Wrong About Japan (6 page)

But had we come to Japan to look at such mundane appliances? In search of stronger stuff, we entered a labyrinth of lanes, arcades where it was not always clear where one business ended and another began. Like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo looking for spare parts on the planet Xenon, we browsed in dusty little shops selling mammoth radio valves, tiny black items identified only by the number on the box and sometimes by a small yellow stripe like a vein of candy sandwiched in a block of licorice.

There was plenty of noise, but nothing like the barrage that awaited us in Sega World: five floors devoted to terrifying arcade games where kids with guns shoot men like fish in a bucket. This was before Iraq made the doubling of war and fantasy so ominous. But war had been much on my mind before we came to Japan, and I was searching in every cultural artifact for echoes of the atomic bomb, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, the American occupation, the manner in which a proud and isolated society had waged war, suffered war, emerged from war.

In New York, Charley had broken his NO MUSEUMS rule to visit the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a show called
My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation
. There we encountered the work of Kenji Yanobe, sculptures created on a carlike scale. According to the catalogue: “Yanobe’s playful atomic cars are a cross between robots and Volkswagen Beetles, but deal with the horrific idea of surviving a nuclear holocaust. Bold colors and shiny surfaces display Geiger counters, flashing lights, radiation penetration counters, heating stems, and disposals. Both science fiction and cartoon, the cars encapsulate their drivers and provide for their survival.” The cars are cute and funny, but also terrifying and claustrophobic. You cannot look at them without thinking of both the poisoning of
the earth and the isolation of the individual in urban postindustrial society.

To my mind, there was a distinct parallel between Yanobe’s work and the Mobile Suit Gun-dam anime that, thanks to Charley, I was already familiar with. Originally televised in 1979, this phenomenon features giant robots, popularly known as Mobile Suits, “piloted” by young soldiers in the throes of an intergalactic war. Before leaving New York I had already begun a correspondence with Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gundam’s creator, with whom I brashly shared many of my opinions: “It is immediately obvious that one of the emotionally satisfying aspects of Gundam is the way in which children pilot these huge and powerful mechanical warriors. Therefore they can deliver to children what many other successful children’s books and films have done—feelings of power.

“But the feelings that are produced in your work are far more complex. I think of the way in which individuals are cut off from society, isolated within these suits. Do these readings of the imagery make any sense to you?

“Naturally, I think of children and trauma of war, of their inherent powerlessness. One then can see these suits as offering a protection that is never available in the horrors of real-life war.

“I look at the sculpture of Kenji Yanobe and see individuals enclosed within postapocalyptic survival vehicles. I wonder if you know Mr. Yanobe’s work and if you feel any connection with it? You were both children when the atomic bombs were dropped, when Tokyo was firebombed. Could you comment on this?”

By the time Charley and I got to Japan, I was also coming to see the Mobile Suits as a metaphor for a curiously elusive personality type called an
otaku
. An otaku is often described as someone who lives alone in a small room and connects with the world only via computer. Of course, this touched on my own concerns about my son and the cell phone, my son and the ticket machines, my son and the Destructor Simulator, please insert two tokens.

As it happens, the first time Charley and I encountered the term was in the glossary of the show at the Brooklyn Museum: “Otaku: an anime fan. The term literally means ‘you’ in a very formal sense. In Japan, it has come to mean people who are obsessed with something to the point where they have few personal relationships. The nature of the obsession can be anything from anime to computers. In Japan otaku has the same negative connotation as nerd. In America, however, it refers specifically to hardcore anime fans, without any negative connotations.”

Yet no definition of otaku was ever completely satisfying and by the time we left Japan, I had asked perhaps twenty people to define it for me; few of them agreed, and some answers were more disturbing than others.

This is an excellent example of how perplexing Japanese culture can be, and a reminder of why Kosei Ono’s warning is worth heeding. Better to know nothing than a little, for the more you try to pin down
otaku
, the more wriggly it gets. Lawrence Eng, the author of
The Politics of Otaku
, comments that
otaku
means, literally “your house,” and more generally is a distant, formal way of saying “you.” Later he suggests the term originated amongst the collectors of animation pictures. “The basic idea,” he writes, “is that the word is used to explicitly indicate detachedness from who you are speaking to. For example, a dedicated and experienced collector of eels [the transparent plastic sheets on which animators paint] will have a vast network of connections to aid in his or her search for rare eels.” These contacts would be at once familiar and far from intimate.

But as so often is the case in the Japanese language, just when you think you may almost understand a word, hopeless complications destroy it anew. In the late eighties a man named Tsutomu Miyazaki kidnapped and murdered four little girls
and the police found his apartment crammed with anime and manga and videos, some of them pornographic. From this time the word
otaku
became associated with sociopaths, serial killers.

In an article written with his colleague Timothy Blum, my New York friend the sculptor Jon Kessler complicates it further:
“Otaku
are the generations of kids raised to memorize volumes of context-less information for university entrance exams. Somewhere a glitch occurred and they are stuck in information mode, hoarding and exchanging information about the seemingly useless obsessions of
otaku
, such as the bra sizes of idols, to information about Levi’s 501 jeans, as well as secrets about their mischievous break-ins to data-banks….
Otakus
are socially inept information junkies who rarely leave their homes, preferring to interface with the world via data-banks, modems and faxes.”

And what about my own dear son? Well, back in Sega World his face was washed by flashing red lights as he let off another twenty rounds, fighting street to street.

“Enough,” I said. “Let’s go.”

But he was stuck to the machine. “One more, please.”

“No. You need to rest. You’ve got Kabuki tomorrow.”

“No, you promised! No Real Japan!”

“This is not the real Japan. This is something else.”

“What is it then? You don’t know,” said Charley desperately. He nodded to Takashi who, it seemed, had been standing behind me all this time. “Ask him.”

“Can I help you, Carey-san?”

“I was trying to explain to Charley about Kabuki.”

“Ah,” he said, “yes, my grandmother likes Kabuki.”

Later I understood: he was dying of embarrassment for my son, but at the time I could not read the curious rictus on the Gundam pilot’s face.

4.

Charley squirmed and whined. He had no idea what Kabuki was, only that he’d hate it, and it was not only Kabuki that produced this visceral response but the whiff of culture in any form. To see his face that night in our hotel room, you would’ve thought I was
commanding him to drink molten lead. In both New York and London, he had happily attended shows of contemporary Japanese art, and we’d found ourselves, amazingly in agreement about what we liked. But Kabuki was in another category and that it meant “crooked” or “deviant” failed to calm him down.

“Last night,” he said, “you told me it meant the song-and-dance art.”

“Well, that’s another meaning.”

“Dad, you don’t really know. Stop pretending that you do.”

“Okay but we’re still going. Now go to sleep.”

He woke me at 3 a.m., pleading to be spared, even offering to do chores at home to pay me back for the tickets.

In the spooky light from the street I could see his contorted face, the Gundam figures standing guard all around the room, the glowing face of the cell phone.

“Kabuki,” I said, “is like the manga of its time.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Then go to sleep.”

There was so much more I might have said, but it was pointless. It certainly wouldn’t have helped to quote to him from Alex Kerr’s sad and celebratory book,
Lost Japan
, where, in his chapter on Kabuki, he
writes: “Focus on the ‘instant’ is characteristic of Japanese culture as a whole. In Chinese poetry, the poet’s imagination might begin with flowers and rivers, and then suddenly leap up into the Nine Heavens to ride a dragon to Mt. K’un-lun and frolic with the immortals. Japanese haiku focus on the mundane moment, as in Bashō’s well-known poem: The old pond, a frog leaps in, the sound of water.”

You can see this as a frame from a manga.

And there are other connections and parallels. In Kabuki, he writes, “There might be a scene where two people are casually talking; then, from some detail in the conversation, the characters suddenly comprehend each other’s true feelings. In that instant, action stops, actors freeze, and from stage left wooden clappers go
battari
! The two characters resume speaking as though nothing has happened; however, in the instant of that
battari
!, everything has changed. While most forms of theater try to preserve a narrative continuity, Kabuki focuses around such crucial instants of stop and start, start and stop.”

Just like manga!

But none of these amazing insights would ease the anguish of my son, who, at one o’clock the following afternoon, made his way through the crowd of straight-backed grandmothers, many of them dressed formally in kimonos. He was a miserable
American boy with leather bands around his wrist and a homemade T-shirt that read
GEORGE BUSH, NOT MY PRESIDENT
. He entered the auditorium of the famous Kabukiza as cheerfully as Gonpachi, a character in one of the plays we were about to see, was delivered to his own execution.

“Sit up.”

“No.”

And he did not yet know the performance would be four hours long! As he said to me later, “How could you do that to me?”

Yes, I’d broken my promise about the Real Japan. But I’d foolishly hoped he might somehow become interested in an art form which once had been as disreputable as manga was today. After all, Kabuki was considered so deviant that it had been banished up the river to Yoshiwara, although the actual nature of the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens was not something I wished to discuss with my son in any detail.

“There’s a fighting scene,” I said. “With ladders.”

“Great.”

Bored and restless, the poor boy endured play after play, expecting each one to be the last. And while I could not possibly admit it to him, I was not always fully engaged either. Yet there was one play,
Sono Kouta Yume mo Yoshiwara
, we both liked, and even though Charley now insists all this is entirely my own invention, I remember how he stilled as his attention was seized.

Gonpachi is brought to the execution site on horseback, then pulled off the horse. A severe official dolefully recites the details of his crimes before asking him if there is any last statement he wishes to make. This being Kabuki, Gonpachi naturally wishes to speak, launching into a long and passionate confession. Born into a good samurai family he had committed a murder in a moment of passion and fled to Edo. Then, in Yoshiwara, he fell in love with a geisha. Now, everyone understands that such affairs are an expensive business, so he had fallen into debt and from there to robbery.

He now repents and asks everyone to pray for his soul.

The geisha arrives as the speech ends, having slipped away from Yoshiwara to say good-bye. Beautiful, pitiful, she begs the officials to let her share a drink of water with her lover, and one of them relents. Only then does the geisha reveal that she has a knife. My foreigner’s heart leaps with hope when she cuts the ropes binding Gonpachi, but then the guards rush in. Gonpachi struggles to defend himself, warding off the guards’ staves in such a way that
they make a cross, an echo of the crucifix on which he is condemned to die.