The first morning I woke up on a futon resting low on tatami, I had an acute sensation of falling. Everything was too high and my head too low, the air too thick to breathe and my limbs unresponsive after the 14-hour flight from Los Angeles to Osaka. At the end of the futon my toes poked out from a blanket that had good intentions but couldn't deliver. On my first morning in Suzuka, Japan, I was -- as I would be for the entire summer -- a poor fit.
Suzuka is several hours south of Tokyo along the east coast of Japan's main island. It has about 150,000 people spread out in small, sensible houses along the shore and for several miles inland. Not many foreigners penetrate to this place where the biggest attractions are a racetrack and a small amusement park. Little English is spoken, and that's why I came: to teach English classes for the summer at Suzuka Kyokai, the local church.
The first half of the summer I spent with a family of three: Takashi, Atsuko and their small daughter, Mari. They welcomed me to breakfast the first morning with miso soup, rice, green tea, daikon radish slices, a Tupperware container of smoked fish and a packet of miniature dry fish and seaweed to shake onto my rice. When I couldn't identify the smoked fish, Atsuko smilingly looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary.
"Eel," she announced -- it would give me energy in the sledgehammer heat. She watched approvingly as I transferred a chunk of eel to my rice bowl with slippery lacquered chopsticks: The first morning was no time to be a squeamish gaijin, or foreigner. "Gaikoku-jin" -- "gaijin" for short -- are literally "outside people" in a society where to be an insider is the goal of all social interaction. Cautiously I imitated my 5-year-old hostess and obeyed her imperious directions about how to hold my chopsticks.
The first real test came that night when the family graciously took me to a very nice sushi restaurant and insisted that I consume every tentacled, raw, unidentifiable item on a vast tray of sushi and sashimi while Mari giggled and mimicked the faces I was trying not to make. I had been a vegetarian for two years prior to that day, but suddenly nothing in the world could have persuaded me not to follow willingly wherever my hosts might lead.
I bowed, I smiled, I knelt, I ate and it was remarkably good. In these entirely foreign surroundings, no generosity could be refused, no shocking peculiarity (the ubiquitous Turkish toilets come to mind) complained about, lest I shame all of America before these kind people who would know America best through me. I had fallen into the deep arms of Japan's saltwater embrace; there was nothing to do but drift with her warm tide.
That summer, the tide took me wholly. With my new companions I walked the secret chambers of a ninja castle and the singing "nightingale" floors of an ancient imperial palace. I left my offering to Shinto ancestors and sat with Buddhists while we performed the tea ceremony in an open-walled room far above a misted valley town, surrounded by shades of green I thought existed only in Ireland. At home I drank so much chilled green tea that eventually I was required to brew it myself to replenish the supply. I was introduced to the quiet arts of flower arranging and calligraphy by elderly women and men who had seen the horrors of the great war and were still capable of bending their bodies around a young American to teach me the right postures and perspective. Their touch was dry, soft as parchment, excruciatingly gentle.
"Breathe," they would say to me, then sit quite still and wait for silence to rain into us.
I was ushered into a private family shrine on an exquisite prewar estate, where we all bowed flat to the ground before advancing toward holy things I did not comprehend. I learned to sit with my legs folded under me, aching, for longer than I had ever sat in any position. I enjoyed those moments in which no one looked at me, when my height, my round eyes and my ignorance could be forgotten.
Up in the mountains at a traditional bathhouse I joined a dozen other women in a ritual of cleansing and relaxation that lasted hours. Everything seemed to last hours, and I stopped keeping track. Atsuko dressed me in a light cotton summer kimono, perfect as a doll in a wide belt and wood sandals, and took me to the bon-odori summer festival. We danced traditional dances, moving in large circles among people who occasionally looked into my gaijin eyes and smiled broadly, relishing my incongruous presence. I was astonished much later to discover that we had danced most of the night while I was simply moving, going where the dance went, sucking at a Popsicle someone handed me in the thick night heat while time washed along like water.
My loneliness started the first time I walked alone into the streets of Suzuka and a little girl turned suddenly toward me, realized that I was not Japanese, screamed and ran to her mother babbling, "Gaijin! Gaijin!" Other children made circles with their fingers around their eyes at the sight of me, just as a Caucasian child might pull out the corners of her eyes to mock Asian features. Mari came up to me once and pulled gently at the edges of my eyes to see if they might be coaxed into a more pleasing shape. A student said shyly, intending to compliment me, "You don't seem American. Americans are fat."
Another day at the train station a young man struck up a conversation with me. He was a mechanic at the Suzuka Circuit racetrack, and he told me point-blank that he wanted to go on a date with a foreigner. A few days later in a movie theater that smelled like a new car, he ran his hand up and down my arm with a fetishist's appreciation. There was no further advance, no words spoken, and at the end of the movie he thanked me politely and took the next train home. I unlocked my bicycle, watching the raised hair on my arm slowly subside as if the flesh no longer belonged to me.
There were uglier incidents, too, that made me feel how far I was from belonging -- or perhaps, inversely, that I had made some progress toward seeing the real Japan rather than the tourist's paradise my friends so beneficently offered to me. One afternoon, riding a bicycle home from work, I noticed a car slowing down beside me. Two young men were inside, laughing, and the near one thrust a magazine at me so hard I veered and nearly fell. The picture I saw before they raced away was of a Caucasian woman on her knees fellating a black man.
The erotic is not far from the untouchable. At the lovely bathhouse in the mountains, as I made my way to the hot indoor pool, two elderly women glanced anxiously up at me and, murmuring to each other, hurried out of the water before I entered it. Even more dramatic was the old man in Nara who rushed at me angrily, shaking his fist and calling me American along with other words I didn't understand and that my companion refused to translate.
Americans travel with ease into the exoticism of others; we relish and eroticize it. We are less comfortable with voyages into our own exoticism, and that, I realize now, is the voyage I undertook. As my way of seeing became more Japanese, I felt my height and my features acutely: They were appendages I carried unwillingly in public, things I would have cast off, if possible, to reveal a more suitable Japanese form. My own ways had grown too loud and large; one day soon I would fly back to Los Angeles and feel physically alarmed by the size and sound of the Americans rushing by me.
One day I came up behind a crowd of schoolchildren in the street and noticed a few of them whispering "gaijin" to each other as they pointed back at me. I hurried to catch up with the last few children, bent down and whispered, "Gaijin! Gaijin!" to tease them. They turned and shrieked at my nearness, as I had expected, but then came an unexpected reward for my boldness: All the children, dressed identically in kindergarten uniforms, began to laugh with me, surrounding me with their merry energy, sweeping me along on an irresistible riptide of children's laughter back into a welcoming sea.
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