Osaka Diaries: A Salaryman's Wakeup Call

Kyoto Station (above) and Nara temples (below)

The Kintetsu Limited Express sped along the snow-dusted tracks, following a path that cuts across the Kansai region like a Katana. The 25-mile route connects Nara, a temple-dotted ancient city guarded by black-robed Buddhist priests and wild deers, and Kyoto, where the foot soldiers of Nintendo and Kyocera negotiate traffic with the tour buses streaming into the Imperial Palace and the Kiyomizu Dera temple.

I sat comfortably on a warm seat (warmed, mind you, not by the body heat of the previous passenger but by the temperature control beneath the seat), diligently listening to the station names called out by the conductor. There was, I thought, a certain poetry in the sound of the names themselves, divorced from their meanings: the childlike repetition in Tambabashi, the flowery Takeda, the tender-textured Fushimi, and the Geisha-like Jujo.
 
On the opposite bench sat a salaryman, making up for the long hours he'd had to endure the night before with a quick nap in transit. On his shoulders hung a wrinkled overcoat, a poor substitute for the blanket his wife might have draped over him if he were in his own bed. Above him a hand-holding ring swung gently, like a noose tempting him to flee the cycle of doldrums with a spectacular act of self-destruction.

An hour before, while transferring from the Osaka Loop line that services regular commuters, I came face to face with a swarm of dark suits, surging forward, crashing into the ticket gates like an infantry undertaking a downhill charge. This was Japan's economic muscle, the rank and file of the Keiretsus. 

The salaryman and I didn't cross paths often, for good reason. On vacation in Osaka, I slept in, nursed my burakku kohi (black coffee) in the morning, and fumbled my way through a guidebook toward notable temples in the late afternoon. He, on the other hand, must show up bright and early at the glass castle or steel tower of his corporate overlord, ready to do battle by the time I was finishing my toast.

Late at night, while I snuggled in my own room with the mangas I'd borrowed from the guest house's library (I couldn't read Japanese, so I conjured up my own plots to make sense of the illustrations), the salaryman would have been drowning himself in Asahi beer, sharing chicken gizzards with his boss at some Yakitori bar out of a sense of obligation. Then, too drunk to go home or too late to catch the last train, he might spend the night in a capsule hotel, squeezed into a dryer-like pocket with a built-in TV. By the time he wakes up, the unchanging patterns of his days return with clockwork regularity. When I wake up, my day was a blank slate, open for a leisurely stroll or a two-hour lunch at the noodle place around the corner.

Earlier, I crossed path with a deer in Nara Park. The creature--one of the hundreds that roam free here--strode onto the path toward the Kofukuji temple and paused, posing against the austere wood-beamed five-story pagoda and the slopes of Mount Wakakusa. A shock of red leaves framed the animal, considered a messenger of the Shinto gods. It regarded me with the indifference of a mountain or a river. In the depth of its dark eyes I saw the same stillness one finds at the bottom of an unfathomable well or in the expanse of the blue sky.

Kyoto was the end of the line. Several blue-suited conductors in caps walked the length of the train, pausing to bow before and after entering each car. One of them roused the salaryman who was asleep. That, too, was done with the same ritualized reverence of a Buddhist monk lighting an incense, and enviable efficiency of a shopkeeper packing up a box of Yatsuhasi sweets for a customer.


Delicate women in kimonos--courtesans robed in cranes and chrysanthemums--glided past me. Suppressed giggles escaped from a few schoolgirls saddled with backpacks, decorated with stickers of pink rabbits and cute kittens. Families rushed to the glass window to watch the snowfall outside. Some lone travelers tried to take photos, using selfie sticks to hold and remotely operate their smartphones. Unfazed by the silver flowers raining down from heaven, the salaryman shuffled past the crowd. He pulled up his overcoat's collars, breathed out puffs of crystallized anxiety, then disappeared in the direction of the Kyoto Tower.

Can the salaryman still taste the green-tea powder in his sweets, I wondered? Does he ever watch the sun sinking into the smoky woods from the open deck of the Kiyomizu Dera? Would he dare decline his boss's invitation to a weekend golf game in favor of a quiet evening with his family in a lantern-lit village? His calendar, I imagined, must look like the color-coded schedule of tour buses published inside the Tourist Information Center.

As I pulled out my iPhone to connect to the Tourist Center's free public WiFi network, I glanced at my own Outlook calendar. To my satisfaction, a row of blue-coded days marked my vacation, stretching out and spilling into the next week. No conference call, no WebEx meeting, just a series of empty days as blue as the Osaka sky.

But that, I soon had to admit, was an illusion. My vacation, like the Kintetsu train, did have a hard stop. In time, when it reached the end of the line, I too would be roused from my incensed stillness and pushed back into the grinds of workaday life. My schedule, too, would become as regimented as the salaryman's. Once I return to my duties, the demands of the enterprises large and small that I'm attached to will creep back into my calender, slowly chipping away the open blue days till there's nothing left but a checklist and a timetable.

My freedom, as a true Zen master might point out, is temporal, as limited as the 2.5 square miles sanctuary in Nara where the deers are allowed to wander. Outside these confines, all the unavoidable necessities of making a living detracts one from the sheer act of living.

I looked at the wild deer, and saw the life I aspire to lead. But I looked at the salaryman, and saw who I feared I had already become.

I'm looking for a train without a schedule, departing from a small hill station, going to a sacred place that knows no deadline. On that train, I'm told, the salaryman finds poetry in a monk sweeping the temple ground, tastes divinity in every slab of meat floating in his Ramen broth, and licks the sunshine that floods the field of life.

Can anybody tell me where to board?

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