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left unattended for an hour or two. They always find everything as they left it
when they return. Try that in New York, or Regina!”
I didn’t believe it, but went to the kiosk when I returned to Akihabra some
days later, just to prove Randy was wrong. Yet there it was, my gift, safe and
sound. I conclude Japanese people are very scrupulously honest:if something
isn’t mine, they seem to reason, it must belong to someone else. I’d read that until
recently, a thief paid for his crime with a hand; a three-time thief, or murderer, paid
with his head:samurai swords dispensed unyielding justice. This may have been
the law until after World War II when Japan became a completely modern country.
Old habits are long remembered. Good thing!
Now we’re really flying. We’ve zipped through the endless grey concrete
box buildings of Tokyo — where are all the pagodas? We are now out in the
countryside. I can’t say I’m very enthusiastic about what we moderns continue
creating:everything is ugly, garish, plastic, noisy and unsettling. Or worse, it’s
completely sterile. “You’ll know when you’re in Kyoto,” Randy opined. “Just
like in every city that thinks it’s important in the West, they built a giant phallus
symbol at the train station to mark the spot and transmit TV signals. In historic
Kyoto! Japan’s capital for a thousand years.”
I heave a sigh of relief to be in the countryside now, breezing along at well
over a hundred miles an hour just above the ground on the ultramodern bullet train.
I have a seat on the right side of the train and can see rice paddies stretched
out beside me. Clumps of trees near and far dot the land. We’re whisking past
villages where life is peaceful and quiet. So different from Tokyo! The sky is
clear and blue. Before long I see Mount Fuji towering in the distance, its white
snow cap gleaming. This Japanese icon of serenity and peace I know is in reality
an “extinct” volcano and I wonder if it will always be so in this geologically active
land. Now Saskatchewan, thatplace has stable geology! Soil miles deep.
Everything there is sostable. Why, things hardly change at all. Maybe, I think,
changelessness is not such a good thing after all. And maybe old things seem good
only because it is that only the best is saved while most of the every day junk is
discarded, to be replaced by a new day’s junk:Somewhere in today’s pile a few
good things will survive to be cherished in the future when people will fondly
remember the good old days.
Whatever eventually replaces it, the bullet train will be fondly remembered.
I’m sure of that. Here comes a crisply-uniformed stewardess. Just like on an
by Morley Evans