Hospitality

Top: a delicious Japanese soup, with custard, gingko beans, pink and blue seafood disks as decoration, fu, and chicken

Above: My new friend Reiko-san of Kameoka, at a Shinto shrine.

Yesterday I had a large dose of the kind of Japanese hospitality that Donald Richie (in The Inland Sea) and especially Pico Iyer (The Lady and the Monk) talk about, and that long-time foreign residents of Japan try to explain to recent arrivals. Steve, the energetic and kind Australian professor at KGU, also mentioned this type of almost overwhelming attention. The Japanese seem to us (and I mean our small group) quite shy and somewhat introverted, especially in comparison to the effervescent and bold Chinese, who are not afraid to go up to strangers and start talking in a way that would make even the most extroverted Americans seem reserved in comparison. (It’s hard to imagine even an outgoing and confident New Yorker interrupting someone on the street to practice a language they learned in school and rarely speak – like French or German – to ask how they like the United States, but that happens to Americans in China frequently.) Here you can take a train from Kameoka to Kyoto in the morning and hear a pin drop; the Japanese use train travel for sleeping or text messaging, somehow waking up just in time to get off at their stops. Americans feel somewhat uncomfortable and restricted in travel silence, and we were cheered in China realizing that no matter what we could not be too loud. (I usually use the explanation that unless you jump on a table and start yelling, you will not be louder than the Chinese in public. There loud conversation, even argument, is sport; in Japan loud or even obvious but restrained argument is severely frowned on and buses and subways echo with energetic conversation).

The Japanese seem to us extremely polite but harder to get to know, especially in casual encounters. But last week when I stopped to take a photo of the Girl and Boy Scouts in front of the Saty grocery and department store, and left a small donation in their boxes (covered earlier in my blog), I offered my name card (business card) to some of the adults with the scouts.

(I highly recommend carrying cards all the time in China and Japan; it’s easy to let someone know your email address that way. In China you can even get name cards made with Chinese on one side and English on the other for just a few dollars. I’m sure you can do it in Japan also, but for a higher fee. Or get a friend who knows enough English and is a native Japanese speaker to do a Japanese translation for you.)

One of the women in the group emailed me, and did something which is pretty unusual in Japan: she invited me to her house. And since so much of what you do in other countries is a leap of faith, and I was anxious to visit a Japanese home, of course I said yes, I would love to visit her house. She said in her email that she had been with the scouts as part of her volunteer position on the Welfare Commission in Kameoka.

In the Japanese way, as I knew it would be, it was a visit where every step was planned for the comfort and entertainment of the guest. (Sometimes when you are in Japan every minute brings another realization that you will never be able to repay the kindness you are being treated to.) She made a trip on Saturday (when I was sleeping most of the day, recovering from spending two nights in a row on the overnight bus from Hiroshima) to find out where I was staying. Fortunately I am across the street from a small but excellent fruit market which everyone in the area seems to know. She rang the bell at the gate at precisely 10 a.m. on Sunday, which I knew she would. Her adult son, who I found out actually lives in Kobe, had been pressed into service to drive for the day. (I hope he didn’t drive all the way from Kobe just to chauffeur me around, but it is possible.) Reiko-san and her husband don’t drive; they take buses, ride bicycles or walk for all of their errands, in the heat of summer as well as in snowy January. No wonder these people are so healthy.

At Reiko-san’s house we began with tea and sweets. She brought out family albums, a wonderful idea for foreign visitors, and showed me photographs of her grandparents dating back one hundred years, everyone in traditional dress for a formal portrait. There was also a portrait of her parents on the day they were married, also in traditional dress. I saw a photo of a hunter in what looked like buckskin, carrying a rifle on his back; when I asked what he hunted – was it deer? (We have seen lots of tame deer) and she and her son said yes – but also wild boar and bears. She said bears still live in the mountains around Kameoka. She then she asked what kind of food I liked: did I like chicken, Japanese food, and so on. I said I liked all kinds of food, which is true. I really was only expecting tea and some cookies, but suddenly the doorbell rang, and huge quantities of food appeared, including a round box the size of a large cookie tin that when opened revealed smoked salmon, tuna sashimi, rice molded into a star, a fried shrimp, gingery pickles, sesame tofu custard, a tiny sweet shaped and colored like an autumn maple leaf, small pieces of fresh orange and fresh strawberry, and perhaps a dozen other small treats. In addition, we had two kinds of soup, one I was familiar with (miso with tofu and seaweed), and another I had not seen, which included a broth that tasted a little bit of bacon, but looked on top like a cup of egg custard. It included gingko beans, fu (described in her electronic dictionary as “a bread-like food made of wheat”), small pieces of chicken, and vegetables. It was hot and delicious. She had also prepared and placed in front of me dishes of vegetables that she had not only cooked, but grown in a garden plot. One reminded me of dandelion greens and was topped with crushed black sesame seeds, a dish that is supposed to be very healthy and tasted wonderful. Another dish was made of glutinous rice and sweet red azuki beans that she mentioned was cooked and served for celebrations. She served cold beer and room-temperature sake, the sake in a beautiful small blue cut-glass tumbler. I was only sorry that I had to eat it all myself – usually the boys in my group eye what I’ve ordered and estimate how much of it I will finish and how much of the leftovers they’ll get to consume. Sorry, guys. I couldn’t finish all of it, but then neither could Reiko-san.

Then Reiko-san and her son determined which Kameoka sites I had not visited, and we went to two shrines, one not far from the same river where we took the boat trip I have written about; in fact, her son drove over a low span that looked no bigger than a footbridge just as one of the tour boats was passing beneath. When we got to the first shrine the sun was shining, the wind was blowing through the evergreens, and two five-year-old children in beautiful traditional kimono were receiving a blessing in a service being performed by a Shinto priest. We used the spring water at the entrance to wash our hands and rinse out our mouths (you don’t drink from the cup, just pour from it into your mouth) and then rinsed out the ladle in the Shinto way. She presented me with an amulet for safe travel. We also went to a shrine that is very close to where I live, but has a long entrance driveway that had been too intimidating to take on for someone who only knows hiragana and therefore will only be able to read a few signs. (The nouns are in non-phonetic kanji, and words borrowed from other languages are in katakana, which is also phonetic; after six weeks I can read hiragana, which means I can figure out the particles and grammatical connecting words, which is like looking at a sentence like “The book is on the table over there,” being able to read “the,” “on,” and “over there,” and wondering what’s on what.)


Then we returned to Reiko-san’s house for coffee and lemon cheesecake. We sat for a long time, Reiko-san using her English, which is fairly good, aided by two electronic dictionaries (I highly recommend them for anyone spending more than a month in China or Japan) and five or six English-Japanese dictionaries. I drew maps of the United States pointing out the various cities where my parents, sisters, and children live and indicating the distance between them. We discussed her work on the Welfare Commission for Kameoka (she is going to a lecture on child abuse in Sendai soon) and I explained a little bit about my work on the Naperville Plan Commission, both of us having put in many years of volunteer service to our cities. We discussed how working mothers need people to watch their children, and their many responsibilities in both Japan and the United States in balancing housework, childcare, and work outside the home. Glimpses into her kitchen showed that in preparing this meal she had used almost every pot and pan in the house.

My offer to help clear the table and wash dishes was politely refused, as I knew it would be (Japanese who visit my house, however, always offer to do the dishes, usually in a group or at least a pair, and I say yes.) She said she had decided to email me because although others were walking past without noticing the scouts or offering donations, that I had stopped and talked to them, taken photos, and made a small donation, and she thought I must have a kind heart. Then she gave me a loaf of freshly baked raisin bread she had made. We parted with offers of overnight hospitality and home stays to one another and an exchange of home addresses and phone numbers; her son drove me home, and he and Reiko-san both got out of the car to bow, shake hands, and say goodbye. I was almost in tears thinking of all the effort that had gone into her making the visit so memorable. Only after they left did I realize I didn’t get a photo of the two of us, although we each have photos of the other.