Village Japan. Malcolm Ritchie

      ♦ Preface ♦

      My wife, Masako, and I had decided to return to Japan, where we had previously lived in Tokyo for five years, hoping to find somewhere in the countryside where we could support ourselves by doing translation work. In the event, a chance meeting with a young Japanese couple, the Yokos, who had come to study in Britain for a year, led us to a remote farming/fishing village on the Noto Peninsula on the Japan Sea coast.

      Initially, on our arrival in Noto, we stayed in the house of Mr. Yoko's mother in the village of Kanami while we searched the area for an empty house that might be suitable to rent. One evening Mr. Yoko returned home to say that he had heard of an empty house in the neighboring village of Sora and that he would take us to look at it the following day.

      The next morning after breakfast, Mr. Yoko drove us the four kilometers to Sora, through the village main street to a point where the road crossed a bridge with vermilion railings. There we took a turning to the left and stopped outside a house just a few yards from the bridge. The house stood at the apex of a triangle formed by the confluence of two small rivers that flowed close to either side of it and came together just a few yards from its front door, between it and the bridge. A small footbridge gave access to the house across the river that ran between the house and the road.

      Just as we were getting out of the car, a very small man appeared suddenly, as if from nowhere, and wandered across the road toward us. He was about four feet six inches in height, with a swarthy skin and an unshaven chin. As he approached us, he held his head back slightly in order to look up at us. His walk was more a kind of shuffle, and he held the branch of a tree in his right hand as a walking stick.

      I bowed and said, "Konnichiwa" (Good day), and he returned my bow with "Konnichiwa. Who are you? I don't know you." His curiosity seemingly satisfied, he turned his back and shuffled away in the direction of a large dilapidated house beside the vermilion bridge.

      At the time, I wondered how to interpret his greeting and worried, having been told how conservative these villages were, how he might react on finding that a foreigner was going to live almost opposite his house. On our moving in, however, I was soon relieved of any such apprehension because Mr. Fukada, who was eighty-three, and known locally by his given name as Old Man Gonsaku, became a close neighbor and friend. In fact, for me he was the genius loci, with more than a little trickster in his nature. A man who seemed to live in his own time/space, ignoring the more conventional attitudes and habits of his neighbors and often perplexing them with his own. He had, for example, a predilection for going to the lavatory al fresco, although his house was furnished with the traditional dry lavatory. The site of his choice was a few yards in front of his own house, at the crossroads between the main village street and the turnoff from the vermilion bridge to the road on which our own house was situated. Actually, the spot he had chosen was directly opposite my workroom window, and in the spring and summer months I was to be frequently disturbed away from my desk by the sounds of altercation as he was berated where he squatted by someone passing on a bicycle on their way to or from their fields or from the back of a tractor and trailer. He always seemed to have a ready rejoinder, which he delivered with whatever else he was depositing at the time, without adjustment to either his position or his dropped trousers or indeed his determination to continue whatever he was engaged in.

      Old Man Gonsaku's presence is frequent throughout the pages of this book, as indeed it was throughout the days, and sometimes nights, of our sojourn in Sora. And here he is, already at the beginning of the book, much in the same way that he appeared on our first visit to the house we were to live in for the next two and a half years.

      This book is not intended as a sociological, anthropological, historical, or any other kind of study. Rather it is a collection of anecdotes, encounters, conversations, and thoughts that I recorded in notebooks and on tapes during the period that we lived in Sora. This being the case, I have not set out to produce an in-depth portrait of life in a Japanese village but to bring a miscellany of subjects, people, and places,

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