A Perfectly Ordinary Journey

The Nozomi Super Express sped along on its way through the countryside and sometimes I watched the landscape rolling by and sometimes I turned my attention to the scene inside the car.

One of the first things you should know about riding on long-distance trains or planes in Japan is that if you are the person in the center or window seat? That you are considered rude if you have to get up for any reason. This disturbs the other passengers and they don’t like it.

As an example, I will tell you about the man who I sat next to on the flight from America to Japan. The flight from Houston to Tokyo is about fourteen hours. The man was in the middle of a row of five seats and he didn’t get up once, not a single time, during the flight. And he drank perhaps five or seven cups of green tea over the course of the flight. Luckily, I was on the aisle, so getting up wasn’t a problem. I got up maybe twice an hour when I wasn’t sleeping.

But this morning before boarding the Shinkansen, I had two double espressos and two cups of regular coffee and a liter of water for breakfast, a coffee at Macu while I waited for the train, and a coffee from the vending machine on the train platform. I was not happy to see that, for the four hour ride from Hiroshima to Tokyo, I had the window seat on an aisle of three seats, two of which were already filled.

On the aisle seat was a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen, dressed in a striped shirt and blue jeans and off-white socks. At her feet was a white canvas tote bag that had a book of photographs of the recent holiday, and a book for reading, and homemade food and store-bought drinks. Over the course of the ride, the bag gave rise to apple juice for her and black coffee for her father and some homemade muffins (tiny, doll-sized muffins in gold foil cups, wrapped in plastic and tied with a blue ribbon) and some intriguingly yellow slices of sweet-looking bread, and mikan tangerines. The little girl’s pageboy haircut looked like it hadn’t been combed since she woke up--though I’m not sure that this wasn’t because she hadn’t yet woken up. She slept steadily during the trip, going from slumping back in her seat, to dropping her tray table sleepily and slumping forward over onto it to rest her head on her folded forearms.

Her father was perhaps in his early forties and a bit shorter than me. He wore a grayish-green sweater and blue jeans. He was solidly built and, in a different context, would have been quite handsome. His short, curly, dark brown hair was turning gray at the temples, and he had somewhat coarse brown skin and large beautiful hands, the likes of which are rare on men in Japan. He worked steadily during the ride, recording receipts in an expense ledger, making lists of contacts, or reading a book about business in which he made tiny, nearly invisible marks in with a pen that matched his brown leather date book. He didn’t have the kind of contact inhibition that many Japanese have when it comes to foreigners (this is not exhibited, I’ll just say, by old men and women) and this led him consequently to take over the armrest on my left, the kind of thing that men feel perfectly at ease doing in America, but which is so rare as to be all but nonexistent in Japan.

When I got on the train at Hiroshima, the man and his daughter were already on the train. If they were not pleased to see me, their large gaijin seat mate, they covered it well. I apologized for disturbing them and popped my huge suitcase into the overhead rack and put my bags of omiyage at my feet and hung my coat on the hook next to the window and put in my headphones. I dropped my tray table and put my datebook and trip journal on it and turned and to the window, waiting to see.

I say that I was waiting to see because first, my thoughts are often turned inward and have trouble focusing on things outside my head, and second, am very impatient and it takes me a long time to settle down and actually see anything. The scenery outside the window flew by and after a bit, my eye calmed down and I could see.

First I saw the man and his daughter. Then I saw their bags and baggage. The man was chewing gum fairly openly which is unusual for Japan. I saw all this and then after I saw this, I began to see the other passengers in the car. I did not look directly at anyone, but rather I studied the other people as they were reflected in the train window.

I saw that I wasn’t the only gaijin in the car.

Across the aisle and one seat ahead was a black man with his head phones in. He was asleep. There were several bags in the rack above his head including many large backpacks (the kind of which I avoid using because they are commonly carried by backpacking tourists). After a bit, another gaijin came down the aisle from the bathroom, another black man who didn’t appear to be with the first. This man wore a red turtleneck and blue jeans and he had a slight pot belly and noticeably round eyes. Neither man looked military.

The presence of other gaijin wasn’t, I don’t think, unusual for the longer distance ride, but on the shorter-distance rides, the rides from Okayama to Hiroshima, there were never any other gaijin in my car.

I opened my trip journal, not to make notes about the other foreigners, but to note that:

It takes me a long time to see and a long time to understand by hearing. I learn through touch, through my hands, through the interface between the universe and my skin. And I absorb the energy around me, the spatial relationships, the touching without touching.

I put my pen and notebook down, my notebook face down so that a blank page faced up.

I have grown used to hiding everything in Japan. It is in this aspect of Japanese life that I am most comfortable. Everyone here tries to hide things, their family lives, their opinions, the habits that belie an undisciplined mindset. I haven’t considered why everyone here does it, but for me it meshes with a childhood spent with an alcoholic, it is a return to the days when the fact that my father was a drunk was the secret that everyone knew but that I had to hide anyway.

After a bit, I pick up my trip journal and pen again and make a note about the Ex-Student:

He studies my face very carefully for about the first hour. I watch his eyes flit over my expressions, looking for a break in my expressions of a glad heart. I am calm. I have the belief--maybe--some understanding anyway that a future between us is only the remotest possibility. And when I am gone, if you were to crack open my heart with a chisel and hammer, you’d find a soft, tiny piece with the name ________ ________ written on it. Because the truth is that I love him. Loving him is what I am on this train from Hiroshima to Tokyo.

I put down my pen, turn the page of my notebook so that the face that faces up is a Japanese face, blank, and I turn my own face to the window and I cry for a bit.

I look out the window at the blurred scenery and after a bit, when I can see again, I start a letter to a friend. The letter goes nowhere and I put down my trip journal and wait. Finally, I pick it up again to note:

The smoking car is filled with smoke and I get--finally--the connection between smoke and sweet as I realize that the car smells much like a walk-in flower cooler at a florists.

And I put down my trip journal.

The car is a smoking car. The smell is sort of sickening and oddly attractive both. Of course, I have begun to smoke again in Japan. Smoking is cheap and acceptable and so I smoke. But I don’t need to smoke on this train because the second hand smoke is enough to keep me calm.

I pull out my train journal and note:

In Japan, the men seem quieter, quiet like the men you respect--and so the dividing line becomes whether they are calm or nervous, settled within themselves or filled with a kind of confusion. The men in Japan are quieter, quieter with their bodies, voices and emotions. They are fearful or not depending on their personalities--and thought they respect women as little or less than their American counterparts, their behavior in general is publicly more respectful. In private, that may be different. Between Japanese men and women that may be different, but between American women and Japanese men, it’s about the same as if both were American.

And I put down my journal.

I study the other passengers reflected in the window. It is just as rude to stare in Japan as it is in America, so I’ve become adept at watching people in reflective surfaces. Across the aisle from me, a man is picking his nose. This is not an uncommon habit in Japan. I’ve seen otherwise respectable men dig in their noses and come up with some interesting things. One morning I had to close my eyes against a man who spent most of a very long commute from Asakusa to Ginza digging in one nostril and plucking things out with no small display of force.

The nose-picker on the train reminds me that it’s easy to be judgmental about behavior, I think, and around the world, the Japanese have a reputation is for a kind of clean and simple perfection. I have spoken to other gaijin who try to hold all Japanese to this ideal and who become scornful of those Japanese who don’t measure up.

I turn away from the nose-picker and pick up my journal:

For a foreigner, the trick sometimes becomes to not unnecessarily hold the Japanese to a standard of perfection. Certainly many gaijin seem to find the pursuit of perfection a worthy goal---so long as it manifests itself in another person and so long as one is not forced to uphold it oneself. But what comes along with the mindset of perfection can be uncomfortable. The fine attention that the Japanese pay to detail is charming so long as its laser-like intensity is not directed at you, in which case it can become incredibly uncomfortable. For me, attempting to deflect this attention has meant developing a strict adherence to a policy of consistency so as to avoid having to endure the polite but incredibly pointed examination of anything new. A new hair clip, for example, incites as much attention as might a new hairstyle, so I avoid both. And this is not true only of accessories, of appearances, it is also true of behavior as well, likes and dislikes, facial expressions, everything. Even for a strong-willed individual, it can be incredibly uncomfortable.

I put down my journal.

In many ways, this journey is perfectly ordinary. Six Shinkansen per hour make a similar journey from Hiroshima to Tokyo. Just like those trains, the train I am on passes through several cities, stops in a few. Just like the other passengers, I sleep or don’t sleep, work or don’t work, read or don’t read. I eat a sandwich that I bought in Hiroshima and listen to music on my headphones. I get up and go to the bathroom and I have a cigarette.

In many ways, this journey from one side of Japan to the other is just like any journey. Along with my omiyage, my gifts for others, and the suitcase full of things that have mostly turned out to be unnecessary, I carry home with me some new knowledge. I carry home with me the new symbols of a new dream and I carry home with me the newly-planted wisdom about the ability to see in either direction in time. I call this knowledge wisdom, but that is not entirely correct if only because the word wisdom suggests some finality of understanding. In fact, that quality of finality is not to be found--not here certainly, but perhaps not anywhere.

Ah, I struggle now to explain in words what I know in my heart. I want to say things, important things, about wisdom and about how it is balanced perfectly in that it both endures and is fleeting. I want to write about how my life has a perfectly seamless dreamlike quality that is a kind of endlessly beautiful thing to me and I want write that I want to learn to stay as unattached to it as possible because then maybe I can learn to see.