Alien Rice; A Novel. (5 page)

But she also remembered what ex-Mrs. Tagawa had told her at the embassy reception several months before. Xenophobia might one day blow up throughout the country, and Alice would be hated as a foreigner.

A few days prior to their departure, Manager and Mrs. Takahashi invited the Tanakas to their West Kensington residence for a farewell dinner. Alice had been told that it was an exceptional invitation which an employee of Tanaka's rank could not normally expect. This special mark of hospitality could only be explained by the fact that Alice was not a Japanese woman.

"Well, Tanaka, you are finally off to Japan with Alice. Your life in Tokyo, as I warned you before, will not be an easy one. But I am sure you will be able to manage. As for you, Alice, you have done well in our office for the last four years. I much appreciate your service. I only hope you will be happy wherever you may be."

Mr. Takahashi spoke with dignity and compassion.

The dinner that evening was Japanese style and, as was customary, a plate of raw tuna fish was served. Alice did her best to swallow one slice as a mark of appreciation to the hostess.

Mrs. Takahashi was charming and gracious.

"Alice, it has been a pleasure to have known you. Our company wives have enjoyed your kindness and many of their husbands derived much benefit from your English class. I pray for safe delivery of your first baby in Japan."

Alice was moved by Mrs. Takahashi's thoughtful words.

"Despite some of their strange customs and behavior the Japanese are an exceedingly kind and generous people. Maybe," Alice said to herself, "I do not have to dread going to Japan after all."

As the Japan Airlines DC-8 was readying for a takeoff on its sixteen-hour polar flight to Tokyo, there were over a hundred Japanese people who had come to see the Tanakas off at Heathrow. In the crowd was a lone British couple, Mr. and Mrs. James C. Bums of Glasgow, who had come to see their daughter and son-in-law off. They thought they might not see Alice or Saburo again in their lifetimes, and their parting was tearful.

Saburo was pondering over the hundred-odd Japanese assembled there. They were his colleagues at Tozai, some people from rival trading firms and some other members of the Japanese community. It was a weekday and during morning working hours. Yet those employees could spare time to come all the way to Heathrow. How many times had Saburo himself come here for these perfunctory arrival and departure ceremonies? In fact, it seemed to him that almost half of his three-year tenure of duties in England had been wasted on those meaningless trips.

Now the plane was aloft and England was rapidly receding into the December fog.

CHAPTER
  5

Alice's first and most abiding impression of Japan as she landed at Tokyo International Airport was the overcrowding. Masses of humanity everywhere. The airport terminal was so congested that Saburo had a hard time locating the relatives and friends who had come to meet him and his wife.

The air in the terminal was foul and enervating; in fact, Alice had felt a gust of lukewarm air the moment she stepped out of the plane. Humidity was relatively high although it was December, supposedly in the "dry season."

Genzo Tanaka came to the airport alone; his wife had remained in Nagoya, laid up with a cold. Saburo, to his great surprise, found Genzo considerably aged during his absence. Despite his age of sixty-five, Genzo now looked more like a man of seventy-five. Saburo's marriage to a Western woman must have given his father a lot of worry and heartbreak.

"Welcome home!" Genzo said as he saw Saburo. Saburo introduced Alice to his father.

"This is my wife, Alice, Father," he said bashfully and awkwardly.

"
Hajimemashite
[How do you do?]"

Alice greeted her father-in-law in Japanese. This was one of the few Japanese expressions she had managed to learn.

Genzo looked at her intently. "Oh, you speak Japanese!"

Then, turning to Saburo, he remarked, "She is a big woman, isn't she? Hasn't she got a baby yet?"

After a few exchanges between Genzo and Alice (with the help of Saburo's interpretation), Mr. Tanaka looked more relaxed and even became amiable. The initial stiffness had given way to an air of intimacy. Alice, on her part, did not find Genzo any different from her father, except that Genzo did not understand English. Then she remembered a saying she had heard once, "You cannot hate a man whom you know."

As they drove toward the city center Alice saw a suburban electric train which was packed to overflowing. The proverbial phrase, "packed sardines," was an under-statement. Streets were thronged with pedestrians and vehicles. There were traffic jams everywhere. Alice saw a young man standing by the roadside, nonchalantly following his natural urge to urinate. She was shocked.

Saburo and Alice stayed at a downtown hotel. The lobby was so crowded that Alice became separated from her husband and nearly got lost before they reached the counter to check in. And how small the room was! The twin-bed room in which they stayed was not larger than a single room in a London hotel. There was hardly space to move about in the bath room. The tub was deep, about three feet square, and one had to squat when bathing. Everything was undersized: the bed, chair and even an electric socket.

Saburo took Alice out later in the afternoon for a walk. They stopped at a department store near the hotel. The store was huge, and as imposing as Harrods or Selfridges. In the store, again, there were so many people that one had to elbow one's way through. Aisles between the counters were very narrow. There were salesmen and salesgirls all around, smiling and bowing. Alice's attention was drawn to a uniformed girl who was standing at the foot of an escalator, doing nothing but bowing to the incoming visitors.

"What is that girl standing there for?" Alice asked.

"She is greeting the customers as they come into the store and step on the escalator."

"Is that all she does?" Alice inquired.

"She is also there to watch the passengers, lest they should trip over the steps and get hurt."

Obviously the unbelievable congestion within the store made such a precaution necessary.

After leaving the department store, the couple went to nearby Hibiya Park. "This is the famous Hibiya Park, the largest in Tokyo," Saburo explained.

"You say this is the largest park?" Alice could not believe it. Compared with Hyde Park or Regent's Park, Hibiya was so small and so shabby that it could hardly be
called a park in the Western sense of the word.

"How small and low these benches are!" remarked Alice, unable to hide her astonishment.

On the way back to the hotel they happened to walk along a narrow street lined with rickety houses and open booths gaudily decorated with strange signs and banners. There, to her amazement and annoyance, Alice saw several young boys practicing baseball, their favorite game, unmindful of the traffic hazard.

Overpopulation and lack of space were apparent everywhere.

Saburo reported to the Head Office to start work on the day following his arrival. He first went to the section chief of the foodstuff department, who was to be his immediate chief. Without preliminaries the section chief said,

"Tanaka, I'm afraid our foodstuff section is not doing well lately. Competition is keen and the margin of profit of our exports is falling. We must by hook or crook increase our profit for the coming six-month period by 20 percent. I want you to be in charge of the export of canned goods to Europe, since you know the area quite well."

"I will do my best, Sir," Tanaka replied tersely.

"By the way, Tanaka, I hear your wife is English. You may have some difficulty in your private life but I expect the fact of your wife being a foreigner not to interfere with the conduct of your work."

Saburo sensed a certain reserve and felt that his chief disapproved of an East-West marriage as a matter of principle.

Saburo Tanaka also detected a certain coolness toward him on the part of his colleagues. This was explained by the fact that only about 8 percent of the total staff of Tozai was normally posted in its overseas offices. Life in Europe or America has always been a coveted dream and cherished desire of Japanese in all walks of life. At Tozai, as everywhere else in Japan, there had always been keen competition to get a foreign assignment, which is hard to come by.

Hence those left behind in Japan, going through grinding daily life in the overcrowded country, tended to look upon a new returnee from abroad with a sense of envy mingled with jealousy, if not hostility. And in regard to Saburo, jealousy was obviously greater now that he had come home with a Western wife.

Tozai's Tokyo headquarters were huge. The entire staff of nearly five thousand was housed in an ultramodern nine-story ferroconcrete building. There were over a dozen departments dealing with iron ore, machinery, textiles and foodstuffs, and each department was subdivided into several sections.

In Saburo Tanaka's section there were twenty workers, of whom five were girls who did miscellaneous work and also served hot Japanese tea to the male members of the section as well as to visitors. Those twenty employees were huddled into the small space allocated to the section. Even the section chief did not have an office of his own. He had a desk in the center while his junior clerks, each with a small desk, sat in rows, facing one another. Every worker could hear and see what the others were doing. There was absolutely no privacy.

Most of these employees lived in company dormitories or apartments located in the suburbs of Tokyo. Some, of course, lived in their own homes or apartments. Usually it took an hour and a half of travel time from home to the office, which meant that the average worker spent at least three hours every day commuting in overcrowded buses or trains. The resultant physical strain was very great indeed.

After staying a week in the hotel, the Tanakas moved to a company apartment near Yokohama, some fifteen miles southwest of Tokyo. The rent was a nominal 1,500 yen a month, but Saburo had to spend an hour and a half by bus and train to get to Tokyo. He chose Yokohama mainly because it was a little less crowded than Tokyo. Since Alice was expecting a baby within four months, she needed a quieter place. Also the choice was due in part to the fact that there was a sizable foreign colony there more concentrated than that in Tokyo, and Saburo had hoped that his wife would find some friends and would not be too lonely.

The Tanaka apartment was one of fifty standard twenty-mat affairs,
^*
housed in one big, drab-looking block, a three-story concrete structure. Each apartment was partitioned into two rooms, plus a tiny kitchen and bath room. The ceiling was so low that Alice nearly bumped her head at the entrance. The apartment was scantily furnished with the minimum chairs and tables, which, however, were so undersized that Alice felt as if she were now in Gulliver's Lilliput.

There was a tiny strip of open ground, unkempt and covered with weeds, in front of each block of apartments. All over the apartment block the tenants hung their bedding in the sun, drying laundry on small balconies, presenting a scene of indescribable disorder. Alice could not hide her disillusionment.

"Saburo, do all the company people live in a place like this? What sort of a house has Mr. Takahashi got in Tokyo?" Alice asked.

"I've never been to his house but I understand that Mr. Takahashi used to live in a company house in the outskirts of Tokyo. Because of wartime destruction the housing situation in Japan is still very difficult, you know," Saburo replied.

"Is the company house large?" Alice asked with curiosity, remembering Manager Takahashi's luxurious flat in West Kensington.

"No, the house could not be very pretentious. It is one of those small Japanese houses with a minuscule garden."

As in London, Saburo spent most of his time away from home, both during the week and on weekends. He usually left at 7:30
A.M.
and seldom came home before midnight. Now Saburo often came home quite intoxicated, with his breath smelling of sake.

"My section now has to entertain very many clients. Personal relations are very important in Japan and no business can be done without first hosting a dinner party. We also have to entertain government officials."

"Where do you entertain them?" Alice asked.

"In a Japanese-style tea house, as a rule."

Saburo did not go into details, but what happened was that after a normal meal in a restaurant or tea house, the participants, both hosts and guests, repaired to one of the bar and social club combinations found in profusion in the narrow lanes behind the Ginza, Tokyo's main thoroughfare. There they sipped sake and drank imported whisky and brandy and other fancy foreign drinks in the company of young waitresses and hostesses. Such a party would go on almost endlessly. After leaving one night club they would visit another club of their own patronage and then still another. This continuous drinking stint was a popular form of expense-account entertaining.

One evening Saburo was drinking in a bar where he used to go, surrounded by a few hostesses. One of the waitresses spoke to him.

"Tanaka-san, you don't seem to enjoy yourself here very much. Is anything wrong?"

"Well, things tend to bother me lately."

"That's too bad. I hear your wife is a Westerner, and they say that Western women are much more taxing physically and otherwise. You seem to be lacking the spunk you used to have. Do you feel it yourself?" The girl was half teasing.

"I don't know," he said vacuously.

In the Tozai staff housing compound, privacy was hard to maintain. Since each apartment was so small and all were built so closely together, everyone was subject to the prying eyes of all around him and was constantly exposed to the comment of others.

Soon after the Tanakas moved in, a swarm of neighboring children started to peep through the windows. Apparently Alice was the center of curiosity. Children, as well as adults in the neighborhood, would spy on the Tanaka household to find out what they were eating or doing. Their curiosity knew no bounds. The occasional meal of beefsteak Alice prepared was commented on widely by the neighborhood housewives.

"Mrs. Tanaka buys 400 grams [a pound] of beef almost every other day at the butcher's around the corner," Mrs. Watanabe, the next-door neighbor, was telling another neighbor one day.

"Mr. Tanaka gets the same salary as my husband. How can they afford to do that, I wonder?" the other neighbor said.

"Well, Mrs. Tanaka is a foreigner and she must be wealthy," Mrs. Watanabe replied.

"But I hear Mrs. Tanaka was a typist or something in London, so she cannot be very rich," the other woman opined.

Alice shopped for daily necessities in a shopping center outside the compound. She made it a point to ask the price of each item and compare prices of various competing stores before making a purchase, which was quite a normal thing for an Occidental to do. Japanese housewives, on the other hand, often made purchases on the spur of the moment and seldom compared prices.

Kore ikura,
meaning "How much is this?" was one of the first Japanese phrases Alice learned after arriving in Japan. Whenever she visited the shopping center she used the Japanese phrase. In no time, both among the shopkeepers and her neighbors, Alice was nicknamed "Madame Kore-ikura," the connotation being that she was a woman of somewhat mean and exacting character. One evening Alice asked her husband,

"Saburo, whenever I go shopping in the center salesgirls chuckle and mutter Madame Kore-something and whisper among themselves. I feel most uncomfortable. What does Madame Kore-something mean?"

"It must be your nickname. Since you say
kore-ikura?
or 'how much is this' they just make fun of you."

"Oh, they are so rude. And those kids in the neighborhood who come round and peep into our apartment, they are so ill-mannered! Can't they mind their own business?" Alice was furious.