Directionless

the thing I laugh about most with my husband

Today was one of those rare mornings when Hiro and I awoke at the same time. We’re coming up on a major anniversary (November 23 marks thirty years since our first date) and we’re both in the habit of reminiscing.

For as long as I’ve known Hiro, he’s been terrible with directions. I think the only reason he found the spot where we (and several other people, thankfully none of whom showed up) were slated to meet was because it was such a prominent landmark: the Kaminarimon entrance to Sensōji, Tōkyō’s oldest temple.

I forget the English word for someone who is bad at directions, perhaps because, to my knowledge, there is no corresponding word in Japanese. But after the fourth date, when I asked him to meet me at the West Exit wickets at Shinjuku Station, and he asked me, which is the west exit, I had to come up with something.

The term for tone deaf in Japanese is 音痴, onchi. I say that Hiro is 地理音痴, chiri onchi, geographically tone deaf.

Hiro was born and raised in Tōkyō but it takes skill to navigate there.

I might be one of those people with an inner compass (although perhaps not of the moral kind, judging on past behavior which, thankfully, is no guarantee of future results). Not only am I usually able to figure out which way is north (even with no trees and moss around), I learned to drive back when the person next to you in the car had a map open on their laps and shouted directions.

When I arrived in Japan in 1988, maps were CRITICAL. During my first three months in homestays, when I wasn’t re-reading the five paperbacks I had brought in my luggage, I studied maps. Learning place names in Japanese was one benefit, to be sure. Tracing train lines that led from where I lived down into Tōkyō offered me hope for the fun I might experience once I was done with homestays, too.

Most importantly, when I was finally living on my own and finally had access to Japanese gay magazines and therefore could figure out which gay bars I wanted to go to, I had a new kind of map to cross reference.

Here’s an example from an backissue of Samson (a gay magazine focused on older men and chubbier men) that Hiro and I have kept.

The bar in question, Grazie, is no longer in business.

Let’s compare this to a map of roughly the same area.

The (former) location of the bar is starred and circled in red.

Aside from the orientation (the top of the magazine map is southwest), you might notice some other key differences that I found very helpful when navigating.

• The streets are stylized and do not follow the curves you see in the atlas map.

• Intersections with traffic lights have dots in each corner on the stylized map.

• The names of either immediately visible landmarks, such as the two banks at the corner of the first major intersection (富士銀行, Fuji Bank, and 協和銀行, Kyōwa Bank).

• The temple, noted in the atlas map as Iriya Kishimonjin (入谷鬼子母神, dedicated to Buddhist divinity whose name literally reads demon-child-mother-god, and yes, I’m adding that temple to my list for the next visit) is marked on the stylized map with a symbol for Buddhist temples, 卍. Although pronounced as svastika in Sanskrit, this character would like to remind you that it existed for thousands of years before the Third Reich.

• Another feature on the stylized map is a landmark most of the bar’s patrons would have known, ２４会館, ni yon kaikan, the Ueno branch of a Tōkyō chain of gay bathhouses.

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Let me end with one of my favorite stories of Hiro’s directionlessness.

In the spring of 1994, friends of mine from high school came to visit Japan. I squeezed everyone into my Daihatsu Charmant and we drove to Hakone, south of Tōkyō, to soak in the hot springs there. From there, my friends headed on to Gotemba to spend the night.

As we prepared to drive home, Hiro remembered that I had a guest pass for a hot spring hotel in Nikkō that was about to expire and he said, let’s spend the night there!

I smiled in agreement, and started driving. As we entered to Tōkyō area, Hiro recognized where we were. Why are we driving back to the city?

Because we’re going to Nikkō.

But isn’t Nikkō near Hakone?

By car, Nikkō is at least ninety minutes north of Tōkyō. Hiro had no idea that he had asked me to not only drive back but to keep going. I like driving and didn’t mind, but I still laugh, remembering his confusion and my using the dashboard to draw a map of Japan for him with my finger.

We made it to the hotel thirty minutes before the hot spring baths closed for the night. And we spent the next day exploring smaller hot springs up in the mountains, including the little roadside one that had so much sulfur in the water that our silver rings turned black the second our hands entered the rough-hewn tub.

For the entire way home, a soft, non-unpleasant smell of hot spring ions permeated the car. And I realized, or perhaps recalled, that things that make Hiro happy make me happy.