Eels, escalators and a side-splitting story


30th July 2008


If you've visited this blog before, you'll know that what follows is longer than the published version.

How much longer?

About 100 per cent. I was under the influence of eel.

...

Some people say that we live in but one universe among many and that parallel worlds hold other versions of ourselves.

These theories may be more than science fiction because, every now and again, something rumples the fabric of space and time – and I get e-mail meant for an alternative me, in particular, the one doing a column called Letter from Tokyo.

I answer the messages anyway, and hope that the other me responds to readers who write in about the Letter from Kyoto column.

But I’ve been thinking lately that there can’t be that many fluctuations in the space-time continuum and perhaps people just confuse Kyoto with Tokyo?

I’ve resisted this explanation because though the names sound similar and the two cities are separated by only about two and a half hours by bullet train, they’re worlds apart.

Even without going into the centuries of rivalry, it takes just one visit to start seeing the differences.

In Tokyo, I get lost in train stations like underground cities and among reefs of steel and glass skyscrapers.

In Kyoto, buildings in the city centre are capped at 31m – about 10 storeys – and the sky can breathe out without fear of being poked and pinched.

But I still get lost. Though if I’m lucky, it happens in streets of picturesque wooden townhouses.

If you were to take a bird’s eye view – assuming you can find an urban-minded bird – more differences appear.

Tokyo sprawls over a plain by the sea, crowding neighbouring prefectures, while Kyoto city sits with its feet together in an armchair of mountains – and doesn’t look like it’s going to move from its inland spot any time soon.

As a result, Tokyo was in a good position to become sushi capital of the world unlike landlocked Kyoto, where not much is said about the fish. But what it lacks in raw tuna, it makes up with tofu. And its vegetables, whether pickled or fresh, can turn the most unrepentant meat-eater into a convert.

But cities are fed by more than food. In Tokyo, government, finance and commerce sustain its population of 12.8 million as they race from one trend to the next in a relentless pursuit of the new. Kyoto, on the other hand, draws strength from the past; some of its shops are run by families who have been in the trade for over 20 generations.

I’m generalising, of course. Tokyo has plenty of history – Sensoji, its oldest temple, dates back to the seventh century – and Kyoto, for all its tradition, is also the headquarters of Nintendo, which began there in 1889 as a company that produced handmade playing cards.

Still, don’t throw away the stereotypes yet; they may come in handy as we flip through the pages into the past, all the way back to 794, when Emperor Kanmu established his base in the river basin that came to be known as Kyoto, the Capital City.

Centuries of power struggles followed but in 1600, warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu fought his way to the top, eventually ruling a unified Japan as shogun from his castle in Edo (now Tokyo). Kyoto ended up politically sidelined, like the emperor and his court, but this freed its citizens, from the nobility down to merchants and craftsmen, to devote themselves to culture.

Specialising in disciplines such as poetry, incense and the tea ceremony, Kyoto's people built on their reputation for refinement, creating luxury goods for the rest of the country. That reputation has lasted and the city is still a shrine to traditional arts and crafts. So if you find yourself there during Kyoto's notoriously sticky summers, fan yourself with one of their delicate, handmade sensu - and melt in style.

If Kyoto was the city of culture then Edo was the city of samurai, the linchpin of the military government that remained until 1868. It was a man's town, with about 70 per cent of its land given over to the samurai, who swaggered about with two swords stuck through their waist sashes.

In contrast, Kyoto didn't even have a residential area for samurai and neither did nearby Osaka, the port city that became the centre of the Japanese economy in the first century of Tokugawa rule.

Discussions of the Kyoto-Tokyo divide tend to spread out into a wider regional debate that sweeps up even foreigners in Japan. Over in the eastern corner is the Kanto area, commonly equated with Tokyo because it takes up such a Godzilla-sized place in the popular mind that the prefectures of Kanagawa, Saitama, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki and Chiba get overlooked.

To the west is the Kansai region, probably known best for rambunctious Osaka, but also buoyed up by the idiosyncracies of Kyoto, Nara, Wakayama, Hyogo, Mie and Shiga.

The rules of the debate are simple: Familiarise yourself with the stereotypes and then…pick a side!

The very names ‘Kanto’ and ‘Kansai’ are about sides. Kan means barrier – in this case, an old checkpoint in Hakone – so Kansai refers to the land west (sai) of the barrier and Kanto, the region east (to) of it.

This division is found in everything from dialects to eels to escalators.

A Tokyo friend who met her future husband when they shared the same office in the capital said there were times when she just couldn’t understand him. This had nothing to do with the usual man-woman communication breakdown. Born in Nara, he would lapse at times into the Kansai dialect, which veers away from standard Japanese in intonation, inflections and even in vocabulary.

But the rift goes beyond how people talk to what they actually say. According to the stereotype, Kanto residents are cool, reserved and more interested in sophistication than Kansai folk: a straight-shooting, entrepreneurial lot who would rather play for laughs.

This perception has a great deal to do with the association of Kansai with Osaka, which has a history as a city of merchants – and comedians.

Manzai duos from the city became famous across the country when they took their routines to television but the ordinary Osakan is also seen as someone with an Inner Comic just waiting to be unleashed.

Here’s something to try if you visit the city: Hold your fingers like a gun and pretend to fire it at a passer-by, preferably with a cry of ‘bakkyun!’ If the passer-by is a native of Osaka, chances are, he’ll fall about and do his best to act like he’s been shot.

Having cut their teeth on comedy programmes, Osakans are primed to join in gags even if they’re by complete strangers.

Chizu-san, a friend who explained the phenomenon from a native’s point of view, said: ‘I think none of us can stop ourselves from pretending to be shot if we were “bakkyuned”.’

But Osaka is also known as a city of people who would bankrupt themselves for food. (In Kyoto, it’s kimono. As for Tokyo, er, I don’t know. Black suits and shoes, maybe?)

And food is another area where Kansai and Kanto have agreed to disagree. They split over the soup for noodles (darker in the east) and complain that instant noodles taste funny on the other side of the country. If the debate goes on, someone may raise a stink about the smelly fermented soya beans called natto – a lot of Kansai people won’t touch the stuff though Kanto swears by it.

Even the ways eels are sliced depends on region. In Tokyo, they’re split in the back because cutting across the front reminded the samurai there of seppuku – ritual suicide that began with slashing the abdomen.

But in Osaka, with samurai making up less than 1 per cent of the population then, this was hardly a problem. If anything, to the merchants of the city, opening up the gut symbolised hiding nothing from customers.

The we-merchant-you-samurai difference is also whipped out to explain why people in Kanto stand on the left on escalators, leaving a path clear for people to charge up and down, while Osakans line up on the right side.

Standing on the left, it is said, lets samurai draw their swords freely but merchants will keep to the other side to protect their belongings in their right hands.

It’s a great theory though it starts to unravel when you consider the number of years separating the ban on carrying swords and the introduction of escalators.

The more convincing explanation is that when the World Exposition was held in Osaka in 1970, a railway line there made announcements asking passengers to keep on the right to accommodate the numbers of foreign visitors.

But what all this really means is that by travelling a little, you get to take a ride on the other side – and taste different flavours in soup, speech and spirit.

When I asked a Japanese businessman about this, he said: ‘I’ve been to 56 countries but still think Japan is unique because, even though it’s not a big country, the regions have their own identities – perhaps because there are so many mountains separating them.’

For this reason, I get the feeling that I’m not just doing a Letter from Tokyo column in an alternative reality. I think I’m scattered through the worlds of the multiverse, filing stories from all corners of Japan – and enjoying the view from whichever side of the escalator I’m on.

Silk and straw


21st July 2008


Whenever the reading lists for Japanese studies are pulled out, Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum And The Sword is almost certain to be featured.

Though criticisms have been levelled at the anthropologist's most famous work, it's still worth studying, if only for the impact it has had.

But equally worth reading is Dr Junichi Saga's Memories Of Silk And Straw. Even when passed through the filters of interviews and translation, it lets you hear the voices of ordinary Japanese in a way that Benedict's book doesn't.

Unlike her work, it's short on theory. It just presents a fading generation as best as it can - and lets you make your own mind and your own theories up.

So I'll just tell you a bit more about the book and leave you to decide for yourself if it's something you want to look into.

...


‘My mother once told me that I only just avoided being killed the day I was born.’

Thus begins one of the life stories in Memories Of Silk And Straw, a book of reminiscences collected by Japanese doctor Junichi Saga.

Based in Tsuchiura, a small town about an hour by train from Tokyo, he would end his day by putting a tape recorder in his medical bag and going to interview the elderly.

He spoke to hundreds of them, piecing together what life there was like before World War II.

Many of them talked about the widespread poverty that made it common for people to go about barefoot and hungry – and to kill newborns they couldn’t feed.

But in the case of Mrs Fumi Suzuki, whose mother told her that the start of her life was nearly the end of it, it was her looks that were her undoing. Apparently, she was so ugly that her parents and grandparents decided that she wouldn’t be able to find a husband and so asked the midwife to get rid of her.

The woman wrapped the baby tightly, covered her face and left her to suffocate.

But after a while, the mother noticed the bundle of rags moving and when they unwrapped it, found the newborn still alive.

They decided that it would be bad luck to try to kill her again so they let her live. She went on to get married at 20 and survived into her 80s to tell Dr Saga her tale.

Her story, together with 60 others, was published in 1981.

Dr Saga then pushed for an English translation because ‘the stories revealed something about modern Japan very little understood by the rest of the world, and perhaps not even by the Japanese themselves. Namely, that the Japan which now prides itself on being an advanced, high-technology nation had, until only recently, a very different type of society; and that indeed it was this very society, backward though it may have been, which created the basis for what Japan has become today’.

He saw in Tsuchiura the kind of small town found all over the country and in its elderly, a generation who had experienced centuries worth of change compressed like an accordion into about 50 years.

Part of that change was the abolition of feudalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. But even after the laws dictating class differences vanished, a ghost of them lingered in people’s minds.

Mrs Mineko Toyama, born in 1903, remembered walking as a child with her grandmother one day when they met a woman who used to work for her family as a maid.

She ‘looked slightly shocked for a moment, then fell quickly to her knees and bowed with her forehead touching the ground’. Even though her old employer had been the wife of the local magistrate, ‘no passer-by, whether he’d known who my grandmother was or not, would have been particularly surprised at this spectacle’.

Though you’re not likely to see people kneeling like that in the streets of modern Japan, the reflexive ordering of the world into hierarchies remains.

In the same way, the work ethic of the present can be traced back to a world where people began the day not with the cock’s crow but before it.

Tofu makers were some of the earliest to rise: They were up before 2am to grind soya beans, squeeze milk from them and when it had set, went from door to door to sell it.

Children had to work too and those who living on farms would till the rice fields from half past four in the morning. One man who did this said: ‘By the time the six o’clock siren sounded I would hardly be able to move another step; but it was still a while before I got my breakfast so I’d just do my best to carry on’.

His stoicism might have been remarkable but it was by no means unique. Even childbirth hardly interrupted work.

Mrs Tai Terakada, born in 1899, recalled how her mother went into the mountains one day to chop wood and returned with something wrapped in her apron.

Thinking that it was fruit, she asked: ‘Have you got something nice for me?’

Her mother laughed and said: ‘Yes, I’ve brought you back a little baby sister.’

Alone in the mountains, her mother had given birth to the child, cut its umbilical cord with her knife then carried it home. But she didn’t want to leave the pile of branches she’d cut so she lugged that back too.

When recording this story, Dr Saga does not say what he, as a medical man, thought of this and the women who had to deliver their own babies because the midwife couldn’t reach them in time.

In his introduction to the book though, he dwells on the hardship of that period. But, he adds, ‘amid all the poverty and unhappiness of those days, there also existed a strange kind of serenity which today seems to have been lost’.

If you also feel that serenity is missing, try spending some time with Dr Saga’s people. Get into a boat with lake fishermen who can tell you what mood the sky is in by reading the clouds and listening to a faraway sea. Or else join hands with the neighbourhood children and walk around town, inviting people to a birthday party.

It may be dark when you leave the party for home but if it’s a summer evening, fireflies will fill the air like sparks blown from a fire.

From behind you comes the sound of bare feet slapping on the path – you turn to see a rickshaw, its lanterns swinging from side to side.

It may scare the frogs into silence but they’ll start up again once the rickshaw goes and besides, the moon, less easily startled, will wait over the distant mountains until you find your way home.