Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

I flew from Danang to Nha Trang to take a train to Thap Cham, but the day I arrived there was an attack by a squad of sappers on the oil depot outside Saigon, at Nha Be, and 50 per cent of Vietnam's fuel was wiped out in a morning. Fuel rationing started and I cancelled my trip. It was an unnecessary extravagance, since I would have to be driven a hundred miles back in a car. I got a bicycle and pedalled around the town of abandoned villas, then ate eels at a sea-front restaurant. The next day I waited hours at Nha Trang airport for a Saigon plane; and finally one came, a C-123 laden with Kleenex, Kotex, beans, toilet paper, grapefruit juice, a huge crate of Port of Call Extra Fancy Cal-Rose Rice (odd, since Nha Trang is in a rice-growing area), and a 1967 Dodge, belonging to one of the Americans there.

The flight back to Saigon in a thunderstorm scared the life out of me; I was strapped against the stomach wall of this pitching whale, and the three Chinese pilots gave me no reassurance. I recovered sufficiently to give two more lectures of which I remember little apart from what Auden described in 'On the Circuit' as

A truly asinine remark, A soul-bewitching face.

And then I was off and waiting at Tan Son Nhut Airport to go to Japan. In better times I would have taken the train to Hanoi, changed for Peking, and gone via Shenyang and Seoul to Pusan for a boat linking to one of Japan's Kyushu expresses. Or I could have gone straight from Peking to Moscow via Ulan Bator in Mongolia, and then home. The way is clear, by rail, from Hanoi Junction to Liverpool Street Station in London. Perhaps at some future date…*

* Now – April 1975 – most of the Vietnam towns I passed through by rail have been blown up, all have been captured, and many 6f their people killed. For the survivors the future is melancholy, and the little train no longer runs between Hue and Danang.

THE HATSUKARI ('EARLY BIRD') LIMITED EXPRESS TO AOMORI

In Japan I planned to outfit myself for Siberia. There were the trains, of course, and the lectures to pay for them; but clothing for my onward journey was my initial concern. I arrived in Tokyo with the clothes that had served me for three months in the tropics, my drip-dry wardrobe. These clothes, stained with curry juice, somewhat threadbare, the trouser seats worn shiny by my sedentary travelling, were inadequate for the freezing Japanese weather, which augured ill for what I had been forewarned (Soviet railway timetables give average temperatures) would be thirty below in Khabarovsk. It was then December. Tokyo's winter was aggravated by wind-blown grit and exhaust fumes and those choking updrafts between buildings that characterize big-city winters. I spent two days searching for warm clothes. But Japanese clothes are not designed for the Siberian winter, and they are made only in small sizes, and they cost the earth.

It is with a kind of perverse pride that the Japanese point out how expensive their country has become. But this is as much a measure of wealth as of inflation, and I began to wonder if it was as crippling as people claimed. I asked about it, but this timid inquiry is the foreigner's first question and the knowing resident is prepared to shock you with joke prices. How much does a kimono cost? 'You can get a good one for a thousand dollars.' A meal? 'At most restaurants you cann get away with paying about twenty dollars – for one peirrson.' A bottle of gin? 'Imported stuff might set you bs-ack twenty dollars or more.' And when I laughed denrisively, an American turned on me with what I thounght was unwarranted savagery and said, 'Listen, you caiAn't get a cup of coffee here for less than a dollar!' There was, I learned later, a place in the Tokyo outskirts wvhere a cup of coffee (including cream and sugar) was saiftid to cost forty dollars. This information, offered so casunally, is like a form of fagging at schools where the senioors' automatic response to the new boy is to exclude hii.m by horrifying him. Americans in Thailand initiate youu by saying, 'Never pat a Thai on the head – the head is s sacred here. You could be killed for that.' The retailing; of the Thai religious mystique, like the money mystiquue in Japan, is supposed to make you think twice about starving. No one says you can live cheaply in Japan – but it's possible, by staying in Japanese inns and developing a tasiSte for the large bowls of noodle soup called ra-men (no o charge for the tea) and using the train. Fruit is also inexpeensive since Japan buys cut-price oranges, apples, and tang.gerines from the South Africans, who are so grateful to geaet radios in return, they have officially declared the Japarnese to be white. And there is a McDonald's hamburgeer joint on the Ginza. Winter clothes were a different strtory. Most coats I saw were well over $100 and the onee I settled for, a tight-fitting number with a rabbit-fur- collar, cost me $150. Gloves, scarf, woollen hat, and s so forth exhausted the fee I got for my first lecture, but 11 was prepared not only for Siberia but also for my speaking engagement in the December snows of Hokkaido, two train trips north.

The streets of Toyko after dark were filled with glad groups of whooping Japanese. Less enthusiastic ones lay dead drunk in the doorways of Mori's Noodle House or the Pub Glasgow, or were slumped on the sidewalks of crooked back lanes – wherever they were overcome by alcoholic fatigue. These were casualties of the bonus. Twice a year Japanese employees are awarded a bonus: December is one of these months and it was my fate to arrive the day the money was dished out. Towards midnight I could see all the stages of Japanese drunkenness, from the early one, in which they raise their voices, to the last stage, where they simply flop down, collapsing on a restaurant floor or in a freezing street. Between the loudness and paralysis they throw up and sing. I thought of the casualties as 'bonuses', and I could see them being lugged by their friends, many of whom, at the singing stage, had enough boozy courage to howl in my direction. After twelve there were fewer of them; the streets were quiet enough for ladies in kimonos, shawls, and thick slippers to walk their dogs – invariably sleek well-bred hounds. Two ladies, chatting softly, advanced upon me. The dog paused, rocked back and shat; one lady flourished a paper she had held in readiness, and, still chatting to her friend, delicately scooped up the dog shit and deposited it in a nearby barrel.

I hadn't seen the barrel until she used it: Tokyo's order is apparent only up close – from a distance it is a jumble, but the jumble must be studied for the plan to emerge. Then you see the sliding doors, the neatly hidden lights in the wall and under the table connected to barely visible switches marked bright and dusky, the tables and waiters and spigots that materialize from the wall, the machines in the subway that sell you a ticket and then punch it, the disappearing chairs, and the silent trains you board with the help of the disembodied arm of a man who is hired to push people aboard. At seven o'clock in the evening when the stores close, two girls in uniform appear at the door; they bow, say 'Thank you' and 'Come again' to each customer, and they are back in the morning. At the enormous Isetan Department Store in Shinjuku, the groups of employees standing by display counters say, 'Good morning' to the first customers, making them feel like stock-holders. Everything works: the place spins with polite invention.

On a department-store wall there are forty-eight colour televisions, an impressive display of electronics, and, though even forty-eight images of a little Japanese politician giving a speech in living colour do not make him Winston Churchill, the array reveals the Japanese taste for gadgetry. There must be something in the Japanese character that saves them from the despair Americans feel in similar throes of consuming. The American, gorging himself on merchandise, develops a sense of guilty self-consciousness; if the Japanese have these doubts they do not show them. Perhaps hesitation is not part of the national character, or perhaps the ones who hesitate are trampled by the crowds of shoppers -that natural selection that capitalist society practises against the reflective. The strong impression I had was of a people who acted together because of a preconceived plan: a people programmed. You see them queuing automatically in the subway, naturally forming lines at ticket counters and machines, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the people all have printed circuits. But my assessment changed with time and I began to see people struggling against order in these subway lines: as soon as the train drew in and the doors flashed open, many people who had waited silently for a long time in an orderly line broke ranks and began shoving and flailing their parcels and throwing themselves at the door.