It should have come as no surprise, but when Vince and Connie visited the Women's Forum just a couple of minutes walk from Totsuka Station, the first thing to catch his eye was a computer system with databases on just about everything you'd ever want to know about Japan - Japanese Culture and Events, Traditional Recipes, Restaurants, Daily Information, Sports Facilities and so forth. The Women' Forum also had a gymnasium, a conference room, a clinic and a handicrafts room. The clinic offered breast cancer checks and information about fertility and birth control. There was also an anatomical model of a woman as opposed to the regulation male or neuter models. Vince took a section of it apart and had difficulty getting it back together until someone pointed out that the womb went behind the colon.
Vince had always believed that the Japanese and the Germans had lost the war but won the peace. While Japanese men had definitely taken the credit for this, Connie had read somewhere that the reason behind Japan's extraordinary economic recovery was the hard work and frugality of Japanese womenfolk.
Vince didn't need any books to tell him this. Japanese women who had lived through the war era had an aura of competence and practicality that astounded him. He had a theory that if you wanted to know something you should ask a woman of 70 and, if she couldn't tell you off the top of her head, she'd give someone a call and have the facts at your finger tips in a matter of minutes. In short, she was a walking version of the Women's Forum computer with a knowledge base to match its database. Vince liked to think that this was a skill that was acquired over a lifetime and that the older women got in Japan, the more practical information they had stored away. Indeed, he had discovered that women in their 50's generally seemed more aware than women in their 40's who still held a sharp edge on 30 year olds. The scale went right down to his own students who seemed to know less about Japan than he did himself.
In comparison, the menfolk knew nothing. How many times had he sat through some blundering fool talking about something he had little or no idea of, because he was the man and was therefore the more important person. One of the women behind him often prompted him during his speech and when it came to question time, she would fill you in on the real low down.
Vince believed that women had the edge on men in this regard because of networking. The male system was vertical. Every junior (kohai) had his senior (senpai). This was great if you were intent on climbing the hierarchy, but little good for the practicalities of life. Japanese women developed networks of friends. Everybody knew someone else or a relative who could help. Vince knew the moment he asked Mrs. Matsumoto about how tatami was made, she would find some friend who had an uncle who ran a tatamiya.
If there was a network of women in Japan, and Vince was certain that there was, Connie was instantly a part of it as soon as they were installed in Yokohama. Vince hovered on the periphery of the society of Japanese men, always welcome up to a point, but never beyond. He could brag at work that he spent more time socialising with his Japanese friends than with his colleagues or other foreigners, but the truth was that almost all of these were Connie's friends.
How did she do it? Vince had no real idea, but thought back to his mother's friends and how everyone in the community was allotted a talent - Mrs. McKinley baked the best scones in town while Mrs. Worthington made the best pavlovas. Vince had been quite aware that his own mother made far better scones than Mrs. McKinley, but he knew that there was unspoken rule that no one should upstage Mrs. McKinley at her allotted talent. He had seen exactly the same thing in his brief stint as a teacher in a country high school in Australia. Every girl had her special skill. Ruth's was public speaking, Kylie's was textiles, Mandy's was Maths. And there was no way that you could ever induce Ruth to do better at Maths than Mandy or Kylie to speak better than Ruth.
Vince suspected the same was true in Japan - maybe women everywhere had that sense of community, a feeling that everyone needed their place and the belief they were important. Vince had the feeling that Japanese men had once shared this sense of community, but now, as super commuter salarymen, they had become divorced from it. In any case, Connie was soon a member of the Co-op home delivery grocery service group, a tennis club and several morning coffee sessions in which gossip was exchanged. Without even seeking it, she soon discovered that she was earning half again what Vince made trundling to Shinjuku every day, just with housewife and primary school student classes in their own three room apartment. Furthermore, Connie was always making deals. She had one woman making her clothes in exchange for English lessons while another gave her cooking lessons.
Finally, Connie arrived home one day and announced to Vince that she was having sumie lessons with a woman who wanted English lessons in return. Vince frowned. He knew all too well that Connie had a bad habit of overbooking herself.
"Sumie?" he queried.
"Yes, you know, ink painting." Vince didn't know, but he was soon to find out. Connie soon had an ink block, ink and brushes on the table at any spare moment practising from a painting that her sensei, Mrs. Odori, had painted for her. Connie would try to imitate the original with slow, steady brush strokes, but before each one was finished, she'd frown and say: "I'm never going to get this!" Vince often thought that Connie's botches were better than the originals by Odori-sensei, but he knew better than to say so, lest he give away his ignorance of classical Japanese refinements. He'd been caught before while admiring Shodo or Japanese calligraphy. He always praised the inferior works until he discovered that the rule of thumb was if you could read it, it was no good. If it looked like fast dripping black water, it was usually excellent. He'd also discovered that, when regarding Japanese ceramics, the masterpiece was always the one that looked as if it had come straight from a kindergarten kiln. If it didn't, it was probably moulded clay and he should have been looking at the glaze. Vince was not to meet Odori-sensei until Connie exhibited her first work at a Kenmin Hall exhibition. Connie explained that it wasn't really her own work at all. She had started it, but Odori-sensei had retouched it to the point where it would be presentable enough to go into the exhibition. Vince was quite frankly appalled that Connie would allow anyone to tamper with something she'd painted herself and then exhibit it under her own name.
He was soon learn why. He was whisked away from Connie as soon as he walked into the room and guided around the exhibition. Mrs. Odori only came up to his left nipple, but she quite clearly dominated all who gathered around her, including Connie and, to his own immense bewilderment, himself.
She explained that sumie was in fact a Zen art. Through long hours of practice, the brush strokes became such second nature that it was as if the mind, the hand and the brush moved as one. Vince was trying to spot Connie's piece, but Odori-sensei had already moved him onto a series that her own daughter had painted. They showed, she told Vince, the four major plants in sumie - the plum (ume), the bamboo (take), the chrysanthemum (kiku) and the orchid (ran).
"Of course, there are a lot of other flowers too, irises, camelias, wistarias, magnolias, but once you have mastered these four, you have mastered sumie." Vince felt like asking Mrs. Odori whether Connie could ever master sumie if someone else retouched their work all the time, but he knew as this tiny woman with the pipelike voice bustled him about that he would hardly dare. Vince suddenly discovered that he had a Japanese mother-in-law to match his Australian one.
Mrs. Odori took Connie and Vince everywhere. They spent obon with her family and visited the family graves went to her granddaughter's wedding, saw Kabuki theatre with her, toured Nagano prefecture with her, went to see the hydrangeas near Hakone with her. Everything was Odori-sensei's idea, done at her speed and in the correct Odori order. There was no deviation allowed from the central plan and if someone else planned something that just happened to conflict, then it had to be changed. As Connie pointed out, Odori-sensei had a heart of gold, but Vince could see right through her. She was an obatarian, one of those dragons from the city who push their way to the front of queues and muscle into you on the train.
"Now," Vince waggled a finger at Connie, "there's a Zen art for you, sitting down on the train." "If sitting down on the train is a Zen art, so is everything." "My point exactly," Vince exclaimed.
"And what exactly is your point?" "The seat in front of you is vacated. For a matter of seconds, you contemplate it with the air of someone who does not believe it exists, that there is in fact someone still sitting there. Then, in one single graceful movement, you reach up to the overhead rack with your right hand and pull down your brief case, swivelling as you do so in a semi-circle before gently touching down on the seat as if it were part of your buttocks, that the seat has been severed unnaturally from them and this was the longed for, yearned for point of time in which they were to be reunited, like the arms being reattached to the Venus de Milo ..." "So, sitting down on the train is a Zen art?" "Then, wham ... Zen interruptus, an obatarian has swooped into the seat you were aiming for, like an eagle attacking a mouse." Vince, however, had to admire obatarians. They feared no man, flirted with no man, cared only for what was theirs. They only asked that the world should live by their rules, tried and tested, Vince reflected. he seriously wondered about whether he should himself become an obatarian.