It u

N

SPECIAL

The night our house burnt down

Murray Sayle

Aikawa, near Tokyo THE night of 19 December last was cold and starry. Our house stood in a clearing in a pine forest half-way up a mountainside, and the flames could be seen a good ten miles away, down by the Nissan factory. Some of them even downed tools for a moment or two, we heard, wondering what the bright light was.

Not that fires are unusual in Japan. Before the days of concrete cliffs they were called The Flowers of Edo', the old name of Tokyo. Traditional Japanese houses are built of massive wooden beams to sway with earthquakes (ours came through the great quake of 1923 without a scratch) with two-inch-thick straw mats on the floors, Papered room dividers, thatched roofs and wooden shutters to keep out the rain. You have to heat them somehow, and the choice is electricity, charcoal or paraffin we had a full 200-litre tank in the garden. Add pots of paint and varnish, a 15-year accumulation of books and files, records, children's and adults' toys, winter clothes, bamboo furniture and three television sets and we have, or rather had a dwelling as flammable as a box of matches. The fire started in the children's room (boy ten, girl seven, boy two) at supper- time, around 7.30 p.m. An electric blanket had been switched on minutes before; nothing more is known of its cause. My Woodford Jenny (who hails, incidentally, from woodford in Essex), went to investigate, found a bunkbed ablaze, emptied a fire extinguisher on it, pitched the smouldering remains of a futon, a kind of quilt, out the back door and returned to see flames already in the rafters. Correctly assessing her priorities (I was away at the time) she took the children to a neighbour's and returned to find the house alight from end

to end.

The fire brigade, informed by telephone that a house (uchi in Japanese) was on fire, cruised the village looking for a non- existent Mr Uchida until it was suggested that the fiery beacon on the hillside might interest them. Some kind soul had dumped builder's rubble on the nearest fire hydrant (our water came from a spring) and by the time the amateur firemen found another, 34 minutes later, nothing of the house was standing. Jenny drove the family car out of the blazing garage moments before it too went up. The fire melted aluminium, twisted stainless steel and welded a kettle to the remains of the kitchen stove. Apart from a word-processor grabbed from our office by a brave neighbour and some emergency funds Jenny kept in the re- frigerator, nothing usable was saved from the house. It was, the firemen told our neighbour, the hottest house fire they had ever seen.

In the olden days, we were told, a bronze gong would have sounded at our local Buddhist temple to inform the people that something of general concern was afoot. Our village is moving with the times, and now we have a loudspeaker system installed on trees and telephone poles which summons the part-time firemen, announces delays in school hours caused by typhoons, floods or deep snow, calls for volunteers to clear the roads, reports traf- fic accidents, tells children when it's time to go home for supper and generally keeps everyone in touch. For households out of earshot the local farmers' co-operative runs a similar systematised gossip network based on telephone calls with half-hourly bulletins on local news, lost cats and dogs, music for morning exercises, calls for baby-sitters and so on. Our local electronic media, we later learnt, got an early news break on the fire at the foreigner Sayru- San's house and called the buraku-kai, the village association into action.

The buraku-kai is not exactly an official organisation. It holds no elections, appoints its officers by Buggins' turn among the old families and admits new members only after long inspection. Buraku-kai have run the affairs of Japanese villages since long before the days of the Shoguns and, apart from the unregretted war years when they were pressed into government service to inform on grumblers and dissidents, they bring a purely village consensus to bear on quar- rels, family disputes and minor misadven- tures. Japanese villages' as a result have no lawyers, and no use for them.

The village association runs sports days and festivals at shrines and temples and organises things like basic garbage collec- tion, snow-clearing and cutting the grass beside the roads. We can't remember ever actually joining it, but one day there was the name Sayru on a wooden tablet hung up to indicate we were next to sort the recyclable garbage. It looked, even to us,

JAPANESE SPECIAL

odd among all the Suzukis and Watanabes brushed in neat Chinese characters, but somehow, without anyone ever actually saying so, we had been accepted.

Over the years, we have often been asked to village funerals and weddings, to the blessings of babies and the opening of new businesses. These outings can be expensive as the guests are expected to bring gifts of money, and we often see the sidekicks of local politicians making good fellows of their bosses by handing out well-stuffed envelopes, the constant haemorrhage of cash that leads many an ambitious Japanese legislator into corrup- tion and scandal. We have, of course, never asked anyone for a vote ourselves, but we have tried to be good neighbours, to the best of our understanding.

As a result, we knew by sight many but by no means all of the people who gathered within minutes around the flick- ering embers of our house, and not out of curiosity. The women brought rice, soy- bean cakes and bottles of sake, the all- purpose Japanese emergency rations, and explained soothingly that everyone could do with a drink and a bite to eat, particu- larly the victims and the firemen. After several bids had been put in, Jenny and the children were escorted to the house of a neighbour whose children go to the local primary school with ours — where they are by way of being star pupils, being the first and only non-Japanese ever enrolled there.

About ten p.m. the deputy headmaster of the school, no less, arrived to check that our two older children had clean under- wear and school bags (other neighbours had arrived with both) and would be ready to join their group for the normal walk to school (compulsory in Japan) at the usual time, 7.45 a.m. the next morning. The police and firemen called and took state- ments while everybody's mind was fresh, and it was suggested that we get a good night's sleep as we all had a big day tomorrow.

The ruins of 15 years looked especially forlorn on a bright, clear winter morning. By ten a.m. 50 people had assembled with trucks, a bulldozer and a portable gener- ator. From the village clubhouse others had brought a tent, folding tables and chairs and more riceballs, sake and bean cakes. A volunteer salvage crew was soon at work picking through the wreckage, shoving aside the charred remains of 1,000 books — no time for frivolities at a serious moment like this — and pouncing on really useful items like blackened and buckled cooking pots and a pan that might conceiv- ably fry again. Roughly cleared, the site looked like a small section of wartime Berlin, Beirut or, for that matter, Tokyo. Neighbours with power saws moved in to cut down the blackened stumps of the house while the bulldozer man filled in the sewage and water tanks and dug a large hole for another, controlled fire of wreckage. As the winter afternoon faded, floodlights powered by the generator lit a busy, happy scene, all the happier for beer and sake served by beaming housewives to the workers. The clearance, we were told, had a dual purpose; partly to remove any possibility of still-smouldering fire spread- ing, partly to show that life goes on, starting right now.

Meanwhile, a steady procession of villa- gers had been arriving all day with gifts of goods and money, all listed and ticketed by two ladies at the folding tables. People we could and could not recall seeing before brought radishes, apples, ten-kilo bags of rice, schoolbooks, pencils, old clothes, new clothes, towels, blankets, more frying pans, five-kilo packets of instant curry (curry, anybody?) two television sets, shoes, scarves and hats. Most of them also left money, folded in the special envelopes sold in Japan for the purpose with the name of the giver outside and the sum written under a flap which folds over for privacy. One neighbour tallied the total while another separately listed the names, and both kept an eye open for kajidorobo, or 'fire thieves', who set up their own tables at well-attended fires and funerals, collect condolences and money and de- camp with the proceeds. None were sight- ed and more than £1,000 had been contri- buted by lunch-time.

The site secured and the children home from school (where the classmates of our daughter Malindi passed a resolution call- ing on all of us to gambatte, or `hang in there', undoubtedly the most-proffered advice in Japan) it was time, we were told, for the big party, held at yet another neighbour's house. Here beer, wine, more sake, whisky, sushi and rice balls had been set out and, it was stressed, we were the hosts, thanking the workers for their efforts and paying for the clean-up and the party — no problem, as Jenny now had a gift handbag stuffed with banknotes. Well, everyone said, it could have been worse and, our children around us, we agreed. The keynote speech (Japanese love pub- lic speaking) was delivered by Yukio Narui, recently retired from the silk busi- ness and the current head of the buraku- kai, who got a laugh by recalling that a Japanese family who suffered a fire used to be expected to move away for five genera- tions — the time it took for the obligations they had incurred by inevitably setting the houses next door on fire to be repaid. We had, however, caused no such damage, and as the people of the village felt that we should be treated exactly as Japanese would be they wanted us to stay among them for as long as we liked. Seconding, a lady told Jenny, 'You behaved like an old-fashioned Japanese woman,' a compli- ment which brought applause and more drinks.

Responding, Jenny (whose command of gracious Japanese is several hundred times better than mine) said that we had been deeply impressed by seeing one of Japan's bifu, or 'beautiful customs', and we could understand better now why Japanese liked being Japanese when they got such support from each other in a time of trouble. Her speech went down well, and during the evening she got useful advice: bank the surplus of funds several villages away to foil envious gossipers and dump unwear- able clothes at a similar discreet distance.

That night we signed 152 thank-you cards in flowery Japanese composed by a committee of neighbours versed in pro- tocol. With these delivered before the end of the year, all our obligations (except good villagership) are, by Japanese no- tions, fully discharged, the slate cleared for a fresh start. Several of the guests sug- gested houses in various states of repair and disrepair into which we might move, and indeed we are happily re-established in one now.

Not all our friends live in one small Japanese village. The word spread, and two of them in London all unbeknownst to us started an international whipround. Letters and cheques — we were told arrived from Britain, from the United States, from Australia, from France, from Africa and points east and west, the addresses of friends lost track of even more welcome than their contributions. Charity is, among us, a deeply ambivalent opera- tion, it being more blessed to give than to receive which can leave us receivers feeling rather left out (a useful insight into the plight of the refugee); simultaneously grateful, indebted and impostors in pocket- ing anything at all in a world with so many more deserving claimants. The formalised Japanese approach to, misfortune acknowledges the victims' dilemma, and perhaps suggested a re- sponse. We have started up a fund of our own in Tokyo which, we hope, might one day help someone here similarly touched by fate's fickle finger to give fate the same reply. It's called the J Fund and the last time we asked it had something like f5,(0 in it. We Westerners have our own odd but perhaps not altogether unattractive cus- toms.