Anniversary: The Only Gaijin in the Village

Yes, I am a long way from home.

I just realised that today (near as dammit) is the fifth anniversary of publication of The Only Gaijin in the Village. That seems both recent and distant, but while I cope with the passage of time, here, for those who haven’t had the chance yet, is the opening of the book.

I’m going to die in Japan.

At least, that’s the plan. Plan is the wrong word. I’ve not sat down like Wile E. Coyote gripped by a wave of self-destruction and plotted my own demise, strung an anvil from the roof or painted a tunnel on the garage door. Nor am I predicting that a North Korean missile will take me out any time soon, though that is certainly more likely. I have the experience to prove it. It was 29 August 2017.

I was camping in Aomori, the most northerly prefecture on Honshu, Japan’s main island. Over the water is Hokkaido – the last prefecture before Russia – then a string of disputed islands and ice. During the summer vacation I’d thrown the camping gear in the back of the car, caught up in a surge of wild-man envy. I needed masculine exploits and rugged scenery. By the time I’d reached Aomori I’d already been stung thirty-six times by bees, developed a fever as a result, been chased by a biker gang and run away from a hotel before they discovered that when my fever broke I’d sweated so much I’d turned their comfortable mattress into a water bed. I’d been travelling for ten days, hadn’t spoken to anyone for three, and was beginning to crack up. I woke about 4 a.m., packed up quickly, happy to have been undisturbed by bears, and pointed the car south. Mogwai soared from the open windows as I sped through glorious forest roads – the kind Iain Banks called ‘great wee roads’ – with the sun rising behind me.

I joined the highway a little before six, my intention to go as far as Sendai, refuel and take it from there. A night in the city or another campsite? Fresh sheets or the pleasure of a lakeside sunset? My phone, acting as a sat nav from the 100-yen holster I’d taped to the dashboard, started buzzing like thirty-six bees had got inside it, immediately followed by a screeching alarm, far louder than the ear-hurting stereo volume. It was the J-Alert.

J-Alert is a nationwide warning system designed with two functions: the first is to give people a few seconds’ notice in advance of an earth- quake or other disaster. (A few seconds is all science can give us, but it can make a lot of difference. It can be enough time to turn off the gas cooker, to get away from the windows, to get out the shower and avoid the indignity of running from the house in soapy humiliation.) The second is to scare the living shit out of people. With a volume and tone similar to the ‘howler’ letters in Harry Potter – think an air horn attached to a bull horn being held down by someone intent on giving you a heart attack – the J-Alert has caused me to leap from bed in the small hours, stub a toe, crack a shin, hit my head and fall to the floor in terror. This time it caused me to swerve wildly into the outside lane. Luckily the highway was empty. Had it not been, I wondered, would my death count as an earthquake fatality? In Australia, most deaths caused by spiders have nothing to do with bites and industrial levels of venom. Rather, the majority of fatalities are caused by people pulling down the sun visor while cruising along innocently, having a dangerous spider fall into their lap, very naturally reacting with some surprise and crashing the car into a wall/truck/convincing picture of a tunnel left by Wile E. Coyote. Spiders don’t kill people, I’m sure the NRA would say, walls do. The alarm finished, I righted my direction and pulled back into the inside lane. Japanese highways are raised affairs. Literal highways on massive concrete legs with high sides to keep the noise in and presuma- bly to stop any spider-surprised drivers from going over the edge. During the 1995 earthquake, the raised highway in Kobe flipped over. If there was a big earthquake, I wanted to be somewhere less . . . flippable. I wanted to be on a great wee road, ideally in Scotland.

After the alarm, an electronic female voice announced in Japanese, ‘MISSILE LAUNCH! MISSILE LAUNCH!’

‘What?’

‘MISSILE LAUNCH! MISSILE LAUNCH!’

‘I thought that’s what you said.’

I pulled the phone from its slot and tried to read the alert. In Japanese. In a tiny font. Still doing about 100kph on the highway. Not bright but, you know, special circumstances.

Missile launch! Missile launch! Get to a safe place. Find somewhere underground or go inside a strong building.

High in the air, on a concrete strip. The next exit was 20km away.

No further information from the J-Alert. I went onto Twitter. The alert was already trending but every tweet was a variation of ‘WTF?’. I phoned Minori, my wife.

‘What?’

‘What’s happening?’

‘I’m asleep.’

‘No, with the missile.’

‘What missile?’

‘The alert.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Put on the news and call me back.’

As I waited I remembered that the day before, driving north, I’d been stuck behind a convoy of military vehicles. Trucks, jeeps, and something that looked so suspiciously like a rocket launcher that I took a photo. For about thirty minutes I’d trailed this convoy. I’d assumed there was a base nearby, though the surprised expressions and pointed fingers of villagers made me suspect not. They’d turned off a few kilometres before my junc- tion and I’d thought no more about it. Now the presence of that rocket launcher seemed ominous. Did they know something?

‘Hi. Where are you?’

‘On the highway in Aomori. What’s going on?’

‘The TV says it’s a test.’

‘North Korea?’

‘Of course. It flew over Hokkaido and landed in the sea.’

She had this tone like it was the most mundane thing in the world. Like she was reciting the weather forecast or responding to me telling her about my day.

‘So we’re not at war?’

‘Not yet. What are your plans?’

‘I was going to go to Sendai. Now I’m not so sure.’ ‘Okay. Drive safe.’

‘Let me know if a war starts.’ ‘Okay.’

As I drove south I pondered my situation. If war did break out, what would I do? In many ways I was already in the best place. I was in the middle of nowhere, or at least very close to it, with enough provisions to last a week, maybe two if I was careful. I had a car full of camping gear, water, food fresh and dried. But I was a long way from home. What would I do? Should I make a dash for home or hole up in the forest and wait it out? Scenes from various post-apocalyptic films played out. Soon I was imagining a zombie infestation and making plans.

By 10 a.m. I’d reached Sendai. I came off the highway and refuelled. I was exhausted, stiff, itchy and sore, and now Kim was lobbing missiles at me. The holiday was over. Time to go home.

In twelve hours I drove more than 1,000 kilometres, stopping at service stations for lunch and dinner. When I swung into the driveway, I felt all the tension seep away.

I was home. This is where I want to die. Home is where the heart stops.

It was my neighbour who first made me think about it in this way. He asked me outright not long after we bought the house. We were sitting in my garden with a beer each and the conversation quickly ran beyond getting-to-know-you inanities. In his forties, he was still living in the house he’d been born in and will remain there until he dies, his son taking over mastership. Such is the Japanese way, and so common is it that it often never occurs to some that there could be an alternative. So when a foreigner bought the house next door, Kensuke seemed at a loss to understand why. Surely at some point I’d go home? Only soldiers and refugees died in foreign lands. And if so, why buy a house and a big plot of land? Why not rent somewhere far more convenient until it was time to leave? It wasn’t xenophobia or anything like that, no ‘when are you going home?’ enquiry that can be expressed by some in Japan. Rather, it was just an idea so far beyond his experience and desires that he felt he had to tackle it head on.

‘You’re going to live here until you die?’

‘That’s the plan.’

I moved to Japan from Scotland in 2005. Sometime in 2013, Minori and I decided to decamp from our Aichi commuter town. We both grew up in the countryside and the idea of space, of greenness, of silence and solitude resonated like a temple bell. We contacted a fudō-san (an estate agent) and explained our plan.

‘So where do you want to buy a house?’ ‘We don’t care, as long as it’s rural.’ ‘But close to your jobs?’

‘No, we’re going to get new ones.’ ‘Okay. But somewhere convenient?’ ‘No, we don’t care about convenience.’

He twirled his pen and looked at us, baffled by this un-Japanese concept. ‘So what are your criteria?’

‘Beautiful.’

‘Quiet.’

‘Big. We want to grow our own vegetables.’

‘You want to be farmers? Oh, in that case –’

‘No, just enough to support ourselves.’

‘Okay, but the house. Do you want –’

‘We don’t care about that either. It’s the land that matters.’

He threw his pen down in defeat, clearly a man who had never seen The Good Life. He mulled, hummed, pondered the ceiling. ‘You know what? My job’s getting pretty boring. This sounds like a new challenge. I’m in.’

In Japan a house is for life, not just for Christmas. In the most seismi- cally active country in the world, houses depreciate in value as soon as you drive them off the forecourt. The land usually appreciates – land is limited in a predominantly mountainous country – though an ageing population and a well-publicised disinterest in the reproductive arts amongst young people mean that even the price of land is sure to fall. But houses aren’t built to last. The older a house is, the more likely it is for an earthquake to shake, rattle and roll it. With houses as with TV demographics, anything over about twenty is considered irrelevant to the market.

Consequently, there is no housing market of which to speak. Second- hand houses here have the same reputation as second-hand cars in the UK. Low mileage, one careful owner, but make sure you get someone who knows what they’re doing to look under the hood. People buy new- builds or, if they can afford it, order to their tastes. If you decide to move on, your property will not only be worth less than you paid for it, it might be practically unsellable. The new owners would have to factor in the cost of demolishing the old house before they begin paying for their own home, rendering it massively unattractive. Add VAT on everything and you’ve got the kind of dead property market that would clear immi- gration off the Daily Mail’s front page for months.

There is no property ladder. You can’t start small and build up to your dream home. When you buy, you buy for life. So you’d better get it right first time. You’d better be damn sure you know what you’re doing. No buyer’s remorse here. Hence Kensuke’s confusion.

Three years after first meeting the fudō-san, in May 2016, we got the keys to a house in Gifu Prefecture. It wasn’t as rural as we first imag- ined – we have neighbours, and it’s only a twenty-minute drive to the nearest supermarket – but it’s a small community and we’re on the edge of it, surrounded by trees, seemingly cut off. It was idyllic and we were delighted.

That lasted about thirty hours.

As I drove back and forth from our old apartment with boxes, bikes and bedding, Minori and her parents cleaned the new house, hung curtains and unpacked. While I was away the hanchō-san, the head of the neighbourhood association (where the phrase ‘head honcho’ comes from), Sasaki-san, and our immediate neighbour, Asai-san, appeared and introduced themselves.

This is how my wife relayed it to me later: ‘After introducing them- selves they started complaining about the trees. They want us to cut three down because the leaves block their gutters every autumn. They were so rude about it.’

She was nearly in tears, the stress of the move now combined with this. I was angry, but it was night already and there was little I could do about it. We went to bed worried that we’d made a terrible mistake.

There were two main issues we were concerned about before buying the house. I was worried about racism. We were told by one owner that he wouldn’t sell to a foreigner. There had been another place our fudō- san told us not to buy because while driving through the village he’d seen two huge black trucks covered with flags and imperial regalia driving around blasting nationalistic music and anti-foreign slogans. Not what you want in the next driveway. It’s a cliché but rural commu- nities are often resistant to incomers, and foreign incomers are usually even less welcome.

Minori was worried about the neighbourhood association. She quickly tires of the rules and responsibilities Japanese society foists upon its citizens. The idea of attending meetings, standing guard over garbage collection sites and having to listen to the never-ending complaints of elderly people with nothing better to do filled her with dread and loathing. Neighbours are troublemakers, and here, she’d been proven right.

The next day I saw Asai in his garden and marched across to intro- duce myself. After the standard pleasantries and onegaishimasu-es (a greeting/polite expression with no English equivalent) and your Japanese is very good-s, I broached the subject.

‘My wife tells me there’s a problem with the trees. Don’t worry, we’ll deal with them, but can you give us a bit of time? We haven’t even unpacked yet.’

‘Problem? What problem?’

‘She says you want us to cut these three trees down.’

‘No! Don’t cut these down. They’re cherry blossom trees, they’re so beautiful in the spring. Please don’t cut them!’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Nothing. I was just explaining to her that these trees are mine, and I’ll look after them. Those ones are yours, and they’re your responsibility. Look, the land boundary runs down here.’

We laughed at the misunderstanding, at the fact that the native Japanese speaker had misunderstood while the foreigner with the broken Japanese and weird accent had sorted it out. His son, Kensuke, came over with three beers. We kampai-ed, and they gave me a lesson in Japanese dendrology. Asai left, and Kensuke sat down with me, leading to the ‘Are you going to live here until you die?’ question. He and I both meant decades hence, at the end of a full and natural lifespan. I didn’t imagine that my continued existence would be so comprehensively threatened by Kim Jong-Un, snakes or typhoons over the next year.