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During my first moments in Japan an image struck me: that of a small rice field being worked by a farmer. As I watched him stoop over the green waving shoots, I thought it possible that his family had worked that land for centuries. As I pondered this a bullet train sped through the midst of his fields, piercing this feudalistic scene at 200 mph, and the rift between two facets of Japanese culture then closed as though nothing had happened. This was the first of many such experiences, and I came to learn that my year in Japan would be about extremes.
That was 1989, when I flew to Japan for a year-long exchange program between my American school, Antioch College, and its new sister school, Kyoto Seika University. When I arrived in Osaka I was greeted by the president of the school. I hadn't expected such an illustrious envoy, and he was very kind. It was from a soothingly tinted window of his enormous white Nissan sedan that I saw the rice farmer as we rode toward Kyoto.
I understood from my studies and by speaking with Japanese teachers at Antioch that Japanese society demands conformity — one works selflessly and harmoniously within the group dynamic. Our pioneers, too, illustrated this view with the adage, "Pound down the nail that sticks up."
I had always been the nail that sticks up. I had grown up one of those people who was picked last for school teams, who was misunderstood. Such injustices had led me to Antioch College, a university known for accepting those who had been labeled, cast out, or told that education was not open to them. It was the first North American school to admit African American students to study in a previously white-only environment. Also it pioneered co-education in the country. It was the first community that opened its arms to me, the first place where I felt welcome, and it was there that I became myself. The school's founder had exhorted his 19th century students and all who followed to "be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." It is still my goal.
At Antioch I learned through forums, classes, student groups and teachers how to tap into an inner strength, to value the power of individual decision-making. I came to see that people's differences were to be celebrated, not feared.
Yet in this new Japanese world I was not initially successful. Inwardly I railed against being compartmentalized, seen as a foreigner and just a foreigner. Not everyone thought of me as such, but most did. It's a subtle exclusion, never directly expressed — that's not the Japanese way. But one feels it and sees it in action. In time, I learned that fighting this way of thinking was unproductive. I could keep my individuality; no one could take it away. At the same time I learned I must play by the rules, strict as they seemed, in order to succeed.
I was the first Antioch exchange student to Kyoto Seika University. So I knew that my performance was going to be watched carefully. Success was paramount and my degree relied upon it as well.
 I actually lived in Kyoto, in a beautiful part of the city surrounded by mountains. Many of the traditional arts are practiced, taught, and seriously cultivated throughout Kyoto. Pursuits such as the tea ceremony and kabuki are promulgated through centuries-old schools and theaters in Kyoto. Tools for performing these art forms — painted paper fans, ceramic bowls, lacquer and bamboo ware — are made there. Kyoto is also famous for its intricate and beautiful citywide festivals. They alone merit a trip.
But these lovely images left me during that first hour when the very terms of my stay were brought into question. I had believed that I would have a home stay while living in Japan. But that was not the case. Being a pioneer for this exchange program meant being at the mercy of details, and the first detail missed was my living arrangements. I faced the staff of International Education, they faced me, and we all were embarrassed. I had been quite mistaken about the home stay; regardless of fault, I was homeless in Asia and it was not an auspicious beginning.
My hosts eventually housed me in a boys' dormitory, a place for hopefuls coming to take grueling entrance exams for Kyoto-based universities. The dorm was conveniently close to school, but the shabbiest, dirtiest and coldest place in which I had lived. My fellow inhabitants didn't seem to mind. It is unseemly to complain in Japanese society, but I was shocked: Cleanliness is highly regarded by the Japanese.
Before long I asked one of the boys about the squalor. His answer surprised me. He said that he and the others liked it because it was the first, and probably the last, time that the rules of society would relax for them. For a year they could live without rigidity and stifling rules. It made perfect sense, and I came away from that exchange more tolerant of the mounting dust and mold.
Being a gaijin, literally, "outside person," was difficult, for many Japanese people don't seem to believe that an outsider can participate in or understand their daily experiences. Centuries of isolationism continue to influence the society. Gaijin wa gaijin —"A foreigner is a foreigner," I overheard my landlady say. She was old and I was young, but I often felt left out because of these prevailing attitudes. It reminded me of my lonely youth, and those feelings made it harder to remember my earlier resolve that my new and hard-won sense of inner strength would not be diminished.
There were illuminating moments as well, such as the first time I walked to a grocery in my new neighborhood, passing the large Buddhist graveyard along the way. The burning incense wafted out and encircled me with a realization that just about no one around me shared my beliefs. I was learning in my studies that, in Japan, suicide was an acceptable means of averting disgrace, truth could be relative and Jesus lived back in America. This country was infused with countless spirits, a world ruled by the sun goddess Amaterasu-sama. She was the grandmother of the first Emperor, Jimu; and alongside her and her spiritual family who dominate the living world is the serene Buddha, to whom the worthy fly upon death.
I was put in a place of considering the world without the centricism that marks American perspective. My beliefs of how the Universe works were challenged. The Japanese had believed in their creation stories for far longer than my ancestors had. Who was right? Did it matter?
I continued on to the grocery store in an opening world.
TV in Japan, or in any foreign country, is a great learning tool. I saw a nation informing, amusing and expressing itself. Like the car window that framed the bullet train, this little window presented another more dramatic extreme. Consider HRH Crown Princess Masako nee Owada, quite the media star the year I was in Japan. She was not yet royal, but a successful trade specialist at the Foreign Ministry; incredibly dynamic, intelligent and ambitious, from a prestigious family herself. Her high-profile government career was stellar. However, the not-so-glamorous Crown Prince Naruhito really, really liked Masako, so much so that he had repeatedly asked her to someday share the Chrysanthemum Throne with him as his bride and eventual Empress. She graciously declined each time, until HM Empress Michiko herself paid a personal visit. The winning argument for the marriage apparently was that it was Masako's duty to the nation. Why it was her duty was never made entirely clear — at least not to me. Perhaps the Imperial Family felt it needed an infusion of strong genes and good looks, and another eligible woman with such credentials and charisma would be hard to find.
In Masako I saw a woman, successful and prominent in a male-dominated Ministry department, who stuck out too much. Ironically, she is now a prisoner of the most high-profile job she could have in a country where women over 25 are perceived in one of two roles: homemaking or spinsterhood.
 I had met Kunihiro, who had taken the role of homemaker, in Kyoto in the early spring; cherry blossom season. His gentle voice, his beautiful manners and face captivated me. We'd have coffee but our growing desire for more made for awkward silences. Going to my place was out of the question. The dorm had thin walls and fourteen young inquiring minds within them. We would have to be discreet.
Kunihiro said his place was muzukashii, difficult. The word means "out of the question, forget it." Nevertheless, he did invite me to his house, cautioning that it must be our secret. He went on about how strange his place was, repeating again and again that I must never speak of it. I agreed to his terms, and after a 30-minute drive we arrived at a small but immaculate, well-lit, Shinto shrine within a walled-in yard. Beyond that, in the gloom of night, Kunihiro's house was faintly visible.
By Japanese standards, the house was huge, and exquisitely furnished. Everywhere I looked there were statues, scrolls, wall hangings, antique Chinese furniture, vases and paintings; a staggering fortune in Asian art. He explained that it was a 400-year-old building, formerly a residence for Shinto priests attending the shrine. Where I lived there was no hot running water, and fourteen Japanese boys away from home who seldom bothered to clean. So I looked forward to a hot bath in a clean bathroom without the interruption of roommates. When Kunihiro laid out the linen pajamas, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
In the morning we shared breakfast on a 200-year-old Chinese table with mother-of-pearl inlay. Kunihiro then told me his story. When he was 16, his parents had foisted him onto an American host family in California, essentially wishing to leave him there permanently. Kunihiro's gentle beauty had not properly upheld the proscribed masculine role of the first son. Neighbors looked on warily and his parents reacted by getting rid of the problem.
He finished high school in California, where in addition to grammar and manners, he learned that being a young, attractive Japanese man had some cachet. Being kept by rich men became his vocation, being a housewife his dream. Kunihiro had modeled his role on the hetero Japanese ideal — that of being the accommodating wife of a well-paid husband.
So prevalent is the accepted paradigm of a relationship requiring a dominant partner — male — and a weak partner — female, that one between two men must be that way too. To Kunihiro, and Japanese people in general, a man and a woman create a relationship.
Before I met Kunihiro my search for gay life in Kyoto had come up empty. It seemed the only way to meet other gay men in Japan was to join expensive clubs — an impossibility on a student's budget — or to join the other men cruising parks for their next sexual encounter. And at that time the Japanese government was telling its people that AIDS was a Western disease and that avoiding sex with them was the best method of avoiding infection. White people were avoided.
 There was little or no information about safe sex in Kyoto's mainstream media. Condoms, as well as other forms of birth control, were prohibitively expensive. So it wasn't terribly surprising to learn, through underground and Western newspapers, that the increasing incidence of HIV infections among Japanese people had remained undisclosed in the Japanese press. Generally it was businessmen traveling outside of Japan's societal constraints to Southeast Asian sex capitols, such as Bangkok, who contracted HIV. A familiar euphemism among these men was, "How was Miss Kim?" meaning, "Did you score?"
If AIDS, initially called the "gay plague" in America, was a blight on a family name, even worse was the shame it would bring to a Japanese family. When Japanese people did die of AIDS, it was unthinkable to both families and doctors that the actual cause of death be disclosed. Such a loss of face would have had truly ruinous effects on family and employer. Thus, Japanese death certificates from the mid- to late '80s will show that there was an uncommonly high number of deaths from virulent strains of "cancer."
When I was seeing Kunihiro, he was with keeper number nine, his most successful one yet. This man showed up for three days a week, got his basic needs met and occasionally demanded lavish catering services for parties for his friends. That was Kunihiro's marriage, his ideal supposedly realized. But I was not to speak of the keeper ever. I considered how dreary my life had been until I had met Kunihiro, and decided I would ask no questions. We were both very lonely.
But I was curious. By poking about the house I learned what his keeper's name was and accidentally mentioned it one night after too much plum wine. It was then that I saw the crack in Kunihiro's composure. His mask broke in half, revealing pure rage. He demanded to know how I knew the name. Frightened, I remained silent. He pounded on the table between us, then lunged across it right into my face. After twenty minutes of shouting, I convinced him that I had seen the name in his kitchen on a piece of paper but had remained true to my promise to mention nothing.
Never had I seen a Japanese person so heedless of decorum. His emotion and vivid expression now struggled with the gentle hausfrau. The relationship was never the same after that, giving me time to consider everything more clearly, from a distance and with far less neediness.
Kunihiro had taken his path from among the few he had been taught as a child in Japan. He picked a scenario in which a wife, maintained control of the family's finances, thus engendering decision-making power and a certain degree of autonomy during the day, with the husband at work. Kunihiro did not have that privilege, nor could he be a docile wife, so strong was his pent-up rage. I was to learn later, through a mutual friend, that he was notorious for scenes of domestic violence.
Kunihiro clutched his dream, an imagined life he would not realize in Japan. That expressive soul would ever be ripping through rice paper walls.
I will go back to Japan. I arrived there full of idealistic images and expectations. I came away bitter, and anger is something hard to let go of. But now, as years have passed, I'm able to see that what I first fell in love with is still there. That romanticized world exists in small places and for short amounts of time.
I remember an outdoor springtime performance of No theater in an ancient Shinto shrine. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. The gold, reds and greens of the kimonos, ignited in the setting sun, were breathtaking. The memory of the exquisite masks, a single heightened emotion frozen in time, and the serene, regal pace of the performance are a gift I hold close.
 The shrines and temples themselves, all painstakingly preserved, were refuges for me. I enjoyed a rare peace with their resting gods in the silence.
I do think the Japanese are oppressed, much as Americans were in the post-war conservatism of the 1950s. But change is inevitable. Commercials for the ubiquitous energy drinks now feature a woman as the successful, fast-paced executive who needs them. There is a blossoming gay rights movement in Tokyo that recently brought about Japan's first Pride Day Parade; and the government has had a part in positive change too. They've exerted pressure, but a new kind — one that encourages their people to take more vacation time and rest from the intense pushings and pullings of Japanese life. They could use the rest. |
