Minka by John Roderick
Author:John Roderick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568989624
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2008-03-30T04:00:00+00:00
At last, a house of my own
Book Two
Beauty has power to disarm the raging barbarian; there is no greater security against violence and injury than beauty and dignity.
—LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI
Feel Poor!
Yochan’s journey to Russia, Europe, the Middle East, and America came at a critical, formative period in his young life.
He was a likeable, pleasant, easy-going country boy, thrilled to be in Tokyo and at Waseda, when I met him. Fascinated by the large, outgoing, self-confident Americans who thronged the emerging metropolis, he never in his wildest dreams thought he would meet one.
During his university years, through me, he met not only other Americans but the various other foreigners—teachers, mostly, and other correspondents—of my acquaintance.
All this time he was becoming less provincial and more international. His English, barely understandable at first, became fluent. He immersed himself in Western things—Mozart and Beethoven, spaghetti and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, American movies and television programs (they helped improve his English).
The minka reconstruction was another step in his education. It plunged him into a position of leadership unusual for one so young. He found himself the head man of a project that required constant attention to detail, an undertaking complicated by the fact that it was being built for me, a foreigner. His involvement in all its aspects—hourly supervision, interpreting, acting as a gofer, helping make decisions, and assisting the carpenters—left him exhausted but also older, wiser, and more confident than before.
In leaving Japan so soon after granting my wish for a home of my own he began what essentially was a search for his own identity. He was torn between town and country, wished to be part of one as well as the other. The old minka, with its roots in the mountains, resolved this tug-of-war within him. Its almost rural setting on a green hilltop within commuting distance to Tokyo partly satisfied both urges. Now he was about to dip a toe into international waters to see how the West, the Middle East, and Africa compared with Japan, for whose history and culture he felt a fierce pride.
His voyage of discovery was done on the cheap, by ship, train, hitch-hiking; he couldn’t afford to fly. He marveled at the Kremlin in Moscow, was overwhelmed by the treasures of St. Petersburg, marched up the Champs-Élysées in Paris with French students demonstrating for reforms, slept in the desert in Libya, froze on trains in Turkey, sold his blood in Kuwait, found romance on the beaches in Spain, spent two months brushing up his English in Cambridge, sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to New York, visited my family in Maine, and attended the Republican convention in Miami.
Yochan returned to Kamakura from Honolulu deeply tanned and wearing a pineapple hat. He was glad, he said, to have gone and even more to be back.
Not long afterward he took the oral part of the bar exam and passed, but he failed the written, a minefield of tricky questions designed to discourage. Of 15,000 who took it that year, only 500 passed.
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