(See earlier post: MONK)
I’d been in Kyoto just over a year. Four seasons in a land ruled by seasons, where on designated days in spring and fall the entire nation changes the colors it wears and the shedding of cherry blossoms is a national event. My letters home bear a voice I don’t quite recognize: quiet, formal, poetic.
I lived in a tiny teahouse on the grounds of a small villa owned by a silk merchant’s daughter. Summer among water bugs and tatami and typhoons, silk dyes shimmering in the river canals like iridescent carp. Monk’s lunches of tofu and green tea in the compounds of Nanzen-ji. Noh plays by candlelight at Heian Shrine. Gardens and inns, pachinko arcades, salary men reading S&M comic books on the commuter trains. A civilized culture, to be sure, but one far stranger than I’d encountered in, say, Morocco.
By the end of my first year in Kyoto, I’d taken my place among a small community of foreign scholars, potters, priests and Zen students, among them the poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. I taught English to students and businessmen, lectured on American culture to Japanese Fulbright scholars, wrote essays on aspects of teaching for obscure Japanese magazines. In letters home I sound like that young instructor - opaque, intellectual, disclosing little. In fact, I was happy to be far away again, crafting an expatriate life at a distance from America and my parents. Buzzing through the back streets and lanes and geisha quarters on a little 50cc motor scooter, my teacher’s jacket and tie flapping, I came to know the old capital’s contours and moods. My students took me to odd little coffee bars and tearooms, introducing me to the intense, weird Japanese jazz scene. With a nisei friend from California I studied gagaku, Japanese court music, stately and slow, coming to understand rhythm not only as human heartbeat, step, or dance, but as interruptions in silence: the irregular sounds of nature, water, wind: the duration of time itself.
The Kyoto YMCA occupied a cramped downtown building, teaching haven to a dozen or so foreigners from the far reaches of empire - scholars, writers, drifters, Buddhists, artists - delivering serviceable English instruction for tiny wages, using oral methods not dependent upon knowing much Japanese (I’d cobbled together the rudiments of teaching English as a foreign language from a manual I’d read on shipboard). Soon other classes fell my way: teaching executives at department stores, instructing private students at home. The inordinate respect accorded the role of sensei, teacher, in Japanese society invested me with a curious status, venerated for my purported skills yet strangely quarantined from ordinary life. Never in the nearly two years I was there was I invited beyond the genkan, the entry of a Japanese home; the only interiors I ever saw were on television soap operas.
Twice a week I traveled to the nearby port cities of Osaka and Kobe to teach. One of my employers, a Europhile who wore a beret and constantly interjected French words into our conversation, dealt in shunga, Japanese erotic scrolls. His lifelong dream was to publish a book of his collection with English text. Each week, in a Kobe waterfront pub, he’d unscroll his treasures - a horizontal tumult of disrobings, leering faces, and exaggerated genitalia - then I’d go back to Kyoto and try to make something of his transliterated Japanese texts (my first, but not my last, venture into erotic writing).
By my second year in Japan, sunk into a chill winter, I was making a living but saving little. By then it was clear I’d never be accepted in Japan as anything other than an exotic professional, channeled into places and roles reserved for foreigners. It was time to think about returning home and trying to put some sort of American life together.
Or had I become addicted to exoticism? Had I drifted into displacement as a steady state, fated to wander endlessly? I knew there were plenty of others like me along the airways, the steamer lines, the donkey trails. I’d run into them brandishing their little stamp-filled blue passports before dour border officials, catching last planes out as some countries closed off while others opened. I’d see them out there, circling earth, their papers in order, attuned to travel advisories, terrorist alerts, and border skirmishes, pockets full of undigested currencies, punched stubs, names of cheap tasty restaurants in exotic capitals scribbled on the backs of matchbooks. I’d notice them in hotel lounges, plazas and cafes where foreigners deposit themselves to drink or wait, or in remote village bars, watching some football game or election on television. I’d watch them staring blearily at Samsonites, garment bags and backpacks tumbling onto shiny aluminum conveyors, seldom speaking, eyes flicking, never steadying on anything for very long. Artists, intelligence men, wanderers, addicts. Never stopping, never adhering, taking brief comfort in the purchased hospitality of peoples whose smiles of welcome hid fathomless scorn. To these travelers, earth was a single city, its countries neighborhoods of a vast polyglot metropolis.
Though I studied them, peopled my notebooks with them, I was no different, really. If their axioms and evasions were becoming known to me, it was because they were mine.
So fascinating, another’s view and process of becoming, for want of another word, an expat…when is that moment…for me it was driving around the Colosseum at midnight under a full moon. My native land slipped into second place. Loved this piece so much..
It was similiar but different in Europe. The faces were familiar even if the language wasn't. Greece was the most blendible country. If you spoke a few words of Greeks the Greeks would welcome you into their homes and feed you while introducing their whole family and neighbors. Korea was like Japan, foreigners would always be foreigners. Thailand is half way between; you can come in but the conversation will be superficial. Everywhere there is distrust of foreigners.