Wrong About Japan Read Online Free PDF Page A

building.”
“CU?”
“Close-up. Charley will know CU when he goes to film school. You zoom in on where you want to go.”
Thus Etsuko set to zoom in on the sword maker, Yoshindo Yoshihara, in Katsushika Ward. She skirted ahead, darting right and left while the rest of us dawdled behind, my son still engaged in thumb-talk: WHERE CAN U GET COOL MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM MODELS , or words to that effect. In the great suburban silence I could hear his clicking, and then the sound of wooden clogs on bitumen. A well-preserved man of perhaps fifty rounded the corner. He wore crisply pressed corduroy trousers and his geta, his clogs, were a gorgeous honeyed yellow.
“Ah,” said the man, in answer to Etsuko. “Yoshihara-san!” Then he began walking her to the corner and pointing.
“Turn it off,” I hissed.
“In a minute,” said Charley.
“Now!”
Etsuko finally matched the numbers on a gate to the address on her piece of paper. I saw a pile of bright long metal rods stacked against the side of an outbuilding, a sign of light industry that appeared out of place in this neighbourhood.
As Charley reluctantly slipped his phone into the leg pocket of his baggy jeans, we crossed a lovelymossy garden through which a small brook ran—not something one might have imagined when staring out the window of the Narita Express.
Yoshihara-san greeted us politely but as the four of us huddled in his doorway I had the sudden, shocking sense that while the surroundings seemed rather ordinary we were disturbing a highly distinguished fellow. Even before we were ushered into a parlour and Yoshihara-san asked what we wished to know, I felt out of my depth, like a day-tripper who has somehow found himself in the presence of Picasso.
The room was at once suburban and not. Along one wall stood tall thick books, their spines marked in Japanese characters, and also a warrior’s helmet, obviously very old. On an adjacent wall were displayed some tiny model swords in brightly coloured scabbards. Through glass doors I could see a diorama of family life: a baby, a toddler, a larger son, a pretty wife.
What did we want to know? Well, I certainly wasn’t about to talk to this man about cartoons. Instead, I recalled what was written in The Japanese Sword: The Soul of the Samurai: “Traditionally the forging of a Japanese sword took place in near-religious conditions. The smithy would be purified by a Shinto priest and would have a sacred rice-strawrope (shimenawa) with sacred paper (gohei) attached as symbols of purity erected to surround the smithy.”
So I asked if making a sword felt like a spiritual business to him.
Yoshihara-san smiled. “You’ve been reading American books?”
“English,” I admitted.
“Perhaps some people have spiritual experiences. They hear voices talking to them. Then they are crazy.”
Later Charley said, “He was very energetic. He laughed a lot.”
Indeed he did. He also had bright, challenging eyes and an attractive earthiness.
I asked him if he did not sometimes think about the function of the sword as he forged it, that it was made to cut skin and flesh, to take life.
No, Yoshihara-san replied. He never thought about the sword this way. “Never.”
I said nothing of the diagram I had seen, one which shows the human body overlaid with a catalogue of different cuts that the sword appraisers of the Edo period used on condemned or recently executed prisoners.
What he concentrated on, Yoshihara-san explained, was how to make the sword.
And why should I doubt him? The making of the Japanese sword is a very exacting business, requiring the steel be folded and refolded on itself until it had formed the most extraordinary molecular bonds, some of which, when the sword is finally polished, will show like clouds, summer lightning, ghosts running parallel to the edge of death.
Yoshihara-san claimed to think only of the sword. But later I read his book The Craft of the Japanese Sword , in which he wrote that you cannot make a sword