Video Night in Kathmandu (53 page)

That the league’s few
gaijin
so effortlessly dominated the game was a source of abiding unease for the Japanese. The imported stars could, to be sure, be shown off as adornments of the Japanese game; but they were also unpleasant reminders of the apparent superiority of the American game. Thus the Japanese found themselves painfully divided. On the one hand, they did not like
gaijin;
on the other, they did not like losers (incredibly, almost one fan in every two across the country supports the Yomiuri Giants, the powerhouse that once won nine pennants in a row).

In the end, then, the Japanese had tried to unriddle the knot with still more regulations, many of them unwritten. The Giants had long made a point of fielding no foreigners at all. For years, no foreigner appeared on the cover of
Baseball
magazine. And to this day, only two
gaijin
are allowed on every team (even in the All-Star Game, where, by rights, five or six probably deserve to qualify). Sometimes, however, even rules cannot bend Nature, and the Japanese were driven to acts of quiet desperation. At the end of the ’85 season, Bass came into Tokyo needing only one more home run to tie the all-time single-season record, set by the legendary Oh in his miracle season of 1964. The American’s opponents were the Giants, managed by Oh. The first time Bass came up to the plate, he was intentionally walked. The second time, he was walked again. And the third time too. And yet again the fourth. And four times the next game too. No matter that the play was foul; by taking the bat out of Bass’s hands, the Giants successfully ensured that the record remained safely in Oh’s thoroughly Japanese hands (that Oh was in fact half-Chinese was a fact usually overlooked). “It’s a funny situation when a foreigner is the ace pitcher of the team or the home-run leader,” Whiting quotes the League Commissioner as declaring. “Foreigners, at best, should be by-players to bolster Japanese teams.”

Foreign players, then, were simultaneously given the red carpet and the cold shoulder. The Japanese flocked to see Bass hit, and he was once rewarded for his skills with a year’s supply of rice; yet nobody wanted him to beat Oh’s record. Within a few days of his arrival, Horner had become a kind of folk hero, and as three TV stations organized “Horner Corner” updates, while a soft drink company asked him to endorse a vegetable drink called “Toughman,” many Japanese spoke fretfully of a dangerous “Horner Syndrome.” Yet as I looked down on Cromartie doffing his cap in center field, as the Korakuen crowd cheered his every move (“Cro mar tei! Cro mar tei!”), and raising his glove to acknowledge their applause after his catching of a routine fly ball, he struck me as a slightly lonely and bewildered figure.

Off the field, many
gaijin
found themselves in even more of a gilded cage. Horner, for example, was paid $1.3 million for one year, more than 20 Japanese players might hope to earn, in addition to a $500,000 bonus just for signing; all his living expenses were paid for him, and he and his family were set up in a three-bedroom “mansion” apartment. Many others were given personal interpreters, and chauffeurs to drive them to each game. But there they had to practice—often for six hours each day—with teammates who could not speak their language and did not share their interests. And though they might be feted—waiters at restaurants would often give them free meals, for example—they were also fated never to be accepted as part of Japan. “You read a lot of books,” said Bass in describing his life in Japan. “You can’t talk to anyone. You’ve got nothing to do but sit here and think.” In coming to Japan, the typical American had traded in a cozy mediocrity for the most alienating kind of success.

THE CONTRADICTIONS
that haunted Japan’s uneasy importing of baseball were very similar, I thought, to those that shadowed all the goods and techniques that it had brought over from the West. For even as the Japanese omnivorously cannibalized the world outside, they never appeared to defer to it, or to worry that Japanese integrity might be compromised by the feverish importation. Their willy-nilly consumption of foreign goods seemed less, in fact, an act of homage than a way of making their
own land a composite of all that was best in the world. Again, the logic was flawless: if Japan had everything good from the West, together with all its own homegrown virtues, how could anyone surpass it?

And again, I thought, Tokyo Disneyland was eloquent. For though it was based, down to the last detail, upon its American counterpart, its effect was to serve as a shrine to Japan’s self-validating beliefs, a monument to the motherland. Thus it fed off borrowed images from the Wild West, but domesticated them with its own urban cowboys. It took what is known in American Disneylands as Main Street, and turned it into the World Bazaar, where all the products and all the possibilities of all the continents in the world are brought together in one synthetic complex that was wholly Japanese. In the Meet the World pavilion—a ride not to be found in American Disneylands—a sagacious crane guides a little boy and his kid sister around what is not only a history of Japan but also a defense of the Japanese way. The bird points out a group of cavemen seated around a campfire. “They have learned,” pronounces the Feathered One, “the importance of banding together to survive.” Then it goes on to introduce the children to a samurai. “At least,” boasts the warrior, “we never became a colony.” And in the Magic Journeys ride—again peculiar to Tokyo Disneyland—a whirlwind trip across all five continents culminates, dramatically, in a return to “our beloved Japan, where our heart always remains.”

Some of that same spirit could be found among Japanese in the United States. When Chinese or Indian or Korean or Vietnamese immigrants move to the Promised Land, they generally lose no time at all in assimilating themselves; they set up shops and set about working, often very hard, in the confident hope that if they work hard enough, they can create a new life for themselves in the land of opportunity, fashion a fresh American destiny. Many Japanese in America, however, were much less conspicuous, and much less American. One third of the Japanese in New York, according to a poll, never read an American periodical; around a half admitted (or boasted?) that they had no American friends at all.

The Japanese abroad, indeed, whether tourist or expat, often reminded one less of sightseers than of undercover spies, assiduously
observing, and even mastering, the ways of an alien land, in order to bring home new assets to the motherland. Instead of mingling with the locals, the Japanese famously traveled in groups (confirming many a Western stereotype, in part perhaps because a stereotype is what they aspire to) and sequestered themselves in specifically Japanese base camps: in Manhattan, they generally forswore the Rainbow Room or the roadside hot-dog stand in favor of transplanted Japanese piano bars, and on their sex tours, salarymen did not hit the streets along with German or Australian or American males, but stayed in special Japanese hotels appointed with Japanese waiters and Japanese-seeming girls. Even their furious clicking away with cameras could sometimes seem a way of capturing a foreign place only in order to take it back home. The Japanese, as John David Morley notes, are unrivaled in their collection of
omiyage
, or souvenirs. Yet as a Japanese friend explains to Morley, “We take something back home less as a reminder of the place where it was bought than as proof we’d been thinking of home at the place we bought it.”

In its relations to the world at large, then, Japan reminded me, in the end, of a tribal conqueror who dons the armor, or even eats the heart, of a defeated opponent, so that his enemy’s strength will become his own. Oh’s spiritual breakthrough had come, I recalled, when his teacher took him to another
sensei
for an explanation of the central Kabuki principle of
ma
, “the space and/or time in between.” “Make the opponent yours,” declared the sage. “Absorb and incorporate his thinking as your own. Become one with him so you know him perfectly and can be one step ahead of his every movement.” The central notion of
ki
, or “spirit power,” like the guiding principle of judo, was similarly angled: “Make use of an opponent’s strength and yours will be doubled.”

IN RECENT YEARS
of course, this strategy had met with astonishing success; Japan had made good, to a remarkable degree, on its determination to beat the West at its own game, be it baseball or technology or trade. While mastering nearly every Western technique, the Japanese had overtaken nearly every Western nation. On the day that I left New York for Tokyo, the cover story of
The New York Times Magazine
was a long article by
Theodore H. White describing the Japanese surrender in 1945, and discussing the country’s almost militaristic drive for success in the intervening forty years. Japan, White implied, had exacted revenge for its defeat in the war by trouncing the West in the trade war. Though America had invented the radio and the black-and-white TV, he noted, it now imported both products from Japan, together with nearly all its VCRs, calculators, watches and even pianos. “Perhaps we did not win the war,” he wrote, with some rancor. “Perhaps the Japanese, unknown even to them, were the winners.”

A former baseball reporter from Minneapolis made the same point to me, more casually, after attending a game in Koshien. “Jesus!” he marveled. “They’ve out-Americaned America.”

Yet still the Japanese seemed as unready to accept victory as defeat, as anxious as ever, and as serene. This came home to me most hauntingly when I went to Hiroshima on the fortieth anniversary of the day the American bomb had dropped from the heavens. I arrived at the Peace Park expecting to find the historic occasion marked by huge crowds, lobby groups, placards and policemen. There was none of that. The moment was observed with quintessential Japanese delicacy: it was a day of resounding quietness.

In the great open space of the park, little girls in bonnets were bending down to feed pigeons. Old men in T-shirts that said “Peace” staggered, foot by twisted foot, toward the shrine. In the shade, a schoolgirl sat under her mother’s parasol, sketching the outline of the famous dome whose skeleton was all that remained after the bombing. Off to one side, in a quiet grove, an old lady who had survived the attack stood before a circle of hushed listeners, describing all that she had experienced. And everywhere, heaped on the Children’s Peace Monument, gathered in boxes, fluttering across the grass, were hundreds upon hundreds of rainbowed banners plaited together in the shape of a many-colored crane. Anyone who tied 1,000 of these streamers together, the Japanese believed, was assured of a long life. The paper that now blanketed the park recalled a little girl who had survived the bombing and managed to tie together 960 colored banners, and then had died.

As the day wore on, all the soft moments began to gather weight, and their pathos started to build. Six old women held up
sticks of incense before a Buddhist cenotaph, to be joined by a pudgy teenage monk in a steady, mournful keening. And in a golden glade at twilight, in a circle of trees spangled by the sun, thirty anti-nuclear protesters put their arms around each other’s shoulders and sang, slowly and with feeling, “We Shall Overcome.”

That night, hundreds upon hundreds of candlelit paper lanterns—golden and red and green and white—were sent down the Honkawa River, in memory of the departed. Along the riverbank, the faces of children, lit up by the flickering candles, looked hollow and unearthly. Nothing was said as the lanterns continued their silent, leisurely flow. For more than an hour they drifted downriver, with the gentleness of time or reminiscence. Then, in silence, they sailed under a bridge and away into the dark.

Like much else I had seen in Japan, the occasion was graced, almost transfigured, by a beauty that left the heart quite still.

Yet the surfaces that surrounded me were as busy and incongruous as ever. Inside the Peace Museum, rows of stark black-and-white photos chronicled, unblinkingly, the inexpressible horror of the bomb: long, terrible processions of the lame and dying through gutted streets, whole neighborhoods wiped from the earth, ghastly disfigurements tearing skins apart, bodies twisted in the last convulsions of protracted deaths. The Japanese who inspected these harrowing documents wore T-shirts that said “No. 1 American Beer,” “Carolina Western Express” and “Cherry ice-cube steak.” Others were emblazoned with “Billy Club” and “Carrot Club” and “Baseball Club.” One advertised “U.S.A. Soul: Nostalgic Train.”

By then, I had grown familiar with the willful brightness of Japanese surfaces, the mass-produced optimism of a culture awash in sugary tunes that sold “Sunny California” cars and “Sunshine Heart” coolers, consumed “Sweet Kiss” candies and tuned TV sets to
The Nice Morning Show.
By then too, I knew that the Japanese had followed, to perfection, Arnold’s famous maxim that “the pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of sweetness and light.” But still I could not reconcile the memory of 200,000 lives destroyed in an instant with T-shirts that said “Fine Day” and “Good Time.” The Japanese were not just putting the best face on things, they were putting an ideal face on them, as if to
deny themselves, even in the face of their deepest sorrow, a human response, which could only be a flawed response. “Have a nice day,” they seemed to sing in unison as they trotted toward Apocalypse.

Modern Japan had in a sense been created by the most advanced of all scientific achievements, the Bomb, that monster marvel that revealed, in a terrible flash, how far progress can push us backwards and how much technology may outstrip vision. In that single nightmare moment, the full breadth of human possibility had been suddenly lit up, and it was a prospect that brought as much horror as awe. Begotten in that double-edged instant, modern Japan had now become almost a model of that uplifting and unsettling ambiguity. It had revealed, exhilaratingly, how much humanity can achieve—but it had done so, perhaps, at the expense of humanity. It had shown how close perfection could be, but also how terribly costly. It had extended sophistication to the limit, but also to the breaking point. And whenever I looked at Japan, I could not help but think of the haiku of the Zen poet Issa: “Closer, closer to paradise. How cold!” And I could not help but wonder whether the sticking-out nails that were being so efficiently hammered down were, in fact, being driven into perfect, look-alike coffins.