Memory tells me it was within a week of my departure, but perhaps it was more like a month, that Sara informed me that she would be returning to Canada the day after I arrived rather than spending the six weeks in Japan with me.
In the summer of 1993, my friend and sparring partner had invited me to join her and some friends for a six-week backpacking trek across Japan. Having decided to take a year off from a general arts degree and move to Japan on a working-holiday visa, it would be my first time living away from home at age 20. Sara was on a year-long engineering exchange program at Tottori University on the northern coast of western Honshu. So, with another English-speaking resident as my travelling companion, I figured that after the six weeks I would be able to navigate myself to some sort of accommodation and employment. But with the recent itinerary changes, only the conviction borne of naiveté and the presumption to impose on others told me it was still ok to go and that ‘things would work out’
We were meant to meet at Bentencho station. Arriving off the connecting flight in Osaka, I made my way through the confusion of signs, swarms of people and foreign smells to a large, clean bus that, to my young white nostrils, was ripe with the distinct smell of sweaty, middle-aged Japanese men. As it swayed through the dark, past the building-sized neon signs and heavy traffic, I kept my eyes and ears tuned to every confirmation that a) Bentencho was on this route, and that b) I hadn’t missed it. I hadn’t been on the ground for an hour and already I was scared.
Triple-confirming with the bus driver, and then again at the ticket kiosk, that we had stopped at Bentencho station, I felt my first thrill of travel success as I descended in to the station and found a bench that would be my bed for the night. Sara and I were to meet the following morning at 7:30, whence we would head out to explore Kyoto on foot for the day.
There were no mobile phones then. So no text or email to touch base and reconfirm our meeting plans, nor were there any games to pass the time. I don’t remember if I took out my journal or a book. I remember that no food was available in the station, but don’t remember if I found some other way to eat. I just remember waiting on the bench with my large duffel and backpack until I was sleepy enough to recline. It must have been around midnight when I woke to a nudge and a serious-gazed, square-faced police officer staring down at me.
Great. Not four hours in my new country and I was under arrest. “Tomodachi o mateimasu.” Waiting for my friend, I tried to explain. “Ashita, ashita.” Tomorrow, tomorrow. My innocence must have been obvious, and his English just good enough, for us to agree that it was ok for me to wait on the bench all night, as long as I didn’t lie down. It struck me then that this rule was about optics – no vagabonds. With another successful negotiation under my belt I was starting to like this travel stuff. My forty-two year old self would like to say that I then sat in lotus position and meditated for the remainder of the night, but in truth, my twenty year old self slumped against a pillar and dozed with head hanging, listing, and bobbing.
When morning brought the first commuters, I was awake enough to start to keep an eye out for Sara. She’d be hard to miss. A 5’10”, long legged and strong hipped western woman with light brown, shoulder blade-length hair, blue-grey eyes and pink-white complexion would be a beacon of strange in the black-haired, be-suited throng of chin-height, mostly male salarymen.
7:30 came and went. 8:00 came and went. 8:30 came and went. Remember, I couldn’t text. The earlier self-congratulation that accompanied my presumed successes was quickly turning from a familiar sense of uncertainty to outright fear. 9:00am. Still no Sara. “Bentencho?” I asked again at the ticket kiosk. The station was empty again as everyone was already at work. “Eehhh.” Yes. Leaving wasn’t an option, but staying eventually would wear itself out, too. If Sara didn’t materialize by noon that day, I’d be launched into this new land with no friends, no language and little money. Waving down a cab, pronouncing “Ritz-Carlton” and throwing it on a credit card wasn’t among my range of choices.
In the hospitality business, we say that the sound of one’s own name is the sweetest on earth. Who knows why? Does it remind us of our mother calling to us? Is it an anchor that not only confirms we exist, but affirms that we’re important to someone?
Hearing “MATT! MATT!” at 9:30 that morning still counts among the biggest joyful reliefs of my life. Around the corner came that pretty face. I don’t think we embraced. We had the awkward friendship in which the younger boy is smitten with the slightly older woman, who knows it, and he knows that she knows it, and further knows that though she would never return his romantic affection, she had an equally large yet entirely innocent affection for him. I was under no illusion that anything would happen between us, and at no point did I ever suggest or show that I even flirted with the possibility.
We had become friends at our dojo. After three months at age thirteen in the kids’ class, I moved to the adult class upon earning my yellow belt. There was this tall, pretty, older girl there who worked harder and more fiercely than anyone I’d ever seen work at anything. She spoke intelligently and wanted to be a writer. A tenuous home life kept her with one foot on the dark side and another on the light. Her boyfriend, Paul, wore a jean jacket, and had big hair and the quiet cool of a white Jimi Hendrix, and though I’d never heard him play, our high-school lore had him equally skilled.
She and I shared an absolute and unquestioned burning drive to perfect our karate. We constantly pushed ourselves and each other through and beyond the hours of exhaustion, streams of sweat, sting of blisters, frustration of incompetence, and ache of muscle, bone and joint to become stronger, fitter, faster, more precise. On afternoons in the school hallways we would pause to giggle at our pain as we passed each other hobbling up or down the stairs. Sometimes she would seek me out of my homeroom just before class started, filling my younger heart with the pulse and throb of recognition by a recognized older girl. We would quickly compare bruises on our wrists or shins, or show our flaps of palm skin from the friction caused by our weapons training, then she’d drift back to her own class just after the bell, just to make a point.
So not embracing, but being nonetheless happy to have found each other, we quickly sorted out that Bentencho was also a train station. I’d been waiting at the bus station. With the see of failure now back to the saw of success, we stepped out into the mushiatsui, sticky-humid-hot, Kyoto day on our mission to find the Butokuden, the headquarters of not only our martial arts organization, but the former bureau of Japanese national martial arts ranking and standards. We walked, and walked. We found something to eat in an underground market. Then walked some more. And when we came upon the stone marker carved with the kanji Bu-Toku-Kai, Martial Virtues Association, we looked up to behold a classic grand old Japanese building complete with a bumpy ceramic roof, its corners curling up like dog-eared pages, white stucco exterior with dark Tudor-style vertical and horizontal wooden beams, and the massive south entrance doors reserved for use by the emperor only. We also happened upon a naginata tournament. Naginata, a six foot staff with a two foot, slightly curved blade on the end, is primarily a woman’s weapon, which really thrilled Sara. The huge, wide-planked oak training floor was full of women in full kendo regalia, and as we knelt politely among the other spectators on the tatami over on the side, and listened to the crack of spirited war cries, the precise and direct directions given by the referees, and the swirl of ruffling karate-gi, it was a testament to the severity of the training we had received to be largely underwhelmed by the performances.
Still, not wanting to leave the physical center and spiritual genesis of our chosen path, we nonetheless knew that we had to get on with the day. After 24 hours of travel followed by a non-sleep in the bus station, then a long morning of walking in the humidity, I was relishing the impending shower and real bed in whatever type of accommodation we found.
“Because I leave right for the airport first thing tomorrow morning, I thought we’d just sleep in a park tonight.”
Uhhh. Ok. You’re older, more experienced here, and I like you. I guess that’s what we’re doing.
I don’t remember how we spent the rest of the day. It involved a lot of walking. We did find a beautiful, sprawling park with a relatively remote corner that was slightly elevated, and had a bench under a large tree. I had decided on a sandwich of some kind from a supermarket, but the thick slices and sweetness of the bread was too unusual for my liking. We took turns hanging out on the bench, practicing our katas, and dozing while sitting up. We found a grove of trees that ran up a hillside where we lay out our sleeping bags. About twenty minutes after trying to get some proper sleep, we heard a snapping and shuffling in the woods rifling down the hill toward us. Leaping like cheetahs up and out of our sleeping bags, we hurriedly gathered up our things and giggled while streaming back to the safety of our bench under the tree. We guessed wolves. I remember asking her lots of questions about Japan. And what is that smell?
“They don’t cover the sewers here. They run all along the sides of the roads.”
At around 4:30 in the morning it began to rain. We laughed at the insult added to our injury, did more kata practice, and talked and sat and dozed some more. When 6:30 rolled around, it was time for Sara to go. I had been looking on message boards for any kind of job or accommodation in the one day I’d been there, and almost worked up the courage to call one of them. Sara helped me find a hostel-style inn in the north of the city. I want to say it was the Kyo-no-En, but that was twenty-two years ago.
After saying our good-byes, and too scared to take another bus, I walked the several hours through the city to my first night alone in this new and strange country. Arriving at the quaint ryokan, I embarrassed myself for the first of many times by attempting to wash my feet, complete with pussy, oozing ankle blister, in the proprietor’s fish pond. It would strike me years later that when she lit incense and offered me a bath, she wasn’t being polite or hospitable in that customer-oriented Japanese way. I just stank.
The cold, trickling shower in a bamboo grove was the sweetest moment in the three-plus days of travel, two of which were spent in the thick, heavy, wet air of Kyoto in July. Collapsing in the middle of the common sleeping area at around four o’clock that afternoon on about my forty-seventh hour without sleep, I went down so heavy that sixteen straight hours later I would awake surrounded by twelve other inn guests. They had arrived back from their day the evening before, made supper, talked, went to bed, got up, and made their breakfast. As I stirred and came-to, one of them gasped, laughed, then turned to me and said “We thought you were dead.”
