The empty seat

by David Benjamin

“I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart.”

— Rosa Parks

 

CHIGASAKI, Japan — Last week, sitting (thankfully) on the crowded Tokaido Line commuter train between Yokohama and Odawara, I had a bittersweet pang of nostalgia. Thanks to her talent as a subway mole, Hotlips and I had managed two seats, in a bank of three, near the end of the car. Beside me, one seat remained temptingly available.

Just as the door alarm sounded, an elderly lady squeezed inside, lurched to a stop and peered pessimistically for a spot to rest her bones. Ah! There it was, right beside me. The lady made a beeline, but halted suddenly as she took note of the company she would be obliged to keep—namely, me, my body pressed against hers. Just as suddenly, she pivoted on her sensible shoes and plunged through a throng of standees, in search of a seat anywhere but next to a gaijin.

I’d been there before.

Remarkably, after almost eighty years of peaceful—even congenial—postwar coexistence with its World War II enemies, Japan retains a trace of unease with the presence of foreigners. So, after the old lady’s dramatic retreat, Hotlips and both raised an eyebrow and smiled. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Curiously, these subtle spasms of xenophobia are exceedingly ill-tolerated by many expatriates residing in Japan. I observed this phenomenon throughout a seven-year residence in Tokyo, a year of which I spent as editor of a city magazine, Tokyo Journal. I found both remarkable and hyperbolic the rancor—even fury—expressed by a certain segment of Americans who experienced in Japan what are now called “micro-aggressions,” typically inflicted by aged natives.

After fielding a flow of complaints from readers of Tokyo Journal, I realized that these aggrieved gaijin seemed to be taking a perverse and fairly complicated pleasure from their minor mistreatments. In Tokyo, there thrives a demographic (perhaps common to other international destinations) of privileged white twenty-somethings, rich enough to globetrot, whose arrival thrusts them into status as a “minority.” Often, there follows an epiphany almost irresistible to the expat’s liberal perception of injustice, grievance and guilt. After a (short) lifetime of bearing the unsought burden of racial domination in New York, California, Virginia or Idaho, these young beikokujin find themselves staring at a conscience-cleansing mirror image of themselves. They suddenly have the opportunity to deem themselves, with righteous indignation, an oppressed and harassed caste of untouchables—largely because old ladies won’t plop down beside them on the subway.

I never took part in the melodrama. Maybe I was too old already, perhaps too ironic. I enjoyed being a foreigner, not fitting in, seen constantly as an outsider, free to flout convention and joke about stuff like Zen, aikido and the boring opacity of noh theater. So, in my occasional moments fielding trivial bigotry from the locals, I tended to be surprised and then—upon reflection—amused.

One of my first incidents took place on the Japan Railroad platform at Ebisu Station. As I awaited my train, I saw, in the corner of my eye, an ancient woman shuffling laboriously along the middle of the platform. At some point, she took note of me and paused. Then, shifting her considerable weight, she detoured.  Veering in my direction, she passed close enough to nudge me—disapprovingly—in the back. After that, she resumed her mid-platform path, trailing a whiff of ethnic triumph.

Frequently, similar old ladies would plant an elbow in my torso while we waited together in the supermarket “express” lane. If I snuck forward to escape the pressure, the elbow followed—leaning, insinuating. Eventually, I gained the ability to pacify these passive tormenters by assailing them with at least three different forms of apology. Hearing all this penitence, from a gaijin, in formal Nihongo, had powers to soothe all but the fiercest of xenophobic seniors.

By and by, I grew more alert to the potential of a petty affront. One of my favorite moments occurred in a basement market in Tokyo’s Shibuya area. The aisles, lined with veggie vendors, rice-sellers and fishmongers, were crowded with bargain-hunters. As I edged through the traffic, I spied a geezer with a glint in his eye. He began sharpening his elbow at the first sight of a gaijin coming his way. Having been poked, jostled and shoved by old farts like him a few dozen times, apparently in revenge for the dictatorship of Douglas MacArthur (in which I played no role), I steeled myself for my elderly attacker.

I was roughly a foot taller than the old guy and outweighed him by at least three stone. All he had on me, presumably, was the element of surprise. But I had long since ceased to be surprised by untoward jabs from cranky ojin. So, as the old guy wound up to thump me with a forearm shiver, I cocked a hip, caught him off balance and, literally, lifted him off his feet. He landed in a potato bin with a look on his face that I wish I could have photographed.

As usual, I smiled, moved on, never looked back and reveled in vindication.

However, in all my Tokyo years, I never extrapolated these minor slights and glancing blows into some sort of racist pattern directed at me and my sort. Indeed, Japan is as rampant with racial animus as is the US of A. But the real targets of this deepseated and intractable bigotry are not rich, white kids with backpacks and university degrees. If you want the locals to really hate you in Japan, you have to be Chinese, Korean or burakumin.

Burakumin? Don’t ask.

What my white complainers to Tokyo Journal—about Japanese prejudice—did not get was the irony of their position. They were feeling, for a brief and adventurous period in their lives, the loss of white privilege. They were bereft an entitlement that had been ingrained, since birth and through their school years, in their identity. Until they’d been nudged or shunned on the Yamanote Line, they had been cocooned within a pervasive racism that had made their lives—all their life—insular, safe, suburban and affluent. Now, here, in this strange land of aliens, poof! They had been rendered merely equal, even a teensy bit unequal.

This triggered an ambivalence that these white kids struggled to resolve. On one hand, they were pissed at not being special anymore. On the other hand, they could entertain the thrilling illusion that they “understood.” Their introduction to injustice among the Yellow Peril had bonded them to the mongrels who had once been their traditional inferiors. Now, at last, they suffered the very same fear, torment and degradation that their ethnic and religious majority—back home—had inflicted for centuries on former slaves and unwelcome immigrants, on Jews, Muslims, on lettuce-pickers, reservation-dwellers and Jap cane-cutters.

Having stepped through Customs at Narita, they had lost the entitlement that comes with whiteness, and they fancied themselves worthy to assume the only  entitlement granted to the poor and the black in America, the right to feel downtrodden, disenfranchised, outcast and righteously angry. In their letters to the editor and in their bar conversations, they proposed that the offenses visited against them by the Japanese entitled them to the depth of rage that festers in the circumscribed existence of the people whom their tribe, back home in Indiana, has ostracized and dehumanized for centuries.

They thought, poor kids, that they could cross over—and join the victims for whom they’d always felt sort of sorry—without tripping over the doorsill. You could tell them that they’re wrong.

I tried, but I only managed to offend them.