Wrong About Japan Read Free

who?”
“Takashi.”
But we were already being escorted to a phone box which turned out to be an elevator, and while we ascended mechanically, the kimonoed maid tore up the stairs, spiralling around us so she might meet us when the lift doors opened on the floor above.
“Watch head,” she said, a little out of breath.
The low-ceilinged corridor presented many reasons to “watch head,” as we turned left, then right, past the communal bath and into our room which, if spacious in comparison with the lift, wasvery small indeed. A single bed had been made up on the floor.
“Ah,” said the maid, seeing my unhappy face. “So sorry. We thought one person only.”
I had sent so many faxes asking for a big room that I am almost certain—and of course I may be wrong—that this was as large a room as two people were going to be allowed. Any bigger and they would’ve squeezed in three mattresses. Back in the days of travelling salesmen, this is how hotels accommodated them, and you see the economic sense of it. Now that there are no travelling salesmen the hotel stages cultural performances, traditional songs, little plays, big parties, fifty empty beer bottles after breakfast!
“One more mattress, yes?”
“Yes. Where do we put our suitcases?”
“Ah, so sorry. Japanese room.”
Yes, that’s exactly what the faxes had demanded: a Japanese room, tatami, very minimal. We’d seen it in the movies. Now we resolved to keep it neat, except there was nowhere to hide the luggage, never mind. I never saw a suitcase in the movies.
We had no sooner begun to drink our green tea, sitting cross-legged at a little table that would be pushed to one side at night, than Charley asked me to call Takashi—the first salvo in what wouldbecome a constant battle to have me talk instead of him.
“You call,” I said. “He’s your friend.”
“Dad, I have to go to the toilet.”
As he closed the door behind him, I resolved that I would not give in this time. He would have to talk himself.
“Come!” he called from the bathroom. “Come now. Quick!”
Whatever he had seen in the bathroom, I knew immediately, was very strange. He’d already seen weird Japanese stuff on the way here—the white-gloved taxi driver, the extraordinary neon-lit shop of pink and orange and blue flowers, a newsstand filled with countless manga with spines two inches thick— but the strangeness he was now negotiating was of a different magnitude.
“Everybody with a taste for traditional architecture,” Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in 1933, “must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfection.” He then lamented the cost of traditional construction and described his own compromise between cost and custom. “I at least avoided tiles, and had the floor done in camphour wood. To that extent I tried to create a Japanese atmosphere, but was frustrated, finally, by the toilet fixtures themselves. As everyone knows, toilet fixtures are made of pure white porcelain and have handles of sparkling metal. Were Iable to have things my own way I would much prefer fixtures—both men’s and women’s—made of wood. Wood finished in glistening black lacquer is the very best; but even unfinished wood, as it darkens and the grain grows more subtle with the years, acquires an inexplicable power to calm and soothe. The ultimate, of course, is a wooden ‘morning glory’ urinal filled with boughs of cedar; this is a delight to look at and makes not the slightest sound.”
“Dad, come now ! Look!”
God knows what Tanizaki would have thought, but I was certainly as startled as my son, for the toilet in our traditional hotel looked like a contraption designed for a science-fiction comedy. Its arrays of yellow, red, and blue buttons beside the seat might, as one could guess, lower or raise the device, convert the toilet to a bidet or—surely this must have been my misunderstanding—a shower. However, it was not immediately clear how one would flush it. Finally I pushed the blue