36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan - Softcover

Davidson, Cathy N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822339137 ISBN 13: 9780822339137

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2006

Synopsis

In 1980 Cathy N. Davidson traveled to Japan to teach English at a leading all-women’s university. It was the first of many journeys and the beginning of a deep and abiding fascination. In this extraordinary book, Davidson depicts a series of intimate moments and small epiphanies that together make up a panoramic view of Japan. With wit, candor, and a lover’s keen eye, she tells captivating stories—from that of a Buddhist funeral laden with ritual to an exhilarating evening spent touring the “Floating World,” the sensual demimonde in which salaryman meets geisha and the normal rules are suspended. On a remote island inhabited by one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, a disconcertingly down-to-earth priestess leads her to the heart of a sacred grove. And she spends a few unforgettable weeks in a quasi-Victorian residence called the Practice House, where, until recently, Japanese women were taught American customs so that they would make proper wives for husbands who might be stationed abroad. In an afterword new to this edition, Davidson tells of a poignant trip back to Japan in 2005 to visit friends who had remade their lives after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which had devastated the city of Kobe, as well as the small town where Davidson had lived and the university where she taught.

36 Views of Mount Fuji not only transforms our image of Japan, it offers a stirring look at the very nature of culture and identity. Often funny, sometimes liltingly sad, it is as intimate and irresistible as a long-awaited letter from a good friend.

About this title

About the Author

Cathy N. Davidson is Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, cofounder of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, and Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke University. Her numerous books include Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America; Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory; and No More Separate Spheres! (with Jessamyn A. Hatcher), also published by Duke University Press. She is a past president of the American Studies Association and a previous editor of the journal American Literature.

From the Back Cover

"A delightful read, offering insight not only into Japan but into the adventure of living in a foreign culture anywhere in the world."--Mary Catherine Bateson, author of "Composing a Life"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

36 VIEWS OF MOUNT FUJI

On Finding Myself in JapanBy CATHY N. DAVIDSON

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3913-7

Contents

A Note on Japanese Names.......................................ixList of Illustrations..........................................xiPreface........................................................xiii1 Seeing and Being Seen.......................................12 Foreigners..................................................93 After School................................................214 From the Best Families......................................375 Typical Japanese Women......................................496 Night Moves.................................................697 Sacred Places...............................................838 Accident....................................................1059 Going Home..................................................12310 Sea of Japan, Oki, 1987....................................13911 Tatami Room in Cedar Grove.................................15512 Festival of the Dead.......................................16913 Photo Album: The Fourth Journey............................18514 The Practice House.........................................20515 House Guest................................................21716 Climbing the Mountain......................................227Afterword (2005)...............................................233Acknowledgments to the First Edition...........................241Acknowledgments to the Second Edition..........................243Glossary of Japanese Words and Expressions.....................245

Chapter One

SEEING AND BEING SEEN

I dreamt Japan long before I went there. Moss gardens, straw-mat rooms, wooden bridges arching in the moonlight, paper lanterns with the fire glowing inside. Whenever I paged through photography books of traditional Japan, I found myself gasping with appreciation. Three rocks, a gnarled pine tree, raked white sand: awe. Pictures of Windsor Castle or the fountains of Versailles have never left me breathless.

But what struck me as we drove away from Osaka International Airport was the unattractiveness of the scene. Forget rocks and raked sand! Neon everywhere, billboards as far as the eye could see, concrete apartment blocks dingy with pollution. Even the details radiated a sense of urbanization run amok. Whereas other affluent nations bury power lines and strive for at least some sense of visual harmony, Japan seemed to be clotted with the cables and wires of modern life. Looking out the car window at gray buildings with rusting metal roofs, the power lines crisscrossing bizarrely overhead, I was reminded of some grim old photograph of a nineteenth-century immigrant ghetto, zapped by late-twentieth-century electronic overload.

My husband, Ted, and I were in Japan to teach English. Michigan State University, where I taught at the time, had established a faculty exchange program with Kansai Women's University. A Japanese professor would teach my courses at MSU while I taught hers at KWU. Ted took an unpaid leave from his liberal arts college in the States and accepted part-time jobs at both KWU and a larger, coed university in a nearby town. It had all happened fast-a note in the faculty mailboxes one winter day inviting applications, a few hasty lessons in conversational Japanese, and then, in March, we were there.

"Is it what you were expecting?" Professor Sano, the department head at KWU, asked as we drove from the airport to Nigawa, the suburb where we would be living for the next year.

I knew that Japan wouldn't look like the picture books but I was surprised at how different it really was. I joked that I had thought the streets of Japan would be paved with gold.

He laughed and said that many Americans had that reaction. Then, nodding at the passing scene, a particularly drab stretch of warehouse-like buildings, he added more soberly, "We Japanese like to say that we have a great sense of beauty and no sense of ugliness. You'll find a lot of Japan is like that."

The beauty is still there, he explained; one just has to look for it. What happens outside, in the world, is chaotic, contingent, filled with speed and accident. But, as we would later see, bleak stretches of urban sprawl are punctuated by exquisite Buddhist temples set off from the city, sometimes by stark clay walls or elaborate wooden gates, a separate peace within the chaos. On national holidays, Japanese go to these temples en masse to recharge, and they become as packed as a rush-hour subway train. We'd see the same thing soon in cherry-viewing season, he said, when everyone sets aside the tragedies or just the predictable dailiness of life to picnic and party beneath the fragile blossoms.

He described one of his favorite places, a busy intersection in a nondescript area of Kyoto where a simple carved stone Buddha, much beloved by the residents, smiles enigmatically amid the carbon monoxide and the car horns. Professor Sano dropped us off at the Western-style home of an American couple who taught at Kansai Women's University, a kind of halfway house between the two cultures, where we spent our first night in Japan. The next day the couple showed us around the local grocery store, explained how the train system worked, and delivered us to our apartment building in Nigawa, an affluent suburb between Kobe and Osaka, about half an hour by train from either. They told us that, before the War, Nigawa was a sleepy resort town, with ryokan (inns) and country villas, and long before that a stop for pilgrims on their way to Kabuto-yama Daishi, a Shingon Buddhist temple built in the ninth century on the helmet-shaped mountain a few miles beyond Nigawa. Carrying our suitcases up the three flights of stairs to our apartment, we heard the low, somber gong of the temple bell mingled with suburban sounds of commuter trains and mopeds.

We lived on the top floor of a "mansion," the Japanese term for a modern ferro-concrete apartment complex. Kansai Women's University owned our apartment and two others on the floor, each a 2DK-two rooms plus a galley kitchen, with a dining area large enough for a table and four chairs. The Western-style living room was furnished with small brown tweed couches and a coffee table. The bedroom was more traditional, with tatami (green-gold straw mats) on the floor and walls covered in a rough ocher paper that recalled the clay walls of a tea house. We had been asked if we wanted a double bed and declined in favor of the traditional futons. A bed would have filled the entire room. With futons, what was a bedroom by night became, with the futons folded away, a study where I worked on the floor, Japanese-style, breathing in the incomparable fragrance of rice straw.

A few days after our arrival, I set out for my first official visit to Kansai Women's University. Our American colleagues had drawn us a map of Nigawa that included two different routes to the university-a direct one along well-marked streets lined with apartment buildings and expensive sub-urban houses and a more circuitous scenic route past the last thatch-roof building in Nigawa, by a few remaining old kura (storehouses), over a small stream, and then up a path that led through a rice paddy at the very top of a hill. On clear days, they said, we'd be able to see Osaka. Beyond the smokestacks, factories, and oil tankers, we'd even glimpse the fabled Inland Sea.

Of course I took the scenic route, noticing, with anticipation, that the cherry trees arching over one part of my walk were in bud. On campus, a few early trees were already in bloom. The students were blooming, too, hundreds and hundreds of them, looking fresh and lovely.

In the English Department office, I met various new colleagues, most of them Japanese but also a few gaijin (foreigners), from the United States and the United Kingdom. I heard again how happy everyone was that I was able to come for the year. The auto industry in 1980 was suffering its worst crisis in history, and anti-Japanese feelings ran high in Michigan. I liked to think of myself and the Japanese exchange professor as minor goodwill ambassadors.

As my new colleagues hurried off in the general bustle of starting another school year, I stayed behind in the main office, sipping a cup of green tea that one of the secretaries had offered me. I browsed through the mail that had accumulated in my box, mostly institutional memos about commencement, class lists, and other official matters. There were a number of notices in Japanese that the secretary told me not to bother about and then a brief note in both English and Japanese announcing that "everyone should please try to have the health examination before the beginning of classes."

I was puzzled. We didn't get memos at Michigan State that told us "please try" to do things. And what kind of health examination? My doctor had given me a complete physical before I left the United States, but I wasn't sure whether that counted or not. I'd been told I would be covered for the year by Japan's national health plan and supposed that this physical was part of the plan. I also suspected that the vague wording in the memo might be an example of tatemae, the form of a polite suggestion masking the substance (honne) of an explicit order. I'd read about this Japanese habit of indirect expression in all the travel guides.

"I guess I should take this health exam, shouldn't I?" I asked one of the secretaries who spoke excellent English. She nodded agreement and told me that it was being given right now in the auditorium in the next building. I could just follow all the young women who were walking in that direction. I thanked her, bowed, and headed off for my first all-Japanese experience.

The room was filled with students, most of them from the high school and junior high that are also part of KWU. As far as I could see, there was only one other faculty member present. I wasn't at all sure what to do, but took heart when I noticed that the youngest girls, probably away from home for the first time, seemed every bit as bewildered as I. I smiled at them and drew startled, wide-eyed expressions in return. It occurred to me that some of them had probably never been this close to a foreigner before. I bowed. They bowed. We waited in line together and were handed plastic slippers and hospital gowns as well as small baskets for our clothes and shoes. We then waited in another line to enter a room where, presumably, we would have our medical examinations. A tiny girl, smaller than her friends, gazed up at me with a look somewhere between excitement and fear. I introduced myself to her in formal Japanese, just as I had learned in my first lesson in conversational Japanese. She broke into giggles, then bowed and solemnly introduced herself to me, her friends still giggling behind hands held to their mouths.

My determination to act confident and congenial wavered as soon as I entered the next room and realized that there were no private changing areas, no discreet doctor's cubicles. I was going to have to slip into my hospital gown out in the open, in a room filled with curious Japanese schoolgirls. Still worse, as I unfolded the gown I saw that it was intended to fit a Japanese junior high girl, not a tall gaijin woman.

I'd read about the Japanese virtue gaman (perseverance, endurance). In the gaman spirit, I decided I'd get through this as best I could. I started to take off my blouse and skirt, then noticed that the Japanese were disrobing differently. Somehow they managed to get out of their clothes and into the hospital gown without revealing an inch of extra flesh. It was impressive to watch: a flurry of arms and voila! The gown on, the clothes off, the underwear zipping out from underneath to go folded neatly, with everything else, into the mesh basket. Maybe it was a skill learned long ago in cramped living quarters or something you practiced before taking a communal Japanese bath. My American body didn't know how to do that Houdini bit with the underwear, especially with some two hundred pairs of eyes taking in my failure.

I felt my gaman slipping.

I had an unusually brief interview with the doctor. He knew as much English as I knew Japanese. When he pantomimed that I should open wide, I volunteered "Ahhh!" the way I would in America, and he almost fell off his chair.

"Why you do that?" he asked, sounding both hurt and offended.

I learned later that the whole process is quieter in Japan. With visible relief, the doctor waved me on to yet another line.

This was for chest X-rays. Two young men with fashionably permed hair, probably in their early twenties, had the dream job of administering the X-rays to hundreds of nubile schoolgirls. And to me. Once again it became clear that my prior education had been incomplete. The girls went up to the X-ray machine, pressed against it, then opened their hospital gowns, with nary a hint of indiscretion. I could tell by anxious glances in my direction that they expected I would again embarrass myself and them when it came my turn. I studied their method. After I executed it with fair success, the two students in line behind me actually applauded. I strode out of the X-ray room, dignity intact.

"Gambatte kudasai!" (Persevere! Do your best! Good luck!), one of these young women said to me a few moments later as I stood in the auditorium, unsure of what to do next. Then, in excellent English, she added, "It's almost over. Only one more thing to do." She brought me a clear plastic cup from a cart I'd overlooked near the door. "You go there"-she pointed to the lavatories-"then take it to the nurse at the front of the room. That's it!"

Even as I thanked her for her help, I foresaw, with despair, what was going to come next. The medicine I was taking for a minor bladder infection happens to turn my urine an exquisite azure color, reminiscent of the sky in old Japanese prints.

"Aoi! Aoi!" (Blue! Blue!), I heard whispered as I walked through the packed auditorium in my minigown and carrying the plastic cup. The well-bred young students of Kansai Women's University made like hooligans, popping in and out of various lines, attempting to get a look for themselves, then joining in the chorus "Aoi! Aoi!" Never had I been the subject of such wonder and awe.

"You know, you didn't really have to take that physical," one of my new colleagues, an American, said when I slunk back into the English Department office a few days later.

"You've heard?" I asked her.

"Cathy, this is Japan. Of course I heard-we all did. Get used to it. This is a village of 120 million people. There isn't much you can do here without everybody finding out."

She thought the whole thing was hilarious. I realized, with a sinking feeling, that just about anyone I would meet over the next few weeks would have heard about the aoi incident. So much for making a good first impression!

I asked why the department secretary hadn't told me that I didn't have to take the physical. My colleague explained that, especially at a place like KWU, one of Japan's most elite women's colleges, status and politeness mean a lot and it is very awkward for a secretary to tell a sensei (teacher) what to do or not do.

She told me about a visiting foreign teacher who, on a train platform, had asked one of his students, "This is the train to Osaka, isn't it?" and had been told yes, even though it wasn't. It would have been rude to tell him that he was mistaken. If he had asked, "Excuse me, please. Could you tell me which is the train to Osaka?" he would have been answered very differently. My situation was much the same. I was a sensei and the secretary would have felt presumptuous telling me that I had been wrong to assume I had to take the physical. Nor could she tell me the notice did not mean what it said. It was an official notice; the university was doing its job by providing annual physicals; the students obeyed the requirement but most of the faculty just threw the notice away. "It's like ignoring the 55 mph speed limit on highways back in America," my colleague said.

"You haven't made my job any easier," one of the foreign teachers at KWU's junior high kidded me a few weeks later. "My Japanese students come here already convinced that the Japanese brain is different than ours, that their tongue has a different shape, that their blood is stronger. I can't tell you how many oral reports I've heard this term about how Japanese and gaijin look and act so different because gaijin have blue pee."

It was a funny way to enter a new culture, but it didn't feel funny at the time. I was in Japan to see, to experience, to learn, to understand. I wanted to be a good tourist, receptive to new experiences, new sights and sounds. It never occurred to me, until the moment I donned my hospital gown, that I would become one of the sights-examined, not just the examiner.

I'm not sure I'd call it a baptism by fire, but the health exam taught me that no matter how hard I might try to understand this new culture, to fit in as gracefully as possible, at times I was going to fail. There would be many more embarrassing or painful moments, misunderstandings, conflicts, confusion, frustration. Since I am not a person whose anxiety diminishes at the prospect of certain failure, I gave myself a pep talk. A nation that could tolerate ugliness without losing its appreciation for beauty would probably be a pretty forgiving place. Think gardens in the urban chaos, I told myself. Think Buddhas amid the car horns.

Walking back home to the apartment in Nigawa, past the last thatch building, under cherry trees aching to bloom, I realized that I was seeing Japan but I was also seeing myself again, inside out, viewed as well as viewing. This, I thought, is what it means to be a foreigner. Conspicuous, ardent, cowed, I began my year in Japan.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from 36 VIEWS OF MOUNT FUJIby CATHY N. DAVIDSON Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822339137
• ISBN 13: 9780822339137
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272