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  Inukai, Japan
Sunday, May 1, 2005

So bus to the Station, cable car downhill, train to Osaka-Namba, subway to Shin-Osaka, bullet-train to Kyoto (pant pant), train to Kameoka... Ask someone the way to the International Zendo and no-one knows. No-one speaks any English for that matter, so I may be in trouble. Ask a smiling policeman and doesn't know. OK. So ask for Inukai, which is the address of the Zendo, and they tell me to catch a bus which takes me to a University in the middle of a field, then the driver tells me to wait for fifty minutes there until a second bus finally arrives and takes me to a junction, and then the driver tells me to get off: Inukai. I left at 10 this morning. It's now 4:15 pm.

Inukai is not just in middle of nowhere. Inukai IS the middle of nowhere. It's a village, a very rural kind of place, with old-fashioned homes and small bonsai gardens and rice-paddies, in a valley surrounded by mountains. I have doubts that I've ended up in the right place. I ask a lady who got off the bus with me, 'Kokusai Zendo' and she smiles and talks and talks and indicates me to follow her, which I do, and she talks and talks, and I smile and say 'wakarimasen', which means 'honey, I don't know what you're talking about' but she laughs nervously and keeps yapping. So I realise she's a couple of slices short of a loaf, which is not what I need now, and wonder whether to follow her or not, when I discover a German-looking woman going for a stroll, and I think I can't be that lost after all.

And in effect, the Japanese woman from the bus leaves me in front of the Zendo. Well, where shall I start? The Zendo is run by a German-speaking Swiss called Gentokku, his lieutenant is from Siberia, and the two long-term residents are German, although one of them could possibly be from Mars too: the place is a ball. I get given a cup of green tea by Gentokku and a form to fill in, and then I'm left alone to sit down, sip my tea and stare at the walls for about half an hour. The man from Siberia then appears and says he will show me my room before dinner, which is at five, so he takes me to another building and shows me a beautiful room with a view of a moss garden, which is all for me. And then we go for dinner. Or so they call it.

I still have to laugh when I think of that first dinner. They start by chanting like maniacs, at full speed, (I think, they're having a laugh, aren't they?), they bow, they put five bowls in front of them, they chant, they bow, they serve themselves rice. They pass the rice, we bow. When I put the chopsticks down on the table, they make noise, so I'm yelled at for making noise. I drop a few grains of rice on the table. I'm asked to pick them. With the chopsticks. Then the soup. More bowing. And the boiled weeds. More chanting. I don't know where to look anymore. It's now time to eat and the food is not that bad, actually, so I take my time, and then I realise that everyone is waiting for me. Put the chopsticks down, with a noise, get yelled at. Seconds anyone? The pots start passing in the opposite direction so I help myself to more rice. So of course, I'm again the last one to finish. I open my mouth to apologise and get yelled 'don't talk!!!'. More chanting. More bowing. Hot water and we rinse the bowls with the water, clean them with a pickle and drink the water. More chanting. More bowing. It was simply the most stressful meal I ever had.

After that, I'm asked to clean the dishes (not the bowls, those we've cleaned and drunk). Then zazen and more chanting. Things don't relax until afterwards, when everyone congregates in the living room. The other visitors are mostly German, except for an Indian girl and an American one, who, with me, are the only English-speakers. German is definitely the lingua franca is this International Zendo, followed by Japanese. We have a bit of tea and get sent to bed at 10.

Wake-up yell at ten to five in the morning. Chanting. Zazen. Then they make me clean the wooden parts of the floor. I begin to wonder what the hell I'm doing here. Then breakfast, and the same palaver again, with the rice and the noisy chopsticks, and the chanting and the bowing. Then cleaning the plates. Then more manual labour until 10:30 and a rest, and lunch at twelve. I'm so stressed by the proceedings that I don't have seconds today. I'd rather starve myself than have to drop rice again, or be the last to finish again, or be shouted again for not putting the bowls together in the right order. The girl from America arrived the same day as me and she's had enough. She wants to leave. But I've got nowhere to go to. So I must stay.

Then everything changes. We've got new arrivals, a German couple and a Japanese-American one. The pressure's off me now. That evening, I don't get shouted at anymore: the newcomers get all the attention. I can finally enjoy the food. The Japanese-American guy gets shouted at during zazen for moving too much, his girlfriend can't move because her legs are so numb. The German girl puts down the chopsticks with too much noise, his friend drops some rice on the table. Ah, I've seen all before.

The last day I finally begin to get into the rythm of it all. There's a strange beauty in the synchronised movements during the meals. The meaningless chanting is kind of soothing. And I'm beginning to make a bit of progress during zazen. The American girl is leaving today, she's had enough, but I'm happy to stay. Manual labour today is at the moss garden so it's particularly beautiful and tranquil. The German guy and I pick the weeds with our fingers for one-and-a-half hours. He can't believe his parents fight the moss while we're here protecting it! It gets rainy in the afternoon, and we stay indoors after the afternoon zazen, watching the pond and the moss and the maples. And there's mist on the hills, and the houses look wet and the trees themselves look like clumps of moss. We talk about Keralan food and the God of Small Things and London and Japan. Everything -the rythms, the colours, the voices- are so subdued, that we seem to be characters in a Swedish movie. Five more Germans arrive that evening.

The last morning there, the five new Germans wake us up at four (why?) because they don't want to be late for zazen. We do all the things that we've done all the other days until 9 am and then the German couple and I get ready to leave. I don't think I could live here, like the guy from Siberia, for four years. It would all get too repetitive after a while. But I can see the beauty of it all for a short period of time, and I wish I was staying a bit longer. On the other hand, what between the vegetarian food and the copious amounts of green tea, I haven't been to the toilet since I can remember, so maybe I need a change of diet. And I haven't had a shower since I arrived, because Buddhist monks only bathe every five days, and I missed my turn. So that's something to look forward to.

Dogen says that 'enlightenment is practice and practice is enlightenment'. After three days in Inukai, I think I get his point.

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