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April 1989 - Living in Kyoto
I’m not quite sure how to describe the feeling of moving into the American compound in old Kyoto, or my feelings on living there for so many years, because it still invokes such mixed emotions for me.
I would say though that it was this period of my life that defined me and shaped my future sense of being Japanese as much as my time on the base had. It also gave me a sense of independence that my Mother would never be able to eradicate. Life on the base was a world away from old Kyoto; until I moved to Kyoto I lived in a blue and white bungalow. It was low lying and had a white picket fence and a green law that required watering at dusk, dawn, and again at night just to keep it healthy during the hot Japanese summers. Everything on the base was neatly arranged into rows and lined up along orderly streets that were empty of people for most of the day because the families lived some distance away from the actual machinations of military life. It was spacious and open and it was so neat that it could have been painted on a postcard. The base was a place where the American flag was hoisted every day and where service men in pressed uniforms marched down the road every morning. It might only have been a small outpost skirting a much larger military presence, and it certainly wasn’t a frontline base or I wouldn’t have grown up in it, but everything was neat and ordered as if it where the back garden of the Pentagon. People in the base came from all over America, or at least represented the diversity of the country, and came from a few small areas hidden away inside the country. Everybody was American in their own way and everybody was part of one great family, the service. We were all friends and neighbors together. Americans, but not defensively. By contrast Kyoto was very different; I lived in the old part of the city among a maze of bustling alleyways that crisscrossed the entire district of the old city. The roads had been built on the principle that somebody had built their shop back three feet from its neighbor, so the road must move by three feet as well. It was old, it was traditional and most of all it was pure Japan. There were no picket fences, very few lawns, and apart from the public parks and amenities there was no open grass until you reached the more affluent or the newer parts of the city. This part of the city was so old that it had evolved over the centuries but had apparently changed very little. People didn’t live in open bungalows with big gardens as they did on the base, or in squat apartment blocks as they do in many of Japan’s more modern cities; instead they occupied small apartments, often subdivided from larger houses, or they dwelled in houses with walled gardens that were seemingly built at random intervals. The colour of your lawn wasn’t seen as particularly exciting, largely because Japanese gardens don’t have lawns as I knew them from my previous home. Neighbourhoods were far more crowded and jumble than on the base, and wherever there was space to fit a house or a shop, somebody had found a way to fit three. I know that this is a bit of an odd description of Kyoto and only matches a part of the city, but when coming from an ordered base and looking at the world through the eyes of a child, it is how I remembered it. It seemed to me as a child that Kyoto was entirely made up of back streets and alleyways between or behind peoples’ homes, only opening out in the tourist districts and the familiar streets of new Kyoto. My house too was very different from the one that I had lived in all of my life; instead of a squat bungalow with low ceilings we now lived in a two storey four-room apartment with high ceilings and open beams. The apartment had two rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs with an open staircase running down one side. We cooked and ate downstairs and we lived upstairs, sleeping in the same rooms as we went about our lives. The apartment was also so small that it didn’t have its own bathroom, but to my endless joy we shared a large communal bathhouse with the other residents. Apart from the necessity of stalls and washbasins we had a steam room, hot and cold baths and all of the other luxuries that come with living in a former mansion, which is what the compound had originally been designed as. The compound wasn’t really a compound, it was a single large square building that had at one time been a grand house with a courtyard in the center, but it had been converted to be four sides of terraced homes that opened out onto a shared plaza that was open to the sun and the rain. It was two stories in places and three in others as roofs had been turned into dormers and the space between beams had been reinforced and made into rooms Life inside the compound was like a condensed version of America. It was literally a place where everybody dragged their tables out into the central yard and had barbecues in the summer and then dragged their tables into the main hall in the winter for Thanksgiving dinner. It was in many ways a far more patriotic place than the based ever was, if only because everybody felt the need to remember that they were Americans in a strange country. While the people on the base had left the door open to Japan, even if it was only to let in the local maid, the people in the compound decided to shut out the country as much as they could. People on the base had Japanese furniture and decorations, they appeared to go round every city in Japan and pick up anything that looked Japanese to put on their shelves. They looked at Japan as being their home and didn’t feel that accepting local customs was a threat to their American persona. In the compound things were utterly different. To live in this American community was to bar the door to Japan. They knew that Japan was out there but they also knew that when they closed the doors it was America in the Compound. There wasn’t a trace of Japanese furniture anywhere outside the bathhouse, no Japanese souvenirs in the bedrooms, and no tatami on the floor. There wasn’t even the hint of chopstick or rice bowls in the dinning hall. Despite all of the bluster inside the compound about being in a tiny corner of Japan that was pretending to be America, outside of the walls it really was Japan, and outside the gates was where I spent much of my life. I went to a Japanese School and from sunrise to eight or nine at night I did exactly what every other Japanese boy or girl did. During our time in Kyoto my mother was to happy to let me roam freely, and despite me actually spending all day at school, and then either studying with friends, and latter in a private study school known to the US as a cram school, I had a lot of time in between to be my own person if mostly on the weekend or after hours. To me the compound was the place where I slept and where I used the bathhouse, which was to feed my adult desire to ease even the slightest bit of tension away by scrubbing up and soaking in a bathtub. I could simply walk out of the gates before breakfast and come home when I was to tired to do anything more. I had more than enough friends to play with and homes where I could eat or study, and until my small family became bigger, I only had to come back home to sleep. Outside the gates of the compound I could simply merge with the other boys and girls and hide in the crowd, apart from not having a local accent for a few days I was utterly indistinguishable from anybody who had lived in the city their entire life. Outside the gates I reinvented myself and shed all traces of being American. My life in Kyoto gave me a time when I could hide from my Mother, who had become too involved in her own work to care about where I was all day, it also gave me a time to absorb ever aspect of life in Japan and to make it a part of me. |
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