GPS-ing to a Japanese village

It is often said, especially among the foreigners in Japan, that one is handicapped here without a car. This one feels the most when paying a lot for public transport just to travel a short distance. But when you are in a personal car, especially sharing it with others, traveling can be comparatively cheap. True, you need to buy fuel, and pay toll/s for the highways (which are pretty high, with people always complaining about it), but it is still cheap compared to public transport. Yuko had rented a five-seater car for 56 hours, and then we were on the road.

This was totally a different Japan for me, or for anyone who didn't travel much by road.

All areas of Japanese cities and suburbs tend to be the same--no definite localities or neighborhoods. To us in the cities--except for knowing about 'agricultural areas'--it is easy to assume that there is no rural Japan as we Bangladeshis tend to understand the term. Traveling by Shinkanshin [the bullet train] can be a sheer thrill for a Bangladeshi. Discussions can center around whether one has experienced a ride already, or is going to. But those trains do not provide any sense of Japanese countryside. Local trains are of course local. I don't know why, but when I rode a local train here for the first time, I thought of the music played by the metro rail authorities in Kolkata. I missed those tunes.

It is by car that one gets to see the Japanese landscape. Fabulous hills in so many shades of green. A green that, of course, turns to yellow in the winter, then reddish and finally brown. Drive along, and all of a sudden you enter a valley with typical two-stored Japanese houses. In their compounds--you can even see it from far--are carefully planted fruit trees. Agricultural lands are there also. This is of course modern technocratic Japan, still the outcome of Meiji Restoration. Bangladeshis often are surprised with their use of land--even a one-decimal flat land is cultivated. But sitting in a car waiting for the next valley habitat, you come upon a hill with a hundred houses delicately grafted onto its body. Looking at the countryside architecture in Japan can be confusing. You see the mighty bridges, tunnels, highways--solid concrete or steel. Then you see the fragile-looking wooden lodgings.

Yuko had strongly recommended that we bring all our favorite music for the trip just to avoid monotony. I don't know about Tehsan, our Taiwanese companion. But for us--Humayun, Seuty and me, the three Bangladeshis--the car windows were just too magical. We stuck onto it. Then I learnt something astonishing about our car. I had heard about GPS [Global Positioning System] before, but sitting beside Yuko, I found her looking into the multi-purpose screen, supposedly our CD player cum DVD player cum TV. It provided us with a satellite- controlled GPS image that showed every detail of Japanese highways and roads. We could even know how many meters away we were from a highway-cafe or a signal light. I sat speechless for a while with my eyes on the screen. I recalled the second-hand pen with an electronic watch I got as a gift from my parents during my last days of school, a very expensive item given our living standards then. Yet, the next week I had dismantled it--the result of my curiosity about it. Sitting in the car, I controlled myself from being inquisitive about the mysterious screen. It was hard, though.

We reached at our destination finally, after dusk. One or two hens were still moving in the yard. Hypothetically it was Japanese countryside. That is, neighbors knew each other, and there were no nearby shopping malls. Yuko told us later that for weeks the story would make the rounds in the neighborhood that the Mizuno family had some foreigner guests. A long time back her grandfather had come here, settled, and built a futon [mattress and blanket] factory which now was run by her father. 'Factory' actually would not be the right term since it was more the traditional cottage industry, nowadays fast disappearing. It is more kind of dhunkar in the Bangladeshi context. But no comparison is possible given the affluence of Japanese society.

Next morning, on the way to Fukuoka, we talked about that.

'Father is somehow disappointed that none of my brothers came to the profession.' Yuko was talking about her father. One of her brothers was in the fire service, while the other was in the navy.

'But that's understandable I guess. Does he have regular clients?'

'Long-time ones. But these days even they hardly come for a new one.'

'Why?'

'They ask for repair of their old ones.'

'So that's also part of your services?'

'Now that has become the only service.'

'Then how can your father really expect his sons to join him?'

'Right. Last year my father himself bought two blankets from Nafco.' Yuko was laughing. Nafco is one of the major chain shops in Japan. And among other items, they sell the futons--the readymade ones that are factory-manufactured and mainly synthetic. 'Cotton is expensive," she added.

'What about Japanese cotton?"

'Well, Japan produces cotton. But the main source for traditional futons is imported cotton. My father developed an import chain from India. All by himself."

A familiar story, I felt. And at the same time not so. The dying out of this cottage industry didn't really marginalize a whole generation of craftsmen. Well, perhaps in cultural terms, but not in financial terms. At least it didn't seem so.

Her parents were waiting for us to join them at dinner. Her mother and sister-in-law had been preparing food for us for hours. His brother and his wife drove down just for the event--to meet his sister's foreigner friends. We sat down at Japanese short tables loaded with food. Soba [noodles], onigiri [a cake made of rice and fishes], susi [raw fishes with some sauce], boiled shrimps, chips, cakes, cheeses, beers, fruits juices, sake [traditional Japanese wine] and some more I couldn't follow. Everybody was keen to know their guests. The language divide was great: Yuko spoke Japanese and English. Her parents, brother and sister-in-law knew only Japanese. We three Bangladeshis spoke Bangla and English. And Tehsan spoke Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese and a little English. Now, except for me, the other two Bangladeshis--Seuty and Humayun--could follow some words and phrases in Japanese. Yuko's father somehow had learnt some Bangla and Hindi words. Yuko could follow a simple Bangla conversation very roughly.

Yuko's mother learnt Chinese in a language school and now had largely forgotten it. And Yuko's 2-year-old nephew was still struggling with Japanese. Very soon the dinning table turned into enthusiastic language exercises.

The place where we had dinner was actually the guest house, though Yuko had a room in this. We five were to stay in this house. Yuko's brother, his wife and the little one went off. After they left, her parents also went to the main house. Both of them were early risers. Futons came out from wardrobes. "These are our factory products," Yuko said. Everyone got a singe bed with a thin blanket, placed on the wooden floor. Tehsan was the disciplined one, so she went to bed. But we four went on with our adda till midnight. We had been so distracted after we reached her home that none of us had thanked Yuko until then.

'So you like it?'

'I feel like I am visiting my grandparents at my home village.' Humayun said. He had told me this twice, and now he told this to the others as well.

'Honto? [really?]'

'Me too. I feel like I am in Syedpur in my maternal grandma's house.' Seuty had been raised in her grandmother's house for years, and now she was thinking of her. Yuko felt happy providing this at-home feeling to her friends and classmates. I was thinking of it too. How our memories were always seeking referents. Was it by chance? Otherwise how could a village in Japan, absent any sensible linguistic exchange, so strongly re-generate old emotions? All of us no doubt were thinking about the inevitable drift of later generations towards the city. Yuko also told us about how she decided to go for a distant university, not the one near by. She asked me, 'And Manosh da, you?'

'I am enjoying myself thoroughly. And I am thinking of it too.'

'Don't you feel the way they feel?'

'No.'

'Why?'

'I had never been to my village except for my grandfather's funeral when I was twelve. And before that I saw him once for two hours.'

'Honto? And don't you have some other memories?'

'Nothing comparable. My maternal grandparents also didn't live in their village home. Then they left Bangladesh long back, in 1981.'

'And didn't you ever visit any of your friends' homes?'

'That is what I am thinking about right now. No. This is the first time that I am staying in somebody's home village.'

'How can it be?'

Seuty and Humayun also waited for my response. But I couldn't find the right answer to the question. I knew what I wanted to say, but it was hard to translate it into language.

Manosh Chowdhury is on study leave from Anthropology department, Jahangirnagar University.