Cutters

© 2006 Jon Donlon

Men seem to be spending money on themselves reminiscent of the Gilded Age, with fat cigars, old liquors, fast horses, and young women. Glossy men’s mags are getting short on old fashioned visual porn and long on fashionable consumables. But I'm not looking for a high maintenance babe who can suck a golf ball through six meters of garden hose or expensive deluxe bijoux--overpriced sweat-shop produced clothing with some other guy’s initials on them or complicated toys. I just want to find a good cutter.

This was no problem for the decade or so during which I didn't cut my hair. Back then I just pulled it back and snapped a rubber band with coloured plastic balls around it. But, one day, in Spain, I thought it would be cool to visit the barber of Seville.

He would cut it, the young barber in a white lab coat said, but after lunch.

Jolly and I returned, paella laden, to find that a dozen or fifteen carefully oiled and coifed Spanish men had gathered to witness the event, and render the auto de Fe seal of approval. When the barber snipped off my thick ponytail, and finished the cut, they each solemnly rose and shook my hand. I was no longer a goofy hippie. Well, no longer a hippie.

Cut once, I found hair had to be cut again every now and then.

When we moved to Japan recently I became acquainted with its wonderfully arcane methods of organization. For my first hair cut here I wandered to the train station for a trim at the franchise. They spoke little English and I spoke less Japanese. But it was easy enough for the barber to gesture toward a machine into which I fed a 1000 yen note and from which a printed receipt curled. The barber took this, sat me in a padded chair with a pair of painted foot prints on the floor in front of it. Where else would I put my feet I had to wonder? He swung open the mirror I faced once seated. It revealed a shallow closet for coat, bag, and other personal belongings. All very efficient. Well organized.

The Japanese cutter held out a special, narrow case for my classes. Then he swathed me in paper neck tape and traditional bib. Of course without a common language it’s impossible to say “short,” “long,” or “fashionable.” But I could show the guy my Louisiana driver’s license. That thing carries a then current cut. I could and did make a fingers-close-together sign hoping to convey the idea that I wanted a short trim – and hope that I’d not conveyed the idea that I wanted him to shrink my noggin down to two inches like a Borneo head-hunter’s trophy. (That’s so outré this season.)

Although cheap at the price, the thousand yen cut was pretty good.

He did a preliminary cutting with the power machine and then a lot of clipping with shears. Done, a vacuum hose dropped from the ceiling, accoutred with a stiff upholstery brush on the end. It sucked up stray bits from his work exactly like I clean up after the cat. The haircut was quick if not dirty, although there was none of the detail work you get at a full service barber. In Japan, a colleague tells me over expensive imported Irish bitter, that means shaving the forehead, too. Errant eyebrow fibres and stray ear infill are things to be removed at the home sink if one scruples to use the economy barber.

It is curious how many ways this simple task, cutting your hair, can be handled.

For some time I was working just south of Chicago, "city of the broad shoulders, . . . meatpacker to the world" in the vast repository library at the University of Illinois. Back then I went to a Brazilian women who would gently wash my hair and chatter away in a wonderful syrupy accent about her father's horse farm in South America.

After the trim, she'd stand behind me, hold my head in her small hot hands, centered between her teacup breasts, and we'd both look straight ahead into the mirror. She would think about my haircut. All done, she'd pull away the white apron, bend forward, purse her carmine lips and blow stray trimmings out of my collar with her tropical breath.

But I finished my work in the heartland and had to leave library, Brazilian bust, warm exotic puffs and all.

My next cutter, an African-American in the Deep South, gave a wonderfully stylish haircut but was apparently homophobic and frightened of touching another man or at least another man's head: odd for a barber. He'd sort of fix my shaggy bean with a fingertip and go to town with power clippers and then a pint-sized red vacuum cleaner. I would be shorn and free of trimmings in a jiffy as a room full of black women relaxed their locks all around us.

On Gibraltar once doing a story on Rock Buster, the Victorian 100-ton gun at Rosaria cove, I stopped in for a cut by an Irish barber. He spun a tale while he snip, snip, snipped away with glittering rat-tail stainless-steel scissors. I was entertained but wound up with a high-on-one-side reprise of Michael Caine's hair from his first film, Zulu.

When Jolly, my travelling companion said, "What did you do!?" while snuffling like an asthmatic yet not totally amused goose, I knew I had to go back. Unsurprised, the fellow Donkey worked on me again, saying "aye, but it does look to be lacking in symmetry, don't you know."

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an acquaintance recommended a Cuban émigré operating from a shop fitted out in a domestic garage. It was a sublime experience.

The barber was clearly deeply macho, confirmed in his manliness and willing to display. His slacks and shirt were ironed smooth as plate glass, a gold ring shown on his pinkie, gold watch on his wrist, and chain on his neck. Here was a real cutter.

An innovator, too, he'd plumbed the small barber shop with yellow plastic pneumatic line terminating in one of those bronze nozzles manufactured to be used in machine shops to clear away the iron filings during grinding and lathing. The Cuban cutter would hold my head, turn it, tilt it, twist it like a burned out light bulb and otherwise present my cranium for his careful work. From time to time he'd blast away the trimmed hair with a terrific chilled hiss from the industrial air-tap. This man knew his craft.

First, he picked up a shaker bottle and liberally sprinkled an astringent on my hirsute coconut, working the cool fluid into the scalp by massaging my noggin--his hands were like a pair of steroidal arachnids doing push-ups on a golf green. Next, he combed my anaemic mane straight back, then ran wildly buzzing electric clippers quickly and deftly here and there. Buzz, buzz, clip, clip, clip, blast, blast and the air was filled with scented hair.

For the final shaping, he used a series of different scissors to complete the work and to probe, pathologist like, into my ears to trim away those awful sprouts.

Then, cut complete I thought, he began to shape my moustache and use a tiny pair of scissors to deal with the hair forward of my ear. Still going on, he ran a small yet menacingly loud machine of indeterminate age and origin to generate a wad of hot foam, which he edged, with a sudden well-trained series of flicks, along my sideburns and the edge of my moustache.

Flipping open a straight razor with a thought provoking snap, he oh so carefully drew it along the now laser-straight frontier of those highly visible yet troublesome to trim zones.

Pulling a hot, wet white towel from a covered metal tray, this wonderful cutter wiped the remaining foam traces away and completed the job, finally, by firmly rubbing an antiquated, but cold and pleasant, floral cologne into my satisfied pate.

In all, it was a performance. Unfortunately, deep in the doldrums about circumstances in his earstwhile homeland he blew his capable brains out on a visit to Miami, his last earthly move being to place the cool, blunt muzzle of a small-frame .38 above his ear, nestled in his perfectly cut hairline.

I moved from that community, and that cutter, and landed in Botswana's sunny clime.

Then, if the larder was low and my skull was getting bushy, I'd pedal down the dusty road a bit to get a net sack of South African oranges and to catch a trim at "Booboos Rocket Styles." Booboo (not his real name) opened for business by wheel barrowing his sign, big piece of broken mirror, three home-market clippers, and small red Honda generator into work.

Although Booboo's sign offers fully a half-dozen styles from which to choose, I always opted for the basic buzz cut.

I’d slice open juicy oranges for all the bon vivants larking about the premises, sit back in the white plastic lawn chair and ask Booboo as he fires up the Honda, if we should discuss literature, politics, or soccer as we chatted beneath the prickly thorn bush branches, electric cutter a’ vibrating in the African afternoon.

The barber in the Sirkeci station in Istanbul usefully brackets my experience at the Japanese train station. Turkish barbers can only be described as wonderful. The cut itself may vary in quality depending on the skill of the cutter, but the experience is always top notch. It involves getting tea. It involves getting a shoulder message, a hand message, and a facial in a hot towel. You’re nuts if you don’t get shaved at the same time you get trimmed. Indeed, if you have not had a close, straight razor shave from an experience barber, you probably have not had a close shave.

Be ready. If you visit a Turkish barber with ear hair, here is the methodology. Twist up a ball of cotton at the end of a bit of wire. Dip the utensil in antiseptic. Set this aflame. Bounce said utensil carefully against the ear hair.

It works fine. However, if you are uninformed of the procedure and catch sight of a flaming cotton ball headed for your eardrum out of the corner of your eye, that can be disconcerting.

Many things make visiting Turkish barbers a joyful experience, and not less so the particular shop in the ornate Istanbul rail station. This cutter enjoyed the company of a charming pet bird which climbed about on his back as he worked. From time to time the companionable creature would creep up his sweater and perch on the barber’s shoulder, cooing and making comments in his ear. The barber would pause, smile, and make small talk with his feathered pet. Such moments make going to a barber better than just getting a good haircut.

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In Hot Water Again

© 2006 Donlon

On the flight over from the United States to Japan I began reading Alexia Brue’s (2003) Cathedrals of the Flesh: My Search for the Perfect Bath. Anyone who knows me knows that I, too, have traveled the globe seeking out bath options of various kinds. You will immediately understand my affection for this small, witty book. Hot water? Hey, I’m in it.

Maybe my own quest began as long ago as high school, when we would cut class to go up to the thermal seeps in the rocky gorges above Palm Springs. Sitting in a beat-up claw footed tub wedged in the sandstone with nekkid girls is good Zen training, I recall.

In fact speaking of useful things from the bath, after pretty fair field trials, George Trumper’s “traveler’s shaving brush” is definitely a find. It’s a badger bristle thing which screws apart in the grandest Victorian fashion. While on the move, you can protect the brush part by sliding it into the heavy handle. Trumper’s small shop filled with men’s bath gear is on Curzon Street in the London theatre district. If you do a “twofer” play, it’s easy to stop in before curtain time and get a few gizmos with the cash you save. If you want a decent shaving kit but with minimum weight and bulk, this is a useful item.

Anyway, Alexia Brue wrote about visiting cavernous banya’s in Moscow, hamam in Istanbul, sauna in Finland and so on finishing her book talking about the hot baths in Japan.

Public baths used to be popular in Japan. Onsen (regulated by the government according to mineral content and temperature) are natural springs and generally rural. Sento, which do not involve spring water, are set in the city. Urban onsen do exist and I suppose rural sento may exist, as well. But today individual bathing has become more common with public baths in decline.

Our small apartment has a cast concrete, tile, and painted plaster room. This bathroom is almost a cube with ½ the floor space, once you enter a glassed door, devoted to a tiled shower area. Parallel to this, about ½ the room is filled by a short, blue, very deep, almost vertical sided tub. Asian faucets often are configured as a bar with the hot & cold feeds entering the back. The temperature adjustment is on the end, and the volume knob is, as I’d expect it, in the middle front. Because of these 2 knobs, it’s easy to set a temperature and then get about that each time you a turn the volume knob in the center. This is almost like the rigs in expensive darkroom setups I’ve seen in the States (not as precise, but as convenient). The shower head is on a flex tube with two cradles on the wall, one low and one high.

Bathing’s “ideal” protocol demands are very thorough. They include soapy cleaning on the duck boards away from the tub, in public or in private. Some folks like to stand at a shower and some like to sit on a plastic stool, usually provided, and pour water over themselves with a plastic basin. If you talk about baths, there is always talk about clean water sluicing, and plenty of it.

Then, into the tub, the hot water unsullied by soap. No further soaping allowed.

But every place has its “real” and its “ideal.” I’ll rely on Donald Richie and his inches thick diary of life in Japan here. In his years of observation this, too, seems more of a “do what I say, not what I do” situation. In that habit the Japanese would be joining, if not good company, at least copious company—probably every other nation on the globe. That doan mean the maid won’t break into a crazy dance like a Wild Tchapatoulas if a foreigner soaps up the soak tub.

Years ago, Sally and Mike invited me as a guest to the New Orleans Athletic Club, at the time a kind of labor of love by the owner to maintain a traditional setting with marble slabs, steam bath, and swimming pool nested in old world columned architecture. It was well before I’d traveled in Cyprus and Turkey, and I didn’t get the Classical bath references. I don’t know what happed to the NOAC, especially after Katrina, but I hope it’s still steaming along. Here in Hadano we love our individual bath, which is the modern, home version of the public tradition.

And Onsen are still going strong in Japan. The urban species, as is the case of hamams in most areas of Turkey and the baths in Russia, are slowly being phased out. Some commercial baths in Japan are hanging on by the expedient of adding karaoke pubs and the like.

Our first hot bath was far from Tokyo, on the opposite side of the archipelago. Friends of the owners, Jolly and I had the tank to ourselves when we tried out that first surprisingly hot soak. The place was way up the mountains near the setting for Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, the Nobel Prize winning novel about a country geisha at a hot springs resort. No coy geishas and only fast melting snow when we were par boiling.

In the Japanese bath, otokoburo marks the male side and onnaburo the female side of almost invariably gender separate pools. Turkish hamams may be either exclusive to gender or wig and wag by days of the week. Country by country, each bathing style deals with gender in its way.

It wasn’t always separate in Japan. Brue, always an amusing writer in each chapter of her book, out does herself describing when she was fundamentally mislead by her careful research. Finding one of the last onsen in which men and women bathe together, way, way up in the outback, she and the Belgian art dealer with whom she’d hooked up on the plane (her long-time relationship in recent shambles) visit as a romantic opener. She steps from the shower area holding her furoshiki, the small square of cloth in which one’s loufa and shampoo are tied, but otherwise blissfully unencumbered by earthly concerns or possessions.

As you might predict, almost immediately, in her towering European pinkness, she quickly accesses the reality that she is not simply the only non-Asian. That would explain the immediate silence. But she is also the only woman of any flavor among a tank of nude men. Importantly, she knows immediately that the tiny square furoshiki has little or no tactical use, regardless of coverage choice.

For his part, the Belgian is fully as useful as any male companion would be at such times. He is doubled up, as she notes, in a gale of laughter at the spectacle. Unfortunately, during the chapter discussing Moscow, Brue had given a full précis on the “Mohawk” waxing habits of the New Russian women compared to the natural look sported by aficionados at the sauna in Finland. The author underwent the painful cosmetic procedure, all in the name of participant observation, in Moscow, but we have no idea if the Asian men at the rustic mountain onsen were greeted by an American Mohawk or its au natural brethren.

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The Yen for Dollars

© 2006 Donlon

Everyone knows the story. Japan’s economy was going great guns and then hit some sort of wall. It seemed sluggish and lethargic for years, in spite of sometimes raffish attempts to kick start it. Now, things seem to be on the upswing. The central bank, this enormous monstrosity, in an effort to quell inflation, has been steadily pulling cash out of its money markets. One result has been a bit of a global market pullback. In some ways right now it’s the Bank of Japan that’s calling the shots in terms of the World’s equity markets.

Forbes and The Economist magazines, among others, have run articles detailing the results of the tax re-writes in the United States under the Bush regime, with the very rich receiving access to enormous windfall investment capital. Of course, this was exported from the US and a lot of it went to China. Much of that went to bricks-and-mortar construction of factories with the resultant surge in demand for electricity and the predictable spike in energy costs – seen most vividly in America at the gas pump. Pundits truthfully tell American consumers that the price of oil goes up reflecting the demand. Less truthfully, by omission they often don’t mention that the demand was actively created by that extraordinary building spurt financed by the “gift” of a 9 trillion dollar US debt. It was the combination of spending like teens with dad’s credit card and the evisceration of the revenue stream that did the trick. Then, in mid-May the Dow Jones tumbled a couple hundred points with big worries of US inflation going on a roller coaster ride. If the inflation index the Federal Reserve keeps its eye on goes too high, they may adjust interest rates. Woof!

The Bank of Japan has been vacuuming up enormous amounts of cash from the world’s markets. In the past, the Bank had been valiantly flowing billions into Japan’s general economy (conduited through the banking system according to the BBC), trying to re-inflate the flaccid thing. Now the flow direction has changed.

In one article, financial writer Jim Jubak claimed that, “in the last two months, the bank [of Japan] has taken almost 16 trillion yen, or about $140 billion, in cash deposits out of the country's banks. The country's money supply has fallen by almost 10%. The Bank of Japan isn't finished pumping out the liquidity that it had pumped in. That should take a few more months. And when it is finished, the Bank of Japan is expected to start raising short-term interest rates.”

Right on the web site for the bank that noble institution explains what “The Bank of Japan's missions are.” And they are two fold. Both involve keeping things on an even keel. Or, as the web site puts it, “to maintain price stability and to ensure the stability of the financial system, thereby laying the foundations for sound economic development.”

The paternalistic tone of the Bank of Japan’s text is unmistakable:

“What if the prices of your daily necessities and food were to rise continuously? You would need to spend more money to buy the same basket of goods. In other words, the purchasing power of your money would go down. If the prices of various goods rose, people would naturally have a harder time making a living.

On the other hand, what if the prices of goods were to decline continuously? A decline in prices appears to be favorable to consumers as they can buy the same basket of goods more cheaply. But if prices were to decline continuously, both the sales and profits of firms that produce or sell goods would decrease. As a result, the salaries of workers at those firms would decrease and the number of unemployed persons might increase.

A continuous rise in the prices of goods and services is generally referred to as ‘inflation,’ and a continuous decline in prices is referred to as ‘, deflation.’ As you can see from the above, both inflation and deflation are a threat to our daily lives.

When the economy enters a period of inflation in which the purchasing power of money is gradually eroded, people's confidence in money will diminish. If many people considered that the prices of goods and services would continue to rise in the future, they would rush to buy goods and services before prices rose even further. This would create upward pressure on prices, thus increasing the likelihood that the anticipated rise in prices would actually take place. In contrast, if people considered that prices would continue to decline in the future, they would wait to make their purchases until prices had declined further. Thus, they would spend less and save more and economic activity might eventually be across the economy, and disrupt financial transactions, which involve the lending or borrowing of money.

The Bank of Japan's mission is to pursue price stability, in other words to maintain an economic environment in which there is neither inflation nor deflation.”

Now, you gotta love it. That may have been the Bank’s intentions, but thuggish speculators made out like bandits borrowing cheap money in Japan at about 1%, rolling and leveraging to turn 1 dollar into 2 or 3 or 4 dollars of borrowed cash, according to economic reportage from the likes of Jubak. Weep for them, Argentina, only making 12 or 15 percent on the almost riskless turnaround. With that kind of sweet heart deal and in the US Bush trimming back the tax burden for his golf buddies, it’s easy to see why America’s richest 10% is in its highest clover in 60 years.

Anyway, all that effort by the Bank of Japan does indeed seem to be having that stabilizing effect and the cheap money may not be so available – at least from the Japanese font. As May came to a close speculators rushed to find the best harbor for their resources and widespread adjustment took place – ranging from me doing my laundry to the Bank of Iceland changing its prime interest rate.

Japan had, as you may recall, experienced spectacular growth at the end of the last century. But that meteoric economic activity flattened out and for a decade business was in the doldrums. So these last few pages are only like lines in a long chapter of a big book.

Japan entered the last century like a lion, fighting and winning a war with Russia including the now-famous fleet action when Tojo engaged his heroic “J” maneuver. Many historians point to this as the turning point: world powers ganged up on the winner, refusing proper spoils to Japan and setting the stage for its later Imperial expansion and ultimately the Second World War.

When Japan did surrender after WW II in August 1945 the archipelago was occupied with the purpose of demilitarization and democratization. Hoping to reduce the political problems of the transition, the US opted to maintain some Japanese social institutions such as the emperor (who was, none the less, no longer considered divine). Other measures, such as dissolution of the so-called “zaibatsu” (or financial combines) and the granting of women’s suffrage were taken. Generally, attempts were made to decentralize structures which were seen to grant too much power to government, such as education and the police. At first, building the Japanese economy was not a great concern of the American occupying forces.

However, with the beginning of the Cold War, cooler heads did not prevail. The Nationalists failed in their bid for control of China. By the late forties the Communists Chinese were in total control and American capitalists were virtually insane with fear that their privileged positions would be in jeopardy. This lead to a fundamental reversal of policy in Japan.

It was lawful to be a Communist in Japan—the place was a democracy -- yet the Americans pushed for a crackdown. They reversed policy in regards to the zaibatsu (seen as the bag men for the military) and returned support for a strong centralized police force. All this was driven by fear of the specter of communism. In addition, the US government relinquished their claim to war reparations – and with that, of course, any pay back to American tax payers. Rather than pay war reparations to Britain and most Asian countries, American agents began to hustle to arrange commercial treaties linking Japan with countries like the Philippines.

To avoid a fertile Communist breeding ground, the US committed to the economy of Japan. A trio of draconian measures were engaged to help bring prosperity about: the budget would be balanced, state loans to industry would be fundamentally suspended, and a de facto and general abolition of state subsidies would be followed, at least for the time being. These harsh guidelines, with their predictably tremendous stress, almost drew the nation into a depression.

“Luckily” some might say, “right on schedule” a more callus and cynical historian could also put it, at that point the opening of the Korean War flooded Japan with cash. Not only was the enormous surge in military procurement orders to Japanese industry an economic Godsend—cash flow in this category from the US between 1951 and 1953 was in the neighborhood of two billion dollars—it was a huge overall portion (60% of its exports) and involved a high ratio of heavy industry. This boon, of course, positioned Japan to excel in automobile manufacturing at the expense of US competitors as this factory power came on line. All because of the fear of communism. It’s a fitting irony that decades later George Bush Jr.’s tax give away to the very rich – which as mentioned flowed to Communist China to finance a staggering array of factories with the predictable huge increase in demand for electricity and the just as predictable rise in cost of gas at the pump in the US blablabla—has similar pebble in the pond ripples in the water effects.

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Snow Country Like Japan © Donlon 2006

We had been visiting Suziki Bokushi’s snow country; the region in present Niigata Prefecture which receives the moist Siberian current’s wind and, when slid up the spine of jagged mountains, converts it to snow—a dozen or more feet of it. Bokushi’s charming narrative of the local’s stories and means of living in this white world, Hokuetsu Seppu, was translated as “Snow Country Tales” (and was source material for Yasunari Kawabata’s much more widely known novel, “Snow country,” which mostly uses the folk lore as back drop for intrigue and a love story.

Now, the roads are modern, with rows of disks down the center to squirt snow removing warm water in the winter and the farmer’s once prized oxen have given way to squat, tough tractors. But the small, carefully cultivated stepped paddies still produce rice reputed to be “the best in the world.” In the old days, the tiny fields were repeatedly flooded to keep the snow off. So, as the adjacent areas were layered, again and again with snowfall, the farmers could be seen going to work with ladders, necessary to climb down ten or 12 or 14 feet to the prepared seed beds below.

Long winter months fostered indoor craft, as you might imagine. While in the prefecture, we spent some time examining the design and setting of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples—shrines are always Shinto and temples are always Buddhist. The shrines we visited were also usually smaller, simpler, set in a copse of trees, through a dignified usually red post & lintel “gate,” or torii with an arrow-straight approach—none of this “meandering curves to increase visual interest” stuff for these folks. Our hosts for our holiday, friends and colleagues with a “cottage” in the mountains, noticed our interest. We are all interested in what the Japanese call “mingae” or folk crafts.

Jocelyn and I had described earlier work we’d done, reporting on Louisiana’s program to collect alligator eggs, distribute them to commercial ‘gator farms, and monitor the eventual release of a portion of the healthy young back into the wild. This work guarantees a better fit with the optimum carry capacity of available habitat and supports the regional economy, since the skin is a valuable export product. We “followed” a Louisiana alligator skin through the process to a tannery in rural France, an international sales fair in gay Paree, distribution depots in a couple of places in Italy and then, perhaps most interesting for us, to a wonderful fine craft cottage industry shoe maker who brought into being the designs of Manolo Blahnik.

Prior to that experience, even watching Sarah’s gams on “Sex In The City”—as Carrie Bradshaw-- it was hard to see how a shoe—each shoe—could be worth $500 (or a grand a pair). Blahnik, from Santa de La Palma in the Canary Islands, makes a solid line of dependables, a little less avant guard, for $300 a pair, too. He does it all, from sketching the idea in swift strokes of his Tombo Japanese Brush pen (a favorite of Manga artists) to cutting the heel.

However, driving with Geraldo, a suave skin merchant in North Italy to the “shoe town” near by and hearing about the level of craftsmanship and the cost at each step, so to speak, and then watching the torturous process as each tiny bit of alligator hide was gently persuaded, tapped, glued, bradded, stitched, or caressed into its place—all without surface blemish--made us believers.

In Japan, we’d seen beautiful kimono, often displayed on a wood rod after the fashion of fine art. They can be very expensive; finely tailored and created in elegant fabric. Suzuki Bokushi’s home town has also been known for making silk kimono textiles. (In Kawabata’s novel the woman about to become a geisha lives in a former silkworm loft when she is having the fatal affair.) Like the superb luxury of fine alligator shoes, once you appreciate the enormous complexity of the process of creating a traditional silk kimono, the asking price no longer seems remarkable—a thing to remark upon.

Just a few blocks from a fine little museum which celebrates the scribe’s life we stopped to visit a silk weaving center. On one table at the silk kimono cottage factory, as examples, we saw a plate of marshmallow-sized silk bolls, spun by that unique caterpillar, specially fed on mulberry leaves; a bug whose husbandry goes back into dim antiquity. Best known for fine fashion wear today, silk was widely used as early armor (a feature unmentioned at the cottage factory). The fibers are so tough that “stand off weapons” such as arrows, darts, or fleshetts, would push the tightly woven cloth into the wound rather than cut through. This fact made it much easier to remove the projectile and very much reduced infection. The only “slings and arrows” most of us face now are of mere outrageous fortune of dumb luck, and neither fine silk nor ice-cream colored polyester leisure suits guarantee much protection.

The hair-tiny worm filaments are combed into threads, and threads twisted into yarn. In the small factory, we could watch a row of “spools” (paper rolls about as big as one’s calf wrapped with yarn) being uncoiled onto a long wooden frame. The yarn mistress placed a tea saucer on top of each spool, very much like the bail of a spinning reel, to control and “open” its loops as the stuff came off the roll. Back and fourth she walked, to bundle the gathered bunch collected from 20 or so spools, each managed by its own saucer, the thread sliding gracefully around the slick, glossy edge.

The weaving of the textile is done with a machine having the same attributes of a hand loom but, if you imagine, for example, the Turkish kilim loom (or other rug looms) being massively built, squarish, tall and reminiscent of an upright piano (though, of course, bigger), the Japanese silk kimono loom is much more lightly constructed, narrow and long, reminiscent of the bowling game in an arcade---it has a very long bed. As is typically the case, a bullet-shaped cock is shot one way and then back as the long yarns or threads are raised and lowered, usually with a foot treadle; it trails the horizontal threads in its wake.

In short, this is a great deal of hand work, by skilled, attentive crafts folk, exactly as was the case with the production of the luxury goods we saw in Italy. Indeed, chatting with a designer handbag maker in Milan he showed us a loom there perhaps 10% the size of the silk kimono fabric one: it created the special gold material for his purses. There is essentially no way to reduce the process or simplify the procedure and maintain the integrity of the creative moment of these truly luxurious goods.

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Plumbing the Soul of Japan
© 2006 Donlon

Anybody that does much work in tourism is familiar with the “transit” associated with travel in another culture: at first everything is exotic. Then, after a little experience, you come to grips with how the new systems work. Next, at last, you get fed up with things being different from “home” or what’s familiar. At least, that’s a fairly typical pattern.

And then, in the language of so many wise bartenders, there are two kinds of travelers: one sort, confronted with, say, a squat “terlet” is willing to give it a go, or at least a shot, even generating sound effects for “bombers over Berlin.” The other, maybe less adventurous, perhaps just more realistic, tries to will away “that” feeling by force of character until a “regular” commode hoves into view.

Some folks enjoy the challenge of the new, while others are discomforted by change. Indeed it’s curious the place of plumbing in travel anxiety and peoples hearts, so to speak. Donald Richie, later to become so important for his analysis of Japanese cinema, explaining and introducing it to the West, wrote in his Japan Journals entry of 1954 “the Japanese toilet is supposed difficult for Westerns to manage. Strange that these people who willingly relinquish traditional underwear and phallic worship cling to their toilets.” It is perhaps predictable that the Japanese manufacture the Ur commode with power controls including such dubious pleasures as sound effects I gently mocked above.

Well, Japan is thoroughly industrialized and we’ve traveled too much to really get into the “transit,” pattern although we do tend to rank some things we see or experience as innovative, and some things as peculiar, and, always, we simply can’t figure out a few things. If we fail to understand, we just go along: like, aside from an entire slipper grammar to learn, it’s really an issue that shoes are not only taken off, but positioned “right,” as in “properly,” by the door way.

Taking off shoes makes a great deal of sense, and is an idea that deserves being carried ‘cross the sea. No matter how much you are used to the filthy habit there isn’t a very good reason to continue to wear dirty, outdoor shoes into a clean, indoor space after you think about it. You will certainly take your shoes off, eventually, inside. Why not do so before you contaminate your domestic quarters? Once upon a time the practice saved tatami floor surfaces. These inches thick rice matts weren’t even trod upon with slippers, however. And precious few living spaces today are real tatami, though living spaces are likely to be measured by their 3 X 6 dimensions (with folks living for years in a 6 tatami flat in Tokyo, for example).

But we do go along with shoe positioning, “facing,” them out, right, or left, on faith alone.

When we lived in France we immediately saw the wisdom of the morning coffee bowl and the French breakfast. Well, we tasted the wisdom of it at least. Bakers made fresh baguettes which were like enormous yeasty cigars with spidery tissues of white bread under a crusty, brown, edible exoskeleton. Breaking the night’s fast involved troweling butter and jam into these flakey “tubes” and washing it all down with a gold-fish globe sized trough of thick milk and coffee from a ceramic bowl designed for the purpose. Soon after getting to France we saw a Hotel Chenier in Paris (located near St Dennis, in the liminal zone on the edge of the garment & hooker districts – we would see young Moroccans push racks of designer clothes through the street in front of rows of bored tarts dressed up like secretaries) and, of course, because of Clifton Chenier this hotel became our favorite one. It was cheap, and it served this wonderful breakfast. In all about a half-million calories and the closest thing to healthy food was, maybe, the milk in the coffee. But it did stick to your ribs for a half hour or so. We loved those big coffee bowls and brought some home.

Even though we have been in Japan a very short time, we have noticed a number of things apparently worth our admiration, especially an economical use of space—though it does not seem useful to mention the small cars and related vehicles, for example. My own experience with Asian gardens was limited, and within that pretty much limited to the formal species. I seem to recall that most American lawns devolve from when Christopher Wren and his ilk reformatted the angular English garden into the “natural look,” even forgoing fences, using the “ha ha” a deep ditch to control livestock (funny, I suppose, unless you are a field hand walking home in the dark). England, and by extension, America, were looking for a very different feel.

I had seen from time to time those stone lanterns in Asian space and as we slowly learn more about Japanese gardens, they become more interesting to us. If the English ideal is a “natural field,” the sense desired by many Asian gardeners is tranquility, it seems to me. This can be compared to Islamic images of gardens which is largely sensual: many images from Middle Eastern poetry involve the garden as a place filled with productive fruit trees, water sources, cool breezes and, moreover, a place to meet one’s lover, human or spiritual.

But, back to the lanterns. In addition to being a focus, which they no doubt are, they provide illumination. Part of their role may be, if a passing conversation is correct, lingering from garden design as old as 1000 years: tubo gardens were created as 1.8 meters (of course not meters then, the French inventing both that great gift to humanity and the modern pencil, with which to write nutty letters to the editor about why the US should not adopt the metric system, only in the 1700s) or around the glow of the lamps.

Our apartment is about a 25 minute walk from my office – a walk I take most mornings and evenings now. One day I stopped short to notice that, on the edge of a sort of parking lot, someone was and is maintaining a “tubo” garden, about a meter and a half or 2 meters cluster of stacked water or earth filled pots. Some are big as bushel baskets, others as buckets, a few 1-quart containers, and one or two as big as your closed fist. There are also bits of drift wood and bamboo pieces. Tall, grassy greenery shoots up, weedy stuff sprouts, water plants float, vines coils about, a number of different, but small, flowers were blooming when I saw the garden last. The whole thing is very small but very carefully composed and a strange mix of “smooth” and “shaggy.” Certainly this “tubo” garden, if indeed that is what it is, is worthy of my admiration established on the corner of essentially waste ground, and maintained consciously with no particular goal for praise or to achieve acclaim.

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LEAVING ON A JET PLANE

Leaving Baton Rouge was fraught with emotions but, by unusual circumstance, was wonderfully easy for us in the physical sense. After hour upon hour spent turning a small, flat, hill of folded brown cartons we bought at the box store into a mass of filled, taped, labeled, carted, stacked, and “climate controlled” stored chattel it seemed as if we would never reach the end of our preparations to leave home and actually get on the road, or, more precisely, into the air. But we eventually did shake the bayou mud off our cuffs and brush the Baton Rouge petro-chemical residue from our hair.

Stuffing our enormous bags into the little rental car (nearly every piece would prove to be overweight) we scooted to Baton Rouge’s signage-lite airport. We didn’t have to pull my “harpoon from my dirty red bandanna,” like Bobby McGee but we did have a hoot joking with the Thai-American check-in guy, talking about how he taught English in Paris for a while before he wound up down in Red Stick. “Just luck!” he guessed.

I know that travelers delight in tales of woe, in much the same way that sailors prefer to discuss bad weather and fisher folk the big’un that got away, but our flights went off pretty much without hitch. Indeed, the connection in Texas debouched, or barfed, I could say more colorfully and graphically, us out almost at the toe of the waiting deck for our next flight.

Interestingly, it cost 20 bucks to have those enormous bags brought from the curb in Baton Rouge to the desk inside the terminal. Once in Tokyo, it was convenient to have the biggest bags sent from the City to the small town in which we reside (a common service provided from the airport). They arrived at our door, delivered next day for $30+-. It was ten dollars more and it did take a day longer, but otherwise I’d say the delivery from Tokyo was a value. After being here for just a few weeks, and still debating the purchase of a vehicle, renting or leasing, or forgoing the honor of pumping up the global fat-cat industrialist economy in that particular way at all, we have found out that a wonderful network of delivery services exist in Japan. You can go into Tokyo to shop, leaving a trail of wine, cheese, and other purchases in your wake, and a day or so later the bags just arrive.

The first delivery service we used (the one from the airport) had a logo which, to me, oddly, seemed to be a cat with two heads. Of course one does not really question a new culture too closely initially and, if a two headed cat signified cartage for the Japanese, who am I to doubt it? I mean, I’ve eaten a Tombstone Pizza for Christ sake—what’s the symbolism there? Then, on the road to a mountain holiday, I caught another gander of the banana yellow logo on a long-haul truck filling its fuel tanks slung under the long chassis: the image is really a mama cat with a kitten in its mouth—not a two-headed beast. For a delivery company, that seems to make more sense!

But back to the flight. Once we made the connection in Dallas, it was about a 13 or so hour flight toward Japan, and I suppose they fly an “arc,” or “rhomb,” line in what must be the straightest way accommodating the prevailing winds and yaddayadda, but in any event in several hours we were, with a low sun and few clouds, over the gypsum whites, vivid roses, and metallic sunny edges of the mountainous Alaskan landscape at 30,000 feet. I’m guessing that this view is often obscured by mist, but for a long time we could see the dramatic, broken fields of mountains, ice, and snow and perhaps, in what looked like sooty valleys, glaciers. I’ll risk a charge of cliché to say the relatively horizontal snow really did bring to mind vast heaps of the whitest sugar, while the sunward sides of the crazily rough places were hosed down with bronze, silver, and canary yellow. The sun-lee-side of the mountain surfaces were pale lead, pewter, lavender—purple, just like the song says—blue, and even black (although art teachers always say shadows are never black). Every now and then a movie comes out about people stranded in that kind of “outback,” and the plot always seems a little tortured. Now, seeing the scale of the landscape roll on and on until, finally, it was covered over by thick layers of mist, has made me more of a believer.

The flawless transit continued into Tokyo, with our paperwork all in place (“tourist visas” are more colloquially called “landing permits” now, it seems) and helpful folks from Tokai University picked us up in the grey, cold, rainy afternoon. Our back-door exit from Tokyo to our town of Hadano was accomplished like a scene from Blade Runner, our eyes glued to a very sophisticated in-dash GPS as we ball-bearinged down twisty, narrow thruways in the gloom. From time to time we would turn into a toll lane, the red and white ringed poles popping open at seemingly the last moment, having scanned a sensor in the car’s bumper.

Hadano is not much like Tokyo, of course not much at all like Old Japan (raked pea gravel around a single well-situated boulder, sliding paper doors into Zen-bare spaces), but if anything is redolent of the architectural glamour of chock-a-block row houses in Baltimore or a bedroom community in New Jersey. It’s just a contemporary town with lots of commuters who train into Tokyo: mostly housing, food markets, convenience stores for the necessities. Things do seem very orderly and there is generally much less litter. Of course the language is thus far absolutely opaque.

Newly arrived, and having read what we could about Japan and talked with folks about their own experiences, we find that we are uncertain exactly which, and how much of, our expectations we want to pan out. Nathanial Hawthorne once advised a young writer ready to travel to note “every peculiarity” no matter how small. We intend to. Sayonara y’all.

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