The Land of the Rising Sun

World Traveller Series II ~ Events & Incidents ~ Episode 3

by Brett Hayhoe

Japan has the distinction of being a country I have visited twice — and on both occasions, it managed to be an entirely different country.

The first time, I was seventeen. The second, twenty-five. The Japan of a teenage exchange student and the Japan of a young association president bear only the most superficial resemblance to one another, and the person who visited each of them was barely recognisable as the same individual either. What they shared was the country itself — extraordinary, layered, endlessly surprising — and the conviction, formed on arrival and never subsequently revised, that Japan does something to a person. It gets into you. It stays.

Dōmo arigatō gozaimasu, Japan. You changed everything.

Before the Journey — Mother, and the Weight of History

There are some destinations that carry history into the planning stage, long before a passport is opened or a bag is packed. Japan was one of them.

My mother was, without qualification, the most remarkable woman I have ever known. She raised five children — Lynn, Kim, Rae, Tanya, and me, the youngest and the only boy — largely on her own, working more jobs than she would ever enumerate, asking for nothing and providing everything. I was the baby of the family and was spoiled accordingly, blissfully unaware at the time of what that required of her. At fifty-nine, I understand it considerably better.

When Lions offered me a student exchange placement and I was given the choice between the United States and Japan, it was not an uncomplicated decision. Not for Mother. The memories of the Second World War were not abstract history in our household. My Uncle Jim had been a prisoner of war at Changi. What he endured there — and what he carried for the rest of his life as a consequence — was the kind of thing that does not fade with the passing of decades. It marks a family.

What Google articulates clinically — that Japan’s POW camp system involved brutal exploitation and severe malnutrition, with a panicked pivot toward improved conditions only in the final weeks before surrender — was, in our family, a lived inheritance. Uncle Jim survived Changi. He did not, in the end, survive an Australian road: he was killed by a drunk driver on the range between Cairns and Kuranda. The cruelty of that particular conclusion is something that does not bear much dwelling upon.

Mother agreed, after consideration, that Japan was the better choice for me. Her love for her boy overrode whatever she was still carrying. That is the measure of who she was.

The journey began.

Nara — The First Home

My first host family was based in Nara — a beautiful, unhurried city south of Osaka, ancient in the way that Japanese cities are ancient, which is to say rather more seriously than anywhere I had previously encountered the concept.

The family itself was a particular kind of Japanese arrangement: grandfather and grandmother, mother and father — who were, as it happened, also brother and sister, a configuration that was not uncommon in Japan at the time. They were warm, formal in the way that Japanese hospitality tends to be formal, and extraordinarily generous.

I had my first indication of what I had walked into somewhere between Osaka airport and Nara, in the back of the car, when I asked the grandfather — my host — whether I might smoke the last cigarette in my packet. I was seventeen. The legal smoking age in Japan was twenty-one. He agreed without ceremony, and from that point forward, for the entire duration of my stay in his home, he made sure there was a packet of cigarettes in the limousine, a packet in my room, and a packet on my person at all times.

The wealth was, it must be said, quite extreme.

There was a chauffeur. On one occasion, grandfather took me to see his factory — one of the largest plastics manufacturing plants in the world, as it turned out — and as I stepped inside, the assembled staff of more than two hundred people bowed, in unison, in front of me. I was seventeen years old and had arrived in Cairns, Queensland, with what I knew of the world. The recalibration required was considerable.

The evenings were quieter. Grandfather and I would sit together, and later grandmother would join us, and I would teach them English while they gave me a crash course in Japanese. It was an exchange of the most straightforward and genuine kind, and I think of it warmly.

Kyoto — The Second Home

My second placement was in Kyoto, and it was a different world entirely — not in wealth, but in texture.

My host father there owned a kimono-making company. The home was traditional, quiet, and situated along the golden walk near Kinkakuji — the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, one of the most famous buildings in Japan, a Buddhist temple whose gilded upper stories have been reflecting in their surrounding pond for centuries. In summer it is spectacular. In winter, the traditional architecture becomes something else entirely: snow-covered, still, like a postcard that has decided to be real.

Snow, however, is not all it is cracked up to be.

On one occasion — a short walk across the road to one of the street vending machines for a cup of coffee — I discovered the particular joy of a Japanese winter street with traffic on it. A car passed. Then another, in the opposite direction. By the time I reached the machine, my lower half had been comprehensively coated in the grey, slushy, magnificent mixture of melted snow, mud, and whatever else a road accumulates in winter. It was a formative experience.

I also managed, in the way that one manages things at seventeen without realising one is managing anything at all, a small international incident.

At dinner, unable to sit cross-legged — a limitation I carry to this day, without apology or improvement — I reclined on the traditional tatami matting. This was, in the cultural framework of my host family, an insult of some significance. Lions intervened, the situation was smoothed over, and all was, as the expression goes, okie dorie. My host brothers were kind throughout, and on one occasion we walked together for what felt like an entire day through the prefecture and into neighbouring ones — winding paths, extraordinary landscapes, a silence between us that had nothing to do with hostility and everything to do with the fact that we didn’t share a language and didn’t particularly need to.

It is a day I will not forget.

Homecoming — The Flag Pin

The return to Cairns brought with it the particular joy of a mother helping her son unpack his bags.

Somewhere in the luggage was a small lapel pin of the Japanese flag. She found it. She looked at it. She looked at me.

“You don’t have a larger version of this, I hope.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “The people are coming tomorrow to put a flagpole in the front yard.”

A pause. “Over my dead body.”

It was, of course, a joke. She knew it was a joke. And she laughed — the laugh of a woman who had been brave enough to let her boy go to the country she had every reason to mistrust, and wise enough to know that what he came back with was worth whatever it had cost her to agree.

The Return — Young Queenslanders Tourism Association

Several years later, at twenty-five, the invitation came to return to Japan as President of the Young Queenslanders Tourism Association. I accepted without pausing long enough to ask any of the questions a more cautious person might have asked.

The answer, as it turned out, would have been interesting.

There were eighty of us — Australians and New Zealanders, from every conceivable background and profession. The itinerary was Tokyo, then a ride on the bullet train to Kyoto, Hiroshima, Osaka — five-star throughout, with every conceivable expense covered. Airfares, accommodation, tours, food, drinks. Everything. The identity of our host was, initially, kept anonymous.

At some point during the trip, it was revealed. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the largest drug dealers and brothel owners in the country — a man who provided the government with sufficient financial motivation to look the other way, in exchange for being permitted to continue his business without interference. His contribution to our trip was apparently part of a broader pattern of largesse toward young people and public life.

One of our group took considerable exception to this. She came to me with her objections, which were not, it must be said, without a certain logic.

“Has he asked you to take drugs?” I asked.

“No.”

“Has he asked you to become a prostitute?”

“No.”

“Then what is your problem. Shut up and enjoy the trip.”

She reluctantly agreed. I stand by the reasoning.

The trip itself filled in every gap the first visit had left. Tokyo’s extraordinary, relentless energy. The haunting, essential weight of Hiroshima. Kyoto again, this time at twenty-five, which is a very different city from Kyoto at seventeen. Osaka, alive and noisy and wonderful. The bullet train — the shinkansen — sliding between cities at speeds that make the landscape abstract, a blur of green and grey and the occasional, arresting silhouette of Fuji.

I could fill many more pages with the events and incidents of both Japanese chapters. Perhaps I will. What can be said with certainty is that Japan gave me the travel bug, and the travel bug has not, in the decades since, shown any signs of releasing its grip.

Conclusion

Japan is not one country. It is at least two: the Japan you see at seventeen, wide-eyed and newly arrived, and the Japan you see when you return with a little more of the world behind you. Both are extraordinary. Both leave their mark.

What stays, across both visits, is the particular quality of Japanese generosity — formal and sincere, unhurried and absolute. The grandfather who made sure there were cigarettes in the limo. The host family who found their way past the tatami incident. The nameless benefactor who sent eighty young Antipodeans across the country first class, for reasons of his own.

And what stays most of all is the memory of a small lapel pin, and a mother who laughed.

Dōmo arigatō gozaimasu, Japan. The debt has not been repaid. It never will be.

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: Japan part II