And yet this, I said, holding up the bowl from which I had been drinking, is particularly fine.

  Yes, he said, and I am glad it pleases you. It is by Shōji Hamada. But he works in a tradition. He owes great debt to those who have gone before, to generations of artisans.

  Anonymous, said Suzuki. Unsung.

  Yes, said Yanagi.

  But this, I said, again indicating the bowl, this is special.

  It manifests mekiki, said Suzuki. You might call it the seeing eye.

  Mekiki, I said, savouring the word, saving it for future use.

  Yanagi said he was not denying the existence of individual talent, even genius. But real greatness, he said, lay in humility. This was not negating individuality but transcending it.

  I nodded, laughing at the clarity of his insight.

  Yes!

  Suzuki said, It is letting the Buddha-nature shine through.

  Now it was Yanagi who nodded and laughed. He clapped his hands.

  Hai!

  Suzuki continued. The best quality of Yanagi-san’s work is shibui.

  This time Yanagi simply bowed.

  How to translate shibui? Austere? Subdued? But more complex than these (and at the same time simpler!) the word held a suggestion of quietness, purity, depth, all born of an inwardness, something innately spiritual.

  Like this, I said, holding up the bowl from which I had been drinking.

  Yanagi bowed again, leaned across and re-filled the bowl with tea.

  We talked the afternoon away, moving easily from Zen and the Pure Land to Blake and Ruskin, Basho to the French Impressionists, the Bible to the Dhammapada.

  When it was time to leave he handed me a little package, a gift. I opened it back in Mejiro, found it contained the tea bowl I had used and admired. He had obviously asked one of his assistants to wash it and wipe it dry, wrap it for me in beautiful rough-textured handmade paper.

  A few weeks later I returned to the museum at Yanagi’s invitation to meet his old friend, the potter Bernard Leach who was visiting from England. I knew Leach by reputation, and he was also an admirer, almost an acolyte, of Suzuki (who had sent his apologies and could not attend on this occasion). Grateful for Yanagi’s generous gift of the tea bowl, I brought, by way of thanks, a signed copy of my Zen in English Literature and another copy for Mr Leach.

  Yanagi thanked me with much enthusiasm, grinning and touching the book to his forehead. He pointed to the inscription, delighted, thanked me again. Leach was much more restrained, in a way I remembered as peculiarly English. It was there too in his appearance, tall and thin in a well cut suit, a collar and tie, white hair neatly combed, moustache trimmed. His manner was rather scholarly – a visiting professor – as he scanned the contents of the book.

  Interesting, he said. Thank you. Then offhandedly, almost diffidently, he gave me a copy of his own volume, modestly titled A Potter’s Book, which I took gratefully and touched to my own forehead.

  Arigato.

  Thank you.

  Leach’s voice was pleasant enough, urbane, not too Home Counties, with a slight lilt to it, perhaps from spending time in St Ives.

  He asked where I was from, how I had come to be in Japan.

  Like Yanagi he was intrigued that I had spent time in Korea, and he asked about my Zen practice there. Was there a touch of amusement in the eyes when I told him how many years I had done zazen?

  Excellent, he said. Dr Suzuki speaks very highly of you.

  And of you. I said.

  He told me he had first been drawn to Japan by the magic of Lafcadio Hearne’s prose. I resolved to put that aside and not hold it against him. He then spoke at length of his connection with Suzuki, linking through Gakushuin to the group of writers and artists known (rather too poetically for my taste) as Shirakaba, or Silver Birch.

  As on my previous visit, we sat together drinking tea (I had one cup then switched to warm water) and setting the world to rights. Leach had a tendency to hold forth, a self-styled expert. But he was a clear thinker and it was no great hardship to listen to him expound, especially with Yanagi contributing a counterpoint, making his own enthusiastic interruptions. My own role, I felt, was to add the occasional grace note.

  We spoke of beauty and pattern, vitality and stillness, the joy of imperfection. We returned again to Blake, the holy madman.

  Yanagi spoke about Blake with something approaching reverence. Blake loved nature, he said, but he knew we could not copy nature.

  Yanagi denounced those who dismissed Blake’s visions as pathological. No! he said, his own eyes shining. Blake saw beyond the senses. He saw the infinite in all things. He saw God.

  In this world, I said. Here and now..

  This. A rainy day in Tokyo.

  Amen! said Leach, and he laughed.

  Most of all, said Yanagi, Blake hated the kind of mechanistic rationalism we see everywhere.

  I told him I was given to ranting about exactly that, whenever the opportunity arose.

  Once again we talked the afternoon away.

  When it was time for me to go, both men shook my hand. Leach asked if I ever visited Cornwall.

  I’ve never been, I said.

  You would love it, he said. The quality of the light…

  He left the sentence unfinished, the words trailing, his eyes bright with remembrance, and in the moment I saw the life of him, his inwardness, the quality I had seen in his vases and pots, a kind of delicacy combined with robustness.

  You must visit, he said, next time you are in England.

  I will indeed, I said. But even as I spoke the words, I sensed that I never would. I would not return home. Not never no more.

  13

  SACRED TREASURE

  One day at the school, after a lesson, Yamanashi took me aside. He looked thoughtful, serious, enough to cause me a little flurry of concern. I waited for him to speak.

  There was a faction, he said at last, certain friends of the school, who would be happy to see me removed.

  I know I can be difficult, I said, perhaps even anarchic. But I’m damned if I’m going to show up at those endless faculty meetings that start in the early morning and go on till late at night and end up resolving absolutely nothing. They are my idea of hell.

  He nodded, smiled.

  I understand, he said. And yes, your non-attendance must annoy some of your colleagues. But the problem is deeper than that.

  He had my full attention.

  What have I done?

  These people have short memories, he said. They forget that Gakushuin owes its continued existence to your efforts. They want things to be as they were, without foreign interference. And when they see a gaijin teaching their sons, teaching the Crown Prince, the kind of people we are talking about can be very disapproving.

  The kind of people who had disapproved of the Emperor’s Declaration of Humanity, and the very act of surrender. The kind of people who had approved of the war in the first place.

  I understood what the Admiral was telling me. I had to be circumspect.

  Around this time I was cycling home one day from the Palace and heard a blast of martial music, tinny and loud, blaring from a loudspeaker van up ahead. I felt a sickening emptiness in my gut as I recognised the melody, remembered it from Kobe, crackling on the the camp commander’s old gramophone, Roei no Uta, the Bivouac Song. The van pulled over and three men got out, all in dark suits and wearing armbands. They began handing leaflets to passers by as the music carried on the air, above the traffic noise, ridiculous and chilling, for all the world like the out-of-tune soundtrack to some old flickering newsreel film in a pre-war cinema, an anachronism, a time gone.

  Yamanashi’s none-too-veiled warnings about those hostile factions proved prescient. A few weeks after I had spoken to him, I came out of the classroom after a day’s teaching to find that the tyres on my bicycle had been slashed. A close examination showed it could be no accident – the rubber had been cut through. I had to push the bike and walk home where I found Tomiko distraught and the girls close to tears. While we had been out in the afternoon and the house had been empty, someone had broken in and slashed the tatami mats in the downstairs room.

  The authorities were apologetic, the damage was repaired immediately and there were no further attacks, but the whole business left us uneasy. I thanked God that Tomiko and the girls had not been at home. But the threat was clear. I had been warned.

  Message received and understood.

  Even now after living here for almost half my life, and immersing myself in the culture, and being, as Yamanashi-san would have it, an honorary Japanese, or in Dr Suzuki’s eyes, an old Japanese soul, I am still regarded as gaijin, outsider, alien. (And, looking as I do, how could I ever be anything else?) Even the very word, gaijin, holds within it the idea of the other, and beyond that a sense of taint, impurity, uncleanliness – the foreigner as the great unwashed, the dirty barbarian. (And who can blame the Japanese for that? Do we not wallow in our own filthy bathwater, rather than washing first? Do we not wear our outdoor shoes inside, bringing all manner of muck from the street into our homes?)

  I have long had a fondness for the films of Ozu, which I have been watching avidly since just after the War. They catch unerringly the texture and timbre of everyday life, portraying the nothing-special of it with profound insight and humanity. They are zen-without-Zen (and perhaps that is the best kind!) – understated, casting a clear eye on the everyday, the tangle and complexity of family life. They are suffused with utter melancholy but succeed in being affirmative. They always move me to my core, make me weep. And yet I have a Japanese colleague who prides himself on his knowledge of Ozu, and who insists that as I am not Japanese, I cannot possibly understand the films or appreciate them fully.

  And why might that be? I ask him.

  Simply because you are not Japanese, he answers.

  I neglect to tell him that I once watched Tokyo Story with Tomiko and realised she found it slow and dull, the lives portrayed just too familiar.

  Instead I tell the colleague that there may be subtleties and nuances I have missed, but I understand the spirit of the films, their intrinsic meaning (or non-meaning). And after all, I have lived in Japan for a very long time and immersed myself in the culture here far more than most.

  It’s true, he says. You are almost Japanese, so perhaps you can almost understand Ozu. But not completely.

  We agreed to disagree.

  I think when we westerners, we gaijin – especially men – first come to Japan, we see it through enchanted eyes. Then after some time that changes and we see through a glass darkly, we see the flaws and the shortcomings, the complexity and the sheer incomprehensibility of the place. Finally, perhaps, we see it as it really is, good and bad and neither, simply and utterly itself.

  It is like the old Zen saying. Before studying Zen, the men are men and the mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, everything gets mixed up and it’s hard to distinguish one thing from another. After studying Zen, once again the men are men and the mountains are mountains.

  I once asked Suzuki, So what then is the difference between the before and the after? He answered, Afterwards you are maybe six inches off the ground!

  So.

  During a period of my own disenchantment with the place (the during, as it were, rather than the before or after) I found myself exasperated by the constraints and limitations I encountered. For a time I had been consumed by the notion that I should make a visit to London to see my mother. It was long overdue – I had not been home in almost twenty years – and I began, with some eagerness, to plan my trip. Then I came up against the brick wall of bureaucracy.

  Currency regulations forbade the taking of Japanese Yen out of the country. I would have to pay for my whole trip in Pounds Sterling. I thought, foolishly, that this would not be a problem. I was still earning a decent salary. I had sufficient funds. It should simply be a matter, surely, of making the exchange, buying what I needed.

  Not so.

  The office, in Shinjuku, was a characterless concrete monolith, one of the new monstrosities that had been thrown up – I use the term in both senses – immediately after the war.

  The room was a clutter of wall-to-wall filing cabinets (in gunmetal grey) on top of which were cardboard boxes on top of which were stacks of dusty papers, the whole edifice looking as if it might topple at any moment. The scene was Dickensian – Jarndyce v Jarndyce. Or then again I might have wandered into a novel by Mr Kafka, or a play by Mr Beckett. And yet there was something about it all that was peculiarly and particularly Japanese, a resolute holding fast to some sense of order amid the chaos.

  The young man dealing with me epitomised this. He explained to me, politely, the limit on the amount of Yen I would be able to buy. I did a quick calculation, told him, politely, that this would not be enough. It would barely cover my travel costs, allow for nothing extra, not even the basics. He said this was unfortunate but there was nothing he could do. I countered by telling him of my exalted status as a respected academic with money-in-the-bank. I even, to my shame, mentioned my role as tutor to the Crown Prince. Friends in High Places. He looked momentarily flustered then expressed his regret, came out with that old familiar mantra, Shikata ga nai – It can’t be helped.

  When I asked what on earth I was supposed to do, he said it was not for him to say….

  There is another Japanese expression I had picked up. It refers to the habit of prevaricating, of talking round a subject, holding something back. I have to say it is something to which the Japanese are particularly prone. (That inclination of the head. Anno…) The way they put it is this: Okuba ni mono ga hasamatta youna iikata o suru. It literally means to speak as if there is something stuck between your back teeth. That was exactly what this young man did. He said perhaps I might make other arrangements.

  I was blunt, asked him, What other arrangements?

  I was being disingenuous. I knew what he meant but wanted him to come right out and say it. He meant I could buy US dollars on the black market and exchange them for pounds in the UK. Tomiko had mentioned this as a possibility, and even Yamanashi had reluctantly alluded to it, though he stopped short of recommending it as a course of action.

  I asked the young man if he was indeed suggesting I buy black market dollars, no doubt at a greatly inflated rate. That figurative something, a prawn, an un-chewed piece of chicken, stayed lodged between his molars.

  Anno…

  I stood up and bowed, thanked him with exaggerated civility and made my way, raging, out of the building.

  An earthquake, a toothache, a mad dog, a telephone message, and our house of peace, so painstakingly built, tumbles like a pack of cards.

  I thought of the monk who asked his master how to conquer his overwhelming anger.

  Can you show me this anger? said the master. Where is it to be found?

  Back home I told Tomiko what had happened. I said I had made up my mind and I would not bend. She said something that might be translated as, Now there’s a surprise! That made me smile, but I meant what I said. I would not do business with the black marketeers. And if that meant I could not yet return home, then so be it.

  So be it.

  I never made that trip home, never saw my mother. Now I fear I never will.

  Swings and roundabouts. Yamanashi told me I had been nominated for an award from the Japanese Government, in the name of the Emperor. The particular honour was the the Zuihosho, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, (Fourth Grade!) and it was rare for such a thing to be awarded to a foreigner.

  I was honoured, I said. Or rather, I would be once it was bestowed.

  I assumed it was the equivalent of an OBE back home, or an MBE. I really had no idea.

  In general I had no truck with honours of any kind, found the whole idea repellent. But I was rather tickled at the thought of this prophet-without-honour being recognised in his adopted home. There was also a certain bittersweet irony in the thought that my old mother would have taken great pride in the award. It might be some small recompense for my having been denied the opportunity to return to England to see her. For that reason alone (I told myself) I would be happy to receive the Order. Sacred Treasure. Fourth Grade.

  There was one sticking point. For some reason the presentation of the award to a British national had to be sanctioned by Her Britannic Majesty. And with my history of pacifism and conscientious objection, my lifetime of living in exile, in might be that Her Majesty would dismiss me as a knave, consign me to the outer darkness.

  Off with his head!

  Yamanashi said he would keep me informed, and in due course he told me permission had been granted and I was invited to receive the award from the Emperor himself in a special ceremony at the palace.

  On the appointed day I travelled to the palace by taxi rather than on my bicycle, and instead of my chalky tweeds I wore a formal black three-piece suit, hired for the occasion, with a stiff-collared shirt and black bow tie. I might almost have passed for a gentleman of some standing.

  The Emperor seemed genuinely happy to be presenting me with the award – an exquisitely crafted gilt medal, shaped like a Maltese cross, its ribbon pale blue trimmed with gold. He smiled as he pinned the medal to my lapel and I bowed with a truly heartfelt respect. He said he was grateful to be able to recognise my years of service to Japan, to his family and to Gakushuin. He also handed me a commemorative scroll bearing the Imperial chrysanthemum crest and his signature, with a reproduction of the medal, and my name spelled out in katakana lettering. RH Bu-Rai-Su. Mister Timeless. Reggie Blyth from Leytonstone. My old Ma would indeed have been proud, and the thought moved me greatly.