Once again, I am here in the world’s most exciting, most magnificent city — home to 15 million busy cosmopolites and my favorite writing sanctuary. Why Tokyo? Because it is very safe, because the people are ever so helpful and polite, because there is so much to see — a walking city with so many pleasant surprises in all its neighborhoods, unique boutiques, splendid architecture — those magnificent structures usually ten stories tall on which the Japanese have lavished their aesthetic skills and maximization of space. Tokyo, because the food is excellent; as the French journalist Philippe Pons said, “French bread in Tokyo is much better than French bread in Paris.”
And to this hosanna, my wife would add: “Tokyo pizza is better than pizza in Italy.” I sometimes muse what it would be like if a Filipino restaurant were to sprout somewhere in this dizzying burg.
So here I am again in Shibuya — Tokyo’s most ebullient, dazzling, frenetic district. I sit on the sidewalk in front of Shibuya building 109 in the late spring afternoon — the temperature cool enough to demand a jacket, and on this Friday, the last working day of the week, Tokyo’s population coagulates here. The green light flashes and the mass of people cross the central square in all directions, mostly young Japanese — teenagers, students, the girls in their short skirts and knee-length socks, the others in Shibuya trendy fashion — kinky, in riotous colors, office workers in dark jackets, some of them without neckties. This is a phenomenon in Japan — the apparent informality of executive dress. Barkers are calling out their wares, young men and women are passing out packets of tissue promoting sleazy clubs, massage parlors, cosmetics, whatever will draw crowds to Shibuya’s innards, throbbing with restaurants, record bars and love motels.
I went to Shibuya for the first time in 1955. It was then one end of the Ginza subway line, the first in Japan. The other end is Asakusa. I remember how the wooden stairway shook as people went up the station. I had gone there chasing this elusive dish, whale sushi. Shibuya then was a backwater, a nondescript district. I watched it grow through the years, the wooden buildings metamorphosing into skyscrapers, the traditional houses flanking the narrow streets become chic boutiques.
I touch base with Ms. Matsuyo (Jan) Yamamoto, old friend, editor, social activist and writer. She brings along her assistant, Syoko, and we meet at that famous rendezvous spot in all of Japan — Hachiko, the square with a statue of an akita — a dog native to Japan.
It is worthwhile repeating the story of Hachiko to illustrate the fidelity of the Japanese. Every afternoon, this dog went to the Shibuya station to wait for its master. Without it knowing, the master had died but the dog stayed on in the station, waiting, waiting, till it, too, died. In the afternoon, especially around dusk, the place is so crowded it is not uncommon for people to miss their appointments. But not us; Ms. Yamamoto arrives; she is short and she walks with some difficulty now, like me, but our meetings are always so warm, I hug her and so does my wife.
We walk across the square to the Tokyo Plaza and pitch up to the ninth floor, to the sushi restaurant there where I order my favorite shirashi — vinegared rice, topped by a splendid array of raw fish slices and other delicious goodies, this time with a giant prawn which tastes sweetish and so delicate. Must be one of those rarities in Tsukiji, Japan’s biggest fish market, Ms. Yamamoto asks the chef where it came from and he says it is imported from New Zealand.
Jan is always a pleasure to talk with, for her insights on her country are ever-fresh and often profound. She has long been advocating the education of women, and her magazine precisely addresses the problems of mothers, the need for cultural rejuvenation and an understanding of the folklore and the myths that underpin Japanese society.
Many years back, she took me to a folk art museum — she is a big promoter of folk art, including ours. That visit had impressed me very much for, in a sense, it explains the craftsmanship of the Japanese, their innate aesthetics and their attention to the minutest detail. These attitudes have contributed immensely to the high quality of Japanese products and, in a sense, their rootedness in nature and the environment.
She had been collecting Filipino folk art, baskets, carvings, hand-woven cloth, other artifacts, and recently she had an exhibition of her collection at a small gallery outside Tokyo. The exhibition was noticed and publicized in a major Japanese paper. She had decided to donate that collection to a museum that has a Philippine gallery and, hopefully, it will attract Filipinos who tend to ignore the living vestiges of their folk culture.
In Shibuya my writing sanctuary is the Petit Atelier of the Dominican monastery in Nampeidai. Along the same street is the old Philippine embassy compound. Remember, this is one of the plushest districts in Tokyo, a walking distance from the Shibuya station. The compound is a disgrace in this well-groomed neighborhood — its wide yard is littered with fallen leaves, the building is unkempt, in need of refurbishing and maintenance. Why is such superb property of the government unused and decrepit?
Why can’t this government make it into a Philippine House? A Balai Pinoy similar to what other governments have — Instituto Cervantes, Goethe House, the British Council, the Alliance Francaise — an establishment separate from the embassy, but functioning in a semi public capacity to promote the Philippines with, perhaps, a library, an art gallery, lessons in Tagalog, the upper floors, a hostel for Filipinos cast adrift in Japan. It should not be difficult to raise personnel for it, or funds to develop it instead of letting it rot — a disgrace to the posh neighborhood.
On this trip, I missed most an old friend, Edward Seidensticker — the American scholar who translated major Japanese authors and, on his own, wrote beautifully on Japanese literature, culture and on his favorite city, Tokyo. Where ever possible, in Tokyo or in Honolulu where he had retired, we would meet and reminisce and discuss — what else, but literature. He had introduced me to Yasunari Kawabata. It is said that it was because of his translation that Kawabata won the Nobel — the first Japanese to do so. He was not happy about Kenaburo Oe’s election and said so publicly.
I met Ed in the late ‘50s. He had invited me to lunch at the old Imperial Hotel, that iconic edifice by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I was not impressed by it; it was squat, very dark inside, and it exuded gloom rather than light. In any case, here we were at its restaurants having a Japanese lunch. The soup came — it was clear, and on the bottom were several small clams — tulya as we call it. I was shocked. Here at the Imperial — tulya for lunch! I told Ed tulya was eaten only by the poorest Filipinos.
Then again, we met one afternoon for cold sake at this favorite café in the Ginza. After an hour, I asked to leave. I was going to the house of Japanese author whom we knew. He exploded. “That son of a bitch! You meet him only now and he invites you to his house for dinner. I have known him for years and he never extended to me that invitation!”
I was, of course, surprised. It was always an honor to be invited to a Japanese house for any social event because they rarely do; this is understandable for their houses are usually small — “rabbit hutches,” as one Western writer described them.
I asked Ed to extend his arm and I placed mine next to his and said, “Ed — I am Asian, you are Caucasian. And you should know by now is that the Japanese look at other Asians with a sense of superiority. Not so with Caucasians and particularly Americans.”
Some Japanese would deny this, but I know I am very right.
Ed explained that he had bought a one-way ticket from Honolulu. He knew the end was near; he was going to die in his beloved Tokyo.
Tokyo is a great walking city — as all Japanese cities are. Through its small and crowded neighborhoods, there is always something interesting, unlike most American and European cities where the pattern is so monotonous — the downtown district, the main shopping and entertainment areas, then the vast drab suburbs fanning out. Not Tokyo — each district has its own particular charm, parks, temples, unusual architecture, old and new buildings — and those fanciful structures, those pencil buildings as they are called. Tokyo — in fact, all of Japan — is the most electronically advanced country in the world. Here are some of the world’s most fabulous buildings and structures, the organic fusion of Western technology and Japanese spirit.
I paid a courtesy call to Shiro Honda of the Toyota Foundation in Shinjuku. Honda San was in Manila some 20 years ago when those terrible brownouts were a daily occurrence. The Toyota Foundation is on the 37th floor of the Mitsui skyscrapers in Shinjuku — more than 50 stories of glass and steel marvel, one of the first monoliths to go up in the district. When I first visited Tokyo in the ‘50s, no skyscrapers studded the city — the tallest buildings were at the Ginza, department stores like Takashimaya.
We pitch up to the top floor restaurant and over a pleasant Chinese lunch, we reminisced on Manila. Mr. Honda was labeled by the late Brother Andrew Gonzalez as “the brightest young Japanese” he had meet. I regard the Toyota Foundation with fondness. Some 20 years ago, with the help of its program officer, Yoshiko Wakayama, and Kazue Iwamoto, I published many Japanese books in Tagalog translation. For us in Southeast Asia, the most outstanding model for study in development is Japan. Here is a country with very little resources other than its people, yet it was able to modernize in a generation during the Meiji restoration to become a world power, and yet again after the rubble of World War II to be the second largest economic power after the United States. Unfortunately, the books did not sell, although they were already marked down for the Filipino market. I had to donate thousands of the books to the Department of Education, then under Brother Andrew Gonzalez. It was best that way, rather than have them rot in the bodega. I hope that they are now being read and are giving our young people insights on how we can yet rise from the dung heap.
The Toyota Foundation continues its program in Asia and elsewhere, as does the Japan Foundation. As I told Mr. Honda, if I were not writing, I would have wanted to work in a foundation for it is these foundations — particularly those with programs in countries like ours — which are giving real assistance to so many who truly need it. Foundations, even with their self-serving agendas, are shaping leaders and are a potent force in the betterment of the world. This is one contemporary phenomenon that is not yet fully appreciated.
I tell Mr. Honda about this new novel which could very well be my last. It is gothic, it is grim — perhaps appropriate that I am writing it in a Dominican monastery for there is a religious element in it.
In our last week in Tokyo, Tomohiro Kato, a depressed temporary worker, went berserk in that electronic wonderland, Akihabara. Here are the latest electronic
gewgaws — many of them still unseen in commercial stalls even in Japan. Thousands of locals and foreigners gather here every day to try them out: computers, computer games, gadgets and whatever. And so, on this midday while shoppers milled on the streets, this meek-looking man drove a truck into the crowd, ran over three, then dismounted and stabbed to death several more, after which the police arrested him. It was front-page news, depicted and analyzed in media for several days. The man had run amok because of loneliness, job desperation and severe mental stress.
As I told a Japanese acquaintance, the wonder of it all is not the rampage which shocked the Japanese, used as they are to an orderly, crime-free society, but that there hasn’t been more of such stabbing frenzy.
Of course, there are stresses in Japan brought about by so many factors common to rich societies, where changes are also occurring dramatically if at times traumatically.
Some 20 years ago, I read about the phenomenon which they call evaporation — wherein the Japanese disappear. They do not commit suicide — they simply leave their locale and all its social inhibitions, migrate to some place where they can start anew, anonymously and freely, relieved of the social pressures which keep the society intact, disciplined and hard working.
The suicide rate is very high — one of the highest in the world, as high as it is in Scandinavia where there is social protection from “the womb to the tomb.” There is, of course, the tradition of suicide in Japan — the “nobility of failure,” as they call it — which is enshrined in the culture, in its mythology. The presence of mirrors in some of the train stations, it is said, helps deter suicides. Those trains which run so promptly and on time like nowhere in the world can only be delayed in the winter when the tracks freeze, or when someone has jumped in front of a speeding train again.
There is also the phenomenon of young Japanese who cop out, who refuse to leave their rooms not for days but for months, a burden to their families.
The other cataclysmic event was this massive earthquake in Northern Japan at about eight in the morning. I felt it in Tokyo — I was in bed, about to get up when the building shook and the windows rattled — but that seemed fairly normal in Tokyo where earthquakes occur every so often.
Then, on TV it came — the earthquake was massive, almost of the same intensity as the quake which killed thousands in China. This one reshaped the landscape; whole mountainsides collapsed, bridges were broken, roads ripped up and houses tumbled. Again, the wonder of it all was that so few were killed, and many of the buildings withstood the tremor.
For sure, Japan has problems; its economy continues to be in the doldrums but it marked a respectable four percent GNP this past quarter compared to that of the United States, which reported much less. Japanese problems are those of affluence, not of poverty.
No Japanese eats only once a day as is happening now in the Philippines but in spite of the widespread affluence, some Japanese now consider themselves the “working poor.” With fewer and fewer births, increasing divorce rates and women more interested in pursuing their careers than getting married, Japan will soon face a serious demographic problem of having a small working force supporting the pension of a large population of the elderly. In my month in Tokyo, unlike in the past, I saw only six pregnant women.
Some of Koizumi’s reforms in this short while have started to backfire; the privatization of the postal system — one of the world’s largest and most efficient — has deteriorated and is no longer giving good service to some sectors; after all, its logic now is profit, not service.
The old lifetime guarantee in employment has been eroded not because the system has been “Americanized” but because of globalization and competition. Indeed, change has come to so many sectors. Whistleblowers, which were unheard of before because of the engendered loyalty to the company, are now emerging. Two well-publicized cases: a restaurant that closed because it served leftover food, and a manufacturer whose quality control was faulty.
Sure there is corruption, but the corrupt are jailed or they are shamed and they commit suicide. Japan can afford its corruption; we cannot.
Time works so slowly in this tradition bound country. The Ainus — the original residents of Japan who are indistinguishable from other Japanese — are finally being recognized as the indigenous people.
(To be continued)
