As my surrounding changed on my arrival in Kyoto, so to did the people who occupied those surroundings, and nowhere was this more evident that in the men who shared the compound with my small family.

The Compound Dwellers

For the most part, my fellow compound dweller could be divided into three categories.

Firstly there were the compound wives. Aside from the fact that they lived in a converted Chinese style courtyard house in the middle of a Japanese city, they were pretty much like any suburban American housewife. They cooked, they cleaned, they gossiped, and they took care of their families. On the whole, they were probably a little more conservative than is normal for an American housewife, and they were rather strict about maintaining compound ordnances (basically, the rules that governed the miniature community in which I lived), particularly when it came to keeping Japanese influences away from their children, but I guess that that was to be expected, given their situation.

Next comes a group whom I can't help but think of as representing your typical American business salesman. They wore sharp suits, were loud, and greeted everybody with big smiles, firm handshakes, and personalities that were big enough to fill and entire room. I could quite easily imagine moving around corporate events and introducing themselves, and their company’s’ new product lines, in a flood of business cards and back slapping. Strangely, they also predominantly had large families, with three or more young children, who lived with them in the compound.

The others though, the third of the three types, were entirely different. They were far less flamboyant and far less forwards than their counterparts, and they often had an air of quiet menace about them that meant that they would not be out of place standing two steps behind the boss of a shady corporation, at the very same corporate event as their colleagues above, waiting for the instruction to acquaint the competition with the concept of ‘the hard sell’.

For the most part, this third type of people were mostly in their mid thirties to late thirties, or early forties. They almost exclusively had short hair and thin lips. They wore dark suits and seemingly carried briefcases everywhere that they went. They were also were unusually well muscled for office jockeys.

With one exception, only one of these of these dark suited men was married. None of them had any children, and they mostly lived in the simply furnished attic apartments that ran across two sides of the compound, and which were little more than a bedroom and a study that shared the compounds communal kitchen and bathhouse, because they had no kitchens or bathrooms of their own.

Division of Labor

When it came to the structure of the compound, and of the community within, there were clear boundaries and roles.

The wives did the donkey work. They cooked in their own homes and took turns cooking in the communal kitchen which served the homes that had no kitchens of their own, and they kept the place running by ensuring that the cupboards were stocked and everything was where it should be.

While the wives were doing the actual work, the men whom I thought of salesmen, made all of the everyday decision and organized everything that could be done on paper (anything that couldn't had likely already been done by their wives). They were the ones who organized the entertainment, who chose the menu for the week and who did all of the rostering of chores, and so on.

Beyond this though, above the level of the everyday, were the third kind of compound dweller. They made the big decisions. They managed the money, decided who could move into the compound if somebody moved out, and what got put on the compound ordinance. They were also the resident arbitrator (as in Arbitrary) for any disagreements. both those between the compound dwellers, and those between the compound and the outside world.

Though unfair, nobody complained about this distribution of power, or contested the solutions and rules that they imposed on the compound. At least not openly. Everybody else was a little afraid of the men in dark suits.

Work

Strangely when it comes to what exactly it was that compound dwellers were actually doing in Japan, your guess is as good as mine. In all the years that I lived there, I never found out.

I did try to inquire a few times, and even tried to subtly lever a few clues out through subterfuge by carefully directing conversations into the right areas, but it never worked.

When I asked directly about what they did for a living the salesmen types usually rebuffed me with some kind of silly jibe like “I’ll tell you when your older”, or “we’re making the world go round”, and the men in dark suits would give me some abrasive and abrupt refusal that usually followed the lines of “go away, kid. You’re bothering me”.

This strange silence wasn’t only limited to me. Like me, the other compound children found that the adult community was less than talkative, too. They knew that their fathers, and mothers in one or two cases, were in Japan on work, but not what it was that they actually did, where they did it, or whom they did it for.

All we did know was that, whatever it was that the men did, they were as divided within the compound as they were without.

Each morning, the Salesmen types would board one of the compound's minivans,

The men in dark suits would board one of the compound's minivans and would pull out of the gates early in the morning. About 10-15 minutes later, the salesmen types would do likewise with the other minivan. They also returned separately, too. With the salesmen types getting back in the evening, and the men in dark suits pulling in about 40 minutes later. Strongly suggesting that wherever it was that they went, they didn't go to the same place.

There were a few men, most of whom arrived and left within 6 month, whom left on foot or via taxi, heading for the local station, but who were also just as mysterious about what they did, and there was one girl whose knew that her divorced (and thus non-compound dwelling) father was a manager with a transport company in Osaka, but, by and large, all of the men in the compound were bound by these two groups and these sets of habit.

Our Place

As you can probably guess from my disdain for the men in dark suits, my Mother was one of them, both before and after Lucy was born, and for all the time that I lived with her, and for all of the time afterwards, she never breathed a word to me about what she did while we lived in the compound.