Today I branched out from the Tokyo metro system (easy) to the Japan Railways overland system (not so easy). I had an appointment with the chairman of the Japan Toilet Association, a man who has answered his phone once though I have rung it 20 times, and the appointment was in Kokubunji, or, as the Italians say, in culo alla luna (up the backside of the moon). To get to Kokobunji, I took three metro lines and two JR trains, only coming unstuck at Shinjuku, where trains were supposed to depart for Kokobunji but didn't. Who knows why not. I tried to ask the man in the uniform with the whistle but he looked perpetually frantic as he had to run from one side of the platform to the other to blow flags and wave whistles. Which is what I first wrote and which I will leave as is because.
There are many who think Japanese sounds harsh and that - mindful of their wartime behaviour - that the Japanese are an unredeemably harsh people. I can't question that, but I know that the people who translate Japanese metro signs into English come from a gentler, kinder cut than the sign people of the London Underground. Above the doors on one line, there are these signs:
Melody is an unexpected word to find in the field of public information. The melody itself is ear-mangling.
And here is unexpected gentility in the field of toilet-cleaning:
It reads: Cleanup Time. Watch your Step Please. All of which is unexpected to anyone used to the British way of doing things, which generally consists of a mop stuck in a bucket outside the only public toilet for miles, with a sign saying *Toilets closed for cleaning” (Subtext: “Now piss off and find another one if you can”.) I mean, “please”?
To help with interpreting, I was accompanied by P., a young English woman doing a Phd in anthropology in Tokyo street fashion. She knows more than I ever will about Visual Rock and Gothic Lolitas. She actually looked horrified that I'd never heard of Gothic Lolitas. She also thought I would think her phD frivolous, but I don't. Anthropology is anthropology. Now I just wish someone would do some anthropology about toilets before September 2007 so that I could quote knowledgeably from it.
Our meeting took place, rather oddly, in Starbucks, which on Sunday afternoons becomes an office away from home for most of Kokubunji's young people. Everyone had a notebook or a book or a computer. The air was of coffee and concentration.
The chair of the JTA, K., is a lovely man dedicated to toilets and mountains. His elusiveness was explained by the fact that his mobile phone has an inaudible ring, and that yesterday he was up the top of a mountain. After sitting down, he presented me with a bag of apples. “I picked them in Nagoya.” They're big apples, and fruit is expensive in Japan, says P. She got two, too.
K. brought along two friends, both small, slight people, and both charming. H. and T. turned out to be the reason we had come to Kokubunji (they live here), and Kokubunji turns out to be a lively and rather posh western outer suburb of Tokyo. H. possessed a dinky electronic translator which accurately translated such expressions as “mercury poisoning” and “unborn child” and “morbid acidity.” The mercury poisoning related to a discussion about how many heavy metals are in human shit, and about Minamata disease, or mercury poisoning caused by eating too much mercury-infested fish. I'd never heard of it. Yet another reason, beyond the fact it makes me vomit, not to eat sea creatures. H's wife T. is a tiny, vivacious woman who taught in schools for 27 years, and after she retired, travelled to the UK on her own for two weeks. She spent a week on her own in London. I found this astonishing. I thought small Japanese women in London came in packets of tour groups. But Tomoko-san went alone and said she had a splendid time. I said that next time she came to look me up and I would look after her and she actually clapped her hands with delight. I don't think I've ever seen anyone clap their hands with delight. But she's that kind of woman. Spirit disproportionate to stature. Later, K. asked her not to talk about toilets, having just said that toilets were no longer a taboo subject in Japan. I said, *but you just said it's OK to talk about toilets.” “Yes,” he said, “but not as loudly as T. does.”
After the meeting, P. and I went for beers and some food in a restaurant. This was exciting, as I have not yet dared set foot in a real restaurant, not daring to face the complication of “does that have fish”-ing the whole menu. We had edamame and pizza and chips and salad, and it was splendid. I found out things I had been curious about, like what is being yelled at me - and I do mean yelled, in a certain grating pitch that Japanese shop girls must go to grating pitch school to perfect - when I enter and leave shops, and why the cashiers seem to say about two paragraphs when they're handing back the change. P. said they were shouting “welcome”, and that in trendy shops it becomes the Japanese equivalent of “wcm”, because the shop assistants are way too hip to actually put effort into it, but they have to do it out of courtesy. She didn't know what the cashiers were saying, but thought they were probably “haveanicedaynow” sorts of phrases that have to be said as company policy. At the cash desk, when I put down a 10000 yen note for a 3000 yen bill, P. translated. “She said, 'are you sure you want me to take the money out of that large a note?'”
I said, “huh?”
P. said, “I don't get it either. But they always do it.”
P. tried to explain to me how complicated written Japanese was, what with two syllabaries and needing to know at least 2000 characters and some characters having different readings. I'd started the discussion by saying ” at least Japanese isn't tonal. it must be easier than Chinese.” Ha. Watashi wa stupid des. I would try to convey P.'s explanation but I don't want to get a headache.
When the waitress took our order, she got on her knees. When we left, she bowed so low her head touched her ankles. I couldn't even do that if I tried. I said to P., “do you notice any more that how strange that is?” She doesn't. And maybe it isn't strange, though the subservience of knees bothers me. I suppose though it comes from the traditional Japanese seating method of everyone being at the same, low level. Now customers have moved up in height to western-style chairs, but the waitress courtesy has stayed behind, below.
Outside, it was dusk and closing time. As we walked past a camera shop, its three male shop workers were standing outside in a triangular formation. They bowed in unison, first to the right, then to the left, then frontal, saying something in unison. They were addressing no-one in sight. P. looked as astonished as me. “They're thanking everybody.”
What for?
“No idea. For their custom. I've never seen it before.”
In the dark, on an evening approaching winter, with people going home after a hard day's shopping, it was an unsettlingly beautiful thing to see.