小泉八雲[Koizumi Yakumo]/Lafcadio Hearn/Patrick Hearn (1850-1904)

Lafcadio Hearn was the son of a Greek mother and an Irish father. His father, Charles Hearn, was a British army officer serving in Greece. “Lafcadio” was the name he adopted when he arrived in the U.S. He was leaving behind his “real” name “Patrick”. It is a measure of his success that one can scarcely imagine him being called “Pat Hearn” much less “Paddy Hearn”.
Hearn was born on the island of Lefkada (the source of “Lafcadio”). After a couple of years in Dublin, his mother had what is now called a “nervous breakdown” and was sent back to Greece, never to be seen again. Patrick was consigned to his Catholic aunt, and was sent to a Catholic boarding school in the North of England.
He migrated to the U.S. at the age of nineteen, became a successful journalist--specialising in the sub-Poe grotesque, travelled to Japan on an assignment when he was forty, and never left. He got a job teaching at a school in Matsue, on the Sea of Japan coast.

Hearn loved it there but, after staying for less than a year, accepted a job at The Fifth High School (fifth on a national grid) in Kumamoto, hoping that the winter would be less severe. He was three years in Kumamoto, working as a “Foreign Teacher”.
After Matsue, he found Kumamoto disappointingly modern and Western. Hearn took Japanese nationality, adopted the name Koizumi Yakumo (Koizumi being the family name of his wife), and died in Tokyo, after increasingly unhappy years teaching, first at the Imperial University (now Tokyo University), and then at the private Waseda University.

Hearn is perhaps the most famous foreigner to have played a role in Japan’s domestic history and looms large both in Kumamoto and in Matsue.

As two of his many successors in the rank of “Foreign Teacher”, both sharing his dislike of Western imperial arrogance, and of the apostolic zeal of many Christian churches, my friend Alan and I have felt ourselves living in the long shadow of the little Irishman; Alan much more than I, as he has been a long-serving “Foreign Teacher” at the same university where Hearn taught, over a century ago.
Although too remote an ancestor to cause anxiety, Hearn’s prolific writings, and his extraordinary ability to elicit fascinating information with limited Japanese, make it difficult for any “Foreign Teacher” to avoid feeling that one’s own achievements pale in comparison.
Hearn published an average of a book a year all the years he was in Japan. Seeing them together in all their collective bulk at the Hearn museum at Matsue left me in awe of his diligence.

For all of his anti-imperialism, Hearn was quite happy to identify as a Englishman in the best “West-British” style. When his son Kazuo was born, he wrote to a friend in the U.S. that he took after his father, with his “English looks”. I discovered this when I was asked to do the role of Hearn in a play about his life in Kumamoto.
It was written by a local playwright, Ogata Jun. The Japanese script has Hearn writing with pride about his son’s “Irish looks”. I checked with Alan, who is one of the leading Hearn scholars, and learned that the “English” in the original letter had been changed to “Irish”.

Although a precocious admirer of Yeats, whose poems he introduced to students in Kumamoto within years of their publication, Hearn seems to have been profoundly ambiguous about his Irish identity, and the paucity of references to his homeland contrasts with the volumes he wrote about his beloved Japan.

It’s ironic then that the performance of the play was immersed in the music of the Chieftains, and that the Irish Ambassador flew down for every major Hearn function in Kumamoto or Matsue. One puzzled Irish ambassador was reported in the Kumamoto as wondering why Hearn was so popular with Japanese people. Prof. Nakajima, the chair of the local Hearn research group, replied, “We like him because he liked us” [Kumamoto Nichi Nichi Shinbun circa 1994].

Hearn was too complex a man to ever remain the simple fan of the “faery land” of his first day in Yokohama. [See the Penguin anthology of Hearn’s writings.] In his letters to other Western correspondents, he reveals a jaundiced perspective on the academics and bureaucrats who had so much power over him. He jokingly writes that the main task of a “Foreign Teacher” is “to keep the clams happy”. Today’s students are hardly more vocal than the ‘clams’ of a century ago, but they do not share the thirst for knowledge of their “senpai”, (“seniors”/predecessors) of the Meiji period.

Hearn appears to have been an inspirational teacher, and the prospect of following him at Kumamoto and then at Tokyo was a cause of great anxiety for the young writer Natsume Soseki, who felt that he was being selected, not on his merits, but merely because he was Japanese. (Soseki was one of the first generation of Japanese students who had been educated at the new Imperial University and his appointment in Hearn’s place was part of the assertion of academic independence that accompanied Japan’s growing assertiveness on the imperial stage.)

For all that Hearn’s choice of Japanese nationality has been a source of pride to succeeding generations of Japanese people, it was not without its ironic cost. At that time, “Foreign Teachers” earned salaries many times that of their Japanese colleagues. Hearn noted with some satisfaction that he earned more than the Governor of the Prefecture. At the Imperial University, his change of nationality was used as an excuse to reduce his salary by eighty per cent. For all his sympathy for Japanese determination to maintain national independence, Hearn saw this as impossible to accept with dignity, and left for the private Waseda University, where he died shortly afterwards.

Dignity was not the only issue. He was supporting a large household, his wife and children, his wife’s parents and even her adopted parents, not to mention several retainers.

He remained an outsider, unable to hold his own socially in Japanese-speaking environments, till the day he died.


[I am grateful to Dr. Alan Rosen of Kumamoto University for introducing me to Hearn and for generously pointing out some of the mistakes.]

能ーNoh.

During the first week after we arrived in Kumamoto, Y took me to a Noh performance in Suizenji Park, For centuries, the park had been the private garden of the Hosokawas, the Daimyo (feudal lords) of Higo, or Kumamoto as the province is now known. I have a vivid memory of Hagoromo being danced by an old man. I was struck by the ability of the frail, tremulous body to convey the angelic beauty of the dance to win back the hagoromo or “feather cloak” from the fisherman.

A year and a half after that, I was introduced to Tsuiji sensei by Greta, who had taught at the YMCA with me the previous year. Greta was a passionate Noh student, devoting every ounce of energy to her studies, and teaching English just enough to pay the bills. Greta and a Canadian friend, Jane, had been learning from Tsuiji sensei for about a year. I was welcomed by Tsuiji sensei to one of his Friday night classes, and he invited me to join as a student.
There were many reasons to accept. Tsuiji himself was (and is!) a gentle, unpretentious man with a hearty laugh and endless patience. He loved Noh with a single-hearted thoroughness that I could admire but not emulate.
Apart from the year and a bit that we were away in France, I have learnt from Tsuiji sensei ever since. Through him, I have been a member of the school of Noh that he is affiliated to, the Komparu, or “Golden Spring” School. For the first year or so, the foreigners were given special treatment, being exempt from the normal membership duties and fees. When I realized that was happening, I asked to be treated the same way as everyone else, and have been, as far as that is plausible in a society like Japan, where foreign participants are still few (written 2002).

Unlike Greta, I have had an intellectual, rather than an emotional admiration for Noh, and have devoted no more of my time to it than most of my Japanese companions, that is one session a week, with the occasional extra practice before a “Noh kai” or a performance. The Komparu Noh calendar consists of Spring, Summer and Autumn gatherings, with other special events like Takigi or torchlight performances for the Kumamoto Castle Festival in Autumn, and for the annual Fujisaki Shrine Festival. Some of these are Komparu gatherings. Some are in combination with other schools, which are active in Kumamoto, in particular the Kita and Kanze schools.

The typical programme for a Komparu performance would be something like this:

1) a number of shimai: extracts from well-known Noh plays, the equivalent of arias in European opera;
2) A kyougen, a short, comic play, usually based on a Edo period household, with husband-wife-servant relations figuring prominently;
3) a Noh play, somewhat less than an hour in length.

This programme would be about three hours long. When the schools combine, there will be several Noh plays, and the performance may last seven or eight hours. In that case, it becomes rather like a five-day cricket test. People come and go depending on their interest in the programme, and their relations with the participants. Many will nap at some time during the performance.

Alan, a friend and mentor, wondered why I was bothering learning Noh, since it was so difficult for a foreigner that there could be no question of achieving any level of understanding or competence, especially when I was devoting so little of my time to it. I could see his point, but since I was enjoying it, I did not worry about how much progress I made.

Tsuiji sensei, whenever he talks about his experience teaching non-Japanese students, always says that we have brought home to him the theatricality of Noh, the fact that it is first and foremost theatre. The tendency in Japan is for Noh to be seen as something apart, with minimal connections to other forms of theatre.

Noh crystallized in the fourteenth century, under the dynamic influence of an actor called Zeami who followed his father, Kanami in providing the basis for the Noh repertoire, and a body of theory which, even today, is inspirational to Japanese performers. Their two names combine to form the name of one of the Kanze School, which is one of the largest.

The goal of a Noh student is to reach the point where you perform the leading (shite) role in a Noh play. I still haven’t done that.
In fact, the only time I have performed in a full Noh play was in a minor role in Greta’s farewell performance of Hagoromo around 1990. “Farewell” because it was just before her return to the U.S,--where she has continued to do Noh-influenced theatre ever since.

From the first lessons, I enjoyed the lack of what I came to see as the performance anxiety of Western theatre. Whenever I had acted, whether in lesson, rehearsal, or play, in Western theatre, I had always felt worried by the question: “Are you good?” “Is this a good performance?” While something of that anxiety remains in Noh, it is much less. In the Western theatre I had done, I had always felt that the important component of a performance was the part brought by the actor, the individual genius which creates the role.
In Noh, there is almost no worry about that individual component. All your energy and concentration go to learning the role, guided by the model provided by the teacher. That model is determined in great detail, down to the finest finger position, to the angle of fingers from the wrist. Paradoxically, and this was something I remembered from mime classes in Barcelona, the more a performer strives to match an abstract model, the more inevitably individuality will shine through.
I delighted in watching a succession of “shimai” by actors, all trying only to “do it right”, and yet managing to “express themselves” in a way that would delight the teachers of any New York theatre workshop.

I came to realize that the duty of the Noh actor was not to “be good” as a performer, but rather, to be the adequate vehicle for the play which you were transmitting, along with the other people around you: the chorus, the musicians, and all those who had worked to prepare the theatre and make the performance possible.

Like the Irish traditional music performers I so admired, the Noh performers received the pieces from their teachers and felt a duty to pass it on just as they had received it. I remember Sean Potts of the Chieftains saying that you had to pass on “the bones” of the tune, whatever the flesh that an individual performer might choose to add.

For all that there is an impression of a conservative, unchanging tradition passed down over the centuries, I soon realized that there is lot of variation in the Noh tradition. Even within the Kumamoto area of Komparu, different teachers provide noticeably different patterns for their students.

Greta found it very difficult when she had to do lessons from K sensei since Tsuiji sensei could not teach her to play the drum, a skill which was necessary for her to get a teaching licence. She soon found that the two teachers were giving her conflicting directions regarding the position of her hands while dancing. She had to remember the two sets of instructions and vary them according to whose class she was doing.

Although all the schools have a national structure, and most are clearly focussed on the “iemoto” (lit. “head of the house”), the Kumamoto section of Komparu enjoys a level of autonomy which reflects both the strength of the local tradition and the weakness of the national structure. This is a mixed blessing. While local teachers, like Tsuiji sensei, benefit from a kind of federal-style autonomy, they perhaps are deprived of the stimulus of frequent contact with top-level performers.

Over the fifteen years that I have been there, I have generally been impressed by the co-operative and harmonious way in which the Komparu people work together. Each performance requires a huge amount of preparation and physical work, not to mention money. For each Takigi (torchlight) Noh performance at the beginning of August of each year much work is needed:lanterns have to be made from bamboo which has been cut in the shrine grove; marquees set up, and. some years. a whole new stage must be built—and all of this in the 30 degree plus heat of a Kumamoto summer. After two days of such labour, Tsuiji Sensei will then have three hours of performance, leading the chorus, and preparing each of his students for their five minutes of shimai.

The only authority I can see being referred to during all this work is the authority given to those with experience and expert knowledge. There are moments however, when the winds of jealousy and strife wrack even the world of Noh. The death of a teacher has produced tense relations as his authority is passed to his students.

Tsuiji sensei has always been completely untouched by the accumulative instincts of so many of those involved with the traditional crafts of Japan. So many of the tea ceremony and flower arranging hierarchies appear more like pyramid-selling schemes than artistic circles. I had thought such practices were not to be found in Komparu until one of my Noh friends switched his allegiance from another teacher to Tsuiji Sensei. We learned he had been paying large amounts of money to the other teacher over the years to obtain various “certificates”, the main function of which was to provide income for the teacher and for those above him in the hierarchy. As a low-ranking civil servant, on a secure but modest salary, X. was ill-able to afford the fees involved, often more than a $1000, and had been paying them without telling anyone, even his wife.

One straw finally broke the camel’s back, and he made Tsuiji his Noh companion as well, after many years of friendship and doing modern theatre together. I realised once more how fortunate I had been in my own choice of teacher.

政治家-seijika—politicians

“My idea of electoral integrity is voting for the person who pays me to vote for him”: the words of a high school teacher in Minamata, a town in the southern part of Kumamoto Prefecture. He was talking to Michael, a New Zealand friend who was working at the school as an AET （an Assistant English Teacher, a label since changed to JET—Japanese English Teacher）. The going rate for a vote doesn’t seem to have varied much over the past fifteen years-- about 10,000 yen. Every now and again, a politician gets caught, or, more probably, their secretary does; vote buying is clearly endemic, and regarded with cynicism rather than outrage by the woman on the Shin-oo-e omnibus. Sometimes, the money is simply dropped in one’s letterbox a few days before an election. There is no need for any message. The person receiving it will know very well who has put it there and, come election day, will feel morally obliged to vote for the local candidate. I remember reading about the caciques, the system of vote control in rural Spain which ensured that the local elite maintained their grip on the 19th century parliaments in the same way that they controlled their peasantry (Spain 1808–1975. Carr, R. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 1-129).
There is very little feeling that people in areas like Kumamoto are betraying their principles for money. Elections seldom seem to be about ideas or principles. Campaigning seems largely to consist of politicians, or their agents, driving around in little vans, shouting their name over and over again, along with a plea that people vote for them: “Tanaka desu. Tanaka desu! O-negai shimasu! Tanaka desu! O-negai shimasu..” (“This is Tanaka. This is Tanaka. I beg you! This is Tanaka! I beg you!”)
Kumamoto politics, like politics in most of the rest of the country, has been dominated for more than half a century by the Liberal Democratic Party. Y’s father appears to have been a supporter of various LDP politicians for most of that time. Whenever there was a particularly gross case of LDP corruption or venality, he would mutter “Terrible!” or “Disgusting!” along with the rest of the family but, come the next election, he would be round at the local headquarters of the LDP man he was supporting, to share in the excitement of the night.
Electoral politics was much less of a contest between parties and more a competition between rival firms, several of which might have the same party affiliation. For the first ten years that I was in Kumamoto, each electoral area was represented by two, or sometimes three, MPs. There might be several candidates from the LDP who would in effect be competing with each other, as well as with candidates from other parties.
Influence peddling is seen by most people as the main business of politicians, rather than as a distortion of the electoral process. One of my foreign friends was having trouble getting a visa. He told me that his Japanese wife’s family had contacted one of the local MPs. Within weeks, he had been granted his permanent residence. After ten years in Japan, he accepted this as the appropriate way of achieving results.
While this attitude to politics may be dominant, it is far from universal. The LDP covers the whole of the right half of the spectrum and while, several times during the past fifteen years, it looked doomed to follow its equally corrupt Italian sister party, Democrazia Christiana, into the oubliettes of history, it has proved a phoenix too frequent. Rather it has been the opposition parties, less frankly commercial in their electoral appeal, which have suffered most from electoral disillusionment.

When I first arrived in Kumamoto, the Socialist Party (社会党/shakai-tou), led by Takako Doi, was popular, and seemed to represent the same kind of politics as sister social-democratic parties like Helen Clark’s Labour Party.
The deeply conservative rural heartland of Kumamoto always seems more likely to support an alternative right wing party over any leftwing party, particularly if that right-wing party is led by a local aristocrat.

The family that ruled Kumamoto for centuries on behalf of the Shogunate is called Hosokowa. The present Lord (殿様/tono-sama) is called Hosokawa Morihiro (細川護熙). He was elected governor of Kumamoto soon after I arrived in 1986. It seemed a fitting expression of the survival of feudal attitudes that the hereditary lord should actually be elected Governor. He moved on from there to national politics, still within the bosom of one of the factions of the LDP. Before long, he led a faction which jumped ship when the parent party seemed too disgusting to continue to win the votes of even the super-tolerant Japanese electorate, and formed the New Party (新党/Shin-too).

At the subsequent election, I saw the first sign of genuine political enthusiasm among young people. Students were actually campaigning for Hosokawa, without being paid-- something which was rare, even for supporters of the left-wing parties.

Before long, Hosokawa was Prime Minister. People in Kumamoto were as proud as if a local boy had become a sumo Yokozuna (grand champion), or a judo gold medallist, like local hero Yamashita (L.A. Olympics).

Within months, though, Hosokawa had been forced to retire in disgrace, like so many of his LDP predecessors. He had been caught receiving kickbacks from one of the biggest despatch companies, Kuro-neko-ya (黒猫や/Black Cat Co.).

How could he not have done something like that, when such relations with business are the lifeblood of Japanese politics? The lucky don’t get caught, but it would seem almost impossible, even for someone as independently wealthy as Hosokawa, to avoid compromising oneself.

He retired to his mansions, one in Tokyo and the other in Kumamoto, to lick his wounds. He hasn’t exactly abandoned the exertion of political influence but certainly plays no overt role. I was persuaded to go to one of his annual cherry blossom season garden parties a couple of years ago, to see if he could be interested in the fate of the two foreign colleagues who had been unfairly sacked by the Prefectural University, where I worked.

Since the university had been very much Hosokawa’s brainchild, and internationalization had long been one of his hobbyhorses, Yoko, the mother hen of the teachers’ support group, was sure it was worth trying to talk personally to him.
When we arrived in the car park of his mansion, the attendants were wearing “happy coats” (traditional festive jackets) bearing the name of one of Hosokawa’s current political protogees, a certain Matsuno Yorihisa （松野頼久）. Mr. Matsuno was, like Hosokawa himself, a refugee from the LDP and, like him, had inherited his political influence from his father.

Hosokawa gave a warm, eloquent speech, lamenting the decline in the number of traditional varieties of flowering cherry in the face of the ubiquitous ????, which he said had been imported from the Himalayas in the nineteenth century.

There was nothing as crude as an overt political endorsement of Mr. Matsuno. Yoko guided us into a line which would lead to a photo-op with the ex-P.M. In the thirty seconds that were open to them,Yoko and C, one of the sacked teachers, tried to impress upon him the injustice of the situation. He was polite and non-committal, looking wary and weary, as if such minor ambushes were a regrettable but distasteful necessity. He promised nothing, and probably did nothing.

Inside the House (家の中/ie no naka)

In traditional Japanese farmhouses, there is a huge earthen-floored porch where you could work without taking off your shoes. This porch has shrunken in most modern houses to a tiny genkan, which is simply a place to leave your shoes before you step up a step to the shoeless interior. I was prepared for this custom, since many of our Japanese friends in Auckland had “no-shoes in the house” practice. This didn’t spare me from the occasional indignity of having it politely pointed out that I was wandering around the house still wearing my clodhoppers. But mistakes like that were more slips than cultural ignorance.
Usually, there would be slippers to keep your stockinged feet warm inside the house. There is another gradation within the house that took some time to get used to: in the tatami rooms, not even slippers are allowed. To walk on tatami in slippers would be like walking on a bed with slippers, since people often lie directly on the tatami, the way New Zealanders would lie on a bed for a rest.

Outside the house, if you are wandering around the garden, or if the ground is muddy, the traditional footwear is still the geta, the wooden “jandals” with a couple of strips of wood attached to the sole, to keep you out of the mud.

In my second week in Japan, when we were visiting friends in Shizuoka, I managed to commit the mortal sin of footwear transgressions: I walked into the house, ascended the stairs, and penetrated the sanctum sanctorum of the tatami room, all while still wearing my wooden geta.

Bathroom

The bathroom is another difficult zone for foreigners. When we arrived at the Gs’, Y carefully explained to me the proper procedure for having a bath in a Japanese house. The main thing to remember is that the bath itself is not for washing, but for soaking. The actual washing of the body is done outside the bath on the tiled area beside the bath. The dressing and undressing is done in a little ante-room. Once inside the bathroom, one starts a series of alternating bouts of washing and soaking, which can go on for what seems an extraordinarily long time for those whose culture teaches that bathing is a necessary chore, rather than the most sublime of pleasures.
The first wash is pretty perfunctory, with little more than a quick splash to the hot zones--the nether regions and perhaps the armpits. Then, into the tub for a few minutes to relax. Out again, and then some serious washing and shampooing. Al the soap is carefully rinsed off before a further period of immersion. Out again perhaps for a rinse of cool water to clear the head, and back in again. I would seldom get to that point, at least if I was on my own. During the whole exercise, it is extremely important, as Y emphasised to me, to ensure that not the slightest suspicion of soap should penetrate the pristine water in the tub.

I tried to absorb all this, managed the preliminary wash and then, just before I got into the tub, nonchalantly, and innocently, tossed the bar of soap into the water. There was just too much to absorb at one wash.

Over the years though, I began to acquire the instinctive revulsion at the prospect of mixing suds and bathwater. So, I was able to sympathise with both sides of the cultural equation when, some years later, we were at a theatre festival in a mountain valley in Toyama, in the north of Honshu.

We were walking past a bed and breakfast place, when we heard wails of disbelief and outrage emerging from inside: “He’s put soap in the bath! The foreigner has put soap in the bath!” In most hotels, that wouldn’t matter, as the bath would be for just one or two people. In the minshuku (guesthouse, similar to a bed and breakfast) though, the bath is communal, to be used by all the guests: one batch of bathwater has to last a number of people.

It’s easy for non-Japanese to feel a bit hygienically challenged by the Japanese love of bathing, and the insistence that the water be kept unsullied. It is some consolation though to realize that this is the result of the sharing of bath water and that Japanese people are quite happy to wash and shampoo in the bath if they are to be the only ones using the water. ( I should say that I am saying this on the basis of a sample of one, so I can’t be sure. )

So far I’ve been talking only about the domestic bath but the house bath is quite a modern amenity. Most urban Japanese families got a television before they got a bath in the house. In fact, the local neighbourhood bathhouse was an integral part of neighbourhood social life, and has only disappeared during the past couple of decades. Within a five hundred yard radius of our house in Shin-oo-e, there were three public bathhouses. The last closed three years ago. I did little to help them stay alive, usually going to bathhouses only when we were travelling to other cities.
Inside the entrance to a bathhouse, there would usually be a woman collecting money in front of a couple of curtains: one with the ideogram for woman “女”, and the other with “男”(male). The curtains only partially screen the interior, and one catches a glimpse of that pre-Meiji indifference to showing one’s body in public, even to the opposite sex.

These days (2002),in place of the old, functional bathhouses, a newer, glitzier, variety of “bath entertainment centres” have sprung up, which provides an upmarket venue, where a family can bathe and be entertained.

セクハラ—sekuhara (Sexual Harassment)

In 1998, I was in Barcelona to give a talk at “Bellaterra”, the campus of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. One night, after a session at “The Quiet Man”, in the company of old friends from The Dublin School, I was being driven back over the hills from Barcelona to San Cugat by Sean, the Dean of the Faculty which had invited me to speak.
Sean was telling me about his expeditions to the Far East on university business. He had liked Japan and had been impressed by the gardens and temples of Kyoto. “You know”, he said, “One strange thing did happen to me in Kyoto. I was visiting a Zen temple and was sexually assaulted by a monk there.” After I had got a few details from him, I realized we had both been the victims of the same serial molester.
I had been at a JACET （“College Teachers of English”） conference several years before. On the second day of the conference, Prof. Jenkins suggested to Sean, another of the PUK foreign teachers and me that we join him on a visit to a fine temple which he had discovered the day before.

We were admiring one of the gardens when one of the monks approached us and offered to tell us about the temple. He asked us if we wanted to be shown the basics of zen meditation. Before long he had the three of us lined up on the tatami and he was explaining to us the breathing system essential for good meditation. He emphasised that the lower abdomen was the key and, since he was sitting between Sean and me, he was able to put his hands on both of us to check whether we had the technique right. Before I realised what had happened, his hand had strayed lower than could be required by any introduction to zen meditation. I could hardly believe what had happened and did not react. We quickly got up, and left the temple. “Did something odd happen in there?” Sean asked. We confirmed that we had both been victims of the same compulsive monk.
I met Y, who had come to Kyoto for the weekend, an hour later and told her about the “sekuhara”(sexual harassment or assault) at the hands of Zen monk. She burst out laughing-- so much for the loyal support that Japanese women are famous for. I persuaded her that we should do something and half an hour later we were in the City Tourist Office reporting the incident. Y still had trouble keeping a straight face as she explained the incident to the manager of the office, who was giving the impression that he was not taking it seriously. Aware that it wasn’t enough, but comforting myself that at least we had done something, I did nothing more.
The incident brought home to me how difficult it must be for children and young people to resist sexual assaults from adults. If even a couple of forty-year-old university teachers were incapable of reacting at the time and of properly reporting the incident, there can be no wonder that children find to difficult.
I arrived back in New Zealand in May 2002 to find the news media full of cases of sexual assaults of children in various Catholic institutions, some dating back more than 30 years. I had spent thirteen years in Catholic schools, the last five at boarding school, but had never suffered or heard any hint of sexual assault. There were loads of assaults of course, in the form of corporal punishment, but I knew of nothing else. My experience in Kyoto though has given me proof that Christians have no monopoly on sexual hanky-panky. An article by Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books describing how the Mullah in Pakistan are notorious for their salacious interests in male students provided further evidence that such sexual malpractices are indeed an oecumenical phenomenon which transcend all doctrinal barriers.

The Kyoto incident was around 1997. Since then “Seku-hara” has exploded into Japanese consciousness.Committees against it have been set up in universities all over the country and there have been several high profile sackings. In our own city, there was a very low-profile resignation of a foreign teacher of English after allegations of homosexual intimidation of a student over exam results.　　28 Nov. 2002.

Religion (宗教/shuukyou)

Before I came to Japan, I got to know Y in Italy, where we lived in the same city, Turin, for a year. One evening we were waiting with some friends in a small mountain railway station, after a day of skiing in Limone, up near the Alpine border with France. We had more than an hour to wait for a train, and made the waiting room into an impromptu ristorante with cheese, olives, bread and wine. We had the place to ourselves, and the talk turned to our childhoods and our religious education. Michael (Anglican), Chiara (Sicilian Catholic) and I (NZ/Irish Catholic) recited the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s Creed and the Seven Deadly Sins with gusto, and pleasure at how much we could recall after decades of neglect. Y, when it came to her turn, recited the one and only Buddhist prayer she could remember from her lifetime of observance: “南無阿弥陀仏…Namu Amida Butsu ” Yuko said that “Amida Butsu” refers to Buddha but she had no idea what namu means. “I’ve never wondered about that” she said.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to learn?” “Yes,” she assured me. I was already an admirer of Japanese culture, after seeing most of Ozu Yasujiro’s films and devouring hundreds of pre-digested Zen parables; it now seemed even more attractive.If you look at the statistics for religious affiliation, you will see that 90% of Japanese people are Buddhists and that 90% are Shintoists. One can see American trade representatives narrowing their eyes at this statistic. Of course, it is the same people who are both Shinto and Buddhist. Rather than fight over the religious affiliation pie, the two major religious traditions in Japan have, over the centuries, arrived at a kind of mutually profitable entente whereby the milestones of life are divided between them: The Shinto temples get weddings and new babies, while the Buddhists get the funerals. There is a bit of cross-over. Buddhist priests will probably get married in a Buddhist temples and I have heard of Shinto funerals.
“Belief” is the word which springs to mind when talking about Westerners and their religions. The “Credo” is the defining prayer which Catholic children have had to struggle to learn by heart for centuries.

For Japanese people, “practice” seems to be the defining concept. I’ve never heard of a Japanese person say, “I don’t go to the temple (the normal translation for the Buddhist お寺-otera) because I don’t believe in it.” The same goes for the shrine. More than belief, religion in Japan is a matter of doing the socially appropriate thing on a given occasion.

Buddhist services remind me of the Latin mass of the 1950s.The funeral service is pretty much an unintelligible, meaningless drone to the average Japanese person. The priests chant the sutras from concertina-shaped folders at a rhythmic pace which is somewhere between the way priests used to race through a weekday mass and Winston McCarthy giving the commentary on a Springbok test. In fact the language, a solid mass of Chinese characters, is at least as far from modern Japanese as Latin is from English. No translation, no commentary, no exegesis is provided. In fact I have seen one priest achieves a bathetic climax, after a resonant performance of one of the great sutra, by immediately loudly asking for his fee. (Payment to the monk is usually per visit and they receive about 5000 yen ($70 NZ Dec. 2003) for a half hour call. )

I have never heard a Japanese person lament or even mention the fact that they could understand nothing of the ceremony. Most seem to accept that the service is a chance to slip off into a reverie, only broken by the need to move their legs to keep the blood circulating as they sit on their heels on the tatami floor.

Buddhist practice is pretty much a takeaway business. Nothing of importance happens inside a temple. For city funerals, the priests go to the big funeral emporiums and, in the country, to the family house.

Almost as important as the funeral is the elaborate sequence of commemorative days that follow the demise of a family member. Since Y’s mother and four of her brothers had already died before I arrived in Japan, there were plenty of opportunities to admire the thoroughness of this observance, so minimally connected to what westerners would call belief. On the 13th of every month, the family monk would arrive on his scooter and chant prayers for a half an hour or so in front of the Buttsudan (family altar) in Y’s father’s room. In the shrine, there was a picture of her mother, a couple of candles, and a plate of delicacies, perhaps mochi, (rice-paste balls) and fruit. The priest usually came in the morning and anyone who was home would attend. Y would try and say a prayer on that day every month, even if she missed the priest’s visit.

The seventh and the forty-ninth days after the death are important. The first Buddhist All Souls Day (August 13-15) after the death is also a must. The first and third anniversaries are also marked by family gatherings and a prayer session. There is another gathering at the seventeenth anniversary, and then a big gap until the fiftieth anniversary. I was there for the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Y’s oldest brother, and of her father’s mother.


The funeral itself is a grander affair, and the status of the family is measured by the number of priests. The passing of a country doctor like Mr. W, the father of a our sister-in-law, called for a three priest ceremony, and Y father, as a retired headmaster, could hardly have had less than two.

If Buddhist beliefs are vague and cursory for most Japanese people, those relating to Shinto are elusive to the point of invisibility. The wedding ceremony is certainly pleasant and may actually take place inside a shrine. The consumption of saki is an integral and repeated part of the ceremony, and certainly reduces anxiety.

Apart from weddings though, Shinto is a pretty much do-it-yourself affair. You take the baby to the shrine soon after birth, and again on the special feast day called　七五三 Shichi-go-san (Seven-five-three), early in November, when the child is in her third, fifth and seventh year. There may be a priest who can bless the visitants with a wave of paper wand but if not, it is sufficient to stand outside the shrine and make a short prayer to feel that one has satisfied the requirements of a successful visit. In less than five minutes one has completed the necessary ceremonies which would be pretty much as follows: pouring water over one’s hands inside the entrance to the shrine to cleanse oneself; standing in front of the shrine; throwing a coin or, rarely, a 1000 yen note into the collection box; ringing the bell (to awaken the gods), clapping once (to make sure they are awake), bowing and praying silently, for perhaps fifteen seconds; clapping again and leaving. (If it is New Year, people usually also spend fifty yen on a fortune-telling slip -- or two, if the first one offers a less than optimistic prognosis for the coming year.

There is no equivalent to Sunday school for Japanese children, and I have never met any Japanese person except my shakuhachi teacher and monk friend,S, who showed the slightest interest in discussing religious belief.

The "Village People" (部落民/burakumin): the limits of harmony

One Sunday afternoon, when Y and I were visiting the prefectural art gallery, I noticed a large crowd of people gathered around banners and placards, on the other side of the Ni-no-maru park. I had been in Kumamoto for about a year without seeing any large political demonstration, so I was intrigued by this mass of several thousand, clearly politically-motivated people. Y looked carefully and said she thought it looked like a gathering of “burakumin”. I insisted on going and having a look. As we got closer, I could see that the people gathered there very much a typical cross-section of the Kumamoto community. There were children in school
uniforms, men dressed in the ubiquitous grey suits of office workers, and women, indistinguishable from the women down the hill, thronging the big department stores.

As we approached, a small group of teen-age girls, in school uniform, came up to us and, with the shy confidence that came from numbers, began to talk to us. After an exchange of greetings, one of them asked me, “差別をしますか？/—Sabetsu wo shimasu ka?" ("Do you do …" and I didn’t know the meaning of the word “sabetsu”. Y filled in the gap: “Do you discriminate?” “No,” I hurriedly assured them, “I don’t discriminate.” Perish the thought. They went off satisfied.

In later years, I was to recall that conversation and realize that it was not by chance that their question had not defined the object of my potential discrimination, as in, "Do you discriminate against ...whoever?" For decades in Japan, the concept of discrimination has been linked to that section of the Japanese population called the “burakumin”, or “village people”. "Burakumin" is just one of a chain of euphemisms which have been used since the Meiji period to refer to that section of the population which had been an underclass during the Edo period, when they were called "Eta" and "Hinin". They had never been either genetically or culturally distinguishable from the rest of the population. The Eta and Hinin consisted of different groups of people who, for varying reasons, were shunned by their fellows: some because the nature of their work, dealing with human or animal cadavers; some because they, or their ancestors, had been involved in political revolts against the regime, and some because of other more mundane misdemeanours like theft or gambling.

With the Meiji reforms, the Eta and Hinin were restored to the same legal status as the rest of the population, and discrimination against them was made illegal. However, one hundred and fifty years later, they still remain a readily identifiable group throughout Japan, and are still the object of discrimination. There are areas in many Japanese cities and towns which are officially designated as areas which are to receive special help, on the basis that most of the people living in these zones are "burakumin". This positive discrimination is designed to counter the still-pervasive problems of poverty and low educational levels which afflict many of these people.
Like many outsiders who come to live in Japan, I was fascinated by this flaw in the apparently seamless face of Japanese cultural and ethnic unity. My Japanese family could tell me little. Y knew simply that some areas of Kumamoto were known to be places were burakumin lived.

I made a point of asking my students to write brief essays in English about the issue. Out of the hundreds of essays I read, not one of them was written by someone from a burakumin family, or at least by someone who was prepared to say that they were from such a background. A number of students wrote that they had grown up close to “designated areas” where burakumin lived. I began to wonder whether this kind of reference was not a coded way of saying that they were from “burakumin” families.

Needless to say, all students condemned the discrimination. Most said they only knew about the issue because they learned at high school that discrimination against burakumin was bad. Several told stories of young couples whose plans to marry had been blocked because one of them was from a burakumin family. Others told me that firms and families routinely hired private investigators to check whether there was a taint on prospective employees and partners. All condemned such discrimination, writing that it was a problem of the older generations and would eventually disappear.

It was years before I was to have closer contact with burakumin. When the foreign teachers at my university began to resist discrimination of our own, our first support came from the smallest of the three main union federations in Japan, the Zenrokyou, or National Workers’ Council. The first contact we had with their General Workers’ Union was through Mr. Tanaka Nobuyuki, a local man, and through him we met the area union official, Mr. Okabe Tadashi, who was living more than two hours drive away in Kita Kyushu. Both of these men had married women from burakumin families, and both were living with their families in “designated” areas. They knew about discrimination, and they knew that it was not a phenomenon which was limited to a single group of people.

Before long, we had a chance to repay the support we had received. Mr. Tanaka and his family had been passed over for city housing, although he knew they were the next on the list. He sued the City Council for discrimination and won in the District Court. The Council appealed. He called on friends to help leaflet a national congress on “Dowa” (harmony) discrimination. “Social harmony education” is the current official euphemism for the issue of discrimination against burakumin. Three of the foreign teachers at the university joined with ten other supporters of Mr. Tanaka and passed out leaflets to the thousands of delegates pouring into the conference centre. It was ironic, but not unexpected, that the prefectural officials responsible for the discrimination against their own foreign teachers were among those attending. Mr. Tanaka eventually won in the appeal court as well, and the City finally gave in, proving that one of my academic colleagues was unduly pessimistic when he said that you “can’t beat City Hall”.
As outsiders who had “married in” to Burakumin families, Mr. Okabe and Mr. Tanaka talked to me about the situation of their families in a way that their wives have never done. Both were from the radical generation of students from the sixties and seventies, and were relatively immune to the kind of family pressure which would have deterred most young Japanese men.
Mr. Okabe told me of a dark history which went far beyond discrimination. In the area of Northern Kyushu where his wife had grown up in a farming family, there had been massacres of burakumin around the turn of the century when surrounding communities made them scapegoats for their own suffering.

I learnt from my friends that the burakumin communities remain relatively insulated socially, and that “integration” is still a long way off. However, the children that I have met don’t seem cowed by prevailing attitudes. Mr. Tanaka’s oldest son has acted in a number of local theatrical productions and in several films. Mr. Okabe’s son is now a second year university student at the largest private university in Kumamoto, and is a quietly confident young man who has been fighting discrimination and nationalism since he was a schoolboy.
It was from these people that our little group of foreign teachers received unstinting and generous support in our own attempts to get fair treatment at the hand of ingrown bureaucracies who could not imagine treating foreign teachers as anything other than foreign “guests”. Nov. 2002.

Bicycles (jitensha/自転車)

Kumamoto is a good city for bikes. It’s pretty flat, built on a river plain, and much more concentrated than any New Zealand city, even Wellington. From where we lived in Shin-oo-e, I could get to most places by bike within 20 minutes. And I had plenty of company. There are bikes everywhere, mostly being ridden by kids, and housewives. No self-respecting Japanese adult male wants to be seen on a bicycle. Even male students ride with reluctance, as if the bicycle was a badge of their inability to afford a motor of some kind.

Cyclists are very much a law unto themselves, representing the id in the Japanese collective psyche, the untamed free soul, immune to the exacting
restrictions of Japanese social life. It’s not that there are no rules. It’s justthat they are seldom observed, and even more seldom enforced. For all their G7 status, Japanese adolescents retain the same kind of indifference to their physical survival as the youth of Hanoi. A high school girl might show her trust and affection for her boy by riding behind him, holding his shoulders while perched precariously on two little metal pins projecting on either side of the back axle of the lad’s bike. I’ve also seen girls standing on the back carriers, prim and trim in their neo-Victorian uniforms, looking ahead with calm indifference to the manifest danger of their situation.
At night, the roads become as danger-prone as the screens of video games.
Cycling around, one is regularly confronted by groups of kids on bikes, riding without lights, dressed entirely in black, on the wrong side of the road. That last phrase betrays a level of ethnocentrism on my part: for Japanese cyclists, there is effectively no wrong side of the road, just a tendency or a preference to use the left, all things being equal.

Adjusting to traffic mores is a test of cultural adaptability for new foreigners. During my first years in Kumamoto, I often found it impossible to resist the temptation to shout at kids driving on the wrong side of the road at night. While my words would be polite enough, things like “電気をつけてください！－－Turn on your lights, please!”, there would have been no mistaking the suppressed-anger-of-the stressed-foreigner in the voice that delivered the message. One American potter I knew used to squirt water at kids cycling on the “wrong side of the road” during the summer months.

Accidents are, of course, inevitable in these conditions, and I’ve been lucky to have had no more than my share during my fifteen years in the saddle in Kumamoto. Over the handlebars once when a car turned in front of me. I couldn’t move my shoulder properly for years but there were no broken bones. Another time, when a car shot out of a side street in front of me, I was lucky that the bike absorbed the impact and twisted front forks were the only price I had to pay for the encounter with a couple of recently licensed young women.

For most of first decade in Kumamoto, I was riding a fine steed, a huge bicycle built for export which I bought off a Canadian who had been teaching English in the Mitsubishi factory near Osaka. By the time the saddle had been raised to accommodate my six-foot five inch frame, it was pretty much inaccessible to the ubiquitous bicycle thieves. Eventually the saddle post fused into the frame so that it became impregnable even to a spanner-wielding would-be thief. Over the years, I gradually became more negligent about locking the bike, as it seemed unlikely that any potential bicycle thief would be able to ride it away.

Inevitably though, in a culture where bicycle conversion, if not theft, is as much an accepted exception to the general honesty as tax avoidance, my bike was nicked. I had cycled in to a New Year faculty party in the centre of the city. When the party had finished, I emerged to find the bike had gone. I reported it to the police but, as I didn’t even have the maker’s number on the frame, they said there was little chance of finding it, for all that it was head and shoulders taller than the average missing bike.
Y and I visited the city council home for abandoned bikes several times, but without finding it. After some months had passed, I bought a new one which was lighter and fleeter of wheel, and gradually got over the loss. About a year after it had disappeared, I came home one day to hear an ansafone message from my bicycle repair man. He said that he had been visiting the city council depot for abandoned bikes, and had seen my bike among those that were about to be fed into the scrap metal crushing machine. He had rescued it, assuring the workers that he knew the owner.
I drove to his shop and there the bike was, little the worse for wear for its year away. It still serves as a useful backup for when I have problems with its replacement. I’m still hoping to find a 6 foot 5 inch tall poverty-stricken student who would be grateful to give it a new home.

Losing things(物を失う/Mono o ushinau)

When I was in Standard One, Sister Celine, our ginger-eyebrowed St Joseph’s nun, once said to me, “Farrell Cleary, if your head wasn’t attached to your shoulders, you’d forget it.” That was fair comment. I’d never had the Zen gift of being in the moment, and my absentmindedness has meant that I’ve lost more than my share of things during my life. That was until I encountered Japanese culture.

Almost as soon as I met Y, she amazed me by her ability to find missing contact lenses and to remember the location of anything that she had seen around the house. Once, while we were living in Auckland before moving to Japan in 1986, I lost a contact lens while she was away in the South Island working as a tour guide. When she arrived back, she walked along the passage of the flat towards our bedroom to dump her things. It was an old, subdivided house and the passage was dark. Even in those conditions. she caught the glint of the missing lens on the floor. Her sharp eyes have saved us several thousand dollars in replacement lenses over the years.

When we arrived in Japan, I found myself surrounded by Ys, people who seemed determined to stop me losing things. I arrived home from work one day, had a cup of tea, and the phone rang. It was someone ringing from a coffee bar in town. He said that he had picked up my wallet in the street and had taken it to a coffee bar he knew before opening it so that there would be no suspicion that he had interfered with its contents. He told me that he was leaving it in the coffee bar for me to pick up and refused even to leave his name. Dropping my wallet on one of the small private railway lines going inland from Kumamoto city resulted in a similar phone call.

Once I even managed to leave behind my briefcase beside the river when we went to a children’s bonfire festival just after New Year. It was hours before I realised I’d left it behind. I cycled back to the riverbed where the festival had long since finished. There was no-one there. My bag was still there, beside the road, all alone and eloquently standing up where someone had left it so it would be easy to see. I opened it to see that everything was intact, including a clearly visible 10,000 yen note. Don’t ask me what I was doing carrying 10,000 yen notes around in my schoolbag!

Even Japanese society has, on occasion, given way before the relentless onslaught of my absentmindedness. I arrived at University one day to find that my bag was missing from the carrier attached to the rear wheel. I retraced my route from home several times and paid special attention to the unofficial railway crossing where I had dismounted and carried the bike across the rails. Nothing. I duly reported it to the police but never saw it again.

In those early years I used to cycle everywhere with brio, and took delight in racing, and occasionally beating, cars through the narrow streets of the city.
One day I was cycling into town and could feel someone peddling just behind me. I could see out of the corner of my eye that the cyclist was wearing the navy serge of a high school student. He seemed to be trying to race me and I struggled to keep up the pace for another 100 metres, until the next traffic lights. It wasn’t the first time I’d indulged in that kind of adolescent competitiveness, although at 40, I was finding it harder.

The boy pulled up beside me. ”Sumimasen. Otoshimono deshita.[Excuse me. You dropped this.]" He was panting as he thrust a 1000 yen note into my hand, and cycled off in the direction we had come, before I could do more than mutter a quick thanks. That was before the economic bubble burst in 1991, but I think it still could happen today in Kumamoto.

The Shakuhachi.(尺八): Surviving when you can’t talk..

For years, I was given carte blanche at family gatherings to sit in a corner to read, or to quietly slip away next door and watch a video. To make up for the fact that I couldn’t talk with people, because of my minimal Japanese, I took up the shakuhachi, one of the traditional bamboo flutes.

The shakuhachi is made from a piece of bamboo cut out ot the bottom part of carefully selected shoot. The name means literally “one shaku, eight” and could be safely rendered “one-foot-eight” since a shaku was the pre-metric measurement roughly corresponding to a “foot”. Actually there are instruments of different lengths but the generic name remains that of the most commonly used instrument which is in the key of F.

I’d fallen for the instrument years before I went to Japan. All my life I’d been fooling around with flutes, whistles—anything you could blow into. I’d loved the way Matt Malloy of the Chieftains had described his affection for the “bark” of his favourite flute at a music scoil I’d been to in Ireland. At a Japanese culture evening in Auckland, in the early eighties, I’d heard a shakuhachi being played with a range of tones that were fuller and more expressive even than Matt Malloy’s ebony wooden flute. The player had let me handle it, and even though I couldn’t make a sound, I loved the bamboo solidity and simplicity of this instrument which kept it’s bamboo-shootedness in spite of being valued at many thousands of dollars.

During my first year in Kumamoto, through a friend of a friend, I was put in touch with a shakuhachi teacher called Fujiyama Shoryu. Fujiyama sensei also happened to be a Buddhist monk. We met at the home of Kamisakoda sensei, a koto teacher. Fujiyama sensei was very encouraging, and let me try and play one of his shakuhachi. He appeared delighted that I could make a sound at all. He lent me a wooden practice instrument and we began a year of irregularly spaced lessons.

Although I had images of deep mystical meditative playing, I quickly discovered that the world of traditional classical music was very much a part of post-Meiji Japan. Fujiyama sensei was affiliated to Tozan Ryu (the Tozan School) of shakuhachi, as opposed to the Kinko School. Somewhat to my disappointment, I found that the Tozan people seemed to be the modernizers, in that their instruments were modified by the addition of a further hole to the traditional instrument to make it easier for them to play the chromatic scale. The Kinko School seemed closer to the traditional approach and I couldn’t help envying a Canadian friend who was learning from a Kinko teacher. He invited me to come and learn from his teacher but I liked Fujiyama sensei too much to risk any disloyalty.

It was years before I actually met anyone who played honkyoku ("real melodies”--the solo pieces in the style of thope played by Zen monks), and years after that before Shoryu took me to meet another monk who played them well. By that time though, I was studying Noh theatre and didn't have time to work at the shakuhachi.

The melodies I learnt seemed to be traditional style tunes written post-Meiji with ensemble playing in mind. The old shakuhachi was very much a solo instrument and exact tuning was not necessary. The folk music I had encountered before coming to Japan was very much aural music. Most traditional Irish musicians could not read music and would learn the tune by ear, often writing down the notes in letters to jog the memory. The shakuhachi had its own system of musical notation based on a succession of letters with added symbols to mark rhythm and timing.

When I played in public in Kumamoto, it was usually in a team of shakuhachi players lined up behind massed koto in one of the big theatres around town. The other regular “gig” was playing with Fujiyama sensei at the annual concerts of the Koto Club of the Prefectural Women’s University.

I did enjoy the lessons with Shoryu. He was an enthusiastic teacher and although I could understand only bits of what he was telling me, I would record our sessions and Y would tell me what I had missed. There are all kinds of special effects to master, including various onomatopoeic effects echoing wind and wild geese. The names of the notes reflected not only the pitch but also their sound colour. I was told early on that it might take seven years to master the art of producing vibrato, not with the diaphragm, but by kubifuri—literally "neck shaking" although it is more like "head-shaking". It’s sixteen years since I first blew on an instrument and I’m ashamed to say that I still can’t do kubi furi properly.

Fujiyama sensei lived about an hour’s drive out in the country, but that was not a problem since he frequently visitied the city. Like many country monks, Fujiyama sensei is also a school teacher. Every year, in early summer and his wife Kyoko, host a concert of koto and shakuhachi music at their temple, and a hundred or so local people gather for the music and enjoy a communal meal of soba (buckwheat noodles) and mochi (rice dumplings) afterwards.

Although I haven’t taken any lessons after that first year, I continue to enjoy the shakuhachi and it's breathy, windy sound has followed me to the other end of the Pacific.

Having a go at the Japanese Language (日本語/nihongo)

I spent far too long thinking about how to learn Japanese rather than simply learning it. It was a bit of a shock when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to “pick up” Japanese the way I had acquired the other languages I had come to enjoy in my years of living among the Latin dialects of Southern Europe . Y and I arrived in Kumamoto in April 1986. I brought with me Modern Japanese, which I’d used for a course in Auckland --my one, brief attempt to learn Japanese. Victor, a New Zealander doing post-graduate study in Hiroshima, had showed me his little orange kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) dictionary and I had bought a copy, little realising that it was useful to Victor only because he already knew a lot of kanji. It was pretty useless to me since you had to know a lot of kanji before you could use it to look up kanji.

I had only part time work during our first couple of years in Kumamoto, so there was time for studying written Japanese. Y wondered why I bothered, since she knew how hard it was for Japanese kids to learn kanji and she didn’t think it was feasible for a lanky New Zealander in his late thirties.

I remember sitting at the kotatsu (a kind of a cross between a heater and a table) in front of the television at Y's father’s house （ next to our own little cottage), trying to penetrate the mysteries of one of the world’s most complex linguistic codes. I sweated away and, after three months, I finally managed to read something outside of the textbook. I deciphered the word “駐車場 (chuushajo/car park)” as we parked our battered Nissan behind the local Daiei shopping centre. My pleasure at this achievement was undermined by the realization that, if I continued to progress at that rate, it would take me decades before I could hope to read a newspaper.

During my first couple of years in Kumamoto, an English friend and I spent hundreds of hours working out how to use the various dictionaries, and dreaming up new systems which would make these dictionaries easier to use for foreign neophytes. Looking up Chinese Japanese words in a dictionary seemed almost as hard as learning a language in itself.

After seven years of looking for a smart way of learning Japanese, I finally tried the all too obvious method Japanese people have been using for centuries: I started learning the characters by simply writing them out, again and again. Each morning when I got up, I would rub the ink stick onto the black stone base and let it colour the water until I had a little pool of ink, sometimes blue, sometimes black. Then I would copy ten kanji into the square boxes of a Japanese primary school exercise book. I would write each character fourteen times making a total of 140 per day.

I did that for almost a year. There are about 2,000 characters, which kids graduating from school are expected to know. It took me the best part of year to work through them, with the inevitable times off. I was not sure whether this method would “work” any better than the others I had tried. Certainly, at the end of the year I was still only able to write a miserable few of the characters without copying. However, I found that I could read and recognize more of them than I had ever been able to do in all my years of looking for short-cuts.

The spoken language was not much easier. It was years before I could participate in group conversations in Japanese. Since we had no money to speak of when we arrived in Kumamoto, I never considered doing what most people who are serious about living in Japan accept as a matter of course: devoting two years of full-time study to the language, before settling down to the business of everyday life. People like missionaries and diplomats.

Missionaries have told me that, even after their two years of study, they still did not “know” Japanese, but they knew enough to be able to learn from their everyday life in the language. In other words, after a couple of years of full-time study they were pretty much at the level I was on my first day in Spain or Italy.

I had always considered that I liked languages and accepted people’s judgement that I was “good at languages”. When I hit Japanese though, I realised that the Romance languages I had been learning were hardly different languages at all and barely escaped the categorization of dialects of Latin. To my chagrin, I realized that the dialects of Japan were just as different from one another, and from standard Japanese (標準語/hyoujungo), as French was from Italian. I realised how different local speech was from standard Japanese when I went to a language teaching conference in Hamamatsu, near Tokyo, after six months in Kumamoto. I went with Abel, an American friend (and mentor) who had been in Kumamoto for thirteen years when I arrived. We stayed with friends of his wife’s family. To my surprised gratification, I found I could understand a lot more of what people were saying to one another in that family than I could when I listened to Yuko’s family.

The reason? Y and her family spoke Japanese that was heavily influenced by their native dialect, the variety of Kumamato dialect spoken in the volcanic region of Aso. Here are a few examples to give you some idea of the differences.

“It’s hot” would be “Atsui desu!” in standard Japanese and “Atsuka bai” in Kumamoto dialect. “What are you doing?” would be “Nani wo shiteru no?” in the Japanese textbooks and “ Nan ba shotto?” in the dialect.

In Hamamatsu, for the first time, I was surrounded by people who were speaking what I was learning in my textbooks. That gave me hope, at least of making progress in standard Japanese, if not in “Kumamoto ben”. My linguistic enthusiasms know their bounds...

Introduction

1986-2002

I'm going to put in this blog things that I wrote during the months after leaving Japan in 2002.

I could say that I lived for sixteen years in Japan. But it would be more accurate to say that I lived for sixteen years in Kumamoto City (which is the capital of Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu), sixteen years in the suburb of Shin-oo-e, and sixteen years in the same house. Generalisations about "Japan" based on this experience should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Farrell Cleary