Wrong About Japan (11 page)

He was just as adept at lunch and dinner with publishers and agents, and soon he was crossing the road to Fujio Takahashi’s sushi bar, where our beaming host spoiled him rotten with little tidbits of God
knows what while I pushed myself to my gastronomic limit, spooning up the sea urchin that tasted, of course, nothing like the
uni
at Mr. Sushi, more like—as my son informed me—live brain soup. We spurned the McDonald’s down on Drunk Street, and I was proud of how my adventurous son devoured everything Mr. Takahashi placed in front of him. Paternal pride, regrettably brings with it a certain blindness, and I was slow to notice that Charley was eating just a little less each morning. The sour pickled plums were the first to be jettisoned—so what, who cares?—next day the radish was untouched, then that white clammy stuff that doesn’t taste of anything. The cold cooked fish then lost its appeal completely, and finally on the fifth morning, Charley ate a few grains of rice and pushed aside the miso soup.

“This,” he said, “is the breakfast from hell.”

Fair enough. He had given it his best. I asked him what he’d rather have.

“Doughnuts,” he said, “with sprinkles.”

“There are no doughnuts in Japan,” I said. “It is not Japanese food. Besides, we didn’t come all this way to eat doughnuts.”

But he was already thumb-dancing on the cell phone. “For your information,” he announced, his eyes glued to the tiny screen, “Japanese people
eat seven sorts of doughnuts, including American doughnuts. The Japanese word for doughnut is
donatsu
, and there is a Mister Donut across the road from the Asakusa Station.”

“Okay, we can go to Mister Donut.”

“Starbucks is better.”

“Who was that teacher, the one who voted for Ralph Nader? Didn’t he teach you that Starbucks was evil?”

“This is Japanese Starbucks.”

“So?”

He grinned. “We have to experience life.”

Arriving at Starbucks fifteen minutes later, we found Takashi already ensconced in a tall plush red chair that made him—uniformed as he was, and coiffed with such spiked precision—look like a member of the Earth Federation Mobile Suit carrier, White Base.

“You like muffin?” he enquired.
“Miruku?”

The
u
ending suggested an English word recently adopted by the Japanese, but in the case of milk, that made no sense at all, so I asked Takashi was there no other word for milk.

“Oh yes, of course.”

“So why do you call it miruku?”

“Miruku is more modern.”

“But what’s the matter with the other word?”

“Not so hygienic.”

“How is that?”

“The other word is
gyuunyuu.”
He wrinkled his nose. “It means liquid from udder. Miruku is better.”

After days of raw fish and noodles there was something rather comforting about miruku, muffin, cafe latte, and we spread ourselves out, the boys with cell phones and Game Boys and three-inch-thick mangas which you buy at railway stations for a quarter. Charley had also brought an autographed Gun-dam book as a gift for Takashi, who examined Tomino’s signature very closely before turning to me.

“Carey-san, where do you wish to go? Perhaps I can help you?”

When I’d planned the coming evening I had had no idea that Takashi existed, and now I would have given almost anything to include him. “Tonight,” I said, “we have an appointment in Minato-ku.”

“Perhaps there are more interesting places I could take you?”

“Thank you, Takashi, but a friend of mine lives there. We are going to watch My
Neighbor Totoro
in his apartment.” If I thought that mentioning this famous anime would placate him, I was wrong.

“Oh yes,
Totoro
is nice. Children like it very much,” he said, and I suspected that he now wished
to share his animus against
Totoro
with Charley “You have not seen it in New York? When you were younger, Charley?”

“A few times.”

“So why come to Japan to watch what you have already seen?”

“It’s for my dad’s book.”

“We want to understand it in a Japanese way,” I said, “so we are watching it with a Japanese friend.”

Takashi considered this, his head cocked thoughtfully to one side. “Yes,” he said, “foreigners cannot understand us, but if you wish, you could come to my grandmother’s apartment.”

I understood, even at the moment, that he was honouring us by inviting us into his home. I thought also that his grandmother might be thrown into total disarray at having to entertain two gaijin. Just the same, it was with real regret that we declined the invitation.

“If you like,” said Takashi, “you can come to my grandmother’s apartment and I will show you tapes of Mobile Suit Gundam never released in America. I will translate. Perhaps you like Miyazaki, but he is the Japanese Walt Disney. You have your own Walt Disney.” He widened his large eyes, which at that moment seemed as if they’d been drawn by Uncle Walt himself.

Hayao Miyazaki has often been compared to
Walt Disney but neither this nor the fact that Disney owns American rights to most of Miyazaki’s work makes this comparison remotely apt. Miyazaki is a great, not merely successful, artist and
My Neighbor Totoro
a truly masterful film that can sustain frequent viewings, a far more serious accomplishment than, say,
Bambi
or
Snow White
.

“But tomorrow,” I said, “we are going to Mr. Miyazaki’s Ghibli Museum with some other Japanese friends. Perhaps we could get tickets for you. We are hoping we might meet Mr. Miyazaki there.”

“You will never meet Mr. Miyazaki,” Takashi said sternly. “I am very sorry, but whoever has promised this is wrong. All Japanese people know this. I myself prefer the work of Mr. Tomino, who as you probably know worked with Osamu Tezuka on
Astro Boy
and you have already met with him. But Mr. Miyazaki is more difficult to meet than Walt Disney.”

“Takashi,” I said, “Walt Disney is dead.”

“His point,” said Charley.

“I will draw you a map,” said Takashi. “How to come to my grandmother’s. And from his jacket pocket he produced a piece of fine onionskin paper on which he then drew the most exquisite map. “For my grandmother, you should bring a small gift. I will show you where to have it wrapped.”

“But Takashi, we already have an appointment tonight.”

“Just the same,” said the wilful young man, “perhaps the other appointment can be changed.”

Charley has this map still, amongst his collected treasures of Japan. It is very beautiful indeed, but every time I look at it I remember Takashi’s upset face as he left Starbucks that day.

“I think he’s hurt, Dad.”

“What could I do?”

“I know.”

“We have to see Kenji.”

“I know.”

Across the street, the first tourists of the day were entering the arcade of food, kitsch, commercial opportunism, which would lead them to the very beautiful reconstructed temple of Sensoji. Soon, on the way to visit the temple, we would buy a tiny plastic statue of a Mobile Suit, but for now we stayed in Starbucks, guilty and miserable.

9.

“All I want,” I had said to Kenji, “is to watch a video with you.” What I had in mind was to freeze Miyazaki’s images at will and ask him questions about anything I didn’t understand.

Kenji is a busy architect with a Tokyo practice,
and I really had no right to make such a request. Kenji was gracious and too generous to even hint as much, not for a second, but the questions of
where
and
how
to watch this video were not easily answered. Our ryokan would have no VCR, so that was out. Kenji was living at that time with his parents. To see the video there, I assumed, would have raised more problems than a foreigner could begin to imagine.

AGGHHHH, as they say in manga.

“Perhaps,” Kenji said, “we could watch it in my office,” but I could see he was worried about this too, possibly because this venue might appear less hospitable than he would like.

In the end, however, this is exactly where we found ourselves, although “office” hardly describes a space so conspicuously empty of anything that would identify itself as such. I don’t mean to suggest that it was minimalist, only that it was unusually large and there was nothing much in it. Was there a mystery here? I seriously doubt it, although this is how it is with travelling—the simplest things take on an air of great inscrutability and so many questions arise, only to be half born and then lost as they are bumped aside by others. The most mundane events take on the character of deep secrets.

I remember being seated next to a pugnacious
New York celebrity at dinner. When I asked him a question, he glowered at me and said, “Are you interviewing me?”

“You better hope not,” I told him. “I’m a terrible reporter.”

I have not one note on the location of Kenji’s office. I have a vague memory of expensive-looking apartment houses and a paucity of shops. Inside, floating on a beige or off-white carpet was a sofa, a chair, a VCR and monitor.

I expected Charley to be pining for his friend Takashi, but Kenji had provided the most interesting tourist experience of all: exotic junk food in plastic bags. There were three different sorts of junk food but when, months later, I asked Charley what he had eaten, only one item had stuck in his mind. “It was like a cylinder,” he said, “and it was sort of crunchy and there was, whatchamacallit, fine brown sugar so it was really sweet. It tasted sort of weird, but it was very good.”

Thus set up, with a very large bottle of Coca-Cola between us, we began to watch one of the masterpieces of Japanese animation.

Totoro
finally resolves itself as a charming hymn to animism, a world of ghosts and spirits, in particular the spirit of the forest. It does this by telling the story of two young girls who, with their father, move
to an old-fashioned house in the country while their mother is in hospital. Like all of Miyazaki’s work, the film exhibits the most pleasurably detailed physical world, landscape in all its complexity, and architecture so keenly observed that one immediately recognises it was drawn from life. This is something far richer and more sophisticated than the flat, cute world of Disney.

Miyazaki’s production company is Ghibli (from which
Grave of the Fireflies
also emerged) and in the Ghibli Museum you can flip through huge volumes of location photographs and see the director’s sketches pinned to the wall and lying loosely on the tables, as casually as in an artist’s untidy office. Part of Miyazaki’s magic is the way he introduces his cartoon characters—exaggerated in away that the landscapes and architecture are not—into this keenly examined real world. This is not to suggest that the depictions of the human figures are less truthful or detailed. Indeed, one of the film’s great pleasures is the very compelling characterisation, and the joy this can stir in the viewer’s heart.

The film begins with father and daughters travelling in a small van, their possessions strapped down onto its roof. The girls are full of wonder. They pass a capped man riding a bicycle across a bridge. “Mei!” calls the ten-year-old to her four-year-old
sister. “Hide, Mei.” Then, a moment later, she says, “It’s okay, it’s not a policeman.”

So what does this mean? But the film moves so fast that I didn’t ask Kenji to pause the tape until a moment later, to wonder what their voices revealed about the characters.

“That they are city people,” he said. “That they use a sort of polite pronunciation, and that the father, when he talks to them, is well educated.”

The road passes through fields, over a bridge, turns a corner and now we see how rural this is, nothing like the concreted landscape Alex Kerr attacks so eloquently in
Lost Japan
. The road is unsealed, rutted.

“Stop,” said Kenji.

As Charley and I had already seen the film three times, the image Kenji froze was so familiar that it was hard to imagine what else we might learn from it. The right-hand side of the frame was dominated by the trunks of two huge trees; the gloom of the woods was deep, and one already felt the force of nature. What Kenji now pointed out, what Charley and I had never noticed, was that hidden in the shadows were some steps and a
torn
, a red gate to a shrine, an early hint of the film’s religious reverence for nature. This is so subtle, though, that we’re more likely to notice that the truck is a three-wheeler, that
it splashes through a puddle beside the two big trees, and emerges into a bright landscape of rice paddies. It is part of Miyazaki’s genius that as he celebrates the world of nature, trees, flowers, as the girls look into a stream and exclaim about a fish, he also shows us an empty sake bottle abandoned in the water, and that this is done in some morally neutral way.