Deep Country

Ken-san knew enough to know that he would never become a nihon-tsu, or Japan expert.  He had turned 40, his partner was not Japanese, and his academic field was American Studies.  Before he began the rudiments of language study in Washington to prepare for his first assignment at the Embassy, Ken was a Japan virgin, an all but tabula rasa.  He knew about Pearl Harbor, he knew about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  By the midpoint of the initial four-year tour, he had a modicum of language, a dose of culture, and the ability to give good briefing to diverse Americans preparing to give talks and exchange views with Japanese counterparts under the banner of the American Participants program.  Bottom line, he was a quick study, a sponge that American guests could squeeze and feel more knowledgeable about the country where they would spend the next week or so, taking the world renowned shinkansen (bullet train) from city to city.  Energy sapped by trans-Pacific jet lag and the physical demands of speeches that resembled political campaigns, the speakers acted out a version of 1969 film, “If It’s Tuesday, It Must be Belgium.”

Despite four life-stifling years in the bureaucratic and hierarchical Embassy, Ken knew that he wanted to return to Japan, but as an American Center Director, a smaller universe, but a more fruitful one.  To achieve that goal, however, he would have to succeed at the State Department’s Japanese Language Field School in Yokohama.  Like many Foreign Service Officers, Ken had a talent for languages.  He was fluent in French and language qualified in Hebrew.  But succeeding in Japanese was like climbing Mt. Fuji out of season, a daunting task.

Ken made solid progress in his first few months in Yokohama.  He looked over the horizon and compared himself to Shimamura, the protagonist of Yuki-Guni (“Snow Country”) by Yasunari Kawabata.  Ken loved the novel’s first line, “The train emerged from the tunnel into snow country” and could recite it in measured Japanese. He felt that after the long, dark tunnel of Language School, he was about to emerge into the bright light of language competency.  A roadblock remained:  Ken would have to outduel Sensei on the hillside known as aisatsu class.  This was a private tutorial in which the student, already struggling with Japanese grammar, word order and cultural hierarchy, would have to stretch higher and dig deeper to master the nuances of offering a short (perhaps one-minute) speech at a rarefied level of formality.  The field of battle would be a formal ceremony, party or reception where the student was representing the American Embassy.  The audience was members of the Japanese elite:  his efforts in Japanese were more important than their proficiency in English.  He would be expected to deliver the remarks without notes or error.  Drill and memorization were the implements of torture; creativity was absent in that desolate universe.

And sensei, who had survived the American fire-bombing of Tokyo in the latter months of World War II, was a determined adversary and a fierce purist.  Ken intuited that sensei had trained as a Zen monk or martial arts master (perhaps both). He guessed that the narrow path to success would require him to penetrate sensei’s exterior walls of formality known as tatemae and arrive at his true thinking and feeling known as hone.  He would have to show sensei the deference of a samurai.

The biggest challenge of all might be to remain true to his calling as an American officer while mastering the art of the aisatsu.