It's All Under Control

The last few days, we have felt certain things slipping beyond our control. For instance, our tempers. We were getting to the point of any trip, somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 through, where at least one of us is wondering at all times if we will make it to the end without hating each other.  

Allison spent three days incapacitated by a stomach bug, which was particularly unpleasant yesterday as we had to take a cross-country train to get to our next destination. She made it, and the nausea is subsiding slowly. She actually did some sightseeing today and even ate half of her dinner.

Now we are in the home stretch—3 hotel nights to go. Andrew is ready to see his girlfriend again (and not see us for at least a short period of time). Allison is ready to see our dog, to sleep on her own pillow, and to “see people who are not my family.” This might be exacerbated by the fact that Andrew ran out of deodorant, and Natalie had told us to avoid Japanese deodorant, so the only kind he could find at the store was one of the Axe line of deodorants. “Get ready for an Axe bomb,” he announced. Allison is the one sharing a room with him, so you’ll have to ask her how that goes.

Working around our patient’s needs, we have taken turns getting out and around, seeing Kanazawa. Kanazawa is on the west coast, slightly more north from where we have been. It’s sometimes called “Little Kyoto” because of its gracious beauty and historic preservation. It has many less western tourists. It is less busy—the train station doesn’t make you wonder if you’ll ever escape—and it is very slightly less tourist friendly in that the bus system offers less English—we are always sort of hoping we got on the right one.

But there is so much in a small space here. If we weren’t operating a hospital in the hotel room, we could get on a loop bus and go from one thing to the next.

As it was, we were working under less free circumstances, but we had the opportunity to see many of the great things. The Museum of Contemporary Art is currently closed for renovations, and it looks fantastic, so if you come here you might want to check it out.

Higashi Chaya Distr

In the last couple of days we have visited the Higashiyama Higashi Chaya district, which is a long way of saying the geisha district. It is small, but the city has worked hard to preserve the historic tea houses and geisha houses. It is beautiful and has an air of mystery. We saw two different women in full attire—I don’t know enough to know if they were maiko (teen apprentices) or actual graduated geisha. 

If you’ve read “Memoirs of a Geisha” you have read a beautifully atmospheric book; according to the woman whose career reportedly inspired the novel, you have also read a work that is truly fiction. In “Geisha: A Life,” memoirist and former geisha Mineko Iwasaki explains how the western concept of a geisha has been confused, mixing up the highly trained dancers and musicians, who entertain with their art and their entire embodiment of perfection, with oiran, who were courtesans, or high-ranking prostitutes.

The geisha quietly controls the room by entertaining, conversing, smoothing ruffled feathers and soothing frustration to create an oasis of calm and perfection. I can’t help thinking of a geisha as the traditional Japanese version of “Mrs. Dalloway,” throwing perfect society parties in London with a carefree exterior while in deep debate with herself about the direction of her life. Sorry for going into the weeds with a Virginia Woolf allusion—just humor me.

Geisha still entertain groups today, and, conceivably, if we had enough money and, more importantly, the right connections we could have spent time at a teahouse, called an ochaya. Geisha are less common in modern times due to many factors—one being that a geisha might have to leave her family to begin training at 6 or 7 years old. That's a pretty big sacrifice. The rise of more common art forms—movies, popular music—have eaten away at the demand for such specialized traditional training, and it’s hard to imagine the economic recession of the last few decades in Japan hasn’t taken a toll as well, since this is an expensive proposition. Nonetheless, the culture still exists and it continues to carry a certain mystique.

Then there is the samurai. Brave and true, the samurai lived “the way of the warrior” from ancient times until the end of shoguns, which came about partly because American Matthew Perry (no, not Chandler on “Friends”) showed up in a Tokyo Bay with a bunch of battleships. Faced with no chance of victory, the last shogun ended the shogunate and centralized power with the Emperor.

Allison standing in the streets of the 

samurai village

The city of Kanazawa has a samurai village, an area that has also been restored and preserved. You can walk through a clan house, a training facility, and wander a few streets imagining the old days. The samurai lived by Bushido, a code that developed into 8 virtues: Justice, honor, mercy, courage, honesty, loyalty, politeness, and character/self control. Zen Buddhism taught them to control their emotions and fears—to calm themselves (especially important in battle). It also infused a respect for life. Confucianism played a smaller part, but it taught respect for human relationships, which includes ancestors, elders, family members, and superiors. I can’t help but think the three younger Quists might benefit from more Confucian education in their lives.

Samurai needed to know how to write poetry. The valued art, they studied ethics. They also brutally killed their enemies. The samurai was a strange sort of renaissance man.

According to an article on talkaboutjapan.com, the right-wing movement of Imperial Japan as they invaded China and Korea in the lead up to World War II warped the virtue of loyalty into nationalism, and the military leaders betrayed the honor and self-sacrificial nature of the young soldiers by being careless with their lives. By the end of the war Bushido disappeared from the culture. A new version of Bushido came around in the 1970s during the economic boom; it exalted loyalty to your employer, hard work and quality of work as a sign of honor. And politeness is still a deep value everywhere you go in Japan.

\We also visited the gorgeous Kenroku-en Garden. What a lovely place, even in what is likely the least interesting time of the year—no fresh blossoms, no turning leaves, no blanketing snow. After one or two garden visits on this trip, Allison now turns to me often and mimics me with notable sarcasm: “just imagine this with everything bright green!” But the truth is it doesn’t have to be bright green to be impressive. These gardens are perfectly planned, perfectly maintained to be a calming, reflective place.

It’s not hard to find the Bushido effect all around us. The gardeners clipping individual twigs off of trees. The perfectly maintained buses, trains, and bathrooms. The servers and taxi drivers and hotel employees who deliver calm, cool competence with no expectation of a tip—only the expectation of respect and politeness in return. Anytime there is a maintenance or construction project, there is always one person stationed on the sidewalk to watch out for any difficulty and to guide everyone smoothly past. We are fairly sure we’ve seen a bunch of maintenance and renovation in anticipation of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo this year. I can’t think of a country better suited to preparing to host the games with minimal commotion and lots of pageantry.

We look around with wonder at all this perfection. If only the Quists were so well-prepared and so perfectly attuned to their environment! But we are only visitors for a very short time, and there is no way for us to know all that runs below the surface.