Wrong About Japan (5 page)

In any case, I could see that Charley was bored out of his brain. He sat on the sofa with his hands folded on his lap, his shoulders slumped in early teenage melancholy It was time to go. Just the same, I asked if we might see where Yoshihara-san worked, and so we crossed the mossy garden again and entered a sturdy, high-roofed structure with a brick floor and two very simple kilns that looked more like rough stone troughs. My son, it was obvious, was waiting for the time to pass. For his father, however, it was a pleasant place to be, so clean and orderly. Along one wall, near the kiln, were hung some thirty different sets of tongs. Remembering that the traditional Japanese carpenters once used something like forty different planes, and had a name for each, I asked if these tongs had names.

He shrugged. His no did not require translation.

“What do you ask your apprentice to pass you then?”

“Apprentice?” He laughed. “I lean across and get it myself.”

I asked him about
yaki-ire
, the stage of the process where the smith, working at night, must correctly
judge the colour of the heated blade before plunging it into water to harden it. The literature suggests that the colour of the steel ideally matches that of the full moon in February and August, and many of the famous swords of antiquity are dated with these months.

In his own book, Yoshihara and his collaborators write: “Yaki-ire—the process of heating a sword until it is red hot, and then plunging it into a trough of water—is perhaps the most dramatic moment in the swordsmith’s day. In the popular imagination, the glowing blade, the darkened smithy, the hissing billow of steam—all these make yaki-ire an almost mystical enterprise, whereby the metal structure of the blade is itself transformed, and a sword is born.

“The practical reality here, as is so often the case, is quite different. Yaki-ire is all in a day’s work, and as often as not ends in a ruined blade that must be either reworked or discarded. It is performed at night with the lights out so the smith must be able to see the true colour of the naked blade in order to judge its temperature….”

When I asked Yoshihara about forging swords at night, he once more made me feel hopelessly romantic. He worked in the gloom, he said, not at night. But his book gives a more complete answer: “People live at close quarters here, and sword making
can be very noisy work. Yoshindo [Yoshihara] and Shoji [his youngest brother] are currently the only two swordsmiths working within the Tokyo city limits. In deference to their neighbours they restrict their hammering and folding of steel to the hours between nine and five on weekdays.”

We had come a long way from comic strips, or so it seemed, for just a moment.

3.

On two occasions in Tokyo, I spoke with Kosei Ono, not only a cartoonist but a highly respected critic of manga and anime, who put all of his considerable erudition at my service. Our final meeting, however, must have alarmed him. In preparing for my meeting
with Mr. Yoshihara I had read a number of books about the Japanese sword and had noted that the word
saya
meant “sheath.” Saya also happened to be the name of the proud, angry swordswoman in
Blood: The Last Vampire
. My mistake was not in pointing this out to Kosei but allowing a sort of mad excitement to show in my eyes as I did so.

Returning to New York, I found Kosei’s letter awaiting me. Typically it contained all sorts of tantalising information, including the fact that the artwork in
Blood: The Last Vampire
was done by the manga artist Katsuya Terada, who was strongly influenced by such American comic-book artists as Mike Mignola, who in turn was influenced by Jack Kirby the creator of Captain America. Having offered such gifts, Kosei came to a point that must have been worrying him since we said good-bye in Tokyo. He pointed out that so many characters, while pronounced the same way, have quite different meanings. In any case, he continued, “girl’s name will never mean ‘sheath,’ which is too obvious for Japanese people…. Well, so much for today. Be careful, half knowledge is sometimes much worse than complete ignorance. Sorry for my terrible English. Regards, Kosei.”

Reading his very polite letter occasioned a depressing feeling that stemmed from my shameful
ignorance. I’d felt much the same way as we walked away from Yoshihara-san’s workshop without having so much
as glimpsed
a sword.

It had been a grey overcast day in the sword-smith’s suburb. Now my inability to even break the skin of this culture became somehow entangled with this melancholy light and also my feelings about my son, who was slouching slowly towards the train station with his head bowed over the cell phone. Naturally it did not occur to me that he was already adapting to a certain Japanese language; that is, he could do thumb-talk in a way that would forever elude his clumsy father.

“Look around you,” I said irritably. “See where you are. You’re not on Bleecker Street now.”

“I
am
looking,” he said.

At the screen, he meant.

“Takashi wants to know,” he said, “can we go to Sega World?” He held up the iridescent orange instrument. Cut into its seething sci-fi screen was a text message. “He says they have really cool games there.”

“We didn’t fly for eighteen hours to go to a video arcade.”

“Dad, you forget. Sega World is at Akihabara.”

“Akihabara?”

“Electric Town—remember? You read about it.
You wanted us to go there. It’s in
Little Adventures in Tokyo.”

He was right. According to Rick Kennedy the author of this handy guidebook: “The place spills over with raw commercial energy and off-the-rails electronic wizardry. It is gaudy and jarring, exhausting and exhilarating. It is the world’s most high-powered bazaar, with everything always on sale, from voltmeters and logic analyzers to miniature washing machines for miniature apartments … [from] tea-serving robots to solar-powered ice cream makers and pogo sticks with battery-operated digital readout of time-hopped.”

“It was your idea,” my son said indignantly. “You said it was filled with cool stuff, Dad. We could buy a Japanese toilet and take it home for Mom. Just joking.”

“We haven’t even seen a sword yet. Wouldn’t you like to go to the sword museum first?”

But of course I knew the answer. Throughout my failure of an interview with Mr. Yoshihara, Charley had waited politely just as I myself had once waited as my father sold GM cars to farmers. Now it was my son’s turn to enjoy the trip he had been promised.

“Give me some change,” he said. “I’ll get the tickets for Akihabara. Please …”

I gave him a handful of coins, and by the time Jerry Etsuko, and I caught up with him, Charley was feeding a very alien-looking ticket dispenser as if it were a Vegas slot machine. Now he was alive, engaged. The machine whirred at his command, spitting tickets out into his waiting hand.

“How do you know how to do that?”

“I’m going to live here,” he said, “after my band fails.”

The Tokyo subway is big and complicated. The lines are owned by different companies, some of whom accept each other’s tickets, some of whom don’t. Of course I should take Charley to Akihabara—this was his trip after all—but now I saw that he was somehow taking me.

“You are a different species,” I told him.

“We mutated,” he corrected.

Even on the JR Yamanote Line he showed no interest in what was outside the window. Instead, he studied the map, running his fingers along the dense-coloured lines as if reading a circuit in braille. He led the transfer of subway lines at Asakusa and again at Ueno. At Akihabara he slipped our tickets into a machine marked “Fare Adjustment,” and I gave him the two hundred yen he asked for. He then located exit three, where his strange friend was waiting for us.

Takashi bowed to Etsuko, Jerry, and me, but his greeting with Charley was a complicated handshake ending in a shoulder slam.

“Carey-san,” he said to me, “we will see toilets.”

Hearing this news, Etsuko excused herself. She had a job to go to.

Walking a little ahead, Charley and Takashi presented a clear contrast. Charley, tall and twelve years old, wore rumpled New York street clothes. Takashi was perhaps fifteen but a head shorter. His black Japanese hair, even in its wild dishevelment, was crisp and clean as knife blades. There was not a spot or wrinkle on him. Every detail of his tunic was pristine, pressed, as if just released from a polythene wrap.

“Who the hell is he?” I asked Jerry
“What
is he?”

As the two boys pushed through the crowds beneath the railway bridge on Chuo Dori, I remembered Charley’s joke.
“We mutated.”

“First,” Jerry said, “he is a character from anime. All that romantic military stuff, the boots and the coat—I’d say he was out of Mobile Suit Gundam.”

Of all the thousands of anime series, this one I actually knew about because it was Charley’s favourite. In Mobile Suit Gundam the kids fight
endless, politically complex wars from inside giant robots. In fact, Charley and I had an appointment to interview Yoshiyuki Tomino, who originated the series, as I now reminded Jerry.

“Well”—he smiled—“doesn’t he look like a Tomino character to you?”

“He does rather.”

But Jerry had already moved on. “He is also what is called a visualist. You think Japanese are great conformists. Remember, though, that this was a country which once had strict laws about what you wore, where you lived. God help you if you acted like a samurai when you weren’t. Can you imagine what it feels like to wear what you damn well please? You want to be a robot pilot, that’s your choice. I was in Mitsukoshi, the department store, and there was this extraordinary transvestite. He had that same crazed sense of detail—an amazing hat, stacked high with fruit like Carmen Miranda’s. And he was just standing in the middle of the store with everyone walking around him, pretending he wasn’t there. But he was perfect, in every single detail. That’s what a visualist does. My friend’s neighbour likes to dress up as a traditional carpenter—the flared trousers, the two-toed socks, the whole kit. By day he’s an accountant working for a conservative newspaper, and he goes home on the subway looking like a conformist. But
then he’s not only got the clothes, he’s got a bloody carpenter’s
truck
and he goes out cruising.”

“Where does he go cruising?”

“No place we could take Charley.”

“And?”

“He picks up girls. Carpenters have lots of money. Also: go to Harajuku Station and see the kids round there. Elvis, Michael Jackson, Perfect Reproduction Punks. But this is not just a modern thing. Stuff like this was going on in the seventeenth century when it was much more dangerous. In 1600 young men with fuck-you clothes began appearing in the big cities. They were called Kabuki Mono, Kabuki meaning ‘crooked’ or ‘deviant and licentious.’ Reading about them, they seem exactly like punks. Some of them wore imported velvet collars, short kimonos, with lead weights in the hems. I guess you could say they were visualists as well.”

By now we had come to the bustle of Kuramaebashi Dori, and with the kids walking quickly ahead, I was anxious not to lose them. As we pursued them, I asked Jerry what he could tell about Takashi.

“Not much.”

“Well, can you tell his class?”

“Japanese don’t really have class-differentiated accents.”

“Is he well educated? Educated at all?”

“Perhaps.”

“Is he gay do you think?”

“Who would know?”

By now we were in Akihabara, the true belly of the beast, entering a six-storey maze, every floor and corner of it bursting with that neon light Tanizaki so abhorred. Not for nothing is this Electric Town. White and silver and candy-coloured manufactured surfaces glowed in the dustless, conditioned air. Price tags hung from the ceilings in fluorescent orange and red and green and blue. Actually, they may not have been price tags, but the names of fish or the days of the week. We wandered from floor to floor. Stuffu everywhere—plasma screens, cell phones as thin as credit cards with guerilla war playing on their screens, those crazy science-fiction toilets, fifteen models at least.