Time Machine

Have you noticed that good memories can be just as painful as jagged ones? Valued memories cost more because the red hot poker of sentiment leaves scars. To avoid that kind of pain, I tend to nurture the bad ones, stroking the furry little things like a favored pet. Oh, what angst ridden impressions am I waxing dramatic about now?

Have you ever experienced a time in your life that was so magical, so defining that everything after pales by comparison? Astronauts experience this type of pain. I mean, where do you go after visiting the moon?

I had my over-the-moon experience when I was 19 years-old and lived in Japan for the last half of 1983. Not that I haven’t had great moments since, but I was a malleable lump of clay back then, and the experiences cut deep, the stamp of Japan marking me all over on the inside. I may have been born in the US, but part of me was “Made in Japan.”

Through the intervening years, life has imposed its own heat on my clay body, hardening me into whatever it is I am today. I find myself with one foot rooted in 1983 and the other one trying to find grounding in the illusive Now. I say illusive, because my head is often in yesterday, tomorrow or circling the stratosphere in between.

Now please climb aboard my time machine and I will transport us back to 1983. Fasten your seatbelt and use your imagination for an appropriate soundtrack while the pages of our calendar go flippety flip backwards.

Ronald Reagan held the Office of President, Microsoft debuted Word, Tokyo opened Disneyland, a Soviet Union fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Tootsie and Flashdance played in theaters, Duran Duran, Culture Club (remember Boy George?) and Michael Jackson dominated the airwaves as well as MTV, and Cyndi Lauper and Madonna were in the battle of the legwarmers.

During this era, the planets aligned and an opportunity to travel and study in Japan opened to me.

Nobody I knew had ever heard of sushi, the word “Asian” had not yet become PC. Hello, the term was “Oriental.” Ahem, I was in Southern Oregon where men shopped at a clothing store called “The Gay Blade” and we ate “Ayd’s” candy in High School to lose weight, whadd’ya want? CBS aired the final episode of M*A*S*H, Rick Springfield starred on General Hospital and we all knew the lyrics to his Grammy award winning rock song, “Jessie’s Girl.”

So with that illustrious frame of reference, this child of the ‘80’s boarded a plane and flew to the Land of the Rising Sun. I went to work for a 75 year-old missionary in exchange for room and board and a chance to experience the vast culture of Japan. I should mention now, she was surprised that I was far more interested in making friends, studying Kendo, Ikebana (flower arranging), tea ceremony and brush painting than I was in evangelizing. She called me a “hot shot jazz little number.”

This was when and where I became The Everyday Anthropologist.

And now for my confession. I noticed a copy of Shogun on her bookshelf and decided to read the 1200 page novel while living in a house with tatami flooring, sliding rice paper shoji doors, and eating raw octopus and jelly fish like Anjin-san did in the book. I didn’t quite finish the epic before I left, so I borrowed it for the flight home. Without telling her.

The guilt has plagued me for the last 25 years. With this blemish on my conscience, I received a letter from her that she recently turned 100. I immediately booked two flights to Japan. If not now, when? The answer to the question, “Why are you and Companion going to Japan?” is to return a book. See, if I get it back there in time, then technically it’s still “borrowing.”

If my experience in Japan was so fantastic, why am I just now going back? It’s very complicated, but one fraction of the equation is that on my first day in Japan, I met a man that would impact me from that moment on. He drove the Missionary to Osaka from their little village in Western Honshu to pick me up at the airport.

Raised on Hee Haw, Lawrence Welk and Bonanza, I am quite embarrassed to admit, but when I met this gentleman for the first time, I thought he was her “house boy,” like Hop Sing. To be fair, many in their village had never seen an American teenager before and they also had misconceptions. We taught each other many things and built a cultural bridge.

This man, who was married and 69 at the time, became my best friend. We both found it remarkable that two people from different genders, cultures and generations could form such a bond. He and his wife lived next door and adopted me as their American daughter.

I traveled half way around the world to meet my soul mate. He became my mentor, my Sensei, my deep and abiding friend. So it was the shock of my life when I received the phone call telling me he died of a heart attack in his home where I visited every day.

The grief was overwhelming. The idea of returning to Japan without him there was unthinkable. But the planets have rearranged themselves again and I’m getting the Celestial nudge. Intellectually, I know I cannot land in 1983, however much I might want to. The precious little village, where they’d never seen an American teenager, now has a McDonald’s and a Costco. The house where I stayed has been torn down and my favorite store that sold Hello Kitty is now a funeral parlor. What?

Many of the older folks have passed, the one-year old child of a friend is now a Jr. High school teacher, and my single friends are now married, some widowed, and raising children. I’m not the same. A quarter of a century has passed. My head knows these things, but my heart wants what it wants, for everything to be just as it was.

This trip is a pilgrimage, as much to Japan as a journey to the center of myself. If I can go with an open heart and an open mind, then I can make new memories. The pain comes from resisting what is. Or resisting what is not.

At this moment, I’m impaled on my own resistance. My features are feeling stretched and distorted like a pilot’s when faced with extreme G-force. My heart is the stationary object and the flow of time is exerting it’s force upon it, making it feel as though it weighs many times more than normal.

I still have a few days until we leave, I’ll let you know how it goes.