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AT HOME IN TOKYO

INTRODUCTION

IT’S A NICE PLACE TO VISIT, BUT I WOULDN’T WANT TO LIVE THERE

My story begins in February of 1991. I was in London, where I had briefly gone to see our busy daughter and chase down some items in the British Library. All was productive and restful until, one afternoon, a fax appeared under my hotel room door. “Come home,” it cried. “We’re leaving for Tokyo!” With not a word to me, Alan had accepted an invitation to lecture for a year starting April 1, at the University of Tokyo. “I’ve already e-mailed Hugh that we’re coming. You’ll love it.”

Love it? A whole year in Tokyo! I didn’t have time. I had a job. I had commitments. Floored by the prospects of such a future, I put in a call to our Upstate New York home, but Alan was out. Needing to talk to someone immediately, I broke all rules and dialed Gwen Owen’s office. When I’d told her my news, I was sharply regaled with outbursts of joy. “That’s great!” she said. “We can visit you. That’ll be fun” – which, in the event, she couldn’t. Instead, she had a baby, and taught her husband Mark how to iron his own shirts and play the piano.

By the time I got back to our home in Upstate New York, Alan was in top gear, plotting the sabbatical papers he would write, which of the Japanese Alps he would climb with our son Hugh, the research he would engage in, the collaborations he might have with colleagues A-san, B-san, and C-san, along with the improvements he would make on his wobbly Japanese, for some years now a hobby. In Massachusetts our eldest child (also Alan, but called Nak, whose field of interest is management techniques and industrial know-how), added his bit to the swell of everybody else’s elation. “Hey, Mom, that’s great! We'll come visit you,” said he, and did so twice, bringing his wife Margaret and their two under-fives.

So, OK.

I joined the mad race. I sought out and persuaded someone to carry on with the university journal that I was editing and writing for. I found someone to handle our office affairs, someone to housesit and care for our dog, and someone else to mow the grass, look after the garden, and see to our cars. Within a month we had packed, attended the inevitable parties, bought the inevitable presents, said farewell to our friends and raced for the airport. I left home in a much stirred condition. A whole year! I could not get over it.

Hugh was the lure that Alan had taken for granted, the lure that I could not resist. And, in fact, it was marvelous to think that we and he might be dwelling once more in the same country, that our matching clocks would make phone calls mutually convenient. Hugh has a Japanese wife, Kiyo, who comes from the Aomori prefecture at the northern end of Honshu. Having studied English throughout her Japanese high school and university years, and then again in Cambridge, England, where she first met Hugh, she can speak it ably, once she decides to switch into Western mode. At the time of our Japanese sabbatical, their two children, Seigo and Sayako (aged five and three respectively and both born in England) could no longer recall much of their babyhood English. As for Hugh’s prowess in Japanese, I had seen that he could use it to quell his children and to manage effectively in grocery stores and restaurants. Though he was not up to philosophical or political complications, he claimed he was always improving.But in his Tokyo biophysics laboratory, Hugh spoke English. “Not a problem.”

“But do they understand you?”

“They’re very good at guessing.”

Ideally, had there been time before departure, I would have better fortified myself linguistically. But the Japanese language, at least for me, is fiendishly complicated. Though in fact I did give it a shot, I had not the talent, youth, leisure, nor determination to battle it. We have friends our age who try and try, but they never (forgive me, friends) really get fluent. Aware of my language deficiencies, I could not dispel the unease I felt at the prospect of actually keeping house in very foreign and faraway Tokyo. But once Alan and I were airborne and escape was impossible, my mood brightened. I can handle it, I said to myself, while sipping my third champagne.

As it turned out, our Tokyo sojourn of 1991-92 took place during a lively transition period for the Japanese. The industrial boom of the ’70s and ’80s had effected a change in the country’s earlier xenophobic inclinations. As the trickle of Western tourists and businessmen on the big city streets increased, so the public grew more at ease with seeing foreign faces. Nevertheless, Mr. Average Hidehiko was, and is still, more astonished than helpful as he watches us move about his city, hunting for this or that, unable to speak or decipher signs to resolve our quandaries. His assessing glances tell us how unabsorbed we still are. To the Western eye, Japan remains a very foreign sort of place. Once you leave the internationally acclaimed, cosmopolitan ‘high streets’ and enter the local neighborhood byways, your confidence will disintegrate – trust me – and the scene you face will be totally alien.

At Home In Tokyo is focussed on that sabbatical year of living in Tokyo and follows my personal trajectory from desperation and misunderstanding to enlightened enjoyment and much admiration. The opening chapters reflect my early state of mind (not good) as I set about making a home in the midst of unmitigated foreignness, for we did not live in a fancy foreigner’s part of town. Previous experiences in Tokyo’s tourist hotels had done nothing to prepare me for residency. Nor did my considerable background reading or Kiyo’s kindly attentions successfully mollify the shock.

Over the months my changing perspective, though it retained a critical fierceness about some Japanese values, produced a surprising end. Trauma struck upon our return to the United States. It took us a week to settle back to what we had previously perceived to be perfectly normal, but after Japan quite unacceptable – all those synthetic textiles and psychedelic clothing colors, the lazy speech habits, intrusive informality, the fat hips and bellies. America, what has happened to you? Almost every returning sojourner undergoes this cultural after-shock.

The entertaining, interesting, and often exasperating fact is that under its booming, teeming, gleaming, electronic surface, Japan still moves to the beat of its ancient past, a fertile source of mystery. But casting about for what makes Japan tick is a sport better left to statisticians, sociologists, economists, theologians, anthropologists, and religious mystics. I am none of these. This is the chronicle of a pragmatic and plain-speaking female, whose life in Tokyo turned out to be a whole lot better than she thought it would be – for the Japanese, it should be stressed, are fun (yes, fun) to be with.

To protect their identities, I have taken the liberty of using fictitious names for those Japanese who were (and are still) kind enough to be my friends. Apart from that, what you read in these pages is truly what happened.

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