The Hare Krishna chanters on the Ginza said ‘go to Suwanose…’
I think it was the sight of Babe Ruth’s old Yankee uniform that finally convinced me that I had to flee the international ego-trip, that is, Expo ’70, and be off in quest of either the Old Japan, if such a place still existed, or at least a facsimile uncorrupted by cotton candy, Fanta grape soda, glasses of tepid Russian tea and that sleek travelers-check camaraderie that leaves one at the end of a day of pavilion-hopping devoid of any viable Nipponalia beyond the fact that the conversion rate of yen to dollars is 357 point something or other.
The Babe’s baseball suit droops there forlornly in the wire-mesh upright casket formed by his onetime clubhouse locker, part of the first exhibit one encounters upon entering the American pavilion. But it is all rather pointedly ignored by the endless queues of Japanese fairgoers. They jostle past this bit of athletic shrinery as if they were trying to cram aboard the Yamate Line’s 5:15 commuter at Tokyo Central Station. The Bambino’s pinstripes, after a time, have taken on a sort of permanent-press sag: a shred of ghost-filled Rawlings flannel, smelling of Sloan’s Liniment and mothballs; the pants hacked off above the knees, perhaps by Miller Huggins’ jackknife. And on the floor of the locker cage lay the Babe’s rusted and mildewing spikes, petrified by the decades and curling up at the toes like a pair of outsized Korean slippers.
This obviously is not the house that Ruth built. Instead, it is the pavilion where nobody seems to even remember who he was.
One cannot fault the Japanese for slighting the shade of Babe Ruth any more than one can cluck at their snubbing of Heinie Groh’s bottle bat, which is racked in, an adjoining stall. After all they had come, most of them, to see the moon rock and the spaceware. But it all seemed somehow sad, and a little pathetic. Not because the Babe had struck out but because the official U.S. pavilionists had been so provincial and out-of-synch with the times as to think that the new-breed Japanese of 1970 (even those who recall that he once visited Tokyo on a barnstorming tour and swatted a home run of Fuji-esque proportions clear out of Jingu Field, near the site of the present Olympic stadium) would approach Ruth’s moldering memorabilia with any sense of reverence, let alone curiosity. It seemed, after my third day at the Osaka grounds, the most maladroit of Expomanship.
Perhaps it can be blamed in part on culture shock or nostalgia; maybe it was the chicken curry at the Malaysia pavilion restaurant that invoked a gastric crisis that George Herman Ruth himself would have been hard put to match. But Expo-ed out completely, I bought six sour tangerines for 200 yen and caught the 9:18 sleeper at Shin-Osaka station. Wedging my ungainly gaijin body into a middle berth I more or less settled in for the 15-hour ride to the seaport of Kagoshima at the southern prong of Kyushu. There I was to catch a coastal steamer – or was it one of those hijack-prone excursion ferries? – to the island of Suwanose, part of the Satsunan Archipleago which forms the Paleolithic stepping-stone pathway from the Japanese motherland to the Ryukyus and Formosa beyond.
I knew Suwanose (sometimes called Yake-jima, the Burning Island, because of the smoking volcano that forms its highest cusp) only as the former hideaway of Allen Ginsberg, the poet-ecologist Gary Snyder – who married his Japanese wife there and writes lovingly of the island in his book, Earth House Hold – and a group of Japanese bards and wanderers from the Harijan “Bum Academy” in Tokyo’s bohemian Shinjuku quarter.
But the Hare Krishna chanters on the Ginza (yes, they are there, too) had informed me the week before that the island is a new experiment in Anglo-Japanese communal living. “They are trying to get it on where Ken Kesey and his gang at the Farm in Oregon failed,” one of the Krishnas, a tonsured New Jersey youth in saffron robe and thongs, said. “It’s a scene you’ve got to make.”
Feeling very Dharma-ish about it all and even briefly conjuring the ghosts of Japhy Ryder and Jack Kerouac, I had set out for Suwanose (the detour at Expo had been strictly impromptu) with what my painted guru would call an “open head.”
But permitting myself a bit of purely Western indulgence I had, somewhere along the New Tokaido southward, muttered a tiny private prayer: something hopeful to the effect that the Spirit of Expos however that may be defined, had not preceded me to the Burning Island.
Past huddled Hiroshima in the dawn (a schedule recommended for the American conscience; in the stern light of noon the sense of guilt is sharper) with the sandpaper voices of Yamaguchi farmwomen, themselves returning from the wonders of the new Osaka, rasping me awake. The reek of Midori cigarette smoke from the bunk above. The cry of a hungry baby, nubbling for a breast. The land, low and green and lonering in a timeless haze, blurring by outside the train curtain. The gray-smocked vendor girls hawking peach nectar, osembe rice crackers, dried squid, summer oranges and cans of Suntory “Expo ’70” beer. The Sony junior executive in the seat opposite, wearing a Madison Avenue suit and modishly long hair, expectorates and grinds the spittle into the floor with the heel of a handmade shoe. I almost admire the gesture. At least he has not sold out completely to the life style of the Economic Miracle.
Stunted pines and choreographed groves of bamboo. The Japanese have broken the spine of Nature and produced a twisted, tormented mutant to take her place.
The smog-cap of Nagoya. Children in yellow visors jerking through calisthenics in a dust-blown schoolyard. Plumpish middle-school girls in black serge bloomers swatting a volleyball. A factory worker, who would rather play ball than eat, shags flies on his lunch break, Japan is one big outdoor gym.
Far back too, Kyoto. Culture, temples cloistered and secretive in yet more smog. Coca-Cola, the national beverage of the new Japan. A rag picker standing beside his shack, which is made of two jumbo refrigerator cartons, urinating in the clods of his front yard.
Haiku vignettes in the Bashō gloaming. I realized then, with that sort of freeze-dried expertise one acquires so effortlessly in the Orient (simply add water, or instant insight, and stir) that there is really no new or old Japan. There is only Japan. The other locales are mythic nether-regions, which exist only in the minds of the super economists and the Lafcadio Hearn sentimentalists. But the traveler from abroad who seeks any or all of the three domains – even in this year of the World Exposition – is much more than an added foreign attraction. He is a Martian.
A seasick trip to the bucketing dining car. Forks and chopsticks pause in mid-motion. The Martian sits down, nearly upending the tiny table, and orders his breakfast. Tomato juice, toast, coffee, oatmeal, ham and eggs; all for about a dollar, 350 yen. Then, the inevitable. The sidling Japanese businessman, anxious to practice his conversational English. I brace, trying to anticipate the stock queries: “How you like Japan?” “How long you stay Japan?” “Where you from in America?” “How you think about Vietnam?”
But he pulled a Carl Hubbell and threw me a doozy of a screwball. “Did you see,” he asked, “the uniform of Babe Ruth at Expo?”
Kagoshima. A flat and dingy port, Abilene by the sea. The stationmaster studies my blue Ogawa tent rucksack and Levi jacket. “Suwanose?” he asks incredulously as I sound him out about sailing schedules. “Many heepies there. Only three girls on the island. They not allow pictures to be taken. You cannot bring camera.”
Trudging down mystery-streets toward the waterfront, the sweat lines forming on my shirt under the straps of the rucksack. Stopping at a small department store to buy pro visions, a gift-offering for my hosts on Suwanose: cheese, crackers, chocolate, brown rice and Great Wall Brand strawberry jam, made appropriately in Red China.
At the shipping office, bad news. The Toshima Maru, the freighter which calls at Suwanose on irregular intervals during the summer, had not yet begun her seasonal run, It would be at least three weeks before she would anchor off the reef of the Burning Island. But there at the quayside, ready to sail for Naze – the capital of Amami Oshima – lay the Amami Maru, the Toshima’s sister ship.
Up the gangplank, poke in hand, at 4:30. The television in the ship’s lounge features the sumo championships from Tokyo. The announcer’s voice, kabuki-ish and shrill as the 300-pound, percheron-thighed behemoths in inner tube jockstraps tug and strain with top-knotted fury. Where are you, Gorgeous George, now that we need you?
Deep into the occult waters of the Straits of Osumi. Ghost islands, conical and strange, seem to pop out of the Aquarian-murk. Bonito gambol in our argent wake. The Satsunan Sea roughens, the sea that was once the haunt of Chinese and Ryukyuan pirates. But the Amami Maru, a seaworthy little bulldog of 1,050 tons built by Mitsubishi in 1968, rides it out casually. The sea fall twilight purple, hazing to green and then to grayish night-ebb.
We throb south, away from the shoulder of the comforting Kyushu landmass. Ahead, toward Okinawa, Amami Oshima. The island of the deadly habu snake and once the exile of Saigo Takamori, the burly poet-samurai who led an abortive uprising against the Meiji emperor. That worthy’s enlightened regime, he felt, was far too westernized. Being the lone foreigner aboard the Amami Maru, I was beginning to feel the same way about myself…
Traveling with the Japanese people, the ordinary people, tells one perhaps more about their attitudes and philosophy than recourse to endless expatriate bull sessions or the spate of books about the “Miracle Japan” now flooding the stalls on both sides of the Pacific.
First of all, the foreigner traveler learns quickly that it is almost impossible to make eye contact with the Japanese he encounters at large. Mostly, they simply ignore the gaijin. The reason is simple: they really are not all that interested. Being ignored, pointedly, by ten million people during an afternoon on the Ginza for example can be a very ago-shattering experience for a foreigner. The Japanese – if one may be allowed an ethnic generalization – are among the world’s most egocentric people. As Richard Halloran pointed out in his perceptive book, “Japan: Images and Realities,” they adopt the current fade of the time, assimilate the technocratic acumen of the West that will facilitate their amazing economic renaissance, and then simply become – under the urbane surface –even more Japanese.
After a time, the foreigner begins to ignore the Japanese in turn. Eventually a climate of mutual invisibility is built up.
One longtime Japan resident, an American advertising man, summed it up this way: “Look, us round-eyes have been here for a quarter of a century this time. Don’t you think it’s only natural that the Japanese should be tired of us by now?”
Another Old Japan Hand, a Briton, says: “The Japanese thinks he is a superman, Buddha’s Lift to the world. He sees us on the street and we are simply gaijin; he makes no differentiation as to our being British, or German, or American – or Tralfamadorean. It’s driven more than one white devil ’round the bend.”
A GI, in Tokyo on R&R leave: “How can the Japanese men be such slobs – and the women so great?”
And, finally, a Japanese student at Waseda University: “I am tired of hearing America, America. It is time for Japan, Japan…”
“A hotel is a plum tree, abounding in
delicious fruits; its guests are nightingales
sheltering in its branches” – An old ballad
in honor of Japanese hostlery, found in Kyoto
and quoted by V. Blasco-Ibanez.
The Amami Maru docks at Naze on a rainy morning, 13 hours out of Kagoshima. A dizzy night on the deck, drinking sweet-potato shochu brandy with the islanders. The Satsunan dialect, bristling with Chinese and Korean words, practically a foreign language to the people of Tokyo. Three men, returning to their home island of Okino Erabu-shima, the town of Wadomari, dance like besotted trolls, singing songs so ancient that nobody even knows the titles. They use a bo9k of matches from a Kagoshima coffee shop to pluck the jamisen the snakeskin-head mini-banjo, a cousin to the cat skin samisen.
“Come with us to Erabu,” they say. “Much better swimming than on Amami Oshima. And no snake, no habu, on Erabu.” Seated in a circle on the deck, drinking and eating raisins and cheese. The sea-spray sobers us. It is time to stumble below, to our straw mats and tiny leather pillows.
Where is that “climate of mutual invisibility” now, one wonders, Hmmmmm…
Landing at Naze, after a night of sleeping, body to body, on green blankets. Tin pans scattered about for ashtrays – or for the seasick-prone. A glaring light overhead, Beatles music over the P.A., to awaken us at dawn. Naze. Ah, Brigadoon harbor, sentinel rock in the mouth of the bay and the hills beyond, carpeted with pine and bamboo, papaya , sugar cane, early oranges and canopies – acres, really, of purple morning glory. A converted destroyer beside the Amami. On deck a seaman takes vicious swings with a yellow bat; each blow is an imaginary grand-slam home run…of Ruthian dimensions, of course…
Rainbow fish in the green harbor waters. Tiny fishing boats set out for sea, a lone man standing in the stern with ropes, like the shafts of a harness, in each hand guiding the rudder. Fishwives, and husbands, too, shrill for customers. The morning’s catch wiggles on the concrete quay.
A three-minute walk to the Arita ryokan, a tiny inn tucked into a maze-of tinkling streets and nameless alleys, within horn-sound of the harbor. Mama Arita at the door to greet me. A small four-tatami room on the corner, upstairs. Breakfast and dinner thrown in, all for about four dollars American per day. Better not tell the Japan Travel Bureau about this…
Students across the hall, on the island for a weekend fling, chirp and prank until long past midnight. Down the hall a pair of vacationing businessmen play mah-jong till dawn. Click, click – Yo-sho! They argue, unconvincingly.
I am indeed a nightingale in a plum tree. Breakfast: shark paste, kamaboko. Soybean soup, misoshiro. Cold fish. And Mama Arita, catering to my foreign taste, has sent up a bunch of local bananas and a plate of scrambled eggs.
Pictures, from a fan magazine, on the wall. A memento of a former guest, a previous sheltering bird of the storm. Henry Miller and Hoki Tokuda. Miller, Tibetan-eyed and wise; his Japanese wife young and beautiful and tough. John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He lifting her over a snow bank in Copenhagen. An ill omen for both couples, now separated?…
A taxi ride across the island to the village of Kominato. Drop-offs of a hundred meters and more. The taxi driver even more kamikaze than his brothers in Tokyo. “I would be afraid to drive a cab there,” he says, zooming around a hairpin turn at full speed. The road is one vast chuckhole, interspersed only occasionally by short stretches of gravel.
Kominato. The East China Sea, the Pacific on the other side of the cornucopia-shaped island. A beach to put Waikiki to shame. One swims in the paradise-water, blue-green and unpolluted by oil slick or time, in the buff. Who’s to care or worry? In the Garden of Eden, is not Heaven on Earth a reality rather than a mere concept?
Later, basking in the sun, wearing a bathing suit now. The children of the village approach. They frolic and acrobat in the sand, turning cartwheels and somersaults. They, the court jesters, and I the king. Or was it the other way around? They bring notebooks, asking me to sign. “Hello,” they say, their eyes large and a little fearful. They do not see strange Americans every day. I sign their books and they sign mine. The Hello Children of Kominato. Where will they go? What will their world be like?
I leave, walking up the valley toward the mountains, following a river that begins in a flower-dappled spring high in the jungle crags. The children tag behind, trailing me doggedly in a group. “Darrell, come here,” they call. Their voices sweet and thin in the gloaming-air. “Darrell, come here.” All the English they know, or need.
I turn and wave, but I do not go back. Shane, the longhaired American, must go to find his rain tree, his own island in the sun, his own vision of that karmic ethereality called…Japan.
Received in New York on July 1, 1970.
©1970 Darrell Houston
Darrell Houston is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This article may be published with credit to Darrell Houston, the Post-Intelligencer, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
