Video Night in Kathmandu (48 page)

Yet still each day, the would-be conquerors kept flying into town in droves, old men and young, Arabs and Australians and Americans, on pleasure or a kind of business. Some of them had
come many times before, some still had a first-time innocence. And as the airport bus left Johnny behind and drove past the Garden of Eden, Ltd., they could still be seen in the half-light, poring over crumpled pieces of paper (this is Soi Nana, the sex show is here), asking whether the girls were pretty and clean and safe, and concluding, with somewhat shaky assurance, “I think I’ll relax this evening with a good Thai massage.”

And all night long, in darkened hotel rooms across the length and breadth of the city, from the Sukumvhit Road to Suriwongse, uncertain foreigner and shy-smiling girl kept whispering a ritual litany amidst the mirrors and the shadows.

Do you really like me?

Do I really like you?

Why did you choose me?

How much? How much? How often?

When again? How much? Why not?

You have good heart? You will write to me soon?

Can you? Will I? Should we?

No problem, dah-ling. No problem.

W
HEN FIRST
I set foot in Japan, baseball fever was sweeping the country. Every radio in every cab, so it seemed, crackled with play-by-play commentaries. Blackboards had been set up outside electronics stores to provide passersby with inning-by-inning scoreboards. Huge Sonys in tidy blond-wood cases filled every departure lounge in Narita Airport with faultless images of the game of the moment. And the games and the moments never ended: from dawn to midnight, the screen was filled with one mega-montage of half-familiar images—high fives and hyperactive electronic scoreboards and the swaying of fans to caterwauling organ music, and men circling the bases, half-mythic figures, in many cases, from my boyhood, like Reggie Smith. “Baseball School for Children” was on one network at noon, pro baseball was on another at 7:04 p.m. and the All-Japan National High School Championship was being featured on the government station for nine hours each day.

At 9 a.m. on the opening day of the high school championship,
I settled down before a TV set in a Kyoto coffee shop. Already, Koshien Stadium outside Osaka was filled to capacity with 55,000 fans, screaming their appreciation of opening ceremonies worthy of the Olympic Games. Trumpets sounded from the ramparts. Squadrons of girls trooped onto the field in perfect formation, waving flags. Then the teams themselves marched in, goose-stepping together, hands swinging rigidly by their sides, faces turned bravely in the same direction. The Education Minister came on to throw out the first ball. And for the next two weeks, thousands of people across the nation took time off work or closed down shop in order to follow the High School Championship. This was not, it seemed, a land that believed in half measures.

Baseball, indeed, was everywhere I looked in Japan. In the narrow streets of Tokyo, I saw children working and working to perfect their moves, and along the wide boulevards, businessmen were lined up in batting cages to refine their skills against pitching machines. Soft-drink machines incorporated games of baseball roulette, magazines offered readers in Hiroshima the chance to “meet your Carp.” Half the little boys across the length of the country seemed to be sporting Giants caps, and every day brought seven different newspapers dealing with nothing—nothing—but sports. Earlier in the summer, a colleague told me, he had been on a photographic assignment in a Buddhist monastery outside Kyoto. Gradually, and patiently, he had won the trust of the head monk. Finally, once the sacred rituals were complete, the holy man had been moved to give his visitor, as a token of his appreciation, a poem. Oh, and one more thing, the monk had added: Were Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle still playing in the major leagues?

“Baseball is the All-American sport,” marveled Tina, a horse-trainer from Seattle who was bicycling through Japan. “But they’re more fanatic about it here than they are at home.” So indeed it seemed. In America, baseball was only the national pastime; in Japan, it was a national obsession.

JAPAN’S WHOLE-SCALE, WHOLESALE
importation of things American was by now, of course, a universal cliché: students taking courses in Beginning Incongruity or Irony 101 could revel in a treasure house of easy absurdities and crazy juxtapositions,
the silliness of signs for “Jerry Beans” or “Gland Beef,” the almost willful absurdity of calling a video arcade “We’ll Talk.” In the hip young streets around Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, a department store (called American Blvd.) advertised “Jeans” in one area, “Accessories” in another and, in a third, “American Spirit”; the coffee shops nearby were mostly decorated in the borrowed nostalgia of American Graffiti, aglitter with shiny prom-night music and retro-mythic images of American Dream-in’. Tokyo’s strip joints, where blondes were at a premium, were called U.S.A. or Campus City, and the magazines I saw at newsstands seemed ready to adopt any title at all, so long as it was English. Their contents were entirely Japanese, but their names were
McSister, Miss Hero, Fine, Belove, More, Say, Here, With
and, more alarmingly still,
Lemon;
in the well-endowed Adult section, I saw
Big Man
and
Bachelor, Mr. Dandy
and
Cool Guy
(this last including a bold promise on its cover: “Guaranteed Fully Ellection”).

Only three days after my arrival in Tokyo, I made the statutory pilgrimage to Mount Fuji. The holy peak, as legend dictates, was veiled behind a screen of clouds that sometimes thickened, sometimes parted, sometimes drifted across the top to register the mountain’s changing moods. Up at the Fifth Station, old men with backpacks and walking sticks, waving flags of the Rising Sun, made their final preparations for a long, emotion-filled ascent that could, in many cases, be the high point of a lifetime. And as they did so, the PA system blasted out a deafening version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

“Kyoto?” a member of Bruce Springsteen’s band had pronounced in
Newsweek
the day I arrived in the ancient capital. “It was just like New Jersey.” As it happened, I thought, he was righter than he knew. For the Stars and Stripes was everywhere in Japan: waved by children at baseball games, fluttering from tables in restaurants, haloed by neon in the streets. As I ate my enormous American-style buffet breakfast in an enormous American-style coffee shop, the room was flooded with a piped-in rendition of “Home on the Range.” And when I rang up a hotel a little later, I was put on hold, and once again there floated over the line the anesthetic strains of the same Ail-American tune.

The deer and the antelope played here, all right, and seldom
was heard a discouraging word. But even so, Japan did not really feel like home to me. Not just because the Mister Donut outlets offered powdered green tea shakes. Nor even because “Radio City” was a disco here, and “The Village Voice” a bar (while “Manhattan St. NYC Coffee” carried a message inviting one to “taste the happiness of New York … where the streets speak to you, something good will probably happen”). But mostly because the Japanese seemed to have erected all the postcard-perfect props of American Suburbia, even as they continued, behind them, to enact their own unfathomable rites. Waseda University had painstakingly re-created an entire Shakespearean theater, I read, and then turned it into a Kabuki museum.

And if the first familiar truism about Japan was its conspicuous consumption of all things Western, the second was its inability ever to make those things fully its own. “There are few who would seriously object to exposure to foreign habits and customs through copying,” wrote an eighteen-year-old local high school student, Raymond Wong, in a magazine called
Tokyo
, “but when absorbed only at face value—and without understanding—the purpose is lost and the original intention devalued.” Certainly, the culture often appeared to be perversely determined to forswear the matchless refinement that seemed its birthright in favor of an imported crudity that suited it not at all. The best examples of this, I often thought, were the chic young ladies who marched in battalions through the Tokyo streets in Western styles of elegant blandness. Dressed all alike in clothes that deviated not an inch from the textbook norm, they invariably had Givenchy sewn on their skirts and Gucci on their bags (no trace of Issey Miyake here!). But in their eyes was still a shyness, and in their bearing a reticence, that was only and inalienably Japanese. And it was a revelation to me, on the Night of a Thousand Lanterns in Kyoto, to see the same girls who looked so awkward in their cutoff pants and off-the-shoulder provocations sloughing off their imported styles and suddenly returned to inarguable grace in kimonos that moved with the motions of their flowing bodies.

Yet most of these skin-deep anomalies turned on nothing deeper than the funniness of brand names and fashion statements mistranslated. In Japanese baseball, however, I felt that something more complex must be going on. For in baseball,
Japan had taken over not just an American prop but an American rite, a living drama, a healthy slice of the All-American Pie. More than designer jeans or Burger Kings or the Beach Boys, baseball occupied a special place in the American imagination. It was, in a sense, the story that America told itself about what it could be, its rose-tinted image of an Unfallen garden where all races worked together and heroes walked tall on sunlit patches of green, while families watched the rites of innocence over hot dogs and Cokes on a never-ending summer’s afternoon. Baseball was in many ways a repository for certain cherished aspects of the American Daydream.

What, I wondered, could Japan hope to make of this?

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK
on a Sunday morning, while the broad streets of Tokyo were eerily desolate, armies of pitchers warmed up on mounds throughout the sleeping city.

And late at night, in the narrow-waisted back streets of Asakusa, I saw a woman pitching a shuttlecock at a shaven-headed boy who met it with a sweet baseball swing, over and over and over again, while two men crouched in the dark to watch his form. A snatch of a folk song was caught on the breeze. A full moon rose above the nearby temple.

When Japan’s favorite team, the Yomiuri Giants, came to Osaka to play their traditional rivals, the Hanshin Tigers, I took a Hanshin Express from the Hanshin department store and arrived at the Hanshin Tigers’ Koshien Stadium ninety minutes early—only to learn that I was late. Because of the capacity crowds expected for this regular midseason contest, the gates had been opened six hours before gametime, many fans had actually camped out overnight in order to be sure of tickets. And already, there issued forth from within the stadium a steady, relentless, deafening chant. Da da da, da-da da da.

In the forest of shops that encircled the stadium, it was not hard to find pledges of allegiance. Souvenir booths were selling Tiger towels, Tiger pens, Tiger pins, Tiger fans; they had Tiger rings, Tiger opera glasses, Tiger hats, Tiger alarm clocks; they offered Tiger lighters, Tiger radios, Tiger drums, even Tiger
telephones. The huge central gift shop also displayed Tiger purses, Tiger postcards, Tiger pillboxes and Tiger pillows on which was inscribed: “50th Anniversary established. We must win a VICTORY this year. HOLD OUT.” All these items were being snapped up in huge numbers by fans in flowing black-and-golden Tiger kimonos, gold-and-black happi coats and Tiger caps (complete with tails), many of whom had doubtless given prayers at the Tiger shrine. And all around, from every corner, came the solemn martial strains of the Tiger fight song.

Inside, more than an hour before the first ball, the right-field bleachers were already a swelling sea of black and gold. Flags of the Rising Sun snapped in the breeze, and around them fluttered as many as twenty other banners—Tiger flags, numbered pennants, and even the Stars and Stripes. At the front of each row, white-gloved cheerleaders with megaphones were telling the audience when to clap; in the aisles, men in black coats and golden headbands banged heartily on drums to intensify the noise. Most of the time, the fans sat obediently, without a word, in their uniform rows; as soon as they were given their cue, however, they thrust their yellow bullhorns into the air, in perfect unison, and joined together in a thunderous chant. Da da da, da-da da da.

The fans seemed never to tire of their single, monotonous battle cry, and they raised it, and raised it, and raised it again, whenever instructed to do so. Da da da, da-da da da. And by the time the game was ready to begin, the chorus had turned into a deafening roar. Caught up in the sound and the fury, I felt myself irresistibly stirred. I also felt part of a single huge, and single-minded, body. All of us were one, I thought; teenagers and kindly-looking grandmas and self-possessed young mothers and businessmen, all of us were united in our single common cry. Da da da, da-da da da.

Thus the chanting continued, always on time, always in synch, as regular as the tick-tock of a metronome. Whenever a Tiger came up to the plate, the cheerleaders leaped on top of the dugout, the men pounded their drums and the entire army of black and gold rose to its collective feet, waving its bullhorns and rending the air with a special chant devised for every player. As soon as the Giants came up, the crowd fell absolutely silent. The next inning, up again would rise the surging chants. Then
silence again. The regularity of this push-button rhythm was disrupted only when a Tiger pitcher had two strikes on a Giant; then, the fans would rouse themselves from stillness to let out a low, owl-like hoot that rose like a wave and crashed with a roar to throw off the unfortunate batter.

Not once in the game, though, did a single fan shout out of turn, or give way to a sudden yell or solitary jeer. Nobody screamed at the umpire. Nobody cheered on a favorite player. Nobody threw curses, let alone beer cans, at an enemy player. Never once was there an undignified scramble—or any scramble at all—after a foul ball that landed in the stands (instead, it was calmly picked up and ceremonially handed back to a bowing attendant). Everyone cheered only when everyone else cheered, at the prescribed time in the prescribed way. The roars were followed by silence; the silence was followed by a roar. Here was passion by remote control.