Raymond Ohara, a third generation Japanese-American, went to school with our son. They were on the same track team (ran in the same circles, you might say) and, though my son and his family now live in Florida, Ray still drops by our California home whenever he’s in town to bring us up to date and maybe have a cup of coffee.
We’re always glad to see him. Not only because he’s a nice guy, but because he’ll usually sit still and listen to our travel stories, though he really doesn’t seem to like traveling himself.
So, when Ray stopped by a few days ago and Joyce asked him what he’d been doing we were a little surprised at his answer.
“Traveling,” he said. “Japan.”
“Wonderful,” said Joyce.
He smiled, held out his hand, palm down and wobbled it. “Not one-hundred percent entirely,” he said.
I asked him what he meant and he told us a little about his trip, at least the beginnings of it.
“First of all,” he said, “I just wasn’t prepared. I mean I really didn’t know what to expect. I’ve led a sheltered life.”
After graduation, Ray had followed an early love: cars. He had worked on the assembly lines at General Motors, then studied supervision and management and started working his way up.
He’d done so well the company had chosen him and a few of its other bright young middle-management people to go to Tennessee to help build the Saturn.
Then the company decided to send some of these same young people to the Far East to learn about Japanese management techniques. The group went to Tokyo, which presented some problems because none of them understood any Japanese.
Ray’s was the only Japanese face in the crowd.
“I was in trouble from the get-go,” he said. “I was there for an education, but basically I was thinking of myself as an American tourist, only the Japanese didn’t see it that way.
“Anytime anyone at the hotel or at the car companies we were visiting had anything to say to the group, they’d say it to me-in Japanese.”
“Which you speak none of, right?” I said.
“I knew `sayonara,’ said Ray. “And `hari-kari.’ And before long I was thinking about doing it. In restaurants I always got the check and it was my credit card they wanted. Clerks, hotel managers treated me as the group leader and talked to me in Japanese.
“I’d say, `Huh?’ and they’d just say it all again, still in Japanese but slower. Nothing would convince them that I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
“Early on a couple of the guys and I thought we’d go out on the town, explore a little and have a beer. We went to the hotel desk because we’d heard there was a lady there who spoke English.”
“That’s a break,” I said.
“Right,” said Ray, “Only all the English she knew was, `Yes, sir, how may I serve you?’ When one of us answered her in English she looked like somebody’d pulled her plug out of the wall. She bowed, her eyes kind of crossed and she walked away, backwards, and never came back. We bought a map of Tokyo, but it was in Japanese.”
Ray and his friends thought the going would be easier when they spoke to the hotel doorman. At first, he seemed to have a firm grip on things, but then they found he, too, knew only a few key words. Ray continued:
“We said `beer.’ The doorman said, `Ah so’ and laughed. We said `Ginza.’ The doorman said `no,’ and laughed. We said, `Why no Ginza,’ and he said, `No Ginza, no Shibuya District. Nobody goes there anymore. Too crowded.’ Then we laughed.
“When we asked the doorman where we could catch a train, he said, `Train station,’ and laughed again, but then he pointed down the street, leaned over, and spoke to me in Japanese. He gave me a wink and a nudge, like he was conspiring with me against these `round-eyes’ I was with. After we left one of the guys asked me what he said.
“I told him, `He said your fly’s unzipped and you got your shoes on the wrong feet. How the heck do I know what he said?’ We all thought that was pretty funny, but we didn’t laugh for long.
“Five blocks later we found the station. The platform was packed because it was the rush hour, which we later found out, in this particular area, starts at about six in the morning and continues til midnight.
“They’ve got people on the platform to assist you in boarding. They do that by pushing you onto the trains. It doesn’t make any difference whether there’s room or not; they just gather a bunch of you together and push you on til the doors close. I was just glad they weren’t doing it with a skip loader.”
Getting off the train was harder. Ray missed the first stop. He saw his friends getting off but the doors closed before he could get through the crowd.
“The Japanese are very courteous,” he said, “they don’t knock each other down a lot getting on and off, but they like their trains to run on time.
“When I got out of the station and onto the street it got bad. Nothing looked familiar. The few signs that were in English were like `Sanyo, Honda, Fuji, Coca-Cola.’ Street signs, when I could find them, didn’t look like any of the markings on the map. I’ve never been so lost in my life.”
“But,” I said, “you knew where you’d come from, right?”
Ray shook his head. “I looked around for the sun, to get my bearings. Then it occurred to me that wouldn’t do any good because I didn’t know where the sun was suppposed to be. But I knew It was getting later in the day. The farther I walked the darker it got. I tried to talk to a traffic cop; he just stepped back and looked at me like I had bad breath and turned away.
“Now, this might sound a little weird and I’m not ‘Japanese bashing.’ I am of Japanese extraction myself, but I was beginning to feel that everybody on the street, all the Japanese, looked alike. Staring into a store window, it took me a couple of minutes to pick out my own reflection. I was so lost I couldn’t even find myself.”
“How long did this go on?” Joyce asked.
“It seemed like hours,” Ray said. “It was hours. I was hungry, thirsty and I’d have sold my teeth-which were beginning to float-to find a bathroom. I got to thinking about finding a market and grabbing a shopping cart because it was starting to look like I was going to become a street-person.
“I found a telephone, but all I had was paper money and there was no way for me to figure out how to use one of their public phones even if I knew someone to call. How do you dial 911 in Japanese?
“And if I did get the police or maybe get lucky and reach the hotel, how do I tell them where I am when I don’t know? It was so depressing I was looking around for a clean piece of curb so I could sit down and wait to be assimilated or arrested for vagrancy.
“The street lights were coming on when I found a bench. And by this time I was talking to myself. I said a few things and topped it off with `Oye vey is mere,’ which I think is Jewish for `Oh, woe is me,’ and this tall guy stops. He comes back and looks at me. `You not Japanese,’ he says. `I know. I study in R.A.’ `R.A.?’ I said. `Ros Angeres,’ he said.
“It turned out this guy’d gone to USC for two years and had lived in Los Angeles. He tried to tell me how to get back to the center of town, but that wasn’t working, so he found a cab and took me back to the hotel.
“We stopped at McDonald’s first, though, because I think he was proud of it. It was all right with me, besides they had a great bathroom.”
“Ray,” I said, “you went to Tokyo to learn. Did it work out?”
He said it did, regarding the automobile business, but that was another story. They were nice people, he made some friends and he learned a lot.
“Think you’ll ever go back?” my wife asked.
Ray seemed surprised by the question. “Of course, I’ll go back. It’s a great country and my roots are there. But next time I’ll do it right. My girlfriend says she’s going to pin a note to my shirt in case I get lost. I’ll take an official guided tour. And,” he said with a grin, “maybe wear a blond wig.”
