Fugacious

The sakura are past their prime, the petals having fallen from the blossoms like snow.

Going, Going...

This afternoon I was standing against the doors of the crowded train from Asakusa to Higashi-Mukojima. As the train crossed the Sumida river I happened to see a trio sitting near the river, beneath the fading sakura, enjoying what may be the last o-hanami of the season. I watched the two men and their female companion with admiration. I admired, loved, the sentiment behind their party, a celebration not at the height of beauty, but of the passing of the exuberant grandeur of the sakura at their prime.

The Japanese call it mono-no-aware, “an awareness of the transience of things,” an appreciation for what is fleeting, the beauty inherent in death. Spring is a time for rebirth, but inherent in that rebirth is the remembrance of what has come before, the event that necessitates rebirth.

I am shot through with that feeling recently, not because of the sakura, though they do offer a beautiful background to my own emotional state. But it is true: I will be leaving Japan in June, in about two months, and I have to, at some point, say goodbye to this place.

I’ve been here ten months and it has been a beautifully rewarding and difficult ten months.

Let me try to explain some of that.

It is easy for people to travel through Japan. The Japanese are very polite to travelers, very hospitable to strangers in a way that so much of America has forgotten how to be, living as we do in a constant state of fear. The Japanese are very accommodating to the transient, very helpful. But that hospitality, like the sakura, at some point begins to fade.

I have a student who was born in China, who grew up in Shanghai and Tokyo, and who is fluent in Chinese, Japanese, and English. She has lived in Japan for the last thirteen years and will soon marry a Japanese man. She had said, unbidden, the same thing: The Japanese are very accommodating when they believe you are only passing through, but that feeling changes when they think you are going to stay. I’d been tempted to think that it was my imagination or that it had to do with my limited knowledge of the language, but her experience validates my own. She is fluent but she still deals with the inherent insularity of Japan, and that insularity is extreme and built into the culture in such a way that it is likely never to change.

What I Will Miss

I will miss the way living in a city like Tokyo tests one’s ability to withstand the pressures of big city living. I will, I mean, miss the trains packed beyond capacity, the frighteningly high cost of living, the pollution, the incredibly loud street noise, the constant construction, the nearly unbearable din of the city. I will miss crossing a street with thousands of other people, and I will miss the enormous black crows with the deep, scratchy voices, that circle piles of garbage bags like vultures circling corpses.

I will miss the Blade Runner quality of this city, the giant TV screens blaring at all hours at the major intersections, the strange music that wafts from loudspeakers at five-thirty in the afternoon, the incomprehensible announcements from the same loudspeakers at all hours of the day and night. I will miss the right-wing patriotism that lies just beneath the surface of this place, not so scary or in your face as rednecks with American flags, but the nondescript white vans with the tasteful chrysanthemum designs on the sides (symbol of the Emperor’s family) parked near the stations, men manning loudspeakers urging the continued rejection of foreign influence. I will miss a population that steps around these vans on the way to spend spend spend their money, subtle as the nouveau riche they are, on things like Louis Vuitton and Hermes and Dior, luxury goods that they stockpile in their one-room apartments, or in the homes that they share, at twenty, at thirty, at forty, with their parents.

I will miss those things. These are things I never would have believed without seeing.

I will miss the inconvenient convenience of this city. I will miss the twenty-four hour conbini near the station that closes at twelve-thirty. I will miss the bars that stay open all night to accommodate people who miss their last trains. I will miss the way credit cards are difficult to use and I will miss the fact that carrying large amounts of cash is perfectly safe.

I will miss the earthquakes.

If you think that’s a strange list, a list that leaves off sushi and green tea and sakura and temples, a list that leaves off all things that are Japanese and therefore all things exotic, let me tell you a secret:

I never really found Japan exotic.

Oh, maybe at one point I did. Maybe when I was in the third grade and I first heard that there was a place called Japan where people lived on rice which they sat on the floor to eat. Maybe that seemed strange and exotic. But fast-forward twenty-five years, and that exotic quality was washed away. I knew before I came to Japan that this was a real place, with real people. I knew before I came that Tokyo is a big city, with big city problems. I knew that there were homeless people here. (Now I know how quiet they are.) I knew that there was a division between the haves and the have-nots, just as in America, but it took me a long time to see evidence of that division. (Now I know that that division is not so easy to see in part because the Japanese are mono-cultural so that it’s not the darker-skinned people doing the shit work, but that the people doing the shit work--cleaning the train stations, working behind the counter at 7-11--are the same race as the engineers who work in Ginza.) I knew that there were people here who work themselves to death, keeping schedules that hint at insanity. (Now I know what it’s like to work a similar schedule, ten hour days bracketed at each end by an hour commute on a train packed to 400% capacity.) I knew that it was an expensive city. (Now I know what it’s like to spend five-thousand yen on a cab ride from where I work to where I live, to spend sixteen hundred yen on four pounds of rice.)

Now I know.

But exotic was never the appeal of this place to me. I didn’t come to see geisha and samurai. (Samurai don’t exist anymore anyway, outside of TV dramas, and the only geisha left are the high-paid entertainers of even higher-paid businessmen.) I didn’t come to see anime and Harajuku girls and manga. I didn’t come for the promise of easy women. I didn’t come for the sumo or the Shinto or the sake.

Why did I come?

Well, one of the reasons I came is because Japan is a society in flux and I wanted, Hemingway-like, to see what the front-lines look like. For example, Japanese women are marrying later in life--if at all--and the birth rate in Japan is dropping. From outside Japan, it’s easy to speculate about the reasons why this is happening. Women are dissatisfied with their traditional roles and they have begun to change and the men are too traditional for their non-traditional women. Fair enough an explanation, I suppose. But those are just words.

In the last ten months, I have met and talked to some of those women who marry late (or not at all) and I have met those women who remain resolutely childless. I have met the men they reject, and I have met the men they marry. I have seen relationships in Japan and I have seen how they work and how they don’t work, and I have seen what happens in both cases.

I could have stayed in the US and done all the reading there is on the subject, and I could even have amassed enough knowledge to feel comfortable calling myself an expert. But had I never talked to a single woman who lives this particular reality, that would be as wrong as those who major in Asian studies at universities in the US and who have never traveled to a single Asian country, who revere this place for traditions that no longer exist.

Why did I come here?

I came here to see and I have seen.