From a Town on the Hudson (4 page)

AS SOON AS the tournament began, the audience had changed from gentlemen to a rowdy crowd. They roared like lions in Africa. They whistled like a hurricane. Had the Americans gotten angry? They sat, started to come out of their seats, stood, applauded, and then sat back down. They repeated these actions each time a new bout started. My seat shook every time. An announcer who seemed to be a real sumo-lover stirred up the spectators excitement with his quick-witted explanations. The hall was filled with loud voices and constant movement. Do Americans exercise while the players fight? Elderly men looked as excited as the young people; they stood cheering and shaking their fists in mid-air. When the American wrestler, Konishiki, who weighed over 250 kilograms
^*
then, fought with Sakahoko, all the Americans cried out Konishiki's nickname "Sally!" in chorus. The voices of the announcer and the traditionally dressed referee on the
dohyo
were completely drowned out. Someone's drink sprayed onto my neck from behind. Konishiki won the first round and was welcomed with a storm of applause. The air vibrated as if a plane were roaring over my head. How dared the Japanese to have fought against these energetic Americans in the war! I was overcome by the Americans' strong reaction that bore down on me, and I even began to miss the calmer audience at sumo tournaments

in Japan. Could the wrestlers perform in such a different atmosphere as this? What I saw through the excited crowd, however, was the happy faces of wrestlers, something that was never seen during the regular tournaments in Japan. When the long struggle on the
dohyo
was over, the audience, which glowed contentedly, gave a very loud cheer for the completely changed wrestlers, who were now disheveled, gasping for breath, and covered with sand. The wrestlers and the audience shared the moment. It was a different, and terrific, way of seeing sumo.

January 12, 1993, two and a half years after my family had returned home to Japan, I went to see a New Year tournament at Kokugikan, Tokyo's sumo arena. On the first floor, in each of the box seats arranged like terraced paddy-fields, I saw elderly people leisurely enjoying sumo as I had expected. Some napped there or ate a box lunch and drank sake, talking loudly with the others in their group. There was the smell of soy sauce all around. Men in costume from a teahouse walked busily through the narrow aisle between the box seats delivering shopping bags stuffed with sumo souvenirs. Women enjoyed talking with each other and frequently burst into raucous laughter. Others wandered up and down and from side to side in the arena. The audience apparently wasn't looking at the center of the pit. This was not during intermission but while the sumo wrestlers were fighting on the
dohyo.
Except for the big matches, the spectators in the box seats seldom got excited. Even during the climax of a bout, they couldn't move freely, partly because they were sitting cross-legged and partly because they had gotten drunk. Of course, they seemed to be happy and relaxed. They looked as if they were relaxing in the living room of their father's house while enjoying sumo.

More than pointing up differences in temperament between Americans and Japanese, the scenes in Madison Square Garden and in Kokugikan brought home to me anew the long history of sumo. The original form of sumo culture, polished through three centuries, has attracted Americans. Tradition in Japan has never hurried people into loving sumo, but it is something that both Americans and Japanese enjoy.

*
  
550 pounds.

SATURDAY, June 15, 1985, around 10:30
P.M.
, my husband was driving our car along the Henry Hudson Parkway in New York on our way back to Fort Lee. Soon we saw the beautifully illuminated George Washington Bridge ahead on the left. Our family was going home after seeing Japan's Grand Sumo Tournament in Madison Square Garden. The excitement of seeing sumo in the brilliantly lighted hall was still vivid in my mind. We would be home in fifteen minutes.

In fifteen minutes, however, we found that we had lost our way. "Where are we?" "That's what I wanted to ask you." "Look at the map!" Our first exciting night in New York had changed into panic. I was sure that we had lost our way before we had taken the road for the George Washington Bridge. I opened to the page with the bridge. We had moved to the United States just two months before. To me, the maps small letters of many unfamiliar street names looked like crawling worms. It puzzled me even more. I looked up and tried to see the names of the streets we were passing at each corner. No signs could be seen in the area. Most of the lights were broken. Few cars passed by, either. Along some of the nearly deserted streets, the headlights of our new '85 white Pontiac 6000 LE lit up smashed cars, dilapidated shop signs, and damaged show windows.

The scenes of urban decay stirred my imagination. Many violent scenes from American movies like "Dirty Harry" came to mind one after the other. In real life, however, Clint Eastwood never came to help. Even the bulky Japanese sumo wrestlers I had seen at Madison Square Garden about thirty minutes earlier were of no help now. Also the sumo tournament's cheers, sweet smell of popcorn, and spotlights immediately vanished into the darkness that was as black as ink. Everything was so still that I could hear my heart beating. I began to worry about whether we would be able to return to our home in Japan alive or not. At that moment, I missed the safe, secure towns in Japan.

After a while, we found a blood-red light streaming out of the slightly open door of a building on the far right corner of the intersection. I had a ray of hope that somebody would tell us the way to the bridge. Our car moved forward slowly, and as we approached the corner, we could see a liquor store sign and a group of people around the door. Some were lying down on the sidewalk holding bottles and others were leaning against the wall. They seemed to be drunk. I almost gave up hope. Our car slowly turned right. When we were about to pass the store, one of those who had been lying down sat up suddenly, stood up, and then began to approach our car. A few men started following him. They all tottered. One lifted his hand. I held my breath.

I urged our older son, a sleepyhead, to check the rear door locks while, with a forced smile, I pretended to be a calm mother. My hands were moist with sweat because of fear. I looked at my husband, who must have been confused too. He said nothing but slightly pinched his nose a few times. I knew he was perplexed. However, he was calm as he slowed down so as not to hit those men. I prayed nothing would happen, but my imagination ran ahead of me; in my mind our family was at the point of death already.

The tottering men came on. Right in front of our car, with open arms, the astonishingly tall men moved like big puppets. The blood-red light of the liquor shop looked like a flame flaring up behind them. Waving bottles in mid-air they all shouted something to us in hoarse voices. I closed my eyes as I felt our car shake.

Even though our car had shaken only because my husband had suddenly put it in reverse, even though the group, perhaps out of kindness, had come to tell us that we had missed the
ONE-WAY
sign, and even though the sign had been pointing to the ground, it took a while for me to accept the situation. I shivered with fear and at the same time was ashamed of myself for my presumption that the drunken men were going to attack us.

We finally got back to Fort Lee at almost midnight. "We enjoyed the sumo, didn't we?" our younger son, who had been sleeping in the rear seat, said drowsily. I looked up at the modest but heart-warming porch light of our home.

OUR TWO sons were promoted, one to the eighth grade, the other to the third grade, in September 1985. After the long summer vacation, they had reverted to feeling like nervous newcomers. Even though they couldn't follow most of their classes yet, they wanted to participate more fully in school life with their American classmates. The older son especially didn't like being a guest any longer. My husband and I had been helping them with their homework from the beginning. We also started to explain what they would be learning the following day in science and social studies. We read the textbooks with them. My husband helped our older son, and I worked with the younger one. Because both brought home a lot of homework, including leftover classwork that they couldn't finish at school, all of our family spent time doing homework in the evening, and sometimes the next morning as well. My husband and I didn't want our younger son to stay up later than nine o'clock, so he went to bed earlier than his brother.

My husband, who had studied at an American graduate school, strictly guided our older son. Even after he had worked long hours at his office in Manhattan, he never missed tutoring our son. Sometimes he sounded stern, but his strong guidance helped his son feel positive about his life in Fort Lee. The older son, fourteen years old then, gradually became more confident in his studies. Though he couldn't speak English yet, he could participate in his class by doing homework and taking tests. When he received the highest score in his class on the science test for the first time, the science teacher, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, praised him generously, and that encouraged him more. He knew he had grasped the American way of learning when he passed the bilingual class and the E.S.L. class.

For me, to help with our younger son's homework certainly was a joy because I liked English. But it kept me busy as well. From the kitchen, frying fish and mincing onions, I loudly answered his questions while he was doing his homework in the dining room next to the kitchen. After dinner, I sat beside him and helped him with his homework. I had majored in English but certainly had never mastered it. Most of the vocabulary in the textbooks was so new to me even though it was for elementary school children. I was a tutor who spent a lot of time consulting the dictionary and couldn't help crying out each time I found an expression I understood in his textbooks. I had never seen everyday words like "scrub" in the old English poems I had learned in my college days. I often wished I could go to school with our younger son and learn English from the very beginning level. A year later, the hours for doing homework became shorter. When one and a half years had passed, he got so that he could notice some mistakes his mother made. One day, about two years after our younger son had transferred to the American public school, he said, "I will do it by myself, Mother." The two years working with him had stimulated my desire to learn English for myself, and I started to write essays in the summer of 1987.

WHEN MY friend Kiyoko, the wife of my husband's colleague, found a traffic ticket under the windshield wiper of her car, she turned pale. One afternoon in September 1985, the first year of American life for both of us, she got a ticket at the public parking lot in Fort Lee because her time on the parking meter had expired. That day we had gone to a beauty salon near there while our children went to school. Since I hadn't gotten a drivers license yet, she picked me up and took me to the salon. I, too, was responsible for the ticket. The violation slip said that if she didn't pay by the due date she would have to appear in court as well. "Fine" and "court," which we had had nothing to do with until then, suddenly touched our lives. The scene of poor Kiyoko standing in a court of the United States even flashed into my mind. Later when we looked back on that day, we couldn't help laughing. However, we took it seriously at the time.

Both Kiyoko's and my family had moved from Japan about a half-year earlier. Kiyoko and I were not used to the area yet and were not very fluent in English. Our children also struggled with English in their new schools. Our husbands, who were our last resort, were working hard at the New York branch of a Japanese bank. We all were very busy adapting to basic American life. Besides, knotty problems with my house came up frequently: The basement resident of the duplex let his dog walk in the front yard and never cleaned up after it. Water overflowed from one of our toilets sometimes. Squirrels went in and out of the ceiling through a broken place in the eaves. Moreover, I heard from my mother-in-law that my father-in-law had been injured in a traffic accident in Japan. Kiyoko, too, worried about her daughter's health after she had a high fever. There was a mass of things to make us anxious. Kiyoko's getting the parking ticket was one more mess we had gotten into and which we wanted to solve as soon as possible. With our hair freshly done, Kiyoko and I were at a loss beside her big Buick in the large public parking lot.

I thought that we had better ask someone what we should do. In Japan, police officers generally were people to be trusted. American police officers, however, seemed stern, tough, and willing to fire their guns, like the police in old American TV dramas like "The Untouchables."

They also didn't seem the type to be patient about listening to our poor English. So we waited with resignation for the police car to appear in the public parking lot while trying to think of several English words that might be required. When we saw that the police car was coming, Kiyoko nudged me since I was older than her, and asked me to talk to the police officer.

As I expected, the policeman, who appeared to be in his early fifties, and I, a Japanese woman, couldn't understand each other very easily. It was not because he wasn't patient but because I couldn't speak English well. The honest-looking man strained his ears to catch my words when I explained the situation to him. Then he tilted his head and blinked his eyes. Kiyoko and I held our breath as we waited for his words. Then we alternated between relief and disappointment as he responded. We at least understood that we could pay the fine at the Borough Hall, but we didn't know where it was. We shot imploring glances at the gentleman. "Well..." The next moment he started making elaborate gestures as he explained the location. However, the more gestures he made, the farther the Borough Hall seemed to be. An embarrassed atmosphere prevailed among the three of us. At last he seemed to give up as he looked at our frustrated expressions. He promptly got out of the car and opened the door for us. He was so kind that he would take us to the distant destination, I thought. When I made an apology, he said, "It's a piece of cake, ma'am." It was three months later that Kiyoko and I learned the meaning of the idiom "a piece of cake" at the English conversation class in Fort Lee's adult school.

For the first time, we rode in a police car. There was a metal grille on the back of the front seat, probably for protecting police officers from criminals. I could smell something. I regretted my actions a bit because I felt I might have acted hastily at that moment. We two Japanese wives, thirty-two and thirty-nine, sat down on the hard seat meant for criminals, looking at each other awkwardly. He started the car. Kiyoko apologized for troubling him. "No problem, ma'am," he answered through the grille. Kiyoko asked me, "Do you think we will be back in time to pick up the children?" Because I didn't want to ask the police officer such a bothersome question, I answered, "I think so." As we prepared ourselves for the long drive ahead, the car stopped suddenly. "Here we are, ma'am." When the police officer pointed in the direction we had to go, I realized that we had arrived at the Borough Hall. When I heard him say "Take care, and have a nice day, ma'am," I noticed the three of us had only crossed Center Avenue from the public parking lot. It was a ten-second drive. Kiyoko and I entered the building with a blank look on our faces.

"Three dollars!" a clerk at a window of the Parking Authority said bluntly. All the confusion Kiyoko and I had had was just about to go away with three one-dollar bills. We paid half and half, suppressing our laughter in the presence of the clerk, who gave us a suspicious look. When my friend and I left the building, I remembered that the police officer had never fired his gun. Walking to the parking lot, I came to feel as if I would be able to flourish in this host country.