A facility for the decorative is one of the minor satisfactions of being a Japanese person; when he’s made a plate of fried mush appear to be baked Alaska, he feels he’s accomplished something even though he has to eat it himself. He’d rather sell you a dried octopus wrapped to look like a chocolate Easter egg than have you hand him a hundred yen for nothing and walk off leaving him with an unwrapped squid.
A Parisienne doing up a black lace chemise for Franççoise Sagan isn’t in it with a Japanese counter-girl who’s just sold a box of cashew nuts to a total stranger. Just when she gets to the final tassel and Total Stranger thinks “IT’S MINE! MINE! ALL MINE!” she goes for her little scissors and begins fraying each tassel. After the tassels have been individually frayed, each individual fray must be individually curled. And when she looks up to find Total Stranger has fled, she’ll track him down on the Ginza and present him with his prize publicly—arigato gozaimasu and give my best wishes to your father.
One consequence being that I’m stuck with—in addition to the dried octopus—a kilo of something resembling candy com. It was purchased during an intermission at the Japanese National Theater, intended as a gift to my companion, Miss Keiko Kanno, and has now begun to give off a faintly bittersweet scent like that of a medicinal herb. I’ll be able to analyze it better after I’ve found a pipe.
That the Asiatic eye is slanted and the Western eye is round is one delusion which has sustained the East-Is-East-West-Is-West myth. Both are round.
The variation is in the lid. And while Western cosmeticians are turning a pretty penny making Caucasian birds look like Madame Nu, plastic cosmeticians here are doing a landoffice business touching up eyelids. Japanese chicks are now making the street looking like Bette Davis after Paul Henreid began lighting her cigarettes and blowing the smoke in her face.
The Asiatic eye has clearer vision; of that I’m convinced. Because Miss Kanno was able to detect, the moment she opened my second gift box, that what I’d presented her with was fish eggs; not candied pineapple. She was gracious enough to accept them, claiming fish eggs have it all over glazed pineapple.
Another advantage the Oriental eye has is that through it you can see better where you’re going. Look at the Hairy Ainu, blue-eyed, roundeyed and hairy as hell, freezing to death up there on Japan’s bleakest tundra. Common sense tells us that had they been able to see where they were going, they would have stayed in downtown Danzig. A fat lot of good the Caucasian eye did them.
The reason I keep showering Miss Kanno with delicacies is to reward her for her services as an interpreter. I wanted to find out what Shuji Terayama was talking about all the time. Whatever it was, he kept punctuating it with a right cross. Miss Kanno observed him quietly, from a short distance, then told me that he seemed to be describing some sort of game. By this time Terayama was circling the lobby of the Dai-Ichi Hotel with one shoulder slightly higher than the other.
“Now he riding horse,” Miss Kanno explained.
The fact that Miss Kanno knows nothing whatsoever about either fighters or horses didn’t help her interpreting. But she overcame this handicap simply by letting her hands fly to her pretty mouth every time Terayama said something. When she recovered I’d say something and she’d take another spell. I was pleased to see her enjoying herself.
Terayama, whose novels have been translated into French (but not yet into English) and whose underground theater has made him the voice of Tokyo youth, is the son of a farmer of the North who was killed in World War II. He is thirty-three and owns a mare which—he alleges—has won four times at Nayakama Park.
There were 80,000 horse degenerates crowding paddock and rail the Sunday he took Miss Kanno and me to see his speedy horse.
The horses break out of a gate—at Nayakama Park about half the size of the American barrier—onto a course a mile and a half around. But as they run counterclockwise, it seems like two miles.
As Terayama is a form player and Miss Kanno is a novice, I disdained his hot tips and went on her ESP. Miss Kanno and I had three winners. Terayama lost every race and his own horse ran out. He looked as if it had been claimed. Miss Kanno and I remained cheerful. When we offered to take him to dinner he appeared consoled.
Japanese horseplayers play to win it all or go broke, and most of them do. Stands selling secondhand goods line Okera Road, where losers and winners alike go milling when the last race has been run. The stands are the last chance for the losers to make subway fare home; raincoats, watches, jewelry, shirts, shoes and even pants, bought cheap off the nabikai—literally, the “weepers”—are on sale here for winners. The only thing you can’t buy is a hat. Japanese men don’t wear them. Not even winners.
But winners and losers alike seem cheerful. Although Terayama feels that the contentment common to the Japanese face is something of a put-on.
“Most lives in Tokyo are sad,” Terayama feels.
“Bored,” Miss Kanno corrected him.
“Same thing,” Terayama insisted.
“Not mutually exclusive,” I decided.
That the pachinko parlors are crowded, from morning till night, attests to a pervasive boredom. There are thousands of such pinball parlors here, where more men than women, and more young men than old, feed small steel balls into an upright pinball game more complex than the American version. Martial music blares, lights flash off and on, a clatter of small steel balls falls into a cup where a winner has hit—and promptly feeds them back into the machine. He tries to see how long he can play before going broke: spiritual hara-kiri.
“Pachinko is a monologue,” Terayama observed, feeding small steel balls into a machine to redeem his losses at Nayakama Park.
Under the heading ABOLISH THE EMPEROR MOVEMENT, the Saigon Daily News of 4 January 1969 reports that a forty-six-year-old Tokyo factory worker had fired a pachinko ball, from a slingshot, towards Emperor Hirohito when the emperor appeared on his palace balcony to receive New Year banzais from thousands of Japanese.
“The man was arrested and identified as Kenzo Okuzaki, a factory worker who had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment on a murder charge thirteen years ago.
“Okuzaki’s action marked the first time in postwar years that anyone has attempted to assassinate Hirohito.”
The police took Mr. Okuzaki’s pachinko ball away from him.
“When one has no one to talk to,” Miss Kanno observed, “one talks to a machine.”
I’ve never seen a sumo match and I hope I never see one.
It was my good fortune, on the evening that Terayama took Miss Kanno and myself to Kuramae Kogukian, the sumo wrestling stadium, that the hall was being used to decide the junior welterweight boxing title of the world. Takishi Paul Fuji, a Japanese out of Hawaii, was defending against an Argentine, Nicolino Locche.
From the heights of Kuramae Kogukian, portraits of the bellies of the grand champions of sumo look down. Attached to these heroic stomachs are mighty arms and Herculean thighs.
Which is as it ought to be. Because the sumo champion’s vast pride, his ferocity and implacable honor, his capacity for enduring pain and his dedication to his country are more clearly expressed by his belly than by his features; which are lost in fat.
Akashi Shiga-nosuke stood well over eight feet and weighed four hundred pounds. Ume-ga-tani was only five-six yet weighed three hundred thirty-five. Nomi-nosukne stood seven-ten and Big Sky Ozora seven-foot-three.
The main floor of this arena is partitioned into frames capable of seating several sumo fans, teapots and all. There are seats in the galleries and folding chairs ringside, for boxing. Now the main floor was filled by fight fans who sat cross-legged; not one had brought a teapot.
The pageantry of sumo derives from imperial tournaments, held in temple compounds and witnessed only by kings, courtiers and high priests. The gods, whose favors ancient giants sought, show up today in boxing rings as commercial sponsors, blessing all contenders. The ancestral ceremonialism has rubbed off onto modern Japanese boxing.
Tasseled banners, once borne by priestly corner-men assuaging The East Wind as well as The West, are now admen presenting gift boxes accompanied by a plug for the company. I had a hunch that the goody in Nicolino Locche’s box was a nicer goody than the one Takishi Paul Fuji would open before the night was done.
This hunch had been provoked by the Japan Times, Mainichi Daily News, the Ashai Evening News and the Honolulu Advertiser, all of which agreed that Fuji was a lead-pipe cinch to knock Locche out within five rounds. One writer did concede that, if, by chance or luck, Locche should last eight rounds, he’d have an outside chance of still being on his feet at the end of fifteen. They were trying to reassure Fuji was what it sounded like. It sounded as though they were worried about Fuji and that Fuji was worried about Locche. It sounded like the buildup Chicago papers gave Chuck Davey the week before he had to go into the same ring as Kid Gavilan.
Everyone present who’d been bom in the United States and had had his hands inside a pair of boxing gloves, had to be introduced before the main event. I was glad that none of them were given boxes. That accomplished, a gallery group began chanting ‘‘Fuji Fuji Fuji!’’
There were about twenty of these enthusiasts, each draped in a white robe with a rising sun emblazoned on the breast, and a cheerleader, equally draped and emblazoned, to keep them from charging. I hadn’t known the national honor was going on the main event.
But it convinced me. I asked Terayama, who knows everybody, to get me down for ten thousand yen—twenty-eight dollars American—on Locche.
“Betting irregal in Japan,” he assured me.
“Betting also irregal in Chicago,” I assured him.
He got me down at one-four. And when Fuji came out and threw a right hand, intended to end the fight right there, I had a moment of apprehension.
If Locche felt a wind go by, he gave no indication. He simply stuck a short left into Fuji’s face, moved to the right, stuck it in again and then let the wind go. He let Fuji bull him into the ropes until he felt the top strand against the small of his back. He tested its leverage lightly while counting the house. The crowd began shouting to Fuji to go in and finish him, but Fuji sensed the danger; he didn’t go in. Locche stuck the left in Fuji’s face and walked away. The fight was in his hands.
He never let it get away from him. That was the whole fight: Fuji throwing those big rights and lefts, sending the gallery group into the perpetual chant of “Fuji Fuji Fuji!’’—the crowd coming to its feet wondering how Locche could take such punishment, and Locche letting everything bounce off his elbows and shoulders. The crowd saw it as Fuji driving Locche into the ropes. It looked to me like Locche was suckering him in there. Locche looked, to me, more dangerous in that corner. Fuji acted like it struck him the same way. Locche began looking more and more like Willie Pep, the way he kept sliding Fuji’s blows. And the way Fuji began punching himself out, he looked more and more like Don Hayakawa.
That’s how it looked to the Argentine radio announcer, too, who was trying to drown out the cries of “Fuji Fuji Fuji!” by shouting “Locche Locche Locche!” into the mike. He got help from a small group off the pampas.
By the eighth round Fuji was so wearied out that he put his head down against Locche’s chest and wearily flailed the air. While the gallery group continued their chant that now sounded like “Onward Christian Sol-diers/Marching as to War.”
“Fuji isn’t going to last,” I told Terayama in the middle of the eighth as though he couldn’t see it for himself.
“Why you against Fuji?” Miss Kanno asked suspiciously.
“Because he’s a bum,” I had to tell her.
The seat cushions, tangerines and half-eaten sandwiches that showered the ring, when the referee held Locche’s hand up before the bell for the tenth, weren’t protesting Locche’s triumph. The goodies were all for Fuji. It was the first time a Japanese titleholder had surrendered his title in the middle of a fight. And a world title is much more important to a defeated nation than to a victorious one. It took a cordon of police to protect Fuji from being mobbed.
“Surrender” was also the word the Japanese press employed the following morning. Fuji lost more than his title to Locche.
Fuji’s dressing-room comment, “I quit because my face started getting red,” left him wide open to let the press redden it more. “Surrender” has a more bitter sound in Tokyo, Vicksburg or Berlin than in London or Chicago.
Yet Fuji had his defenders.
“Locche win only because he fight Western style,” Miss Kanno perceived. Fuji should have kicked Locche in the teeth was what she meant.
The day after the fight an old man sat down, cross-legged, in front of the Shinjuku Station with a sign around his neck:
Please talk to me
A man of the middle class begging, not for money, but for words.
He sat there three days. Of all the multitudes that hurried past, not one stopped to speak one word.
On the third a young man sat down, cross-legged, across the street from the old man, wearing a sign which said:
You say something first
What words can one say to a stranger? How is your father? Do we have mutual friends? Remember me to your mother?
The old man got up and went home.
Arigato gozaimasu.