Hitching Rides with Buddha: A Journey Across Japan (39 page)

Japan has never originated any major technological advance. Nothing has ever come out of Japan that has ever revolutionized the world, for better
or for worse
. Japan has given us a lot of very creative solutions to consumer needs, however. Think of the huge American boom boxes compared with the futuristic Walkman, or the ridiculous shoulder-breaking video cameras that we were lugging around until companies like Sony began developing hand-held camcorders.

“Sure, the Japanese are clever,” said an American colleague, “but they aren’t creative.”

He was wrong. The Japanese are very creative. In fact, this is one of the most consistently creative countries I know. So are the Americans. It all depends on how you define creativity. In Japan, it’s seen in terms of problem-solving, a new approach to an old puzzle. This type of creativity encourages group effort and fuzzy logic. For Westerners, it is the rugged individual with the sudden light of inspiration. Japan vs. the West. The first is practical creativity; the other, romantic. Neither view is superior, but the one is often baffled by—or even contemptuous of—the other.

The Japanese criticize the Americans as being erratic and sloppy; the Americans criticize the Japanese as being copycats. Each contains an element of truth, but neither approach is necessarily bad. The two actually complement each other.

The Sado Island jet foil bucked a ridge of waves and for one moment the ship dropped slightly, like a plane in an air pocket.

On the television set, a group of pouty teenage heartthrobs were bouncing around with excessive perkiness, insufferably cute as all pouty teenage heartthrobs inevitably are. The band’s name was Cry Babies and their hair was jelled up like unusually large dandelions about to blow away. They skipped and pranced and preened and posed and moved about in what was meant to suggest dancing. But there was only a coincidental connection between their movements and the actual beat. Witnessing the spectacle, I was struck by a wonderfully reassuring thought:
There actually are people in the world with less rhythm than WASPs
.

Watching young, self-conscious Japanese college kids moving through preset dance steps—absolutely divorced from any connection to the music that happens to be playing—is a painful yet sadistically pleasurable experience. Somewhere, somehow, mainstream Japanese music got stuck in the early seventies and never recovered. They might have heart-stopping drums and larger neon signs and faster jet foils, but by God they couldn’t jive their way out of an epilepsy clinic.

And on that refreshing note, I settled down and enjoyed the ride.

7

I
THINK
I caught Niigata on a bad day. Everything looked sullen and soiled and worn out. Even the city’s smokestacks, painted in stripes like candy canes, emerged from the industrial haze like sooty sweets dug out from under a sofa cushion.

After the sparse landscapes of Sado, it was odd to be sucked into the crowds of a city again. The downtown streets were overflowing with bodies in motion. I checked into a generic business hotel, dropped off my pack, and then found a fiery Korean restaurant in which to fill my stomach. (The spiced kimchi would inflame my rectum for the next two days. No wonder the Koreans always look so pissed off.)

The weather was markedly cooler than it had been, and I found that even layering myself in T-shirts was not enough to stave off the creeping dank and cold. In search of warmer garb, I threaded my way into the rabbit hutch of retail shops that spread in tunnelled corridors beneath Niigata Station. It took a while just to find something that fit, and even then I had to settle for a hooded pullover with arms that were five inches too short, giving me that long-limbed gorilla look that women find so endearing. Fortunately, as a sort of bonus, the pullover had a bold message across the back, written in Japanese-English, or “Englese” as it is sometimes known. The message had a definite rap-music rhythm to it, and over the course of the next few weeks, whenever I was alone in front of a mirror, I took to rappin’ it out loudly (with the proper angry, urban-street-gang scowly face and postures, of course). It went like this:

 
Piece by Piece

We Can’t be Born Special
be my power
present international!

Produce Selection Since 1976

Hit It!

This is one of the most surreal aspects of life in Japan: seeing your language reduced to decoration, removed from any context or meaning, rendered into LSD musings. The Japanese approach to language—and most everything else, now that I think about it—is relentlessly deconstructionist. Everything is reduced to the bare elements and then reconstructed. It is less a form of mimicry and more one of reinterpretation. This works great with cars, cameras, and clocks but is less effective with something as organic as language.

My students in Japan were determined to reduce English to mathematical dictums that could then be reassembled. One student, who was a diligent pupil but refused to speak English with me in class, said with perfect sincerity, “It’s just that I hate to make mistakes. So, first I will become fluent in English and
then
I will speak it.” When I tried to explain to him that learning a language was a process and that making mistakes was a necessary, even desirable aspect of it, he politely dismissed my suggestions as being eccentric. Learn by making mistakes? Ridiculous.

The result is a nation of grammar-sharp, language-shy people. And the primary victim in all of this is English itself. When I ran into one of my high-school students in a T-shirt that read
ENJOY MY BROTHER
! I challenged him to explain the phrase. It was a wager, really, because I promised him ten thousand yen if he could do it. This young man was our top student, destined for one of Japan’s finest universities, and he took up the challenge with confidence.
“Enjoy
is the verb,” he said,
“my
is a possessive pronoun, and
brother
is the object. The subject is understood to be
you
, which makes the sentence a command phrase. The exclamation mark adds urgency.” He then held out his hand for the money. “But what does it
mean?”
I said. He looked at me, utterly baffled, and said,
“Enjoy
is the verb,
my
is a possessive pronoun,
brother
is the—” Needless to say, I didn’t
pay him the ten thousand yen and he is still bitter about it. In his mind, he
did
explain it and all I did was welsh on a bet.

The idea that a sentence can have a meaning that is greater than the sum of its parts is hard to get across in Japan. My neighbour’s wife had a favourite shirt that said
LUSTY TOY
, which I could never bring myself to explain to her. (For all I knew it was true. Maybe she
was
a lusty toy and proud of it. Who knows?)

Corporate Japan, with millions of dollars in resources at its fingertips, still can’t come up with brand names that make any sense. English has a definite cachet in Japan, much like French once did in America, hence the irresistible urge to add a sprinkling of English on everything, from pop cans to political posters. Some of the most celebrated examples of Japanese brand names include a sports drink named
Sweat;
powdered coffee cream called
Creap;
round, chocolate plugs labelled, disturbingly,
Colon;
and a soft drink dubbed
Calpis
, a name that always suggests bovine urine to me. (I sent a package of Calpis to my friend Calvin Climie, an Ottawa-based animator, along with the note: “What a brilliant move, Cal! Marketing your own urine! You’ll make a fortune. As long as you have access to tap water, the supply will never dry up.”)

A lady friend of mine from Britain once showed me the tiny instruction pamphlet that came with a box of Japanese feminine hygiene products. The instructions were in Japanese, but even here the company had thought it necessary to jazz things up a bit with a display of English. At the top of the page was the stirring motto:
Let’s All Enjoy Tampon Life!

Harder to understand are the bizarre English slogans of American companies operating in Japan:
I feel Coke!
and
Speak Lark!
(a cigarette company) and
I am Slims!
(Virginia Slims). I was bothered by this—after all, you’d think that if anyone would get it right it would be American companies—but then one day I realized that these slogans were not aimed at
me
but at Japanese consumers. And Japanese consumers have all studied basic English and they can remember and recognize beginner phrases such as “I feel,” “I speak_____,” and “I am_____.” That the actual slogans used make little sense is not important. They instill a sense of cool cosmopolitan awareness in the consumer and in the product. Once I realized what they were doing, these oddball phrases seemed less
like a joke and more like a brilliant marketing ploy. This is also why so many mottoes use the command phrase “Let’s all enjoy ______” and variations of it. This is not because it is common English (how often do you use the phrase “let’s all enjoy” in a normal English conversation?), but because it is common
textbook
English, in much the same way that “This is a pen!” is such a popular English greeting in Japan.

Entire books have been written about Japanese-English. Some of it is bizarre, some of it is almost logical in a non-linear, Japanese sort of way, and a few instances are even poetic. I met an American fellow once whose greatest treasure was a small antique tea box. On the back, in English, was a list of the benefits to be gained from a cup. The list was as follows:

     
The Advantage of Tea

(A) on auxiliary the memory of writingses-say

(B) in increasing the prevailness of poetry

(C) For lossing the fret of mind

(D) By Assisting the discourse of gentility.

(E) With refreshing the spirit of heart

(F) On Digesting the prevention of stomach

(G) To growing the sperm of body

(H) In exempting the sadness of lone,

(I) For Driving the evilness of lone

Naturally, I immediately tried to buy the tea box from the American, but he wouldn’t relent, no matter how much yen I waved in his face. It was a beautiful box as well, decorated in dragons and faded gold kanji and elaborate patterns. It still had the faint scent of tea. And who among us, in drinking a cup of Japanese tea, has not felt an increase in the prevailness of poetry? Or the prevention of stomach? And who, in turn, has not sensed the sadness of lone being exempted?

8

I
WALKED
and walked and walked, trying to escape Niigata City and failing. It was a muggy, cinderblock-and-concrete sort of day, the type that seems to move at half speed and double humidity. The morning traffic began suddenly, coming around the corner like the start of the Indy 500. But fortunately a small pickup truck plucked me out of harm’s way just a moment before the traffic engulfed me. “Thanks,” I said. The driver yawned at me.

He was a very tired, very frazzled, very fatigued-looking fisherman who kept threatening to fall asleep at the wheel as we drove out of the city. His head bobbed slowly down, his chin sagging toward his chest, and then, with a startled jerk, he was upright, gripping the steering wheel with excessive force and peering intently at the road ahead. So, as you can imagine, I talked
a lot
during the ride. “Boy, that Niigata! Some city, eh?!” Fisherman: “Hm? Oh, yeah, ’s great.” Then his eyelids would start to droop and my voice would become even more desperately cheerful. “How about those fish! I bet you catch a lot of fish! Tell me about the fish!”

He dropped me outside the city limits on drab, colourless plains beside the banks of the Agano, a river so thick and silty brown, you could have floated coins on it.

On hearing a lone buzz building up behind me, I turned to see a car approaching, drifting erratically across the centre line. I held out my thumb and the car slowed down to inspect me. Inside were two scruffy-looking young men. They laughed at me and returned my thumbs-up gesture as they passed. I spun around, livid, and I was about to give them a farewell, up-yours, arm salute when I saw the car skid to a stop and then lurch into reverse. It came
swinging wildly back toward me, and I had to leap into the ditch to avoid it.

“Fuck you!” said the passenger, leaning over the driver and shouting down at me. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you.”

I said nothing. What could I say? I stood there looking at their grinning faces until finally, in Japanese, the driver said, “So, where are you going?”