First Empty Your Cup

ALL YOUR LIFE you count on the world to work in a certain way. Then you go to Japan.

I’d only just arrived and had barely figured out how to get some yen out of the airport atm and make it onto the subway when there it was: a freakishly oversized can of Pepsi in the hands of a Tokyo teenager. There are only a few fixed, eternal qualities you can count on in this world, and a twelve-ounce soft drink is one of them. It’s one of the two-by-fours we hang the sheetrock of our reality on, and when it turns into a three-by-eight, where are you? In Japan.

Why were people wearing surgical masks in public? Why were they hitting golf balls on the roof of that twelve-story building? Why was there such an unearthly quiet on the subway at evening rush hour? Why were these nice people handing me free packets of tissues on the street corner? Why did the toilets have four color-coded buttons? Why were the streets picture-perfect clean when there wasn’t a public waste can in sight? And, for that matter, why were there no public waste cans? Did all the people in Tokyo carry their gum wrappers around all day until they got home?

But my most pressing why that first night in Tokyo — once I had absorbed the ontological body blow of the wrong-sized Pepsi can, and emerged from the subway amid an eerily quiet tide of humans in surgical masks, and navigated Ikebukuro Station’s twenty-seven separate exits, and made it past the nice people with the tissues, and checked into the ryokan (Japanese hostel), and tried to use its toilet without launching a strategic missile strike, and headed back out onto the preternaturally clean streets to do something about my nasty hunger pangs — was: Why won’t you take my perfectly good yen and give me one of those lovely bowls of noodle soup?

The man behind the counter at the tiny noodle shop smiled and nodded and held up a little card with a picture of the lovely noodle soup I wanted to eat, but he wouldn’t take my cash, and he wouldn’t give me the soup. He wouldn’t even give me the little photo of the soup. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, and, still smiling, pointed me toward the door.

The place was spotless and brightly lit with fluorescent fixtures, a tiny sink at one end, a tv at the other. A smiling ceramic cat sat on a shelf, its raised paw also seeming to point me to the door. There were ten stools in the place and five customers. No one spoke. Aside from some prodigious slurping, each patron was quiet.

“Do you want,” said a voice behind me, “to purchase Japanese noodle?”

I turned around. One of the noodle slurpers, a shy, middle-aged man, nodded at me. It was almost a bow.

“Very much,” I said, nodding back. “Or any kind of noodles, actually. Please tell me how much.”

“He cannot accept your money.”

And, as if to underscore the shy man’s point, the smiling man behind the counter again pointed to the door.

“I’m sorry,” said the shy man. (Why is everyone so sorry?) “You, ah . . . must go . . .” And then he, too, pointed.

There I was, jet-lagged and famished, being shown the door by two of the most polite people I had ever met. And a smiling cat.

“You must go,” said the shy man, “to get a ticket.”

And then I realized he wasn’t actually pointing to the door but to a machine just inside the door. It had matchbook-sized buttons, each sporting nearly identical pictures of noodle soup. A new customer had just come through the door, and I looked over his shoulder as he inserted various coins and bills and then punched buttons. Out came a ticket with a photo of soup on it, just like the one the man behind the counter had held up. In Japan, it seemed, you couldn’t buy a bowl of soup without first buying a vending-machine photo of that bowl of soup. Was this a better way of doing things? I didn’t know, but I got my soup.

THIS VISIT TO JAPAN was my first stop on a four-month journey to see the world. I’d expected Japan to be clean, well-ordered, and technologically advanced, and it was. I’d also expected it to be different from the U.S., to have its own ways and eccentricities. But I hadn’t put the two together. Here in Japan I found advanced technology implemented by a starkly different civilization. At first blush the result felt like a futuristic sci-fi movie, as much utopian as dystopian.

You’re not here for the future, I kept telling myself those first few evenings, after I’d fallen back to my little room at the ryokan like a shellshocked soldier to his bunker. You’re supposed to be on the first leg of a global pilgrimage. Japan is the homeland of Zen, remember? That’s why you came.

I’d spent a fair portion of my youth puzzling over koans, reading Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, and being beguiled by Zen masters and their oblique stories of enlightenment. These masters spoke of a mysterious emptiness at the heart of Zen, a “marvelous Void.” I’d had my share of run-ins with a spir­itual void in my twenties and thirties, though I would hardly have called them “marvelous.” Rather these run-ins were filled with more terror than wonder. Do not stare too long into the abyss, Nietzsche warned, or the abyss will stare back into you. But I failed to listen. Seeking explanations, I made a few efforts at organized religion, but nothing clicked. Until I stumbled upon Zen. It was the unreligion. Fearless yet playful. Dada, but with discipline. These Zen masters kept a spring in their step, even chuckled as they walked along the lip of the abyss. Zen spoke to me. Unfortunately I was a bit hard of hearing. 

I’d brought with me several slim Zen volumes, and as I lay in my small, cold room at the ryokan, I read them again. “You must let the cloth weave the cloth.” “What was your face before you were born?” I guess I was hoping these koans would make more sense now that I was here in Japan, that maybe just the air, or Japanese gravity, or the spare lines of my room might inch me a hair farther down the path to satori (enlightenment). Not a chance. As always, the koans were utterly baffling — as they were designed to be. Clearly I was going to have to do more than just show up.

In one of my favorite parables a university professor, curious about Zen, comes to visit Master Nan-in. They sit down for tea. The monk quietly pours his visitor’s cup full, then keeps on pouring. The professor watches the cup overflow until he can no longer restrain himself. “It is overfull!” he shouts. “No more will go in!” And then — wait for it, the moment when the master teaches the foolish “grasshopper” a lesson: “Like this cup,” Nan-in says, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Was Tokyo filling my cup or emptying it? I wasn’t sure, but these Zen stories charmed me. I trusted them (though the skeptic in me wondered where the masters kept finding such willing foils). There is something wonderfully absurd about Zen, and something gravely humble as well. It refuses to declare truths or even define itself. Instead, via parable, logical conundrum, or the simple command to sit, breathe, and pay attention, Zen throws you back upon yourself and the “suchness” of everyday reality.

But did I really want to be thrown? If that’s why I’d come to Japan, shouldn’t I have been in Kyoto, meditating in the famous gardens of the Ryōan-ji temple? If I’d come to visit the Zen homeland, shouldn’t I have been hiking on the island of Shikoku, walking the traditional eighty-eight-stage circuit from temple to temple? Or at least popping off to the sacred sites at Nikkō or Kamakura? Yes, but I kept putting off these little pilgrimages. Zen may have charmed me, but it frustrated me too. More than this, it scared me. It made me feel as though I were chasing my own tail — and if I ever caught it, what then? I’d be staring back into my own blank stare, with no idea what to do. So, instead of Nikkō or Shikoku or Kamakura, I flung myself at Tokyo day after day.

“NEW YORK WITH FIVE TIMES SQUARES” was my first stab at trying to describe this city of massive neon caverns. A day later it seemed more like Los Angeles — a huge, decentralized city — but with subways. (Maybe LA would have been more like Tokyo if General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil hadn’t ripped out the cable cars in 1946.) Two days later it was the capital of a feudal kingdom with 1,500 years’ worth of crooked alleyways that had been firebombed into oblivion and rebuilt in a hurry. Or perhaps it was a sprawling Japanese Vegas, minus the desert. Or a fever dream.

Looking for a bathroom one afternoon, I stepped into a downtown cafe, and suddenly I was in France — brioche, croissants, café au lait, little marble tables, wire chairs — but all the customers were Japanese. The next evening it was Italy — a traditional ristorante faithfully re-created down to the Venetian plaster and rococo furnishings — and the evening after that a fellow from the ryokan and I headed to an English pub in the Kabukichō district. Passing through a nondescript door and down a set of stairs, we entered a bar with dark wood banisters, framed oil paintings, and a dartboard. They’d gotten everything right, down to the coat of arms on the wall and the two fine pints of Bass ale we ordered.

It is a canard of postmodernism that the replica is “more real” than the original. (In Disneyland, the Wild West experience is re-created not from actual artifacts of frontier days but from memorabilia of Hollywood westerns.) In Tokyo not only were the copies more real; they were bigger and better. The Tokyo Tower, a huge radio tower built in 1958, is a near replica of the Eiffel Tower, but thirteen meters taller. Americans have done the same in Vegas, with Paris next door to the Roman Colosseum, which is just down the Strip from the Egyptian Pyramids. But in Tokyo it was harder to tell where the real culture began and the copy left off. Baseball and Kentucky Fried Chicken seemed as Japanese as sushi. In one kfc a twenty-something Japanese woman wanting to practice her English struck up a conversation with me. “Do you have also Kentucky Fried Chicken in America?” she asked. Tokyo was a Vegas people actually lived in, then forgot was Vegas.

But the Japanese weren’t the only ones who’d confused the copy and the original. It was impossible for me not to experience Tokyo through the lens of all the media images by which I had come to know it over the prior forty years. Looking out the window of the subway, I’d see a bridge and a river and a kanji-lettered chemical plant and wonder when Godzilla was going to turn it all into a b-movie lake of fire. The Imperial Palace grounds, with their impressive shogun-era fortress walls and towering wooden gateways, seemed wrong without Toshirō Mifune in samurai garb, playing the lead in a Kurosawa epic. “The sky was the color of television,” reads the opening line of William Gibson’s science-fiction novel Neuromancer, as the protagonist drifts through the streets of Tokyo. And so it was my first few nights in the city: rainy and gray, the neon lights reflected in a dome of overcast sky. The Blade Runner set, depicting a dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, was inspired by contemporary Tokyo, with its dark, narrow alleyways and towering electric billboards.

Preconceived notions are bad, I told myself. I shouldn’t let my expectations get in the way of experiencing the place on its own terms. But it was the images and ideas already rattling around in my head that made Tokyo come alive out of the neon and drizzle. Like the rest of the backpackers at the ryokan, I’d always figured the best way to travel was to avoid the tourist traps and seek out “authenticity” — some kind of purer, more “real” experience of the local culture. But in Tokyo, with the real and the imitation already so confused, what did that even mean?

ON THE EVENING of my third day in the city I found myself swapping stories with a mix of Swedes, Italians, and Australians in the ryokan’s tiny kitchenette. It quickly became apparent that we were all collecting a similar set of odd, ironic encounters. I told them my noodle-soup-ticket story; they told me theirs.

“Dude,” said an American who’d been standing by the tea machine, eavesdropping, “they just don’t want to touch the money. Not all Japanese restaurants are set up that way.”

“Actually, I figured that one out myself,” I said. “That’s half the point of the story.”

“But you say it like it’s some kind of great revelation.”

His name was Troy. Tall, mildly handsome, late twenties. He was wearing the same Swatch-brand watch I’d seen most Japanese men his age wearing. He’d been living in Japan for a few years, one of the Swedes had told me, and seemed to harbor a special resentment for American visitors like me.

“Did someone get up on the wrong side of the tatama mat this morning?” I asked.

“It’s a tatami,” he shot back, “and I hope you slept on the futon on top of the tatami.”

The guy had gotten my New York hackles up. “Dude-san, if you know everything already, why are you staying in the ryokan with the rest of us newbies?”

“Look, you’re an American, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve been here, what? Two days?”

“Three.”

“Three days. I’ve been here three years. I’m not saying I know everything, but I know enough to know that there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“That’s very Donald Rumsfeld of you.”

That got a chuckle out of him, and we both eased up a little. He’d been living far to the south in Kobe and was visiting Tokyo like the rest of us. He’d taught English for a year, then stayed on for another two. His Japanese was good. I couldn’t tell what his current job was or if he even had one, but, despite his pretensions, he seemed quite homesick.

“If you’re here for ten days,” he went on, a bit despairingly, “you think you understand the place. If you’re here for ten years, you might actually begin to understand it. Anything in between and you’re lost.” By his own metric he was lost, and so was I — but, crucially, I didn’t know it yet.

“So you’re saying I’m too happy?” I asked. “Or just clueless?”

“Yes.”

“Well, bully for me.”

But, as I walked away, I knew he was right. It took Eugen Herrigel, a German studying Zen archery in Japan in the 1930s, a full five years simply to learn how to release his bowstring “unintentionally.” I was a voyeur, a dilettante, a drive-by gleaner. I was passing through Japan without enough time to learn the language or properly settle in. And I was making up for it by jumping to conclusions and turning ordinary encounters into defining moments.

CULTURE SHOCK, according to the literature, comes in phases, and I happened to be in the honeymoon phase, when every­thing about the foreign culture is romantic and new. Who needed to go on a Zen pilgrimage? Hadn’t I already slipped into a kind of backpacker’s “beginner’s mind” (the mental state prized by Zen for its innocence and openness)? As I flitted about Tokyo’s urban attractions, the entire society felt like a novelty act prepared just for me. I took money out of atms in small amounts not only to keep my spending down but also to return again and again to see the little blue space dog do his cute “transaction complete” somersault on the screen. A punked-out teenager on the street corner singing early Beatles songs? Sweet innocence in a mohawk. The three-foot-tall Godzilla statue? Disappointing, for sure. Hell, I’d thought it was going to be hundreds of feet high. But once I’d gotten over that, oh, so cute, because, well, I was on a honeymoon with Japan! Comic-porn lending libraries? Strange, but maybe my kind of strange. Four-hundred-pound sumo wrestlers knocking bellies with great reverence for the ancient Shinto gods? Incredible!

To a New Yorker the Tokyo subways were a marvel of urban planning and social discipline. No graffiti, no vandalism, no crazy people, no chewing gum stuck to the floor, hardly any dirt or dust, even. Commuters dutifully queued up at marked spots on the platform before each train arrived: Heated seats. Route maps on flat-panel video displays, updating in real time the number of minutes to the next station. Teardrop-shaped ceiling straps, more charming — and more plentiful — than those on New York subways. And everyone quiet, everyone polite, everyone Japanese.

There is hardly any crime in Japan. National pride, social responsibility, and customer service are like secular religions. I had the unmistakable feeling that if my wallet had happened to fall out of my back pocket, it would have found its way back to me within the day, sealed in a zip-lock bag with a full accounting of its contents and an apology that chance or circumstance or sly gravity could have possibly conspired to separate me from it during my short stay on Japanese soil.

According to the books, this high wouldn’t last forever. If I stuck around for another month, I’d cross over from the honeymoon phase to the critical phase: Anxiety, irritation, disgust, mood swings, and depression would be the order of the day.

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