A Heart To Heart With Japan

It was during autumn that Japan first captivated me, making me realise that not living there would feel like a self-imposed exile for life. I was 26, returning to my office in New York City after a business trip to Hong Kong filled with towering boardrooms and banquets in the casinos of Macau. My Japan Airlines itinerary included an overnight layover at Narita Airport near Tokyo—a stop I had no desire to make.

Narita was notorious for over a decade of violent protests by local farmers over the demolition of their rice paddies, culminating in a burning truck ramming through the airport gates not long before. Yet, bound by flight schedules, I found myself stepping into the sleek, high-tech calm of the arrivals area and out into a vibrant, singing autumn afternoon.

A shuttle bus whisked me to an airport hotel, and an elevator carried me up to my floor. Stepping out, I was greeted by a pristine corridor so immaculate that my eyes were drawn straight to the window at the far end. There, framed perfectly, were the first hints of crimson and gold from the surrounding trees. The harmony was striking—it was almost impossible to tell where the forest ended and the building began.

After breakfast the next morning, I still had four hours to spare before check-in. Following a sign in the hotel lobby, I hopped onto a free shuttle van bound for the airport town. Twenty minutes later, I stepped off on a bustling road, crossed the street, and found myself in a world that felt unexpectedly intimate and human-scaled. The streets were so narrow they barely accommodated cars, and many houses were made of wood. Paneled doors slid open to reveal tatami-matted tearooms and restaurants, their picture windows framing trees just beginning to turn. The silence was profound, the streets deserted, and the late-October sky cast a gentle brightness over everything, lending the day an air of both serenity and nostalgia.

I wandered through the maze of streets until I arrived at a large gate that opened into a courtyard heavy with the scent of sweet incense. At the far end stood a sprawling wooden meditation hall, surrounded by protective statues and what appeared to be graves. At the time, I had no idea that Narita was a renowned pilgrimage destination, dedicated to the fire god and steeped in a thousand years of history. Nor did I know that some pilgrims walked the forty-six miles from central Tokyo to pay their respects. I couldn’t have guessed that the Dalai Lama himself would visit just months later, sending his monks here to deepen their understanding of the Shingon sect, Japan’s mystical and esoteric school of Buddhism closest to his own tradition.

I let my instincts guide me into the temple garden, where a group of kindergartners in pink and blue caps darted across the lawns, gathering fallen leaves. Almost immediately, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, I felt an uncanny familiarity with the place—more than I had ever felt for my apartment in New York or even the street where I’d grown up. Perhaps it wasn’t the place itself but the feeling it evoked: a bittersweet blend of wistfulness and buoyancy that seemed to resonate deeply within me.

The tranquil morning had such a profound effect on me that by the time I boarded my plane that afternoon, I had made a life-changing decision: to leave my seemingly comfortable job in New York City and move to Japan. Four autumns later, I found myself standing with a suitcase outside the door of a small temple nestled in Kyoto’s eastern hills. My youthful plan was to spend a year in a simple, unadorned room, immersing myself in everything I couldn’t grasp amidst the hustle and glass towers of Midtown Manhattan.

That plan lasted exactly a week—just enough time for me to realise that scrubbing floors and raking leaves before collapsing with two monks in front of the TV didn’t align with my romanticised vision. I soon relocated to an even smaller room—a mere seventy-five square feet—with no toilet, no telephone, and no visible bed. I convinced myself that life on the margins of the world offered more space to lose oneself and stumble upon new inspiration.

Better yet, I was back to the basics, with few words to rely on, and the contacts on my business card and résumé held no weight in Japan. Every trip to the grocery store brought some delightful surprise, and I stopped checking my watch; each day felt like it contained endless hours. On my third week in the city, I visited Tofukuji, one of Kyoto’s five main Zen temples, to witness its abbot, Keido Fukushima-roshi, receive a new level of responsibility. There, I met Hiroko, a spirited and charming young mother of two from southern Kyoto. She invited me to her daughter’s fifth birthday party, and before long, my year of temple exploration turned into a year of watching new love take flight.

Now, as I step into the post office in Deer's Slope, I can hardly remember the bright-eyed kid who once believed that purity, kindness, and mystery were confined to the temple walls, and that everything beyond them was profane. The beauty of Japan, however, lies in cutting through such divisions and reminding you that true grace and compassion can be found just as easily in a convenience store, at a ping-pong table, or in a bar where two monks are joyfully getting drunk over another Hanshin Tigers game.

My trusty protector behind the post-office counter, with her black, wavy hair cascading down to her shoulders, flashes me a smile of welcome. I imagine she might be relieved to take a break after handling family pension matters all morning. I place the kimono I'm sending to my ten-year-old goddaughter in London on the scales. Long familiar with my clumsiness, she offers to box it up and asks if the little girl would enjoy some pictures of Nara deer on the package. The one time, fatally, I came in during the Pico-handler’s lunch break, a much younger woman handled my postcard with the care one might reserve for something infectious, asked if Singapore was in Europe, hurried back to whisper frantic questions to the coffin-faced boss near the door, and ended up charging me four dollars for a stamp.

Now, after buying a 3-D postcard of two bears enjoying green tea in kimono—my mother can never resist such quirky pieces of Japan—I head out into the little lane of shops, past the computer store that once placed two white kittens in its windows to attract customers. In the local supermarket, the quiet, pale lady with the sad Vermeer face and braids running down to her waist looks relieved that, for once, I haven't left a copy of Henry Miller's effusions in the photocopy machine. An old man sits alone at a small table next to where the mothers are briskly boxing up their groceries, as if waiting for a bridge game to begin. Across the street, the fountain of good cheer at the bakery bustles as fresh loaves are sliced, while a soft-voiced woman purrs on the FM station.

Our main park begins less than two hundred yards behind the shops, and as I pass the elementary school, I can hear the kids chanting, on this warm blue day, the forty-seven syllables of the hiragana alphabet, in the ceremonial song that features each syllable once and only once.

A little like the Anglican hymns we used to sing in school, I think, or the Pledge of Allegiance, which we had to recite during my brief time in a California classroom.

This song, though, might be the scripture of Japan. Bright though they are in color, blossoms fall, I hear the children shouting. Which of us escapes the world of change? We cross the farthest limits of our destiny and let foolish dreams and illusions be gone. I'd never lived by a farmer's calendar until I arrived in Deer's Slope, and it was hard for me to guess that even the Disney-worthy Californian houses along School-dori could be guided by a cycle of nine harvests and petitions to the sun goddess. Last autumn, Hiroko and I spent two nights on Mount Koya, the mountain of Shingon temples two hours from our home, and watched monks carry fresh breakfast and lunch through the forest to the founder of the temples, Kobo Daishi, who passed into deepest meditation in the year 835. In Ise, two hours in another direction, I'd seen similar meals transported twice a day to the empty space that houses, so it's believed, the sun goddess. There are sixteen phases of the moon here. I try never to confuse the waiting moon with the waiting-for-the-twilight moon, and I'm sometimes reminded that, as in classical China, there are seventy-two seasons in the year, so every five days marks a new old world.

"Soon we must eat rice cake," Hiroko had said yesterday, pulling out her compact diary, adorned with pictures of Peter Rabbit, and showing me that the harvest moon, said to be so bright that farmers can continue working after dark, will be visiting a few days from now. Little boys will race around a pond in central Nara, carrying white globe lanterns with rabbits on them. There's a rabbit, not a man, on the moon in Japan, while a bamboo flute stabs notes into the night. I never forget the year I showed up to find a completely empty setting, nothing but silhouettes of temples all around. Realizing I'd got the day wrong, I had to walk down nearby shopping streets to a screening of Rush Hour 3 in an equally deserted cinema.

My neighbors all bow before the seasons here, as before the larger forces that keep us in our place. Autumn is at least more radiant, and a little less abrupt, than the earthquake that set off three hundred fires in Kobe, thirty miles away, not long after we moved here, or the tsunami a few years ago that swept more than eighteen thousand people away to their deaths. The season is a kind of religion, I think, to which we offer poems and petitions, but it is not one you believe in so much as simply inhabit.

Very soon, there'll be tangy apples in the supermarket, replacing watermelons, and they'll bear the kinds of names that Thoreau relished as the trees turned apple-red around him: the Truant Apple, the Saunterer Apple, Wine of New England, the Beauty of the Air. A little later, tiny, sweet tangerines will appear, the kind my father-in-law used to send me every year from a special farm in his beloved Hiroshima.

It took me a while, after I settled down here, to realize that every detail – the apples, the boxes they sit in, the table on which we place them – counts, because none of these things is inanimate in Japan. Only yesterday, Hiroko remembered, "Small time, I kicking table sometimes, little angry. Every time, my father say, 'You must apologize to table. That table has heart. It never hit you. Why you must hit it?'"

If she threw a pencil across the room, she was told she might have been flinging her older brother against a wall.

When my mother-in-law was born, there was a deity on the throne, a direct descendant of the sun goddess. But after the Emperor was declared mortal, it was other forces that the people of Japan could more reliably depend upon—the eight million gods of rice paddies and wind, maple trees and the ever-changing sky, whose presence we can never forget.

Disclaimer: This story is a previously published work that has been republished for your reading.