Beauty Secrets

Tuesday morning, I woke up to the sound of the wind rattling my front door, and could almost feel the draft through my thin walls. I must have hit the snooze button on my small plastic alarm clock four or five times; the tapping of the rain against the windowpane urged me not to climb out of my cozy futon. When I finally did get up and draw back the curtains, I felt like I was looking out on the deck of a ship at sea, not my courtyard. The rain coming down in sheets was moving horizontally, matching the branches of the trees and bushes as they were pulled by the wind. In my groggy morning thoughts, the only thing that could solidify was “Maybe there’s such a thing as a rain day. I can’t possibly be expected to ride my bicycle to work in this.”

But alas, the Japanese workforce is unflagging, and they expect the same of their foreign visitors. Autumn has finally come to Honshu, and although Japan boasts an excellent reputation for its calm fall climate and spectacular foliage, I am finding that the most dramatic feature of the season is the typhoon weather that I woke up to early last week. The chilling gales wouldn’t be so bad if my school was heated -which it isn’t.

In fact, this is the standard practice in Japanese high schools. They think each individual should be responsible for his own heat conservation. (What happened to group mentality?) The office of my school is tolerable, maybe 67 degrees, but the doors of the school are kept open, causing the typhoon winds to whip down the corridors, bringing the hallway temperature down to around 45. I asked my co-workers if the exterior doors of the school are always kept ajar and they assured me that even in the wintertime, during blizzards, the doors remain open “for the convenience of the students who must pass through them.” I’m thinking that these kids are smart enough to be able to manipulate a doorknob, but maybe I’m overestimating my students’ aptitude.

My students see me suffering from the cold and ask if I am from a warm climate. I explain that Illinois is just as cold as Tochigi, but the people of America have a strong belief in indoor heating. This may somehow be related to our obsession with freedom, but I’m still trying to piece that one together.

The cold isn’t completely bad, though. I’m beginning to suspect it’s one of the secrets behind why Japanese women age so well. When I refrigerate my produce, it stays crisper for longer before it turns soggy. Perhaps the same is true for the feminine countenance. If so, the freezing work conditions are actually a perk of working in a public school. Additionally, our bodies burn more calories trying to stay warm, so the lack of indoor heating also helps a girl maintain a slim figure. I consider myself lucky to be receiving these ancient beauty secrets of the Orient, at no cost save the possibility of frostbite-induced amputation.

Like natto, my unheated school is something I’m beginning to warm up to (though strictly in the figurative sense). I can now begin to reap the beauty rewards Japanese women have been enjoying for centuries. Discovering the age-preserving benefits of the unheated workplace actually comes as excellent news; all this time I’ve been eating sheets of seaweed like it’s going out of fashion.

Ghosts

While waiting for a train on Platform 9 last week, I thought I saw a ghost. In the scratched plastic window of a passing car, the face of my mother appeared like a dreamy vision, and then was carried away down the tracks to Kuroiso. My first thought was, “Why is my mother on a train in central Honshu?” I had spoken with her on the phone that morning, and was fairly certain she was in Midwestern America, giving lectures on computer programming and speeding around in her silver Saturn. It was impossible for her to be here. As I pondered this mystery, my train arrived and as the song of scraping metal and wall of thick warm air washed over me, I saw her again, and understood my mistake. On the cloudy surface of the sliding doors, my own reflection looked back at me, and in my face I saw my mother.
This was not the first time this had happened, not even the first time it had happened that week. I have recently been seeing apparitions of my mother in store windows, rear-view mirrors, and group photos. These visions are not exact representations of my mother as she is now; they resemble my mother as I remember her from when I was a child. It is a bizarre phenomenon; its oddity overshadowed only by the feelings which surface within me when it happens.
Seeing my mother as I remember her from my childhood makes a little well of childlike devotion spring up within me. I am filled with the memory of how it feels to depend entirely on one person for all of my needs. When I was very little, I used to think of myself as an extension of my mother, a detached digit or appendage that must remain close to the parent as much as possible. I would always want to be held or carried, and would even leave my bed in the night so I could go sleep next to her.
Now I am no longer a little girl, and the love I have for my mother has changed with me as I have grown. And although it has been many years since I have felt the obsession young children have for their parents, I have begun feeling the strange echoes of this love, and am left to wonder from where they are reverberating.
I did the math, and discovered that I’m the same age that my mother was when she was pregnant with me. It’s hard to imagine expecting a child at this point in my life, though when my mother was 24, she was married and already had one baby. Things are different for me: I have no career, no children, no house, and no husband. I only have freedom (only, as if it were such a small thing).
I am beginning to wonder if the strange narcissistic feeling of nostalgia brought on by seeing my mother in myself is actually an indication of my desire to regain that special relationship. But I can’t go back to being a child, nor do I want to. So I am left to conclude that part of me is looking for the other side of the relationship: motherhood. It’s a scary thought, but I’m growing accustomed to scary things like seeing apparitions in passing train cars and growing up.
We are coming up on Halloween, a time when the door between our world and the spirit world opens a crack. Halloween is based on the Celtic celebration of Samhain, a holiday whose purpose was to mark the transition between the summer and winter months. It was a time of celebration, but also a time of reflection of the past and a shift in mindset for the future. Samhain and Halloween are both tinseled with dichotomy: the gruesome and the cute, the sweet and the rotting, the summer and the winter, the dead and the living. I find it appropriate that as we draw near to this holiday, I am encountering my own transition of consciousness, from wanting to be held to wanting to hold. The ghosts who stare back at me from shop windows are ghosts of my past, phantoms of who my mother was to me when I was just a baby. But they are also reflections of my own face, of the woman that I have become. And maybe (I like to think) they are visions of who I will be someday, to someone else.
It’s amazing to think how we change and grow, how our love matures and develops as our bodies and minds become adults. The ways we grow can be both fascinating and surprising, and it all happens with such flourish; it’s something beautiful that sneaks up on us like the leaves turning from green to crimson, or the first thick frost on an autumn morning.
The ghosts who haunt me this Halloween aren’t anything to be afraid of. Instead of nightmares, they bring me dreams of a future when I can be for someone what my mother was, and continues to be for me. She may be thousands of miles away, but I carry with me, in my face and my memory, everything my mother is to me. It’s a spirit I’m more than happy to live with.

Happy Halloween.

The Nude Look

When I was a little girl, my mother used to take me and my sister Amy to the public swimming pool near our home. Summers in the Midwest can be painfully hot, so I always looked forward to splashing about in the kiddie pool or taking a run down the waterslide. I loved nearly everything about the public pool: the hot, scratchy pavement on my bare feet, the smell of giant pretzels and cherry coke wafting from the concession stand, and the relief of dipping my sweaty body into cool chlorine blue. The joy of the public pool was only shadowed by one factor: the locker room. Before and after enjoying the splendors of public bathing, I would have to pass through the smelly and dimly lit chamber of naked middle-aged women. They were just ordinary ladies, many just like my mother accompanying small children, but to me these women seemed terrifying. There was something unsettling about seeing a fully naked adult woman. Of course, I had seen my own mother nude and thought it was quite natural, but as the strange women of the public pool locker room stripped off their wet bathing suits, I found myself wondering, “Have they no shame? Don’t they care that I can see them NAKED?” Ladies who seemed so sophisticated in their chic summer dresses would instantly transform into fleshy animals.
Modestly, I would change in the private changing stalls.

I’m not sure when or why I got over my aversion to locker room nudity. While in University, I joined a gym, and thought little of changing and showering in front of so many strangers. They were just strangers; why should they care about me?

I began to feel like being comfortable with my own nudity was a mark of adulthood. We even use the term “adult” to refer to things related to nudity. This validated my sense of maturity*.

*another term denoting nudity

This past weekend my friend Mami organized a group trip of sorts to a small town north of Nikko that is famous for onsen, or Japanese-style public bath. There is a high frequency of natural hot springs in the Nikko mountain area, making it a popular resort destination for city slickers from Tokyo (and the less-slick from Utsunomiya). Our group, consisting of a mix of Japanese and gaijin, met downtown on Saturday afternoon, then caravanned up the winding and stunningly picturesque road to the onsen. After checking into our hotel and being shown our three washitsu, we assembled and the boys’ room, sipping oolong tea and taking turns introducing ourselves. (Mami was the only one who knew everybody.)
Dinner was served in another private dining room, where we each had our own small table laden with a variety of colorful (and sometimes unrecognizable) foods.

To get into the party spirit, we had all agreed to change into the yukata, or cotton robes, provided by the hotel. Sitting in two opposite rows in the massive washitsu, we looked like a strange conglomeration of business associates in matching pajamas.
The beer, whisky, and sake which flowed liberally soon served to ease any nervous dispositions, and before long the two gaijin boys were singing the “Whole New World” Aladdin duet while the rest of us reclined to the romantic ballad.
My favorite routine was Queen’s “Champions,” which was performed by an unassuming Japanese medical student with a hidden talent (and passion) for singing classic 80’s tunes.
The karaoke-booze-pajama revelry carried on for several hours, until we had all either humiliated ourselves or amassed a private fan club or both.

And just when we all thought the fun had reached an all-time high, we commenced the activity that we had all (secretly and openly) been pining for all day: public bathing.

Japanese onsen, though essentially just large, public bathtubs, have a meditative, purifying atmosphere that serves to usher the bather into a semi-conscious state of bliss. The onsen at our hotel was gender-segregated (though not all are in Japan), and when our quartet of girls reached the 11th floor suite of bathtubs overlooking the town, we were nearly the only bathers. And by the time we stripped down, had the mandatory pre-bath shower, and splashed into the bath, we had frightened away the several older Japanese ladies who lingered. (The Japanese word for cute is “kawaai.” “Kwaai” means scary. Funny how fast a gijiin can drop the extra “a” with the removal of a few pieces of clothing.)
We soaked, splashed, fashioned our bathing towels like nuns’ habits and brides’ veils, and, inspired by an enthusiastic performance during karaoke, even sang a few reprises of the Little Mermaid’s “Part of Their World.” I never knew you could have so much wholesome fun in the nude.

The fun couldn’t last forever, though, and like a gang of pink raisins, we reluctantly got out and dried off, returning downstairs to reunite with the boys.

The next morning was clear and crisp, a perfect opportunity to visit the outdoor onsen located behind the hotel, overlooking the river. We scurried down after breakfast, and found the small bath empty and inviting. Tired from an intense tournament of ping-pong the night before, we didn’t talk much as we soaked in the steaming waters. I think more than one of us may have fallen asleep to the soothing sound of the river running over the rocks below. We had been soaking for perhaps a half an hour when we were joined by a woman and two young girls.
The girls were about 7 or 8 years old, and while it was unclear if they were sisters, they were certainly very close. As they huddled together in the bath next to us, they counseled each other on the safety of playing near the river below. I don’t speak Japanese, so I had to rely on Mari for a translation, but it seemed that some of their conversation was also about us. Mari later confirmed my suspicion.

Seeing the two girls in the onsen reminded me of the old summer days at the public pool. Amy and I would exchange glances of support and horror as we watched strangers undress immodestly in the chlorine-scented locker room. And, much like the two girls at the onsen, I now realize we were probably less than discreet about our observations. As an adult, I can see the irony of my obsession with modesty paired with my disregard for courtesy. After all, isn’t true modesty an expression of courtesy? If so, proper onsen etiquette requires comfort in nudity; my nakedness is simply a demonstration of my propriety.
I am continually discovering interesting and wonderful elements of Japanese culture. My newest, and certainly one of my favorite, Japanese customs is the tradition of public bathing. There is something to be said of a culture that has made public nudity an element of polite society. It’s a relief to discover that sometimes, the most sophisticated thing to wear is nothing at all.