7
Although News Pop was picking up my tab for travel, hotel rooms, and meals, all sightseeing was to be done on my own nickel. I was still living off the settlement given me when the Calcommon Corporation downsized my job out of existence, so although I could expect a check for a few more months, I didn’t have money to burn.
There’s a large shopping arcade under the Imperial Hotel, and after changing some traveler’s checks for yen in the lobby, I went down to the arcade as my first stop. I passed the fancy art galleries, designer clothing stores, and nice restaurants and made my way to a bookstore. At the bookstore, I bought a good street map of Tokyo and had the clerk circle the location of the Imperial Hotel.
I figured if I got really lost, I could point to the circle on the map and a taxi driver could get me back to the hotel. Of course, that might not always work. I heard a story of a tourist in Tokyo who picked up a matchbook in his hotel’s lobby, figuring that if he ever became lost he could point to the hotel’s name on the matchbook and have the taxi driver take him back to the hotel.
The inevitable happened and the tourist became hopelessly lost. He jumped into a taxi and handed the matchbook to the driver. The driver asked a question in Japanese and the tourist replied in English. It took about two seconds to realize that neither person could speak the other’s language. The tourist kept pointing to the matchbook and gesturing until the taxi driver had a light bulb go on. “Ah!” the driver exclaimed and he started driving. The tourist settled back in the cab and relaxed while the driver drove for about thirty minutes.
Suddenly the taxi came to a stop in an industrial neighborhood that was totally unfamiliar to the tourist. He was trying to figure out where he was while the driver proudly pointed to a building in front of the cab. The tourist looked out of the cab and saw a factory building with a big sign on it that said Tokyo Match Company.
My map had a diagram of the large Tokyo subway and rail system on it. One elevated train, the Yamanote line, runs in a huge circle around Tokyo. This circular line is sometimes used in Japan to describe a speaker. If a speaker is a Yamanote, it means he goes around and around and never comes to the point. I thought riding a loop on the Yamanote line would be a cheap way to get a quick tour of the city. I checked my map and decided to walk to a nearby train station, hop on the Yamanote line, and ride it until I had made a complete circle before getting off at the station next to where I got on.
Walking to the train station from the hotel was an interesting experience. I thought that some racial memory might make the streets of Japan familiar, but although I felt oddly comfortable on the streets, Tokyo was as alien to me as Lagos, Nigeria, or Bombay, India would be.
The twisty streets of Tokyo, originally laid out in a way to confound invading armies, also serve to confound invading tourists. The fact that some streets don’t have names also adds to the fun, along with the Japanese custom of assigning numbers based on the sequence that the buildings in a neighborhood were built. Over time, this custom makes it impossible to guarantee that building four is flanked by buildings three and five. For a country normally viewed by the rest of the world as being orderly and systematic, something as simple as trying to find an address illustrates that the Japanese are as illogical and silly as the rest of us.
As I walked along, the people around me seemed to be in a great rush. In Los Angeles, we sort of meander when we walk. In Tokyo, people were very intent on reaching their destination and not intent on enjoying the journey. As I walked along, I wondered if I was doing the gin-bura, or Ginza stroll. In the old days, the samurai would positively swagger, especially on a big public street in the Ginza district, where all the big money lenders, banks, and smartest shops could be found. Now it looked more to me like the Japanese were practicing the Ginza sprint, because I was the only one strolling.
As people scurried past me, they treated me very much like a tree or one of the metal guardrails that seemed designed to keep people from parking on the sidewalk. The bustle was very reminiscent of New York City, but with one big difference. In Tokyo, not one person bumped into me, jostled me, or even gave me a hard look. The schools of people seemed to flow around me like fish around coral.
I made it to the train station, bought a ticket from a machine, and climbed up to the platform. The train was old, but kept up, and for once I had a good time running around in circles. I ended up in the Ginza, near where I started from, and spent the rest of the day exploring the area and wandering through the big department stores.
For lunch I stopped at the restaurant in the Wako department store that looks over the intersection of Chuo Dori and Harumi Dori, the heart of the Ginza. I ate tiny cucumber, butter, and ham sandwiches that had the crusts carefully sliced off and watched the endless ebb and flow of humanity outside the window.
In the crowd, I saw a tall blond tourist making his way across the intersection. His pale skin, straw hair, and lanky body looked totally out of place in the milling crowd of short, dark-haired pedestrians. He was a pale cork bobbing in a sea of black and brown. I realized that the reason I felt comfortable on the streets was because I blended into the crowd perfectly. That’s not always an advantage in Japan. I know another AJA (American of Japanese Ancestry) who frequently comes to Japan on business. He once told me that he liked to walk with tall, blond business associates because the Tokyo drivers will always stop and let a gaijin (foreigner) cross the street. Because he looked Japanese, my friend was cut no slack by Tokyo drivers, and he was expected to be nimble and watch out for himself when crossing the road.
Junko would be able to blend into this street scene as easily as I would, but in Japan she was an alien. I was used to standing out based on my Asian looks, and I associated racial prejudice with looking different. When I was in the army during the Vietnam War, I was once sitting on the ground with a large number of recruits early in my stint in basic training. A grizzled sergeant came up to us and barked, “Tanaka! Stand up!” I didn’t know what I had done wrong, but I scrambled to my feet as ordered. “Okay, you recruits, look at Tanaka. Take a good look, because this is what a gook looks like, and gooks are the enemy!” My faced burned, but I was nineteen and in the midst of the most frightening and unsettling experience of my life and didn’t know what to do. All I could do was stand there humiliated as the other recruits laughed. What was especially disturbing was this sergeant was African-American, and he must have known what it was like to be singled out because of your race. Unfortunately, whatever life experiences he had along these lines didn’t teach him empathy, only mimicry.
Junko looked just like the people walking around on the street below me. Yet despite looking, acting, and sounding like everyone else, she was a minority because her ancestors were born in Korea. It’s a strange world, and one we make unnecessarily stranger by dividing people up into different types of minorities.
In the afternoon, I took a cab back to the studio and met with a pleasant surprise from Junko. As soon as she saw me, she asked, “Where did you say you bought that sword?”
“At a garage sale.”
“And how much did you pay for it?”
“A hundred dollars.”
“When we leave the studio I want you to go with me to buy a lottery ticket,” Junko said.
“Why?”
“Because you must be incredibly lucky. That sword could be very valuable.”
Stunned, I asked, “How do you know?”
“Those news stories we found made me curious about who the swordsmith Kannemori was and why so many of his swords were stolen, so I did some research against some Japanese language databases. Those databases are more comprehensive than the English language databases we subscribe to. In the university database, I found an article about Kannemori swords that was printed in a scholarly journal in 1987. It described some unusual swords made by Kannemori in the early 1600s. It seems the swords were especially made for the Toyotomi clan. These blades have a design incised into the blades that actually weakens the sword and ruins it as a fighting weapon. Your sword has the same kind of designs as those described in the article. The article talked about blades at the Japan National Museum and in the hands of a private collector here in Japan. Those two had different designs on their blades and yours seems to be different still. If yours is a Kannemori blade it could be worth a lot.”