Scattered Moments

Looking for something today ended with a box of old photographs and postcards, the search stalled while I rummaged through scattered moments and seasons from bygone days. Unlike some, I’ve always resisted the notion of aligning old photographs in systematic pages of year and occasion, a layout enabling the viewer linear movement through memories that are better enjoyed in haphazard order. Suppose it could be a way of rehashing the past peculiar to just me, but the catapult from one disjointed old image to another is the kind of reminiscence I savor.

Something warns me that few beside myself will find much meaning or value in the three photographs and two postcards I set aside. Can’t remember when I last looked at these pictures, small and rumpled paper cards that got tossed into a box when I left Japan. Each one of the five rings a distinct tone, has a background that could fill, well…

Postcard from a longtime friend who left Japan after a long stay. For some years all non-Japanese residents of Japan were required to register at a government office called ‘Alien Registration.’ This old postcard is an American card, one probably made by a photographer familiar with Japanese Immigration procedures. From my friend Laura, it brings her back in a thousand ways.

Through the connections of my teacher or deliberations unknown to me, one of my works in brushwriting (shodô) was selected for inclusion in an exhibition. Mine is at the top left in the green frame. Makes me wonder how Motohashi-san, my longtime teacher is getting along.

Picture of my very first desktop in Komae, 1982. Most of the books are dictionaries of one kind or another, the large red one at the left is even now resting at one end of my Florida desk. This photo reminds me of a good friend and the house we rented beside a bamboo grove on the grounds of an old temple.

‘A Man of the World’ (Ein Mann von Welt!), a German postcard from one of my oldest friends, mailed from New York to Tokyo.

A memento of Singapore purchased at a flea market while on holiday in Southeast Asia. The picture caught my eye with its sublime composition of eight family members, almost certainly ethnic Chinese—the unknown photographer a true artist. Oddly enough, looking at the picture brings back a terrible car crash I came through one week earlier in Southern Thailand.

As Dean Martin once sang, “Memories are made of this…”

Lost Along the Way

Once more thoughts today have drifted east, curling backward through maze-like tracks of memory to faces and experiences of almost thirty years ago. No idea what it is that brings Junichi Mori to mind, but suddenly there he is, tall, gawky and ink-stained, writing in elegant swirls of jet black sumi-ink the old proverb or tidbit of poetry that was our assignment.

Soon after arriving in Tokyo all those years ago, I began looking around for someone to teach me Japanese brushwriting, shodô—in English, ‘the way of the brush.’ It was one of the first enchantments in my fascination with Japan and once settled there the hope was to jump right under the wing of a teacher. The practice of writing with brush and ink has always been taught in Japanese schools and teachers are about as rare as acorns under an oak tree, with every neighborhood boasting one, two, sometimes three teachers. I found Mrs Motohashi down at the end of my street, showed up at her door one day and sputtered out in broken bits of Japanese my desire to learn brushwriting. She told me to come back on Saturday morning at 10:00.

And there I was, sitting painfully on my heels, back straight before a low table laid out with felt pad, white rice paper, paperweight, a well of ink and a fat horsehair brush. To my left sat a college boy, and I noticed right off that he had the hands of a pianist, well-shaped and strong, not too big. It would have been obvious to anyone that the Chinese characters gliding off the end of his brush were hardly the work of a dilettante.

His name was Junichi, he lived a few houses down, was in his junior year at university studying English literature and had been a student of Mrs Motohashi since old enough to hold a brush. We became good friends and soon I was spending an hour or more at his home several times a week, his mother stuffing me with cakes and cookies, the occasional lunch or dinner and endless questions about America. Junichi’s family was the second to take me into their lives and show me the depth and breadth of Japanese kindness and heart. Conversation with Junichi—half English, half Japanese—was always easy, but curiously enough he never asked questions about English, about his reading assignments, and in the same vein, I never asked him to reinforce Mrs Motohashi’s teaching or to correct my faltering brush.

In another year he graduated from university and completely unrelated to his study, accepted a job in one of the big department stores. I soon learned that Junichi’s path was not at all uncommon among university graduates, that very few indeed ended up in a job related to university study. But he seemed happy, continued to live at home and continued to visit Mrs Motohashi once a week for calligraphy lessons.

A year passed and though Junichi was still shy of the average age when Japanese men marry, his parents began to get ideas of ‘arranging’ something. The traditional arranged marriages once common in Japan still have small presence in modern times, though it is becoming more rare, especially in the big cities.

It worked out badly for Junichi. Through both sets of parents arrangements were made for Junichi to marry the daughter of a Buddhist priest, for him to be adopted into the bride’s family with the assurance that Junichi would one day take over as the head priest at the temple in Kyoto. Yeah, I know…from English literature to a department store and then to a Buddhist temple on a mountainside in Kyoto. I attended the wedding, and I offered my best wishes to bride and groom, and to both families (my Japanese somewhat better at this point). But then for reasons I was not party to, it all came apart after several months of marriage. From the little I heard, things did not work out as the bride’s father expected.

These days, many years after the broken marriage Junichi is an English teacher in a public junior high school in Tokyo. We lost touch after the marriage failed and he returned to Tokyo from Kyoto. It was almost twenty-three years later that I got a phone call from his mother. She gave me Junichi’s number, I called, we talked but then never did manage to meet again. Feels like I lost a friend.