Copyright © 1977, 1996-2008, Randy R. Johnson, all rights reserved
Such was Sugimoto's, a place no one could call home without a sardonic smile. Why, it could scarcely be called a house without reservations. Yet of all my many homes, it evokes the fondest memories, holding a forgotten warmth, tempered by an icy blast through the hole in the window.
Sugimoto owned the place. Once a month he and his wife would arrive from Kobe and take up residence in the third floor apartment long enough to collect the rent from the eight other rooms. I don't know why he bothered; the $20 a month we paid him could scarcely have covered the utilities.
Still, the utilities were few, and far between. There was no gas, a dire calamity in a country that still hasn't completely succumbed to electrical appliances and central heating.
The country is Japan, the city -- Kyoto. "Jogjakarta is the Kyoto of Indonesia", they say; "Chiang Mai is the Kyoto of Thailand"; "Luang Prabang is the Kyoto of Laos." And Kyoto is... Kyoto. To what can it be compared -- a city so rich in history, tradition, and grandeur that it required 1100 years to achieve it all before the capital could be moved to Tokyo, in 1869.
There was also no sewage. Even in modern Japan, you needn't travel far from the hub of a city to outdistance the sewage system. And this applies equally to Tokyo, a city of 12 millions, including its far flung suburbs. For two months I lived with a modern Japanese family in their new house in a suburb not six kilometers from central Tokyo. Yet right there at the end of the hall, was unmistakably an indoor outhouse.
There, as at Sugimoto's, the sewage collectors would appear every two weeks to open the fateful hatch and pump our night soil into the bowels of their tank truck. But at Sugimoto's, their coming was something we looked forward to with a mixture of dread and longing. For the stench of the cleaning process, first wafted on the morning breeze from down the road, was more volatile than either the common smells that greeted the regular visitor, or the devastating blockbuster that assailed the nostrils after the couple downstairs administered a fortnightly bottle of ammonia in hopes of quelling the ripening fumes.
The structure itself was unique among outhouses. Even the more genteel lady tenants could only refer to it by the more colloquial term, benjo, which may be literally rendered as the "crapper." It was separated from the main building, if only by a narrow cement catwalk. But the toilet proper was located on the second floor and the facility as a whole formed a veritable cement silo of human waste that brought a new dimension of meaning to "straight-drop plumbing".
In the evening hours of peak use, the hill behind Sugimoto's -- the Narabi-ga-oka hill, once the sacred burial ground of the ancients -- saw more business than the dreaded benjo, as sake-drinking college boys took respite from their nightly mah-jong marathon to go pee.
For among its myriad other identities, Kyoto is a college town, crowded with the students of numerous universities, colleges, and other institutions of advanced learning. The students play mah-jong and live on instant ramen in thousands of stark little rooms and geshukus around town. A geshuku is a rooming house which not uncommonly provides room, board, and supervision for acquiescent students. How Sugimoto's abandoned hovel came to be known as a geshuku is any body's guess -- perhaps as a tax write-off -- but it did lend a certain air of respectability to an otherwise despicable living situation.
My room was not really much to describe. It tenaciously held sway over the upper northeast corner of Sugimoto's square tenement of concrete blocks, separated visually, if not audibly, from the other three corners only by hollow sliding doors which had been nailed shut, creating from a vast four-room suite, four tiny cubicles of six mats (9 feet by 12 feet) each.
This simple design however, left hardly any room for closets or cupboards. Even the scant and barely functional genkan -- the traditional entryway where shoes are left -- protruded into the room itself.
My bedding formed a couch in one corner, the kitchen filled another, a bookshelf lined a third wall, and a low table sat in the middle, leaving no room for idle clutter to lay about. Consequently, instead of relegating all of my belongings to a great heap upon the floor, I took to hanging everything up on the walls -- that is, the doors; I mean the partitions: the only two walls not made of concrete. As a general policy, anything that got under foot was nailed to the wall, or hung from it. New nails were added periodically as the hiking boots took their place beside the rucksack, the clothes rack, the book bag.
Not that the floor was much to look at -- I just needed it to live on. Some furnishings hold their age rather well, actually increasing in charm and utility as they grow older. Tatami mats do not. The only vintage year for tatami is this year. No fastidious Japanese -- and there are few who are not -- would move into a new apartment without fresh new reed mats, the scent of which is enough to bring euphoria, if not satori, to any connoisseur of Japanese culture.
In his haste, Sugimoto seems to have neglected that amenity for at least the last ten years. After some years of use and abuse, mats become brittle and frayed, soft and mushy, undulating across the floor like a rolling sea. Tattered mats also provide a pleasant summer home for cockroaches, who delight in diving into worn holes or between the mats, under the futile swat of an irate slipper.
What we did have was electricity, though not a great deal of it coursed through that concrete chamber, and in the winter time we had to coordinate cooking shifts to avoid blowing the fuse. I learned to make efficient use of my single electrical outlet, as well as tapping the solitary light fixture, dangling starkly overhead. These brought welcome life to my modern conveniences: an electric burner, toaster, percolator, electric fry pan and kotatsu.
The kotatsu is a standard low table with a heat lamp fitted into the frame. A large quilt is spread between the table top and the frame, and around this contraption much of Japan huddles in the winter time, sipping hot tea or sake, and tending whatever affairs can be attended to over the table while feet and legs keep warm under the quilt.
Originally, the kotatsu was a charcoal pit built into the floor beneath a low table, so that feet dangled more comfortably down over glowing embers. My first experience with a real kotatsu, at an isolated mountaineering hut high on a snow-covered ridge, was somewhat less that agreeable, especially to the proprietor, who complained that my oversized legs reached to the coals and threatened to track ashes all over the mats. I was more concerned with my socks catching fire.
My kitchen was just a narrow table under the broken window, on which the appliances rested. Under the kitchen, a plastic picnic bag served as a refrigerator, keeping vegetables fresh for several days in the winter -- scarcely overnight in the summer time. But daily trips to the boisterous marketplace at Kitano for a sack full of produce kept me up on the latest gossip and made each meal a surprise, dependent upon the daily bargain, or an especially convincing fishmonger.
We also had water. Out on the catwalk just outside my door hung a small porcelain sink with a single faucet -- cold -- which I shared with my neighbor to the south. Granted, it may be pleasant enough to wash up in the great outdoors, but stealing out into the icy rain for tea water on a stormy winter's night is not much of a reason for abandoning the kotatsu.
And washing the dishes out in that tiny sink for all of Kyoto to see, was something short of exhilarating. Hot water was the work of the percolator -- never used to make coffee -- and it performed admirably, boiling eggs in no time, water for shaving in a jiffy. But filling the sink and a rinse tub with hot water was like bailing a sinking ship; I needed to wash, boil, and carry water all at the same time.
One blistering afternoon in Taipei, impecuniously suffering from the exorbitant price of beer and the sore lack of uncontaminated water, I conjured in my hazy mind the vision of that much-maligned spigot just outside my door at Sugimoto's, where I could go anytime of the day or night and drink my fill of icy cold fresh pure water.
There was also a laundry. From our alleyway on ground level, one steel stairway led up to the second storey while another led steeply down to the first floor, where an innocuous little agitator sat. Basically, it agitated -- up to fifteen minutes at a time. With a little soap, it washed; then, fed by a hose from the sink nearby, and with the rinse drain open, it rinsed. Then, in a final burst of glory, it provided a vigorous little 5-minute spin dryer. So if you were really on your toes, within 45 minutes you could be up on the third floor hanging out your wash across Sugimoto's front door.
By this time I should have included a careful description of Sugimoto himself, but the truth is I never met the man. He would always arrive in the evening while I was at work, collect the rent money via my neighbor, then disappear into his private apartment and leave in the early morning. I caught glimpses of him a few times, coming down the stairs, but that was enough for me.
That one pillbox apartment atop the two tenant floors remained vacant most of the time, but through the cracks in the windows, we could see that it was equipped with a real kitchen, with a real refrigerator, and genuine closets.
The rest of the third level formed a broad concrete deck which afforded a fine place to sunbathe, or just to stand and gaze out across the city. For it wasn't just the price, nor was it masochism that endeared me to Sugimoto's tenement; perched upon the foot of Narabi-ga-oka hill, it had the best views in town!
To the Japanese, nothing is complete without its context and nothing can be considered without relation to its surroundings, for together they form an integral whole. So it was with Sugimoto's. The quality of accommodation stank, pure and simple; but oh, that context. Every morning when I flung open that broken window, there was majestic Mount Hiei to the east, rising beyond the city which spread out beneath my very gaze. Mount Hiei in the East, Sugimoto's geshuku in the West, and in between the vibrant sea of Kyoto tossed from shore to shore.
Out over my kitchen table I looked across the vast Myoshin-ji Zen monastery, over a distant Kyoto Tower downtown, and on a clear day I could discern the rooftops of the Kiyomizu Temple, nestled among the eastern hills. And through my northern window the massive gateway and pagoda of nearby Ninna-ji Temple appeared among the trees, and a string of tiny shrines climbed up the steep northern hills beyond.
Before Sugimoto's fortress, all other houses bowed down, showing only their rooftops. Immediately behind, and separated only by the narrow dirt alley, rose the lush virgin hills of Narabi-ga-oka. A five minute climb to the deserted summit, pitted by old tomb excavations, and there was nothing you could not see! To the south, Kyoto's vast industrial basin unfolded; and beyond, Nagaoka and the countryside. To the west rose more mountains, and yet more -- Takao... Kitayama... Nishiyama... the WORLD!
But I digress.