The restaurant was large, cheerful, and crowded. Diners sat at a long polished wooden counter while the cooks worked on the other side. The specialty of the house was tonkatsu, a breaded pork cutlet, deep-fried and served with a special sauce on a bed of finely shredded cabbage. The restaurant’s name, Tonki, fit with the name of the dish.
“I used to come here in my student days,” Buzz said. “This is a typical neighborhood restaurant here in Tokyo, quite different than the ones we normally go to when we’re on expense account.” We had to wait for a place, sitting along the wall with about thirty other people. There seemed to be a constant ebb and flow of people entering and leaving the restaurant.
“How do we know when it’s our turn?” I asked.
“The woman by the cash register saw us enter. When it’s our turn she’ll call us up.”
I was a little skeptical of the woman’s ability to keep all the new arrivals in order without notes or even a glance towards the door as new customers came in, but sure enough, we were called up in the proper sequence.
The pork cutlets were cooked in front of us in large vats of hot oil. The cooks were all veterans with hands scarred pink and brown from splattering oil. They worked over the vats using extremely long metal chopsticks, seemingly oblivious to the heat and jumping oil from the vats. I thought this might be a boring job, but many Japanese craftsmen seem to have a very Zen-like approach to this kind of career, carefully perfecting their craft though diligent repetition. It’s something we seem to have forgotten in the U.S., where we’re always seeking novelty in the things we do. The thought of spending a lifetime to perfect something as simple as frying a pork cutlet is a notion we can’t fathom.
There’s a story about old-time Tokyo oil sellers that illustrates this attitude. In the 1920s these peddlers used to walk around neighborhoods with a big jug of oil slung on their backs, crying out their wares. A local resident would come out with a pot to buy oil, and the seller would tip the big jug and pour out the purchased oil into the pot. One local oil seller was famous because he would take a Japanese coin that has a small 1/8-inch hole in the center and pour the oil through the hole without getting any on the coin. A visiting tourist once saw this demonstration and exclaimed, “What skill!” The oil seller looked at the tourist and said, “That is not skill. It is practice.”
The food was good and filling and I decided that fast-food tonkatsu could be a big money maker in the states. During the dinner, I mentioned the two muggers and I asked Sugimoto if he thought I should report the incident to the police.
“You want to stay away from Japanese cops. They’re terrible.”
“What do you mean?” I was surprised.
“There’s a story about an emperor in China who had three suspects for a crime,” Sugimoto said. “The emperor didn’t know who the real criminal was, but he knew one of the three had to be guilty. Instead of finding out who the guilty one was he simply had all three killed. In the West, you worry about protecting the rights of the innocent. Here in Japan, the cops are more interested in closing a case. They’re like that Chinese emperor. They’d rather kill innocent men and close the case.”
I looked incredulous, so Sugimoto continued. “Do you remember the Matsumoto poisoning case?”
“Is that the one with the doomsday cult?”
“That’s right, the Aum Supreme Truth, the same cult that released the poison gas in the Tokyo subways. Matsumoto is a small town. One night a cloud of poison Sarin nerve gas rolled over a neighborhood in Matsumoto and seven people died. Hundreds of others were sickened. In that neighborhood lived a judge who had given a judgment against Aum. We know now that Aum wanted to test its nerve gas on people, and they figured they could literally kill two objectives if they released the gas in the judge’s neighborhood.
“After the attack in Matsumoto, the police were puzzled. They didn’t make the link between Aum and the judge, even though at least one newspaper reported it. Instead of tracking down Aum and perhaps preventing the Tokyo disaster, the police decided to close the case by saying a man named Kono caused the cloud of poison gas by mixing garden chemicals to make a weed killer. Scientists from all over Japan pointed out it was absurd to think that an amateur gardener could accidentally make a sophisticated nerve gas in a potting shed, but the police stuck to their theory and even extracted a confession out of Kono-san. I don’t know how they got that confession, but Kono-san recanted it later. Anyway, after the Tokyo gassing, they quietly dropped the case against Kono-san, but they were quite willing to prosecute an innocent man to close the Matsumoto case. The Japanese legal system has something like a ninety-nine percent conviction rate on criminal cases, mostly based on confessions by the people charged.”
“So the bottom line is, you don’t think I should report my incident to the police?”
“Nothing good can come of it and maybe something bad might happen. The police aren’t going to do anything. Two guys seemed to chase you, but you don’t know why. It was an unpleasant chance encounter, and I’m sorry it scared you.”
“Excuse me for saying this, but the Japanese legal system doesn’t sound too attractive.”
Sugimoto hesitated, but since I had plunged in, he decided he could speak frankly, too. “Actually, to most Japanese, the American legal system seems a little crazy.”
“I’m not going to try to defend the American legal system. Something is definitely broken.”
“Why don’t Americans fix it?”
“I don’t know, exactly. One barrier to reform is that there are too many vested interests protecting the current system, so agreement can’t be reached on how to fix it. Some people support radical change and others are fearful they will become victims of unfair changes. It’s a difficult problem because the American system is essentially based on idealism. We honestly believe that an individual’s life and rights are important. Most of us don’t accept arguments that individual rights should be sacrificed. Despite that, we still act in ways that contradict this principle. As a Japanese-American, I’m especially sensitive to this because one hundred twenty thousand Japanese-Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, were rounded up and shipped off to camps in World War II. We weren’t treated with the inhuman cruelty of the Nazi concentration camps, but our rights as citizens were certainly trampled. The U.S. Supreme Court said this action was fine, and it took half a century to achieve redress and overturn the legal underpinnings of this action. Most people don’t realize that for half a century after World War II, any American president who declared a national emergency could take groups of people selected by race or other criteria and ship them off to a camp with the signing of an executive order.”
“Well, the Japanese system may be better, after all.”
“I didn’t say that. The Japanese system seems to be based on maintaining harmony, not on respecting individuals. It’s ironic, but that’s exactly the kind of thinking that promoted the camps for Japanese-Americans. Besides, you seem pretty unhappy with the Japanese system.”
“Actually, I’m unhappy with Japan.”
“Why?”
“We’ve lost our way. We’re drifting without a clear concept of where we should be going as a nation. We adopt Western fads and abandon Japanese customs without any rhyme or reason. Maybe I’m an idealist, too, but we seem to have lost the unique things that make us Japanese.”
“Mr. Sugimoto-”
“Call me Buzz. I like people to call me that.”
“Okay, Buzz. I don’t want to insult you, but I’m puzzled by why you dress the way you do if you have strong feelings about Japan losing her way.”
“What do you mean?”
“You dress very much like James Dean.”
“Of course. James Dean is a symbol of rebellion and I am still a rebel.”
“Yes, but James Dean is an American.”