Meet Vince Patchwork,  an ordinary man, extraordinary in not
          being at all  extraordinary.  I know we work at neighbouring
          schools in Shinjuku  and share a stout, most Fridays, in one
          of the university  pubs in the Subnade, the one in which the
          statues of muscular  men  in  their  underpants  stand  with
          enormous phalluses at  their  heels. In fact, we met at this
          very pub. I  could  see  his  balding head with ginger eaves
          above a copy  of  the  evening  Asahi  newspaper,  the  brow
          wrinkling and unwrinkling  as  he scanned the headlines. His
          pate was a bright red, orange in the strong pub lighting and
          I noticed that  his  fingers trembled ever so slightly as he
          held the paper.


          "Excuse me," I stammered, "could you tell me the time?"

          Eyebrows arched over  gold-rimmed glasses, just a trifle too
          square to be  John  Lennon  glasses.  One  edge of his paper
          dropped, almost floating  down  and  landing  on  top of his
          daijogi of black beer.

          "6:25," he replied.

          "Thank you," I  paused.  "I've  still  got an hour to spare.
          Would you care to join me?"

          The glint of  the  spectacles stared back at me blankly, but
          the mouth manoeuvred itself into a smile.

          "Why not?"

          Yes, why not  indeed.  It'll  always be the phrase that most
          characterises Vince Patchwork, the question that's more like
          a statement, a  summary  of philosophy, lifestyle, religion,
          capacity for yet  another  drink.  It was the statement that
          opened for Vince a whole vista of experiences in Japan. Some
          rather  ordinary, others  mildly  extraordinary.  They  were
          experiences that never  gave me a second glance. Vince would
          say Why not?  where  I would fill the blank with a myriad of
          excuses.

          "How about another beer?"

          "Why not?"

          "How about going to Chiba, this weekend?"

          "Why not?"

          "How about a trip to the Moon?"

          "Why not?"

          Why not? meant  that  Vince  Patchwork  would never be rich,
          well not in  pecuniary  terms,  but  that  he  would have an
          immense log of  personal  memorabilia,  which  he would load
          into  letters  and   conversations.   He  was  after  all  a
          compulsive letter-writer, after all, and a conversationalist
          too. He would  fill  me  in  on  all the details of the past
          weekend and the coming one.

          Vince Patchwork, at  one  and the same time, knew everything
          and nothing about  Japan,  which  seems  to  be the way that
          Tokyoites or Kantonese, born and bred, seem to know it.

          "Do you know anything about rakugo?"

          "Rakugo?" he would  suck in a lot of air. "Old time Japanese
          joke sessions?"

          "Classical Japanese story-telling, I believe."

          "Well, not a lot, Louis. All I know is that they sit down on
          a cushion with  a  fan and a napkin ... and there're lots of
          puns and in-Japanese jokes."

          "Have you ever been?"

          "Oh, a few times. You know, with friends."

          "A few times!?!"

          "Listen, I've got  a  couple of tickets here," he'd pull out
          his wallet and draw out a couple of dog eared slips of paper
          with drawings of  bunnies  on them. "I was wondering who I'd
          go with. They're for next Saturday."


          Caught by surprise,  I'd look blank. It wasn't that I didn't
          want to go.  It was just that I knew how exhausted I'd be at
          the end of  the  next  week  and how little I'd relish doing
          anything very much  at all unless it involved holding a beer
          in my hand.

          "No, I'm sorry,"  I'd  stumble, "I've got something on, next
          Saturday."

          I was later  to  discover  that  Vince  was  something of an
          expert on rakugo,  at  least  he knew more about the subject
          than 99.9 per cent of all Japanese. In similar terms, he was
          also an expert  on sumo, Japanese rice culture, Edo history,
          sumie, shogi, Japanese  vegetables and fungi, kagura, kyudo,
          sekibutsu and shabu  shabu.  To be an expert in Japan, it is
          necessary to know a lot intellectually, but not important to
          have even a  modicum  of  practical  experience.  There  are
          dedicated  fishermen  who   have   never   caught   a  fish,
          technically perfect golfers  who have never played on a golf
          course, diehard skiers  who are lucky to hit the slopes once
          every five years.

          Every now and then, Vince would appear to say something that
          seemed to encapsulate  a major truth about Japan, a truth so
          valuable in its insight that it would take your breath away.
          Whenever he did,  he  never  let  24  hours  go  by  without
          contradicting it. One  day,  by  way  of example, I had been
          ranting, I fear,  about the appalling service I had received
          in one of Tokyo's major book shops.

          "Ha," I scoffed.  "And  yet,  how  often have you heard that
          Japanese service is the best in the world?"

          Vince held his  daijogi  to  the light and looked around the
          room through its curved amber perspective.

          "You know, Louis,"  he  told  me  quietly,  "in  Japan,  the
          product is far  more  important  than  the market. In short,
          what you sell  or make is far more important than the people
          who buy it.  Of course, the Japanese have the reputation for
          the most spectacular  service,  but  only  when  the service
          itself is the  product.  If  it isn't, you come in a distant
          second to what  you're  buying. In the west, if the customer
          wants tomato sauce  on  his  crepe suzette, then he gets it.
          Here, you're going  to  have  a hard job convincing a noodle
          chef that you want your udon without negi."

          This statement held for me, in one subtle moment, so many of
          the contradictions, frustrations,  total  bewilderment I had
          been feeling for  some  time in Tokyo. For a crystal second,
          everything was suddenly  explained. Then, in another second,
          it was shattered.

          "Of course, that's  total  bullshit.  Take the school I work
          for. It's just a business. You'd expect that there'd be some
          interest in education, but no, there's not. They actually go
          out of their way to obstruct it.

          "It's the same  with  medicine.  Have  I ever told you about
          Nozomi? She's a  nurse  at  an  old  folks' home. They had a
          patient transferred in,  last  week, from a hospital. He was
          in a critical  condition, but the hospital needed the bed so
          they transferred him  into  a  place  with  limited  medical
          facilities. He died  four  days later and, in all that time,
          the doctor at the home hadn't been to see him once.

          "Same with the music industry. There's an incredible fringe,
          I know, but  the  heart  of  it all is Japanese pops, cutesy
          boys and girls  who  can't sing or dance and aren't even the
          best-looking kids around.  The  guys that are making the big
          money give nothing back to music or musicians."

          And just as  you  were digesting that, he would be off again
          about a photo shop where they really looked out for you or a
          green grocer where  the  owner  had asked him not to buy the
          apples today, because  there'd  be  better ones in tomorrow.
          Yes, the green  grocer  would declare, you could have enough
          apples to tide  you over until the next day, but he wouldn't
          let you pay  for them. It wasn't as if it was your fault the
          good apples weren't  in  today. Or the old gentlemen who had
          followed him all  the  way  to the sixth floor of Kinokuniya
          Bookstore to return  a  package of rye bread and rhubarb jam
          he'd bought in Mejiro.


          In the end, Vince had only one absolute message about Japan,
          one that he repeated over and over again.

          "The only way  to  enjoy  any country is to get to know some
          people there, make  some  friends.  Most Japanese people are
          okay. The ones  who  aren't  usually  avoid  you anyway. The
          Japanese generally like  uniforms,  a  sense  of identity, a
          role. But people  in uniforms are pricks anywhere. It's only
          when people shed  the  uniform  that you see the real person
          beneath. Get a  salaryman in a shot bar and watch him loosen
          his neck tie.  The  best place to meet people in Japan is in
          the sento ..."