For Japan~ One Year Upon a Dreaming Dragon

One Year Upon a Dreaming Dragon

Twenty years ago, I left for Japan.

No one spoke a word of English in my Tokyo hotel.
The receptionist at the desk sounded like a samurai.
“Hai, hai,” she repeated sharply, bowing low, as she spoke on the phone.
Why bow while on the phone? I wondered.
The taxi-driver who dropped me off refused my tip.
On my first train in Tokyo, someone felt me up,
tearing instantaneously my ideals of the respectful Japanese.
Truly, I was in a foreign land.

Twenty years ago, I taught English in Japan.

An official language-consultant,
I spread my knowledge of American English
to Japanese businessmen in hi-tech Hitachi,
machinists in Makino Frice.
The factory workers rocked. Utterly unselfconscious,
they spoke their “Herros” and “How are you?’s” with unabashed enthusiasm.
On their last day of class, however, they remained strangely quiet.
“What is wrong?” I asked.
One man stood up, slightly bowed.
“We are lonely,” he said. Pause.
“Nartana smile, we never forget.”

Twenty years ago, I lived in Japan.

A Hindu Brahmin Midwestern American—
and, most dauntingly, a vegetarian—
I explored to the best of my ability, forests
of kanji, the ordinary of each day.
It exhausts, to live in a land you can’t read,
communicate with those with whom you can’t speak.
Most difficult, perhaps, to enjoy a culture whose foods you can’t eat.

But we need to live
our loneliness.

I’m glad I lived it without email.

And I didn’t fall in love with the land.

Twenty years on, I weep for Japan.
Why?
I lived only a split-second of my life,
upon this floating, dreaming, feisty dragon.

There is the human tragedy, of course.
But why cry?
Quakes wake us, to remind us we are the earth.
And death is as natural as birth.

So why cry?

Perhaps because I now understand,
I learned something very Japanese
in Japan—

not how to make sushi, or read hundreds of kanji—

but something subtler:
a stoicism

of the soul.

I lived
my loneliness;
owned its nothingness.

And kept going.

“We will rebuild Japan from scratch,” declared Prime Minister Kan today.

This dragon, breathes fire.

Twenty years on, I pray for Japan.