Wrong About Japan (12 page)

“You can see,” Kenji said, “that this is set twenty or thirty years ago.”

In fact, this had not occurred to me.

“Perhaps,” he said, “it is Miyazaki’s childhood. What tells us that this is so long ago? Well, firstly the three-wheeled van, and then the local bus it passes. See the model. He is not being romantic about the countryside but he is perhaps nostalgic about his childhood, and for a physical world that, while not pristine then, has been seriously messed-up since.”

The three characters finally arrive at the house on foot. To my eye, it is a simple farmhouse, rundown, rustic, but also particularly Japanese. The first time I saw the film, I wished to live in that house, and it was because of this that I thought it might be interesting to watch it with an architect, to extract all the information that was before my eyes but culturally inaccessible. Now Kenji explained that this was in fact two houses, an old house with a modern addition, a Western-style front constructed in perhaps the 1920s.

Western? It had seemed so Japanese.

Wonderfully, this was not the only misunderstanding. First, Kenji told us, this dusty, slightly rundown house belonged to a rich family. “Who else could afford such a luxury? Also,” he said, “it is a kind of a ghost house.”

“What makes it a ghost house?”

“Well, as you will see in a moment, there is a well.”

“So?”

“The well is a very animistic thing. It is a hole to another world, to ghosts and spirits. A Japanese viewer sees that well and immediately understands that this will be a story about spirits. Besides— there!—the older girl is calling. She says, This is like a haunted house.”

A moment later we see how this notion is developed: girls play, running, whooping, performing handsprings which serve to draw them (and us) from the house and into nature. Suddenly we are confronted by a vast and ancient camphor tree which looms like a mountain above the children. This tree will be a major character in the story, the world of the wonderful mythic Totoro. But only after the girls enter the house, and a single nut drops mysteriously to the floor, do we really begin to feel the place is haunted.

It is just at this point, as the father offers rational
explanations—squirrels, perhaps, or acorn mice—that Miyazaki shows us that well, which in New York City had seemed merely commonplace, utilitarian.

Then the girls open the back door. It is bright outside, dark inside. As the door swings open, we see tiny black creatures and hear a high-pitched sort of “squittering” as they flee the light. We are reminded of both bats and cockroaches, but these are neither.

The girls scream but then, without reference to each other, square their shoulders and march forward, an action that not only strengthens the drama, but also commences an architectural tour. By freezing the frame at any point, we could have had a tutorial on the Japanese house, but let us move forward to the bathroom. “Father, Father,” the girls call. “There’s something in here.”

“What?”

“We don’t know. Squirrels? Not cockroaches. Not mice.”

The father peers inside the bath and there, rendered in loving detail, is a Japanese soaking tub (the history of which might be a book in itself), where later we will see the family bathe together. Kenji will point out that the bathroom is illuminated solely by light “stolen” from the kitchen next
door, which is not only architecturally ingenious, but perfectly revealing of how Japanese families traditionally bathed, with no shred of shame or immodesty.

Meanwhile, the girls are still excited about these spooky little black things they have seen.

“Ah so,” says the father (yes, really, that is what he says). “It must be makkuro kurosuke.”

“Makkuro kurosuke?”

“The black spots that appear in front of your eyes,” he explains, “when you come inside on a bright day.”

The girls laugh. “Come on out, makkuro kurosuke. Come out or we’ll pull your eyes out.”

Miyazaki then undercuts this rational explanation, showing us these black dust bunnies scuttling into a drainpipe by the children’s feet.

“Okay,” the father says, “now we need to find the stairs to the second floor. Can you do this for me? We need to open the windows.” The children run off and our architectural tour continues, as fine a tour as you could find in any museum. This is at once a real house and a vividly imagined one, filled everywhere with particular detail: shoji with two transparent panels in each; a circular window between rooms; tatami over which the children, shoes still on their feet, must walk on their knees.

Very soon there will be more drama, nuts falling and strange little black spirits rustling, skittering from the light. Mei catches one and carries it downstairs, trapped like a mosquito in her hands, and from here the story moves relentlessly forward to her meeting with the Totoro, the spirit of the woods, and introduces us to the sick mother, who unlike the stock figure in an American movie neither dies nor returns home.

That night in Minato-ku, Charley fell asleep quite early. He had, after all, seen the film many times already and the purpose of this particular viewing was not to annotate it to death but to understand that this beautiful entertainment contained a whole history and culture hidden between the frames.

We then arrived, however, at the most exciting example of hidden signs. High in the ceiling of the attic, where Mei caught the dust bunny, there is an ornament, no more commented on than the red gate to the shrine or the simple rope around the camphor tree indicating that it’s sacred. Though the director does nothing to draw our attention to it, I recall the paper decoration hanging from the ridgepole looked something like a bird. It would have existed, Kenji explained, from the time construction on the house began. We were now talking not of figments made of
pixels but of actual substances. During construction the ornament on the ridgepole would have been blown by the wind and drenched by rain until it was torn and tattered. Once there was a roof to shelter it, this weathered talisman would have been tucked down into the attic and kept there, protected, for good luck. All this Charley would learn in the morning; for now, at his father’s favourite part, he was emitting a sweet adenoidal snore.

Kenji found Charley a quilt and went on to tell me that Japanese carpenters are often—unlike their visualist cousins in Shinjuku—very religious. A great many Shinto ceremonies are associated with the construction of a house and these are part of Kenji’s life in Tokyo today He began describing ceremonies with rice and salt and sake and I later found the same information in William Coaldrake’s
Way of the Carpenter
, which is far more quotable than my so-called reporter’s notebook: “Young bamboo stalks are used to mark the four corners of a sacred enclosure on the building site,” he writes. “These are joined by a sacred rope of new straw (hymenia) bearing sacred, folded white invocatory papers. An altar is erected with a separate table for offerings of rice, salt, fruit and sake…. The most important ceremony celebrating completion of the assembly of the timber frame, is the ridge-raising ceremony
(Joutoushiki
or
muneageshiki)
. It includes the ceremonial raising and positioning of the ridgepole, thanksgiving for the safe erection of the frame, and prayers for the long life and well-being of the building and its inhabitants…. In traditional practice, the chief master carpenter himself frequently officiated at the ceremonies, donning the robes of a Shinto priest…. The chief master carpenter was formerly responsible for making the ritual implements and decorations for these ceremonies, such as the ridge plaque and sacred bow and arrow that were attached to the ridgepole during the ridge-raising ceremony, but this practice has largely lapsed.”

Sometime around ten we rewound the tape, still only one-third played, and Kenji, kind as ever, drove us back to Asakusa, where we slipped through the narrow lanes moving bicycles aside as if playing a life-sized game of checkers that would finally lead us to our tatami-matted room where all seven pounds of
Gundam Officials, Limited Edition
was placed reverently in the tokonoma.

“I feel sorry for Takashi,” said Charley “I think he might be mad at me.”

“Why? For visiting Kenji instead of his grandmother?”

“No, because I’m going to see Mr. Miyazaki.
Maybe he thinks I am not loyal to Mr. Tomino.”

“No,” I said. “I’m sure that’s not true. Did you clean your teeth?”

“Yes,” he lied, and immediately fell into a sleep from which he would not be woken.

10.

We would have been wiser to have breakfasted on fish and miso. There was a long, long day ahead, an interview with the elusive Mr. Kitakubo of
Blood: The Last Vampire
and then a tour of the Ghibli Museum and a visit to Miyazaki’s studio. Our schedule had
protein written all over it, but we were weary of live fish and dead fish and battered fish and fish with skewers stuck up their little bottoms. So we left the ryokan, and headed in search of Mister Donut, stepping wide of the early-morning alcoholics feeding their hundred-yen coins into the sake machine on the corner, past the kids with their black hair stripped back to a dangerous-looking anime brown, then crossing over the bridge at the Asakusa View Hotel to the other side of Kokusai Street, where weaving bicyclists sliced between us, quiet and polite as death itself. At last, thank God, we finally located Mister Donut, where we discovered, to our huge surprise, none other than he who had so subtly steered Charley to Starbucks.

There stood Takashi, no longer a Mobile Suit pilot, but a teenage employee, dressed neatly in a multicoloured uniform with
Mister Donut™
embroidered on its pocket. In this role he would not acknowledge us, unless you interpreted the rising glow in his cheeks as a form of recognition. Takashi was in character, completely. He was Mister Donut himself. He greeted us as customers, as strangers to be respected and served, issuing that singsong welcome that Paul told me had its origins in the Yoshiwara Pleasure Gardens, whose courtesans developed a kind of lingua franca understood by all the powerful
visitors from distant provinces, a polite greeting that echoes centuries later at the entrance to every department store in Tokyo.

“Irasshaimase
,” he said, in unison with his workmates. “Please?” he enquired, his expression sugar-glazed, no sprinkles.

“Two doughnuts,” I said. “One milk, one coffee.”

“Stay or go?” he enquired, his English as American as his menu.

“To stay,” I said, then regretted it, for I had just glimpsed the fury in his eyes.

Moments later we were carrying our trays to the farthermost corner where Charley would neither eat nor look at me.

“Come on. This is not my fault.”

“I
told
you,” he whispered. “Takashi thinks we are disloyal to Mr. Tomino.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Not to him, Dad. He can’t understand how we can go to Studio Ghibli either.”

“More likely he doesn’t want us to see him here. He can’t be proud of working here. It’s like McDonald’s.”

We ate our doughnuts in sugary misery, and when we left for our meeting with the director of
Blood: The Last Vampire
, we shared no more intimacy
with our former friend than that offered by the Yoshiwara farewell—although I did notice that Takashi’s bow was very low indeed, and I suspected him of sarcasm such as I had suffered, many years before, in the house of a Japanese friend’s father who had fought Australians and despised us all.

It was not until we were on the train that Charley spoke. “I still have his cell phone,” he said.

“Good, we can text-message him.”

“No. But I have to give it back.”

“We’ll take it to him tomorrow. In the morning, before we leave.”

“We should buy him a gift, Dad. He was really nice to us.”

“Yes, very kind.”

“We should have taken him to meet Mr. Tomino. That would have made him really happy.”

“Well, I think he was too shy, but I should have offered anyway.”

“Yes,” said Charley. “And it would have been easy to take him to dinner with the otaku, to that place, you know, with that guy.” He was referring to the evening we’d spent in a Shinjuku restaurant patronised by manga artists, where the producer of the hugely popular anime and manga series One Piece taught him tricks requiring not a word of English, and where Yuka the otaku leaned behind my
back and whispered to Charley, “Shush, big secret, there is a new Mobile Suit Gundam series, very soon.” And the mama-san had once been a famous radio announcer, and the master of the house was from a samurai family and now, suffering from emphysema, was sucking oxygen through plastic tubes, sitting grandly, cross-legged, while taking our orders. Gathered all around us were manga writers, artists, anime producers, publishers like Irie-san from Kodansha. Here someone had produced the latest
Shonen jump
, a best-selling manga, warm off the presses, in which a huge spread depicted our host himself, a samurai with plastic tubes and a bevy of cute cartoon nurses tending him. We were, at that giddy moment, at the red-hot centre of the manga world, or so it felt to both of us.