Tales of Embarrassment

I’m at Fordham Prep school in the Bronx and I’m about, oh, I don’t know, 12 or 13. Anyway, it’s a summer program of some sort, I don’t really know the specifics, but the main activity is basketball.

By this time in my life, for some reason, I had already developed a deep distaste for team sports. I think originally it was that I didn’t want to be depended on, and later in my life, probably for my ego’s sake, it turned into not wanting to depend on anyone else. Plus I hate losing… a lot. So much so that often, I’d rather not try than lose

Anyway, while everyone else is running up and down the court playing offense and defense and all that, I’m kind of trotting the baseline back and forth not making eye contact and hoping that no one will notice me and pass me the ball.

My main fear at the time was the possibility of shooting an airball. Independently, “airball” sounds pretty cool. It sounds maybe like a magical toy, or a game played in the clouds by angels, or like a marketing gimmick to sell balloons. But in basketball an airball is a mark of shame, an athletic scarlet letter, and I wanted no part of it. For the 45 minutes or so of that game, all of my self confidence and self worth was inversely proportionate to the distance of a ball shot from my hands to the basketball hoop. If the ball never touches my hands then the equation is null and I can go home free of self and peer inflicted humiliation.

So there I am, jogging up and down the court looking anywhere but at my teammates. Suddenly out of nowhere (nowhere, in this case, being the hands of my overzealous teammate) the basketball comes flying towards me. Having trained myself, over the course of the past half an hour, to not touch the ball or have anything to do with it, there was but one correct reaction: to duck, which I did almost reflexively. The ball shot over my head and out of bounds.

As it turns out, there are actually more embarrassing things you can do in basketball than shooting an airball.

---------------------------------------------------

I’m the best student in my Japanese class in my sophomore year of college. This is doubly impressive considering that I attend the class approximately half of the time. This percentage is actually considerably higher than for my other classes. I like Japanese.

There is a multi-school speech contest to be moderated by Tim Cook, the very teacher who starred in the video lessons I took in my senior year of high school as a part of its fledgling Japanese program. He is a celebrity to me. My teacher hounds me relentlessly to participate, and I finally give in. It’s not like I’m doing anything else.

I write my speech and my teacher helps me translate it. There are two weeks until the speech contest during which I must memorize it and work on my delivery.

I spend those two weeks doing everything but that.

Two DAYS before the contest my teacher calls me in for a 1-on-1 rehearsal. Two HOURS before the rehearsal I start to look at the speech. By the time I am to meet her, I’ve memorized about half of it. The next day at the final rehearsal I’ve somehow managed to temporarily jam almost all the words into my head.

The next day, the day of the speech contest, I enter the auditorium which is surprisingly and disconcertingly full. My classmates are looking at me like I’m Luke Skywalker come to save the day.

The rest of the day is a blur. I remember small snippets: students from other schools spouting the most eloquent and perfect Japanese I’ve ever heard; a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I’ve come to recognize as that of impending doom. And, of course, there was my inevitable performance.

I remember my nausea after finishing the first four sentences of my speech, the only ones I still had memorized. I remember glancing up occasionally as I woodenly read the rest of it off of some sheets of loose-leaf.

What I see: my teacher holds her head in her hands and is either laughing or sobbing uncontrollably. My classmates shuffle their feet and won’t make eye contact with me. Tim Cook sits at the judges table, a look of distaste and disdain on his face. Some girl mouths the words “my god” to her neighbor.

I drop out and join the Air Force. It was the only choice, really.

Rising Son

Konnichiwa, I am Japan.

Relatively recently in my history, in the midst of my transformation from a post-war pariah to a burgeoning economic empire, a child was born across the world. Despite my small stature, my shadow loomed large over this soon-to-be young man from a very young age; from books and movies and the study of martial arts, this youth was swiftly swept away by my legend, even as I left that legend further and further behind.

To this boy, the tales of Japan, told second and third-hand in manga, anime, and movies, were no more legends than were the daily news reports. They held the reality of story, which preys on youth, and they formed in his mind an idea of honor and a vision of strength that captivated and enraptured him. Their ideals became more real than reality, their stories became doctrine. These are tales I know well; the sound of their tread is as a heartbeat to me, as they have walked my shores for centuries in one form or another.

More important, by far, was beauty. To the child across the sea there was no greater beauty than the combination of form and function, the beauty of the dance of the fighting arts, and the spirit of harmony promoted by them. This ideal of harmony was absent from his life, and perhaps absent from the world, save for in his myths of me.

He longed to be that peaceful warrior, for whom fighting had become superfluous, a futile exercise, for when one harms others he also harms himself. Or the boy simply claimed to want this for himself, yet his fantasies, often played out behind glazed eyes in forgotten classrooms, were full of acts of savage violence, beautifully executed. In that way, I suppose, that spirit of harmony was absent from him, too. Is peace, then, a thing within the power of man to achieve, or is it simply a legend of a place that has never existed?

To this boy, Japan was the peace of the world.

Childhood ends. The boy is still there, but he is buried beneath layers of learning; the dust of his travels. His view of me, too, is filtered now through that silt, and I have become as grey as the rest of the world. My shores, which held such fascination for the child, seem just like any other now: full of people full of turmoil, restless in their hearts and foolish. His world had become a reflection of himself. The images reaching those child’s eyes were filtered through murky self doubt, and the Japan of his youth was lost. It was lost to me too as the world closed in. I can’t remember if it ever was.

Our stories intertwined for a time in the young man’s 26th year when he traveled, finally, to my shores, furiously lacking expectation but truthfully wracked by fear of disappointment. This is an old story for me. Foreigners approach on tender feet, cautiously feeling my edges, afraid and expectant. They who have made me in their minds are now afraid to meet me. I am the celebrity of the earth; the master author who, with a handshake and a greeting, may immortalize my works or tarnish them forever.

Our meeting lasted a month.

From Tokyo to Fuji to Kyoto to Okinawa he wandered, searching for an unknown thing as so many have done before and will, undoubtedly, continue to do in the future. At times he thinks he has found it. In a traditional Japanese home, in an old woman’s smile and slowly spoken question, in a rain dotted pool on temple grounds, in a child’s open stare.

But mostly he finds, as he expected to, that I am just a place like any other. People are simply people, the world over, surviving in the only ways they know how. The only place my legend exists is in the children of my heart. I am the ancestor of the storyteller, and the mist tumbling down from the mountains ensures that there will always be gods. And the kiai of a child ensures that there will always be bushido. There are no samurai anymore, no ninja, no bushi, no hitokiri. But my people are Japanese. And they are all of those things in their hearts.

If not them, then who?




Oh, I forgot. There was a moment when, in a Tokyo museum, the boy who was now a young man happened upon a spear blade crafted in the 16th century. I remember this blade well; It was mined from my heart, after all. As he stared at this blade, this perfect untouched needle of light, for a moment the murkiness of the interceding years cleared away, and I briefly met that child across the sea for the first time.