Long before the advent of anime, the ubiquity of the weeb, or the proliferation of Japanese ingredients on menus that bill their cuisine as “New American,” Japan occupied an exalted place in the collective imagination of the West.
For centuries, much of that enigmatic magnetism came from the country’s hermetic zeal– its dogged determination to isolation. In 1543, however, a powerful storm and a Portuguese merchant ship banded together to break the previously stubborn lid on the nation’s fortified shores.
Had Japan not been mired in a protracted civil war at the time of the wayward traders’ accidental arrival, the far-ranging refugees would have likely been turned away—or worse. The Portuguese introduced innumerable foreign items that would later become staples of the once-cloistered culture. Tobacco, tempura, and bread-baking, just to name a few. But it was a more destructive technology that secured their safe harbor: matchlock firearms.
Promising to import these novel instruments of death, the Portuguese were permitted to establish a trading post in a nation that had never once made such an agreement. Their activities, both commercial and religious, were sanctioned for a single place: a humble fishing village called Nagasaki.
During the subsequent century, the Nanban trade (a moniker that prophetically translates to the “Southern Barbarian trade”) reshaped Japanese history. The sleepy fishing village became a bustling port city. After a peasant uprising in the late 1630s, fueled in no small part by Catholic influence, Japan’s shogunate banished the Portuguese from the island.
Four hundred years later, a different Western power would introduce the country to yet another entirely new weapon. And this time, it wouldn’t only be Japan, but the entire world that was forever transformed.
My personal affinity for the Land of the Rising Sun was sparked by a summer job at a family restaurant in Bridgehampton, New York. Like Japan, Yama-Q was tidy, quaint, and meticulously intentional. Like the island nation, too, the 32-seater punched far above its weight and boasted a committed following that was borderline zealous in its loyalty. At the end of my third summer, the family invited me on their annual autumn trip to Japan.
We flew out of JFK on Halloween night, 2016.
After a straight shot to Tokyo, we boarded a smaller plane to Osaka, where we were met by a tall man with a van, the restaurant owner’s brother, who ferried us to a tiny city in Nara Prefecture where we’d be based for our three-and-a-half-week stay.
Tenri, a picturesque community of some sixty thousand residents, briefly served as the country’s capital during the 5th century. Since then, it’s best known as the headquarters of a modern Japanese religion called Tenrikyo. The church of Tenrikyo, one in which our host and his family were intimately involved, is oriented around achieving a “Joyous Life” through a practice known as Tannō: the “Joyous Acceptance” of troubles, illness and all manner of earthly difficulties.
Aside from certain church duties, our time was our own during the first week. We wandered the town’s narrow streets and explored the holes in its old walls—the dimly lit izakayas and brightly lit bakeries. There were day trips to Nara to walk the tree-lined promenades populated with the bowing sika deer, after which we’d dip into signless curry houses for lunches I’ll long remember and never replicate.
On the morning of our seventh day, the joyous life we’d settled into was put on pause for a three-day excursion that would push our uniquely deficient (re: American) capacity for joyous acceptance to its limit.
We arrived in Hiroshima on November 8th. Unlike Tenri, an unassuming little burg of low profile and cobbled stone, Hiroshima cut a decidedly modern figure. While the reason for Hiroshima’s more contemporary character is obvious—upwards of 92% of the city’s buildings were partially or wholly destroyed in a single day in 1945—the true consequences of the birth of the nuclear age were all but absent in the American public school curriculum I grew up with.
The mindful efficiency for which Japan is famous is not just reflected in its sink-topped water-saving toilets or its immaculate rail system, rather, it informs a commitment to historical preservation and to the museums and monuments that immortalize its complicated past.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a testament to the country’s ability to turn the incomprehensible into something that can (almost) be understood. The museum is laid out like a maze that charts the before, during and after of that singularly consequential day in modern history. The hour it takes to navigate the labyrinth of grisly images feels, at once, like an instant and an eternity. The disorienting sense of timelessness one experiences walking down the last hallway is not unlike that described by survivors who couldn’t gauge the hour of the day for all the dirt the blast sucked up into the sky.
The last exhibit is a signed letter from then-President Barack Obama. Encased in glass with a photograph and two origami cranes meant to represent a lasting peace and a friendship forged after fire, there is nothing in the president’s words that comes close to any kind of apology.
While the least moving element of the visit, that image of Obama smiling with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reminded me that another potentially historic event was about to get underway on the other side of the world.
The next morning, we boarded a train bound for Nagasaki. If the election results were even remotely close to the political handicappers’ projections, the United States would elect its first female president by the time we arrived at the second leg of our atomic holiday. (I had cast an early absentee ballot by mail, a write-in vote for a different woman: Alyson Kennedy, the Socialist Workers Party candidate.)
Rattling out of the last stop before Nagasaki—a cell reception desert, as it turned out—-our train came to a screeching halt. An announcement over the intercom, translated by my friendly English-speaking seatmate, informed us of a disturbance at the crossing.
Not five minutes later, our train car was inundated with a battalion of smartly dressed police officers. An elderly woman, her shopping buggy's wheel jammed in the track, had gotten stuck between the blinking crossing arms.
According to my neighbor—who, like every Japanese passenger, had been questioned by the police—the woman evaded the oncoming train but was injured in the course of her escape.
Our arrival in Nagasaki was delayed by more than two hours. Finally able to access the internet with the station’s public Wi-Fi, I logged on expecting to see by just how much Hillary Clinton had won. The headlines read something altogether different: it was improbable news that I confirmed in an equally unlikely location.
On the wall of a florist stall next to the station’s exit, a television played a Japanese public television broadcast of CNN. As the president-elect swaggered onto the stage, a pair of old Japanese men turned to where my American friend and I were standing in a state of sober shock. They turned back to the television. They turned back to us. They looked at one another and erupted in laughter.
It was all rather absurd. There we were: American tourists enjoying a nuclear sightseeing expedition in the city that endured the worst of the second half of that horrid week in August 1945, while a couple of stoop-shouldered old men, who very well could have been survivors, broke the seal on their society’s decorous demeanor to laugh in our faces.
Our only answer was Tannō in real time.
At dinner that night, our table was visited by the restaurant’s owner. Overhearing our accents and references to New York, he was eager to show off the fluent English he honed as an exchange student at St.John’s University in the ‘80s. After expressing his deep affection for our country and culture, he paused. Striking a more somber tone, he told us how sorry he was for what had happened in our election. How he couldn’t believe—this coming from a Nagasaki native whose parents had survived the nuclear attack—that the United States was capable of making such a terrible decision.