GREAT AND ALIEN LAND

Our half-year stay in the US straddling the New Year had all the makings of a confrontation. With the new head office. With Chicago. With America.

Seven years earlier, our first US visit was no confrontation. We were wide-eyed tourists then, basking in America's sun and easy smiles without care or consequence. Even our brief stay in Illinois in 1965, a year after my bank's takeover by the Chicago bank, was little more than a courtesy call made out of our safe and trusted Japanese home base.

But this time it was different. This protracted stay was intended to be confrontational. There were wise men in the head office suspecting their ‘man in Tokyo’ of alien sympathies. They were right, twice over.

First there was my typical European prejudice against the might and swagger of America, its superficial, money-based way of life, its waste and hyperbole, even its ‘pursuit of happiness’, that questionable concept. This spoon-fed mindset was overlain by a less expressible, more internalised reserve about the United States, Japan-grown and stubborn. It was directed at the American mentality, the casual arrogance that is the birthright of the strong. It was a silent protest against the overweening patronising manners of so many Americans toward anyone and anything foreign, and especially Asian. Above all it was a deep-seated resistance against the immodest American approach to life itself, its aggressive ‘conflict model’, its blatant emotionalism and lack of restraint, its materialism and physicality and holier-than-thou Christian orthodoxy.

I arrived in Chicago heavily freighted with opinion but also willing to change my views ‘in hgbit of new experience’. Well, experience is what we got. From the first day I had to place my mental constructs on the backburner. Actual, visceral life, took precedence. The accommodation the bank had arranged for us, a small, furnished apartment in Old Town, turned out to be an address of ill repute, teemingwith prostitutes. Within our stingy rent allowance, we found a better place, near the Ambassador East Hotel, with mostly decent tenants.