Tales of Japan

Japan has been part of my life the whole time, it seems.  When I was young, we lived in Orange county, California, and we often went to Knotts Berry Farm, an amusement park.  Nearby was Japanland* (not there any more) where we had sampled Japanese foods, saw some of the more obvious culture of Japan, and where I had gotten my first Japanese flag, the rising sun flag, which sat on my desk for years afterwards.

*I don’t remember the real name of the place.

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My father bought, in 1972, a Toyota Celica ST to commute with.  He eventually worked for JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, a 60 mile drive each way, so that by his death in 1977, that car had 105,000 miles on it.

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When I first went to Japan in 1985, I spoke one sentance of Japanese: "At Yale, we saw squirrels".  (we had gone there on our honeymoon trip) I knew some words, and my Japanese wife had been teaching me the pronuciation of the language (Japanese is a very regular language, unlike English).  On our honeymoon trip, driving across and around the US before we went to Japan, I knew the words for things like sheep, cows, cats, dogs, squirrels, and other animals, so as we drove along, it was partly fun and partly practise to point out those animals and say "there’s a/an (animal)!"

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When I first arrived there, only my wife spoke much English, and my mother-in-law was one of my prime teachers of the language.  She was the family cook, and as we ate, she’d tell me what I was eating, and eventually, if I wanted something, I had to ask for it by name.  She was a strict but kind teacher, and I owe some of my Japanese abilities to her efforts.

When I first got there, the family was curious to see the foreigner that their daughter/sister had brought home.  We had arrived after a long and mishap filled trip (the plane, which left from Los Angeles, had developed flying problems that put us in Seatle overnight, onto a different airplane, flying to a different airport, etc, etc)and we were tired.  Her parents picked us up at Osaka airport, and I cringed as we drove home, because they drive on the other side of the road than we do here in the US, and the whole way home I was envisioning head-on collisions.  It all looked so different!  I could read maybe 5% of the signs I saw- Sony, Toyota, and Toshiba, for example, are the same there as they are here, but nearly everything else I saw was either in Katakana, Hiragana, (Japanese characters) or in Chinese characters.

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We walked into the family house, which I immeadiately noted was much smaller than any I’d lived in with my own family, and quickly found out that one took off one’s shoes BEFORE going in out of the entranceway.  As I said, everyone was curious and somewhat cautious about the foriegner that the family’s #1 daughter had brought home from her college days in the US, and as I sat in the kitchen and tried to keep up with the questions and answers my wife translated between us, the family cat, a big, tiger-stripped cat, came and sniffed the new arrival too.

The cat, Chibi Nyan (small meow) was notably cautious, I was told, and not given to displays of affection, so it was with amazement that everyone watched as he sniffed me and immeadiately jumped in my lap and purred, very loudly.  He had never done that before with anyone,  I was told, and from that point on, my place in the family was assured- the harshest critic in the family had purred his approval just minutes after I arrived.

(cats like me.  They know who I am)

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I was born in 1962, 17 years after the end of WW2, but in Southern California, where we lived, there were wartime signs all aroud. The oil derricks in San Pedro and Long Beach still wore their wartime camoflage, and the words, "you dirty Jap" were still part of the language.  Japan’s long "economic miracle" was just getting started, and there were complaints that "they" were taking over American industries like stereo and television manufacturing – and cars.  Toyota was of course the biggest, most well-known auto maker, but Datsun (now Nissan) was coming along, and the newest auto maker, Honda, was making small cars that were gaining popularity.  Japanese motorcycles were already well know, and competed very favorably against long-established brands like Harley Davidson and Triumph and Huskevarna.

Because the war was still in recent memory, there were a lot of war movies on TV, and my brother and I devoured these and played at "war games" with our friends.  As I grew older, I became more curious about what had happened, so that by the time I actually went there at 23, I knew a lot of the history about WW2 and the reasons behind it.

I knew that "we" had bombed the piss out of Japan in the last year of the war, that the 100 largest cities had been destroyed and that millions had died there because of American bombs.  I was prepared to be disliked, even hated, and was filled with trepidation.  "We" had occupied Japan for seven years after the war (and indeed, still maintain large bases in Okinawa and around Tokyo), but what I found was not at all what I had expected.  Most of the Japanese I interacted with saw Japan’s defeat at the end of the war as a blessing, and saw Americans as someone to emulate and imitate.  I’ve been to Japan about a dozen time by now, and only one person out of my years of interaction with the Japanese has ever given me a hard time for being an American.

(This may well have changed, since the world’s view of Americans has been corroded by the current administration.  Japanese TV focuses on the Iraqi’s and their plight much more than it does on the Americans, and there are nowadays regular protests at our embassy in Tokyo and at our consulates in Japan)

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I have been interested in Nuclear physics and the means of making and using atomic weapons and have studied that subject at great length.  I have been to Los Alamos, the National Atomic Museum, and the Trinity site in New Mexico (site of the first test bomb), to Lawrance Livermore labs in the Bay area, and to the test site north of Las Vegas.  I have read at great length about the Hanford atomic production site in Washington (my

university is the repository for all documents on Hanford).

As part of my study of these things, I have been to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Both have awesome and chilling museums about the atomic bombs that destroyed both cities in 1945.  People’s shadows really were burned into the pavement and walls.  In both places I was quite prepared to be hated and despised. 

Nothing like that occurred at all.

In fact, one of the most surreal things I ever saw in Japan was below the museum at Hiroshima’s peace park, the hypocenter of the bomb’s detonation. 

The museum is a large building on posts, whose first floor sits above the ground below it, the center of the bomb’s detonation, and below the museum, I saw teenagers, Japanese teens, dressed in 1950’s American styles dancing to American 1950’s rock n’roll, blasting out of the boombox they kept fed with batteries.  Girls in flouncy skirts and saddle shoes, guys in pegged Levi’s wearing Duck’s Ass haircuts, dancing the Lindy Hop.  It was beyond surreal, as the musuem to the bomb sat overhead and the International Trade Center, the most famous building in Hiroshima, sat along the river beyond.

the International Trade Center

(more tales to come)

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