Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

“Walk a little more… a little more gracefully,” said the videographer’s assistant, gesturing with her hands. “Smaller steps.” She turned to show me, swaying slightly from side to side as she took slow, tiny steps along the canal. She turned her head over her shoulder to look at me, her eyebrows lifted as if to say, “See what I mean?”

I was walking along a traditional alleyway in the Gion district of Kyoto, and it was slick with recent rain. Walking gracefully was proving difficult for a variety of reasons, foremost among them that I was wearing geta—traditional Japanese sandals. I was also wearing a kimono, a very heavy black wig, and white paint on my face and neck.

Somehow, though—perhaps it was the way I was walking, perhaps it was something else—I was still noticeably foreign.

This was why I got the job in the first place.

The Kansai tourism board was making a video of foreigners partaking in traditional Japanese customs to promote the tourism of tradition—something in which Kyoto excels. Kyoto is where craftspeople still make washi (a special kind of paper) and traditional pottery. It is where my students take lessons on the tea ceremony. It is where you can wander from temple to temple for days on end, trying to attain enlightenment by listening to monks chant at Chion-in, or by seeing all the stones in Ryoanji’s zen garden at the same time. It is where, at night, geisha patter hurriedly past telephone poles plastered with porn ads.

Still, I feel that small places frequently offer a type of authenticity that cities cannot, so two years after I dressed up as a maiko, I decided to leave Kyoto for somewhere rural.

I arrived in the town of Oboke in the early afternoon on a train filled with chattering, uniformed students on their way home from school. The first sign that this town might be what I was looking for was, literally, a sign. As usual, large kanji (Chinese characters) indicated the name of the town, but there was no romaji (Roman letter) translation.

The hostel where I was staying felt more like a home. “Japanese tourists want to sleep on tatami,” the owner, Nori, told me. “They want to feel like they are at their grandmother’s house. Many apartments in Tokyo are now Western… sometimes, here, people don’t even sleep on the futon. They just sleep right on the tatami.”

“You’re from Tokyo, right?” I asked.

“I’m from outside Tokyo. But after I got married, I wanted to find a simpler life… that’s why I named my hostel ‘Ku-Nel-Asob.’ It’s from the kanji meaning, ‘Eat, Sleep, Play.’ These are the three most essential things in life.”

Later, after two other guests had arrived, we sat around the table eating Nori’s homegrown eggplant and drinking sake. “Where are you going tomorrow?” Nori asked me.

“Kazurabashi.” It was a well-known vine bridge, spanning Oboke gorge. Nori made a bit of a face. “What?" I asked. "You don’t like it?”

“No, it’s … you’ll see. But if you want to see something else, I recommend Fufu Ohashi—‘Husband and Wife’ bridges.”

The next morning, I stood with one other pilgrim—an older Japanese man—with my ticket in my sweaty hand, staring at the Kazurabashi bridge. Vines angled in curves to support it, winding their way along at elbow level. The planks were wooden, with spaces between them. What had Nori been talking about?

That’s when I heard the pounding of feet behind me.

The man standing next to me began bowing to the stream of people descending the hill. They slipped and clutched at each other, laughing, snapping pictures. I inched closer, looking at the planks and the vines, and it was only then that I saw the wire and the vine-colored plastic wound around it. Someone flipped a switch, and tinny traditional music began piping from speakers embedded in the cliffs. I began to feel like I was in a theme park. I realized that the man bowing beside me was a tour guide.

At the bus stop, I trailed my finger along the sign, sounding out the words as I went. There—Fufu Ohashi! I would go there. The bus came at 2 p.m. I looked at my watch: 1 p.m. Well … I could wait an hour.

After I had been sitting on the bench pressed up against the guardrail for 20 minutes or so, nodding to elderly passing residents, it began to rain. I got out my umbrella. I sat. I looked at my watch. Two p.m. No bus.

At 2:45, a taxi drove past me, going the wrong way. The driver slowed down and looked at me, then backed up and got out, holding his arms over his head to shield himself from the downpour. I stood up. “Where do you want to go?” he shouted.

“Fufu Ohashi!”

He blinked water out of his eyes. His suit was dark with rain. “Three-thousand yen! There and back!”

We pulled up in front of a building the size of a large outhouse. An old woman peered out the open window; the driver dashed out of the car and into the building, nodding to her when he got inside. I got out, umbrella first, and smiled at her.

“I’d like to buy a ticket,” I said.

She took my money and leaned back to look at me.

“Do you have a raincoat?”

“No.”

“Boots?”

“No.”

“A hat?”

“No. I have my umbrella.”

She stood up and pulled me inside. “Use mine.”

Overriding my protests, she gave me a crooked smile as she pulled the hat over my wet hair, clucking at the sopping state of my jeans. “What will your family say when you tell them an old lady lent you her clothes?”

I slipped down the muddy trail and stood for a few moments before the bridge. The river roared below. I snapped a picture and tucked my camera inside my purse, inching out over the planks, looking at the river, angry and brown, through the gaps between them. Water dripped from my hat down the inside of my jacket. I clutched tightly to the vines, looking down at my shoes. I was wrapped in a curtain of rain.

Was this bridge, this experience more "real?" What does it mean to be "authentic" anyway? At the beginning of my time in Japan, I was a gaijin (literally, "outside person") wearing the clothes of a maiko. Now, about to leave, I wore the rain gear of an obasan (older woman). I thought about how Tokyo-ites hungry for culture sleep on the tatami floors in Ku-Nel-Asob, and tourists stand on new bridges, snapping pictures of old ones. I will return to Virginia; the Tokyo-ites will go back to Tokyo. Nori will stay, tending his eggplant.