Foreigners who live for any length of time in Japan soon discover that many of their experiences, both the delightful and demoralizing, prove to be not merely commonplace but identical to the experiences of most other foreigners. This may be equally true of ex-pats living in Ecuador or Senegal, and therefore a banality; but somehow I doubt there is another country in the world where patterns of behaviour and speech are as standardized and predictable as in Japan. Most gaijin at some point undergo the ‘food test’ under the watchful eye of their Japanese hosts (I passed steamrollered sparrow grilled on a stick, but failed the bottled grasshoppers in black sauce), and many still have tales of torment and endurance at a Japanese bank (though perhaps no different these days from similar tales elsewhere). All will certainly have been lost in trying to find their way around the urban streets, with or without a taxi driver’s aid, and there was once a time when I could count on one hand the number of foreign women I knew in Tokyo who hadn’t woken up one morning to find their underwear missing from the washing line.
Many also observe a more peculiar facet of behaviour here: parental complacency. Though hardly unique to Japan, it is common enough to provoke some gaijin from time to time to air their incomprehension in letters to the local English-language dailies or in online comments and blogs. Perhaps they had seen, as I once did, a mother in the front seat of a passing car bouncing her baby on her knees, or another chatting to a friend as her child skipped along the edge of a station platform. Or they may have recently read about the baby left in a car on a blistering summer’s day who died of heat exhaustion while mother went shopping and father played pachinko, or the kids at home alone who died in a fire or by falling from a window.
Except in casual conversation, I had never felt impelled to air my own exasperation at such occurrences. They were things invariably registered at several removes, the inevitably dissociative effect of daily media reportage. I would feel nonplussed or briefly angered but powerless always to envision any change in a nation of such fatalists, where ‘sho ga nai’ – ‘It can’t be helped’ – is a standard comment on whatever it may be that has happened.
One windy autumn day I had a more immediate encounter.
It was mid-afternoon and I was leaving home for a late shift at the office. I took the lift down to the lobby of my building and was checking my mailbox there when the caretaker cheerily emerged from his room with a parcel of books that had arrived for me. We chatted for a short while, and I decided to take the package back up to my apartment, where I spent a few minutes opening it and inspecting the contents. I left the books on the kitchen table and set off again.
The block of flats in which I lived was set back a hundred metres or so down a narrow street which ran at right angles into Waseda-dori, one of the busiest roads in Tokyo. As I started walking towards the junction I could see the traffic in full flow ahead, an almost constant stream in both directions, left to right, right to left. A sudden gust of wind through a gap between the buildings whipped up the dust on the street, and I was forced to pause and put my briefcase down to clear my eyes. When I looked up again I saw a woman on a bicycle gliding along the pavement and over the short pedestrian crossing at the end of the road, closely followed by a young boy on a smaller bike. They had disappeared from view when a younger girl on a child’s tricycle entered the frame in pursuit.
As she pedaled over the crossing another burst of wind conjured into the air a small polythene bag, transparent and empty, from the wire basket at the front of her cycle, teasing it away from her instinctive grasp. She stopped right there in the middle of the crossing and clambered off the bike, her gaze never leaving the manic bag which swooped and soared through the passing traffic out into the middle of the road.
Things which happen quickly often seem in memory to have taken place in slow motion. In my mind the image of the bag itself floating on the wind gives a retrospective aura of unhurried ease to the incident, like a half-remembered dream. I can’t recall at what point I started to run – perhaps at that very moment as the green delivery truck parked on the nearside to the right of the junction came into my view. I was probably already yelling out the danger – ‘abunai! abunai!’ – but my voice too seemed to float away on the wind as the little girl sleepwalked out into the road. In that moment of suspended time the gap between us seemed unbridgeable. And then she stepped blindly beyond the parked truck.
I cannot say she flew through the air, but both her feet must certainly have left the ground as she was lifted and jerked backwards by the hood of her duffle coat. A black car sped obliviously past as we both fell against the front of the truck and tumbled to the ground. Regaining our feet somehow, she stared at me with wide, uncomprehending eyes, unamazed to hear her language bursting from a frenzied foreign face, and pointed anxiously with grubby hands at her precious bag now swirling in the gutter on the far side of the road.
I told her not to walk into the road; I told her that the traffic was dangerous; I told her that she must stay with her tricycle, that I would fetch the bag for her. I asked her if she understood, and then we locked little fingers in the common Japanese gesture of agreement. Eventually I weaved my way through the gaps in the traffic and duly retrieved the torn and flimsy treasure.
By the time I got back across the road her mother had reappeared from somewhere and was chastising her for her tardiness, bending over her and brushing down her coat. I gave the girl her bag, which she took with both hands silently, while the mother bowed to me profuse apologies, embarrassed for the inconvenience her wayward daughter had caused me. I told her it had been no trouble, anxious at first to spare the girl a further scolding, and before I could catch my breath again they were off, pedaling back up the pavement in the direction from which they had come.
I stood for a moment, my pulse still racing, looking around me with sudden self- consciousness, but also, I began to realize, for witnesses, as if I needed some kind of consolation or at least some affirmation of what had just occurred. There was nobody in sight, incredible in such a place on a weekday afternoon – no one waiting at the bus stop over the road, no customers inspecting the vegetables outside the corner shop, no passing pedestrians or other cyclists, not even the driver of the badly parked delivery truck.
I walked back down the side-street to retrieve my battered briefcase, dropped at some point during my sprint, and sat on a low wall. Slowly at first, but then with growing intensity, the enormity sank in, and I became aware that my legs were shaking. The power of indignation almost pulled me to my feet again – the indignation I had failed to express – to set off in pursuit of the young girl’s nonchalant mother and sting her with a sermon on parental care.
But already I had only half a mind to do so. The feeling of relief that had washed over me at first was settling into something deeper, a contentment that was swelling into a kind of elation, such as I felt I had never fully experienced: the private elation of undiluted selflessness.
As I walked to the bus stop I played the incident over in my mind, as if to test its verity, to find some fault with the facts. I continued to do so for many days, for many weeks afterwards, but each time it fell out the same: if I hadn’t encountered the caretaker in the lobby, or had left the package in his care… if I had taken a few seconds longer to wipe the dust from my eyes… if the single toggle on her duffle coat that held it together had been undone like all the others…
Although that sense of elation has faded with the passing years, like passion, like grief, like most emotions, I remind myself of it from time to time, of how it was granted to me once, with divinely whimsical irony, to play the hero – a hero in a drama unobserved, a hero unproven. A sense of grace endures, a quieting gratitude for something unsought, and if I never do a good deed in my life again, I can at least claim to have had one experience most foreigners in Japan – perhaps most people everywhere – never get to have.
