Japan Diary #6—Defending the castle

      KUMAMOTO—  Who doesn't love a castle? They look cool, first. They have this wonderful aura of protection. We all want to be safe within castle walls, secure against the danger and the enemies we know, or sometimes just imagine, are outside, trying to get at us.
     Arriving at this scenic place in southwestern Japan, a six-hour bullet train ride from Tokyo—I expected a rural nowhere—I was pleasantly surprised to find a vibrant city of 700,000, with a university and lots of bookstores, albeit selling books I can't read, and this edifice looming over the town.
    It's natural to head for the castle, to take a look around. 
    They give you a lot of history at these places. The 13 generations of Hosokawa clan shogun who held power here from when the castle was first built in 1607. Not that the building before us is that old — and I always sniff around for this detail when I visit these kind of places. Some sites hide it, but here they are fairly upfront. Burned in the Satsume Rebellion of 1877; the castle was reconstructed in 1960, which means we're the same age. 
      I'd say the castle is holding up better.
      That would be enough to chew on, just seeing a historic castle that is really a facsimile of a castle that what was once there. A sort of ghost castle. I suppose you could say it is the same castle, the same entity, in the way I'm the same person I was 30 years ago, except that my cells have more or less all been replaced with new ones.
     As I read my way up to the tower and down, pausing for that moment of frisson by the open air windows atop the thing, looking at that drop, imagining. Then I came to how the castle was burned down. Not by any enemy, though the enemy was both real and nearby. It was the defenders of the castle, putting some structures below to the torch, to deny their opponents access or a place they could set up artillery. Sparks from the flames they set were carried by the wind, swirling behind them and up the hill, and burned down the castle they were trying to protect. The castle defended them, but they couldn't defend it.
     Typical.  Whatever you fear, whatever you worry about, seldom can hurt you with the devastating efficiency you use to hurt yourself. The bogeymen the Republicans dread, from immigrants to Muslims to gays, are really only helping the country; the damage comes from the fires the GOP has been setting for 25 years, trying to stop their progress.

At first, the official story was that the rebel army burned the
castle down. The problem was, they hadn't arrived yet. 

     But let's not be political. You don't have to be an imploding political party to burn your castle. How many gun owners turn their guns upon themselves? Far more than ever thwart a criminal. How many good people break down fearing something they suspect is out there? The stress gets us far more than the things we're stressed about do. We're in a good position, safe, secure, behind the walls, but we don't accept it, and, trying for even more protection, burn the damn thing down ourselves, preparing for an enemy that might never come.
     
      
      

Respectable Republican Cloth Coat

    Today it has been one week since I left for Japan, and though there's much more to say, my mind simply balks at the prospect of trying to say it. Luckily, with Republicans crawling over Illinois, and Trump deciding he couldn't face the righteous wrath of Chicagoans, this column — which I wrote last month, but never posted —is of the moment.

     Waiting for the results from Iowa Monday, I found myself thinking of Pat Nixon's coat.
     If you recall, Pat Nixon was the tightly-wound wife of Richard Nixon, and her coat...well, I should probably just tell the story,.
     In 1952 Nixon was a senator from California—he was famed as a red-baiting hatchet man; think Ted Cruz, but with friends—running for vice president on the Republican ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. As the election neared, controversy grew over a fund that paid Nixon's considerable political expenses, trying to cover the state of California, his airplane tickets and Christmas cards and such. The fund had $18,000 in it, about $200,000 in today's dollars, a third more than Nixon received as an annual salary for being a United States senator.
     A pittance in today's world of SuperPacs.
     But enough to raise questions whether Nixon was ethical enough to stay on the ticket. The Republican National Committee bought a half hour of television time and Nixon took to live airwaves, shamelessly pleading for support from viewers, touting his middle class lifestyle:
     "We lived rather modestly," he said. "For four years we lived in an apartment in Park Fairfax, in Alexandria, Virginia. The rent was $80 a month."
     As for his wife.
     "Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat."
     The famous ending shifted attention from the thousands businessmen were contributing to underwrite his political career to a particular gift.

One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don't they'll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something—a gift—after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was?     It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he'd sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the 6-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.

    The speech was genius  and it worked. The gullible public, choked up over a dog, wrote in to the Republican National Committee by the millions demanding that Nixon to be kept on the ticket, and he was. 
    When Nixon ran for president in 1960, he kept pushing his humble roots. Pat was never to appear in a fur, and he forbade Cadillacs from carrying him in motorcades.
     That was not a qualm for John F. Kennedy. He loved Cadillacs. He loved being rich, and had his own private plane, The Caroline, named for his daughter. Kennedy joked that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had instructed him not to buy one more vote than necessary. "I'm not paying for a landslide," he had his father saying.
     Nixon lost to Kennedy, and while I don't want to paint a straight line between then and now, let's just say that if Donald Trump's victory in Iowa shows anything, it shows that our aversion to wealth has worn off.  For decades, Trump represented the worst gold-plated excesses of the super-wealthy, its shallowness and lack of serious intent. And now he won the Iowa caucus as a Republican. You wonder what Richard Nixon would make of this. He would be amazed. I sure am.

Japan Diary #5: Taking the Shinkansen

     KUMAMOTO— I flew over on one of the new Boeing 787s, and while I appreciated the accommodate-the-human-body-and-not-a-centimeter-more seating layout in economy, I was not awed. Even though you had all sorts of technology at your fingertips: the metrics the pilot was seeing, the clipping along airspeed—550 miles per hour. The fact that you were flying six miles up and it was 40 degrees below zero outside, a few feet to the left. 

     So interested, satisfied even. But not thrilled, not in the little boy giddy, look-what-humans-can-do way of seeing the Shinkansen bullet train pull up at Tokyo Station, of dragging my luggage above, nestling into seat, setting out my lunch, and soon clipping along at 174 miles an hour. 
     I wish I could explain to you how Japan, whose sclerotic economy has been in the toilet for the past 20 years, can maintain this national system of sleek electric trains, while the United States of America, self-proclaimed greatest country in not just the world but the known universe too, at least according to Republican presidential candidates, can barely field Amtrak, a wheezing tortoise slowed by pain meds. I've been on more than one Amtrak train, back in the day when I would still climb aboard, where the delay was longer than the trip itself. 
     We could never even board the trains the way they do here.
     "They're never going to make it," my brother says, as we stood on the platform. The digital clock reads 12:54. Our tickets say the train is to leave at 12:59. The train isn't even there yet.
     A whoosh of activity. Train rushes up, doors slide open, passengers stumble out, then others hurry aboard. A pause, then the train, all electric, takes off like a silent shot, sliding faster and faster. I check my cell phone: "12:59," turn it so he can see.
     "There goes that theory," he says. 

    This has not been an entirely happy trip. In part because of a jet lag that never went away: many hours staring at the ceiling. But the closest I got to joy was sitting on the Shinkansen, digging into a very good box lunch, pulling on an Orangina, watching Japan flash by. The nerve-shredded, exhausted gloom lifted, for a while.
     Another moment was arriving at Kumamoto, the city in southwestern Japan. I'm here for the birthday party of Kumamon, the town's mascot, a Quixotic quest that should leave me giddy, but doesn't. 
      The Kumamoto platform was completely bare of the bear decorations I half expected. No banners, no posters, no photos of birthday cake.
      "Wouldn't it be something if I had the wrong weekend?" I thought, darkly, on the escalator, going down. "Maybe there won't be any hoopla at all."
     At that moment I caught a glimpse of the giant head waiting below.

Japan Diary #4: More to it than just that bomb

     Hiroshima is a fun town.
     That will sound odd, almost sacrilegious to those who know just one thing about the 1oth largest city in Japan: that the first atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped on it at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.
     But there's more to it than that.
     I admit I was one of those The Place The Bomb Dropped people. Ten minutes after I dropped my bags at the RIHGA Royal Hotel (big, swank, with pillbox-capped bellhops muscling your bags into your room) I was hot-footing over to the Atomic Dome. 
      Like most iconic images you've seen all your life,  the building looked smaller than it had loomed in imagination. Just the shell of a modest building,  a 1920s trade hall made eerie by having Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped from the belly of the Enola Gay, explode 600 yards above it, so that the blast came straight down and the walls were preserved. 
     But after that, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, some of the quietest room I ever walked through, jarring photos and melted glass bottles presented with a musty 1950a repetition and lack of modern curatorial verve. Lots of burned uniforms of middle school students—so many so it seemed a form of special pleading, as though to emphasize their own innocence; though I did note, with grim satisfaction, that one placard actually mentioned that Japan started the war, a rare bit of historical lucidity in a country often myopic to its own past crimes.  

      Touring the museum took 30 minutes. And then what? Turns out, there's great shopping in Hiroshima: which boasts an endless expanse of outdoor malls, with arching glass ceilings and colorful lights. There were candy shops and stationery shops, bookstores, department stores. My wife had expressed interest in fabric, and I popped into a kimono shop, where the roll of flowered cloth I thought would look nice on our wall cost only $2,500 — or would, for someone who could afford to buy it. It was so beautiful I squinted and tried to imagine that maybe it would be a noble husbandly gesture to buy the thing, and only the thought of my wife being forced to murder me when I came home and bury the body where it would never be found stayed my hand.  

      My brother, who is traveling with me, and I paused in front of a place offering oysters, and considered a pre-dinner snack. But then we noticed the place served "whale bacon" for 720 yen, and while curiosity made us take one step toward the place, moral revulsion made us decide we didn't want to patronize them at all, not even for oysters. A good call, as we found a branch of Ohsho, whose ethereal gyoza have ruined the crescent-shaped dumpling for me anyplace else. For dinner, my brother insisted we try something called okanomayaki, a local favorite that looked to me like glop: noodles and seafood and egg and barbecue sauce all mashed up on a grill. I resisted at first, but he prevailed. 

Okanomayaki,

    "Rarely do I have the chance to introduce someone as worldly as you to the a new food experience," he said, buttering me up. It worked. The stuff was great: Fumichan is the name of restaurant, if you ever get out this way. 
     Heading back to our hotel, we raved about how refreshing Hiroshima was after the dense chaos of Tokyo, and my brother paid Hiroshima the ultimate honor.
    "It's like Chicago," he said. 

Japan Diary #3 — Tokyo Subway

     Chicago has some 2.7 million people, using 102 miles of its L subway system.
     Tokyo has 13.8 million people and 121 miles of metro subway. 
     Do the math: five times the population using just 20 percent more track. It gets crowded. 
     Hurrying through the maze of stations, trying to get to the right line, the right track, is like being in an M.C. Escher etching come to life, with surreal masses of people flying in all directions, platoons fleeing up and down stairs, ramps, escalators. If I looked up and saw mobs pounding across the ceiling and walls it could hardly seem more otherworldly.

      It was amazing that no one seemed to be slamming into each other, yet somehow all the hurrying commuters slid around one another. 
     On the platforms, people form lines behind where the doors will open, and while I didn't see any of the famous "pushers" who used to jam people into the trains, I could see the reason they'd be employed. 
      About 100 people a year in Tokyo die by falling in front of subway trains, usually after drinking, and to try to cut that toll, a number of stations I visited had an impressive automatic gate system, where the track is completely walled off from the platform, with doors that slide apart a moment before the train doors open. 

     Other cities around the world have them—Paris is another—but American metropolitan governments don't find them worth the $ 1 million or so they cost for each station. Though about 50 people a year die in New York, putting it roughly on par with Tokyo, the idea of barriers there was dismissed.
    The Tokyo subway also has "Women only" cars, designated by pink signs, for women who want to ride the subway without being fondled by chikan, or "gropers." But only during the morning rush hour. I'd say we don't have those on the Chicago "L" because they're not necessary, but I can't state that with any authority. 

Japan Diary # 2: Rain

Imperial Palace grounds.

     TOKYO —The plan was to start Monday touring the city's Harajuku district, talking to the Lolita goths and costumed cosplay kids who hang around the bridge there about Japanese concepts of cuteness, for my article. 
    But it rained. The weather report had said, "Scattered Showers," but they never scattered. They stayed together, pelting down hard, all day. Really, it was like the opening scene of "Rashomon."
     So Plan B. I walked around the Imperial Palace, waiting for the rain to stop.  The place was utterly deserted, such a contrast to the unbelievable density of the Tokyo subway. Then, when I realized the rain wasn't letting up, I gave Harajuku my best shot but, it was raining, there too, and while there were shoppers, the street scene folk who usually enliven the landscape were staying dry. 
     Across the bridge is the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and since I was standing in front of the entrance, I took refuge there, and toured its gardens, contemplating my mission. I was rewarded with a conversation with a pair of garden guards about yuru-kyara—the official mascots I'm writing about—that helped focus my thinking on the subject.
    By 2 p.m., after ... eight full hours walking in the rain, with another few to go before it let up, I was steaming up my glasses over a bowl of hot ramen. I'm not sure whether it was the best ramen I've ever eaten, or merely the most appreciated. But either way, it brought me back to the room. I only slept an hour last night -- even though I had only slept an hour on the plane, my body still thought it was 12 noon, not 2 a.m. So a nap seems in order. 

Japan Diary #1: How about some pig's rectum with that?

     TOKYO—It's been so long that I've sat among smokers at dinner that I forgot that, in Japan, it's still a thing. It didn't bother me before, so didn't bother me now at this Yakitori bar in the Kabukichan area of Tokyo. In fact, it sort of added to the I'm-in-a-foreign-place vibe, to be among young people puffing away. The food was still good, hot from the brazier, impaled on flimsy wooden stick.s. I had all sorts of skewers — tomatoes wrapped in bacon, grilled asparagas with chicken, pork belly—I drew the line at the more exotic fare, such as sparrow, or pig's rectum. The drink to the left is a Nippon soda, which comes with a clump of ginger, and I found it tasty, in a gingery kind of way.

   The whole trip to Japan has been very low key. The flight, on a new American Airlines 787, was filled but not crowded or hellish. I slept for an hour, which gave me energy to last until ... well, it's nearly 10 p.m. now, or 7 a.m. Chicago time. I don't feel exhausted or jet lagged or anything. Maybe that's tomorrow. 
    If you look at the menu below, you'll see it's fairly cheap—110 yen make a dollar. The hotel is very small, but clean and modern and inviting, and also inexpensive; it set me back $80, a reminder that Japan has been in recession for a long, long time.
     Okay, the last thoughts in my head have drained out. A shower and sleep. 
     If you want something to discuss, consider one reason the Japanese economy is in such trouble is their population is dwindling—the place looked empty on the train from Narita, though it got denser quickly as we approached central Tokyo. It has no border with Mexico and far fewer immigrants (though much more signage, not only in English, but Chinese and Korean than when last I was here, so the place is certainly more multi-cultural). Remember that being anti-immigrant is not only morally wrong, but it's economically disastrous too. G'night.