More than a convenience

The local store is the heart of community kindness

TO live in Japan without eating Japanese food seems an advanced kind of heresy. my sushi-loving friends in California regard me as a lost cause; my housemates in Japan simply shrug and see this as ultimate confirmation — me dragging at some lasagne in a plastic box while they gobble down dried fish — that I belong to an alien species.

I grew up in England, on boarding-school food, no less, I tell them; I like Japan at some level deeper than the visible (or edible). they look away and try not to scream. yet the habit that has won me complete excommunication on both sides of the world is my readiness to eat (twice a day) from Lawson, my tiny local convenience store in the old Japanese capital of Nara.

A convenience store speaks to many of us of all that is questionable in modern Japan: a soulless, synthetic, one-size-fits-all lifestyle that the efficiency-loving country has perfected. it marks, most would say, the end of family, of tradition, of community and the advent of a new, homogenised, even genetically modified era.

The convenience store is certainly a model of Japan in miniature: the triumph of function over fuss and ease over embarrassment. Just as you can buy bottles of whisky, porno mags and even (it is said) used pieces of female underwear in vending machines found in Buddhist temples and the remotest parts of the countryside, so you can all but live in convenience stores.

I pay my phone bills and send my packages at the local branch of the national Lawson chain; I buy my bus cards there and tickets for Neil Young concerts. yet the first law of Japan, even in Lawson, is that nothing is what it seems, and that you can find all the cultures of the world here, made Japanese and strange. Here, in the four aisles of my local store, are the McVitie’s chocolate digestives of my youth in England (turned into bite-sized afterthoughts the size of 50c coins).

Here are Milky Bar white chocolates, converted into bullet-sized pellets. Here are Mentos in shades of lime and grape, cans of Royal Milk Tea with strawberry flavouring, and the Smarties I used to collect as a boy, repackaged as Marble Chocolate. Were Marcel Proust to come to Lawson, he would find his madeleines daily, around every corner, but made smaller, sweeter and mnemonically new.

It’s common to hear that Japan has created a promiscuous anthology of the world’s best styles (a bride on her wedding day here wears classical Shinto hood, Audrey Hepburn-worthy white wedding dress and little black Chanel dress, all in quick succession). And the convenience store is the epicentre of this.

Tubs of Earl Grey ice-cream, sticks of mangosteen chewing gum, Kit Kat bars in green-tea flavour: they are all here in abundance (though, in fashion-victimised Japan, no sooner have I developed a fondness for Kiss Mints in Etiquette flavour than they’ve been replaced by ice-creams in the shape of watermelon slices).

And even the smallest chocolate bar comes with an English-language inscription that, in the Japanese way, makes no sense whatsoever, yet confers on everything a perfume of enigmatic fairytale: "a lovely and tiny twig," says my box of Koeda Cappuccino chocolates. "it is a heroine’s treasured chocolate born in the forest."

In modern Japan, the convenience store is taken to be the spiritual home of the boys in hip-hop shorts and the girls in shockingly yellow hair, with artificial tans. The door of my local Lawson has badges to denote police surveillance and armed guards nearby, and where the great 20th-century novelist Junichiro Tanizaki praised shadows (nuance, ambiguity, the lure of the half-seen) as the essence of the Japan he loved, Lawson speaks for a new fluorescent, post-human, even anti-Japanese, future.

And yet, in the many years I’ve lived on and off in my suburb, the one person who has come to embody for me all the care for detail and solicitude I love in Japan is, in fact, the lady at the cash register in Lawson. Small, short-haired, and perpetually harried, Hirata-san races to the back of the store to fetch coupons for me that will give me the equivalent of 10c off my Moisture Dessert. she bows to the local gangster who leaves his Bentley running outside the store, and comes in with his high-heeled moll to claim an X-rated magazine. When occasionally I don’t show up for six or seven hours, she sends, through my housemates, a free bag of french fries to revive me.

The Japanese are so good at keeping up appearances that few signs are ever evident of the recent recessions. but over the years I have seen the poor woman’s husband (the store’s manager) open his doors around the clock, and take the graveyard shift himself. The place started, perhaps in desperation, to stock Tequila Sunrise cocktails in a can, and little bottles of wine.

Soon even the couple’s two high-school age sons were being pressed into (unpaid, I am sure) service.

It’s no easier to understand Japan through Western terms than it is, I think, to eat noodles with a knife and fork. yet it’s been evident to me for some time that the crush of the anonymous world lies out in the temple-filled streets, but the heart of the familiarity, the sense of neighbourhood, the simple kindness that brought me to Japan lies in the convenience store.

Not many months ago, writing an article on the concept of paradise, I surmised that my modest neighbourhood could be improved upon only by the advent of a cinema but, given the laws of human longing and limitation, such an arrival would probably mean the end of my favourite convenience store. be careful of what you write. Days before my article came out, a sign appeared on my local Lawson, announcing it was going out of business.

Almost everyone in the neighbourhood was shaken, but no one knew what to do (how to express your gratitude to a convenience store?). We’d watched the owners’ sons grow up while their parents served bags of Chicken McNuggets in three spicy flavours.

I went home and found a set of elegant bowls I’d bought in case of a sudden need for a wedding present. I walked back to the store and found my favourite caregiver. they were going to be transferred to a far-off shop in the countryside, she said; she feared for her kids. she was even afraid of going out there herself. Then I handed over the box and she realised why I had come. she began to waver for a moment, then turned away from me and put something in the microwave. true Japanese to the end, she wanted to protect me from her tears.

This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared in The new York Times.

<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/travel/destination-japan/more-than-a-convenience/story-e6frg8ux-1225949371782tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/travel/destination-japan/more-than-a-convenience/story-e6frg8ux-1225949371782Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:20:04 GMT 00:00″>More than a convenience

embarrassment, japanese capital, local store, loving friends, nara