Japanese blossoms and erotic art

“You lucky dogs! You’ll be staying in Tokyo with the passengers for five days,” the dispatcher declared. “They’ll continue to Bangkok, and you’ll resume a flight to Saigon before flying home.”

Our crew had assembled at the Oakland base and heard the news of our two-week schedule. For most flights to Japan we landed at Tachikawa Air Base, twenty miles west of Tokyo, and received only a two- or three-day layover. This Asian trip allowed extra time for those of us who liked to shop and explore.

“You’ll be staying downtown at the Imperial Hotel,” the dispatcher continued.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “That’s one of the best hotels in the world.”

I knew many historic facts about the hotel from my college architecture classes. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and constructed in the early 1920s. To stay at the Imperial would be awesome.

After we landed in Tokyo and drove to the Imperial Hotel, we passed a reflecting pool and continued up the driveway to the low-slanted, copper-roofed building. Uniformed men with white gloves took our luggage and led us into the reception area. The impressive interior of high ceilings, yellow-glass lamps, and built-in furniture epitomized Wright’s arts and crafts design.

The passengers arrived by bus and were similarly escorted into the lobby. Our airline booked the crew on the ground floor of a three-story wing, and Elaine and I shared a room. We slept at least ten hours, recuperating from our twenty-hour duty that began in Los Angeles the previous day.

The hotel stood near the grounds of the Emperor’s Imperial Palace and was walking distance to the Ginza, the main shopping area of Tokyo. It was springtime, and the cherry blossoms bloomed throughout the city. When we left the building it looked like we were strolling in a cotton-candy land.

Tokyo’s police, in dark uniforms and white gloves, wore facemasks because of the city’s heavy air pollution. The smog was so thick that I never saw the sun during this particular time in Japan.

At every department store, two young, uniformed girls, again with white gloves, greeted us as we entered the main doors. They bowed and lowered their eyes.

“Konnichiwa,” they said. Good afternoon.

More girls stood at the sides of the escalators. They wiped the sliding handrails with a thick cloth and bowed another greeting as we stepped onto the moving staircase.

“I’d like to buy a kimono,” I said to one of the store clerks standing on the second floor.

She escorted Elaine and me to a specific area at the top of the third escalator. An attendant showed us a brightly colored silk kimono patterned with birds and flowers. The T-shaped robes reached the floor and had wide sleeves. The kimono’s two-foot sleeves are used to store items that Western women carry in their purses.

The silk kimono I chose to buy cost thousands of dollars. Reconsidering, I picked out a blue polyester kimono decorated with pink cherry blossoms. Its price was still pretty steep…a hundred dollars. It included two belts, some tabis (a pair of two-toed socks), and a brocaded obi (the square sash at the back of the kimono).

Once the purchase was completed, we took an elevator down to the street level. Elaine and I were the last to enter and turned to face the doors. Glancing to the side, I couldn’t help but notice that each generation of Japanese was defined by their height. The grandparents were small and stooped. The parents were a little taller. And the children were our height. When the doors opened, the men behind us literally pushed Elaine and me to the side so they could exit before us. Thus we learned another Japanese custom: men come first.

After shopping, Elaine and I walked to a restaurant located on a side street near the Ginza. The paved alley slanted toward the middle, where an open sewer ran. We smelled only a hint of odor, so I assumed the liquid in the center channel was mostly gray water. We learned later that Japanese farmers used human waste to fertilize their crops.

Elaine and I stopped at a tiny café. We passed under foot-long strips of navy cloth and stepped into a four-table lunch shop. To help foreigners, there were photographs of different menu dishes at the entrance. We pointed to our choice of food, notified the waitress, and ate with chopsticks, our only utensils.

Back at the hotel, we each ordered a massage. Two small girls arrived at our room and informed us through sign language about their techniques. They did not know English, and we knew just the basics of Japanese. For six dollars, they massaged our bodies for an hour.

After much rubbing, I rearranged my body so the masseuse could walk on my back. With her heels on my ribs, she curled her toes around my spine and gave me a deep massage to those muscles closest to the center. She also walked along my spine, cracking her way from my waist to my neck.

The next day Elaine and I took a public train to several tourist sites. The cleanliness, speed, and reliability of Japan’s transportation system were thoroughly impressive as we traveled through the different sections of Tokyo.

Even privately owned automobiles were fastidiously clean. At every stoplight drivers got out and wiped their cars with two-foot-long feather dusters. Because of the massive destruction from World War II bombings, reconstruction was still taking place twenty-four hours a day and dust accumulated on everything.

Not wanting to squander all our layover time shopping, Elaine and I attended a class at the Imperial Hotel on woodblock printing. A design was carved on a block of wood, painted one specific color, and pressed into the paper to create a beautiful image. Another block was carved to create another layer of color. Some prints required fifty blocks of wood to produce the many subtle shades appearing in the final image.

Another class explained the rudiments of an abacus, a rectangular frame with ten or more rods, each holding numerous hollow beads. To establish a number, the user would slide the beads up and down on a dowel.

“It’s faster than an adding machine,” the instructor told us.

Using this unique mathematical tool, I taught the other flight attendants to calculate their monthly earnings. We were amazed by its accuracy and speed, and, surprisingly, we quickly learned how to use it.

On the last day of our layover, Elaine and I visited the Tokyo National Museum, the oldest and largest in Japan. As an art history major, I was most impressed by the paintings of ancient Japanese life. My favorite works were of mountain scenes fading into the distance through waves of fog and clouds. Artists used tiny ink brushes on silk canvases; some brushes had just a single bristle.

Besides scenery paintings, we also saw depictions of royal life, religious scenes, battles, and detailed sex acts. One painting caught my eye. It showed a nude woman sitting in a basket, bent at the waist with her hands tied to her feet. Her buttocks were at the bottom of the basket and her extremities were at the top. She was being lowered over a nude man, lying below her on a table. He had an erection, and two men stood by his side.

The docent, who had accompanied us throughout the museum, explained the Edo period painting. She continued, “Because erotic or shunga art was more profitable, Japan has many such paintings — erotic, artistic, and fun, all at the same time. The woman is positioned so that the man can enter her. Once he is inside her, the two attendants carefully rotate and spin the basket.”

Elaine replied, “American art books never illustrate such sexual scenes.”

“The only nudity I ever saw growing up was of aborigines in National Geographic magazines,” I added.

The docent reacted with uncertainty to our comments, covering her mouth in embarrassment.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-27