THE SHOTEN GAI

Walking at a steady pace, none too hurried but not dawdling either, and making sure to wait for the lights to change to give the right of way to the cars at every intersection, one can walk from one end of the Azabu Juban shoten gai to the other in approximately six and a half minutes. Stretching in a shallow crescent from the Tokyo Metro station across from Ichinohashi up to the developed foothills of the sprawling, modern Roppongi Hills district, the street is a mere five hundred meters, a half a kilometer or slightly less than a third of a mile in length. Leaving the subway station and starting up the street one is heading in a roughly westerly direction, but by the end of the jaunt the orientation has shifted northward. At a sprint or on a bike, weaving your way through the crowds and the traffic, it can be covered in a minute or two. In a car, it’s more likely to take fifteen given the congestion, the frequent stopping of taxis to load and unload passengers, the delivery trucks and the traffic lights. But visiting the street from the confines of an automobile is not to be recommended. Apart from the fact that once you’ve arrived in the street in your vehicle you’ll be hard-pressed to find a place to park it, driving through the Azabu Juban shoten gai for a visit almost defeats the purpose: it is a street that needs to be experienced from the pavement up.

On a map, the district of Azabu Juban sits in the middle of a triangle formed by Chiyoda-ku (where the Imperial Palace is located), the Shinagawa wharf district on the Tokyo Bay, and the entertainment, shopping and business hub of Shinjuku. Of course, where one wishes to situate the center of anything in turn defines the orienting points one chooses on one’s personal map. Were I writing this story about Ginza or Ueno or Aoyama – or else some neighborhood or street in Istanbul or Paris or Dubai, where I’ve also lived – I’m sure I would have been able to find other geometrical shapes formed by other locations on the map that placed my chosen district right in the center. Such was the logic that allowed the artist Salvadore Dali, when he disembarked at the train station in Perpignan in the south of France to declare to the group of journalists who had gathered to meet him that the platform on which he was standing was in fact the center of the universe. So for the story I have to tell, Azabu Juban’s shoten gai will serve as the center, if not of the universe, at least of the world as I wish to describe it here.

The Azabu Juban shoten gai is both a street and a district – more of a zone, really; the Japanese term shoten gai (pronounced “show-ten guy”) means roughly “shopping area.” An American writer such as Sinclair Lewis might have called it "Main Street, Azabu", but perhaps in part in tribute to my British mother, I’ve chosen to call it for the purposes of this work, "The Azabu High Street."  It is a place both eminently real, and one which exists through the prism of my observation and my imagination. Although everything I recount is strictly true, the Azabu High Street I will describe cannot be found on any map. By the same token, the people who inhabit these pages – the shop-owners, the diplomats, the entrepreneurs, the artists and entertainers – belong both to the real world, their world, and also to the Azabu High Street of my making. Their words are real, but I’ve borrowed their stories and the fragments of their lives to construct my own story, as well.

Whichever terminology applies, the shoten gai of Azabu Juban is very much defined by its contradictions and paradoxes. Although the concept of “center of town” is somewhat moveable in Tokyo, it would be difficult to find a street more centrally located; and yet in many respects and from many perspectives, the shoten gai of today still retains an almost provincial character. Despite the dramatic changes the street would undergo during the five years I lived there, a slight but dwindling majority of the buildings were still no more than three or four stories in height, many of them incorporating shop, storage area and residence for the business proprietor and his family. Many of these older buildings would be demolished and replaced, while I lived there, by multiple-story residential, retail and office towers. And, as the global economic crisis struck with devastating effect in 2008, while I was already working on my story of the street, a good number of these newer buildings remained empty, week after week, month after month, following their completion.

In the Azabu High Street, in the early years of this new century, musty old shops that looked like they were transported straight from the 1950s (or earlier), unchanged and mysteriously clinging to survival, sat next to the shiny avatars of the global economy such as Starbucks, Wendy’s and McDonald’s. In this respect the shoten gai was a striking mélange of the dynamic and the inert, the vibrant and the moribund, the modern and the quaint. The street boasted one of the oldest traditional public baths or onsens in Tokyo, as well as an outlet for the LA-based fashion brand American Apparel; it had a traditional Chinese medicine (or Kampo) pharmacy right down the street from a mass market drug and beauty outlet specializing in products from the cosmetics giant Shiseido; it had a traditional teashop just half a block from a new chain called Koots specializing in fancy green tea beverages (which itself replaced another old teashop at the same location); it had four noodle restaurants, at least one of them in operation for more than two centuries, and as many Western fast food franchises; it had a kimono shop and a boutique selling hand-me-down Channel and Louis Vuitton; it had dusty cavernous furniture shops with wares that had gone out of fashion thirty years before, and a glitzy pet spa frequented by young Japanese women with their designer dogs.

Across Tokyo or even across Japan for that matter, the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, the oriental and the occidental, is nothing unusual; it is one of the characteristics which lends Japan much of its charm. And yet, in Azabu Juban’s shoten gai it was the strangely harmonious concentration of these unrelated influences that gave the street its pleasingly eclectic air. 

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B U C K W H E A T

It was on a Saturday morning that I was initiated into the art of making soba by Yoshinori-san. The appointment was set for 7 am. As I waited in front of the restaurant, birds chirped from the trees and the first glimmer of daylight was beginning to infuse the sky above the Azabu High Street. I studied the display case with idealized plastic replicas of sushi rolls and soba noodles – the same kind of pristine display of culinary perfection that served to advertise the offerings of Japanese restaurants the world over. Even the little dabs of green wasabi mustard and the tiny clippings of green onion stems had been faithfully replicated. Suddenly the door of the restaurant popped open and Yoshinori-san emerged.

"Ohayo gozaimasu!" he exclaimed. Then in English: “Good morning. I hope it is not too early for you?”

Not at all, I told him. I was often out on my bike at this time of the morning, to beat the rush hour traffic.

"So desu ne!" he said – is that so. “My morning exercise is walking to the restaurant – and making soba noodles!”

We walked through the darkened interior towards the back of the restaurant, past tables that I had usually seen bustling with customers slurping noodles but which now sat silently in the shadows. We passed through a curtain into the kitchen area. It was to be the final time during my journey along the Azabu High Street when, thanks to the graciousness of one of my hosts and guides, I would be allowed to penetrate into the world behind the façade.

Yoshinori-san stopped in front of a wooden door with a window looking into a brightly illuminated room. He slipped off his shoes and I followed suit. When he slid the door open and we stepped in, I saw that we were in a cramped closet-like space with a couple of pieces of unfamiliar-looking machinery. One of them emitted a steady hum as a heavy stone wheel turned and a small spout sprinkled freshly ground flour into a wooden bowl. The other sat inactive in the corner; out of context, if I’d been forced to guess, I might have thought it was a machine for making taffy or for weaving yarn. As I discovered later, it was actually the machine that was used to knead and cut the Sarashina soba.

The presence of these machines aside, the demonstration of craft that Yoshinori-san was to share with me over the following hour was more about brute strength and highly refined skill than it was about reliance on mechanical convenience. In fact, making soba the traditional way – the way his ancestor Nunoya Tahei had done some two hundred years earlier – was to prove to be both a highly physical and an incredibly precise endeavor.

Yoshinori-san took a step forward to a large wooden bowl with a vibrant red lacquered interior that sat on a low wooden stand. “Here is where we make the dough,” he proclaimed, as he proceeded to scoop flour from one wooden bowl into the other. “First 1200 grams of buckwheat flour” – scoop, scoop, scoop, then he leaned over and scooped a different kind of flour out of an open sack on the floor – “then 300 grams of wheat flour.” He threw the final scoop into the bowl and clapped his hands, sending a small cloud of our dust into the air. It had only taken seconds, a series of fluid gestures that seemed both effortless and precise.

“The proportions are exactly 20 to 80, twenty per cent wheat flour to eighty per cent buckwheat flour,” he explained. “This is why we call this 'ni-hachi soba' [two-eight soba]. This is the traditional Edo style soba.”

If names had been one of the dominant themes in my conversation with his father the previous Saturday, numbers were to characterize Yoshinori-san’s magisterial lesson in soba making. To that point, he sloshed some water onto the flour from a small plastic pitcher, saying “You put in 70% of the water first, then two more times, 15% each.” His hands and arms, as they performed these movements, seemed to know instinctively when the quantities were right.

“Three eggs.” With one hand, he cracked the eggs on the edge of the bowl and began to knead the dough.

For a couple of minutes, Yoshinori-san stopped talking as he leaned over the lacquered wooden bowl, his shoulders moving back and forth like two pistons, his muscular forearms beating the dough into submission. The air in the small room was warm and powdery with flour dust; the space was intimate and mysterious, almost crypt-like although brightly lit. The silence was punctuated by the rhythmic breathing and occasional grunts of Yoshinori-san as he kneaded the dough.

I asked about the water.

Still kneading, his entire body engaged in laborious effort above the wooden bowl, Yoshinori-san panted, “Excellent question! To make perfect soba, the water is very important. Very important. Must be 100% pure. Here we have water purifiers that treat all the water coming into the restaurant. Even the water in the toilets is purified!”

“Yoshinori-san, did your father teach you the art of making soba when you were a boy?”

Promptly, he answered, “No, not as a boy. It was not until after university. I never thought about making soba before then – you see, I was studying Descartes!”

I wanted to ask whether the mind that had come up with the dictum, "I think, therefore I am" had any lessons to provide to the maker of soba noodles. “I knead, therefore I am?” I decided it was too early in the morning for feeble attempts at humor; besides, Yoshinori-san’s English was limited and it was unlikely he would appreciate the joke. Instead I watched, took pictures, listened. There was in fact a great deal of unspoken philosophy, and poetry, in the precisely calibrated movements and fluid movements of the 50-year-old soba noodle master.

As he worked, the dough became progressively less granular, its clumps eventually coming together into a smooth ball that grew darker as he rolled it around the glistening red surface of the wooden bowl. Yoshiniori-san seemed to sense my interest in the bowl. “It is more than twenty years old,” he said. “It takes a while before a bowl becomes perfect for making soba.”

“And how long does it take to learn how to make soba perfectly?” I asked.

Yoshinori-san grunted as he rolled the ball. “To learn the first 80% doesn’t take long – maybe only four months or so. But it takes years to master the other 20%. To learn how to make the noodles very smooth, and very thin. A very long time.” There were those percentages again. 

Yoshinori-san had gradually shaped the dough into a cone that he then shifted onto a wooden cutting board on a counter next to the bowl.

He then immediately started flattening the cone and with a rod-like rolling pin made it progressively thinner. It was very reminiscent of the preparation of a pizza crust, a fact that I commented on. Yoshinori-san simply nodded, but clearly thought what he was doing had nothing to do with pizza crust.

“You’ve been doing these same gestures for what, 25 years?” I asked. “Don’t you ever get bored, Yoshinori-san?”

“No, not really. I don’t hate making soba,” he said simply. 

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A S P H A L T

On a Tuesday in February of 2009, Chris and I made our way by taxi after a client meeting over to the office of Kitaro Watanabe and his daughter, Nishida-san, in the Atlas Building in Azabu Juban. The imposing building sat on one corner of the major thoroughfare leading up to Roppongi Hills and that runs parallel to the Azabu High Street, one block down from where the onsen once stood. The much narrower street which links the two arteries continues in one direction up a hill called Torii Zaka (after the family of daimyos that lived there during the Edo period) and heads towards the seedy nightclub district of Roppongi, along a kilometer long stretch of property which was purchased several years ago by the Mori Corporation as the intended site of their latest ambitious endeavor to reshape the urban landscape of Tokyo. Caught in the maelstrom of the global economic meltdown, the development project had been indefinitely put on hold in 2008.

Going in the opposite direction, the narrow street makes its way across the shoten gai, past the parking lot that replaced the onsen and the Saint Moritz bakery, up another hill known as Kurayami Zaka (or Darkness Hill). The evocative name is said to derive in part from the somewhat gloomy and desolate aspect of the slope, which lies in the shadow of a curving stone wall on one side of the street, across from the squatting, angular presence of the brick-built compound of the Austrian embassy.

At the foot of Darkness Hill, sits a modest intersection exactly one block off the Azabu High Street. I had often walked through the intersection on the weekend, going in one direction or another, but finding little to recommend this patch of pavement. On one corner sat a ramshackle wooden edifice with a barber’s pole outside, advertising the profession of the building’s erstwhile resident. Otherwise, the structure, which must have dated from just after the war, seemed to serve as home for a little old lady – perhaps the widow of the barber – who emerged only periodically to water her plants. At the other three corners of the crossroads stand nondescript modern buildings. All in all, it is an entirely unremarkable corner of the city of Tokyo.

Despite its decidedly ordinary appearance, this intersection witnessed the first tentative steps in the business world of one of the most colorful and intriguing characters of Japan’s bubble years (the 1980s): Kitaro Watanabe. For it was on the corner, diagonally across the intersection from the ramshackle ex-barber shop, in the years when Azabu Juban was engineering its post-war renaissance, that he operated his first business, the neighborhood bicycle shop. Later expanding to provide motorized delivery carts to the neighborhood shops and restaurants, and then to a car dealership selling secondhand Datsuns before finally importing Fords and Chryslers during the boom years of the 1960s, Watanabe’s business expanded in a trajectory every bit as impressive as the country’s ascendance to global economic superpower. But it was neither bicycles, nor delivery vans, nor automobiles that fueled Watanabe’s ever-growing fortune during the forty-five years between the end of the war and the end of the bubble. It was quite simply property. Land and buildings. Real estate.

On the second floor of the Atlas Building, Chris and I entered an unmarked office where we were greeted by a conservatively dressed, kindly looking Japanese woman in her early forties who it turned out was Watanabe’s daughter, Nishida-san. She smiled and bowed, immediately ushering us through the narrow lobby into a surprisingly confined, almost claustrophobic office. The room could barely accommodate the small but solidly built conference table, at the head of which sat Kitaro Watanabe.

He was dressed in a modest, off-gray suit; in lieu of a necktie, a baby blue ascot blossomed between the collars of his white shirt. He removed his glasses as he stood up and shook our hands. He was short and somewhat stocky. He was wearing slippers. His hair was a faded brown, showing no grey despite his seventy-five years. He gestured for us to squeeze around the conference table and, after the exchange of cards and introductions, he launched almost without hesitation into his life’s story.

“I was born in Morishita-cho in the Fukagawa ward, on the east side of the Sumida River in Tokyo, in the year of Showa 8,” he started. (Throughout the interview, he consistently gave dates, even recent ones, using the imperial calendar. The Showa period was that of the reign of Hirohito, who ascended to the throne in 1926. Kitaro-san’s date of birth, therefore, was 1934).

“The area was one of the worst hit by the fire-bombing at the end of the war. My entire family was wiped out, father, mother, my five brothers and sisters,” he said, making a sweeping gesture accompanied by a roaring vocal sound effect – "gacha-gacha!"  – which seemed designed to evoke the violence of the attack that had entirely decimated his immediate family. He recounted this horriffic event without apparent emotion or sentimentality, as though telling of something that had no immediate bearing on his personal history. He had been ten years old at the time.

“I had been sent away to school during the war, to keep me safe, on the grounds of a temple in Niigata, along with 33 other kids. Although after the war, there no longer seemed any point in going back to school. I left after the third grade... never went back. On the other hand, you could say, I’m a graduate of the University of Life. The College of Hard Knocks!”

Nishida-san smiled and nodded her head demurely. “And the School of Common Sense,” she added. 

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W A T E R

Months before I ever set foot in the Azabu Juban Onsen, I would regularly walk past the unprepossessing five-story building on my way to or from Roppongi Hills. Nothing in the outward appearance of the building – a rectangular box of dingy concrete and dust-encrusted windows – gave any indication of the purportedly restorative qualities of the waters within. Nor did the building even remotely conjure up the traditional images of Japanese mineral baths, generally depicted as inviting pools of steaming water surrounded by artfully hewn rocks in a bucolic setting. This building, on the other hand, could easily have stood in for a Soviet-era recreational hall or municipal dormitory on the outskirts of Moscow, for a Japanese film director who needed such a setting but couldn’t afford the airfare.

In fact, only one feature of the building from the outside gave any indication of what was happening inside, and this was the glowing inferno that was visible from the street when one of the side doors into the furnace room was left open. Within, you could sometimes see the black silhouette of a figure tossing wood into the roaring flames, like some machinist in the engine room of a steamboat, stoking the furnace that heated the onsen waters. Right behind the building, in a full-size lot that would by most measures be considered one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Tokyo, a chaotic jumble of lumber and scraps of wood waited to become fuel for the ravenous furnace that kept the customers of the onsen stewing, at just the right temperature, for ten hours every day.

Since I was accustomed to thinking of the traditional Japanese bath as offering waters naturally heated by flowing magma far beneath the earth’s crust, this aspect of the Azabu Juban Onsen’s operation was initially disappointing, as it seemed to suggest some artifice out of keeping with the time-honored and ecologically sound principles that should govern a Japanese spa. Nonetheless, the antique furnace did seem very much true to the generally ramshackle and dilapidated nature of this particular establishment that, as I was to discover, was undergoing something akin to death throes during the first two years of my residence in the Azabu High Street. Invisible to the outside world, the real estate “vultures” had been slowly circling in the skies above this prime double lot on the corner of one of the busiest intersections of the shoten gai.  

Although my frame of reference was limited, customer attendance at the onsen did seem to mirror its sorry outward appearance. From what I could see of the rare customers making their way into the building on a weekend afternoon, often dressed in traditional garb, towels draped over their arms, and clopping down the sidewalk in their wooden geta sandals, the onsen was serving a decidedly aging population base. Local folklore (subsequently substantiated by several “knowledgeable sources”) also held that the Azabu Juban Onsen was known as a favorite hangout for yakuza, whose colorful tattoos made them persona non grata at most other public baths. However, although I kept my eye out for them every time I passed by, never did I see the black sedans or huddled groups of men in dark suits outside the spa that would indicate the presence of bathing mob bosses within.

After letting my curiosity percolate for longer than I ever should have, I finally one day took the leap and decided to experience the Azabu Juban Onsen “in the flesh.” The day I chose was a wintry Sunday afternoon in early February, which also happened to be the day the Japanese celebrate the religious festival of Setsubun. It seemed somehow appropriate to choose this event, which marks the transition from winter to spring, from barrenness to fertility, for my own ritual purification in the reputedly health-giving waters of the onsen. 

In the pages of his journal, Townsend Harris had appeared to take a somewhat more cautiously benign, if Victorian view of the traditional practice of public bathing. While still based in his remote outpost of Shimoda, Harris reported approvingly that the Japanese were very “cleanly” and bathed daily, before going on to write,

The wealthy people have their baths in their own houses, but the working classes all, of both sexes, old and young, enter the same bathroom, and there perform their ablutions in a state of perfect nudity. I cannot account for so indelicate a proceeding on the part of a people so generally correct. I am assured, however, that it is not considered as dangerous to the chastity of their females; on the contrary, they urge that this very exposure lessens the desire that owes much of its power to mystery and difficulty.

Given the lack of any interior plumbing at the temple where he was housed, it is presumed that Harris must have continued his visits to the bathhouse during the rest of his stay in Shimoda. The titillating practice of mixed gender bathing there may have contributed to the legend that arose around the supposed affair that Harris had with a 17-year-old geisha he’d reportedly seen leaving the bath house. 

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P A P E R

“Today, one thing that’s changed, for sure, is the use of ketai - cell phones,” said the attractive, casually dressed Japanese woman, as she leaned forward over her cup of tea. “Now kids can access manga on their phones. They don’t even need to go into bookstores any more! They look at manga on those small screens. I’d much rather they read it on paper!” Her voice rose and broke into a musical peal of girlish laughter.

“Or else they buy them at the konbini – the convenience store,” added the middle-aged but young looking Japanese man seated next to her. “Only girls buy manga at bookstores these days.”

"Konbini! Really?” said the woman, shrilly. “I can’t believe it!”

We were seated around a low table in the atrium-like lobby of a hotel in the Shirokane district of Tokyo. The hotel was of that generation of hotels that sprang up in the years after the 1964 Olympics, when Tokyo began to come into its own on the world stage and needed facilities to cater to the influx of businessmen and tourists. On this day in March 2009, however, the crowd seated at the tables in the lobby drinking tea and nibbling cakes was almost exclusively Japanese. Through two-story plate glass windows, the lobby looked out over a formal Japanese garden, awash with green in the early Spring sunlight.

The woman was Naoko Takeuchi, author of Sailor Moon. She was dressed in sporty slacks and flat-soled shoes, looking much less the image of her youthful heroine – generally portrayed in skimpy skirts and high heels – than that of her more recent role in life, housewife and mother. In fact, she had recently given birth to her second child with her husband, the manga artist Yoshihiro Togashi. For all intents and purposes, in the fast-moving world of manga, she was retired, somewhat of a has-been, although the power of her work continued to attract fans globally. The youngish looking man who had accompanied Takeuchi-san to the interview was Kenji Osano, her editor from the Kodansha publishing house. On this occasion, my translator was one of Sylvie’s friends, Nadia, who spoke fluent Japanese and whose daughter was an avid Sailor Moon fan.

The planning for this particular interview had been some months in the works and had required the generous intervention of my colleagues from the large Japanese advertising agency with which I worked. Some favors had been pulled on my behalf with Kodansha, whose publications depended on advertising dollars from the agency’s clients. The connection had been strong enough, at least, to convince Kodansha to entice the semi-reclusive authoress to come to a two-hour interview with a gaijin executive and would-be writer whose project on Azabu Juban must have seemed to them fanciful at best.

So that’s how I found myself in the company of the woman whose manga masterwork, published more than fifteen years earlier, was still literally revered by zealous fans the world over. With a gentle elegance of manner and exquisite grace, she submitted patiently to what must have seemed at times like an incredibly naïve and decidedly monomaniacal line of questioning. Punctuated by ripples of laughter, her answers were both simple and honest, always considered if occasionally coy. She was the very image of a woman who was – in her own words – “on top of the world,” not because of the success and wealth her work had brought her, but because she was in fact living out her own adolescent dream: to be happily married with kids.

Any self-respecting otaku – the term used to describe the most die-hard manga fans, those who have a predilection for dressing up as their favorite characters and spending hours blogging about the minutiae of their favorite series – would have given their eye-teeth, if not some particularly valuable article of manga memorabilia, to have been seated where I was that afternoon. And yet, the sole focus of my inquiry was one that would have been for them of only marginal interest: the connection that Naoko Takeuchi had felt with my adopted neighborhood, Azabu Juban, and what part it had played in the inspiration for Sailor Moon. 

It seemed natural enough to begin at the beginning, so I asked what had first brought her to the neighborhood.

“My university was nearby, in Shibakoen, close to the Tokyo Tower,” she began, referring to the distinctive red and white Eiffel Tower look-alike that appears often in the pages of her manga series. “We’d often come to Azabu Juban in the evenings to have dinner or to have fun with my friends. It was a very agreeable neighborhood.”

She paused, thinking back to the time when she was still studying to be a pharmacist, before her invention of a superhero in a school girl’s uniform brought her fame and fortune.

“I’ve always liked old-fashioned things,” she went on with a pensive air. “And then, there was the Tokyo Tower, which for me is kind of a symbol. I could see it from the university, but there was nowhere to live right around the tower itself, there are only office buildings. But from Azabu Juban, you can still see the Tokyo Tower. There’s kind of a nostalgic side to the Tokyo Tower and Azabu Juban. For me, they are like two symbols of the city.”

She turned to Osano-san. “You don’t think they’ll tear down the Tokyo Tower now that they’re building that new one, what’s it called? The Crystal Tower?”

“Sky Tower,” her editor corrected. She had inadvertently replaced the name of the new construction project, announced to be the tallest structure in metropolitan Tokyo, with the name of the imaginary palace that in the pages of Sailor Moon gets built upon the ashes of Azabu Juban, some centuries hence.

“I don’t think they’d tear down the Tokyo Tower,” Osano-san said, shaking his head. 

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S P I R I T S

On January 1st, 1861, the twenty-eight-year-old Henry Heusken resumed keeping the journal that he had abandoned a year and a half earlier. His first entry on that New Year’s day noted that “...the government of Japan has learned of a rumor that five or six hundred ronin, probably of the Prince of Mito, are embittered against foreigners, the reason being that, because of the export trade, the price of food staples is rising constantly, and that they want to burn Yokohama to the ground.” He also reported that Townsend Harris did not “think the matter so serious.”

At the time, Heusken was busy assisting the Prussian government in the negotiation of a commercial treaty that was in most respects identical with the one he had spent so many long months working on since his arrival in Japan. As such, he was a frequent visitor to the Prussian embassy, on the grounds of a temple in the adjacent district of Akabanebashi. Despite the reports of threats against foreigners, he continued to gallivant around Edo on his horse during the day – and became such a common sight among the local populace that his very name, Heusken, had come familiarly to mean gaijin. Francis Hall, another American who had recently taken up residence in the Japanese capital, wrote in his own journal, “Wherever he rode in Yedo he was hailed with shouts of his name, indeed his name had almost become a synonym for foreigner as it would be shouted to any foreigner who passed the streets.” As Harris stewed in his own juices, so to speak, day after day and night after night in the grim confines of the Zenpuku-ji Temple, the young Heusken was having the time of his life.

At around nine o’clock on the evening on January 15th, 1861, Henry Heusken played a final hand of whist at the Prussian Legation and took leave of his host, who was that country’s envoy to Japan, Count Friedrich Eulenberg. The young interpreter mounted his horse and, accompanied by an escort of three mounted guards and two grooms on foot carrying lanterns, he began the short trek back to Azabu Juban. The evening was chilly and a light rain was falling. As the group entered a narrow street near the Nakanohashi Bridge over the Furukawa River, there was a sudden commotion and a flurry of movement in the darkness. Two groups of masked men lunged at Heusken from either side, brandishing swords. By leaning back in the saddle, Heusken managed to avoid the first thrust of the sword, but the second group of ronin hit their mark. Spurring his horse, Heusken galloped ahead for about two hundred yards before the pain became too much. He dismounted and fell to the ground.

“I am dying!” the anguished young man shouted out, as one of the grooms kneeled by his side. A deep gash had been opened on Heusken’s abdomen and it was bleeding profusely. As his retinue dashed off to seek help, the dying man was left alone on the pavement for thirty long minutes. The only sound he could hear was that of his own blood coursing out of his body onto the paving stones.

Finally, at about 9:30 in the evening, a small procession arrived at the Zenpuku-ji Temple, carrying the wounded Heusken stretched out on a door that had been removed from a neighborhood house for that purpose. Those attending to the young man had to carry him through the streets of Azabu Juban with extra care to ensure that his intestines did not spill out of the gaping wound. His shrieks of pain reverberated throughout the neighborhood in the crisp evening air. Harris roused himself from his quarters and watched as the mortally wounded young man, his helper and companion for more than five years, was carried into his room and laid down on the floor. The senior American diplomat immediately dispatched a servant to rush back to the Prussian Legation to seek medical assistance.

When the doctor arrived and began to tend to Heusken’s wound the young diplomat was pallid from the loss of blood. His eyes were sunken. As the wound was sewn, he moaned and asked whether he was going to die. All he wanted to do, he said, was sleep. Once the wound was closed, he seemed to improve momentarily and asked for some wine, which he was given. He thanked the small group that huddled around him, then asked for more wine and water. Fortunately, the legation’s provisions of alcohol on the temple grounds allowed the young man’s last request to be accommodated. Suddenly, shortly after midnight, his condition deteriorated sharply. His breathing became “rattling” — according to the autopsy report led later by the doctor and preserved in the National Archives. With a Catholic priest delivering the last rites, Henry Heusken died. 

T E A

The Iwata-en family shop, which had become a franchise of the national tea conglomerate Satsukinou some years earlier, was typical in size, layout and operations to the dozens of other family owned businesses which had sprung back to life in the Azabu High Street in the months after the war. The shop’s façade was only about fifteen feet wide and was composed of two display windows on either side of an automatic door. On the sidewalk in front of the shop, Hisako-san and her nephew, a lackadaisical looking fellow in his fifties with an incongruous pony tail who seemed to be the only permanent help in the shop, would place a portable display unit with bags of tea on it, when the weather was nice. Otherwise, the exterior of the shop, as well as the two-story building that housed it (simultaneously place of business and residence of the Iwata family) was as modest and understated as the proprietors themselves. Various utensils for the preparation or consumption of tea were shown in the shop windows, alongside an eclectic collection of the kind of mementoes and religious figurines that feature in most businesses in Japan – many of which are believed to attract success and fortune, such as the ubiquitous white ceramic cat with a raised paw. The cramped interior of the shop, only about as deep as it was wide, was adorned as well on almost every shelf or in every nook or cranny with an array of tokens of superstition or amulets inviting the favor of the gods of commerce. Given the clearly declining fortunes of the shop – threatened on the one hand by the influx of supermarkets to the neighborhood and on the other by a younger generation’s waning interest in consuming tea – I asked Muneaki-san during one of my visits if he thought that the strategy of seeking business success through religious or superstitious invocation was perhaps not proving to be terribly successful. As he didn’t appear to appreciate the intended irony of my question, I didn’t insist.

The shop was originally founded by Muneaki-san’s grandparents, almost exactly a century earlier, around the corner from its present-day location on the Azabu High Street. The family business had operated first as a grocery store before the couple later decided to specialize in tea. Perhaps the grocery business had not lived up to the Iwata’s commercial ambitions, or perhaps, even in that far removed time, competition in the grocery sector in the neighborhood made prospects less than favorable. Either way, according to the family legend that Muneaki-san shared with me during one of my regular weekend visits to the shop, the decision to specialize in tea came after his grandfather struck up an acquaintance with a prosperous tea merchant from Kyoto, who was visiting the capital. The visiting businessman must have painted a glowing picture of the development of tea consumption in Japan, for that chance encounter was enough to convince the neophyte shop owner of the opportunities in tea, and he promptly shifted his inventory to cater to this national predilection.

From the beginning, the shop stocked teas from all around Japan – and only from Japan. When I asked Muneaki-san one day why the family didn’t expand its selection of teas to the more exotic or even to imports from other lands, he looked at me with a highly quizzical expression, as though surprised by the incongruity of my suggestion. The main source of the tea in the shop was the region of Shizuoka, which produces 50% of all the green tea in the country. According to Muneaki-san, who spoke with the authority of an expert (if not with a wee bit of exaggeration), Shizuoka is known to produce “the best tea in all of Japan... If not the world!” he added with a twinkle in his eye.

In terms of the leading tea-consuming countries on earth, Japan ranks fourth, after India, Russia and Britain, consuming an average total of 142,977 metric tons of tea leaves every year. Tea in Japan is also big business: the country’s 51,930 hectares of tea fields yield 92,630 tons of leaves every year, mostly green tea or o-cha, transformed into a variety of products that are marketed by huge conglomerates such as Ito-en and the franchise to which the Iwata family shop belonged, Satsukino-en. (The suffix “en” means garden or field in Japanese.) Given the gap between the country’s fondness for tea and the volume of domestic production – notwithstanding Iwata-en’s somewhat xenophobic practices – Japan must turn to markets overseas to support the national habit; the country imports annually a variety of teas, while its exports of domestically grown tea are on the decline. In recent years, the popularity of green tea in Japan has undergone a bit of a resurgence as the country’s tea manufacturers have developed innovative new ways delivering tea to consumers, in the form of ready-made beverages, ice cream, biscuits and candies.

Muneaki-san himself claimed a “three-cup a day” tea habit – essentially a cup after every meal. He proudly pointed out that scientific studies have demonstrated that tea drinking is good for one’s health. In fact, he insisted, statistically the residents of Shizuoka – where the plantations are located that provide much of the shop’s teas – have a much lower incidence of cancer than the population at large.

Although the shop carried some of the specialty items of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the finer art of cha-do (or sa-do - the way of the tea) was not the real stock in trade of Iwata-en, which catered instead to the more mundane requirements of the typical Japanese householder’s daily tea consumption. The more traditional specialty items – including a range of expensive bamboo whisks to mix the green tea powder in the boiled water – seem to have been mainly stocked for decorative purposes, or perhaps for the occasional tourists visiting the shop.

The great cultural and philosophical importance attached to the preparation and the serving of tea in Japan has fascinated Western observers ever since the practice of cha-do became known to the outside world – just as Townsend Harris had recorded in his journal the sense of marvel he witnessed in the audience of courtiers who attended the tea service hosted by Prince Shinano, one of the emissaries of the Tokugawa Shogunate who visited the American consul general in the remote outpost of Shimoda. At the time, the New Yorker failed to appreciate at its true value the honor that was being bestowed upon him by having so elevated an official personally prepare and serve tea to the foreign guest. Nor was he able to read into the series of simple yet ritualized gestures the deep significance that the art of cha-do ascribed to them. An ability to experience awe in the contemplation of the simple things in life is one of the first necessary steps towards understanding the culture of Japan. As much as he was to teach me about the history of the street where his family had done business for the better part of a century, Muneaki-san also helped cultivate in me the appreciation of things less obvious.

Absent the ritual and the ceremony, nevertheless Muneaki-san made it a point to put water to boil when I would show up at his shop, and he would invite me to sit at the small table in the back to enjoy a cup of green tea. To accompany this simple gesture of hospitality he would sometimes bring out a small plate of pastries, similar in form and taste to the French madeleine, which for a reason he was never able to explain to my satisfaction were known as “siberias.” Muneaki- san would never serve himself tea during my visits; it seemed enough for him to see that I was attended to. I held the round ceramic cup by its thin rim in my right hand, cradled in my left hand, as I had read was the appropriate way to drink tea in Japan. After the first sip, I would always compliment my host on how delicious his tea was. Invariably, Muneaki-san would seem inordinately delighted by this praise, as though it had been totally unexpected that I would appreciate something as simple and unassuming as a cup of tea. 

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M A S K S

A half a block off the Azabu High Street stood a nondescript little eatery that operated for years under the grandiose name of The Palace Restaurant (in English in the original). Palatial in name only, the establishment presented a somewhat murky interior to any passerby who might have been curious enough to peer in the window. On a dingy wooden stand on the sidewalk, a menu (again in English) advertised a selection of dishes that could have come from just about any roadside diner anywhere in America. Alien and for the most part unappetizing to the average Japanese palate, the menu presumably served more as a reminder of the predilections of the restaurant's proprietor than as a true enticement to most of the neighborhood’s residents. And yet behind that American-style menu and the restaurant’s unprepossessing façade lay the story of a gaijin personality familiar throughout Japan. For this modest little “palace” served over the years as the informal headquarters in Japan for one of pro-wrestling’s greats – another displaced New Yorker – whose actual name was the comfortingly middle-of-the-road sounding Dick Beyer, although he was far better known in wrestling circles, and more broadly and lastingly in Japanese popular culture, as The Destroyer.  

Indeed, while peering inside for the first time after noticing this unassuming little restaurant, I was struck to see, prominently displayed near the entrance, a collage of photographs of a somewhat outlandish looking masked figure who, I subsequently discovered, hailed from a small town near Buffalo, New York, and who had garnered fame and fortune in Japan in the 1960’s and 70’s. Considered “one of the most famous American wrestlers to have worn a mask” (according to Wikipedia), The Destroyer was born on July 11, 1931. Nothing in his upbringing in a rural backwater in upstate New York in the years before WW II seemed to predestine him for an illustrious career in the country whose surprise attack on Pearl Harbor occurred when Beyer was just ten years old.

Sports, on the other hand, were definitely in his blood. Beyer’s father was a minor league baseball pitcher and, in the years right after the war, young Dick was to become a campus jock at Syracuse University, playing on the varsity football and wrestling teams. After earning a Masters Degree in education, he took his first steps in the ring as a professional wrestler in 1954, fighting initially under his real name.

When a fateful turn in his career brought him to Japan a little less than nine years later to fight his first match with the legendary Rikidozan, a former sumo wrestler whose conversion to professional wrestling had marked the beginning of the sport’s popularity in Japan, Beyer had already adopted his signature white and red mask and had gained a modicum of celebrity in the ring as The Destroyer. Little did he realize at the time that this first match in Japan in 1963 – and a later rematch that same year watched by an astonishing 70 million TV viewers at a time when the country’s total population was just over 100 million – was the beginning of what would become for him a lifelong connection to the Land of the Rising Sun.

Initially, when I observed that the interior of The Palace had been converted into a virtual shrine to the memory of the wrestler’s career, complete with multiple dog-eared photos and plastic bobble-head dolls, I had assumed that it was because the restaurant’s proprietor, Takeo-san, was a die-hard fan. The somewhat gangly, graying Takeo-san, his head adorned with a bandanna reminiscent of those worn by kamikaze pilots during the war, was manning the grill behind the restaurant’s counter when I first ventured inside, as his wife Miwako-san sat on one of the diner-like stools chain-smoking cigarettes. It was easy enough to imagine both of them surrounded by a raucous crowd watching the historic match on a black and white television set in the narrow, smoky confines of the restaurant, as had occurred in dozens of the shops, restaurants, bars and private dwellings in Azabu Juban on that evening in 1963.

However, as I was to learn, the couple were not the committed wrestling fans I thought they were; indeed, they had actually managed to miss seeing the famous match pitting The Destroyer against the Japanese wrestling hero – which would have placed them in a decided minority among the adult population of Japan. The Destroyer’s connection to the Palace Restaurant was in reality far less straightforward and less obvious, more intimate and personal – which was also to make it for me an even more fitting testimonial to the memory of the time this fellow ex-pat had spent in Japan. And, some fifteen years after the wrestler’s sayonara appearance in 1993, at the iconic Budokan stadium in the heart of Tokyo, this enduring connection was still much in evidence at The Palace Restaurant in Azabu Juban – just as The Destroyer’s fame in Japan has yet to wane, even to this day. 

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BEANS

On Thursday December 1st, 1857, having been at last received at the Shogun’s palace at Edo (and accommodated for the occasion in the “Office for the Examination of Barbarian Books”), the American Consul General Townsend Harris made the following notation in his journal:

When I reached my private apartments, the present was brought in. On opening it, it was found to contain four trays of Japan bonbons, made of sugar, rice flour, fruit, nuts, etc. They were arranged in the trays in a beautiful manner, and the forms, colors, and decorations were all very neat. The quantity was about seventy pounds of weight. I am sorry I cannot send them to the United States, but they will not keep for so long a voyage.

Accompanied by a retinue of 350 officials, guards, carriers and servants, Harris had left the remote outpost of Shimoda eight days earlier for the 200 kilometer trip to the capital city of Edo. Finding the norimon with twelve bearers that had been placed at his disposal to be awkward and uncomfortable, the rotund consul made most of the trip on horseback. Every evening along the route, accommodations were provided to Harris and his sidekick Heusken, and the senior diplomat recorded with evident relish the various signs of respect and courtesy that were extended along the way.

This was the crowning moment of his career as a diplomat, the sudden and unexpected breakthrough in the negotiations he had been waiting for during the long solitary months at the temple in Shimoda. Harris’s journal noted that, as his party approached the city of Edo, a “vast multitude” bore silent witness to the ceremonial entrance into the capital of the first foreign diplomatic envoy to Japan. He estimated the size of the crowd at around one hundred and eighty five thousand – a gathering of positively staggering proportions.

“The people all appeared clean, well clad and well fed,” Harris noted appreciatively.

On the morning after their arrival at the castle of Edo, Harris and Heusken were paid a visit of ceremony by the eight commissioners who had been appointed by the Shogun’s government for the purpose of receiving the American diplomat. They arrived in great pomp and circumstance with retinues that numbered in “some hundreds”. Much bowing and formal speeches ensued: this was the “horrible reception” that the travel-weary Heusken commented on in his own journal. In the afternoon, there was more ceremony as a prince who was identified as “the Ambassador” came bearing a lacquered box some three feet high, tied with a “broad, green, silk braid.” Harris bowed in the direction of the box to acknowledge receipt of the gift. Once it had been carried back to his quarters, he opened the box and discovered the contents: these were the seventy pounds of bonbons. Whether the box of candies would truly “make ill an infinite number of children” – as the young Heusken went on to note somewhat ungenerously – history has not recorded what actually became of the heavy, calorie-laden gift to Japan’s first visiting diplomat.

The “disconnect” between the accounts of the two diplomats speaks to more than just the difference between the sensibilities of the older, wiser and more understanding Harris and the younger, impetuous and more callous Heusken. As he considered that his journal was tantamount to an historical account, Harris on many occasions tended to “sugar-coat” his observations, and his report on this particular Japanese diplomatic offering was no exception; it was vital for the record to show that the United States had been a gracious recipient of the gift. Heusken on the other hand had no such niceties in mind and his jocular comments were not only more spontaneous and unadulterated – they may also have represented the true feelings of the elder statesman as well. The importance the Japanese attached to a gift of sugary confectionery – which for the Western participants seemed quaint and perhaps somewhat derisory – again highlights the cultural divide that existed, that still exists, between the two nations. 

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