Kanoya, a small town which is on the map if you look closely enough, is where we spent that first night, in a hotel, the New World, Western-style as it happened. In my room, I gave my legs a lengthy soak in a tub about the size of a folding chair and then lay down, propping them on a love pillows japan .
That evening we were treated to a surprising glimpse of Japanese life. The dining room was on the top floor of the hotel, and during dinner we were there alone there until a party of eight Japanese came in. They were well dressed and one or two of them very drunk. They'd come from a wedding, it turned out, and were continuing the celebration in the local equivalent of the Rainbow Room. After a few minutes, one of the women, good-looking and in a classic black cocktail dress, got up and began dancing by herself. She did some jitterbug steps. It was as if we were not there. Then, unexpectedly, she picked up a microphone and began to sing. She sang several songs, handling herself with the aplomb of a professional entertainer. Members of her party were encouraging and calling to her. I then realized that the words to the songs were being shown on a sort of television console and that the accompanying music was coming from the same source.
After a while, one of the men took the mike. He could have been in the blue-white spotlight in Vegas. When he finished, they tried to get one of the drunks to sing but he wouldn't, and the woman got up again. It went on and on. It's a phenomenon very popular in Japan, called karaoke. In restaurants and nightclubs, people get up and without inhibition belt out songs - the polite, reserved nature of the Japanese turned completely around.
Although I had brought along John Toland's book ''The Rising Sun'' (my son was reading Lafcadio Hearn), I knew I would not be divining the real nature of the Japanese people merely from descriptions of World War II campaigns, however well written, or from stopping along the road every hour or so to buy a can of cold fruit juice from a vending machine. (A can cost 100 yen, which was about 65 cents, also the price of an airmail stamp for a postcard.) Gradually, I confirmed my impression of the Japanese as stoic and hard working. We rode past sweeping bays and beaches with the Pacific swelling in. The road usually hugged the shore. In the remote countryside, lone women, older for the most part, were clearing weeds from the side of the road. At railroad stations in suburban towns, hundreds of bicycles were stacked aginst each other waiting for their owners to return from work in the city.
The rural villages were undistinguished and often, if they were of any size, defaced with signs. The roofs of the houses were of a ubiquitous gray tile, with a television antenna sticking up somewhere. The quality that made the houses fine, however ordinary they were, was the way in which they were set off by walls, sometimes very low, only a foot or two high, with hedges along them, perhaps. Buildings were often crowded close together in haphazard fashion, handsome houses beside gas stations, and between and among everything shone the green of small rice fields.
