A Letter To Japan

By: Denis Rouse | March 19, 2008 | Travel

I wanted to return to Japan, specifically to Kyushu, that sacred southernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, and I could think of no better individual to lead me than my dear friend Hiroshi Noda. Noda is a native son of Kobe, but he’s lived all over the United States in places like New York (in midtown Manhattan, no less), in California, in Orange County (no emphasis required), and in Arlington, Texas (definitely ditto).

Hiroshi, or Henry, as he is known by his many friends in the United States, should sound familiar to anyone who might be a motorcycle enthusiast. He was once the president of Kawasaki Heavy Industries, USA, now retired after 40 years at the corporation. Former colleagues like Sam Tanegashima and Tatsuya Watanabe speak of Noda’s leadership with respect and admiration. They’ll tell you he bucked trends. They’ll tell you he was a corporate leader with integrity. What a concept.

Today, he lives with his wife Takako (after meeting her, we now call him “Lucky Hiroshi”) and their family dachshund Ai (which means “love” in Japanese) in his hometown of Kobe, where he says he’s busier than he was at a helm of one of the world’s biggest corporations. He is a career counselor to students at his alma mater, Kobe University, and he’s perfecting his art, mokuhan-ga (color prints made out of carved wood blocks) a precision craft that dates back 400 years when Tokyo was called Edo.

“Henry,” I said, “let’s rent a car and go see Kyushu.” Bless him, he said yes.
– Denis Rouse

A Letter to Japan
Dear Hiroshi, I told you that when I got back to the United States, the first thing I would miss would be the Japanese breakfast. I was right. This morning, I would have given anything for a porcelain bowl of natto, the pleasantly odoriferous (like the best cheese) fermented big soybean — traditional style (you so informed me).  I loved that dish that was served as part of the splendorous breakfast buffet at the Mikuma Hotel perched on a bank of the Mikuma River in Hita City in the beautiful Oita Prefecture where old Japan is still extant. On the frosty morning we departed the hotel, the personnel — including the manager — put an accent on their graciousness (so very Kyushu, as we were to learn during our trip) by scraping the ice off the windshield of our Toyota Voxy van.

Of course the spare, elegant Tokugawa architecture impressed me, as did the legacy of Tanso Hirose, revered 19th century Confucian scholar and educator, whose basic credo fused accretion of knowledge with character and morality, and who thought contemporary statesmen at the time “spoke in circles.” (Some things never change.)

When I think of Hita City, can I ever forget the lovely woman street vendor charcoal-grilling unagi, river eel, and ayu, a local, tasty member of the trout family? Never. Nor can I forget our lunch in that earthy place that was once a merchant’s store on an ancient path up from the river. The meal consisted mostly of wild mountain vegetables way off typical Western menus. Neither can I forget the 200-year-old garden behind the restaurant where someone at that intimate establishment said, “As our valued customer please walk in our garden before you take your leave.”

My thought at the time, in that serenity and solitude and harmony of a Japanese garden, was how fortunate we are to be here.

I know you remember those great evenings we spent in the dim past in various Orange County sushi bars where you taught me certain rules of etiquette, a key one being never to mix wasabi into my ceramic dishlet of shoyu as both condiments have unique property so noble that adulteration by combination is a comestible crime. Whenever I witness such an act of cultural heresy, and it’s common here in California Roll country, I think of Musashi Miyamoto and his epic, 18th century showdown with Kojiro Sasaki on Ganryu-jima Island, and the sibilance of the master’s sword stroke. Swoosh.

Anyway, how about that magnificent sushi we shared in Fukuoka in Tenjin where the standard order of a particular kind of sushi is one rather than two pieces, thus allowing much variety before one becomes sated? I thought the fare so fresh as to suggest a nearby portal to the ocean, and of course that’s the reality in Japan. The uni was terrific, an explosion on the palate of silky golden sea urchin roe. No finer caviar exists on the planet. How sad when I got home and read on the Internet a clueless American woman’s soliloquy, a self-styled sushi expert, wherein she opines uni tastes like “rancid mustard sitting in a bucket of seawater for a week.” Madam, sorry your experience was ruined by poor-quality uni not so fresh that it still quivered. I’d like you to meet my friend Musashi. Swoosh.

Religion is a sensitive subject these days. Each of the many Shinto shrines we visited during the tour we took, which you expertly planned, gave me pause. At the Kushida Shrine in Hakata, believed to have been built in 757 A.D., you pointed out the mirror in the holiest place of veneration of the gods who represent elements of nature, especially Amaterasu, the goddess of the sun, and also other spirits representing aspects of the natural world. The mirror, you said, reminds supplicants entreating the gods who’s responsible for the many woes that betide us all. It made abundant sense to me.

At the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine built over the grave of the great 9th century scholar Michizane Sugawara, who served the emperor as a trusted minister — you told the story near a blazing display of chrysanthemums — of his demotion and exile because of slander and political chicanery of a rival clan. Now, Sugawara is celebrated as a man pure of heart and deed, and more than a millennium after his death, worshipped as a god. Could I miss the parallel with other theologies here?
I know how intense the work ethic is in your country. Every time we pulled into a gas station during our 700-mile tour of Kyushu, at least one attendant jumped on our case like a chicken on a June bug like nothing else on earth mattered except handling our patronage with courtesy and dispatch, impeccable manners and unmistakable kindness. It was the same at every restaurant, every hotel — employees literally running to be of service.

Do I understand why parks and gardens are so important in Japan?  Do I know why Japanese people revere settings of profound natural beauty in which to recline peacefully and recharge in quiet repose? I will never forget our private tea ceremony in the elegant tranquility of Rakusuien, the stunning retreat of a Meiji-era Hakata merchant, where the immaculate room, devoid of clutter, was fragrant with tatami and well-aged wood, and filled with the murmur of water running softly over rocks emanating from the artful garden that was clearly visible through large, open rice-paper windows. Is there a more impressive garden in all of Japan than the Suizenji Jojuen Garden in Kumamoto, a 17th Century, 80-year project of Tadatoshi, the third Lord of Hosokawa? I doubt it. The garden replicates the landscape of the 53 stations of the old Tokaido Road that linked Edo and Kyoto, including a dramatic natural sculpture on the rolling green grounds instantly recognizable as Mount Fuji.

And the black castle of Kumamoto … the vision of this magnificently restored 400-year-old citadel lit the evening and could be seen from the window of my 20th floor room in the Nikko Kumamoto Hotel. It made me crazy to know more. I read of the seven-month-long Satsuma Rebellion, the fiery destruction of Kumamoto Castle and the final moments of the real last samurai (sorry Tom Cruise and your silly movie) led by the great Takamori Saigo who, on Sept. 25, 1877, with only 40 remaining warriors of the last traditional samurai army in Japanese history, drew his sword and charged into the guns of the 30,000-man-strong imperial army, the finis of a feudal system that dominated Japan for 700 years.

One of my favorite days was when we drove up the toll road from Fukuoka to Moji at the northern tip of Kyushu, near Ganryu-jima Island in the blue Kanmon-kaikyo Strait where Musashi and Kojiro squared off. Once an important town where people caught the ferry to Honshu, it is now less so because the Kanmon-bashi expressway bridge and the railroad tunnels beneath the strait that get people to Honshu much faster. A shame, I thought, because our experience in the old town was to treasure. The Lonely Planet Guide to Japan doesn’t even mention Moji in their putatively expert text, but rather extols Shimonoseki across the strait on Honshu as the venue to “dare to Fugu.” Just goes to show you these tourist guidebooks have their flaws. I know you will always remember when we entreated the purveyor of a local fish market to tell us where we could get a Fugu lunch. She said, “Wait right here,” and then a pretty young woman showed up and led us hand in hand to heaven, to her family-owned restaurant nearby where Fugu, or potentially poisonous blowfish, is a specialty. Then on it came to our private tatami room the indescribably delicious (I should say intoxicatingly so) Fugu sashimi, Fugu nabe, Fugu kara-age, Fugu okayu, Fugu everything, but a bit of the liver — an overdose of which killed famous kabuki actor Bando Mitsugoro VIII in 1975. One day, Hiroshi, when we’ve drunk enough shochu, let’s “dare to Fugu” just a sliver of the liver. At our advanced age, the downside risk seems negligible.

When I think of our voyage, which frankly is all the time, a slide show begins. Often, image No. 1 is a view from atop a watchtower at a main gate of the moated Yayoi village of Yoshinogari in Saga Prefecture, an evocative archeological site that is an excavation and restoration of the main village of an ancient kingdom that flourished here from 300 B.C. to 300 A.D., a period when Japan was founded, when rice cultivation began, and when a sophisticated culture had lively trade going with China and Korea.

There you are below me standing amidst a group of timbered, thatched-roof pit dwellings in an area of the village, judging from the scale of defense that included a circular moat, a stout fence and a log-frame watchtower, where successive rulers of Yoshinogari resided. I felt a spiritual presence I believe had connection to your ancestors.  A photo I didn’t take, but an image we drove by that remains framed in memory is the window of an old weathered wooden building at the edge of a rice field through which was visible a seemingly haphazard display of gleaming white and blue Imari porcelain, priceless 17th Century examples of that which we had been admiring earlier in a pottery museum in the town of Imari a few kilometers up the road. I know you would have stopped for the shot had I asked you to, but I was looking forward to our destination that evening, and I believe some photographs, particularly the treasured ones, need to remain solely in the refuge of one’s mind. That’s pretty Zen, isn’t it?

In my notes it simply says: onsen, ryokan, Yumotoso Toyokan, Takeo, Saga Prefecture. In memory it says: natural hot spring bath, very traditional Japanese country inn, picturesque mountain town. Go to your tatami mat room — shoes off, of course — disrobe and slip into your yukata, a silky Japanese bathrobe immaculate and folded and fragrant with that just-laundered, snapping clean freshness and ready for you in your tatami mat room. Proceed to the onsen, a natural hot spring bath, where you first wash your soiled tired body and then immerse your weary self up to your bubkas in natural hot spring water, the source of which is under a volcano you’ll see soon. As you turn to loose change while immersed in the onsen up to your bubkas, you notice the smashing, but softly lit Japanese garden visible through a window right in front of you. You know zilch about Japanese culture but this aspect of it, this onsen in which you are immersed up to your bubkas in a soporific, nearly prenatal sort of state, is immersion into its heart. It is whispering in your ear, “here is one of Japan’s secrets for survival in a frenetic age.” After onsen, when you’re dreamy with notions of an evening when the terrors of everyday life are far, far away, report back to your tatami mat room, seat yourself at low wooden table, and await the dutiful women to bring you food and drink with dispatch, with consideration, with a gentle manner that borders disturbingly upon love. Or should I say drink and food, because affection for Suntory whiskey has become primal by now.

Hiroshi, you were kind to me then, admonishing me ever so gently when I began to eat from a small pot of insanely delicious nabe over a brazier placed at my setting instead of, as good manners dictate, spooning a portion of it into my bowl. When the perfectly steamed head of a tai arrived, you said, “Here it is, Denis, your dream.” And of course it was, as you know I know from experience that the head of a fresh fish, particularly a sea bream from the Inland Sea, done the Japanese way, is a matchless culinary experience with a message that Western culture is throwing into the garbage treasure from the sea that could otherwise feed the needy of the whole planet. Yes, I loved the eye, relished it in fact. Then, after wave after wave of more delicacies, comes the hibachi and the sliced morsels of sizzling Saga beef, and damn if we aren’t having the world’s most succulent moo-moo for what amounts to dessert, and then the table is cleared, and the futon beds are made, and you fall right down into the best night of sleep you’ve had in 40 years. Hear this: Japan makes the rest of the world seem like it isn’t getting life quite right.

Please extend my special thanks again to Mr. Tatsuya Watanabe, executive director of Kawasaki’s Autopolis International Raceway, for hosting our great visit. The udon and skewered Oita beef lunch was a knockout, and I appreciated the sensory lift in the pressure tank usually used to give drivers and riders an edge on the track, and our tire-scrubbing laps in the Honda stock car with a pro at the wheel had me biting washers out of my seat. And to Robert Watson, marketing director at the Oyama Yumekobo store and plum winery, thanks for the wonderful samples, especially for the plums from the ferment we enjoyed so much. Bob, Hiroshi said you spoke perfect Japanese with a slight Kyushu dialect, coming from him, trust me, high praise indeed. Was she your Japanese wife we saw with whom you were driving to Hita City after our meeting?  If so, in my next life, I want to be you.

After having survived the disastrous Kobe earthquake in 1995 that killed 6,000 people, I wondered if you felt any trepidation during our volcano tours later in the trip that included a cable car ride nearly up to the summit of Unzen-dake, the huge peak of which erupted in 1991 after lying dormant for 200 years, an explosion that left at least 40 people dead and hundreds evacuated. I’m not crazy about cable cars, and I would have been OK had you declined, but you didn’t, and so the incredible views of the lava torrent and of the storied Shimabara Peninsula far below will remain etched in memory.

As we were ascending the road to check out volcano No. 2, mighty Aso-san, the largest active caldera in the world with a circumference of some 80 miles, to peer into its very active crater of Naka-dake, I was reading a few tidbits in The Lonely Planet Guide to Japan:  “In 1979, an eruption here killed a woman on her honeymoon. … The last major blast was in 1993, but the summit is regularly declared off-limits due to toxic (sulphuric) gas emissions. … In 1958, when a totally unexpected eruption killed 12 onlookers, concrete bomb shelters were built around the rim … nevertheless an eruption in 1979 killed three visitors over a kilometer away from the cone … and destroyed a cable car.”

Turns out we did have to speed-walk away from the edge of the crater, due to an enormous cloud of poison gas from jigoku (that’s “hell” in Japanese) heading straight for us on a shifting wind, but I got enough of a choking whiff of it to know for sure that not much more than that could easily be fatal. However, we survived Naka-dake. Marketers of message T-shirts, take note of this inspired brilliant copy researched first hand.

What can I say of Nagasaki, a city by a bay every bit as beautiful as San Francisco? Was this the stunning panorama of the city from high on a hill in the plentitude of industrialist Thomas Blake Glover’s garden that inspired Giacomo Puccini’s immortal paean to Japan, Madam Butterfly? Was this the place where the accidental arrival of a Portuguese ship in 1542 signaled the beginning of Japan’s fateful connection to The West? Was it here in 1597, that 26 European and Japanese Christians were crucified? Or in 1614, when the religion was banned and Catholic Portuguese and Spanish traders were expelled in favor of the Protestant Dutch who were perceived to be more interested in trade than in religion?  Was it here the Shimabara peasant uprising of 1637, when Amakusa Shiro and 37,000 of the faithful who held out for 80 days were slaughtered at the southern tip of the Shimabara Peninsula at Hara-jo, was the final chapter of the Christian Century in Japan? That when Nagasaki re-opened to the west in 1859 it quickly became a major economic force, particularly in shipbuilding, an industry that made it a target on August 9, 1945? That the bomb scored a direct hit on Urakami Cathedral, the largest Catholic Church in Japan? That it killed 75,000 of Nagasaki’s 240,000 population? That most victims were women, children and senior citizens? That those killed also included 13,000 conscripted Korean laborers and 200 allied POW’s? We visited this history at memorials and museums but nothing affected me more profoundly than the Atomic Bomb Museum at ground zero where I thought not for the first time there’s something terribly wrong in the blueprint of our entire species that such disaster, although I pray not, is far from unlikely to occur again.

Hiroshi, please accept my heartfelt thanks again for a singular experience you made richer with the privilege of our stay in your home in Kobe. The dinner Takako prepared was magnificent, and it was an honor to meet Sam and Nobuko Tanegashima and especially reminisce with Sam about old days and mutual friends in the motorcycle business. He answered my question about basashi — raw horsemeat, and a favored delicacy in his hometown of Kumamoto that its origin began in the aftermath of a great battle when Japanese history pivoted, when soldiers were very hungry. Stay well and please visit us at your earliest possible opportunity. I can’t guarantee anything as fabulous as our Kyushu sojourn but I’ll do my very best. Warmest personal regards, Denis.

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 1 pages