Morning arrived in the form of the generator's low hum; a murmur of voices; the footsteps, discernible somehow, of people at task. I crawled out of my futon (everyone I'd offered it to - elderly women, infant-coddling mothers, even the girl who literally fell asleep on her knees on the bare hardwood - had declined in favor of their own measly blankets) and looked around at a gymnasium filled with sunlight. People were up and about, moving not so much with purpose as with a desire for purpose. A few still reclined where they had slept, or not slept. Many stood in a line that stretched halfway around the room and ran right past the edges of my comforter. In shorts and a t-shirt I folded everything into a less obtrusive pile. The people at whose feet I'd just been sleeping pretended not to notice or care.
At the long tables against the far wall men and women handed out rice balls and tea. My wife was already on line, both our boys hanging onto her. I caught her eye and she motioned for me to join her; food was being carefully rationed out and they might not have given her any extra rice for a husband she'd claim was still asleep in that oversized lump of bedding over there. Although with our own leftover rice from home, along with some crackers and bread and peanut butter and juice, we weren't living on the edge of survival. Not yet.
Overnight the sheltered masses had sat nervously, clutching their blankets and murmuring louder with each successive aftershock.
Some were like angry growls of warning, a couple lasted much too long for anyone's liking. Many amounted to mere shivers, like the earth was shaking off its own unease. Into the wee hours I'd been up, watching with sordid amusement a scene reminiscent of a Monty Python skit: with each new rumble a half dozen bodies would spring from slumber to startled; they'd sit straight up, wide wary eyes peering into the dark corners of the room and beyond; the rumbling would stop then, and as if some kind of switch of consciousness had been turned off, they'd all collapse like rag dolls back down onto their makeshift pillows.
In the course of the evening I'd run into Lee, a British guy I knew from the Japanese class we both attended on a strictly irregular basis. He lived not a cricket batsman's fair effort from the Shimizu learning center with his wife and her family and their unusually dense and heavy baby boy. He told me their house was fine, no apparent structural damage - 'a real testament to the quality of Japanese construction,' he noted - but they decided they'd rather not have to deal with the sudden lack of water and electricity. Not that things were much better there at the shelter, but having the choice was something of a luxury.
We'd heard from people who had spotty Internet access through their cell phones that the massive (as suspected) earthquake had originated off the coast of Miyagi, north of Fukushima. 8.8 they said. Or 8.9. All that meant to me and Lee was that there had to be some pretty serious damage somewhere up the road. 'If we have to be anywhere close to that monstrous a quake,' Lee added, 'on solid Fukushima ground is a good place to be.' Neither of us thought much of the vague reports we'd heard of a tsunami.
With the coming of daylight the atmosphere in the shelter changed dramatically. It was as if we could now look around and see with our own eyes that things were still as we remembered them. That despite the unsettling suspicion that we were wrong, perhaps we could go on believing that life would continue on as normal. People seemed a bit lighter on their feet; voices sounded less grave. Still, the occasional tremor reminded us - reminded me - of an earth still very much alive under our feet.
Sixteen hours had passed since I held my son, telling him everything was okay as I prayed for the world to stop, and still I hadn't been able to contact anyone, to let them know we were fine. After hours of trying, Lee had been able to get a text message to England through his mother-in-law's phone. She let me try, to no avail. The pay phones couldn't handle international calls, or even calls across town at times. The men in the office-cum-crisis management center told me (without, oddly, offering to try) that I wouldn't be able to get through using the phones there either. But no worries, I figured, assuming everyone back home knew I lived on safe, steady ground. (The absurdity of anyone back home understanding this somehow did not click with me.)
With the tremors growing fainter and less frequent, with the sun shining down on a beautiful day in Fukushima City, people slowly began packing up their blankets to go back home. Lines formed outside the building on both sides, folks toting jugs and buckets and garbage cans to fill with water from the spigots that had already come back to life if they had ever even died at all. Cars moved easily up and down the street. An old man and his granddaughter walked their dog together. I watched as my older son played on the jungle gym and the swings, along with a handful of other blessedly naive souls. I spoke with a few of the parents, but only in the context of our kids; I wasn't sure what to say about the quake and wanted to let them bring it up if they wanted. None did.
On the playground and in the buildings and houses all around not a brick, not a tree branch looked out of place. Mount Shinobu, Fukushima City's grand natural centerpiece, rose up into the bright blue sky as it always had, lines of her hilltop temples visible through the naked branches, radio towers standing straight and tall. Snowmelt ran down the concrete gutters. Birds chirped and flitted overhead. Down at the edge of the river my son and I flipped rocks into the water. The world indeed felt at peace. 'See what happens when you throw a rock in?' My son watched intently. 'It sinks. It goes down to the bottom, right?' He smiled and threw another of his own in and watched it disappear. 'Now watch this,' I said, picking up a thick, weather-beaten stick. 'This is going to float on top.' And I tossed it into the current.
My son and I watched silently as the stick splashed into the water, drifted along a few inches under the surface, then slowly sank into the murky depths and disappeared.
'I guess that was a really heavy stick,' I said to my son. Like everything else going on it didn't mean much to him. Thank God.
A loose crowd around a large flat screen television in the front hall of the Shimizu building told me the electricity was back, at least here. Tonight, if we did stay, we wouldn't be hanging around in shadows. We wouldn't have to bring a flashlight to the bathroom. We could now recharge our cell phones and try once again to reach the outside world.
Staring at the images coming across the screen, reaching the outside world was suddenly a much more urgent and pressing matter and at the same time nothing more than the most trivial of matters.
Fishing villages reduced to fields of splintered wood. Cars and houses and debris packed in surreal heaps. Who knew what everyone back home was seeing? Who out there knew what the situation was where I lived? Who knew where I even was? These thoughts were washed away though; I was fine, and my family would know this soon enough. Right now, though, right up the road, were scenes so terrible, so horrific, they barely made sense even as I stood watching them, over and over. It felt like watching planes fly into buildings on TV. It hit me like having to listen to my sister tell me over the phone to come home to say my last good-byes to my father.
For the rest of that crisp, sparkling blue Saturday I kept returning, with the others, to stare at those images. I went home, to check if by chance we'd gotten electricity back - and looked around at the pictures and knick-knacks that had fallen to the floor, the bottles of cooking oil and boxes of curry mix that had been shaken right out of the cabinets, the papers and toys and crafts from pre-school, scattered all over an apartment that, despite its appearance, was safe. Still, we would sleep in a gymnasium one more night.
Slight though they were, there will still tremors out there.
Separated from our haven by thirty miles and a range of mountains, just over there along the coast, the world we knew and had been to many times, and as recently as four days ago, had suddenly ceased to exist. That our building, that Lee's home, that my son's pre-school and Fukushima City were still standing was indeed a testament to the world man had built around us. But my wife and I felt better, for now, having others around us. Just in case.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Calm Amid Calamity -- tohoku earthquake part two
I walked into the dark front hall of the Shimizu Learning Center. A man in a blue windbreaker approached, moving with an efficiency that told me he was at work though in what capacity I had no idea. What was the situation here, or anywhere else? What had really happened, and what needed to be done? I hadn't seen any damage. A distant siren bled through the hum of a single generator; outside the glass doors a circle of men dressed in shadows watched over a huge pot of water, slowly warming over a propane flame.
I suppose I expected to be received in some way, for someone in a dark blue windbreaker to ask me my name, if I was all right and did I come with any family. I waited for direction but the man kept walking, by my shoulder and out into the wind and the returning snow. More figures appeared, out of the black corridors ahead and the blustery darkness behind. A couple of them held flashlights. They traded scant words as they passed each other. No one spoke to me. No lines, no people with clipboards. Barely a sound besides that generator. The siren in the distance faded and died. Something was going on here - but what? I wondered if we had come to the wrong place.
Yet the parking lot outside was full; my wife was waiting out there with our two boys, along with enough food and blankets, we hoped, to get us through the night. There had to be others. I walked down the left corridor, drawn to a softly-illuminated doorway and a murmur of voices. At the bottom of a single step a dozen pairs of shoes lie in semi-disarray. I kicked off my battered sneakers and stepped inside.
Three hundred people I would guess, the majority of them families and elderly couples, took up most of the gymnasium floor. Most were spread out on blankets, staking their orderly claim on some space for the night. Others sat up against the walls, in chairs or on the floor, out of reach of the glare of the two sets of spotlights focused on the middle of the room. Folks walked in slow motion, toward a long table with silver urns of hot water and tea, to the side a mishmash of half-empty jars of instant coffee. Others roamed with bald aimlessness the narrow makeshift walkways, careful not to step on their new neighbors' blankets and bags and shoes. A few just stood in place, looking out over the scene as if they had already resigned themselves to something they had yet to understand.
Squares of empty floor still remained; a family of three edged past, clutching blankets to their chests, scanning the room with tired eyes. I ran back out to the car. The snow had begun to stick to the windshield. 'You take him,' I said, pointing to our little one. 'I'll bring everything else, let's go.' My older son was fast asleep in his car seat. He'd be all right for the time it would take for us to spread out on our temporary hardwood home. We'd brought two heavy blankets and my wife's futon; with a little creativity we'd be able to stave off the chill seeping in through the walls but for me, for my family, this was not good enough. I'd go home and grab what more I could. 'I'll be right back. Do we need anything else?' Before my wife could answer the world started shaking again.
With the added blankets we had, for the four of us, more comfort than any other ten people in the room. And there was still my futon in the car. The amount of food we had with us was also, at least by comparison, obscene. My wife went about settling in, as much as one can settle in on a gymnasium floor among three hundred other people. I began scoping out the place, looking for someone to approach.
Among the mass of people and blankets were several small clusters of older folks, sitting in chairs, blankets over their shoulders, quiet conversation floating up from the air around them. In the shadows their faces showed nothing that could be called fear. Some spoke calmly; others listened, waiting their turn. A few smiled or nodded casually to things I couldn't hear. Along the edge of the room too they sat, in chairs or on thin blankets. Up close I saw lines of worry in their faces, though something in there told me their worries were older than today.
Men in windbreakers, and a few women too, continued moving among the people. People who, once here, had nothing to do except wait. Wait for clean tea cups; wait for the next tremor. Wait for the light of morning. The clock high on the wall read 11:30. It felt much, much later than that.
I wiped a used mug with a damp cloth, made myself some coffee and leaned against the wall, sipping slowly as I tried to wrap my head around the day. At 2:45 I was thinking about the surprise birthday party I was planning for my wife. At 2:46 I was holding onto my son, listening to him giggle as I prayed over and over for the shaking for stop. I'd been through earthquakes but nothing like that, not even close. It wouldn't be until the next day, with the power partially restored and the first images appearing on the news, that we would all begin to understand just what had happened.
But for the moment there was no urgency, no desperation. Save for the lack of electricity and the occasional aftershock this was just an assortment of people gathered in a gym for a night. Then a man in a dark blue jacket entered the room, speaking someone's name. He called out three times, waiting in between, only to be answered with silence. This would occur intermittently throughout the night, bringing with it the underlying and palpable sense that somewhere things were very, very bad.
I walked among the people, eventually picking out an elderly couple sitting quietly on the floor. Their legs were crossed and wrapped in brown wool blankets. There was a hint of sleep in their eyes. 'I have two extra futons in my car, would you like them?' They smiled and slowly shook their heads. 'We are fine, thank you,' the woman said. I asked again. Again they politely, quietly declined. I nodded and bowed slightly (as I figured I should) and gently turned away, wondering what was really behind their outward desire to sit on the floor all night.
I asked several more people, old folks and older folks and couples with small children. Each of them refused, offering the same assurances that they were okay. I hauled the futons in from the car; maybe no one wanted to have me go outside and carry them in on their account. Sitting on the gymnasium floor in a pile they looked nothing less than a pot of gold in a field of rubble. Yet still I could find no takers. I spread them out, hoping to make them seem more attractive, more inviting, at least more available. But really, this just made them seem more out of place among the hundreds of people making do with the scarcest of warmth. And with each demure refusal to accept such luxury when others had so little I began to sense the collective spirit of a people facing a shared disaster.
I listened to the calm words floating in the air around me; under the quiet concern I could hear no complaining. Three hundred people, thrown together through stressful circumstances, and not once did anyone raise his voice. I glanced over the urns of tea and hot water. I stared at the spotlights taped in place on metal racks. A woman walked past carrying a tray of clean tea cups. Men in the hall dragged large plastic trash cans filled with water into the bathrooms. Outside in the elements men prepared dozens and dozens of packets of instant rice; others brought them inside in cardboard boxes, handing them out to people lining up briskly, eagerly and in perfect order. Three elderly women smiled in understanding when my little boy next to them woke up and began crying.
I would speak the next day to a woman in her eighties; she'd say she had lived through a thousand earthquakes but never anything like this, thought she knew what an aftershock was until sitting up all night, listening, witnessing the ongoing drama. And so it was for everyone else that night too, in that shelter and across town and all up and down eastern Japan. Yet at least in Fukushima, at the Shimizu Learning Center, all everyone knew was to take it in peaceful stride. To gather in a gymnasium. To rig up lights and make instant rice. To share space and trade words. To spend the night on a blanket.
And to say that they were okay.
I suppose I expected to be received in some way, for someone in a dark blue windbreaker to ask me my name, if I was all right and did I come with any family. I waited for direction but the man kept walking, by my shoulder and out into the wind and the returning snow. More figures appeared, out of the black corridors ahead and the blustery darkness behind. A couple of them held flashlights. They traded scant words as they passed each other. No one spoke to me. No lines, no people with clipboards. Barely a sound besides that generator. The siren in the distance faded and died. Something was going on here - but what? I wondered if we had come to the wrong place.
Yet the parking lot outside was full; my wife was waiting out there with our two boys, along with enough food and blankets, we hoped, to get us through the night. There had to be others. I walked down the left corridor, drawn to a softly-illuminated doorway and a murmur of voices. At the bottom of a single step a dozen pairs of shoes lie in semi-disarray. I kicked off my battered sneakers and stepped inside.
Three hundred people I would guess, the majority of them families and elderly couples, took up most of the gymnasium floor. Most were spread out on blankets, staking their orderly claim on some space for the night. Others sat up against the walls, in chairs or on the floor, out of reach of the glare of the two sets of spotlights focused on the middle of the room. Folks walked in slow motion, toward a long table with silver urns of hot water and tea, to the side a mishmash of half-empty jars of instant coffee. Others roamed with bald aimlessness the narrow makeshift walkways, careful not to step on their new neighbors' blankets and bags and shoes. A few just stood in place, looking out over the scene as if they had already resigned themselves to something they had yet to understand.
Squares of empty floor still remained; a family of three edged past, clutching blankets to their chests, scanning the room with tired eyes. I ran back out to the car. The snow had begun to stick to the windshield. 'You take him,' I said, pointing to our little one. 'I'll bring everything else, let's go.' My older son was fast asleep in his car seat. He'd be all right for the time it would take for us to spread out on our temporary hardwood home. We'd brought two heavy blankets and my wife's futon; with a little creativity we'd be able to stave off the chill seeping in through the walls but for me, for my family, this was not good enough. I'd go home and grab what more I could. 'I'll be right back. Do we need anything else?' Before my wife could answer the world started shaking again.
With the added blankets we had, for the four of us, more comfort than any other ten people in the room. And there was still my futon in the car. The amount of food we had with us was also, at least by comparison, obscene. My wife went about settling in, as much as one can settle in on a gymnasium floor among three hundred other people. I began scoping out the place, looking for someone to approach.
Among the mass of people and blankets were several small clusters of older folks, sitting in chairs, blankets over their shoulders, quiet conversation floating up from the air around them. In the shadows their faces showed nothing that could be called fear. Some spoke calmly; others listened, waiting their turn. A few smiled or nodded casually to things I couldn't hear. Along the edge of the room too they sat, in chairs or on thin blankets. Up close I saw lines of worry in their faces, though something in there told me their worries were older than today.
Men in windbreakers, and a few women too, continued moving among the people. People who, once here, had nothing to do except wait. Wait for clean tea cups; wait for the next tremor. Wait for the light of morning. The clock high on the wall read 11:30. It felt much, much later than that.
I wiped a used mug with a damp cloth, made myself some coffee and leaned against the wall, sipping slowly as I tried to wrap my head around the day. At 2:45 I was thinking about the surprise birthday party I was planning for my wife. At 2:46 I was holding onto my son, listening to him giggle as I prayed over and over for the shaking for stop. I'd been through earthquakes but nothing like that, not even close. It wouldn't be until the next day, with the power partially restored and the first images appearing on the news, that we would all begin to understand just what had happened.
But for the moment there was no urgency, no desperation. Save for the lack of electricity and the occasional aftershock this was just an assortment of people gathered in a gym for a night. Then a man in a dark blue jacket entered the room, speaking someone's name. He called out three times, waiting in between, only to be answered with silence. This would occur intermittently throughout the night, bringing with it the underlying and palpable sense that somewhere things were very, very bad.
I walked among the people, eventually picking out an elderly couple sitting quietly on the floor. Their legs were crossed and wrapped in brown wool blankets. There was a hint of sleep in their eyes. 'I have two extra futons in my car, would you like them?' They smiled and slowly shook their heads. 'We are fine, thank you,' the woman said. I asked again. Again they politely, quietly declined. I nodded and bowed slightly (as I figured I should) and gently turned away, wondering what was really behind their outward desire to sit on the floor all night.
I asked several more people, old folks and older folks and couples with small children. Each of them refused, offering the same assurances that they were okay. I hauled the futons in from the car; maybe no one wanted to have me go outside and carry them in on their account. Sitting on the gymnasium floor in a pile they looked nothing less than a pot of gold in a field of rubble. Yet still I could find no takers. I spread them out, hoping to make them seem more attractive, more inviting, at least more available. But really, this just made them seem more out of place among the hundreds of people making do with the scarcest of warmth. And with each demure refusal to accept such luxury when others had so little I began to sense the collective spirit of a people facing a shared disaster.
I listened to the calm words floating in the air around me; under the quiet concern I could hear no complaining. Three hundred people, thrown together through stressful circumstances, and not once did anyone raise his voice. I glanced over the urns of tea and hot water. I stared at the spotlights taped in place on metal racks. A woman walked past carrying a tray of clean tea cups. Men in the hall dragged large plastic trash cans filled with water into the bathrooms. Outside in the elements men prepared dozens and dozens of packets of instant rice; others brought them inside in cardboard boxes, handing them out to people lining up briskly, eagerly and in perfect order. Three elderly women smiled in understanding when my little boy next to them woke up and began crying.
I would speak the next day to a woman in her eighties; she'd say she had lived through a thousand earthquakes but never anything like this, thought she knew what an aftershock was until sitting up all night, listening, witnessing the ongoing drama. And so it was for everyone else that night too, in that shelter and across town and all up and down eastern Japan. Yet at least in Fukushima, at the Shimizu Learning Center, all everyone knew was to take it in peaceful stride. To gather in a gymnasium. To rig up lights and make instant rice. To share space and trade words. To spend the night on a blanket.
And to say that they were okay.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Where Fear Lies -- tohoku earthquake part one
With a cheap driver I worked the tiny screw on the back of my son's toy microwave oven. He likes to play restaurant every now and then, making me fish pizza and croissant soup or whatever strikes his blossoming imagination. Then he tells me to 'sit here and eat'. I couldn't remember those words coming from him lately though so maybe the batteries in there still had some juice.
The sky outside was growing dim.
I am so not prepared for this.
----------------------
Quarter to three in the afternoon; my son is sitting at a kid-sized table with his friends at the Shinryo pre-school, chomping on cookies and drinking cold tea. The other kids are there with their moms. Both teachers in the room are women. I'm the only adult male, and though they all say it's great that my son could be there today with his 'O-to-san' I'm feeling a bit out of place. I stir my paper cup of coffee and watch my son interact with the other kids in effortless Japanese.
All along the coast, from Fukushima up through Miyagi and into Iwate, fishermen in slickers and rubber boots and weathered skin tie off their nets and head to bed. Their wives sit on the floor on straw mats pouring tea, alone or with friends, glancing outside at the slowly warming March weather. Young children play and shriek and eat cookies at schools just like Shinryo. All along the coast.
I slip my fingers around the lip of my cup as I feel a gentle tremor. This time, that familiar awe laced with vague fear that usually carries me through will only last the first couple of seconds.
The previous evening my student Eriko and I had gotten onto the subject of earthquakes. 'The Big One' was coming, we agreed, in the next ten or twenty years. Could be Tokyo, or maybe the Kansai area which includes Osaka, Japan's second largest city, and Kobe, center of the devastation of 1996. 'It won't be in Fukushima,' I added as the prefecture lies on relatively solid ground. 'We're lucky we live here.'
Eriko nodded in agreement.
---------------------
A bang, a bolt of sound so fast and fierce it pierces not your ears but your chest. A bang like a truck slamming into the building. But this explosion, this war cry from an unseen beast, came at us from all sides; the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all suddenly, violently alive...three seconds...six seconds...ten.... The sway and creak usually rises and falls, God reaching down with one hand to shake us out of our complacence and then leaving us to our own again to ponder the continuance of the day. Today, in this moment that felt like it would last the rest of our lifetimes, there was no build-up, no gentility, only the earth erupting in what we would personify as rage as if there were even a word for what was happening. I felt that familiar awe being buried, swallowed by a fear no longer vague. A fear so distinct it turns into images, growing increasingly real.
I held my son. I thought of my wife and my baby boy and a conversation with Eriko.
This was Fukushima, this didn't happen here.
----------------------
The floor and the building and the world shook again as I pried the batteries out of a toy, a hunk of molded plastic so trivial yet imbued now with something so important. Fear comes not from knowing what is happening, but from not knowing what will happen - in the next second, the next minute, the next hour if it is coming. I screwed the battery cover back into place. Don't lose that little screw, we'll need it I assured myself.
I grabbed two children's books, filled a plastic bag with snack food and water and went back out to the car, the safest place - the only safe place - for now and who knew how long. My wife was in the passenger seat holding our ten-month-old. My older boy was in his seat in the back. He had himself all buckled in, ready to go. How to explain to a kid of three why we're sitting in the car if we aren't going anywhere?
Sometimes fifteen minutes would pass without another tremor. Sometimes it was only five. 'Are we gonna get another reeeeally big earthquake?' my son asked.
I stared out the windshield, the last of the sun disappearing behind the mountains. There were no lights, anywhere, save for the faint pinpoints of the stars. Behind my son the world was black. Up ahead, on all sides, it would soon be the same.
Fear comes not from knowing what is happening, but from not knowing what will happen.
'I don't know, buddy,' I said to my son. 'I don't know.'
The sky outside was growing dim.
I am so not prepared for this.
----------------------
Quarter to three in the afternoon; my son is sitting at a kid-sized table with his friends at the Shinryo pre-school, chomping on cookies and drinking cold tea. The other kids are there with their moms. Both teachers in the room are women. I'm the only adult male, and though they all say it's great that my son could be there today with his 'O-to-san' I'm feeling a bit out of place. I stir my paper cup of coffee and watch my son interact with the other kids in effortless Japanese.
All along the coast, from Fukushima up through Miyagi and into Iwate, fishermen in slickers and rubber boots and weathered skin tie off their nets and head to bed. Their wives sit on the floor on straw mats pouring tea, alone or with friends, glancing outside at the slowly warming March weather. Young children play and shriek and eat cookies at schools just like Shinryo. All along the coast.
I slip my fingers around the lip of my cup as I feel a gentle tremor. This time, that familiar awe laced with vague fear that usually carries me through will only last the first couple of seconds.
The previous evening my student Eriko and I had gotten onto the subject of earthquakes. 'The Big One' was coming, we agreed, in the next ten or twenty years. Could be Tokyo, or maybe the Kansai area which includes Osaka, Japan's second largest city, and Kobe, center of the devastation of 1996. 'It won't be in Fukushima,' I added as the prefecture lies on relatively solid ground. 'We're lucky we live here.'
Eriko nodded in agreement.
---------------------
A bang, a bolt of sound so fast and fierce it pierces not your ears but your chest. A bang like a truck slamming into the building. But this explosion, this war cry from an unseen beast, came at us from all sides; the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all suddenly, violently alive...three seconds...six seconds...ten.... The sway and creak usually rises and falls, God reaching down with one hand to shake us out of our complacence and then leaving us to our own again to ponder the continuance of the day. Today, in this moment that felt like it would last the rest of our lifetimes, there was no build-up, no gentility, only the earth erupting in what we would personify as rage as if there were even a word for what was happening. I felt that familiar awe being buried, swallowed by a fear no longer vague. A fear so distinct it turns into images, growing increasingly real.
I held my son. I thought of my wife and my baby boy and a conversation with Eriko.
This was Fukushima, this didn't happen here.
----------------------
The floor and the building and the world shook again as I pried the batteries out of a toy, a hunk of molded plastic so trivial yet imbued now with something so important. Fear comes not from knowing what is happening, but from not knowing what will happen - in the next second, the next minute, the next hour if it is coming. I screwed the battery cover back into place. Don't lose that little screw, we'll need it I assured myself.
I grabbed two children's books, filled a plastic bag with snack food and water and went back out to the car, the safest place - the only safe place - for now and who knew how long. My wife was in the passenger seat holding our ten-month-old. My older boy was in his seat in the back. He had himself all buckled in, ready to go. How to explain to a kid of three why we're sitting in the car if we aren't going anywhere?
Sometimes fifteen minutes would pass without another tremor. Sometimes it was only five. 'Are we gonna get another reeeeally big earthquake?' my son asked.
I stared out the windshield, the last of the sun disappearing behind the mountains. There were no lights, anywhere, save for the faint pinpoints of the stars. Behind my son the world was black. Up ahead, on all sides, it would soon be the same.
Fear comes not from knowing what is happening, but from not knowing what will happen.
'I don't know, buddy,' I said to my son. 'I don't know.'
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Bathrobes and Beer: The Japanese Ryokan Experience - A Year in Fukushima #9
Japan boasts a considerable array of accommodation options – to put it in cheesy tourist pamphlet terms. Capsule hotels, business hotels, love hotels; the Hilton and the Hyatt and the Japanese versions of such; you have your youth hostels (thirty dollars with membership) and your campgrounds (thirty dollars without); and on the traditional side, you’ve got your minshuku, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself comfy as you watch your coin-operated 13-inch television, and then you have your more upscale ryokan, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself extra comfy as you relax and watch your wide screen high-definition plasma television.
In the course of my travels around Japan, when not camping (illegally) or sleeping on a beach or a gazebo in a park (maybe legally), I’ve rucked up to many a minshuku. They give you those robes to hang out in, and dinner and breakfast are included so why not? I’m not much of a TV guy however so I never sprang for the more expensive ryokan. And if my wife hadn’t finagled a sweet deal at Azuma-So up the road in Iizaka last weekend I might very well have ended up leaving Japan – or dying – without ever experiencing a wide plasma screen while hanging out on the floor drinking tea in someone else’s bath robe.
The word ryokan has always conjured up images in my mind of something like this. So it was a tad anticlimactic when we pulled up – an hour late because minor things (like one-page translations) tend to make me forget about more major obligations (like mini family vacations) – to what impressed as a converted gymnasium. It had this arched roof which made the building look like a long, fat shiitake mushroom with the rounded ends lopped off. The front entrance consisted of wide, automatic sliding glass doors flanked by more glass, offering a generous view of the red carpeted lobby. On the tiled floor, lined up neatly below the step up to the carpet, were four pairs of wooden sandals. This being Japan, I couldn’t discount the possibility that these people just knew, could feel when we would be arriving, and set those slick lacquered flip-flops there for us and buggered off out of sight again while we were still in the parking lot, distracted by the architectural wonder of this big cement toadstool. But missing there in the vestibule was the standard shelving for guests to place their shoes. Were we expected, allowed to walk from the muddy parking lot up onto that carpet? My wife took her Asics off and went inside to check, our little boy bouncing around in her arms. I stayed behind, holding my older boy’s hood as he strained to slap one wet and dirty Thomas the Tank Engine boot on the carpet. There were forty-yen beers in there waiting for me, I didn’t need my kid’s footprints getting in the way.
As he switched feet and lunged forward again a jaunty silver-haired couple stepped through the doors and walked right on into the lobby and out of sight. ‘Okay, I guess we can go in,’ I said, half to myself, half to Pig Pen. I let go of his hood. He went tripping and sprawling into the lobby. I followed, grinding his mud splatters as deep into the carpet as I could. I wanted those beers.
The lobby was long and brightly-lit and could have passed for a cheap Vegas hotel. Or a nice Hampton Inn. Outside the row of floor-to-ceiling windows along the back of the room sat an uninspired attempt at a Japanese garden, soaking in rain and melting snow. At the top of a staircase with no risers in between the steps so your kid can slip right through and down on top of the stacks of boxes and hastily-stored panel dividers beneath if you aren’t watching him (because you are thinking about forty-yen beers) we reached a dim hall with the kind of hard, gray carpeting you might find in the little alcove in the DMV where you get your picture taken. In one corner were a half dozen wooden armchairs; on the floor next to a door with a brass plate engraved with a lackluster nick-name for a banquet hall was a rolled-up projection screen, minus the stand. The faint discolorations in the carpeting here and there made me wonder when my New Jersey license was set to expire.
My wife’s mother was already in the room, waiting for us for the last hour. (‘We’re ready to go,’ my wife had said rather impatiently when I’d gotten home after the translating gig, leaving me to remember, if I had indeed forgotten, as she suspected, just where in the blazes we were going on a Monday afternoon.) ‘Come on in,’ my mother-in-law said, all smiles seeing her two little nephews. She was decked out in her official green and white Azuma-So bath robe. There was green tea and a variety of snacks on the low table in the middle of the room. The huge flat screen was showing a samurai movie.
We sat for a while on the floor, drinking tea and sharing cookies and chocolate and rice crackers and strawberries. Soon, though, and with a subtle giddiness, my wife and her mother began suggesting we get ready for the main event, the great purpose for our congregating there (which, incredibly, was not the forty-yen beers). Yes, it was time for the rest of us to get our robes on and head downstairs to take a bath.
Of course it sounds silly to put it in such coarse terms. This Azuma, this lopped off mushroom, was a ryokan in Iizaka, one of the best-known hot spring (‘onsen’) areas in all of Tohoku. People come from all over Japan, and even overseas, to enjoy the mildly alkaline waters, known for their magical therapeutic powers including the mitigation of your neuralgia. (This, coincidentally, is a line from the translation bit I had just finished a couple of hours earlier – and it still didn’t occur to me that I was forgetting something.) To sit and soak in these natural spring waters is, in all honesty, a fantastic way to spend an otherwise cold, wet and dreary afternoon. Stick it in between a table covered with snacks and a table with forty-yen beers and it becomes something like poetry.
That’s not to say the experience wasn’t befitting an hour inside a concrete fungus.
My wife and my mother-in-law like sitting in scalding water more than I do; figuring I’d be done and headed back to our room first they quickly elected me keeper of the room key. ‘Here, put it in a locker,’ my mother-in-law said, pointing to a cabinet of tiny metal lock boxes. I stuck our room key in one, shut and locked it and took the numbered locker key, which I would leave sitting in a wicker basket on a shelf in the men’s change room along with my boxers and my towel and my green and white robe, safe among all the other wicker baskets with underwear and towels and robes and keys.
There is a whole handbook of rules for proper onsen etiquette, but this should not discourage anyone not intimately familiar with the process of onsen bathing. For the most part you just watch what those around you are doing and do the same. (The toilet located just inside the door to the actual bathing room, on the other hand, is a good example of a conceptual clue, i.e. having an accident in the water is generally, and quite literally, frowned upon.) But when the piped-in music floating through the damp, misty air sounds not so much like Kyoto as it does Venice one can get the feeling one really has no idea what the hell is going on.
I strode into the bath room (after slipping stealthily into and out of the toilet), self-assured and buck-naked. One elderly man sitting in the water had a small white towel folded and perched on top of his bald head; the man across from him, slightly younger and much more blessed upstairs, was wringing his out; a third man stepped gently down the two steps into the bath, his little white towel held strategically in front of his little naughty bits. I had no little white towel – and suddenly felt only slightly less awkward than I would had I walked into the women’s bath by mistake. No matter, the row of spigots – and my link to cultural conformity – was only a few feet away. I sat down on my plastic bucket and put my plastic wash basin under the tap and pressed the lever – and a tepid spray rained down on me from the hand shower thing on the wall.
The guys on either side of me washed their bodies with their soapy white towelettes. I had to make do with my hands, lathering up and rinsing off, for this is what you do before you sink yourself into the onsen water that is ostensibly clean and pure due in large part to everyone’s proper use of the plastic wash basins and the toilet. Sitting in the boiling water I watched the steam rise in swirls to the ceiling and tried to forget that I had no towel to rinse and wring and balance on my head.
Periodically one of the other men – most of them seemed twice my age – would get out of the water and go sit on a bucket and rinse off. Then he’d get right back in the water. I think they did it just to confuse me. They do the same thing out on the street (no not rinse off naked). At that socially ambiguous time between 10am and noon I never know whether to say ‘Ohayo’ or ‘Konnichi-wa’. There seems to be no set delineation, no acknowledged rule – and these people, deep inside I am sure, or maybe not so deep, get a kick out of their ability to keep me eternally in the dark about it. ‘Ohayo,’ I’ll say cheerfully as I am hauling the trash to the designated pickup spot at the end of the street. Old man Sato looks over – ‘Konnichi-wa.’ – and continues on his smug, elitist way. Then when I am toting the recyclables out the next morning – at the same time – you can bet Sato-san will pull a fast one on me. ‘Konnichi wa.’ ‘Ohayo…(bakana gaijin…)’. It’s no different in the evening. Konnichi wa. Konban-wa. When is the switchover? When it’s dark at five pm in December is it considered evening? I’ve never gotten a straight answer on this, so I have to be crafty. ‘Konnnn….’ And I wait for surly old Sato to commit one way or the other. It’s been a while since I’ve run into Sato-san in the evening, I think he deliberately avoids me. When he appears in the morning I just say ‘Hey.’
So these old men are running this rinse and soak game on me, going through exaggerated motions with their little white towels for an extra bit of salt in my wounded pride. I had no choice; I sat up on the edge of the bath, the water only halfway up my shins. No sense in trying to hide behind an itty-bitty washcloth, ay gentlemen, what do you think?
Within ten minutes the place had all but cleared out. One of them, on his way through the door into the change room, said to another something about dinner time – obviously an excuse for leaving that I was meant to hear because in a real conversation they would have been talking about forty-yen beers.
On the tatami step leading into the dining hall was a free-standing banner with what at first glance looked like the Kanji for ‘draft beer’ and ‘graduation’. On closer inspection I saw I was right; the fine folks who would be serving us tonight had passed through a rigorous training course on serving beer to people enjoying some exquisite Japanese cuisine in their bath robes. There were even individual certificates of achievement, framed and hung proudly, official statement of congratulations printed in English as well as Japanese. ‘You have gained many knowledge and skill in an art of draft beer…’
For forty yen a pop I wasn’t really expecting that much anyway. But nor was I expecting my mother-in-law to take her beer coupon and use it for herself. Suddenly I was faced with the ponderous task of making two big fat mugs of Kirin Lager last through the innumerable fish and vegetable dishes – prepared so delicately, placed so perfectly on their stylish plates and bowls of food they made the digital camera in my hand look like a stone arrowhead from the Jomon era. With the entire flock of soft-spoken guests moving gently toward their pre-assigned tables in their green and white bath robes I wasn’t sure what time period I had slipped into.
At the far end of the room, over my wife’s shoulder and past approximately twenty meters of flawlessly-aligned tatami mats boasting flawlessly-woven pieces of straw and just the faintest evidence of beer stains, a large frame hung on the wall. On the canvas – or shall I say the secret Japanese paper (secret because in nine years I have not yet found the time to find out the proper name for it) – were written in that typical sweeping style four Chinese characters. On the surface, and to the uninitiated, this sort of reckless behavior with a ten-pound brush may seem incongruous at best, and oh for heaven’s sake how silly-goosey at worst. What’s the point of creating such dramatic, beautiful and (one might assume) Confucian-esque wisdom-cum-art if no one can read it? Well, I may not know the correct term for that paper but in nine years I have learned a thing or two, and I can decipher that cryptic script over there. It reads ‘Nose City never wins.’
Throughout our delectable dinner, through the light, flaky fish with the subtly tangy sauce, the surgically-sliced vegetables and the soba grain soup and the individual-sized clay pots of more fish and vegetables fired to perfection with the open flame burners underneath to add a subliminal element of danger to the gentle atmosphere, all I kept thinking was How do women manage to sit comfortably (or at all) without their skirts riding up to their torsos? Granted the slit in my bath robe went up a bit higher than on anything Sharon Stone ever wore but still I couldn’t get it out of my mind that I was flashing the people diagonally across the way. To cover myself (so to speak) I had to demand that my son stay in his chair, kneeling and turned slightly sideways and don’t worry too much if you spill your soup on yourself okay buddy?
As my wife struggled to feed our little one I plowed through my first beer before my debauchery-minded mother-in-law had a chance to snag my wife’s beer coupon ahead of me.
That evening my older son couldn’t have been any more excited as he destroyed all order among the futons the kind people at Azuma had so lovingly laid out for us while we were downstairs eating. This had initially instilled in me a sense of unease; these people knew exactly when we would not be in the room. I threw my son from my futon onto his and reached for my backpack to check on my secret chocolate stash. In retrospect, this might have been what sent his hyperactive wheels in motion in the first place.
As soft and freshly-laundered as those futons were, my little pre-toddler isn’t completely accustomed to sleeping in foreign environments just yet and for most of the night my wife would barely have a chance to get back to her snoring before the critter would resume his routine and wake her up. ‘He’s thirsty,’ my mother-in-law said at one point from the depths of her comforter. Three seconds ago she too had been sawing bamboo, now she sounded like she’d been up and doing laundry for hours. My wife grunted in agreement, my mother-in-law grunted in acknowledgement, and six seconds later she was working her saw again.
Sitting in the corner of the room under a soft spotlight, I poured myself another cup of green tea and got back to my book.
The tea Azuma provided, by the way, was a bit of a disappointment. I expected, or maybe just hoped, despite the indications inherent in the lobby and the carpeting and the mushroom motif in the architecture, that we would be getting that fine powdery stuff, kept fresh in a carved wooden canister, the figure of a stork or a chrysanthemum perhaps inlaid on the top. Instead we walked into a pile of green aluminum packets, with tea bags inside that all but said Lipton. On the back of each packet even were directions on ’How to Enjoy Delicious Tea (Standard Version)’ This is likely kind reciprocation for the thoughtful ‘Lather. Rinse. Repeat.’ we extend to foreigners not accustomed to using shampoo.
Despite my littler kid’s nighttime antics my wife was up and in the bath again and back before I’d emerged from my futon. She didn’t have to say she went, I knew from the fading first-degree burns on her cheeks. ‘Did you hear the announcement?’ she asked, smelling ever so faintly of sulfur. ‘No,’ I said into my pillow. But then I thought yes. I had a dream about a loudspeaker that had no business being in my life. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘7:15, breakfast is ready!’ my wife sang in whispering imitation of the monster who I remember roaring the same thing in my dream.
My older son destroyed the futons again, my younger son tried to punch a hole in the wide screen with the key to the safe and we shuffled off to breakfast – though this time I put on pants.
I love Japanese food, I truly do. But rice and miso soup and fish just don’t do it for me in the morning. I left satisfied, surely enough, but still I found myself pining for the Hampton Inn. The Azuma did offer soft-boiled eggs to go with the rice (no toast, the Azuma sticks to eastern tradition – except for maybe the coffee, and the ping pong table – ‘First Hour Free!’ the sign in the elevator proclaimed). I powered down three of them despite the fact that they are called ‘radium eggs’. This of course brings visions of Nagasaki and incinerated chicken coops but naturally this is ridiculous. Iizaka would get their radium eggs from Hiroshima, which is much closer.
I failed to mention one major difference between a minshuku and a ryokan. At a minshuku, you are expected to fold up your futon and slip it back into the big closet in the wall before you check out. At a ryokan they do it for you. This leaves you with a palatable aura of luxury as you pack up and leave your room, the wide screen plasma television disappearing as you close the door.
Then it’s back to the industrial carpeting, the stray projector screen and the Vegas hotel lobby. And your fond memories of all that Azuma-So had to offer.
In the course of my travels around Japan, when not camping (illegally) or sleeping on a beach or a gazebo in a park (maybe legally), I’ve rucked up to many a minshuku. They give you those robes to hang out in, and dinner and breakfast are included so why not? I’m not much of a TV guy however so I never sprang for the more expensive ryokan. And if my wife hadn’t finagled a sweet deal at Azuma-So up the road in Iizaka last weekend I might very well have ended up leaving Japan – or dying – without ever experiencing a wide plasma screen while hanging out on the floor drinking tea in someone else’s bath robe.
The word ryokan has always conjured up images in my mind of something like this. So it was a tad anticlimactic when we pulled up – an hour late because minor things (like one-page translations) tend to make me forget about more major obligations (like mini family vacations) – to what impressed as a converted gymnasium. It had this arched roof which made the building look like a long, fat shiitake mushroom with the rounded ends lopped off. The front entrance consisted of wide, automatic sliding glass doors flanked by more glass, offering a generous view of the red carpeted lobby. On the tiled floor, lined up neatly below the step up to the carpet, were four pairs of wooden sandals. This being Japan, I couldn’t discount the possibility that these people just knew, could feel when we would be arriving, and set those slick lacquered flip-flops there for us and buggered off out of sight again while we were still in the parking lot, distracted by the architectural wonder of this big cement toadstool. But missing there in the vestibule was the standard shelving for guests to place their shoes. Were we expected, allowed to walk from the muddy parking lot up onto that carpet? My wife took her Asics off and went inside to check, our little boy bouncing around in her arms. I stayed behind, holding my older boy’s hood as he strained to slap one wet and dirty Thomas the Tank Engine boot on the carpet. There were forty-yen beers in there waiting for me, I didn’t need my kid’s footprints getting in the way.
As he switched feet and lunged forward again a jaunty silver-haired couple stepped through the doors and walked right on into the lobby and out of sight. ‘Okay, I guess we can go in,’ I said, half to myself, half to Pig Pen. I let go of his hood. He went tripping and sprawling into the lobby. I followed, grinding his mud splatters as deep into the carpet as I could. I wanted those beers.
The lobby was long and brightly-lit and could have passed for a cheap Vegas hotel. Or a nice Hampton Inn. Outside the row of floor-to-ceiling windows along the back of the room sat an uninspired attempt at a Japanese garden, soaking in rain and melting snow. At the top of a staircase with no risers in between the steps so your kid can slip right through and down on top of the stacks of boxes and hastily-stored panel dividers beneath if you aren’t watching him (because you are thinking about forty-yen beers) we reached a dim hall with the kind of hard, gray carpeting you might find in the little alcove in the DMV where you get your picture taken. In one corner were a half dozen wooden armchairs; on the floor next to a door with a brass plate engraved with a lackluster nick-name for a banquet hall was a rolled-up projection screen, minus the stand. The faint discolorations in the carpeting here and there made me wonder when my New Jersey license was set to expire.
My wife’s mother was already in the room, waiting for us for the last hour. (‘We’re ready to go,’ my wife had said rather impatiently when I’d gotten home after the translating gig, leaving me to remember, if I had indeed forgotten, as she suspected, just where in the blazes we were going on a Monday afternoon.) ‘Come on in,’ my mother-in-law said, all smiles seeing her two little nephews. She was decked out in her official green and white Azuma-So bath robe. There was green tea and a variety of snacks on the low table in the middle of the room. The huge flat screen was showing a samurai movie.
We sat for a while on the floor, drinking tea and sharing cookies and chocolate and rice crackers and strawberries. Soon, though, and with a subtle giddiness, my wife and her mother began suggesting we get ready for the main event, the great purpose for our congregating there (which, incredibly, was not the forty-yen beers). Yes, it was time for the rest of us to get our robes on and head downstairs to take a bath.
Of course it sounds silly to put it in such coarse terms. This Azuma, this lopped off mushroom, was a ryokan in Iizaka, one of the best-known hot spring (‘onsen’) areas in all of Tohoku. People come from all over Japan, and even overseas, to enjoy the mildly alkaline waters, known for their magical therapeutic powers including the mitigation of your neuralgia. (This, coincidentally, is a line from the translation bit I had just finished a couple of hours earlier – and it still didn’t occur to me that I was forgetting something.) To sit and soak in these natural spring waters is, in all honesty, a fantastic way to spend an otherwise cold, wet and dreary afternoon. Stick it in between a table covered with snacks and a table with forty-yen beers and it becomes something like poetry.
That’s not to say the experience wasn’t befitting an hour inside a concrete fungus.
My wife and my mother-in-law like sitting in scalding water more than I do; figuring I’d be done and headed back to our room first they quickly elected me keeper of the room key. ‘Here, put it in a locker,’ my mother-in-law said, pointing to a cabinet of tiny metal lock boxes. I stuck our room key in one, shut and locked it and took the numbered locker key, which I would leave sitting in a wicker basket on a shelf in the men’s change room along with my boxers and my towel and my green and white robe, safe among all the other wicker baskets with underwear and towels and robes and keys.
There is a whole handbook of rules for proper onsen etiquette, but this should not discourage anyone not intimately familiar with the process of onsen bathing. For the most part you just watch what those around you are doing and do the same. (The toilet located just inside the door to the actual bathing room, on the other hand, is a good example of a conceptual clue, i.e. having an accident in the water is generally, and quite literally, frowned upon.) But when the piped-in music floating through the damp, misty air sounds not so much like Kyoto as it does Venice one can get the feeling one really has no idea what the hell is going on.
I strode into the bath room (after slipping stealthily into and out of the toilet), self-assured and buck-naked. One elderly man sitting in the water had a small white towel folded and perched on top of his bald head; the man across from him, slightly younger and much more blessed upstairs, was wringing his out; a third man stepped gently down the two steps into the bath, his little white towel held strategically in front of his little naughty bits. I had no little white towel – and suddenly felt only slightly less awkward than I would had I walked into the women’s bath by mistake. No matter, the row of spigots – and my link to cultural conformity – was only a few feet away. I sat down on my plastic bucket and put my plastic wash basin under the tap and pressed the lever – and a tepid spray rained down on me from the hand shower thing on the wall.
The guys on either side of me washed their bodies with their soapy white towelettes. I had to make do with my hands, lathering up and rinsing off, for this is what you do before you sink yourself into the onsen water that is ostensibly clean and pure due in large part to everyone’s proper use of the plastic wash basins and the toilet. Sitting in the boiling water I watched the steam rise in swirls to the ceiling and tried to forget that I had no towel to rinse and wring and balance on my head.
Periodically one of the other men – most of them seemed twice my age – would get out of the water and go sit on a bucket and rinse off. Then he’d get right back in the water. I think they did it just to confuse me. They do the same thing out on the street (no not rinse off naked). At that socially ambiguous time between 10am and noon I never know whether to say ‘Ohayo’ or ‘Konnichi-wa’. There seems to be no set delineation, no acknowledged rule – and these people, deep inside I am sure, or maybe not so deep, get a kick out of their ability to keep me eternally in the dark about it. ‘Ohayo,’ I’ll say cheerfully as I am hauling the trash to the designated pickup spot at the end of the street. Old man Sato looks over – ‘Konnichi-wa.’ – and continues on his smug, elitist way. Then when I am toting the recyclables out the next morning – at the same time – you can bet Sato-san will pull a fast one on me. ‘Konnichi wa.’ ‘Ohayo…(bakana gaijin…)’. It’s no different in the evening. Konnichi wa. Konban-wa. When is the switchover? When it’s dark at five pm in December is it considered evening? I’ve never gotten a straight answer on this, so I have to be crafty. ‘Konnnn….’ And I wait for surly old Sato to commit one way or the other. It’s been a while since I’ve run into Sato-san in the evening, I think he deliberately avoids me. When he appears in the morning I just say ‘Hey.’
So these old men are running this rinse and soak game on me, going through exaggerated motions with their little white towels for an extra bit of salt in my wounded pride. I had no choice; I sat up on the edge of the bath, the water only halfway up my shins. No sense in trying to hide behind an itty-bitty washcloth, ay gentlemen, what do you think?
Within ten minutes the place had all but cleared out. One of them, on his way through the door into the change room, said to another something about dinner time – obviously an excuse for leaving that I was meant to hear because in a real conversation they would have been talking about forty-yen beers.
For forty yen a pop I wasn’t really expecting that much anyway. But nor was I expecting my mother-in-law to take her beer coupon and use it for herself. Suddenly I was faced with the ponderous task of making two big fat mugs of Kirin Lager last through the innumerable fish and vegetable dishes – prepared so delicately, placed so perfectly on their stylish plates and bowls of food they made the digital camera in my hand look like a stone arrowhead from the Jomon era. With the entire flock of soft-spoken guests moving gently toward their pre-assigned tables in their green and white bath robes I wasn’t sure what time period I had slipped into.
At the far end of the room, over my wife’s shoulder and past approximately twenty meters of flawlessly-aligned tatami mats boasting flawlessly-woven pieces of straw and just the faintest evidence of beer stains, a large frame hung on the wall. On the canvas – or shall I say the secret Japanese paper (secret because in nine years I have not yet found the time to find out the proper name for it) – were written in that typical sweeping style four Chinese characters. On the surface, and to the uninitiated, this sort of reckless behavior with a ten-pound brush may seem incongruous at best, and oh for heaven’s sake how silly-goosey at worst. What’s the point of creating such dramatic, beautiful and (one might assume) Confucian-esque wisdom-cum-art if no one can read it? Well, I may not know the correct term for that paper but in nine years I have learned a thing or two, and I can decipher that cryptic script over there. It reads ‘Nose City never wins.’
Throughout our delectable dinner, through the light, flaky fish with the subtly tangy sauce, the surgically-sliced vegetables and the soba grain soup and the individual-sized clay pots of more fish and vegetables fired to perfection with the open flame burners underneath to add a subliminal element of danger to the gentle atmosphere, all I kept thinking was How do women manage to sit comfortably (or at all) without their skirts riding up to their torsos? Granted the slit in my bath robe went up a bit higher than on anything Sharon Stone ever wore but still I couldn’t get it out of my mind that I was flashing the people diagonally across the way. To cover myself (so to speak) I had to demand that my son stay in his chair, kneeling and turned slightly sideways and don’t worry too much if you spill your soup on yourself okay buddy?
As my wife struggled to feed our little one I plowed through my first beer before my debauchery-minded mother-in-law had a chance to snag my wife’s beer coupon ahead of me.
That evening my older son couldn’t have been any more excited as he destroyed all order among the futons the kind people at Azuma had so lovingly laid out for us while we were downstairs eating. This had initially instilled in me a sense of unease; these people knew exactly when we would not be in the room. I threw my son from my futon onto his and reached for my backpack to check on my secret chocolate stash. In retrospect, this might have been what sent his hyperactive wheels in motion in the first place.
As soft and freshly-laundered as those futons were, my little pre-toddler isn’t completely accustomed to sleeping in foreign environments just yet and for most of the night my wife would barely have a chance to get back to her snoring before the critter would resume his routine and wake her up. ‘He’s thirsty,’ my mother-in-law said at one point from the depths of her comforter. Three seconds ago she too had been sawing bamboo, now she sounded like she’d been up and doing laundry for hours. My wife grunted in agreement, my mother-in-law grunted in acknowledgement, and six seconds later she was working her saw again.
Sitting in the corner of the room under a soft spotlight, I poured myself another cup of green tea and got back to my book.
The tea Azuma provided, by the way, was a bit of a disappointment. I expected, or maybe just hoped, despite the indications inherent in the lobby and the carpeting and the mushroom motif in the architecture, that we would be getting that fine powdery stuff, kept fresh in a carved wooden canister, the figure of a stork or a chrysanthemum perhaps inlaid on the top. Instead we walked into a pile of green aluminum packets, with tea bags inside that all but said Lipton. On the back of each packet even were directions on ’How to Enjoy Delicious Tea (Standard Version)’ This is likely kind reciprocation for the thoughtful ‘Lather. Rinse. Repeat.’ we extend to foreigners not accustomed to using shampoo.
Despite my littler kid’s nighttime antics my wife was up and in the bath again and back before I’d emerged from my futon. She didn’t have to say she went, I knew from the fading first-degree burns on her cheeks. ‘Did you hear the announcement?’ she asked, smelling ever so faintly of sulfur. ‘No,’ I said into my pillow. But then I thought yes. I had a dream about a loudspeaker that had no business being in my life. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘7:15, breakfast is ready!’ my wife sang in whispering imitation of the monster who I remember roaring the same thing in my dream.
My older son destroyed the futons again, my younger son tried to punch a hole in the wide screen with the key to the safe and we shuffled off to breakfast – though this time I put on pants.
I love Japanese food, I truly do. But rice and miso soup and fish just don’t do it for me in the morning. I left satisfied, surely enough, but still I found myself pining for the Hampton Inn. The Azuma did offer soft-boiled eggs to go with the rice (no toast, the Azuma sticks to eastern tradition – except for maybe the coffee, and the ping pong table – ‘First Hour Free!’ the sign in the elevator proclaimed). I powered down three of them despite the fact that they are called ‘radium eggs’. This of course brings visions of Nagasaki and incinerated chicken coops but naturally this is ridiculous. Iizaka would get their radium eggs from Hiroshima, which is much closer.
I failed to mention one major difference between a minshuku and a ryokan. At a minshuku, you are expected to fold up your futon and slip it back into the big closet in the wall before you check out. At a ryokan they do it for you. This leaves you with a palatable aura of luxury as you pack up and leave your room, the wide screen plasma television disappearing as you close the door.
Then it’s back to the industrial carpeting, the stray projector screen and the Vegas hotel lobby. And your fond memories of all that Azuma-So had to offer.
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