This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

16th February 2008

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Our first few days and nights in Japan left us feeling as if we were part of a botched high-school science experiment: stuck in a vacuum, a half-world. We had arrived in Nagoya (Japan’s Port Elizabeth, only with no beaches, triple the number of people and ten times the amount of concrete), where we would be staying for a year, teaching English and earning Yen.

Outside, it rained half the time and was simply overcast the rest. We were informed with delight by our new employers that this was Japan’s “worst weather”. Inside, trying to sleep off our jet-lag, my girlfriend and I were living in half an apartment – the half that we had cleaned after the previous tenants left some putrid reminders of their occupancy.

When we summoned the courage to venture out in the grey half-light, under our umbrellas, we encountered a world of convenience stores, obscure food, over-uniformed schoolchildren, myriad cables running from pole to pole in every street. There were sex shops masquerading as video stores; one in our neighbourhood, by the name of “Mr Big” – which we frequented for the single shelf of non-blue, non-Japanese movies – was reached by crossing eight lanes of traffic. A few blocks away there was a shopping centre called “Ozmall” (yes, as in The Wizard of Oz, complete with statues of Dorothy and Toto). Side-streets offered glimpses of cosy restaurants and coffee shops, entry to which seemed like a foreign and forbidden dream. We communicated by pointing, smiling and stammering the few Japanese words we knew but, sooner or later, linguistic frustration would drive us home.

There we found little comfort. We couldn’t figure out the extremely complicated rubbish and recycling system. Fat, aggressive pigeons would brood outside our apartment windows, flapping and scratching around and squawking, messing on every surface of the balcony and generally being loathsome. On TV, men wearing pink jackets and mascara would scream at us incomprehensibly. The only thing we could understand was the English simulcast of the 8pm news, with sports reports on baseball and important events like the World Cup of Facial Hair – held in Norway, apparently. Current affairs would take a back seat to inserts on, for instance, trends in the pet industry, such as “cat therapy houses” where you paid Y1000 (about R80) an hour to stroke pedigree cats as a way of relieving stress. Kind of like a feline brothel.

Fascinating stuff, no doubt, but it only contributed to the impenetrable veneer preventing us as gaijin (foreigners) from accessing Japanese culture. When I was most painfully aware of my outsider status – when I thought I could no longer bear being so abnormal – I would find myself searching for reasons to believe that there was nothing wrong with me. The entire Japanese population, I concluded, was mad. I became convinced that if an international census were taken in which levels of insanity were measured and counted per capita, Japan would have the highest concentrations.

I saw it and heard it all around me: teaching in a classroom, waiting at a traffic light, using the subway. I noticed how people talked to themselves – a classic sign of madness, surely? Routine daily tasks like buying train tickets from a machine or driving a car seemed to require mutters and slurs and sighs; everyone would say things under their breath, as if speaking involuntarily, mouthing reflexive verbal responses. Then there was the recurrent fidgeting. When mental arithmetic was called for, Japanese people would start making circles on their left palm with their right index finger, as if writing out their thoughts, while staring at the ceiling (and, of course, talking to themselves).

I thought perhaps I’d caught the crazy bug when I started hearing voices in my head. Could it be a symptom of schizophrenia? Then I realised that the voices weren’t imagined – they were automated messages, lurking on every corner, waiting to sense my approach within a one-meter radius so that they could welcome me, tell me where to walk, what buttons to press or what product to buy. Not all the messengers were mechanised. There were real live shouters to greet me at department stores; policemen blaring instructions at empty roads; snack vendors advertising their goods to everyone and no-one; megaphone-wielding politicians driving around in electioneering trucks.

My accusations of public lunacy could not, I knew, be reconciled with the prevailing perception of Japan as a well-ordered society, full of rules and etiquette. But, it seemed to me, bizarre behaviour was not only tolerated, it was tacitly encouraged, as if it provided a kind of catharsis. When we had been in Japan for a week, I tested this theory on an American colleague. He poured cold water on it: “Dude, there are whacko people everywhere. It’s just that the Japanese are too polite to do or say anything about theirs.”

The author thoroughly enjoyed the rest of his time in Japan. In fact, some of his best friends are Japanese – and all of them are perfectly sane. He still performs mental arithmetic by doodling on his left palm and staring at the ceiling.