Furusato

A Japanese Division Chief and I
are perched above the ruins of the Bronx;
our rented Town Car trapped on the Expressway,
elevated, air-conditioned, motionless;
and Mr. Kondo stares through the window
at burnt-out tenements and savaged streets.
Figures scrabble through the rubble, hunting copper.
There must be an accident.  Or construction.
What happened? Shit happens. Shikata ga nai,
the Japanese will say, “It can’t be helped.”
“I’m sorry for the dead at Hiroshima,”
the Emperor said, in ‘75,
at the first press conference he ever held,
“but there was a war. It could not be helped.”
Shikata ga nai. Shikata ga nai,
we shrug and mutter tonelessly.

 This should have been a clean shot to the City,
a city boy’s display of city skills –
the Merritt from the factory in Connecticut,
the Hutchinson, the Bruckner, then the fun –
the secret turns, the side streets to the Willis Bridge,
the switch to Lex to dodge the crowded Drive –
then slide a quick block right on Ninety-Sixth,
and roll down glorious Park Avenue
to the Waldorf and its ranks of Japanese.

 But something has gone massively awry –
has Godzilla surfaced in the East River,
sweeping Fords and Chevys off the bridges?
We fester in stalled traffic on the Bruckner.
as my passenger frowns at the South Bronx,
at blocks and blocks of boarded-up windows,
at the bold “X”s painted on raw plywood,
and makes involuntary sucking noises.
I wonder what it is that triggers me
even as I lean in, poke at Mr. Kondo,
and make a sweeping gesture at the landscape:
Watakushi no furusato desu.
“This is my furusato.  My home town.” 
Furusato! That loaded, ancient word.
This is where my people lived, the place
that we are from; my ancestors lie here.
The sucked-air sound was louder now.

 “You don’t need me”, a Tokyo attorney said
about the purchase of a factory site
New Hampshire-born, he’d made Japan his home.
“You don’t need me,“ he said with Yankee truth,
“and neither do you need a title search.
The Japanese have been right here forever.
They didn’t steal their land from the Indians,
everything’s recorded in the register,
and everybody knows where everybody’s from.” 

I could have said to Kondo-san that I was raised
not far from here, but in another world.
On Yom Kippur my father stood outside the shul,
and shnoored the tickets that he could not buy. 
The three Walsh girls wore thick plaid skirts,
I heard the middle one became a nun.
But furusato is where life begins,
and today life started on the Bruckner Elevated
sitting in the crappy afternoon traffic,
waiting for Godzilla to emerge.

 “Furusato,” Mr. Kondo echoed,
gazing sideways at me, and then the Bronx,
and, almost imperceptibly, he bowed –
and bowing, sitting, slid an inch away.  

Originally published in New Walk