Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (9 page)

The harbor was very peaceful. All I heard were birds chirping and the lapping of water. There were no other people. I turned around and saw a house partway up the hill. Half of its face had been sliced off. Inside I could see a poster for Sapporo beer hanging on the wall. It occurred to me that fishermen must have gone there for drinks after a day of work. The headlands were not supposed to be so empty. Before the tsunami, there had been other houses here.

“Do you feel better, seeing that we are still alive?” Semp
asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said automatically. Actually, I didn’t feel better. I felt deeply disturbed. But as much as he didn’t want me to worry, I didn’t want him to worry. There is a lot of this kind of mutual warding off of worry in Japan. It’s the kind of behavior that causes Westerners to accuse the Japanese of “vagueness” or “dishonesty.”

As we walked along the shore, Semp
told me that he had decided we would not bury my grandfather until the following year. He didn’t want to ask my mother’s uncles to travel here now, while the situation was still so unstable. And he didn’t want to touch the ground with his hands. “First they told us there was no meltdown, then it turned out there was a meltdown,” he said ruefully. “Now there is a melt-through. Who knows what will happen. You should not be in a hurry to come back.”

“Semp
,” I said, “why didn’t you leave?” I meant this as a kindness, but he was gruff with his response.

“That would not have been an easy thing to do, for many reasons.” He closed his eyes, like a cat, and gathered his thoughts. “First of all, temples in Japan have tax-free status because we are supposed to be here for people precisely in the case of an emergency. And further . . .” A storm was gathering in him. “It is difficult for you to understand as a Westerner. Buddhism is very different from Christianity, as far as I can tell.”

He went on. “Buddhism saved this country from itself. Think about the last war we fought. ‘Die for your country. The emperor is a god.’ Those kamikaze pilots. Stupid. Do you know what your Aunt Shizuko used to say? She said, Even the emperor must bow at a temple. The point of Buddhism is that everyone is equal. There should be no war. We should take care of each other. You make Buddhism complicated because you are a foreigner. That’s the main reason you don’t understand.”

I
F YOU ARE
a Westerner and you spend enough time in Japan—and you speak Japanese—you will eventually be told that you cannot truly understand the Japanese. Only the Japanese can understand themselves.

There is a word for people who are not Japanese, composed of the Chinese characters for “outside” and “country.” There are those in the country—the Japanese—and those who are “outside of the country”—or
gaijin
. The term is a legacy of Japan’s long period of isolation in the years between 1600 and 1868, when there was almost no contact between the island nation and the outside world. Any Japanese who dared to venture out was not allowed back in. History has preserved a few extraordinary accounts of adventuring Japanese fishermen who explored the landmasses beyond their own, but they were never permitted back home after their disobedience was uncovered. With very few exceptions, no Westerners were ever allowed to live in Japan.

Even after more than one hundred years of contact with the Western world, some of this isolationist attitude lingers. When I visited Japan as a child, it was very common for other children to point and stare at me because I was the very first
gaijin
they had ever seen. I could hear kids asking their parents with the singular guilelessness of the very young, “Mom, is
that
a
gaijin
?” as though to ask if I, the strange creature, was in fact the long-rumored foreigner they had seen in their picture books.

There is also an element within the Japanese culture that persists in telling itself and others that it is special and unlike any place else in the world. The Japanese, in fact, are so special that only they can understand their culture. A
gaijin
cannot be expected to “get it.”

To many scholars—Western and Japanese—the notion that Japan is “special” is uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. It prevents the Japanese from asking for help when they need it. Believing that the Japanese people were special was part of what
sparked Japanese aggression in World War II. Being special does not align with modern Western ideals of multiculturalism, equality of the sexes, and rationality’s power to understand all things. At the same time, there is a persistent Japanese anxiety, often reflected in the media and in books, that Japan is still somehow different—must be different—even if the Japanese cannot articulate exactly how.

There are many good reasons for the Japanese to feel apprehensive about being misunderstood. The cultural bases from which Japan and the West draw are unrelated; the same cannot be said of the United States and Great Britain, for example, who have significant cultural differences but share deep roots. And yet, because Japan looks modern on the surface, Westerners feel like it ought to be “just like us,” and are surprised when it is not. Under such conditions, it is easy for misunderstandings to arise.

Fledgling scientific research, such as the work of Richard E. Nisbett in
The Geography of Thought
, suggests that East Asians and Westerners literally perceive the world differently, to the point of picking out different objects in the landscape. His research also indicates that how one sees the world can be somewhat fluid. First- and certainly second-generation children of an East Asian immigrant in the United States will see the world the way their fellow Westerners do. Asians who grow up in regions with a strong Western influence, like Hong Kong, will behave somewhere in between these two extremes. Perhaps it is possible, then, to see through more than one set of eyes, if one learns to pay attention to one’s environment in a slightly different manner than one is accustomed to from birth.

I have always believed that in a great many ways Japan is indeed unique, and the Japanese are justified in being proud of their cultural sensitivities and unique accomplishments. I had always thought that I was able to appreciate these things. But after my conversation with Semp
,
I wondered if I needed to try a little bit harder to see things through his eyes.

I
HAD SEMP
’S
words on my mind when, in April of 2013, I was asked to participate in a Japanese documentary series called
Tomorrow Japan
, which focuses on life in T
hoku after the disaster. The film’s producer, Endo Shigeru, had been interested in my connection to Iwaki, and my focus on exploring the spiritual traditions to which the Japanese were turning in the aftermath of the tsunami. When we first met in a suburb of T
ky
, Endo brought some research and reading material for me to peruse, and I became particularly intrigued by a short folktale in a collection of stories called
The Legends of T
no
.