11.3.11

   In March 2011 I was living in a Japanese city called Fuji. The famous volcano rises to the north of the city and the streets and ugly buildings sprawl up its lower reaches. To the south is the sea; from that direction comes the foul smell of paper production. 

Fuji

   I lived on the rural eastern edge of Fuji, in a tiny apartment near a bullet train line. At night the frosted front window would be illuminated by the lights from super-express trains making for Tokyo or Osaka. Then the blackness of the countryside would return. 

   On March 11 that year I went home early from my job. I was washing dishes when I felt a shudder. It was almost imperceptible, and I asked my wife if she had noticed it. A few seconds elapsed, then the building started to shake violently. 

   Comically, we wasted a few seconds deciding what to do. We then rushed down the stairs - not a sensible course of action - and outside into the car park. I have only impressions of those few minutes: finding myself outside barefoot, still clutching a dishcloth; the swaying of the power lines; my heart pulsing rapidly; the sun; the quiet. I have no idea how long the trembling of the earth lasted.

   That was the first earthquake that scared me. I had only experienced one other, many years before, and it seemed somehow exciting: I was in a hotel in the south of Japan and woke in the middle of the night to find the bed moving. I was groggy with sleep, and wasn't even certain it was an earthquake until the next morning. 

   I can't imagine what the Great Tohoku Earthquake was like for those near the epicentre. Fuji was several hundred kilometres to the west, and I felt badly shaken up. For days I felt like I was on a ship at sea, and I went to sleep on edge expecting to be woken by an earthquake warning. I did ask a Japanese friend who had been in Sendai on the day about it once, but all she told me was 'Kowai' (scary).  

 

   Years later I returned to Japan to teach at a university. I would ask students about their experiences of the day. I guess it was like the Kennedy assassination: everyone remembered where they had been. One guy even said he had been having sex in a love hotel!  

   The German writer Goethe once remarked on a visit to Naples  that 'here people talk of [earthquakes] as they talk of the weather'. I eventually came to feel that way myself. Numerous were the occasions when I was roused early in the morning in Tokyo by the swaying of the building. It got to the stage where I didn't even bother hiding under my table. I would lie on my futon, half-asleep, and wait until the quake had subsided. 

    And yet, it's a fact that another massive tremblor is around the corner. I no longer live in Japan, but for my old colleagues and friends in Fuji, it's like being on a precipice. They accept it as part of life. I'm not sure I could.

A Parting

 

The three of us met in an izakaya close to the library. Outside it was sultry, a typical June evening in Fuji. We didn’t eat much, just a few sticks of yakitori, and we drank three or four glasses of beer each. The Australian was in good spirits. He was eager to leave Japan and the city that had served as his home for three months. He had come for the wrong reasons, he told us, although we never found out what those reasons were. He was tired of being broke. Maybe he would have lasted longer if he hadn’t been sent to the back of beyond, but there it was.

Yoshiwara Honcho Station

After dinner we crossed the huge vacant lot opposite Mos Burger in virtual pitch darkness and walked in the direction of Yoshiwara Honcho Station, where cockroaches scurried along the single platform in the heat of summer. The arcaded street was as usual deserted, and we went up some stairs to an empty bar which had been the scene of a few amusing drunken incidents.

In fact, a lot of very funny things had happened in those three months. There was the can of chu-hi he had shotgunned in Mini Stop, the wrestling match with the Japanese guy with bad breath, the eye infection, the dance in the Peruvian restaurant, the short-lived friendship with Three Tooth, the cardboard box which had come to serve as furniture, the empty jar of pasta sauce used for cheap red wine. Now it was over.

After a couple more beers the American and I got up to leave. We said our farewells and I for one felt quite moved. I would miss this Australian. Before we parted he had one final, inevitable, request to make of us.

“Have you got any money? I’m gonna stay for a bit and I haven’t got any cash.”

We both handed over a few thousand yen, and I never saw him again.

Weekly Housing

   While in Japan I lived for about a year and a half in what is known as ‘weekly housing’. As I never organized my own accommodation, I still do not know why it is so named. Perhaps the contract renews on a weekly basis, or you only have to give a week’s notice if you are leaving.

   At any rate, weekly housing has a bad rap. When I told my students at Tokyo City University that I was staying in such a joint, I was met with knowing looks. Can you hear your neighbours? they asked.  

   On March 15, 2011 I was living in weekly housing in Fuji city, feeling very much on edge following the massive earthquake which had struck four days earlier. Suddenly, at about half past ten at night, there was a violent paroxysm of shaking. A quake had struck Fujinomiya, just a few miles to the north. My wife and I bolted downstairs into the darkness.

   The power cables at the end of the car park were swinging from side to side. The few cars, mine included, were rocking like drunks. My left leg practically seized up from the surge of adrenaline that shot through my body.

   Fearing another tremor, we were reluctant to return to our weekly housing, so we stayed in the darkness for about half an hour. A hundred metres away I could see the shadowy bulk of the shinkansen line. No trains passed, the earthquake having triggered an automatic shutdown. It was dead silent and, curiously, most of our fellow residents were nowhere to be seen. Our minds turned to urgent questions: should we load up the car, would our flights leave as scheduled, would there be another tsunami? Eventually we climbed the steps and went indoors.

   Passing beyond the sham wooden door that opened into the living area, the first thing I noticed was the TV. There was another sound in the background, though.  Curious, I hit the mute button. The unmistakable noise was coming from the flat next door. My neighbour was snoring! In true Japanese style, he was utterly exhausted, so much so that he had slept through a terrifying earthquake.  

           

Fuji

                    The Japanese are loyal to their hometowns. A native of Hamamatsu once told me straight-faced that it was a beautiful city, and that she wished to retire there. I had been to Hamamatsu, and was therefore well aware that it was a rather dull, utilitarian expanse of concrete, home to over half a million people, with little to recommend it other than a pleasant hill-top castle and a sizeable Brazilian community. Even more remarkably, a Japanese colleague once informed me that she preferred the grim industrial city of Fuji, from which she hailed, to Kyoto. Fuji was, she said, ‘quieter’.

              

            This statement struck me as incredible. How could anyone compare Fuji to Kyoto, one of the world’s greatest cities? I spent a year in Fuji, so I write from a position of knowledge, and I can say with no hesitation that my colleague was deeply misguided. A city of a quarter of a million souls, Fuji sits just a hundred miles to the west of Tokyo in Shizuoka Prefecture, but it feels like another world. It was in fact a rather depressing place to live in. I moved there at the end of March 2010, arriving by shinkansen (from Hamamatsu no less) in the company of a drunk Australian, whose first impression was that it was a ‘shithole’. He lasted a mere three months before he quit/was fired and returned to Queensland.

                

Mount Fuji

               While Hamamatsu at least had its castle, Fuji had

practically nothing. Even the view of majestic Mount Fuji, which loomed to the north of the city, was marred by the tide of concrete which swept up its lower slopes. The landscape was replete with factories, smokestacks and soulless architecture. Route 1, the road which led to Tokyo, passed along the southern extremity of the city, close to the sea, where the air was suffused with the pungent and malodorous smell of paper factories. 

               Fuji was, however, not without its curiosities. A single track railway of minor charm, the Gakunan Tetsudo, crossed the city from Enoo, on the eastern edge of Fuji, to JR Yoshiwara train station, which was situated to the south of the city centre. The train usually comprised a single carriage and seemed to attract more than its quota of high school students and very old people. Tickets were printed on cardboard, a quaint touch, although if you got on at Enoo you didn’t need one, for some unexplained reason. The drivers, who doubled as conductors, were irreproachably turned out in uniforms, white gloves and caps, although one or two were partial to a cigarette when the train reached its destination, spoiling their professional image somewhat.

               Riding the Gaku-tetsu gave you a real flavour of Fuji. It took you past the rice fields around Enoo and Sudo, where in summer the evenings resounded to the din of cicadas, over the rocky and generally bone-dry Sudo River, through the dystopian factory district of Hina, and beside the gloomy canals that led to JR Yoshiwara Station. Some of the stations were

Yoshiwara Honchou Station

themselves a little unusual. Yoshiwara Honchou, for instance, comprised a single covered platform separated from a number of dwellings by a train line. I once saw a resident walk along the further side of the line, probably three metres from the platform, and enter his house behind a corrugated iron fence. While the Gaku-tetsu was far from a noisy train, I could never fathom how people could accustom themselves to living a body’s length from a train line.

              

               The nightlife in Fuji was dire. Those seeking a venue in which to drown their sorrows had to choose from one of two principal entertainment districts, neither of which had much to recommend it. The first of these was around JR Fuji station, in the west of the city, where in the evening a handful of suspicious-looking men in suits cooled their heels on the pavement. These denizens of the night would rouse themselves if a group of inebriates happened to pass, and seek to cajole them into squandering tens of thousands of yen in a snack bar. Rumour had it that there was a strong yakuza presence in the handful of streets north of the station, which may have been true, although the only evidence I saw was a couple of besuited and very shady fat men strolling into Mos Burger and acting as if they owned the place.

               The other nightlife hotspot was Yoshiwara Shouten-gai, an arcaded shopping street, and its environs. Here you found more dodgy guys with spiky dyed hair, the occasional group of boozed-up salarymen, dining establishments, and a few awful, deserted bars where you had to pay 600 yen for a beer. My friends and I patronised a few of these initially, before finally settling on a minuscule surfing bar as our preferred hang-out. This establishment, while joyless, had two advantages: the owner spoke English, and he was willing to give a long line of credit to my perpetually skint and intoxicated Australian colleague. There were also massage parlours and ear-cleaning salons, in one of which my Australian friend drunkenly proposed to and was indeed accepted by a masseuse from Taiwan, before being thrown out by the mama-san who ran the place. 

               A friend of mine, who came from Osaka but had moved to Fuji, told me that the climate in Shizuoka was the best in Japan. This was one of the stranger claims I heard while living in Japan, for it soon became apparent that the weather was virtually intolerable between May and September. The

Sudo River

humidity ratcheted up with the arrival of the rainy season, or tsuyu, a time of leaden skies and ferocious downpours that lasted all night, when the rain pounded down with such intensity that I fully expected the roof of my flimsy abode to spring a leak. Following these torrential bouts of rain the air would become less oppressive, but only for a short time, and water would gush over the bed of the Sudo River. The month-long rainy season was the precursor to the relentless sultriness of summer, from which there was no escape. The sweltering heat drove cockroaches indoors, where they scurried along the walls, their hideous antennae quivering in front of them. Enormous dragonflies flew through the sky in groups. The contrast with the mountain town of Takayama, to which I fled one weekend in September and where the nights were cool, was dramatic.

               Still, Fuji was not all bad. It did at least have a Starbucks, although you needed a car to get there. There was also a Chinese noodle shop near City Hall where you could get a plate of gyoza for 100 yen. Even better, there were numerous fine izakaya where you could get pleasantly drunk on beer and ume-shu while snacking on delicious yakitori. Alas, getting home required an exorbitantly expensive taxi ride, for the Gaku-tetsu closed for business at 9.40 p.m.

Practicalities

Accommodation: I wouldn't advocate spending the night in Fuji. 

Restaurants: Bamiyan. Inexpensive and tasty Chinese food, in front of Hon Yoshiwara Station. Staff do not speak English, and may look panic-stricken upon seeing you.

Getting to Fuji: A ticket on the shinkansen from Tokyo Station will set you back 5,240 yen. It's possible (but inadvisable) to take a local train, changing in Atami.