Mr. Joel Wells
The Critic/ Chicago, I11.
Dear Joel Wells:
Living on Saigon’s Milwaukee Avenue—the Tran Hung-Dao—at the point where Saigon becomes Cholon, is to live with one foot in Vietnam and one foot in China. Cholon is the Chinese ghetto, whose government is run by black-marketeers. Saigon is run by the old French elite, the Vietnamese whose training and schooling is French. Cholon’s first language is Chinese; Vietnamese its second. Saigon’s first language is Vietnamese; its second language French. English is spoken nowhere; not even among GIs.
There is a third tongue common to Cholon, Saigon, Thai, Filipino, Korean, Taiwanese, Australian, New Zealanders, and American soldiers —the one by which most business in this Babel is conducted. I myself have mastered it so you see it is fairly simple. It goes like this:
What nem you? You speak me how much? Five hundred P? You Numba Ten, me give one hundred P. No swat. Two hundred P. Okay, you Numba One. You like nice gel, twelve-year old, Numba One? Me bring by your hou’. No swat. Sorry ’bout that.
Anyone who is unsure, for a moment, whether he is speaking to a Vietnamese or a Chinese, won’t have to wait long to be certain. If the other’s eyes are curiously dull, if he has a listless, dispirited air, fingers your watch and asks “What tam?” or pats your wallet pocket, he is Vietnamese. If the other person responds naturally, seems to know you’re an individual like himself and doesn’t seem to have some mischief in mind, he is Chinese.
If he rubs his stomach, puts his finger in his mouth to indicate hunger (even though he has a toothpick sticking in his teeth as he pleads), he is Vietnamese. If he puffs an imaginary cigarette, simulates drinking a soft drink or lays his palm open and says “kendy?” he is likewise Vietnamese. (I’m not speaking of children, cripples, or professional beggars, but only of your man-and-woman-in-the street.) But if he acts like he knows who he is and has some class about being who he is, he is Chinese.
The Vietnamese vision seems to be normal, but they don’t seem able to visualize. I’ve watched a motorbike rider making 60 mph down a street that curves blindly into oncoming traffic; he makes the turn without slowing down a fraction and meets another bike-rider, doing 65, whose vision is also okay; but he didn’t visualize anyone coming around that curve at the same speed as his own, either. The traffic speeds on around the two tangled bikes—one rider with his head nearly decapitated in the spokes; the other lying doubled up where he’s been thrown—until a policeman or soldier strolls over, studies the damage for a few minutes and ambles to a telephone. After a while an ambulance comes and scrapes them up. The traffic moves on. If one of the riders survives, the first thing he’ll do will be to get another bike and make the same curve at the same speed. I don’t think the Vietnamese are fast learners.
There must be fifty thousand motorbikes racing down the Tran Hung-Dao at any hour between ten and ten. It is the only big city in the world without public transportation. There is a cop for every bike. And every cop watching for Americans riding in a taxi with a Vietnamese woman. That, like dancing in public, is a civil offense here.
It’s easier now for a civilian to shop in the army commissary (where goodies are varied and prices are lower) than for soldiers. The Embassy people dislike having to wait in line behind a queue of GIs to get canned milk-shakes, colored Kleenex, Zippo lighters and chocolate macaroons vacuum-packed in Brooklyn. So the GIs are now barred from the Cholon PX.
There are still a lot of soldiers barring my view of the Johnny Cash record selection, however: the Thai, Filipino, Korean and Australian soldiers still get in. It makes a patriot like myself wonder, having dedicated six months of my life to seeing that Salem cigarettes get into the hands of the poor people of Saigon, whether I’m really appreciated back home.
Another disturbing aspect of life here is the reluctance of American GIs to salute me. My ID card very clearly states that my status is equivalent to that of a major, yet not one of those rifle-carrying bums stands up when I go into a mess hall! They just go on eating.
So I just say “At ease, men,” and let them go on eating.
It was different in my time, I can tell you. When I was a private, at Fort Bragg and Camp Maxey, we jumped to attention when an officer entered the barracks. First thing you know they’ll be billeting the Negroes with US. I thought you ought to know this.
Another thing you ought to know is that I’ve had it in this slobbovia, namely Saigon. It isn’t a war-town, it’s a boom-town. There’s occasional firing on the periphery, I read in the papers, and at night the flareships light up the river to see what Charlie is doing. Nobody thinks about the war. What people think about is what they’re going to invest in here. Because what American business is doing here (with Japanese, Korean, Republic of China, Filipino, Australian, Indian and French business) is to use the armies as a holding operation until a firm economic hold on Southeast Asia is obtained for Western money.
By “Western” money I mean Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Filipino, and Australian money, too. In short, I don’t mean “Western,” I mean “Free Enterprise” money. The “Free Enterprise” Grocery Store has it made here: there won’t be any Dienbienphu. The hold that the French once had has now been extended, so that everybody has a piece.
The only ones who won’t get any are the Vietnamese.
The S. S. Moon of the Orient, which I boarded in San Francisco on Nov. 14, turned out to be a water-borne nursing-home. I was the young-est passenger. The crew was of my own generation. Which partly explains why it took us seventy-two days to make the crossing. The crew wasn’t altogether to blame. East of the West Hebrides we ran into a sixty-mile-an-hour headwind, which would have backed us up clear to South Senility, Utah, had it not been for a tailwind of equal velocity. The captain maneuvered his craft sidewise but we were still in peril of being smashed in two until I advised him to try being becalmed. To show him what I meant, I went down to my cabin and lay becalmed. When I got up the sun was out, the seas were running smooth, and the captain was still running the vessel from an astrology handbook bought in Walgreen’s.
“Guess weatha cwear up, guess choppy weatha, guess wain cwear the weatha,” was all I could get out of that one. The only thing the captain didn’t seem to be guessing about were the birds that kept following us. He kept going around the deck telling tax-paying Americans, “That bird are arbatross.” Who ever heard of an albatross with a thirty-foot wingspread and webbed wings? Fortunately, most of the passengers died en route.
South of the Lower Northerlies we ran out of sailcloth. By good luck I’d brought along an extra roll of waxed paper just in case we ran out of paper napkins. When six more died the waxed paper gave out. We let the arbatrosses have them.
Well, I told you they weren’t albatrosses.
It wasn’t the storm that did most of the passengers in. The majority of them died simply because they were that old when they came aboard.
Tokyo isn’t a city—it’s an explosion. It’s the most alive city I’ve ever seen. New York is poky by comparison. Twelve million people living elbow to elbow; yet maintaining individuality. They move faster than anybody—yet there seems no undue haste. Control—the traffic is controlled, the economic explosion is controlled; and the lives of individuals look controlled—I haven’t been hit by a single panhandler; nobody has yet offered to act as a guide or a tout or to introduce me to his virgin sister. The only beggar I saw was a tall man draped in the black of a Buddhist priest and tinkling a bell for alms. I peeked under his hood—it was an American!
No tipping, no kissing, no handshaking, no hauling, mauling, yanking or back-slapping. It’s part of a very big thing about personal dignity here—sustained even in milling throngs.
An incidental benefit of the incredible crush on the Tokyo subway is that it immobilizes pickpockets. If he has his hands up when he gets in, he can’t get them down to your wallet. If he has them down, he can’t get them up. Passengers’ pockets are thus automatically protected—but unnecessarily so: the Japanese don’t steal. I mean that. They don’t think in those terms. A Japanese bartender may shake you down outrageously for a drink; but he won’t go after your poke directly.
At the racetrack they leave their binoculars beside their racing forms. That’s part of the big thing about personal honor, I suspect. Also everyone is working. Twelve million people—and there’s a labor shor-tage!
Personal cleanliness is also striking. If you buy so much as a two-bit cellophane-wrapped sandwich out of a machine, there is a small, moist napkin for your hands enclosed. Immaculate people. And as courteous as they are tidy. By seven in the morning streets of even the poor sections are spick-and-span. I took a tour of what a Japanese friend here terms “a slum.” He don’t know what a slum is.
The friend in the photo is Suji Terayama, a novelist and dramatist who, as far as I can figure it out, is a kind of Japanese Andy Warhol. This I gather, is because he has an underground theater. By “underground” I don’t mean out of sight. It’s a theater under physical construc-tion now. Terayama must be big around here, because newspapermen take his picture when he shows up at fights and at the races. He hasn’t been translated into English but probably will be. He’s only thirty-three; the son of a farmer of Northern Japan who was killed in World War II.
The intensity of Japanese interest in writing, painting and the arts gives me the idea that Tokyo is going to be, in a time not too far away, what Paris was in the 1880s—the center of the arts for every country. It has all the feel of Paris now. It is so new, so fast and so joyous—an enjoyers’ city.
The wonderful knack the Japanese have is for forever experimenting, trying to do things new ways—originating—and yet keeping their ancient forms. For example, the office building opposite my window here looks more like a gigantic tree than a business building. It has a central beam, like an eleven-storey oak with a dark-green cast; and the offices cling to its trunk like foliage.
Trees, water and rocks—these are the ancient forms in which the Japanese enclose new feeling. I saw Antony and Cleopatra, in Japanese, in a theater that made me feel I was watching the play in between great sea-walls. The play itself was good for the first three hours. But by the time Antony had died and been resurrected three times, I felt it was time to go. It may still be going on. It was too slow and obvious for my own taste.
The impression the Japanese often give, of being cold, is misleading. They are a passionate people but with a controlled passion. On the stage they get wildly demonstrative; but not on the street. Except, of course, when it’s political, as in Shinjuku recently when the Shinjuku students —as well as workers—battled police for five hours trying to stop trains carrying American fuel through the area.
I’ve always thought I could make it as a standup comic, and that suspicion is now confirmed. I don’t even have to stand up here. All I have to do is sit down in a snack bar with a sign in English outside—COFFEE & HOT DOG—and ask for coffee and a hot dog. The place breaks up. Apparently the “coffee” part isn’t hilarious. It’s the “hot dog” business. I’ve mentioned hot dogs to countermen and vendors in Chicago, but they don’t have the sense of humor of the Japanese. Curiously, if I say “Hawta dog,” all I get is a hot dog; and no laughs at all. Sometimes I don’t say anything and they break up. Marvelous sense of humor.
A pretty twenty-two-year-old Japanese girl asked me, “You like to play patinko wid me?” I’d like to play anything wid her. Particularly patinko.
“Pachinko is a monologue of the lonely,” Suji Terayama assured me. “The life here is outwardly joyous and full of amusements. But people are not amused. How sad their private lives are can be seen when young men stand for hours feeding small steel balls into a machine.”
Yet it seems to take very little to get Japanese people laughing. They break up at a touch. For example, my telephone rings and a male voice informs me: “I spreak no Engrish. I spreak only Japanese”—laughter.
“I speak only English,” I assured the voice, “I can’t speak Japanese.”
This, it seems, is funny, too.
Voice: “Hord line one morment prease.”
I hord line.
Second male voice: “This man spreak no Engrish. He speak onry Japanese.”
“I can’t speak Japanese. Only English.”
This time they both break up.
Finally: “Srank you very much. Good-bye.”
This happens several times a day. I’d like to get in on the joke, too.
Prostitution is illegal here. It was outlawed in 1957. Then what are those miniskirted lovelies doing smiling to me under a red lantern? If they’re secretaries, they’re working awfully late.
What the Japanese do with neon is to make a fairyland of this city at night: the signs don’t pitch, like American ads, by hard-selling: Buy! They seduce your eyes in purple, chartreuse, violet, orange, Chinese red, pale pale blue, silver and green—signs that move in squares, in circles, up, down and sidewise in an alphabet consisting of pictures rather than letters. English is the second language; but it’s running a poor second. French is third, and not too far behind to catch up. The French seem to be better liked here than Americans. Well, they never blasted a Japanese city as a demonstration of military might, for one reason.
It would be one of the great ironies of history if, in return for the most deathly strike any people ever inflicted upon another, the East should return that explosion with a life-giving one: if the arts of the West should be drawn away from Paris, London and New York to the great cities of the Orient. After witnessing the condition of the arts in Chicago, one can only hope something like that is happening.
These people are nothing if not logical—especially if you’re caught jay-walking in the middle of Tokyo traffic. These little cars keep at sixty, and they don’t stop when there’s no red light. It’s Jump, mother—and mother jumps. So you see, that stuff about “Day of Infamy” is all wrong —they were just going that way, that’s all.
I’ll modify my observation about no kissing—mothers kiss their babies. I can’t help wondering if in the privacy of their homes husbands kiss their wives—or do they keep bowing?
This bowing isn’t just politeness. It’s part of conversation: discussion is punctuated by bowing. The woman’s deep bow to the man as she is introduced, and his short bow in return, indicate, I take it, that his station is higher than her own. Which is still how it is in Japan.
My two Japanese friends—Terayama and the twenty-two-year-old girl, Keiko—are modern young people whose ways and dress and interests are Western. Yet, after we had spent a day together Keiko told me, “Mr. Terayama aparigize because he cannot do Lady-First.”
After a minute, I got it: I’d been opening doors for her to go first, helping her on with her coat, all the customary American deferences of the man to the woman. But a young Japanese man, like Terayama, doesn’t even think of such deference—and the Japanese girl doesn’t expect it. “Mr. Terayama must not aparigize because he is Japanese man.”
It’s perfectly natural for a man to hit his wife or daughter, Keiko believes, “if she deserve.” But it is never all right for a woman to strike a man. Which accounts, in part, for the relative contentment of Japanese women, compared to the dissatisfied, irritable, unresponsive and boring American female. They have better taste, too.
“What is it that men find so rare and desirable in Japanese women?” Jacqueline Paul inquires in her illustrated opinion of modern Japanese life, Japan Quest, and answers herself: “I see it as the acceptance (real or apparent) of male dominance. Self-effacement in the interests of the man, a charming facade maintained by mannerisms which hide the true feelings, and proper behavior as prescribed by custom; these are the repertoire. If a woman is to earn approval, she must act in conformity with the preconceived role in which a man has placed her. In order to appear feminine to men (and to women as well) she must appear to accept things-as-they-are with a soft humility.
“The men love it, of course. And of course they get bored.”