Section 3 Entry 0001. Date: 2002 October 23 Tuesday   (diary)    (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

0500. The shrieking beep of the alarm. Deodorant. Shirt. Suit. Computer. Putting on shoes in the darkness. What's this? One shoe is a noticeably tighter fit than the other. What have you done, you idiot? Let's check .... one of these shoes has a leather sole but the other has (hidden beneath its business surface) a running shoe sole. Okay, let's have some light here ....

0520. Out of the house. Dark outside, the cold still darkness of an autumn night with no wind. Almost dead silence in this neighborhood at this hour.

Nobody talks on the train. Public silence is a cultural trait of the Japanese, and in the first five years it sometimes seemed eerie .... these packed trains with nobody saying a word, these streets of silent activity

The exception is the guard, who keeps shouting at us. The train has a driver at the front and a guard at the rear, and part of the guard's job is to yell. He addresses the passengers over an intercom (in an ordinary speaking voice, thankfully) announcing the next station and asking us not to use our cellphones and so forth, but at each station he gets out of the train and actually yells something - I can never figure out what.

Today's guard is young and enthusiastic, and the yelling is quite energetic .... by the time the guards hit their fifties or sixties, the yelling has typically died down to a ritualistic muttering.

One of the things about Japan that can annoy at times is the number of people who yell at you. When you enter shops, there's not uncommonly a certain amount of ritualistic yelling from the staff - "Irashai irashai irashaimase!" - and there is also a certain amount of yelling, for some reason, in sushi restaurants.

Personally, I would prefer to eat my sushi in peace and quiet, but for some reason sushi places seem to put a premium on cheerful bustle, to the point where the noise can get offensive.

Then on top of that there's the political electioneering, done outdoors with megaphones, and there are also the advertizing trucks with grossly amplified loudspeakers, some of which make a habit of cruising through residential areas on Sunday mornings (logically enough, since that's when everyone's most likely to be at home to hear the ads.)

This year, in the summer, I was walking down an absolutely deserted road in Gunma, in a semi-rural area a long drive from anything resembling a city, when the peace and quiet was torn apart by a huge voice, a voice as loud as God but five times more enthusiastic. I looked around - left, right, behind me - but there was nothing, nobody. Should I start seriously considering the possibility that I might be hallucinating?

Then the voice came again. From overhead? Yes .... looking up, I saw an airplane trailing a banner of some description, and it was from this plane that the voice was coming. Some kind of advertizing.

Not long ago, a teacher remarked that there is a mismatch between the behavior required from the individual (be quiet, keep your stereo down in your apartment, don't use your cellphone on the train) and that permitted by the advertizer. In five years in Japan, I had never thought about this .... but, yes, when you think about it, this situation does generate a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

On the train, breakfast: a sandwich and a cup of coffee from a flask. Technically, eating in public like this is barbarous, a significantly inappropriate breach of custom. So why do I do it? Well, because, unfortunately, I'm an ignorant foreigner, and I don't understand the Japanese system.

In the train, there's a familiar ad for Hyldemoer, a place billed as "Life Care House". Japan has an aging society, and you really know it when you watch commercial TV and see ads for incontinence pants for old men.

The ads today are bland, ordinary, but at least once a week I see some absolutely stunning example of graphic art which succeeds in holding my full attention for at least five seconds.

Most recently, there were the advertizing posters on the columns in JR's Shinjuku station. Pinkish flesh, absolutely smooth, its anatomical location indeterminate. In the flesh, a vertical slit, oddly fringed with black hair on either side .... like the mouth of a clam, only hairy. Within, darkness.

As you got closer, the darkness within resolved itself into the circle of the pupil of an eye and the darkness of the surrounding circle of color .... the entire image was that of an eye, a woman's eye, cut out of context, massively enlarged and turned from the horizontal to the vertical, defamiliarized to the point where the viewer's first reaction is "Now what the hell is that?"

(It's an advertisement for some kind of makeup. I think. But, in this case, the image rather overwhelms the message.)

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next great ad

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Section 3 Entry 0002. Date: 2002 October 29 Tuesday   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

After six months in the new house I still haven't figured out how to run a bath for myself. It's possible, but a little bit tricky. The problem is that the bath has no taps.

The water is heated by gas, which is the standard method in Japan. The actual burner which does the heating is located outside the house, set against the wall outside the kitchen.

There are two good points about this system. One is that you have an unlimited supply of hot water. The other is that no space is taken up by the hot water cylinder.

(In New Zealand, where I grew up, water is typically heated by electricity, which is a slow method of heating water. A supply of hot water is kept in a hot water cylinder, and households can easily run out of hot water unless everyone exercises strict water discipline.)

To activate the hot water system, there are two control panels, one just at the entrance to the kitchen and one in the bathroom. Each control panel has a blue button and a pink button.

Pressing the blue button turns on the hot water system. Pressing it a second time turns the hot water system off. If you are in the kitchen and you attempt to turn off the hot water system, but accidentally press the pink button, then the bath will start to fill itself.

The bath knows when it is full and knows that it should turn off the water at that point. However, if there is no plug in the bath, then there is no way for the bath to become full, and expensive hot water will continue to pour into the bath and out through the plug hole (for hours, possibly) until someone asks you "Did you turn the bath on?" (To which the sensible reply is, "No, not me. It must have turned itself on.")

What I haven't figured out, even after six months, is whether you have to do something to set the level to which the bath will fill itself, or if there is one preset level .... I just haven't had time to grapple with the technology, so I've been having showers instead, except when someone else has run a bath for me.

The bath features a hole guarded by a metal grille, and it is the water entering this hole which (maybe, but then again, maybe not) is what tells the bath that it is now full and that it should shut off the water.

The really nice thing is that, once the bath is full, water circulates via the hole in the bath, and is reheated at need to maintain a constant temperature. This is really, really nice as we enter the colder days of autumn .... Japanese houses, like the New Zealand houses in which I grew up, typically do not have central heating.

On first moving into the house, I was extremely disconcerted to find that the bath had no taps, since the idea of a bath with no taps seemed positively alien. In the universe that I come from, water comes from faucets, and those faucets have valves that can be manually controlled by the human hand.

I am reminded of the distress I suffered when I first encountered a calculator which had no "off" button. This was only a few years ago, when I was still working at a conversation school - my first teaching job in Japan.

"How can I turn this thing off?"

"You can't," said one of the Japanese staff. "Just put it in a drawer. It will switch itself off in fifteen minutes or so."

I obeyed, but unhappily. Every machine should have both a control for "on" and a control for "off". That is part of the nature of machines. In the universe in which I grew up, it was unimaginable to design a machine which could be switched on but not off.

Shortly afterwards, I was even more distressed when I found that the laser printer I had just gone and bought had neither an on switch nor an on switch. As soon as you connected it to the electricity, it would up. If given no work to do, it would go to sleep after fifteen minutes.

"Well, if I'd known it didn't have a switch, I wouldn't have bought it!"

That was my unhappy comment to myself.

In practice, the laser printer worked just fine, and is still working now .... sort of. (Gadgets wear out, and, after some years and a fair amount of heavy-duty work, this one is fairly close to being worn out.)

Speaking of switches, one of the things that struck me as strange when I first came to Japan was the electrical power outlets. In New Zealand, a power point always has a switch. You have the option of switching a gadget on or off at the wall. In Japan, however, a power outlet typically does not have a switch. You plug in the gadget (and often see a spark of over-eager electricity as you do so) and then the gadget is live.

I don't know how this came to be the custom, but, because it is so convenient to be able to switch gadgets on and off at the wall, Japanese electrical shops routinely sell switch-equipped plus which can be plugged into a standard switchless socket.

On the subject of switches, there is another thing I noticed when I first came to Japan.

In New Zealand, light switches are set in the wall vertically, just as they are in the United Kingdom and the United States. To turn a light on, you press on the bottom of the switch. (I think. To tell the truth, I can't really remember .... anyway, I have a fifty per cent chance of being right .... I think the correct answer is the opposite of whatever is done in the United States.)

In Japan, however, light switches are typically set in the wall horizontally ....

These are the little things about a country that you notice most vividly when you first arrive in a country. (Or even before arriving in it .... if memory serves, in early manhood the British writer Graham Greene wrote a vivid account of a personal visit to Paris without ever having set foot in France.)

The longer I've lived in Japan, the less I've stopped noticing it. My present mode of existence now seems .... well, normal. These gray skies. This eternal webwork of city wires. The concrete landscape with water tanks (spherical, cylindrical, square) perched atop the roofs of multistorey buildings. The fact that I now have (count them) five pairs of black shoes (I went through most of my life with zero.)

(As I went through most of my life dressed in jeans and decayed T-shirts, it's hard to convey the sense of surprise I experienced when I woke up one morning and found that I now had five pairs of black shoes, five suits and more neckties than I could remember).

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Section 3 Entry 0003. Date: 2002 October 30 Wednesday   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

My life was almost cut short tonight by a cyclist who came sailing through an intersection - no lights, no brakes and no cares in the world, apparently - when, according to the traffic lights, it was the time for pedestrians to be crossing.

If there's one thing about Japan that I really haven't adjusted to, even after five years, it's the bicycles.

In New Zealand, bicycles are by and large forbidden to use the sidewalks. Consequently, having spent most of my formative years in New Zealand, I have been indoctrinated with the idea that the sidewalks belong to pedestrians.

In Japan, however, cyclists use the sidewalks as often as they use the road. If they do use the road, they are as likely to cycle against the flow of traffic as with it. They cycle at night with no lights, and they park their bicycles wherever they want, including directly under signs saying "It is forbidden to park bicycles here."

Presumably there are laws which govern this kind of thing, and presumably at least some of the murderously reckless behaviors in which cyclists commonly indulge are technically illegal, but getting on a bicycle seems to bring out the latent hooligan in all too many otherwise law abiding citizens.

The other thing that continues to annoy me about Japan is dogs, but Japanese dogs are annoying for the same reason that New Zealand dogs are annoying.

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Section 3 Entry 0004. Date: 2002 November 06 Wednesday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

The city of Takasaki in Gunma Prefecture. The shinkansen station. (Shinkansen? Bullet train.) Cold winter. The wind remembers that it is from Siberia. Glistening tile, vast expanses of it, very cold, very clean. Outside the toilets, a tablet in braille explains the internal layout. This is a first.

In the gents, another first: projecting from the tiled wall by every urinal, a steel peg on which umbrellas can be hung. By each steel peg is a little tile bearing a picture of a furled umbrella, explaining its purpose, which otherwise would be cryptic to just about everyone.

The urinals, which have little red detecting eyes (infra-red?) designed to monitor patrons, flush themselves automatically when abandoned. Water comes from the faucet, again automatically - here, too, there is no tap.

The waiting room. A Japanese businessman walks up to the door, waits for it to open, then realizes it is not designed that way, and pushes it open. Remembered comment from a Canadian woman: "When I go back home, I'm going to have to learn how to open doors again."

A high-technology world: the ultimate triumph of urbanization.

But, from the house in Yokohama, you can now see Mount Fuji pretty much every day. The air is so clear now that the humidity has dropped down, sometimes dipping below thirty per cent. In the humid summer, my worn-out laser printer was jamming, the rollers routinely picking up two, three, five, six sheets of paper at a time. Now, in the arid winter, the dry paper slides through one sheet at a time, lacking that kiss of moisture needed for aggregation.

Mount Fuji is white with snow. And, sometimes, you can see clouds wreathing the mountain. And then, five, ten minutes later, there are no clouds. The sky is bright blue, empty. The clouds have vanished, whipped away by winds of unimaginable ferocity .... the mountain, so lately crowded with tourists, has become an abandoned killing ground, uninhabited, brutal, accidentally beautiful.

Steel, tile, electronic eyes, double-decker trains, bilingual loudspeaker announcements, remorseless clocks .... at times, this high-technology civilization seems all-conquering, eternal, forever, a dominating given, the necessary path of the future. But it, we, this city, these railway tracks, these timetables, these schedules .... it's all provisional, a blip in time's eye.

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Section 3 Entry 0005. Date: 2002 November 07 Thursday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

Morning in Takasaki, a city (or town, perhaps) which is worth describing, because it is typical of a lot of modern Japan.

The center of the town is the railway station. Car ownership is common in Japan, but roads are typically narrow and crowded, speed limits are low, and the train is still the main means of transport.

The entrance to the train station is on the second storey of a tower block which also houses a variety of shops and, additionally, a hotel. To get to the actual railway platforms, you have to go down one flight of stairs from the train station's main concourse.

The main concourse runs from the east exit to the west exit; a secondary concourse, also at the second storey level, permits a pedestrian to walk from east to west without going through the ticket gates.

On the second storey, there are various bookshops, cheap restaurants with models of food displayed in their windows, and kiosks (chocolate, chewing gum, newspapers and so forth).

This far from the center of civilization, the world has pretty much run out of English. Some of the newspapers at one of the kiosks are in the familiar A to Z alphabet, but in a language unknown to me. (Possibly Portuguese - a couple of generations back, quite a few Japanese people emigrated to Portuguese-speaking Brazil, and these days concentrations of Portuguese-speaking ethnic Japanese live in some areas of Japan, working in factories and so forth.)

At one of the cheap restaurants, I order the "ebi furai teishoku", the "fixed meal" ("teishoku") featuring prawn ("ebi") which has been fried (or, more properly, perhaps, deep fried) in a batter (the word "furai" is derived from the English "fry" or "fried"). This meal, when it arrives (which it does very quickly) features a salad, rice, some kind of miso soup, pickles and two large prawns in batter.

As a rule, in any place anywhere in Japan, the cheap eateries are to be found in or around the main railway station. Cheap places typically display their prices, and often have (even these days) elaborate plastic models of the meals on offer (or, at the very least, color photos of the meals). (I assume the models are made of plastic, though actually this is an uninformed guess.)

Japan is famous for fantastically expensive restaurants, but not everyone has access to a company credit card (certainly not in today's constrained economy) and it's generally possible to buy lunch for well under US $10, if you choose your place with a little care.

In and around the precincts of the railway station there are any number of vending machines, such a common part of the urban landscape that I usually don't notice them. These sell, mostly, drinks: tea, coffee, green tea, water, and various odd concoctions put together by the Japanese drinks industry, which is constantly innovating (sometimes not always to the customer's advantage) in the hope of coming up with the next hit drink.

As mentioned above, the main concourse of the railway station is on the second storey of a high rise building (which does not, in fact, rise all that terribly high). To the east, stairways go down to a small park, beyond which lies a rather characterless area of broad streets and medium-rise buildings laid out in an American-style grid pattern.

To the west, you exit onto an elevated pedestrian plaza set at the second storey level. Beneath this plaza is a bus terminal. This feature in particular - the elevated pedestrian plaza with the bus terminal below - is a very common pattern. It's actually very pleasant: a broad area in which to walk, no threat of bicycles, and benches where you can sit and enjoy the sun.

From the pedestrian plaza, stairs go down to the western side of the city: more medium-rise buildings set out in a grid pattern, everything very clean and very modern.

If you want to see something old, you typically have to hunt around for it. It won't be at the railway station. As a rule, the areas in and around railway stations have typically been torn apart and rebuilt so they all look pretty much the same: clean, bright, tiled, polished and pedestrianized.

The key point about the patterns described above is that they are replicated, again and again, with slight variations and modifications, throughout Japan. There are railway stations in places which are technically part of Tokyo (Fuchu station comes to mind) which look pretty much the same as Takasaki station. Once you've decrypted the basic pattern (and it's not difficult) it's very easy to find all the goods and services you require.

And I'm sitting here in the ebi furai teishoku restaurant and I'm trying to work out how I feel about this, this endless replication of the same familiar pattern. It's unusually difficult to write what I feel about this .... and in the end I realize that the difficulty is because I don't have any feeling about it one way or another. It's just the way things are.

I first visited Japan back in 1989, at the tail end of a long trip which had taken me through places like Thailand, Nepal and India. After Kathmandu and Calcutta, I had pretty much exhausted my repertoire of reactions. I had stopped noticing the small stuff, like whether sugar is white or gray.

I think I would have stronger feelings about Japan if it was one of the first foreign countries that I visited instead of one of the last.

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Section 3 Entry 0006. Date: 2002 November 07 Thursday.   (diary)   (previous)   (top)   (bottom)   (next)  (topics)  (contents)

At Takasaki, with time on my hands, I decide to go to the barber's. For as long as I can remember - from my childhood, in fact - I have never liked this procedure. I've always regarded my time in the barber's chair as a kind of temporary imprisonment, and I'm always worried about what the barber might do with those scissors. (I've never yet met a barber whom I unconditionally trust.) Still, my hair is getting too long, so a visit to the barber's seems a logical move.

The barber's, like most hairdressing establishments in Japan, has the traditional red, white and blue spiraling pole outside. My impression is that these instruments of advertisement have by and large died out in the West, but they're still very much the norm in Japan. You can't really be a proper barber without one.

For a visit to the barber's, it helps to have at least a little of the local language, if only to establish which of the prices on the price board will apply. It turns out that this haircut will cost 3,500 yen, which at today's rate of exchange is about US $28. It's possible to get a haircut for considerably less (at least in Tokyo) but, even so, this price is pretty much what I expected.

The haircut starts out okay. I specify what I want - shorter, clear of the ears, thinned out a little, looking (in general) like a businessman - and the barber gets to work. When he's approximately done, he hands me the mirror, and, having gotten my approval, he puts the finishing touches to the job.

Then he starts rubbing something into my hair, and then he pulls out a big white drawer. I've seen this apparatus before: it's for washing your hair. However, on the previous occasions when I've had my hair washed at the barber's in Japan, it's been before the cut, not afterwards, and to wash the hair afterwards strikes me as a little eccentric.

"Dozo," says the barber, meaning "Go ahead."

And I lean forward, uncomfortably, and lay down my head, for all the world as if I was going to be guillotined - there's a neck-shaped crescent cut in the leading edge of the drawer, which helps add to the illusion.

After having had my hair washed and my scalp kneaded for an uncomfortably long time, I am invited to lie back in the chair, and the barber puts a hot towel on my face and starts cleaning it. He finds it necessary to use the hot towel to clean inside my ears. Even though I know that no norm is being transgressed, at least as far as local culture is concerned, I find myself growing increasingly uncomfortable.

As I mentioned above, I've never been really comfortable with this haircutting business, even before any cross-cultural complexities are added, and I'm very quickly approaching the limits of what I can tolerate, although my feeling is that it would be unmannerly to say so.

Then the barber removes the towel and pulls a little bib of some description right up to just below my nostrils. This is a first, and I can't figure out what's going on. Then I see the barber has a little pair of nippers in his hand - pliers or scissors or something - and that he appears to be intending to attack the hairs in my nose.

Well, no, that's a mistake. The hairs in my nose have an important biological function. They're designed to prevent living organisms larger than an amoeba from penetrating through to my brain, and if I'd wanted them removed I would have done it myself.

I get up from the chair, pay and leave, my hair still uncombed. As I'm traveling, I have a full travel kit, including mirror and comb, and I find a spot on the sidewalk and comb my hair.

In retrospect, I didn't handle that very well. Still, my hair has been cut, and it's a reasonably good haircut.

forward in time to the next haircut

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