Wrong About Japan

  We passed a room of suited men gravely considering a toy robot on a conference table. In another room, Charley and I were presented with an encyclopedic book titled Gundam Officials, Limited Edition. To say this was as large as a telephone book severely understates the case, for it weighed almost seven pounds, concrete evidence of the otaku mindset and an extreme consequence, perhaps, of an education system based on the accumulation and memorization of data.

  My son, I knew, would never surrender the gift. I was doomed to lug it home across the world, this gorgeously produced, very expensive tome in which every known fact about Mobile Suit Gundam was carefully documented and illustrated, with the sort of respect you might expect in the owner’s manual for a Rolex Rocket Ship. It was the Real Japan, and we could not read a word of it.

  Now we gathered in another conference room, and here we were invited to ask Yuka, the author of this bible, anything we liked. Charley, as usual, was reluctant to speak, but when I replayed the audio-tapes back in New York—hearing myself ask Yuka: What was this thing with robots? What was an otaku?— I wondered how difficult it would be for an outsider to recognise that my son was the author of my questions.

  Paul translated Yuka’s reply, which, on the tape at home, was still delicate and careful but much more male than I had noticed at the time. “In the middle eighties, there was a Japanese science-fiction author called Moto Arai. One of her stylistic tics was to address the reader very formally with the second person pronoun, otaku, a much more distant form than the French vous, for instance. Her fans liked this book so much that they adopted this peculiar usage, referring to each other as ‘otaku.’”

  I had read enough to imagine that I understood. “Isn’t it an extremely respectful form of address?” I asked.

  “No!” Yuka cried in English.

  Charley’s eyes flicked my way.

  “The way ‘otaku’ is used now,” Paul translated, “it’s the reverse. It is no longer about fans imitating Moto Arai’s prose. It’s not fun anymore. It’s not respectful, it’s discriminatory. It’s like calling you ‘sir’ when I don’t really mean it. It’s ironic, sarcastic.”

  Okay, so the word’s dripping with discrimination. “But doesn’t it have a number of meanings?”

  “Of course,” Paul said. “It can be used for people who are enthusiastic about almost anything. In English you might say aficionado, although it is also rather like nerd.”

  In the midst of this explanation, the staff of Kodansha, so earnestly at work only minutes previously, erupted into wild cheering. Yuka did not blink an eye. And although sararimen in offices all over Tokyo had abandoned their posts to watch Japan battle Tunisia, she was far more interested in drawing a fat teenager with a schlumpy T-shirt and a bad complexion.

  “Otaku,” she said, pushing it across the table.

  “As you can see,” Paul said, “in this sense an otaku is someone who has no dress or social sense or any interest in anything other than the object of their obsession. This may or may not be manga. It could easily be the bra sizes of actresses.”

  Yuka interrupted and Paul translated: “Also, among the otaku community there are many of us who will laugh and make fun of this sort of person. We used to have a badge, like the Ghostbusters badge, with a red line drawn across this type of figure.”

  “Then otakus are outsiders,” I asked, “different, but united by their outsider status?”

  I don’t know how good Yuka’s English was, but she was correcting me before I finished my sentence.

  “More like a hobbyist,” Paul translated. “If it were England, you might think of trainspotters in anoraks. But then again, that’s a stereotypical otaku. It’s like expecting everyone in Texas to be a cowboy. There are some people like that, but most otakus are not.”

  Of course, I could not doubt him. I knew nothing. I was someone a Japanese would normally avoid sitting next to in the subway, leaving an empty seat in rush hour, someone who did not yet understand that it was rude to blow his big long nose in public.

  But I did remember views of otakus I had not shared with my son, unsettling portraits I had found in the shadowy alleys of the World Wide Web. Most of these renderings were sexually explicit and unpleasant, but one of them, slightly less pornographic, showed an otaku, wired, connected to a woman with a keyboard in her navel. In New York I had printed out these images and filed them away in the back of a drawer.

  How much clearer everything had been at home. Charley and I could sit on the Brooklyn-bound subway happily developing hypotheses about manga and Japanese history. We could be excited to realise, for instance, that manga’s biggest growth occurred in the immediate postwar years when there was no television in Japan, and perhaps had taken off for just that reason. Also, in a crowded country, manga could provide a private entertainment in a public space, much as a Walkman does today. I put this theory to Yuka. But if I had expected any agreement, I was to be severely disappointed.

  “Yuka can understand,” Paul explained, “why you would think this.”

  Yuka spoke, smiling slightly.

  “It is because,” Paul translated, “Americans love TV so much.”

  Of course, I am not American and my relationship with television is far from loving, but that was beside the point. Yuka explained that manga and anime were rooted in kamishibai, or “paper theatre,” an earlier tradition of visual storytelling. Kamishabai was particularly Japanese. It had no relation whatsoever to the West. The kamishibai man, Charley and I now learned, would travel around the city on his bicycle, on the back of which he carried pictures mounted on cards. When he arrived at a suitable park or street corner, he would bang wooden blocks together to attract an audience. Then, as the children gathered, he would set up his cards and, with these pictures and his own artful narration, beguile his audience with ghost stories, fairy stories, samurai stories, structuring them like soap operas in that every episode ended with a cliff-hanger. A good kamishibai man always left his audience hungry for his next visit.

  It was easy enough to understand that kamishibai might have inspired manga and that it could even be seen as a sort of movie storyboard but, this being Japan, the kamishibai business was not what it seemed. Just as the real purpose of Gundam is to sell toy robots, the real point of kamishibai was to sell sweets. The performer was primarily a candy vendor who used his stories to attract customers.

  Kamishibai was still common in Japan after the war, but with increasing affluence, along with the introduction of magazines for children, its appeal diminished and a number of these candy salesmen became manga artists. What’s more, famous kamishibai characters like Golden Bat became manga characters. And, as you’ll see, manga characters often morphed into anime characters. Kamishibai, Yuka concluded, were essentially films on paper.

  Yuka, having judged this page of history complete, then spoke animatedly for a minute or two.

  “Yuka wants to say,” Paul translated at last, “that the manga you see on the newsstands today grew out of the children’s magazines which first appeared in the 1950s—these were monthly at first, then weekly with pictures, stories, and the graphic stories which would soon occupy whole magazines of their own—manga. By the 1960s, there was a particular sort of manga called gekiga, a word which just means ‘action’ or ‘action pictures.’ She is saying— this is very important—that these were aimed at kids as old as eighteen. Tokyo University students became obsessed with them, and in turn, these manga were soon reflecting their concerns about politics and, yes, sex, and sometimes violence. These students have gone on to be very successful and respectable. They are now in their fifties or sixties, but they’re still reading manga. In America this does not happen. She is saying, I think, that these adult manga came, not from a lack of television, but from something more uniquely Japanese.”

  I asked Yuka about the transformation of manga into anime and, as Paul took notes, which he referred to as he translated, she began her answer and I understood how she might have written her
seven-pound book: “When anime first appeared, it grew naturally from these paper films, because that’s how manga really works, much faster than an English-language comic. Watch how quickly the people read manga on the Tokyo subway, almost like a flip book.

  “The most popular manga will be made into TV animations, and the successful TV animations will in turn spawn toys, robots in particular. Astro Boy is, of course, a robot. However, the first really successful robot was Mazinga. Here, a young boy operates a robot. He goes onto the robot’s head and rides it. It was Mazinga that began this robot boom in Japanese anime and it was the oil shock which ensured its continuance.”

  “Oil shock?” I asked.

  “The oil crisis. After that, it was too expensive to have robots in live-action films. There was no question that people wanted robots, that’s only natural. But because of the oil shock, the robots were all animated.”

  “But why this obsession with robots?”

  “As I said, toys.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and could we please explore with Yuka the feelings I had in New York watching Mobile Suit Gundam? Has she seen my questions about children at war, isolated within the belly of the beast, alienated from each other?”

  Paul spoke to Yuka, who, as usual, smiled and shook her head. Charley nudged me under the table.

  “Yuka says it is not like that at all. She thinks that being a pilot in a Mobile Suit is exactly like being inside a womb.”

  Not unsurprisingly, this was not how I’d seen these giant mechanical titan samurai as they clashed violently in the sky. “In the womb?”

  Paul interpreted: “When you see these robots being knocked about and hurt, you’ll notice the person operating the robot is also in pain. She says that if you think about that logically, it shouldn’t happen. They should be like the guys in a military tank, getting knocked around a little roughly perhaps, but you must understand that these pilots are in the womb. They feel what the mother feels. A manga critic once said that when a person is in the womb of the robot, the robot’s armour becomes that person’s body. This is quite the opposite of your idea that being inside the Mobile Suit is like isolating yourself from the world. For her, it is a safe place in which you can interact with the world.”

  Later Yuka would show Charley a series of delicate drawings for some robot toys that she was hoping to have manufactured. In these sketches her feelings were made eerily clear: the robots, like pregnant women, the pilot positioned within a rotund stomach.

  She wanted to know if Charley liked them.

  “Yes,” I translated, watching that very slight movement in the corner of his mouth. “I believe he likes them very much.”

  Paul then relayed this to Yuka and we waited while Yuka then spoke at length to Paul: “She says,” he told us at last, “there’s a Japanese word, gattai, for when two or more things are joined together in some way to become one. The thing about the Gun-dam Mobile Suits is that it’s not like the tanks, it’s a form of unification.”

  By now Tunisia had been defeated 2-0 and the corridors of Kodansha were serene once more. Our interview was almost over, but I still had not asked Yuka about her own transformation and, indeed, was shy to do so. Within one’s own language or culture it might not be so difficult, but having been wrong about everything else, I was reluctant to raise this subject directly and so asked her what it meant to be not a transsexual but a visualist.

  “Are there masquerades in the United States?” she asked, a little archly, I thought.

  “It’s like the Teddy Boys,” Paul offered quickly, “or Mods or Rockers.”

  Perhaps it was getting late or perhaps they were just sick and tired of me, but I persisted, asking about the fastidious attention to detail, the perfectionism which seems so distinctively Japanese. But of course Yuka was the wrong person to ask. She lived inside, not outside, Japan, and it seemed she misunderstood my question.

  “It would be dull if everyone was the same, wouldn’t it?” she said. “Europeans are brought up thinking that if they take their clothes off they’ll all turn into werewolves. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “Thank you.”

  8.

  Transformations being something of a manga specialty, I doubt Charley would have worried about becoming a werewolf, but he had his own reasons for not wanting to take his clothes off in a communal bath. At the inn, there were different bathing hours for men and women, this being indicated by either male or female Kabuki masks hung beside the bathroom door.

  “You go, Dad. That’s the man’s face.”

  “Come on. We should both do it.”

  “Forget it. No. No way.”

  If there is a finger to be pointed here, I guess it is at his parents. Although I had attended a boarding school where naked bathing was compulsory, and had lived with hippies who would have judged it “uptight” to wear a swimsuit, in New York our family maintained a more puritan aesthetic. This may have originated at the moment when Charley’s older brother enquired, in a very sympathetic tone, “What happened to your penis, Mom—got old and fall off?” In any case, we were not one of those families that walked around naked, and now Charley was not about to take his pants off in front of anyone, least of all his father.

  “You go,” he said. “I’m going to build that Gun-dam model.”

  Well, I really should have. I had certainly bathed communally on earlier visits to Japan and enjoyed it, but now, many Toblerones and cognacs later, exhibiting the vanity of the overweight, I also chose to bathe en suite in a deep Japanese tub made not of wood but of stainless steel. Charley was perfectly happy with this bath and in ten days would use it at least three times while I, of course, suffered private guilt over my incomplete experience of the Real Japan.

  My son had made his position on bathing explicit before he left New York but on the question of cuisine I had been less flexible. “We are going to eat weird things,” I had told him. “We will be with Japanese people, and we are going to eat whatever we are offered, no matter how strange it looks. Okay?”

  And he trained for it. At Mr. Sushi on Houston Street, he abandoned his normal California roll in favour of tuna, salmon, and octopus sashimi. I also prepared myself, acquiring a taste for the fragile slimy sea urchins that had once repulsed me.

  In New York, Charley’s breakfast of choice is pancakes with maple syrup. In Tokyo he began each day sitting cross-legged before a spread offish, miso soup, seaweed, pickles, and other exotica I now forget or could never have named. At our first breakfast he was a total ace. There was nothing he would not eat.

  He was just as adept at lunch and dinner with publishers and agents, and soon he was crossing the road to Fujio Takahashi’s sushi bar, where our beaming host spoiled him rotten with little tidbits of God knows what while I pushed myself to my gastronomic limit, spooning up the sea urchin that tasted, of course, nothing like the uni at Mr. Sushi, more like—as my son informed me—live brain soup. We spurned the McDonald’s down on Drunk Street, and I was proud of how my adventurous son devoured everything Mr. Takahashi placed in front of him. Paternal pride, regrettably brings with it a certain blindness, and I was slow to notice that Charley was eating just a little less each morning. The sour pickled plums were the first to be jettisoned—so what, who cares?—next day the radish was untouched, then that white clammy stuff that doesn’t taste of anything. The cold cooked fish then lost its appeal completely, and finally on the fifth morning, Charley ate a few grains of rice and pushed aside the miso soup.

  “This,” he said, “is the breakfast from hell.”

  Fair enough. He had given it his best. I asked him what he’d rather have.

  “Doughnuts,” he said, “with sprinkles.”

  “There are no doughnuts in Japan,” I said. “It is not Japanese food. Besides, we didn’t come all this way to eat doughnuts.”

  But he was already thumb-dancing on the cell phone. “For your information,” he announced, his eyes glued to the tiny screen, “Japanese peop
le eat seven sorts of doughnuts, including American doughnuts. The Japanese word for doughnut is donatsu, and there is a Mister Donut across the road from the Asakusa Station.”

  “Okay, we can go to Mister Donut.”

  “Starbucks is better.”

  “Who was that teacher, the one who voted for Ralph Nader? Didn’t he teach you that Starbucks was evil?”

  “This is Japanese Starbucks.”

  “So?”

  He grinned. “We have to experience life.”

  Arriving at Starbucks fifteen minutes later, we found Takashi already ensconced in a tall plush red chair that made him—uniformed as he was, and coiffed with such spiked precision—look like a member of the Earth Federation Mobile Suit carrier, White Base.

  “You like muffin?” he enquired. “Miruku?”

  The u ending suggested an English word recently adopted by the Japanese, but in the case of milk, that made no sense at all, so I asked Takashi was there no other word for milk.

  “Oh yes, of course.”

  “So why do you call it miruku?”

  “Miruku is more modern.”

  “But what’s the matter with the other word?”

  “Not so hygienic.”

  “How is that?”

  “The other word is gyuunyuu.” He wrinkled his nose. “It means liquid from udder. Miruku is better.”

  After days of raw fish and noodles there was something rather comforting about miruku, muffin, cafe latte, and we spread ourselves out, the boys with cell phones and Game Boys and three-inch-thick mangas which you buy at railway stations for a quarter. Charley had also brought an autographed Gun-dam book as a gift for Takashi, who examined Tomino’s signature very closely before turning to me.

  “Carey-san, where do you wish to go? Perhaps I can help you?”

  When I’d planned the coming evening I had had no idea that Takashi existed, and now I would have given almost anything to include him. “Tonight,” I said, “we have an appointment in Minato-ku.”

  “Perhaps there are more interesting places I could take you?”