At home in Japan, part 3: Homegrown in Wakayama

Shrines and altars aside, I got a sense that the Yoshimatsus were intricately connected to their land.  Yoshimatsu-san, even though he was a retired school teacher and principal, identified himself as a farmer.  At first I thought that maybe he was referring to the vegetables that he grew in practically every available square inch of his yard: edamame, kabocha, myoga (they called it Japanese ginger, but it’s something more complex and delicious), and kuri (thin cucumbers).

Yoshimatsu owns roadside rice fields like this one.

But I soon found out that although he had only recently purchased rice fields, his family has owned orange groves for generations; the plots he now tends were promised to him when he was a boy. 

As I drove through the landscape of Wakayama, past rice field after rice field and orange groves planted on hills so steep that farmers must ride a kind of rudimentary monorail just to tend their fields, I kept thinking of how I’d heard that the Japanese government protects its farmers from competition from agricultural products from abroad (particularly the U.S.).   But one of our American guides said that for the most part, that wasn’t true.  The government certainly didn’t have to protect these orange farmers, whose fruit had a sweetness and delicacy I’d never tasted.   The Japanese are mostly uninterested in oranges that have to be picked while green and shipped across the Pacific.  Apparently, the Japanese have very high standards for fruit.  (This may partly explain the $269 melon I saw in a Tokyo department store.) The peaches and grapes are huge, and everything is flavorful because it ripens on the plant and then is quickly shipped around a relatively small nation. 

Yoshimatsu pruning his orange trees.

This makes sense; the Japanese have always been all about delicious local food.  I’m guessing the word locavore, only recently current in English, might baffle the average Japanese.  They’d probably think, “Duh! What other kind of food would you want to eat?”  Wherever you go, they tell you what’s local and what’s fresh.  They’re so into freshness that when you’re dining in a restaurant with other people and your food comes first, it’s almost rude of you not to start eating immediately:  you have to eat it while it’s fresh.  They’re so conscious of the localness of food that when they go traveling, the train stations are packed with local specialties that you’re supposed to take as a gift to the people you’re visiting, as culinary souvenirs known as omeyagi. 

A bowl of myoga stood ready for our nagashi somen.

Local food was certainly in evidence when we had a barbecue and ate nagashi somen, cold noodles that flow around a kind of watery race course. That evening all four generations were present, eating vegetables from the garden right behind us.  And these were the same people who all work together in the fall to bring in their small rice harvest.

Our Kyoto guide later told me that the demands of rice-growing have helped determine the cooperative nature of Japanese society:  it’s very labor intensive and not something one can do alone.  You have to rely on others, perhaps your extended family.  And it helps if they’re close by, several generations living side by side in an ie household.

At home in Japan, part 2: A sense of place

The whole extended Yoshimatsu family. 

My second homestay was three nights in Arida, Wakayama prefecture, where my hosts Yoshimatsu Toshitake and his family lived a life that seemed almost untouched by all the flagrant Westernization I’d been seeing.  They seemed to live in a classic Japanese lifestyle, in what is called an ‘ie’ (ee-yeh) household, in which several generations or branches of the family live within earshot of each other.  Three houses separated by just a few feet house Yoshimatsu and his wife, who are in their sixties; his parents who are in their late eighties; their older son and daughter-in-law who are in their thirties; and their seven-year-old grandson Kazuki.  

The tatami room in which I stayed at Yoshimatsu's house.

Yoshimatsu’s house is built in the traditional Japanese style.  Outside there is a lot of wood and curved tile roofs.  Inside there are many tatami rooms and long hallways and space under the house and under the roof to create breezes that cool the house down.  I slept in a beautiful tatami room with intricate wood carvings above the sliding doors, and the next room contained the family Buddhist altar and Shinto shrine, as well photos of ancestors going back three generations. (I was told that this usually goes to the house of the eldest son when his parents die, hence possibly the reason there was no altar room in the Momosawa house.) There are three separate rooms to cover the functions of one American bathroom:  toilet room (with separate urinal and tiny sinks for handwashing); bath room (i.e. bath and shower); and another room with a typical bathroom sink and mirror as well as a washing machine. And then in various places are deployed different squads of slippers, the ranking of which I never mastered.

Clearly, Yoshimatsu and his family had lived here a long time.  A little field trip that Yoshimatsu took me on made clear how deep his roots were in this area.

First, we went to his Buddhist temple, a short walk up the hill, where the monk’s wife (that’s right, Japanese monks are not celibate, thanks to Honen, as I later found out, the founder of Pure Land Buddhism) served me tea and a sweet (something just about everyone I met in Japan in a non-commercial setting did).  This made me feel a little better about the excursion, which Yoshimatsu, in his imperfect yet enthusiastic English, had prefaced with “I’m going to show you my grave!”  I had imagined a dug-out rectangle in the earth, or at the very least a blank headstone waiting to be inscribed.  But of course, it was the multi-generational stone memorial to the same three generations of his family whose photos hung near the altar in his home, which he then proceeded to wash and adorn with flowers. 

As he made what struck me as a perfunctory gesture of prayer (probably for my benefit), I thought of an article I had read about whether the Japanese were religious.  Yoshimatsu, as many Japanese do, said he wasn’t really religious, not really a Buddhist. But according to the article, what’s important is not so much what Japanese people say; it’s what they do that counts.

Yoshimatsu prays to the kami.                           

The next day, he drove me up to his local Shinto shrine, a steep walk up a hill that he and hundreds of others make every New Year’s.  And then on the way home, almost as an afterthought, he took me to a little shrine by the side of a creek.  To me it looked Shinto, but it held an image of Jiso, a ubiquitous roundish stone figure who is seen as a protector of the souls of aborted or stillborn fetuses and other lost souls.  Our guide in Kyoto called Jiso a bodhisattva, but I can’t help thinking it’s from a native tradition that’s older than Buddhism.  The story that Yoshimatsu told is that when Honen (mentioned above) was a child, he was walking with his nurse who, frightened by a wild animal, jumped into the creek.  Yoshimatsu’s family and a few others personally maintain this shrine and hold a yearly festival on this spot.  And then something the Kyoto guide said made sense:  the Japanese erect a Jiso not at the grave of the deceased, but at the site of the trauma.  It’s the place that the soul unexpectedly left this world that matters.

The Jiso shrine that Yoshimatsu tends.

Whether Jiso is a bodhisattva or not, this sense of place is very Shinto.  In

Shintoism, good luck, bad luck, success or tragedy are connected to a particular place either because the kami are there or because they’re absent.

The noren in the entry to Yoshimatsu's house.

Maybe Yoshimatsu is not really religious, but he certainly has a Buddhist respect for the dead and a Shinto sense of the sacredness of place.

At home in Japan, part 1: Home is where the shrine is?

I hope I’m not just romanticizing, but I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘home’ usually means a bit more here than it does in the U.S. Or let’s say, something more specific. In America we sometimes talk about homes as commodities; real estate agents trade in them.  And while some of us do have traditions we attach to our homes, there just aren’t as many traditions regarding home as there are in Japan.

The Yoshimatsu family shrine.

To put it simply, home is where the shrine is.  And altar.  And tatami. 

Japanese homes (like some public buildings) have a hierarchy of rooms.  The entryway is where you leave your shoes (always neatly lined up and pointed out) at the genkan, or boundary, where you put on your slippers (which are always neatly lines up and pointed in).  You usually wear slippers around the house, except in tatami rooms, where you take off your slippers.  (The family altar and shrine are always in the nicest tatami room.)  But in the toilet you usually switch to a special pair of toilet slippers. I was also told that Japanese farmhouse kitchens used to have dirt floors (some older ones still do) where people would wear shoes and boots they’d take off before entering the rest of the house. 

The Yoshimatsu family altar

Just as there is a hierarchy of rooms, there can also be a hierarchy of footwear. There are older houses whose piecemeal augmentation over a number of decades necessitates the donning and shedding of various ranks of slippers depending on where in the house one goes.  This can make running through the house very complicated and difficult. And for someone with size 12 feet in a size 8 country, uncomfortable as well.

What I know about Japanese homes, aside from what I’ve read, comes from the three homestays I’ve had during my two trips to Japan.  My first homestay on this trip  was in Obu, a “suburb”  (though not the kind of place to which you could attach the word ‘leafy’) of bustling, workaday Nagoya; my second was in Arida, a small-ish (i.e., by Japanese standards) town in hilly, rural-ish Wakayama on the Kii peninsula, which is on the southern side of Honshu.

Two-year-old Yue Momosawa knows what to do when she enters the house.

I loved my first homestay family, the Momosawas.  They were warm and welcoming and generous, but they didn’t always fit my preconceived notions of what a Japanese family is like, many of which were formed by my first homestay 11 years earlier.  They didn’t have an altar or shrine, they slept on Western-style beds, they seemed to use their tatami rooms for storage, they didn’t use bathroom slippers, they didn’t seem to take traditional Japanese baths, and I didn’t see a low table in the house.  Of course, they didn’t wear their shoes in the house; Tetsuya, the husband did eat natto, that much-maligned concoction of fermented soybeans; and they did start meals with “itadakimas” and ended with “gochisosoma.”  But I got the feeling that some aspects of their lives were evidence of the creeping Westernization I’d seen all over Japan. This may be partly due to the fact that Rina, the mother, is half Chinese and lived in Shanghai until she was 12. Or it may be partly due to the fact that they both work long hours for an arm of the Toyota corporation in Nagoya, and with all the commuting and working and childcare, they’re freaking exhausted.

I had a great time with the warm, generous Momosawas.  But it wasn’t until my second homestay that I fully appreciated how untraditional they were.

Why all this Engrish?

Pretty early in my five-week trip to Japan, I realized there’s something I have to get over.

Lunch at Minami Junior High

I kept finding myself wanting the Japanese to be more Japanese.  I was continually disappointed when things seemed too Western:  like when the sixth grader I was eating lunch with at Minami Junior High School handed me a fork to eat my yakisoba, which went along with what looked like a hot dog and oddly shaped bun.  Or when I saw the words “Fruits and Vegetables” in huge letters on a supermarket wall.  Or when the Obu High School kendo club practice was drowned out by the cheers of pom-pom wielding cheerleaders. Or when I saw a plate of chicken nuggets making the rounds at a kaitenzushi restaurant. Or when my hosts in Obu pulled out a Weber grill for a Japanese style barbecue.

I learned that the Japanese like to barbecue croissants.

Why does everything have to be so familiar?

So much of the West has seeped into Japan in the last 160 years that it seems inescapable.  Everyone knows how adept the Japanese are at emulation and adaptation.  There’s much about their society that suggests a quirky (in some ways retro, and in other ways futuristic) interpretation of Western habits and technology.  Like all the white-gloved taxi drivers and their doily-adorned seats, and the late-model Toyotas that ask you if you’re feeling tired when you turn off the car.

Two Japanese who know how to dress properly.

Now, I’m well aware how ridiculous this must sound.  It’s as if I paid all this money to go on an expensive Asian amusement park ride so they damned well better put on their yukata and geta and do a Noh dance for me.  Sometimes I think I’m being like Adela Quested in A Passage to India who’s always going on about seeing the Real India. 

I just want them to do their job and be The Other.

I think one reason I’m continually reminded of this compromised exoticism is that the Japanese vocabulary is so lousy with English words.

So many words are Japanese versions of English words!  Everyone knows sarariman and biru,  but there are zillions more:  the Japanese play gorufu and tenisu  and eat suteeki and sunaaku and then ask for the chekku (they also love hamu and weenah which they buy at a suupaa). Even basic things like sunglasses (sungurasu) don't seem to have any native Japanese term.  OK, so conceivably, the Japanese didn't have sunglasses until American dudes showed up wearing shades.  But surely, a culture that sealed itself off from foreign influence for hundreds of years had an indigenous word for glasses?  I asked my homestay father, “No,” he said, “Just gurasu.  (Later he corrected himself:  there is a native Japanese word, but to use it is to sound like someone's grandmother. )

I mean, I can understand why they call coffee koheee, but why is milk mirku?  Didn’t they drink it before?  Even when it comes to what is arguably the most quintessential of Japanese foods, rice, the word is often not Japanese.  They have a perfectly good word for it:  gohan.   (In fact, words for the three meals are versions of it:  e.g., hirogohan=lunch).   But when it comes to ordering a bowl of rice in a restaurant (a/k/a resoturan), it’s often raisu.

The Japanese just seem too willing to discard their native language for English. 

I guess there’s only one explanation for it.  The West, and English, must be cool.

At the Obu City Hall cafeteria.

It’s clear that they’re fascinated with Western food, Western clothing and Western sports.  And they also seem to love to use English for more than purely practical purposes.  I see it splashed on advertisements and on business signs in locutions that twist my brain into knots, as if for aesthetic reasons. Hence the proliferation of what some affectionately call “Engrish,” specimens of which I’ve been happily collecting on this trip (and which will be discussed further in another blog post).

It finally occurred to me that I’m judging them by a double standard. I don’t own the hamburger or baseball or hot dogs or English.  They can have all of those things, just as I can have my own Buddhist mala beads and my own woodblock print and my own cast iron teapot.  (Hell, three of my favorite Japanese foods – katsu, curry, and ramen – aren’t really Japanese anyway.)

And just as some Japanese disappoint me by not being Japanese enough, so I must disappoint some Japanese by not being American enough.

I’ve met several Japanese people who are mildly surprised that I know how to use chopsticks, or that I’ve eaten okonomiyaki and sushi before. People will burst out laughing when they hear me say ohayo gozaymas or hajimimashite, as if they’ve just encountered a talking horse. (At least I flatter myself to think it’s that they’re surprised by my ability and not amused by my poor pronunciation.) My co-traveler Tom clearly disappointed his host in Wakayama prefecture when he reported that despite living in Austin, Texas, he owns no horses at all.

In a world where everyone is free to use whatever cultural artifacts or traditions or quirks that strike his or her fancy, it’s foolish to assume that we’re going to encounter an unvitiated native culture anywhere that has internet or cell phone service. 

A street in Edo Wonderland.

Unless it’s in theme parks, like the one I visited today, “Edo Wonderland,” which recreates the Japan of the Tokugawa period.  All the males were wearing topknots, visitors rode in rickshaws, the women ran around in yukata  and geta, and samurais had loud confrontations with thieving ninjas on the streets.

It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed tasting authentic Edo-style soba and tempura.  But after a while it got kind of annoying:  all the signs were exclusively in kanji and hiragana.

Why all this water?

I was so sure Japan would be boiling (and weakly air-conditioned, post Fukushima) that the idea that my first full day in Japan would be nonstop rain never occurred to me.

But there I was, dodging downpours in Kyoto with a cheap umbrella and no rain jacket at Kamigamo Jinja, the second most important Shinto shrine in Japan. The rain pummeled my malfunctioning umbrella and seeped into my backpack, dampening my post-it notes.  It made puddles deeper than the soles of my Keens all over the shrine compound.

It seemed out to get me.

But the rain also softened the graceful lines of the vermilion tori'i gates; it filled up the little wells of purifying water worn into ancient-looking rocks; it dripped from moss-covered cypress bark roofs; it trickled pleasingly through stone runnels; it hung in pearl-like drops from the points of pine needles.

And on this rainy day, huddled under umbrellas and ponchos,  pretty much the first thing we did (under the direction of Reverend Inui, our blue and white clad Shinto guide) was to get ourselves wet by ritually purifying ourselves with water.

Dip the bamboo ladle, pour water over your left hand, then over your right hand, then sip from your left hand and spit out, then over your left hand again, and then let the remainder drip down the handle of the ladle before you put it back.

Now you're pure.  And wet.  (But if you remembered to bring your little hand-schmatta, it's all good.)   And now you're ready to go summon the kami and bow and clap and pray and wish for a good exam result or a good match or a child or  success in business or good health or a pass on the next tsunami.

All this water.  All this rain.  It hadn't occurred to me that Japan was such a rainy country.

Maybe I should have gotten a clue.  Like the fact that there are umbrella stands at the entrances to just about every house and building (with multiple holes, not just the oversize champagne buckets we have in the U.S.) along with dispensers of  disposable plastic umbrella bags.  And that you can actually buy a telescoping umbrella case. And that many of the solid, workaday bicycles that people glide around on have built-in umbrella clips so that they can ride in the rain.  (Although many are impressively adept at riding through traffic while holding an umbrella upright.  This may partially explain why clear plastic umbrellas are so popular.) And maybe that's why the Japanese traditionally wear geta, those raised wooden clogs.  Duh.

This pair certainly seemed to keep Reverend Inui's socks dry.

Water is indeed everywhere here, in the rain and the shrines and the oceans and the tsunamis.  Even metaphorically, in the raked-sand Zen gardens.

Then it occurred to me that all this water may have something to do with why we typically think of Japan as a kind of green country.  In both senses of the word.

Green like moss and mist-covered evergreens and seaweed and green tea.  (You don't think "desert" when you think of Japan, do you?)

But also green like environmentally aware.  Which is only natural for a land that's always been so much at the mercy of nature.

So it makes sense that water is so fundamental to Shintoism, a religion that's all about the power of nature.  Reverend Inui explained that those beautiful moss-covered roofs must continually be replaced.  And that's o.k.  The roofs decay and return to the earth; it's all part of the cycle of nature, and of the kami that reside there.  And all this rain just helps the cycle along. All the Shinto shrines are constantly being rebuilt to the exact detail. There's a regular replacement cycle of 21 years, so that those who did it the last time can train the next generation.

I used to wonder why they don't do more in stone, why a country so much at the mercy of water, wind, and earthquake builds so much with wood.

But I guess it makes sense:  the past endures through the people, despite the drip-drip-drip of all this water.

Putting the pieces together

So why go to Korea?

I've spent 28 years teaching Koreans, living with Koreans, working with Koreans, eating Korean food, and more recently, studying Korean literature and history, but there's nothing like being in Korea and being surrounded by the people and the language and the culture to really start making sense of things.

Flushing and Palisades Park (the latter with perhaps less English on signs than in Korea!) are fascinating, but they're not Seoul.

It's as if all this time I'd been assembling a collection of puzzle pieces but didn't know what to do with them until now.

It' s not enough to go to a Korean restaurant or buy a bucket of kimchi at H-mart.

But . . . .

-after spending nearly two weeks eating Korean food with Koreans three times a day, sitting a low tables, using metal chopsticks and having only Kleenex for napkins and only a half glass of water after the meal and having my young homestay mother feed me with her chopsticks;

-after wandering through the endless market stalls selling fish and fruit and dried food and condiments and sauces and seaweed;

-after going for days with nothing but melon for dessert;

-after realizing that a meal is truly an interaction between host and guest, mother and child;

-after seeing every oddly-shaped bit of ground wedged between houses and roads and fences planted to the last inch with a variety of crops;

. . . only then did it all begin to make sense. Only then did I start to get a grip on a culture.

Even though I know only a handful of Korean words (most of them dealing with food), only by going to Korea and interacting with Koreans did I start to have a feeling not only for the rhythms of their language, but also the nameless aspects of their communication and interaction.

So that's why you go to Korea--to put the pieces together. (Duh.)

Love & kimchi

A wayward son, on the lam for an accidental murder, misses his mother's kimchi so much he risks returning home. His old mother, weeping with joy to see her son again, prepares an elaborate meal while her son takes a nap. He wakes up at a knock on the door, only to be arrested by plainclothes police, who screech out of town with him the back seat. His mother runs after the car, shouting, "Wait! I didn't get to feed him yet!"

This scene, from a Korean movie I saw on the plane home, seemed very emblematic of certain important themes in Korean society. I watched five Korean movies during my trip to Korea (3 on the bus, 2 on the plane). And except for what seemed to be a Korean version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, all dealt with the extremely strong bond between mother and child, often focusing on a child's longing for his mother's cooking, or a mother's yearning to cook for her child. Often, this separation is related to a child's leaving of an almost mythic country home with a chong-dok (a collection of large, brown ceramic pots for kimchi, bean paste, and other home-made culinary necessities that were prepared once a year and buried in the backyard to ferment) for the crowded apartment blocks of Seoul or other cities, a move that millions of Koreans have made in recent decades.

I knew that Korea, a very Confucian society, placed a great emphasis on the parent-child bond; but I had no idea it would all boil down to a longing for your mother's kimchi. This yearning tells a story that reflects some of fundamental changes that have occurred on the Korean peninsula over the past several decades. And it also sheds some light on the Koreans I've known in Bergen County.

For the past 28 years, dealing with the fruits of Korean parenthood has been my business. Over the years, I have come to know Korean parents indirectly, through the worries, obsessions, and behavior of their children, whom I teach and tutor. From my extensive study of the matter, I have come to conclude that Korean parents are hardworking, dedicated, demanding, involved, and not to be messed with. Oh, and they think that no child who can walk should miss school. From the pleas of Korean children who beg, "Please don't call my parents," I know that Korean parents are really old school. They remind me of my father, something of an anachronism even in the 70's, who would say, "If the school calls, it's always your fault." But I also know that they will go to great extremes to obtain the best education for their children, even if it means sending them to the U.S. while they work abroad.

But parenthood was greatly on my mind during my nearly two weeks in Korea for the simple reason that several of the young people I was traveling with were in search of identities that had been at least partly complicated by bold decisions made by parents.

I'm talking about Korean parents who decided to move to northern New Jersey to seek some sort of better life for their children. And Korean parents who decided to give up their babies for adoption. And Caucasian American parents who adopted Korean babies. And Koreans and Caucasians who decided to marry and raise mixed-race children.

I realized that, even with all the struggles and illnesses and accidents and challenges that can befall one's child, I have it so incredibly easy as a parent, simply because of my wife's and my undeserved good luck in having been able to produce our own biological offspring. My children are under no pressure to decide whether or when to search for their birth parents, and they will never have the threat of being unsuccessful in that search.

As a parent, I never have to steel myself for the results of my children's search for their birth identities.

As an American with American children, I never have to worry that my children are growing up without their true identities. I never have to see my 17-year-old Korean adoptee son return with tears in his eyes after playing with Korean orphans, as I did on this trip.

And as an American living in the U.S., I never have to go for months at a time living in a country where I have a job in order to support my family, who live in another country where the educational opportunities are better.

But, sadly, I'm also not part of the kind of universal societal shift like the one Korea has been living since its war, from rural hunger to urban plenty. Like most Americans, I'm relatively rootless. My history doesn't go that deep.

For me, there never were the kimchi jars in the backyard of my rural mountain homestead.