The Land of the Rising Sun — Unfinished Business

World Traveller Series II ~ Episode 3A

by Brett Hayhoe

There are destinations that deserve a single episode, and there are destinations that simply refuse to fit.

Japan is the latter. The stories accumulated across two visits — one as a seventeen-year-old exchange student, one as a twenty-five-year-old association president — are not the kind that compress neatly. They are the kind that keep surfacing, weeks and months and years later, in the middle of conversations about something else entirely. Something will remind you, and there it is again: Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima, a basement nightclub, a Yakuza alley, a vending machine across the road from a very traditional Kyoto bedroom.

This episode is for those stories.

Tokyo — Around the Block

Tokyo is a city of extraordinary contradictions, and one of the more unexpected of them announces itself not in any museum or landmark but simply in the air.

Our group decided, with the confidence of people who had been well fed and well accommodated and perhaps slightly underestimated the scale of Japanese urban life, to take a walk around the block from the hotel. The route, as it happened, circled the Imperial Palace — the residence of the Emperor, set within its ancient moat and gardens at the heart of the city, surrounded by modern Tokyo in every direction. The walk was lovely. The sights were remarkable. The palace, glimpsed through its perimeter of trees and walls, was as impressive as one would expect the home of an emperor to be.

We returned to the hotel and bathed. Every single one of us. Not because we were tired, but because we were comprehensively coated in Tokyo’s pollution — a reminder, delivered with characteristic Japanese efficiency, that one of the world’s great cities is also one of its great industrial centres. It was, by any measure, horrendous. I genuinely hope it has improved in the years since.

The palace, however, was worth it.

Tokyo — The Basement Club

One night, with the good judgement that distinguishes the twenty-five-year-old traveller from his more cautious future self, a group of us ventured into Tokyo’s nightclub district with some gentlemen we had met at the hotel.

This was not, in hindsight, among the more considered decisions of the trip. At the time, it seemed straightforward enough.

The club was in a basement. The walls of the men’s bathroom were covered in mirrors — floor to ceiling, everywhere you looked, a slightly disconcerting multiplication of yourself in various states of nightclub dishevelment. The scotch arrived in the manner that scotch tends to arrive when someone else is paying for it: freely, frequently, and without apparent limit. Our new friends were generous, the music was loud, and the evening proceeded with considerable enthusiasm.

Fortunately — and it is the kind of fortunately that one appreciates more fully in retrospect than in the moment — there were no bad incidents. Only a night full of laughter and booze and the particular camaraderie of people who have found themselves somewhere they probably shouldn’t be and decided to enjoy it wholeheartedly.

Not the safest. Not the sanest. Entirely worth it.

Osaka — The Gate That Refused to Move

Osaka is a former capital of Japan, and it carries that history in a way that a city only can when it has decided, as a matter of civic character, not to let the past be inconvenient.

The most vivid example of this stands — quite literally — in the middle of a busy intersection. The original gates of what I can only imagine was once a palace of considerable significance rise from the tarmac, completely surrounded by modern traffic, entirely unmoved by any of it. Cars navigate around them. Drivers give them the respect they deserve. Visitors stop and stare. The gates themselves, ancient and proud, appear entirely indifferent to the twenty-first century flowing around their base.

It is one of the most quietly extraordinary things I have seen anywhere in the world — not spectacular in the way that great monuments are spectacular, but striking in a different and more particular way. It is a country saying, without drama or announcement: this was here before any of this, and it will remain.

Japan’s relationship with its own past is something that a visitor from a relatively young country finds genuinely difficult to map onto any familiar framework. It simply is. And it is remarkable.

Osaka — The Dinner

Our host — the gentleman whose professional biography I outlined in the previous episode, and whose name remains, for reasons that will be obvious, unrecorded here — treated the entire group of eighty to dinner at the hotel’s signature restaurant.

It was not the kind of restaurant one wanders into on a Tuesday evening. It was the kind of restaurant whose menu assumes a level of commitment from the diner — financial, temporal, and gastronomic — that places it well beyond the reach of the ordinary visitor.

Every dish that arrived melted in my mouth. I have eaten well in many places and on many occasions. That dinner sits in a category of its own.

Whatever one thinks of how the bill was ultimately funded, the meal was extraordinary. These things can both be true simultaneously.

Osaka — The Alley

The following evening, we were given latitude to explore the parts of Osaka that do not appear in the itinerary — the neighbourhoods that the tourist maps leave blank, where the city goes about its actual business.

It was approximately five minutes into this excursion before Osaka made its point.

Screams came from a narrow alley — sharp, unmistakable. One of the larger men in our group moved immediately toward the sound. He was stopped by a stranger standing nearby who offered two words of explanation, delivered quietly and without ambiguity:

“That is the Yakuza.”

And then: “You don’t want to get involved.”

We did not get involved.

The Yakuza — (ヤクザ) — are Japan’s transnational organised crime syndicates, sometimes referred to as the Japanese Mafia. They are known for strict internal codes of conduct, extensive full-body tattoos (irezumi), and historical rituals including yubitsume, the amputation of part of a finger as an act of penance or loyalty. Their reach across illicit trades is broad, their presence in certain neighbourhoods understood, and their tolerance for interference from curious Australian tourists approximately zero.

The group stood, absorbed the information, and continued walking in a different direction.

It was quite the eye opener for everyone present.

Hiroshima — Three Things

The journey to Hiroshima was long enough to require an overnight stop — a hotel midway, ostensibly to rest the driver and guide, though the group required no particular convincing to pause.

The overnight brought its own incident. Several rooms on our floor had their doors left open in the easy, convivial atmosphere of a group travelling together. What emerged, as the evening progressed, was that a couple of the older male participants had herded three of the younger women into one room, with intentions that became apparent quickly and were honourable in no meaningful sense. A few of us went immediately to the tour guide. Security was organised. The matter was resolved.

Some incidents travel well enough to become anecdotes. That particular one does not.

Hiroshima itself arrived the following morning — and it is, as anyone who has been there will understand, a city that arrives with a particular weight.

The city is essentially brand new. It was rebuilt from nothing after August 1945, and it shows — clean, modern, functional, carrying no visible scar except one, and that one is deliberate.

The Atomic Bomb Dome stands — or rather, half-stands — as it was left: the only structure near the hypocentre that remained partially upright after the blast, now preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and permanent reminder. Beside it burns the eternal flame of the Peace Memorial Park, lit in 1964 and pledged to burn until the last nuclear weapon in the world is dismantled.

I confess to hoping they have secured adequate gas reserves. The flame, by all reasonable projections, has considerable burning ahead of it.

The Peace Memorial Museum is something else entirely.

It is, without qualification, one of the saddest places I have ever stood. A soundtrack plays — the voices of men and women, old and young, boys and girls, in extremis — and when I visited, silence among the living was observed throughout. The walls carry photographs: the dead, the injured, the before and the devastating after.

I make no judgement about the decisions that led to the bombing. That is a conversation for historians and strategists and ethicists, all of whom have been having it for eighty years without arriving at a conclusion that satisfies everyone. What I will say is simply this: I defy any person of any background or political persuasion to stand in that museum and not feel a tear forming. The experience does not permit otherwise.

A Kyoto Postscript — The Vending Machine and the Cufflink

This final story belongs to the first Japan trip — the Lions exchange, the seventeen-year-old, the host brother in Kyoto — and it is offered here as a palate cleanser after Hiroshima, because Japan, in addition to everything else it is, is also extremely funny.

The vending machines across the road from our accommodation offered three distinct categories of product. One dispensed snacks. One dispensed coffee. The third dispensed adult publications of the kind that, in most countries, are kept behind counters and require a degree of personal commitment from the purchaser. In Japan in the mid-1980s, they were available on the street, coin-operated, at any hour.

I asked my host brother what they were, with the wide-eyed innocence of a seventeen-year-old who absolutely knew what they were.

“Dame,” he said quickly. Bad. Not for us. Move along.

(Dame — だめ or ダメ — is the Japanese equivalent of “no good,” deployed in this instance with the energy of a person who has lived next to that machine for some time and developed a comprehensive position on it.)

Later that same day, I dropped one of my cufflinks in our shared room and could not locate it. The natural place to look when something rolls under furniture is under the beds.

I looked under the beds.

The cufflink was not there.

What was there, assembled with some care and in some quantity, was a collection of publications identical to those available across the road for a small coin.

My host brother’s position on the vending machine was, it emerged, a matter of public record rather than personal conviction.

I never did find the cufflink.

Conclusion

Japan at seventeen and Japan at twenty-five between them produced enough material to fill considerably more than two episodes. The stories keep arriving — a mirror-lined bathroom in a Tokyo basement, a gate standing in the middle of four lanes of traffic, a stranger’s quiet warning in an Osaka alley, a museum in Hiroshima that does not permit talking, a host brother who kept his reading material under the bed.

What all of it adds up to is a country that demands engagement — not the polished, itinerary-approved engagement of the careful tourist, but the full-contact version, the one that includes the pollution and the screams from the alley and the tears in the museum and the scotch that someone else is paying for.

Japan met every version of me that arrived on its shores, and sent each one home changed.

That is the highest compliment a destination can receive.

Dōmo arigatō gozaimasu, Japan. Again, and always.

The World Traveller Series is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine. Read more at Q Magazine Blogs — Ask Brett Podcasts — Ask Brett Podcasts | Hayhoe YouTube Channel

Next: Nhulunbuy, NT