Sept. 12: Kanazawa, Nagoya

It takes a day like this for me to realize how dependent I am on full information access, and how deeply frustrating it is when it is thwarted. I remember a couple of years ago when Kathleen Maher and I went out for dinner in San Francisco the night her partner Jon had his sort of salon, where he and his friends pick a non-work-related topic and discuss it, and afterwards we joined them. The night’s topic was whether access to information was a basic human right. Good question; I’ve certainly formulated my personal answer.

There were Japanese newspapers all over the place this morning, which hadn’t happened before, and a picture of buildings and what looked like clouds. I assumed that the typhoon had hit Tokyo, (which, in fact, it had) and this is what I was seeing (which, of course, I was not). So I went in to breakfast and then went back to the room and decided to go find that samurai quarter. Very scared after yesterday’s getting lost -- and I didn’t want to miss my train at noon -- I gingerly picked my way to the market and then kept walking down that main street. The map in the book seemed to indicate that there was a more direct way, but I wasn’t taking any chances: this was something I knew. I was looking for the Grand Hotel, and although it sure wasn’t all that grand, it was there. So I picked my way through small streets in the general direction I thought I was supposed to go and was rewarded by a sign pointing right where I wanted to go. There were, it seemed, a lot of old houses in this part of town, but nothing like the photos I’d seen on the website. I even found a signpost with arrows. The one for where I was going pointed 45 degrees to the southwest. This was the location of my feet.

I was still nervous about the time and very insecure about where I was, so I didn’t deviate too much from where I was sure I was oriented back to the hotel. Forget it, I told myself, and walked down a street with pleasant tile-roofed houses to a main street, where I turned right and sure enough, not only did I find myself back at the hotel after a while, but I discovered that this was the road that ran right in front of the damn thing. The weather was threatening rain again, it was muggy, and I was going to be in a bad mood if I let myself go that way, so I just went into the station, got my reservation for a noon train to Nagoya, and went back to finish packing.

I glanced harder at one of the papers when I got to the hotel, and noticed that the picture looked like New York. In the foreground, a well-dressed black man with a briefcase was hustling away from what was clearly an explosion. This meant it wasn’t Japan: no corporation would send over a black executive if they expected to do business with the Japanese, who wouldn’t talk to him. The site seemed to be the World Trade Center. Another bombing? But there was nothing in the copy of the Japan Times I’d bought at the station. Curious.

I checked out, spent an hour mooching around Kanazawa Station, and eventually boarded the train. It was a pleasant trip through a Midwestern landscape, with mountains in the distance and quite a number of tunnels, which indicated that there were other mountains around. We got to one station, where people got off to get on the Shinkansen, and then everybody in the car stood up and wheeled the seats around! I was completely mystified by this, and a couple of young women behind me helped show me what to do. Pretty soon, I began to recognize where we were: Ogaki, Gifu, and...we stopped. A couple of Railroad Police had gotten on in Ogaki, and they walked through the car with radios going. A suicide on the tracks? Maybe.

We sat for an hour, and it got pretty warm, despite our air-conditioning. Eventually the train hauled itself towards Nagoya, and I was pleased to find a tourist info center, complete with an English-speaking woman who took the piece of paper with the hotel name on it and wrote, for the benefit of the taxi-driver, “Take this man to the Garden Palace Hotel.”

I got in the taxi, and as we pulled away, the driver said “American?” I said yes, and he pointed to the radio, where the word “America” kept repeating. I said I didn’t understand, and he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a tiny color television, tuned in a station, and I saw tiny pictures of a disaster. Hard to tell quite what it was, though. It wasn’t until I got to the palatial hotel and turned on the television that I began to figure out what was going on in the outside world. It was perfect nightmare material, combining my fear of flying with my fear of heights and tall buildings. But it was also impossible to stop watching.

Fortunately, Carl called from his house, informing me that they were headed to Nagoya and that once they got there, we’d all be going out for dinner. After he arrived, he caught me up on what information there was, and then we agreed to gather in the lobby for the trip to the place Noda-san had chosen, specializing in a local pork dish. I changed my shirt, got onto the elevator, my head filled with the horror images I’d been seeing on television, and the elevator stopped and on got a couple in full wedding regalia and an older woman who was holding the bride’s train. (The poor groom, however, didn’t look so hot in his brown polyester suit). Just the touch of surrealism I needed. In the lobby was our party. There was Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Hako, the vocalist for tomorrow night’s performance, Noda-san and his girlfriend, Carl and Yoshiko, and a Japanese woman with bleach-blonde hair whose function I wasn’t sure of.

I’d been so distracted with the little television and trying to simultaneously tune it in and make sense of the picture on it that I wasn’t at all sure where I was in the city, but we marched into a Shinjuku-like area and around and down and into an alleyway, at the end of which was a tiny little place. Much shouting and voting on orders and so on ensued, then we took off our shoes and went upstairs. As I am told will happen in joints like this, the food appeared sporadically, but we wound up with rice bowls topped with many pieces of deep-fried breaded pork, mixed with miso, and a raw egg broken into the middle of it, finished off by miso soup with many, many clams. It was delicious.

Afterwards, Carl and Yoshiko and the vocalist went back to the hotel, and the rest of us went into an apartment building which seemed to be full of clubs instead of apartments. After much discussion, we headed towards one on the 4th floor called Chique Fou, but it turned out to be closed. Noda-san and his girlfriend and I went back to the hotel, and Otomo and his bunch headed somewhere else. Noda revealed his passion for Tejano accordion, Cajun and zydeco music (and he knew the difference, unlike most Americans), and Brave Combo, although he’d never heard their Japanese albums. At 9:15, I found myself back in the room, and, unwilling to watch the airliners puncture the towers over and over again (let alone watch it and then be switched immediately to a commercial with a purple kawaii bunny sitting in a field, as had happened earlier), I got a beer from the machine and sat down to read The Russia House until sleep overtook me at about 11.