Shizuoka through a train window is a blurry painting in primary colors in November: endless lines of green tea fenced in by hazy blue mountains, red momiji leaves ablaze in the autumn sun, gold mikans and persimmons hanging heavy from their branches. I was a sucker in a metal box, hurtling too fast through all that beauty, thinking of the landscape of my childhood. Small was what it was. Easy to tame. Easy to destroy. Shizuoka, though, was an intractable vastness with colonies of people in places about the coast. The earth shook often enough to remind people what was what. And a towering beast rose up above it all. The first time I'd seen Mt. Fuji one summer evening when the clouds cleared around him, I'd cried at how great he was.
She was there at the train station waiting for me of course; had probably arrived exactly three minutes before my train pulled in. She hello'd to my konnichiwa, was sweet like that, tried to make communication as easy on me as she could with her few words of English. It struck me that she had never been even the littlest bit offensive during any of our meetings and I wondered if she knew how.
Everyone was offensive back home. Merit lay in keeping the point of your personality sharpened, and in cultivating an immunity to the offensiveness of others. Here there were other foreigners; children of the developed West come to gape at the ways of the Asians. They were offensive by their very nature too but often expressed surprise if one even hinted that they might be, like they had never seen themselves before. For the Japanese though, an encounter with another was not always a battle on behalf of the sacred ego. This gave them a certain blankness that the worst among the gaijin painted their own corrupt selves upon and then stood back in horror.
"This is typical Japanese garden," she said, as we walked through the castle grounds. Around me was a kind of crafted beauty, magnificent as a feat of human achievement and seemingly only mildly related to nature. Five hundred year old cherry trees were now bare and crooked. Jewel colored ducks swam in the little pond-lets. I smiled privately at the thought that those lucky creatures wouldn't last long at home before they were carried away and curried.
We sat on a bench, in the chill air that my blood was too thin for, and ate the cream filled rice cakes she’d brought.
She was there at the train station waiting for me of course; had probably arrived exactly three minutes before my train pulled in. She hello'd to my konnichiwa, was sweet like that, tried to make communication as easy on me as she could with her few words of English. It struck me that she had never been even the littlest bit offensive during any of our meetings and I wondered if she knew how.
Everyone was offensive back home. Merit lay in keeping the point of your personality sharpened, and in cultivating an immunity to the offensiveness of others. Here there were other foreigners; children of the developed West come to gape at the ways of the Asians. They were offensive by their very nature too but often expressed surprise if one even hinted that they might be, like they had never seen themselves before. For the Japanese though, an encounter with another was not always a battle on behalf of the sacred ego. This gave them a certain blankness that the worst among the gaijin painted their own corrupt selves upon and then stood back in horror.
"This is typical Japanese garden," she said, as we walked through the castle grounds. Around me was a kind of crafted beauty, magnificent as a feat of human achievement and seemingly only mildly related to nature. Five hundred year old cherry trees were now bare and crooked. Jewel colored ducks swam in the little pond-lets. I smiled privately at the thought that those lucky creatures wouldn't last long at home before they were carried away and curried.
We sat on a bench, in the chill air that my blood was too thin for, and ate the cream filled rice cakes she’d brought.
