Day 22: Different But in the Same Way

Tuesday May 27 - Onboard the Hiryu, 100 miles from Taiwan

As I write, brown and white sea birds, with sharply-tipped wings, sabre-like beaks and arrogant aerial swaggers, are scooting alongside the boat. Every so often, they bank steeply to starboard and then splash with surprising inelegance into water.

The occasional freighter is in the near distance, slowly gliding north-east toward Japan. The sea is virtually blemish-free; except for the wake of the Hiryu and the sporadic clumsy landings of our escorts, the ocean is an endless expanse of deep sapphire silk, gently ruffled by the tepid breeze.

The Hiryu has docked twice today; once very early this morning, for an hour and 45 minutes, at Miyako Island, and then again at 1015 at Ishigaki Island. In both cases, passengers disembarked and now there are only six of us. I know this because at Ishigaki, we all had to go briefly ashore and pass through Japanese immigration. I was the only Westerner on the Japanese Immigration officer’s tiny list.

I was the last of the half dozen off the boat. I hadn’t heard the announcement on the ship’s PA – nor would I have understood it if I had – because I was listening to my MP3 player. So the purser came to my door and knocked politely yet loudly.

He told me to just bring my passport and guided me into the terminal building. Even though it was a stress-free process, the tiny security guard at the terminal made the most of this weekly event. His dark blue uniform looked like it had been borrowed from someone four sizes larger, but his hat was one size too small. The heavy gold braiding gave him an air of a 1950s cinema usherette and the tight belt merely emphasised the bagginess of his clothes. His trousers were far too long and concertinaed at the knees.

Even so, his misshaped clothes did not prevent him from doing his job correctly. As soon as I passed through the double doors into a sweaty yet spacious waiting area, I nodded and smiled to him. I’m sure that he was on the verge of saluting but simply returned my unspoken greeting. His eyes were fixed in a permanent, wrinkled squint and his stubbled, tanned face, Pacific Islander rather than Japanese, had a porcine sheen. He had collapsed lips which, as he smiled, revealed three rotten teeth and one surprisingly white one.

Once I was through the door, he hitched his trousers, pulled the hem of his jacket down assertively and, looking around for approval, dug in his pocket. He then noisily pulled out a huge bunch of keys, found the right one first time and locked the doors at the top, middle and bottom. Returning to the standing position, he scanned the room with a toothless smile, slowly dropped the keys back in his trouser pocket, adjusted his trousers with a wiggle and stood, licking his thin lips, with his hands behind his back.

The five Japanese travellers were pointed in the direction of the immigration room, where the Hiryu’s chief purser was discharging another of his many duties. Over his shoulder, I could see a uniformed Japanese immigration officer sitting at a makeshift desk in the far corner. An obliging, petite, grey suited woman appeared out of nowhere and told me without emotion that foreigners go last. When it was my turn the chief purser meticulously checked my passport details against those taken when I boarded the ship, just in case anything had changed. Naturally, it hadn’t but this is the Japanese thoroughness in action.

Then I took my passport and my smile to the official. Without a word being spoken, he checked my Taiwanese visa, tore out the Japanese embarkation card, stamped my Japanese visa, returned my passport and within five minutes, I was back in my cabin.

The atmosphere on the ship has now returned to the serenity that followed the departure from Osaka. At Okinawa, the passenger transfer bus made four journeys from the terminal, delivering some sixty people to the Hiryu. Most were Japanese but there were also a handful of Westerners.

I tried to engage one – a young American man called Ken – in a conversation but he seemed elsewhere. He had short reddish hair, freckles and an Abraham Lincoln-style paint-brush beard. He said he was from Colorado and had been working in Osaka for three years. He speaks Japanese and said he enjoyed living in the country yet his eyes darted around incessantly suggesting he was out of his comfort zone.

As we spoke, he asked me the standard questions about my life and journey, but his ‘OK’, ‘Right,’ ‘OK’, ‘Yeah’ answers displayed a lack of connection and interest. We boarded the bus together and as we approached the ship, his concerns became apparent. He had never travelled by boat before and was worried about sharing a cabin.

I told him that they are very civilised quarters and, even if he is with multiple strangers, my experience on the Trans-Siberian suggested that human beings have a innate ability to respect each other’s property, privacy and space, even if they are forced together. ‘Right,’ he said with total detachment. So I decided to add a postscript, just to see if he was listening. ‘Unless, of course, they are mass murderers.’ ‘Right,’ he said with the same tone as if I had told him that Washington DC is the capital of his country.

Also on the bus was a short, dark-haired voluble American man in his mid-twenties, wearing three quarter length cargo pants, a blue polo shirt and flip flops. He had a tiny bag and a huge surfboard. He had sloping shoulders and when he walked, he swung his arms slightly too far from his body in a gun-slinger swagger. When he stopped walking, he planted his feet apart slightly wider than normal and cocked his head combatively to one side.

He was accompanied by another American man – taller, blonder and anonymous - who occasionally said something rather quietly which would be the swaggering guy’s cue to launch into a loud, wise-cracking monologue, to which the swaggerer expected – and got – sycophantic laughter.

The third member of this group was a wide-eyed, soft lipped, slender, verging on anorexic, very westernised Japanese woman. She wore skinny jeans that were still baggy on her stick like legs, strappy, high-heeled sandals, and a white vest top. At first glance it appeared that she had large breasts for her frame, but the bulge was merely an ill-fitting wonderbra. She walked half a step behind her partner, the swaggerer, and said nothing while the male double act performed.

About 45 minutes before the ship was due to depart, three buses draw up on the dockside. They were illuminated within and every seat was occupied by a teenager. Sure enough, within twenty minutes the corridor outside my room was alive with the sound of aimless excitement. From the girls there were squabbles, reasonless screeches, incessant chatter, spontaneous sprints, and hysterical giggling. The boys simply shouted monosyllabically, grunted with their hormones and strutted.

Later in the evening, female noises settle outside my cabin. Then the sound of a hairdryer took over. More voices joined in and competed with the electrical whine which suggested a shortage of electric points in their cabins. I went for a cup of tea and sure enough, a queue had formed. It seemed that every girl in the party had decided to wash their hair and now about 15 Japanese teenage girls were impatiently waiting to use a single hairdryer. Some stood, others squatted, others took photos, others rubbed their hair with towels. But they were all talking, at the same time, and yet none of them, it seemed, were listening.

These were Japanese teenagers, but, as I listened to the tone and speed of their chat, I doubted whether British girls would be any different. I didn’t understand a word, of course, but I would wager that the main subjects of conversation were boys, music, movie stars, fashion, make up, teachers and families, all with a hint of bitchy humour.

Of course each nationality has its own way of doing things. Interaction with alcohol is a good example; the British tend to imbibe with much less restraint than the French, for example. And in my seven years teaching international MA students at Cardiff University, not once did I see a Chinese student have more than two halves of weak beer during social events.

There are also differences between cultures in terms of music, fashion, art and culture; attitudes to authority; relationships with family; courtship; and many other elements of life. But, core principles, seem to be very similar.

This became apparent last week when I was staying with Jim and Miwa. In August, they will be getting married in Hawaii and, while I was at their apartment, they had numerous discussions about the preparations. Jim and Miwa both speak Japanese and English and it was rather entertaining to hear them switch, sometimes mid-sentence, between languages. Sometimes, when they were speaking Japanese, even though I don’t understand a word, I could tell from the tone that there was tension.

On the Friday, Jim took a day off work and he drove me around Tokyo. We started off with a wonderful teppanyaki lunch at a hotel that appeared as a villian’s headquarters in an early James Bond film. The white-overalled chef had the tallest hat I’d ever seen and its height was only matched by his dexterity and mastery of his art.

As he chopped and cooked and described the food with passionate restraint, Jim apologised for the morning’s argument between he and Miwa. It began at 0500 when Jim’s alarm went off at the usual time. He had forgotten to cancel it the night before and Miwa was woken two hours earlier than her normal time.

I told Jim there was no need to apologise but he still felt bad. From that poor start to the day, he and Miwa had heated discussions about various, relatively minor, parts of the wedding preparations. Top of the list was the invitations and whether they should be printed, if so, by whom, and what the wording should be.

As Jim offloaded, I smiled and thought back to the preparations to my first marriage. My wife-to-be and her mother planned, checked and double-checked everything with the precision of military strategists. Nothing was left to chance. I gladly took a backseat and left the women to it, but at times Sarah would ask me for my opinion. Invariably, this would be about a minor issue – for example, the seating plan – but my view was often different to the female’s consensus and a row would ensue.

It might be tempting to suggest that Jim and Miwa have such arguments because he is English and she is Japanese. But, as I said to Jim over another delectable dish, nationality and culture are irrelevant when it comes to weddings. The differences are between men and women.

As he sipped his mineral water, Jim watched the chef perform another dazzling act with his knife. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘What is important to me is that I am getting married to Miwa, but she…’ I nodded knowingly and finished his sentence, ‘She wants the day to be perfect.’

Miwa is Japanese but, more importantly, she is a woman too. Women of all cultures want their wedding day to be perfect. Depending on the country, some elements might be more important than others but, irrespective of nationality, the wedding is the most important day of a woman’s life.

This is by no means a chauvinistic statement; in my experience, it also applies to professional, post-feminism, career-minded women who are equal to men in every respect. And no matter how hard Jim or any other man tries, we will never fully appreciate that sorting out the minutiae, usually in partnership the woman’s mother, has a higher status than the act of marriage itself.

Miwa and Jim, the chattering Japanese schoolgirls on the Hiryu and the humble beggar in Tokyo may do their thing slightly differently to their equivalents in the UK. But ultimately, their lives, priorities and issues are the same. These everyday experiences in Japan confirmed to me that there is more that connects us as humans than divides us as nationalities. And on this basis, I have even less respect for racists whose sole argument seems to be that difference equates to inferiority.