There's Gold On His Menu

We are all, when you get down to it, engaged in the same business, that of turning matter into spirit. We eat animal and vegetable, and it becomes laughter or sorrow or anger or fear. We drink wine, and it becomes song. For a few of us, the process is simple and clean and the result is direct. These are the happy people. For others the conveyor belt pauses or lurches and the conversion gets stalled. The spirit comes out crumpled, or pinched, or stale from the delay.

That said, let's travel to a small island country the size of Montana, where 119 million such processing plants awaken every morning. The spirit there has little space to flex or run or ride the breeze, and so the rules of conduct must be different there than in, say, Montana.

It's a cold January morning, and on the streets of Tokyo the people hustle to work. Many are wearing white masks because of the dissemination of germs. At street corners they wait for the traffic light to change at the spot where two footprints painted in white on the sidewalk tell them to. When they turn to each other and speak, they say, "Shitsurei shimasu" (Sorry to disturb you). "Shitsurei shimashita" (Sorry I have disturbed you), they may say when they part.

In a small hive, honeycombed for 119 million, workers must know at all times where to go and how they must behave. Cooperation and loyalty, homogeneity, courtesy and formality are prized; individuality would mean chaos and the death of the hive.

Just off a busy Tokyo intersection, in a dojo (martial-arts gymnasium) for the city's policemen, nearly 100 men in loose, white, heavy cotton outfits and black belts run slow circles on a floor covered with padded mats. The All-Japan judo team has assembled for practice, oblivious to the screams that pierce the ceiling: One floor above, creatures dressed in dark, flowing skirts, hoods, caged masks and heavy, quilted vests are having at each other with kendo sticks and unleashing the cry of the damned.

On the players' second lap, a barrel of a man enters. His face is so round and radiant it reminds you of a 4-year-old's drawing of the sun. His body has the happy roundness of the stuffed bear on the 4-year-old's bed. His hands and feet are thick and wide and calloused, his ears cauliflowered from 17 years of cuffings during practice. The man bows in respect to the dojo, and the others immediately make space for him to join. His shoulders swaying with each shift of his weight, his arms hanging out from his bulk like some great bird in midflap, the greatest judo player of all jogs his laps.

This is Yasuhiro Yamashita (ya-MAH-shita), his sport's first world superstar, undefeated in 194 matches over the last seven years, winner of four gold medals in the world championships, All-Japan champion for the last eight years—and soon-to-be gold medalist in Los Angeles.

Of the flowers, cherry blossoms. Of the warriors, Yamashita.

"...and so I'm eating at an expensive restaurant with three other men and the bill comes to $1,000. I've eaten $700 of it myself, and besides beer I've drunk a whole bottle of sake. Like that bottle over there [Yamashita points to a bottle a foot and a half tall]. On the way home, I start to feel a little sick...."

At the command of his sensei (judo or martial-arts master), Yamashita forms ranks with the others on the mat and drops to his knees. He bows to the dojo with its wooden Shinto shrine hanging on the wall at one end and then bows to his sensei.