Ladies And Gentlemen, Welcome...

The recording plays every few minutes as I stand on the platform waiting for the train to arrive. The woman’s voice is glad and grandiose both.

”Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Shin Kan Sen!”

January 4, 2006:

Today I rode the Shinkansen from Hiroshima to Tokyo.

At eight-ten in the morning, Hiroshima is cold. I shivered as I waited on the platform. At my feet were my bags, my black suitcase and two shopping bags of omiyage. In the West, we send postcards, but in Japan you bring omiyage, gifts of the local specialties from the places you’ve been to let people know you were thinking of them on your trip and want to share the experience with them in the form of a gift. My bags hold a collection of momiji manju (soft cakes shaped like momiji--maple--leaves and filled with an, sweet red-bean paste) and momiji (maple leaf-shaped) chocolates, senbei (rice crackers) in the shape of rice paddles (which Miyajima is famous for), pottery from Itsukushima and Bizen, and plum liquor from Okayama.

”Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Shin Kan Sen!”

The Shinkansen or New (Shin) Trunk (Kan) Line (Sen) is not known as a “bullet train” in Japan. In fact, many students are surprised to hear that Americans don’t usually know Shinkansen, but they do know “bullet train.”

The Shinkansen is fast (the scheduled top speed of the route I’m traveling, the Tokaido/Sanyo Line, is 300 kilometers--186 miles--per hour) and expensive (about one hundred yen per minute). The cars are quiet and clean and the conductors bow as they enter and turn and bow as they exit each car. I was thrilled to ride the Shinkansen the first time--and the second time--and the third time. Because I rode the Shinkansen from Okayama to HIroshima twice and from Tokyo to HIroshima and back, by the time I disembarked from the Nozomi Super Express (my fourth and final ride) this afternoon, I was done with the Shinkansen for a while. In four days, I spent twelve hours and more money than I’m willing to admit to here riding the Shinkansen from one side of Japan to the other and down the coast of western Honshu.

One of those times was on the way back to HIroshima after a visit with the Ex-Student.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Shin Kan Sen. The Nozomi Express bound for Hiroshima is arriving at track twelve. Cars one, two and three are for passengers without seat reservations...”

January 3, 2006

Tonight, I am preparing to leave Hiroshima.

I spent the day with the Ex-Student. We each traveled two hours by train to meet in Fukuyama. He came from his home in Okayama Prefecture, and I was, of course, traveling from HIroshima-ken. Fukuyama was roughly halfway between his city and mine and there’s a castle in Fukuyama that is, as the Japanese say, a good sightseeing point and that was pretext enough for us to see each other.

We met at the station, the Ex-Student arriving, as he often does, a few minutes late. “Let’s have lunch,” I suggested.

We had Hiroshima okonomiyaki for lunch.

Okonomiyaki, in case you don’t know, are like enormous savory Japanese pancakes. They are made with wheat batter poured over a mix of cabbage and onions and other vegetables and maybe ten other things that you may or may not necessarily want to know the origin of. The whole thing is grilled and then topped with okonomiyaki sauce (a thick shoyu-based sauce) mayonnaise and katsuobushi (dried shaved tuna). There are two basic styles of okonomiyaki: Hiroshima okonomiyaki and Osaka okonomiyaki. The Osaka style is relatively plain. The wheat batter and the ten or so ingredients come to the table on a plate. You cook the okonomiyaki yourself on a grill in the middle of the table by grilling the ingredients and then pouring the batter over everything. The Hiroshima style is cooked for you and is, to me, a much heavier meal as it takes the basic mix and adds noodles (udon or ramen), an egg, and pork or shrimp. Over all is the same okonomiyaki sauce and mayo and katsuobushi. Both styles fill up an entire dinner plate.

I had eaten okonomiyaki the day before at Itsukushima and I knew that if I ate the whole thing, I’d be too full to move, so I ate half and the Ex-Student ate his and then part of the rest of mine and then we were both too full to move. He suggested a walk, so we walked for about ten minutes. Then I suggested a coffee.

We went to S’bux and I asked him what he wanted and he asked for a latte. I ordered his latte and my own Americano (he stood back and let me do it, something he did several times throughout the day, just as he began to speak more Japanese to me as the day progressed). When our coffees came, we took a table upstairs and we sat and talked and talked and talked.

After a bit, we decided to visit Fukuyama Castle. “It is good for foreigners, I think,” he said, by way of suggesting the castle (which turned out, of course, to have no English guide and no English explanations for any of the exhibits).

As we walked back to the station, I asked him if the castle was far.

“Not far,” he said. “It’s not far.”

“Not far” to the Ex-Student sometimes means a thirty minute walk and this has been been kind of a joke between us since we met. At the time, he was living in Tokyo, about a twenty-minute walk away from The Kaisha. When we would walk from The Kaisha to his apartment, I would always ask, “Can’t we take a taxi?” He’d laugh and I’d say, “No, I’m serious! Look! A taxi!” After a minute walking, I’d ask, “Are we getting close? How far is it? I’m tired! There’s a taxi! Look!” I’d play like I was going to hail a taxi rather than walk another eight minutes and he’d laugh. “No, no, no,” he’d say.

As we walked into Fukuyama Station I asked him again how far away the castle was and he said again, “It’s not far.” We passed through the station and ten yards later we walked out of the other side of the station. As we walked out the doors, I was about to ask again how far it was to the castle, and he pointed to a big wall and I looked up and there was the castle.

“That’s convenient,” I said.

“Yes, very convenient,” he said. “Right near the station.”

I asked him if we could take a taxi to the castle.

He laughed and pointed at the thick wall around the castle.

“Ninja used to climb the castle walls,” he said. “Why did they climb the walls?” I asked. I pointed and said, “Look, there are stairs.”

He laughed and we headed for the stairs. “Samurai would drop stones down on the ninja.” He pointed at the lookout, high above us. “That’s where the samurai would look for the ninja coming on the train,” he added. I laughed. “The ninja rode the train?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “It was very convenient for them because the station is right next to the castle.” I laughed so hard that I snorted. I laughed so that I almost had to sit down on the stairs.

When I could breathe again, I said “The ninja train? The ninja densha?”

“Ehhhh?” He said, using the rising sound that Japanese use when they are playing at disbelief. “What did you say?” he asked.

“The Ninja densha,” I repeated. “A special JR line. The ninja no densha. The ninja sen.”

He laughed. “It doesn’t make sense, I don’t think,” he said.

As we approached the castle doors, I began to point out all the modern conveniences of the museum. “Look!” I said of the outdoor toilets, “Samurai no toire!” Samurai toilets. I pointed at the door of the castle and said, “Look, a vending machine!”

“Ehhhh?”

“Yes, yes!” I said. “A samurai vending machine.”

He didn’t see the vending machine. “I don’t think so!” he said.

In fact, it did turn out to be a samurai vending machine as it dispensed tickets to the museum devoted to the samurai lifestyle circa Edo period.

We went into the castle and the woman at the door bowed and the Ex-Student said hello and so did I and we walked over to the vending machine (all of two steps) and the woman immediately stepped up beside us. We put our money in and the woman pressed all the right buttons and out came two tickets and she reached out and took the tickets and tore the end off and handed the ticket stubs to us. Then she asked in Japanese if I wanted an English guide and I said yes, please, and she ran off and the Ex-Student turned to me and said in Japanese that she was going to get an English guide. I laughed. “You’re a good translator!” I said.

We quickly viewed the castle, took a few photos, then headed back for Fukuyama.

“What do you want to do now?” he asked.

“Let’s go to Okayama,” I suggested.

Okayama is nearer to his home and farther from HIroshima. “Are you sure?” he said. “What do you want to do in Okayama?”

“We can have dinner and look around,” I suggested.

“That is a long way for you,” he said, meaning that I would be an hour further away from Hiroshima. I said that I liked to look out the window of the train at the scenery and that I could take the Shinkansen back to HIroshima.

“It is expensive, I think,” he said.

I reminded him of our agreement that he try to squelch his opinion of how I spend my own money and this prompted him to walk over to the window and purchase two tickets. I tried to pay him back and he refused my money.

We boarded the train to Okayama and took a seat. As everyone settled down, I watched as two girls opposite us opened up a box from a bakery and proceed to eat pastry. Over the next hour to Okayama, we chatted and I ignored the scenery going by in favor of looking at the Ex-Student and sometimes at the girls whose magic bakery box gave rise to pastry after pastry which they gnawed daintily and steadily at until I was dizzy just from contact sugar high. They chatted and ate and chatted and ate and ate and ate.

“Wow,” I finally commented to the Ex-Student. “Look at those girls. They’re eating everything.”

“They’re enjoying themselves,” he said.

“Yes!” I agreed happily.

On the ride, we talked about a friend of his, a young Japanese woman who had just broken up with her American boyfriend. The boyfriend told her he loved her, would invite her over for sex and then tell her she couldn’t spend the night. Later, he broke up with her.

(The Ex-Student and I have talked about how many Western men see Japanese women. My view is that Japan and Japanese women constitute some kind of playground for Western men. Western men are like movie idols here to many Japanese women and the men take advantage of this situation to satisfy their curiosity about sex with Japanese women without ever once buying into the dream that the women have that they will get a husband out of the relationship. Too, there are more profound cultural difference. In my opinion, compared to Western women, Japanese women are supremely submissive, weak-minded, and weak-willed. Western men just eat them up and spit out the seeds.) After the American guy left the Ex-Student’s friend, she asked the Ex-Student what she should do and he suggested that she call him.

“Ah, chigau,” I said. Wrong. “Tell her to find another boy.” He said that if he told her that now, she would think that he meant that he was that other boy.

I laughed and agreed that he was probably right about that.

Later, I questioned him about this young woman’s previous boyfriend, and it turns out that she had dated another American who left her after she got pregnant. “It is a hard life for her,” he said. I agreed and pointed out again that Western men often see Japanese women as playthings, as pets that become expendable as soon as they become problematic.

“it sounds like he just wanted a sex friend,” I said, using the Japanese English for booty call.

He said yes, but that if they started out as sex friends, then they could develop into a relationship from there. “Ah, chigau,” I said. Wrong. I explained to him that in America, the prevailing view is that there are two kinds of women: There are the women you have sex with and the women you marry. I said that to many Western men, those are two different types of women. “Many American men think that if a woman has sex with you easily, you shouldn’t marry her,” I said.

This surprised him. “Ehhhh?”

It surprised him because in Japan, sex is not the guilty pleasure that it is in the West. In fact, like the pastry-eating girls who were enjoying themselves without guilt, sex is seen in Japan as something that one does for enjoyment,without the Christian guilt that is the price tag for pleasure in the West. People here are very touch conservative in public, but when it comes to touching in private, when it comes to sex, there is a kind of anything goes mentality that can be very uncomfortable for someone raised in a country that prides itself on an adherence (however halfheartedly) to Christian ethics and morals. Sex friends are seen as a means to a comfortable life, and the relationship is mutually beneficial and without judgment by either party involved. However, there is the expectation, as the Ex-Student had, that the relationship can blossom into something else. Being told that, in America, that this was a relatively unlikely possibility was surprising.

It is a cultural difference, I explained. “Men don’t respect women who have sex too easily and so they don’t want to marry them.”

The conversation progressed and we talked about Western women and Japanese men. I told him about a Kaisha teacher, an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous woman who left Japan in disgust, having had a single (failed) four-month relationship with a Japanese boyfriend in her two years in-country. She wanted to date guys here, I said. But she couldn’t get any dates.

He asked if Western women find Japanese men attractive in comparison to Western men. “Western women aren’t in Japan to meet Western men,” I answered. “They are here to meet Japanese guys.”

I asked him why men in Japan didn’t ask Western women out on dates and for once he didn’t express the view that Japanese men are too shy. This time he had a different opinion. “I think,” he said, “that the cultures are very different and Japanese men think about the future of the woman in Japan.”

Later, on the street, he said of a couple we passed on the street, “Did you see?” he asked.

He said, “It was a Western woman with a Japanese man.”

I, who actually hadn’t noticed the man because I was too busy looking at the gaijin, said I hadn’t seen. He thought I was joking. “Ehhhh. Are you sure?” he asked. I assured him I hadn’t seen.

In fact, the curiosity with which he greeted the woman and her companion is often reflected in the eyes of the people on the street who notice us together. I watch as people look at me, the gaijin, then at my companion, note that he’s Japanese, and then look back at me then at him again in quick succession. It’s very fast and if it only happened once, I would think nothing of it, but it happens over and over again. I was sure that the Ex-Student noticed it, but I pointed it out once when it was particularly blatant and he hadn’t had the faintest idea what I was talking about.

Later, as we had dinner in Okayama, he fed me a hypothetical situation: You have two men who you like equally. One is an American, the other is Japanese. Which would you go with?

I considered. “I would take the Japanese guy,” I said.

“Ehhhh.”

I continued, “I know American guys.”

“That is just you, I think,” he said. “You like adventure.”

Yes, I agreed, maybe it is just me.

”Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the Nozomi Super Express bound for Tokyo.”

When we first meet, he studies my face very carefully each time he has the opportunity. I don’t remember the last time we saw each other face to face, but it was before he left Tokyo and--ah, I do remember:

November 23, 2005:

We went to Yokohama on a date. On the way out to Yokohama on the train, I had jokingly suggested that we visit a love hotel and he, wanting to please me, had earnestly said he would find one.

“No, no,” I said, laughing. “It’s just a joke! We don’t have to go to a hotel!”

He said, “I think you want to go.” I was curious, but said it wasn’t important--and it wasn’t. He said, “You might regret it if you didn’t go.”

I insisted that I didn’t want to go to a love hotel and I think he was disappointed because love hotels have a reputation for being like mini-amusement parks for adults. Honestly, I know that the Hello Kitty-themed rooms are particularly popular with the young women, but on the boys side of that equation are the rooms like game centers (game center is Japanese English for video arcade).

For some reason, while we were drinking our coffee and chatting in S'bux, he brought up the subject of children. When he was studying English in Australia, he had spent a day in a preschool introducing Japanese culture to Australian children. “What did you think?” I asked. He said, “They are very independent. Not like Japanese students.” I asked him to give me some examples and he told me about how, in Australian preschool, the kids could decide what to do for themselves. He listed off their choices: drawing, painting, reading, playing sports. Then he said that in Japanese schools, children were moved about in a group. When it’s time to draw, the teacher says it’s time and everyone draws. They often draw the same thing. I asked him which he liked better. Both are important, he admitted. Then he said, “There are five hours for school. I think that three hours of Japanese style and two hours of Western style.”

I laughed. “Why three and two?” I asked. “Why not two and a half and two and a half?”

He explained that Japanese culture is very complicated and that it must be taught in school. I said, “What about the parents? Shouldn’t they teach culture at home?” No, he said, “The parents are no good.” He brought up teenaged mothers made bad parents (Japan and America share this view of teenaged mothers, sadly) and I reminded him that my own mother had been a teenager when she got married and started her own family and she had done just fine. I reminded him that in my culture, the Spanish-American culture, that being a teenaged mother was not necessarily a bad thing. It’s the woman that matters, not her age, I meant to suggest.

I changed the subject by asking him what he did for fun as a child. He told me that he had stolen mikan from the orchards in the small island where he was a student. I laughed “You stole oranges for fun?” He said, “Not many! Only maybe twenty each for five people. So only about a hundred.” I asked, “Each time?” He said happily, “Yeah, each time.”

”Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Shin Kan Sen! The Kodama Express, arriving at track fourteen, will stop at Hiroshima before continuing to Hakata.”

January 1, 2006

It is New Year’s Day and I ride the local train just for the sheer pleasure of riding the rails and I end up in Okayama where I see the cranes strolling in the garden and then ride the Shinkansen back to HIroshima.

”Ladies and gentlemen, in a few moments we will be arriving at Tokyo Station. Passengers bound for Ueno should take tracks four and five...”

January 4, 2006

The Shinkansen slides across Japan from Hiroshima to Okayama to Shin-Osaka to Kyoto and I nap, waking in time to see the snow as we glide through Nagoya. “Ah, sugoi!” the young girl on the end seat says to her father. Cool! I am in the seat next to the window and I lean back so that she can get a better view. “Uh,” her father agrees in the Japanese version of a “yeah.”

The fields are thickly quilted with snow and the trees on the hills beyond them are dusted gray. There are clusters of houses beside the tracks and here and there smoke rises lazily from chimneys. We move past the houses, climbing higher past Nagoya, and then there are no visual clues for my eye to snag on. We are moving so quickly that the snow blurs into a white sameness and it’s passing through a cloud. I watch for a while and then look away.

And then, just as I have on every Shinkansen I’ve taken, I fall asleep.

When I wake, we are near Itami and the ocean. The sun glints off the water, and though I know it is cold outside, and the water probably freezing, it looks beautifully warm.

The man next to me has paused a few times to drink from a can of black coffee and to pop a new stick of gum in his mouth, but mostly he has worked steadily throughout the whole trip, sometimes recording receipt amounts in a thick, brown leather-bound ledger, and sometimes reading what looks to me like a book about business. His daughter has slept steadily, going first from tilting back in her chair, then to slumping forward over her open tray table, but now she digs in her tote and pulls out a small book of photographs of the just-ended New Year holiday. She flips past photos of people eating o-sechi ryori, the traditional holiday fare, and drinking sake. I try not to be too obvious an observer of the two, but I know that they are probably just as closely observing my movements, so I don’t worry too much about it.

When we near Shinagawa, the first stop in Tokyo, they collect their things. At Shinagawa, which is on the Yamanote line, they exit the train, the father looking back once to see if they’ve left anything. When we near Tokyo Station a few minutes later, I collect my things. Tokyo is the last stop on this particular line, and everyone else exits in the polite Japanese way of pushing along without pushing along.

Tokyo Station is a zoo. The day I left and the day I returned to Tokyo are the busiest travel days of the year in Japan. Tokyo Station is not the busiest station in Tokyo, but it is one of the two Shinkansen stopping points in Tokyo and so it was busy enough on this day. I changed lines, going from the Shinkansen to the Yamanote Line. At Kanda, I changed again from the Yamanote Line to the Ginza Subway Line. At Asakusa Station, I headed for the JR Tobu Line and as I was slowly shuffling along with the crowd, a woman next to me said to her companion in Japanese, “American, don’t you think?” Her companion murmured her agreement.

I moved past them.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Shin Kan Sen.”

January 3, 2005

"From the end of February I'll ride on a ship," the Ex-Student tells me. He has told me that he doesn't want to do this, doesn't want to take over the family business, doesn't like ships, doesn't like being a saiilor. He has said that he doesn't want to do this but that he can't betray his father. He is the oldest son and has no choice, absolutely none as far as anyone is concerned.

"That stupid Japanese way of thinking," he said the first time we met at The Kaisha.

There are many things in life that we have no choice about, but this seems particularly cruel. His family has the money to put him into any business, but they want him in the family business and he is the oldest son and he will obey their wishes.

"I argue with my father," he says. I ask what they argue about. "I want more time off," he says. I ask what he calls the year he lived in America and the year he lived in Australia. He reminds me that he worked in America, for a company associated with his father's company, and in Australia, he was a full-time student, studying English so that he could translate for his father, who doesn't speak English and right now relies on interpreters. He has three days off for the New Year holiday. One of those days he spent with his family, one with his friends, one he has opted to spend with me.

"I know it's a long way for you to travel," I said to him on the phone as we discussed a plan to meet.

"I want to see you," he said.

Each time I see him, I am convinced that there is no possibility of a future between us. We don't talk about possibility or impossibility while we are together. We discuss things like whether Western women find Japanese men attractive. We discuss how children should be raised. We discuss how he should find a wife from his part of Japan, someone who knows the culture, a younger woman. That someone, he says, will probably be chosen by his family.

Each time I see him, I have the feeling that I should be patient. Things take time, I remind myself. Change takes time, I think. I am thirty-four years old and, in Japan, a thirty-four-year-old woman is too old. She is too old to marry and too old to have children and we both know this. I have six-months left on my work visa and we both know this.

We don't discuss possibility or impossibility. We don't discuss possibility and impossibility because those are concepts with culturally-defined boundaries and we come from different cultures.

We don't discuss possibility and impossibility because I don't believe in one. I don't believe in one and he doesn't believe in the other.