Homage to Gaia (65 page)

In September 1992 we started our journey to Japan by flying to Philadelphia for the semi-annual visit to Hewlett Packard, and from there to Chicago and Tokyo on a long fourteen-hour flight on United Airlines. We left Chicago's spacious airport early in the afternoon and arrived in Tokyo at dusk on the next day. We had reclined our seats to the horizontal position and slept for much of the journey across the Pacific. After passing through customs at Narita Airport, we saw Fred Myers waiting, and with him were Hideo Itokawa and two young Japanese friends. There were also the media, with television cameras and journalists to interview us. We were warmly welcomed and, with our bags, taken in a limousine to the New Otani Hotel in the centre of Tokyo, a journey that took nearly two hours. At the hotel, a suite of rooms awaited us, more luxurious than any we had previously known. After an hour to settle in, our hosts invited us to a meal in the hotel's Chinese restaurant. We are immune to jet lag, that misery that comes from travelling by air across time zones, but knew that to be fresh the next day, it would be wise because of our long journey, to stay awake until our usual bedtime of 10 pm. At about 8 o'clock our escorts, Jiro Hata and Hiroshi Yajima, knocked at our door and invited us to accompany them to the private dining room. By now, although dazed, we realized that we were experiencing a royal welcome. These young men were providing care with a degree of attention that made us feel truly wanted, and it was to be like this throughout the whole of the two-week visit. They were there always, ready to carry, to pay and to meet our needs. I began to understand why the rich and the royals never carry money. They do not need to.

Dinner was in a room with a large round table and seated around were our host, Hideo Itokowa, and his friend, Takeshi Kanai. Next to them was a young woman violinist and her husband, and the timber industry's chairman, Motomasa Shimada, and our young friends, Jiro Hata and Hiroshi Yajima. The meal somehow combined the intimacy of a family occasion with the delights of Asian cuisine. It lasted about two hours, by which time we were ready for bed, and knew that this was going to be the most memorable of visits.

There was nothing planned next day until 10 am, when there were two newspaper interviews, and they advised us to sleep late and catch up for any lost sleep on the journey. Hideo invited us to join him and a friend in the hotel dining room for lunch. Our young friends took us there, and to our surprise we found that the huge dining room of the New Otani Hotel was deserted. There were a few people standing
outside, all men, but the room itself was empty, and it seemed odd. Sandy and I were taken in and seated at a table with room for about ten. Our two escorts moved to another table some distance away. Soon Hideo joined us and said his friend would be arriving shortly. A well-dressed man wearing one of the most attractive ties I have ever seen came in, and sat next to Hideo, and opposite Sandy and me. Hideo introduced his friend to us and told us that he was the Japanese Finance Minister, Tsutomu Hata, later to be Prime Minister of Japan. We were flabbergasted. I tried to imagine a Japanese couple unable to speak English seated in a similar room with the Chancellor of the Exchequer facing them. The smooth, almost casual way that we had been elevated to the highest levels in Japan overwhelmed us. Hideo was nothing if not a talented showman, and his grin as he watched across the table made me wonder what would be coming next. After the presentation of gifts—an inscribed collection of Japanese stamps—we were served lunch and started our meal.

The main thrust of the conversation with Tsutomu Hata was about the American super-conducting super-collider experiment. This was a colossal science undertaking due in the next few years in Texas. The Finance Minister wanted my opinion on its scientific merit, because Japan might have to pay several billion dollars towards its cost. I have long believed, and have often expressed the opinion that the value of a scientific project is not commensurate with its cost. Perhaps there is an unrecognized law of economics ‘The lower the cost the greater the payoff.' I came to this view because few of the large steps in science have cost much. Consider Newton, who did his thinking in his spare time, outside his employment as a government advisor. Consider Darwin, who developed his theory while employed as a naturalist on the
Beagle.
Consider Einstein, working as a clerk at the patent office at Bern and developing his ideas in his spare time. None of these great men needed a hugely expensive experiment. Their brains and a pen and paper to record the steps of their thoughts met, for the most part, their needs. I also remembered Professor CF Powell of Bristol University. His research was also into particle physics, and he received a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the pion. He did not do it by seeking funds for a large atom collider; he did it by sending a pile of photographic plates to the upper air, lifted by some surplus meteorological balloons. Nature provided the source of high-speed particles, the cosmic rays from space. I also thought of my own voyage on the
Shackleton
: how little that research cost, yet its results still reverberate
around the scientific community. So here was I, called to account in a high place to justify my opinion. With these thoughts in mind, I answered Tsutomu Hata's question by saying that a better use for the billions might be to fund a series of smaller scientific projects, especially those of environmental importance. I have no idea whether this personal counsel carried weight in the decision by Japan to withdraw from that very expensive project. There was already a particle collider at CERN in Switzerland. I wondered whether one of these monuments of big science was not enough.

When we left Coombe Mill for Japan, Sandy and I did not know about Hideo Itokowa's standing in Japan. We did know that he had been the Japanese equivalent of our own beloved designer and inventor, Barnes Wallis. Hideo had designed the Zero fighter aircraft used during the Second World War, and after the war he turned his talents to space engineering, to violin design and to founding the Systems Research Institute of Japan. But in England, I can think of no scientist or inventor who could invite the Chancellor of the Exchequer to a private lunch with a visiting foreign scientist. We wondered what was next in store for us. After lunch we all travelled by taxi to the main railway station where Ann, Hideo's wife, met us with drinks of iced tea. She was an engaging, young middle-aged Japanese woman. Her laughter and the warmth of her welcome told us how much we would enjoy ourselves. Hideo had told us that Ann did not speak English but did understand it, and we communicated with her by speech and body language well enough. Soon we were all on the train to Ueda-shi. This was before they built the high-speed Shinkansen line for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, and the journey was to take several hours. As the train travelled, we realized for the first time what an urban country Japan is. We seemed to pass a never-ending succession of factories, houses, and tiny green plots of rice. Not until we reached the central mountains did we see the natural landscape appear.

When we left the train there was a sizeable group to meet us, and across the platform hung banners in English and Japanese saying ‘Welcome to Dr James Lovelock'. They were treating us like royalty or sports stars, and then they took us by car to Hideo's ‘country cottage'. It was a traditional Japanese farmhouse, built of wood and located just outside the small town of Ueda. It was an old building that they had moved from a site elsewhere in Japan. Hideo took us to our room, which had a futon and en suite facilities, and then we were able to look at each other and wonder about this extraordinary day.
The furnishing was sparse by western standards: the central room had a sunken area with a large low dining table in its middle. This was the important part of the house and where everything went on, just as in the spacious kitchen of an English farmhouse. We joined the family meal by sitting on the cushions placed on the rim of a rectangular depression in the floor. Hideo explained that in wintertime there would be a fire beneath the table for warmth. In all of our time here, and for the greater part of our two-week stay in Japan, we ate and lived in the Japanese way, and enjoyed it immensely.

Next day we took a short walk along the country lanes that went from the house to the hills. As we turned the first corner, there stood before us a huge violin, standing twelve feet high, beside the road. A quarter of a mile further uphill we came to an open-air theatre and concert hall, with its terraced wooden seats, and nearby was an enclosed concert hall, presumably for the cooler times of year. The idea that Japanese country life included a theatre and a concert hall within walking distance was a wonder to us. We walked on past small, about one-acre-sized, fields with whole families working in them. Much of the area seemed to be devoted to fruit growing—apples and the delicious
kyoho
grapes. It was perhaps the Japanese equivalent of Snape Maltings in East Anglia or Tanglewood in the United States. Having absorbed the influence of the countryside, we returned and prepared for an excursion to an active volcano. Jiro Hata and Hiroshi Yajima accompanied us to the volcano, which on this occasion was quiescent with the water-filled crater no more than a calm lake. Steaming vents and fumaroles exhaling their sulphury smells reminded us of the fire beneath. Hideo's friends were Takeshi Kanai, a local farmer who was also a software developer and an architect, and Motomasa Shimada, a prominent person in the timber industry and politically active in Nagano. They were a joyful company, making every day as if it were the best of family holidays; visits to exciting places, heavenly treats in Japanese inns and eating-places, and their warm and welcome company. In no place abroad had I ever felt so much at home. Without Sandy, though, I would have been overwhelmed with the kindness and the joy of it. Life as a hermit at Coombe Mill, and the long years of Helen's decline had not equipped me for the intensity of this welcome. Sandy is at home in any social scene and seems effortlessly to become a part of it. Alone, I would have felt awkward; together, we felt as if we were members of Hideo's extended family.

I gave three public lectures during this visit, sharing the platform with Hideo. I would speak the first few paragraphs of my speech in English and then Hideo would translate it into colloquial Japanese. It made an hour's speech last two hours, but the audience, to judge by their laughter and enthusiasm, did not mind. A bilingual friend told me after one of these lectures that Hideo gave a strictly accurate, although free, translation of my words. They were the most informal occasions: once Hideo stopped speaking, grinned, and asked the audience to excuse him because his bladder was full. He left for the lavatory behind the stage and returned after a few minutes. Among the places to which our tireless escorts, Hata and Yajima, escorted us were the Ise Shrine, and to Toba to see the pearl fishers; and for contrast we visited the industrial city, Yokkaichi. Few tourists to Japan go to Yokkaichi, as unlikely a tourist destination as would be Runcorn, in England, or Wilmington, in the USA. Yokkaichi is a chemical industrial town and was notorious in the 1950s for its pollution. In the 1990s, it was an example of how a city with an economy based on the chemical industry should be. In keeping with the protocol of our journey through his nation, Hideo had arranged for us to meet the mayor and members of his council and the business community. At a small informal banquet they welcomed us and let us hear the leaders of the Yokkaichi community tell us proudly of their climb to excellence. Once again, while I felt at home in Japan, there was this lingering doubt that someone more distinguished should have been in my place.

Near the end of our stay, Hideo and Ann took us to the resort town of Atami Springs, not far from Tokyo. Here we stayed the night, and after an evening meal, a group of us walked through the streets in our
yukatas
and sandals to a special entertainment that Ann and Hideo had chosen. The outside seemed like a small shop, and the entertainer and her husband welcomed us in. We went through into a medium-sized room, which had a raised platform, about a foot high, at one end. Initially our small group of about ten made up the audience, but several
geishas
joined us later. Our hostess stepped onto the platform, faced the audience, and began her show. At first, she warmed up her audience and made them merry; then she began her special repertoire of tricks. They were some extraordinary feats involving the muscles of her vagina. First she inserted a large cork, through which was threaded a length of strong cord, and she challenged the audience to produce a champion who could draw it out. No one who tried
could and, after more demonstrations like this, she moved on to her pièce de résistance. She inserted a live goldfish and, with a flourish and a heave of her powerful vaginal muscles, expelled it into a bowl of water on the other side of the room. She did this several times and missed only once. Hideo told us that it had taken her years of patient practice to perfect her skill. In the West, such an exhibition might have been criticized as unseemly, but in Japan, it rated as impermanent art. Sandy and I both felt privileged to see this unusual entertainment and, as we left, the entertainer introduced herself and her proud husband. I could not help but think later, back in England, that the Tate Gallery might have done better to stage its recent Turner Prize exhibitions in Soho, as entertainment as well as art.

Our last joint lecture was due in Tokyo. Hideo and I put on our best effort for Gaia before an impressive audience, and our performance was embellished by a recital played on an Itokawa violin. So ended by far the most fulfilling and extraordinary visit of a lifetime. We felt as if a prince had taken us to his fairy castle and made our dreams real for two whole weeks, but the next morning the Itokawa motorcade took us back to Narita Airport. It was truly a family farewell, and a sad one to judge by the tears that flowed, and we boarded our BA flight back to London feeling that it would transport us from an elevated plane to which we could never return. Our flight home in the comfort of the plane enhanced this feeling. As we flew over the icy forests and mountains of Siberia, they seemed to radiate thoughts of Gulags, torture, and privation. The remembered joy of our visit to Japan, and the comfort as we flew were an almost unbearable contrast to what was once below us.