Tokyo: Red Carpets, Jetlag, and Beautiful Murders

The crowd is going wild. The air – filled with waving rectangles of red, white and blue, patterned in American, New Zealand, Taiwanese and British ways. The walls – adorned with other, more exotic and colorful flags – the flags of the various colleges of the day’s celebrities. The ground – occupied by two empires of students separated by a river of red – a real, real red carpet. The screen proudly proclaims “Japan Tour” – and now! – now the names and photos of the first group of professors float onto it. The tutors step onto the carpet, cheered on by the crowd. And after a while – Ewa Bigaj, Pembroke College, Oxford. She walks onto the carpet with two other student-celebrities. The Technos students closest to the carpet wave and grab her by the hands. She is handed a slender rose, and her photo is on a big, big screen, probably for the only time in her life.

This is how we were welcomed to Japan Tour. I was told by the students who came to Technos last year that there was a red carpet and a large screen involved – but nothing could have prepared me for this hour of stardom.

After the welcome ceremony, we were treated to an all-you-can-eat buffet of Japanese delicacies. Over lunch, conversations with the students and obligatory photo shots ensued.

One particular exchange repeated itself over and over throughout my visit.

Technos student: “What’s your major?”

Me: “Math and philosophy.”

“Oh my God! Math? Really? I’ve always hated math! And how long is your course?”

“Four years.”

“Four years of math?! How could you do this to yourself?!”

If I was less predisposed to try and find something interesting in everything under the sun, though, I probably would have exclaimed much the same upon hearing the majors of my Japanese interlocutors. Hotels and Hospitality, Tourism, Civil Aviation – though learning how to make different cocktails sounded like fun, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do this for two or three years – let alone saying, with perfect honesty, that it is one’s greatest dream to work as an airport clerk. But then they couldn’t imagine wanting to be a professor.

There was something slightly Huxleyesque about all these students so happy to do jobs which in the West would not be considered especially attractive, but on the whole I think it was more impressive than frightening. Japanese employees did seem to always do their jobs with an honest smile, and I think (tentatively) that their choices to do their particular jobs were no less their own than my choice to study math and philosophy.

The attraction for that evening was a visit to the kabuki theater. And an attraction indeed it was. The audio guide we were given (which, apart from a translation of most dialogues, gave an informative commentary to the plays) told us that kabuki is sometimes called “moving ukiyo-e” (woodblock prints) – and for an enthusiast of ukiyo-e like me, this meant internally squealing in excitement for half of the play. For the half that I didn’t nearly sleep through, I hurry to add... We were severely jetlagged, the whole group of visiting students and professors, and there comes a point when sleep is much more attractive than beauty...

Kabuki started out in the seventeenth century as a collection of dances performed by a Shinto priestess’s troupe of female dancers. The subsequent kabuki shows were deemed inappropriate and vulgar, and so in 1629 women were banned from the practice. And so originated kabuki as we know it today, with its onnagata – male actors specializing in female roles. But why are female roles still performed by men, even today? The audio guide claimed that women would not be able to play female roles the way onnagata do – a kabuki female cannot be too natural, and besides, the roles often require extremely heavy costumes. Whether this sounds convincing or not, the female-mimicking abilities of the onnagata we saw that day were highly impressive. I found myself thinking “what a beautiful woman!” an embarrassing number of times, and I saw nothing “unnatural” in the onnagata’s acting. I don’t know how they do it, but the audio guide also informed us that young boys could be played by old men in kabuki and it would look perfectly natural...

The series of plays we went to lasted a total of five hours (now you can forgive us our sleepiness, I think) – the first one was about a woman who had left her husband for his brother, and after a year ended up hiding from a snowstorm inside an abandoned hut – only to find the husband-brother seeking shelter in the very same hut. The storm raged outside with a flurry of delicate snowflakes harmonizing with the white make-up of the actors, and the scenes float in front of our eyes with the gracefulness of a winter sketch.

The repentant couple kneels in front of the husband, begging for forgiveness. They yell at him and at each other, he forgives them, blames them, blames himself, wants to kill them, wants to kill himself. The characters are a bit insane, their rapid changes of mind are a little unbelievable, but their gestures and mimicry are utterly sincere. Kabuki, we are assured by the audio guide, is all about the individual actor, his story and his facial expressions. Which are always beautiful, even when they are bizarre.

And when it comes to bizarreness, the second play far surpasses the first. The protagonist chases after his father-in-law with a sword – and he chases, and he chases, and he chases, and as his victim runs and fights back, he tries and tries to stab him. But, as ever, kabuki is beautiful, even in its dark insanity. The fight is not a fight, but a dance – the sword never touches its opponent, hands hit without hitting – and yet hit without any doubt, in the most hitting way possible. Every single movement of the figures, even as seen from under drooping eyelids, emanates fear for one’s life on the one side, and on uncontrollable anger instilled by years of injustice the other.

After long, exquisitely long minutes, the body of the father-in-law is thrown into the lake – it is obviously thrown in, though it walks into the water – which opens up for it, revealing stairs – on its own.

The last play is sheer perfection. Not in the storyline – a man kills his lover’s father, then when she learns the truth he kills her – but in the movement of the actors. It is more a dance than a play – a slow, elegant dance. I had never seen anything like it, and am at a loss for comparisons.

But throughout our evening at the kabuki theater, a comparison sprung to mind every minute. The theater was not as alien as I had expected it to be – the storylines, though bizarre, were not dissimilar to the ones I had seen in Western plays. Love and death and even the more traditionally Japanese honor are intercultural, human themes. The artistry of the scenes and the emphasis on the actor were, up to a point, uniquely Japanese elements – and ones that the West could learn from! But only up to a point. Is kabuki theater unique? Certainly. Is it, with a little help from an audio guide, comprehensible and beautiful to Westerners? Without doubt.

Tokyo: warm-up, or Airport Terminals, Power Lines, Toilet Seats and Helpful Students

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There was no one waiting for me. Here I was, alone at Narita airport – alone in foreign Tokyo, alone in foreign Japan. I’d say I couldn’t believe this was happening to me, but then I’m the sort of person this sort of thing regularly happens to. There I was, on a train somewhere in Barcelona, without a ticket and without the members of my scout troop I’d gone on the trip with. There I was, locked in a toilet with a jammed door in a train somewhere in Romania. There I was, somewhere in the mountains in Norway, realising that I’d just left my wallet – and passport – on the train that we could still make out in the distance. It always worked out somehow in the end, and if I never learned how to avoid such misfortunes, at least I learned how to face them without desperation. (I also learned to always feel a little uncomfortable in the vicinity of trains.)

My first thought was to find an internet cafe and write to our organiser – perhaps he had mobile internet and would be able to receive my message (my phone didn’t work in Japan, and even if it had, I didn’t have his number). Having successfully done that, I began to think a bit more clearly and concluded that that step had probably been unnecessary and that the replacement flight (for the full story, see my previous post) must have landed at a different terminal. I asked the lady in the information booth about the British Airways terminal, and she confirmed that it was Terminal Two rather than One – and that there was a free coach going there. I was saved.

Out the window of the train heading towards our hotel, Japan’s novelty beckoned me to look in all directions at once. There was a thickness, a depth, a lushness to the vegetation here, an exotic elegance to the shapes of trees and the shapes and shades of their leaves.

As we neared more central Tokyo, the vegetation gave way to mazes of streets, houses, skyscrapers, power lines, people. All I’d heard about a city of many faces effortlessly combining the traditional with the contemporary now stared me in the eye. The skyscrapers were not afraid to grow straight into the future – or rather to slalom their way into the future along fantastic, colourful paths. But neither were the little houses with their curved oriental roofs worried that they would not reach the future by staying right where they were, resting their backs comfortably against these young, eager skyscrapers. And the power lines knew that they would always be needed to tie the view together with their myriad ruffled tangles.

After about an hour’s drive, we arrived at our hotel. For Japanese standards, I suppose, the room (which I was to share with a student from New Zealand) was large. For the standards of someone who knows no non-zero lower bound for the time it takes to make a mess, it was minuscule. There was no closet except for a space with a couple of hangers near the entrance; a sign informed you to put your bags under your bed. The one round table standing near the window was not much larger than my laptop. Still, the room was rather elegant, and we were given clean pyjamas (that custom came as a surprise) and Japanese green tea (and this custom made me pretty happy).

Our hotel on the inside

Those easily offended are advised to skip the following paragraph.

You might have heard of crazy Japanese toilet seats, with more functions than a computer. Indeed, our hotel bathroom was equipped with one which, on request, heated up, washed your bottom and had a “strongly deodorizing” function. There were also ones which played back a recorded flushing sound to drown out other toilet noises. Now before I came to Japan, my thoughts were the same as the ones some of you might now be entertaining: What nonsense! Why invest so much technology into toilet seats? But now – and it only took a week in Japan to change my mind – my opinion is more like: Why not? Frankly, these toilet seats are pretty darn useful, and the only reason they haven’t caught on here is because Westerners are too narrow-minded to admit it.

The squeamish can now resume their reading.

After we (two students from Trinity College, New York, and I) dropped our things off at the hotel, one of the students and I were showed around the neighbourhood by a couple of students from Technos College. I was struck – and would be many more times on this trip – by how incredibly nice they were. I had grown up to a stereotypical and outdated view of the Japanese as a somewhat reserved nation – but there was absolutely nothing reserved about the students I was to meet during Japan Tour. They were more smiling, talkative and enthusiastic than Americans, always trying to please and help. During our stay, we were to be treated like royalty, given presents, made to pose for countless photographs, showered with attention and appreciation. But more on that in my next post. For now let us leave me to my exploring the neighbourhood of the hotel, eating a wonderful dinner in a Chinese restaurant (all the meals were paid for, of course), and catching up on much-needed sleep.