thing in my life of which I was unabashedly proud. And so? “Blue Ribbon,” I blurted. “Gentlemen, I represent Blue Ribbon Sports of Portland, Oregon.”

Mr. Miyazaki smiled. The other executives smiled. A murmur went around the table.
Blueribbon, blueribbon, blueribbon.
The executives folded their hands and fell silent again and resumed staring at me. “Well,” I began again, “gentlemen, the American shoe market is enormous. And largely untapped. If Onitsuka can penetrate that market, if Onitsuka can get its Tigers into American stores, and price them to undercut Adidas, which most American athletes now wear, it could be a hugely profitable venture.”

I was simply quoting my presentation at Stanford, verbatim, speaking lines and numbers I'd spent weeks and weeks researching and memorizing, and this helped to create an illusion of eloquence. I could see that the executives were impressed. But when I reached the end of my pitch there was a prickling silence. Then one man broke the silence, and then another, and now they were all speaking over one another in loud, excited voices. Not to me, but to each other.

Then, abruptly, they all stood and left.

Was this the customary Japanese way of rejecting a Crazy Idea? To stand in unison and leave? Had I squandered my
kei—
just like that? Was I dismissed? What should I do? Should I just . . . leave?

After a few minutes they returned. They were carrying sketches, samples, which Mr. Miyazaki helped to spread before me. “Mr. Knight,” he said, “we've been thinking long time about American market.”

“You have?”

“We already sell wrestling shoe in United States. In, eh, Northeast? But we discuss many time bringing other lines to other places in America.”

They showed me three different models of Tigers. A training shoe, which they called a Limber Up. “Nice,” I said. A high-jump shoe, which they called a Spring Up. “Lovely,” I said. And a discus shoe, which they called a Throw Up.

Do not laugh, I told myself. Do not . . . laugh.

They barraged me with questions about the United States, about American culture and consumer trends, about different kinds of athletic shoes available in American sporting goods stores. They asked me how big I thought the American shoe market was, how big it could be, and I told them that ultimately it could be $1 billion. To this day I'm not sure where that number came from. They leaned back, gazed at each other, astonished. Now, to my astonishment, they began pitching
me
. “Would Blue Ribbon . . . be interested . . . in representing Tiger shoes? In the United States?” “Yes,” I said. “Yes, it
would.”

I held forth the Limber Up. “This is a good shoe,” I said. “This shoe—I can sell this shoe.” I asked them to ship me samples right away. I gave them my address and promised to send them a money order for fifty dollars.

They stood. They bowed deeply. I bowed deeply. We shook hands. I bowed again. They bowed again. We all smiled. The war had never happened. We were partners. We were brothers. The meeting, which I'd expected to last fifteen minutes, had gone two hours.