Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
From We Wear The Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar
When I applied to teach English in Nagasaki, Japan, I scarcely knew anything about the country. Kurosawa’s magical films, a few war documentaries and bits and pieces of information gleaned from travel books were my only references.
But these were hardly sufficient, and I remained quite ignorant right up to the time I took up my position at a semi-rural junior high school. I relied heavily on my colleague Ryu Tanaka for his friendship and translations, which gave me a more nuanced understanding of my encounters with the people of Japan.
From the moment I was ushered into the staff room as the newly installed gaijin teacher, I wanted to know about the war.
It was difficult for me to get around to see places of interest without knowing much Japanese, and I quickly developed a reputation for asking impertinent questions, which created discomfort and concern among the teachers. Tanaka intervened on several occasions, offering apologies on my behalf. “Sensei,” he would say, “perhaps you shouldn’t be so direct.”
But no matter how much I tried or how familiar I had become at the school, I couldn’t get anyone to speak with me about the war. One day I asked Tanaka why. “They don’t want to talk about it,” he said during one of our daily lunchtime strolls around the school’s grounds as students peered out at us from windows. Then, with an air of resentment, Tanaka said, “They would rather forget.” I was confused.
I knew the Japanese to be ritualistic in almost every aspect of their lives: the hurried coming and going of our workday the drumbeat classroom routines the practised deference to the school’s authorities. All of it was steeped in ritual. How could this coexist with a desire to forget?
I was spending a lot of time alone in my cramped apartment, trying to get accustomed to the vibrating din of cicadas and the pungent smell of tatami. One day Tanaka, probably out of some form of pity, offered to take me down to the Peace Park.
Established in 1955, the site commemorates the August 9, 1945, atomic bomb attack that nearly destroyed Nagasaki. To enter and fully appreciate the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral, it is essential to know something about the Japanese principles of tatemae (pronounced ta-te-my-eh) and honne (pronounced hone-ne).
Tatemae, crudely translated, means to pretend or to hold back what one actually feels or thinks. Put another way, it’s about offering a guise to the world. Conversely, honne represents one’s true feelings or inner spirit. These are to be guarded at all times and revealed only in degrees based on the closeness of one’s relationships. These principles are paramount in Japan and are used both consciously and subconsciously to show respect and deference.
We took the train into the city’s centre and made our way north on foot. Nagasaki is surrounded by steep green hills flecked with homes up and down the stunning Urakami Valley. The city is situated within a U-shaped crescent of ocean inlets, so there is always a calming reminder of being on an island. Concentric stone circles mark the exact spot above which the plutonium bomb detonated, releasing the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT.
Tanaka seemed intent on staying away while I roamed about. He took a photo without my knowing shortly after we arrived at the Peace Park. In it, I could easily be mistaken for a tourist looking for a detour. I’m tromping around where 40,000 souls perished in a flash of white light.
I caught up with him after I’d seen enough. He was standing alone near the entrance to the park. “Ikimasu sho [let us go]” was all he said.
It was only much later – after I’d come home to Canada and digested my travels – that I grasped why I had behaved so nonchalantly in the presence of such sombre a monument. I realized that subconsciously, I had accepted the principle of tatemae.
American journalist George Weller was one of the first foreigners to visit Nagasaki in the aftermath of the A-bomb. His account, written one month after the bombing, describes the seemingly paradoxical spirit of tatemae:
“The last two or three of what were scores of fires are burning amid Nagasaki’s ruins tonight. They are burning the last human bodies on improvised ghats of rubbish. Flames flicker across flattened blocks from which planks, lathes and timbers have been removed as a fire menace, and only shapeless piles of plaster remain.”
And then Weller discovers what I came to understand some 60 years later:
“Yet the atmosphere is not precisely dolorous. Nagasaki cannot be described as a city of the dead. The Japanese will to live has asserted itself. Though the smashed streets are as barren of production or commerce as Pompeii’s, yet a living stream of humanity pours along them, looking with alert, shoe-button eyes for today’s main chance.”
Even in the midst of a hellish landscape, there was tatemae made visible in the form of equanimity and hope. I’ve had no difficulty understanding honne and tatemae. In many ways, they remind me of the need to wear a guise as a black person in Canada.
The Japanese use these principles to avoid social conflict and the shaming of others. I use them to persist in a society that views me as an outsider. Almost every day, I determine that concealment of my inner self is necessary in order to prevail in a racist environment where my blackness is viewed as a threat. Like the Japanese, I know what it means to withhold emotion and rage only I do it to survive and keep my sanity rather than to hold a social fabric together.
As W.E.B. Du Bois articulated, being black means having “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings two warring ideals in one dark body.”
This comes at a cost. There is always the risk of being misread or misinterpreted when living a life of duality or two-ness. The Japanese, who have been terribly misunderstood by the West, have a unique view on how to sustain their social order, one that only they truly understand. Similarly, only black people know what it means to endure in societies that are hostile toward us.
Before I left Japan, Tanaka invited me to an izakaya owned by one of his relatives. I was mildly disappointed. After two years of my discovering and his explaining, I had wanted to visit him at his home and was sorry that our farewell didn’t happen in a place that was connected to him in a more intimate way. There was so much I wanted to say, so much gratitude that I wanted to extend to him.
We toasted my time in Japan and promised that we would stay in touch. I remember him taking out a white piece of paper from his suit pocket in a very deliberate manner. He wrote his address in kanji on one side of the paper, in English on the other. His writing was beautiful and formal. Handing the paper to me with both of his outstretched hands, he bowed and asked me to write mine. Reaching into his pocket once more, he gave me the photo taken at Urakami.
A few months after I returned home, I wrote a letter to Tanaka. I expressed what I found too difficult to say in his presence: how deeply my time in Japan had affected me and how I owed this to him. I implored him to visit me in Canada and assured him that I would repay in whatever way I could all that he had given me.
Weeks and then months passed as I waited for Tanaka’s reply, but I never received one. In some perfectly understandable way, it would have been un-Japanese of him.
Neil Price is a freelance writer. He teaches at George Brown College.
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