Land of The Risen Sun

The Message was slipped under the door of each guest's room early in the morning. It read: "Welcome congenial guest and honored Japan visitant! Announcing process emergency proper fire drilling the clock eleven." That was the English version. Most guests threw it away or kept it as one of the more intriguing examples of Japanese translation. At precisely 11 that morning, an anxious voice was heard over the guest-room speakers: "Emergency! Emergency! Fire in the main elevator shaft! Fire in seventh and eighth floors! Emergency! Firemen taking good care these fires. Evacuation commencing. Listen for further speaking."

Many guests commenced their own evacuation when they heard this. Most milled nervously in the corridors, some in pajamas with shaving soap on their faces, others still chewing breakfast or carrying luggage. Bright green and purple smoke billowed outside the windows, maids ran around giggling in hard hats and victims wrapped in bandages were lifted onto stretchers and removed to ambulances lined up in the hotel driveway. When one of them careened into the street at top speed and ran into an approaching fire engine, the two "victims" got out and went sprinting back to the hotel to have their dressings checked.

"Very authentic fire drill," beamed the hotel manager to an American guest. "Very thorough to prepare for possible emergency." The guest asked about the collision between the fire engine and the ambulance. "Yes, yes," was the happy response. "Authentic mistake. Sometimes people slightly killed in fire drills, but never any guests. Ha-ha! Very authentic, thank you." And he excused himself to join some hard-hatted, smiling hotel executives who were posing for a group photograph.

Many guests, once they learned the alarm was in fact only a drill, started to return to their rooms. Those on the seventh and eighth floors were informed politely that they were temporarily dead and unidentified, but to the chagrin of the organizers, the occidentals in this group became truculent and refused to play. The Japanese guests went along with the game and took pictures of one another in front of the fire engine, while a couple of Europeans and Americans muttered threats about checking out. Their rooms were full of brightly colored fumes from the smoke bombs detonated outside their windows.

"Further speaking," said the voice on the room speakers. "All guests and participants greatly thanked for their cooperation." A middle-aged English guest stamped into one of the elevators to go back to his breakfast. "Mad buggers," he growled at the smiling operator. "Ruined my bloody boiled eggs."

Many travelers who have been to Japan would argue that this anecdote is hardly typical of everyday life there, but then, few people would agree on what is typical about Japan. What is certain is that to the visiting foreigner, Japan is culture shock on a massive scale. For anyone from Africa, Europe, America or even elsewhere in Asia, the first impressions veer wildly from euphoria to outrage, heavily seasoned with confusion and frustration. Nothing he learns in other parts of the world will equip the visitor to cope with Japan or its people; no society thinks and behaves like the Japanese. To go there is to be transported to another planet, to move among earthlings who in mysterious fashion have acquired an otherworldly culture and scale of values. It is an enlightening, exhilarating and sometimes alarming encounter. One tends to become either an addicted devotee or a hostile critic. It is perhaps the most fascinating country in the world.

In historical terms, Japan is still a novelty, its contact with the modern world dating only from the middle of the past century. For nearly 250 years before that, Japan excluded all foreigners from its shores, with the exception of a handful of Dutch traders based on an island in Nagasaki harbor. Nobody from the outside could get in and no Japanese could get out. When Europeans attempted with limited success to break this blockade, the shogunate, or military leadership, decreed that all foreign ships and crews that tried to dock were to be destroyed. It was not until the mid-1850s that the shogunate, threatened on the one hand by increasing domestic unrest and on the other by persistent demands from foreign powers for commercial pacts, gave in and signed trade treaties, first with the Russians and later with the Americans. With these came an abrupt end to Japan's era of catatonic feudalism and self-imposed isolation, and the dreaded barbarians from the West began to arrive in the biggest and meanest warships ever seen in Japanese waters. Observing all this, and the wondrous products of Western technology they brought with them, Japan's leaders took their first fateful step into the modern world. A special department of research was established; it was called Bansho Torishirabesho, or Office for the Study of Barbarian Books. There was a lot of catching up to do.

Today, of course, Japan is the third-richest power in the world, after the United States and the Soviet Union. Before the end of this century, if current growth continues, some experts feel it may overtake its two original treaty partners to become the wealthiest industrial nation on earth. Other small countries have achieved great commercial success in the past, but usually this was accomplished through a century or more of colonial exploitation. Japan has done it largely through the industry and ingenuity of its own people in the space of only the past 20 years, and in the wake of a cataclysmic defeat in war.

Foreigners are inclined to view this miraculous recovery as a result of the Westernization of Japan, a theory that has been sustained through the years by Western diplomats, politicians, businessmen and military leaders. Almost without exception, they have assumed that the largely benevolent administration of the U. S. occupation forces and the Western-style constitution imposed upon the country after World War Two converted a former enemy into a disciple. Other visitors, noting the Western-style progress of industrial growth and the urbanization of Japan, as well as the passion of its people for Western things, have reasoned that this must mean the country itself is imbued with our ideals. They are mistaken; Westernization is a thin film on the surface of modern Japan. The Japanese have not renounced their faith in deeper and more abiding traditional beliefs; these remain constant. As New York Times correspondent Richard Halloran has pointed out, Japan is a laboratory; it imports ideas, institutions and doctrines from the outside, absorbs those parts it can use--after conversion to Japanese tastes--and discards everything else. In this manner, Japan has assimilated wholesale the concept and apparatus of Western technology, but it has rejected almost entirely the substance of the philosophical, political, religious and cultural patterns ingrained in most Western societies. Anyone who visits Japan today immediately becomes aware of the contrasts.

In America, as in most parts of Western Europe, the responsible citizen knows where he stands. He is (he thinks) what he says he is: an individual born and bred in a society that values and respects the integrity of the individual, or at least makes this claim. He is as good as the next man. The Japanese have no such view of the human condition. They do not share our vaunted-- and sorely abused--assumption that all men are created equal; they believe the opposite, just as they believe that, among nationalities, the Japanese are superior to all. Everyone else is outside the pale, and this includes Okinawa-born Japanese, the children of black or Korean parentage in Japan, the purely Japanese burakumin (the urban-ghetto "village people" who perform the dirtiest and most menial labors in all large cities) and the Ainu, the aboriginal Caucasian inhabitants of the country, who live on Hokkaido and who now hover somewhere between neglect and extinction in the face of an industrial revolution in which they have had little part. Further-more, the Japanese see themselves as members of groups: family, fellow employees, village, town, prefecture and nation. Loyalty to each is observed scrupulously. There is little room for individualism in the Japanese scheme of things, which is why one of the least surprising news events of last year was the highjacking of a Japanese airliner by nine university students. One man acting alone would have been dismissed as a neurotic misfit.

The status of the foreigner--gaijin--in modern Japan is largely that of an outsider who is politely tolerated but not encouraged. Tourist or resident, he is unlikely to be invited very often to a Japanese home, and he is seldom if ever fully accepted in the mainstream of Japanese life. It's not that foreigners are treated with hostility, for the Japanese, as a rule, are friendly to strangers and anxious to please as hosts; it's simply that they feel uncomfortable with a foreigner. They fear he may misunderstand their customs, ridicule their manners or, worse, commit some infinitesimal but embarrassing breach of etiquette--an unpardonable lapse in a country where the people are constantly extending invisible antennas, testing the social climate to make sure they're not going to make (continued on page 243) Risen Sun(continued from page 168) fools of themselves or of someone else. Even the custom of bowing, so odd to Western eyes, is fraught with signals. People adjust their angle of incline according to the rank of the other person: higher if bowing to a subordinate, lower for superiors, youth deferring to age, women to men. For most Japanese, the correct observance of protocol is a matter of course. But it does give rise to a sense of shame and obligation, to the fear that one may lose respect or cause its loss in another--and it explains why foreigners often find it difficult to get a candid no to a straight question.

We in the West are inclined to pride ourselves on the cultivation and application of logic and orderly thought processes in a given situation. Ideally, we use our language to convey direct ideas through explicit words, and we become uneasy when confronted with ambiguities. The Japanese use their language to create a mood, and they have several vocabularies that they employ according to the rank of the person they address. Husbands to wives, company presidents to vice-presidents, teachers to students, all use key words that denote social position in conversation. The emperor has a special set of pronouns that he uses on formal occasions in reference to himself and he speaks a court language so archaic that when he read the Imperial announcement of Japan's defeat at the end of the War, his speech had to be translated for the benefit of the many subjects who couldn't understand him. To quote a Japanese scholar: "After living in the West, one develops a rational mind. This is useless if one must live in Japan."

By our standards, the Japanese may seem a strange people, but we could learn much from their unique and practical approaches to the intricacies of existence, the all-important nuances of Japanese life. The foreigner who takes the trouble to examine and understand these soon discovers that for every seeming quirk of custom or tradition in Japan, he could find something equally bizarre in the habits of his own people.

The islands that comprise this singular country cover a narrow arc of the globe off the East Asian mainland. Superimposed over a map of the North American continent (with whose east coast it shares roughly the same latitude and climate), Japan would reach approximately from Montreal to a point below Atlanta. Including minor islands, the total land area is around 142,000 square miles, but much of this is uninhabitable mountain range, and nearly all of the population of some 103,000,000 lives along the narrow coastal plains that comprise about 20 percent of its territory. In terms of the ratio of inhabitants to area, it is as though almost half the population of the United States lived in less than one fifth of the state of Montana. Tokyo and the other principal cities, Osaka, Yokohama, Kyoto and Kobe, are on the main island of Honshu; the other three biggest islands are Hokkaido in the north, Kyushu in the south, and Shikoku, sandwiched between Kyushu and the lower flank of Honshu.

The tourist in Japan is served by a comprehensive network of railroads, highways and domestic airlines, as well as by such functional novelties as highspeed hydrofoils. In Tokyo, a monorail runs between Haneda International Airport and the downtown terminal, and superbly efficient subway and overhead commuter systems (all marked with English station signs) reach every main district of the city. Super-expresses complete the 320-mile rail journey between Osaka and Tokyo in just over three hours. Passengers can shop for gifts in a small store on the train, read the magazines provided and use the train's telephone to call cities along the route. The doors between cars slide open at the touch of a foot on a rubber mat and, when the conductor makes his ticket rounds, he bows and begs to be pardoned for the intrusion. Girls in starched white aprons pass along the aisles dispensing hot towels and cold drinks. Americans, wearily resigned to the surly and uncertain pattern of railroad service at home, are stunned by the experience.

But Japan offers the unexpected almost everywhere one turns: Construction crews work furiously around the clock in eight-hour shifts and then pass out in a coma of fatigue when the whistle blows; office workers limber up during breaks by running around the moat of the Imperial Palace or joining in group calisthenics on the office roof; factory hands sing company anthems before beginning the day's production. In the Shikoku town of Takamatsu, visitors with a day to spare (the preparation takes about that long) can enjoy a meal that commemorates a battle and recreates the positions of the belligerents. Known as Once Upon a Time Genji and Heike Stew, after the old Japanese stories, it is a feast of pigeon, crab, fish, bamboo, bean curd, ginkgo nuts, radishes and lotus shoots, complete with edible palace, castle, warriors and armor, with lobster ships sailing across fish-paste seas. On the remote island of Tsushima, bare-breasted women dive for shellfish, while at the warm spas of Kyushu, bathers are buried to their necks in steaming sand or gently stewed in bubbling hot springs surrounded by palms and tropical trees.

To the Japanese, none of whom lives more than 100 miles from the sea, the beauty of their coast and countryside is nothing less than sacred. On morning commuter trains to Tokyo from the southwest, sober-faced civil servants and business executives sit engrossed in their newspapers, rarely speaking to anybody and apparently oblivious of the scenery that rushes past the windows. But on clear days, when the train passes a well-known vantage point for Mount Fuji, they stop reading as if on signal and rush to the windows on the left to "see how Fuji looks today." They spend the next five minutes or so in lyrical discussion of the view before returning to their Asahi or Yomiuri Shimbun. These same men can often be found on weekends, sitting in a rowboat on Lake Yamanaka and admiring two Fujiyamas--the real one and its reflection. Or they might take the family to nearby Miyanoshita, a mountainous retreat on the edge of a deep, fir-clad gorge, down which the rain and mist drift in delicate shrouds, clinging to the high ground like fine gauze. In the spring, the falling petals of cherry blossoms are caught by the wind, showering the valley with a snowstorm of pink and white.

Japan is Hokkaido in the north, a sparsely populated land of spectacular ruggedness; Nagasaki and Hiroshima, signposts on the road to Armageddon; the old imperial capital of Kyoto, with its 2000 shrines and temples, castles and palaces; and Mount Aso, the world's largest active volcano. It's the birthplace of the samurai warrior and the kamikaze pilot, the home of Madame Butterfly, the world's fastest trains, largest city, tallest hotel. Religion, history, culture--past, present and future--fact and legend are woven through the fabric of the country, with no clear boundaries to divide one from the other. Its great cities have been razed by man and nature--shuddered to death by earth-quakes, smashed to rubble by incendiary and atomic bombs--only to reappear almost before the dust can clear, rebuilt to face once again whatever the fates hold in store. Japan is optimism and pessimism, too much pride and not enough, innovator-imitator, conformist-radical, teacher-pupil, sensualist-ascetic, contradiction upon contradiction. It is an indefinable, unpredictable country, conquered only once in war but never crushed.

At approximately the geographical center is Tokyo. The capital lies at the northern end of the Japanese megalopolis, a chain of connected cities that extends about 370 miles south to Kobe and contains almost 51,000,000 people, about half the country's population. Some 16,000,000 work in the capital every day and an estimated 12,500,000 live there, making it the world's largest metropolis. Tokyo is the city of the rising gorge, a gaudy, dizzy sprawl that makes Manhattan seem like Walden Pond. It is a city on the rampage to Buddha knows where, a tangled mass of superhighways, steel towers, skyscrapers, cramped suburbs and stupefying traffic jams. Seeing it for the first time, many visitors are plunged into depression, disillusioned beyond their wildest nightmares by the enormity of this urban anarchy. Except for a handful of central thoroughfares, none of the streets is named; buildings are numbered according to their order of construction, not to designate their location. If several houses are built simultaneously on the same lot, they are numbered identically, and some streets have half a dozen or more buildings with the same numerical address.

Cars, trucks, buses and motorbikes choke every main street and, when the lights change, pedestrians flee across in terror, pursued by the worst drivers on earth and, at some main intersections, harried by police in observation booths who scold errant citizens over public-address systems. The gravest threat posed to life and limb is the infamous Tokyo cabdriver, a vestigial descendant of the samurai warrior, whose traditional code of chivalry included a standing instruction to decapitate on the spot "any commoner who behaves in a manner other than expected." There are too many people and machines in Tokyo--and, consequently, too much of their smothering by-products: smog, smell and din. Voices shriek from speakers attached to light poles, exhorting passers-by to wash their hair with this or clean their dentures with that. It's too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. Tokyo should long since have succumbed to one or the other of its many afflictions, but it hasn't. It has thrived in its roaring bedlam, grown steadily larger, more confusing and more exciting. Few cities anywhere can match its infinity of seductive pleasures.

Amid the neon and concrete, the eye is suddenly bewitched by a small detail, an unexpected glimpse of the other Japan--an arrangement of rock, water and bamboo in the lobby of a bank; a pagoda with its gabled roof glinting above the trees of a park; a garden that has been nurtured for centuries; a solemn temple with its chanting priests; or the secretive Imperial Palace, hidden behind a moat and forbidding walls. One sees a crowd of high school girls in brilliantly colored kimonos, or a closed rickshaw being pulled through a dark street in Akasaka, carrying a geisha to an assignation with her patron at a teahouse. In the martial-arts halls, visitors watch in awed silence as teams of young men, some in bloodstained tunics, stand in rigid karate posture while their instructor walks the lines, stopping now and then to deliver a sudden kick to some unfortunate whose foot is planted at the wrong angle. Or they can see displays of judo or of kendo, a style of two-handed fencing with stout poles. And to gain an even greater understanding of the reverence the Japanese have for their country's chivalric past, they need travel no further than the Sengakuji Temple, which houses the graves of the renowned 47 ronin (masterless samurai) who committed mass harakiri some 270 years ago after avenging the death of their dishonored lord and master. Hundreds of families pay homage and burn incense at the graves, sighing over the relics in the small museum. "You must realize," one acquaintance explained, "suicide is a way of life in Japan."

Such manifestations of the culture--kimonos, pagodas and temples--are concrete; the foreigner sees these because he looks for them. But others, just as characteristically Japanese, are not so easy to note. Perhaps most foreign--at least to Americans--is the system of womb-to-tomb corporate paternalism. Being hired by a company in Japan is like joining a family; members owe the company loyalty and hard work and, in return, receive lifelong security. Although salaries are low by American standards, raises come regularly and outstanding work may be rewarded with clandestine gifts and bonuses. Three to six months' pay per bonus is not unusual. Extra benefits ordinarily include expense accounts (even for fairly low-level employees), medical insurance, low-cost company housing, company hospitals, recreational facilities, inexpensive meals in the company cafeteria, subsidies for transportation to and from work, and family-vacation tours and excursions to resort areas, often company owned.

Many other cultural expressions of the Japanese character may be even less comprehensible to the first-time visitor, because they are ritual, and it is these that sometimes lead the Japanese to assume that foreigners know so little about the everyday niceties. A visitor, for example, should remove his topcoat before entering a Japanese house (and put it back on again when he is outside, not before). And it is not enough to remove one's shoes inside; one should also place them neatly side by side, toes pointing toward the exit; and a polite visitor would never turn his back to his host while removing them. He wears house slippers provided inside the door, but discards them before walking on the tatami matting, taking care to avoid the tatami's fabric edging. If his host asks him to sit with his back to the tokonoma (a wall recess that usually contains a scroll), the guest knows he is being given the place of honor. Other positions around the room denote the status of each occupant, that nearest the door being the lowest. A Japanese can walk into such a room and know at a glance how he should behave toward every other member of the assembly. Everyone in Japan has--and knows--his place. In the ritualistic world of the sumo wrestler, for example, boundaries of rank and status are clearly drawn. The lowest position is that of the fundoshikatsugi, "man who carries his superior's underwear." There is a form for everything, even in public restaurants, but these procedures vary according to the type of food served and, for the sake of foreign company, are sometimes dispensed with.

In Japan, food is sustenance to the spirit as well as to the body. Food is even legend, as illustrated by the fable of the beggar who could afford nothing but rice. Everyday, he would stand outside a fish restaurant, eating his rice and taking deep breaths between each mouthful to savor the rich aromas from the kitchen. After a week or so, the owner came out and demanded five yen for the privilege. The beggar produced the money and held it out in his hand, but before the greedy restaurateur could take it, he pocketed the coins. "You asked me to pay you," the beggar told him, "for the smell of your fish. I have done so--with the sight of my money."

Westerners who have assumed that Japanese food is all fish and rice are delighted not only by the variety and subtlety of the cuisine but also by the skill with which it is prepared and served. Watching a veteran sushi counterman is to see a craftsman at work as he swiftly slices the fresh raw fish, kneads the rice into a small, seaweed-wrapped cake and presents the morsel as though it were the last of its kind. Dipped in a tart sauce of soy and green horseradish, sushi is a taste that brings tears to the eyes of aficionados who have been denied it for too long. Among the hundreds of other culinary temptations are tempura (shrimp, fish and vegetables deep-fried in batter), yakitori (skewered beef and chicken, charbroiled), okaribayaki (barbecued beef and game), mizutaki (a type of chicken stew) and sukiyaki. Some restaurants specialize in only one style, others combine all of them or add variations and inventions of their own. Plainer, commoner fare runs to noodles mixed with meat, fish or vegetables, or oden, a pungent, inexpensive hot dish of vegetables and pastry concoctions.

Among the dishes unique to Japan is chanko-nabe, a highly nutritious stew of fish or chicken that forms the sumo wrestler's diet. Perhaps the most appropriate of all, at least in sociological terms, is fugu, an ugly species of blow-fish whose ovaries and liver must be delicately excised because they contain the fatal poison tetraodontoxin, for which there is no known antidote. It is normally served only in restaurants licensed specially by the government, but a number of fugu fanciers expire every year from eating blowfish that has been carelessly prepared. None of the leading fugu establishments in the capital has registered a casualty in recent years, but it's said that in rural districts, where the fish is cooked by less skillful hands, many a diner suddenly pitches across the table and breathes his last--all of which adds to the mystique of this tender and delicate fish.

If fugu or other Japanese dishes don't appeal, Tokyo has dozens of Western restaurants serving French, Italian, American and other international cuisines, as well as some of the best Chinese restaurants in the world--and at least one authentic kosher deli. Steak in Japan is superb, and Kobe beef--which comes from steers fed on beer and wheat and massaged by hand--is unrivaled anywhere. Some restaurants cook it on heated boulders, while the diners sit at the counter and nibble Tokyo's excellent oysters and roast crab, washed down with hot sake or cold beer.

Food is Tokyo's first pleasure, but pleasure itself is the city's main preoccupation. After dark, the capital is a forest of spangled lights. In cavernous night clubs, thousands of hostesses wait attendance on free-spending Japanese businessmen; Turkish baths are packed with customers whose bodies have been steamed, cleaned, oiled, kneaded and trodden into shape by young girls. Restaurants, bars, discothèques, theaters and concert halls are filled to capacity, and bargain hunters prowl through shopping arcades, street markets and department stores. Tokyo has what all large cities have, but it has more of it--not only zoos, museums, art galleries, ultramodern hotels and cabarets but also festivals, fish markets, teahouses, sake bars, sex shops, secluded inns and John Wayne movies with Japanese sound tracks.

There are all-girl revues, such as those offered by the Kokusai, Nichigeki and Takarazuka troupes, which put on grandiose spectaculars worthy of Busby Berkeley in his heyday. Sets explode, buildings collapse in flames, and huge waterfalls arch over chorus lines of 300. Midgets in geisha drag perform outrageous stripteases, orchestras revolve on stages, and scenes change with such frantic speed that it's a miracle one number avoids colliding with the next. These shows and the bawdy, delighted reactions of the audience are wildly exuberant affairs that set to rest any notion of the Japanese as a race of undemonstrative stoics. Even in the kabuki theater, one of Japan's traditional forms of drama, theatergoers leap to their feet with cries of admiration whenever one of the cast strikes a particularly expressive pose.

Japan's capital is a collection of villages, towns and subcities, the more colorful of which are often overlooked by visitors who know the city only in terms of Akasaka, the Ginza or Roppongi, the most popular tourist districts. But only a short distance from these well-trodden paths is Shinjuku, where one can shop in comfort in huge department stores such as Isetan or explore the maze of lantern-bedecked side streets lined with coffeehouses, cellar theaters, jazz clubs, baths, restaurants, bars and a clientele composed largely of students. Shinjuku is about the closest Tokyo comes to the East Village or the old Hashbury, but without the predominant drug culture. Drugs are still mainly a foreign novelty in Japan and the young people who spend their idle hours in the corridors of Shinjuku Station, sniffing glue and paint thinners, rarely get their hands on anything more potent--and perhaps less harmful. Strict anti-drug laws have the support of most Japanese; when some of the Tokyo company of Hair were arrested on narcotics charges a year ago, local discothèques stopped playing Aquarius as a gesture of disapproval.

Adjacent to Shinjuku is another Japanese amusement center, Ikebukuro, which overflows with scores of restaurants, clubs, sake bars, mah-jongg halls and more than a hundred small hotels. At the other end of the city is Asakusa, where countryfolk and Tokyoites flock on monumental weekend binges to empty their pockets in honky-tonks, blue-movie houses, hostess bars, Turkish baths, clip joints and strip shows, solicited by barkers outside nearly every door or beckoned by pretty girls in kimonos or Western dress. To appreciate the earthier attractions that abound in Tokyo's outlying areas, a stranger should take a guide, not because it's dangerous on the streets--the threat of violence is minimal everywhere in Japan--but to help with language and geographic difficulties. It is in these districts, beyond the Ginza lights, that visitors discover cleanliness isn't necessarily next to godliness.

"Ecstasy," sighs the naked American, as a soft, soapy female hand slips between his thighs, "is a Japanese bath."

The girl in the shorts and bra giggles.

"What estasy?" she asks.

"It's like happiness, only bigger."

"Ah, bigga. Unnerstan. Bigga not same small."

"Right."

"You like oil or powda? Massage? Lie on face, I walk your back?"

"Right."

"Everything?"

"Right."

"You want turn ovah? Ooh, you bigga now. You estasy, no? I think you like too much bath in Japan."

Of course he like too much bath in Japan: lying there nude on a rubber air mattress, while a 19-year-old nymph with a body like last night's fantasy slides a slippery knee between his legs and works havoc with her finger tips. This is his second bath since breakfast. By tomorrow morning, he should be several pounds lighter and very clean, indeed. Everybody like too much bath in Japan.

In Tokyo, the sensual ritual of cleanliness can be enjoyed in hundreds and possibly thousands of bathhouses. Some are public, a few communal (for men only), but most are private, which means that each customer gets his own room and masseuse. These latter are the Toruko or Turkish baths, behind whose gleaming walls many a newly arrived gaijin has received the shock of his life in the care of tender young ladies. In the Utamaro bath, midway between downtown Tokyo and Haneda airport, customers are led by the hand along an indoor cobbled path into a room resembling a garden. All the usual bathing and massaging amenities are provided, with the addition of a rubber air mattress, on which the customer reclines while being rinsed and lathered. Connoisseurs of the bath regard this barely endurable pleasure as one of the more enlightened ablutionary innovations.

In the ordinary Toruko, the client asks for a specific girl if he's been there before, or he will be assigned one upon arrival. She will wear a brief robe over a pair of tiny shorts and a halter top. The robe is discarded in the private room and the rest may follow, depending on house policy, which varies according to the prevailing legal mood. Once inside the bathroom, the girl removes the customer's clothes and leads him to a steam box, in which he sits for as long as he wishes, while she busies herself preparing the bath. In some Torukos, the customer is soaped and rinsed on the massage table; in others, he sits on a small wooden stool, where he can have a shampoo and a shave if he wants. After the last rinse, he climbs into the scalding cauldron of the tub and, when he's had enough of that, he lies down on the massage table, where he may be sprayed with talc or rubbed with fragrant oil from toes to temples, front and back, over every inch of his body. For most men, the oil massage is the point of no return, an excruciatingly erotic experience when performed by a skillful masseuse.

Somewhere along the way, the customer should have established his desires. If you wish the girl to take you in hand, as it were, you ask for a "Special" (pronounced Spesharu), which means that she does for you what you could do for yourself. This is about as far as most Tokyo masseuses will go. A "Double" (pronounced Daburu) costs approximately, $10, or about twice as much as a Special, and means that the customer may also indulge in some light petting. The third and rarest category is "Honban" (pronounced Hoh-ban), which is the word used by Japanese movie directors when they shout "Action!," and action is what you get if you say "Honban" at the right moment to the right girl. It costs $15 and up, but most Tokyo Toruko girls refuse to indulge--on the premises. A Toruko masseuse who isn't married or isn't too worried about family ties may consent to meet a customer somewhere else. But in most cases, this contact with Japanese girls (except for hostesses and other professionals--or those few who regard foreigners as exotic sex instructors) is about all the average male tourist can expect.

The chances of a visitor meeting a well-bred young lady during the typical short visit to Tokyo are probably the same as anywhere, but anyone who achieves much more than a few brief, platonic meetings in public is doing extraordinarily well for himself. Japanese girls stay home until marriage, even in Tokyo, and at home the father generally makes the rules and the daughter abides by them. More often than not, this means a midnight curfew. The notion of bringing home a gaijin, except to attend the most formal party, is not regarded with favor.

This raises a major obstacle for the visitor who's lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a girl and has nowhere to go to pursue the friendship. Some of Tokyo's deluxe Western hotels are fussy about guests of opposite sexes and different names sharing the same room and, in a few of them, night desks are manned on every floor to prevent just that. Anyone considering the use of his room as a temporary romantic roost should look over the hotel before checking in, to make sure it has no night desks and that a restaurant, bar or other public facility is located on the roof, so that the elevators may be freely used without fear of intervention by the management.

Japan may not have invented the euphemism that is now known as the hostess, but it did invent one of the earliest examples, the geisha. The word means "accomplished person," and the true geisha is not a prostitute, even though she may establish a liaison with a wealthy patron. Primarily, she is a first-class entertainer, skilled in Japanese ceremonial arts, a young woman who serves a long apprenticeship before starting her career. The cost of a top-notch geisha party is steep (anywhere from around $40 and up, per person) and even if it weren't, its purpose and amusements--which consist mainly of singing, dancing and a number of childlike party games--would appear tiresome and meaningless to the visitor. Even young Japanese men these days find them excessively boring affairs, but not the middle-aged businessmen to whom the geisha is still a figure of respect and affection. One usually needs a formal introduction through a Japanese patron to attend a party in a first-class teahouse, and many geishas are reluctant to entertain Westerners at all because of possible misunderstandings about the girls' function.

Far more popular in present-day Japan are the bar and night-club hostesses, who are paid by the management to drink, talk and/or dance with customers. Though many hostesses will accompany a client home at the drop of a 10,000-yen note (about $28), and others will join him after closing time, some are forbidden to associate with customers off the premises. In the bigger Tokyo night clubs, such as the Mikado, hostesses wear small radio receivers in their bras that are tuned to a central-control frequency, so that the front desk can summon the girl if a big-spending regular arrives and wants her to sit at his table. When this happens, the hostess abandons her current prospect, who has a choice of outbidding the new arrival, waiting for another girl or getting the hell out and finding a place where the staff hasn't been wired for sound.

Excessive rates are charged for both drinks and the small trays of nauseating snacks and nuts that pass as hors d'oeuvres in Tokyo clubs. The customer's can always refuse the nuts when they're placed on the table, but most strangers don't like to for fear of seeming cheap. Do it. Japanese customers seem to live on almost unlimited bank rolls, thanks to the liberal expense accounts that compensate for low salaries, but for most foreigners, the entertainment isn't worth the price. A hundred dollars for three drinks, a saucer of peanuts and half an hour's garbled conversation with a girl whose brassiere periodically emits a shrill chirruping is not the ideal way to spend a night on the town. Younger visitors enjoy themselves more (and meet a greater variety of nonprofessional females) in the discothèques around Akasaka and Roppongi, but it's wise to be on the alert for one of Tokyo's latest sexual hazards--Caucasian males who have had partial sex-change operations and who often bear an amazing resemblance to the real thing. In some cases, surgery has worked such miracles that a number of these changelings work as strippers in Japanese night clubs. Many a midnight rambler has escorted one home only to discover at the moment of truth that the top half didn't match the bottom.

Tokyo is not only Japan's entertainment capital but also the home of its political, cultural and social establishments. It feeds the arteries through which flow the new ideas, fads and fashions that change life styles in the rest of the country. In many respects, most other Japanese cities are merely smaller versions of the capital, at least physically: heavily industrialized on the outer edges, chaotic and crowded in the center. Only one has escaped serious damage in modern times, and this is Kyoto, or Nihon no Furusato, the spiritual heart of Japan, which for that reason was spared Allied bombing in the War by Executive order from Washington. Kyoto is not without its share of factories and urban squalor, but in the older part of town, where the streets retain the classical Chinese grid pattern on which the city was originally laid out, the bemused foreigner who has searched in vain for the "real" Japan is at last rewarded. Here he can stroll through narrow streets of wooden houses, admiring the symmetry of stone and tile in the geisha quarter of Gion or finding his own meaning in the Zen garden of Ryoanji Temple. During the day, he can visit some of the city's thousands of shrines and temples, palaces and museums, marvel at the tranquil moss garden of Kokodera, the five-storied pagoda of Toji or the massive fortifications of Nijo Castle.

Kyoto is the embodiment of the nation's historic and religious heritage, the repository of about a fourth of Japan's cultural treasures, and the home of scholars and craftsmen whose work is of such importance to the state that these gentlemen are officially designated Cultural Intangible Properties. Some of their creations are on display in small stores in market arcades or in workshop showrooms across the River Kamo in the Nishijin weaving district. Here a silk obi or waist sash that may be worn no more than two or three times a year can cost upwards of $15,000. Leading off Shinkyogoku Street are hundreds of inviting lanes and narrow alleys with tiny restaurants, coffeeshops, baths, snack counters and theaters showing the latest flesh epic from Europe. The air is rent by the screech of steam whistles from the carts of chestnut and corn vendors, by hammers working red-hot metal on anvils and by the clatter of a dozen workshop factories. From almost every open window drifts the appetizing bouquet of food being cooked for the next meal. Souvenir hunters can have their names embroidered in Japanese characters on huge banners or engraved on small seals; in the bazaars west of Shinkyogoku, they can shop in hundreds of small stores for Kyoto cloth, kimonos or the newer products of Japanese technology.

Kyoto is a city of festivals, some modest and obscure, others riotous and flamboyant. The biggest of the year is Gion Matsuri, held in the middle of June and lasting over a week. Huge floats are towed through the streets, orchestras of gongs, flutes and drums kick up an unearthly discord and thousands of Japanese pour into the city from all over the country to celebrate in the bars and night clubs of local centers. Many older homes and artisans' workshops are opened to the public, the only time of the year when visitors can wander through them at their leisure.

Because of Kyoto's antiquity and uniquely Japanese charm, it makes little sense to stay in a Western-style hotel while in the city. Instead, the visitor should reserve a room in a ryokan, or Japanese inn, such as the Tawaraya, which has been operated by the same family for more than 200 years. Once inside, it's difficult to remember that such distractions as traffic and crowded streets ever existed. Everything on the outside seems clumsy and inhuman in contrast to the interior of this fragile cocoon, with its sliding walls of paper and floors of tatami. One may occasionally hear the whispered laughter of a couple returning to their room from the bath or the shuffle of slippered feet along a passageway, but one rarely catches a glimpse of other guests. There are no public rooms, no bars or cocktail lounges. Meals are brought to one's room by maids, one to do the cooking, the other to help serve and clear away. Removing their slippers at the edge of the tatami (no footwear is needed on this comfortable two-inch-thick matting), they kneel by the table throughout the meal, attending to the guest's needs almost before he is aware of them. Tea is brought to the room whenever a resident re-enters the inn, his arrival having been mysteriously signaled by unseen sentries who notify the kitchen. A hot tub of water awaits him in the bathroom every night before he goes to bed and when he wakes in the morning; socks and shorts left lying around the room are washed during his absence. Even by comparison with the most luxurious hotels in the West, the service in the best ryokans is far superior in every detail. Some maids even present their guests with a modest gift when they leave, not because they want or expect something in return--tipping is not a custom in Japan--but because in the few days the guest has stayed in her care, the maid has somehow come to regard this former stranger as a member of some large and personal family.

It takes years of training as well as great fortitude to become a ryokan maid and, since it is a lowly paid occupation in comparison with industrial jobs, very few modern girls are willing to make it a career. Most of the maids in Japanese inns are middle-aged or nearly so, and it would be a mistake to assume they are provided for the entertainment of male guests. A single man staying at an inn should take his companion with him, for it is unlikely he will find one inside. Fortunately, Kyoto provides numerous opportunities for the foot-loose male, especially in the hostess bars and night clubs of Pontocho, the most colorful district in the city at night, or in the nearby area between Sanjo and Shijo Streets.

Compared to Tokyo, however, Kyoto's night life is a pallid attraction, and once a visitor has exhausted the local circuit, he should move on to Japan's second city, Osaka. Here superb restaurants, modern hotels and a vast underground shopping complex (as well as one of Japan's best-equipped shopping centers at Osaka Airport) all compete for the tourist's attention. Physically, however, the city can be even more appalling than Tokyo. Swamped in a greasy smog on some days, buried in traffic and athrob with the clangor of new construction, Osaka is still recovering from the ambitious building projects undertaken before Expo was held just outside the city last year. It is a metropolis renowned for the astounding productivity of its factories and an inborn restlessness and opportunism that has made Osaka industrialists the envy of their Tokyo rivals. The city accounts for a quarter of Japan's industrial production and nearly half the nation's exports. A number of factories can be visited by the public, a typical stroke of shrewdness on the part of managements that have turned local eyesores into tourist attractions.

Apart from technological sight-seeing, the most notable Osaka attractions are Osaka Castle, the Bunraku puppet theater, the July festival of Tenjin Matsuri (the most colorful river procession in Japan) and the inevitable sight-seeing tower, from which spectators can peer hopefully into dense factory smoke and automobile exhaust fumes. Several square miles of flashing neon encompass the amusement districts of Dotonbori, Sen-nichi-mae, Shinsekai and Umeda. Night clubs are big and lavish, with floorshows to match; there are discothèques, kabuki theater and pop concerts; and behind many a neon façade is a girl taking everything off. "Osaka may not smell good," as a Japanese guide said to a recent visitor, "but she swing, man."

Some travelers might prefer to pay their farewell to Japan from a more fitting departure point than Osaka's new and modern international airport. But it is no less Japanese, in its way, than the Imperial Palace in Tokyo or the Shinto shrines of Kyoto. Technology and imported amusements may have changed the face of the country, but they have not touched its heart. The new Japan is the old Japan, and modern patterns of life are soon absorbed and reshaped by the ancient. In Japan, it is the West that becomes Easternized rather than the other way around. It is a remarkable transformation to see, and it can be appreciated only by taking a firsthand look at the country whose name means origin of the sun.