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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