kelsey cleveland

The Fan Unfolds

A skinny pole with ten discs, which reminded me of beads on a bracelet, stood on top of the five-tiered wooden pagoda. The bejeweled arm of the pagoda at Toji Temple reached over one hundred eighty feet to the sky. A sense of calm and awe washed over me on the grounds of this Buddhist temple, which symbolized both the ancient capital of Kyoto and the Japan of my imagination.

Yuka, my host sister, acted as my tour guide. She planned a whirlwind tour of Kyoto’s incredible sights. I now realize she, like many Japanese people, experienced a deep sense of pride regarding her nation’s ancient capital. I believe she was honored to share it with a foreigner.  

Sweat trickled down the back of my knees in the heat and humidity. I admired how cool and crisp Yuka looked. She wore a white long-sleeved blouse with the sleeves rolled up, tucked into a tan cotton wrap skirt. She accessorized her chic neutral ensemble with red lipstick, a Louis Vuitton handbag, and brown leather fisherman sandals. I found her three girlfriends who joined us equally chic. 

Later, I walked along a path lined with bamboo. Bamboo rustling in a slight breeze relaxed me. Farmers tending bamboo plants wait three or more years for signs of growth. After the shoots emerge, giant bamboo timber can grow an astonishing ninety feet in only two months. At age nine, after a serendipitous encounter with a Japanese exchange student, I had vowed to learn Japanese and live in Japan one day. My childhood dream of coming to Japan required the faith and focus of a bamboo farmer to make it a reality. Today, here in Kyoto, I discovered proof of my dream at last at age twenty-one.

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At our next stop, my feet crunched along the gravel path of a magnificent strolling garden. A shrill, relentless screech, which I now recognize as cicadas chirping, grew deafening. I gasped when I first spotted the Golden Pavilion, Kinkaku-ji, which appeared to float on a pond surrounded by a forest of tall pine trees. I savored the breathtaking view of a building covered in pure gold leaf reflected in the still waters of the pond. My heart felt full as I admired the mix of nature and architecture. 

“Kirei desu ne,” said Yuka. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” 

I agreed with her that the sight was beautiful. My eyes glowed and my limited Japanese vocabulary couldn’t express how the temple moved me. I opened my mouth to speak, but choked with emotion, I nodded in agreement.

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We walked up a steep, winding, stone-paved pedestrian street to our last destination in Kyoto. Sannenzaka translates as “slope of three years.” Yuka said the hundred-meter long street in Kyoto was one of the most famous streets in Japan. Japanese tourists and international visitors came for a slice of old Japan. Narrow wooden homes with tile roofs lined both sides. Some traditional homes became cafes or restaurants. Shopkeepers sold handicrafts including paper fans, chopsticks, local pottery, trinkets, teas, and sweets from others. 

Yuka and her friends led the way into Yojiya, a cosmetics store whose products featured a black and white painting of a hand mirror with a woman’s face on it. They all headed to the same display case. Yuka picked up a small square piece of thin paper and handed me one too. I had no idea what it was until she blotted oil from her face with it. The store was famous for aburatorigami, blotting papers, favored by geisha and kabuki actors because it doesn’t mess up their makeup. I blotted my forehead, nose, and chin to test it but didn’t purchase any because I didn’t have problems with oily skin or wear much makeup. A few weeks later, when I realized how oily Japan’s climate made my skin, I regretted my decision. 

A few stores away, a woman grilled food in front of her store. She cooked rice dumplings coated in a brown sauce on skewers. The air smelled of smoke, soy sauce, and also had a sweet smell. “I eat these every time I come to Kyoto. Have you ever eaten dango?” Yuka asked. When I shook my head no, a few moments later she returned, handed me a skewer with three balls on it to try, and took a bite off her own stick. I bit one off, chewed the sticky ball, and appreciated the sweet soy sauce coating, with a sweetness subtler than Western desserts. 

I stopped in front of a store selling sensu, folding fans. “Can we stop here?” During my few short days in Japan, I noticed many people cool themselves in the heat with folding fans. Many women also carried parasols to protect themselves from the sun. To me, fans and parasols seemed better suited to a female character in a Jane Austen novel until I spent a day outside in the heat and humidity. I borrowed Yuka’s fan several times that day. The slight breeze it generated cooled me more than I expected. 

Inside the shop, many of the fans were decorative, made from thick paper and lacquered sticks. Yuka and her friends led me to a display of handheld fans you fold up and carry with you in a purse. I selected a small fan decorated with cherry blossoms.

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The street ended at Kiyomizudera, The Pure Water Temple, named for the waterfall that flowed from the mountains to the site. We approached the main pavilion of the Buddhist temple from below to best take in the view. The building clung to the hillside. Kyoto also continued to cling to the old ways and traditions. The wooden building stood thirteen meters above us on a wooden platform. A vast veranda jutted out over the hillside. According to my guidebook, monks used the famous veranda as a stage for the temple’s dedications and offerings. One hundred and sixty-eight pillars—made from thick, centuries-old Zelkova trees—supported the veranda. Carpenters constructed the entire building of wood. They fixed multiple layers of long strips of bark to the roof with bamboo nails, according to my guidebook. 

Tourists and pilgrims flocked to the site for the water. They also admired the impressive feat of religious architecture. The mountain air felt cooler when we joined throngs of tourists on the veranda overlooking the surrounding forest and the city. 

Yuka led me down a flight of stairs to the Otowa waterfall. People waited in line near a stone archway to drink water with healing properties that can also make wishes come true. Water spilled from three water spouts. Yuka stopped me as I headed toward the shortest line. “Each one grants a different wish, but you can only choose one line. My friends and I will stand in the love line.” Yuka, who knew about my boyfriend back in the United States, pointed me to the middle line. “You need academic success.” 

“What about the third line?” 

“Longevity.” 

When it was my turn, I used the long pole with a tin cup attached to drink the cool, fresh water, skeptical whether it would work but willing to try. I avoided touching the cup to my lips and the sacred water from the cup spilled on my shirt as it poured into the pool of water below. I hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.

On our way out, a smaller building caught my attention, so I headed over for a closer look. Yuka joined me at the Hyakutai-Jizo-do (One Hundred Jizo Hall.) Inside the open-air building, two hundred small stone sculptures were arranged in seven tiered rows. They wore red bibs and knitted caps in red, orange, or light blue, which made them resemble babies. Their beatific expressions reminded me of statues I’d seen of Buddha.  

My chest tightened with unexpected sadness. “Are they babies?” 

“No, jizo. For lost babies.” 

“Lost?”

“Babies who were never born because of abortion, stillbirth, or miscarriage.”

None of those words were in my Japanese vocabulary, so I asked her to repeat what she said and searched for the words in the dictionary. Then, I understood my sadness when looking at the statues. The sweet stone statues gave women a symbol for their grief.

No one had ever talked to me so matter-of-factly. Abortion had been legal in Japan since 1949, and condoms were common forms of birth control. After the government approved Viagra for men, women protested for the government to also legalize birth control pills in 1999. I didn’t know this then.

“Who dresses them?”

“Worshippers who have lost a child.” 

I imagined grieving parents securing the bibs under the statues’ chins. “Why are all the bibs red?”

“Red protects from danger and sickness.”

In Japan, “lost” babies are counted and commemorated in solid stone. Their existence wasn’t blotted out like oil on their mothers’ faces. The gaze of the jizo said we existed, we died, and we mattered.

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I followed Yuka into the steamy bathroom at the sentō covering my pelvis with a tenugui, a thin Japanese hand towel made from cotton, and with a locker key on a band around my wrist. When Yuka and I had arrived home from Kyoto, Okā-san greeted us with the news that the bathtub in my host family’s Nagoya home had broken. If we wanted a bath, we had to visit the sentō, a neighborhood communal bathhouse. Women glanced in my direction before returning to their bathing rituals. Embarrassment and the heat turned my face bright red. The air smelled of soap and shampoo. 

Naked Japanese women of all ages and sizes were at various stages of getting clean. The women didn’t hide their nakedness or seem ashamed of unruly pubic hair, scars of cesarean sections, drooping breasts, or dimpled bottoms. A daughter washed her elderly mother’s back. Friends chatted. The experience reminded me of a sauna I took with my mother at YMCA Camp du Nord in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota as a child. I hadn’t been in a room of naked women since then. The young girls there witnessed a timeline of women’s bodies as they aged.  

Yuka and I sat on adjoining plastic stools beneath shower heads. “Hold out your arm.” 

Confused, I did as told.

She put her arm next to mine and laughed. “Look, my skin is paler than yours.”

My voice rose in pitch. “You’re right.” I assumed Caucasian skin was always paler than Asian skin. Her jet black shoulder length hair contrasted with her pale skin.

I joined Yuka on a tour from bathtub to bathtub in the steamy bathing room. First, I sank into a jacuzzi tub, letting the bubbles relax my muscles and melt away my self-consciousness. I dipped a toe in the next tub with scalding water and skipped it. A pine-scented tub with green water reminded me of the smell in the mountains in Kyoto. My thoughts shifted from discomfort at being in a room filled with naked women to relaxing with Yuka and understanding why people enjoyed public bathing. 

When I submerged my body in the last bath, a strange tingling sensation like pins and needles coursed through me and made me numb. I scrambled out of the tub, not in pain, but in confusion. The tub sign stated denkiburo, which translated as electricity bath. My eyes widened in shock. Our cheeks rosy from the bath, Yuka and I walked home holding bags with our toiletries after getting dressed. 

 “Did a bath have electricity running through it?” I asked. When she replied yes, I tried to keep the judgement out of my voice when I asked isn’t that dangerous? She assured me it wasn’t and declared it helped relieve stiff shoulders and back pain. One my biggest regrets of my time as an exchange student is that I only visited the sentō once. When I had bathed there out of necessity to get clean, I hadn’t grasped how communal relaxation was as important, or even more important, than washing my body.

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Now, I often think of the folding fan like the one I purchased in Kyoto, and how much it was like my experiences living in Japan. At first, the culture and customs were opaque because I couldn’t understand the entire picture. Like a fan unfolding, I grasped more, fold by fold. Closed, the design on the fan remained hidden, revealing only the background color. A fan started from a single point until the wooden blades spread out representing life’s many paths after birth. First, a few scattered pink petals appeared on a blue background as the fan unfurled, followed by several clusters of blossoms. The knowledge that emerged about Japan often took me by surprise like the jizo, a bath charged with electricity. During my exchange, the more I understood about the culture and language made me realize how little I knew. I suspected my life’s path would continue to include Japan again even if I didn’t know how the future would unfold.