NSNETNOV LATITUDE 33

                                                        THE CALLIGRAPHY LESSON

    Charlie knew he wasn’t doing it right.  He felt Mashiko’s presence behind him, and then she was guiding his hand, lifting it, till the brush was perpendicular to the paper.  “Ichi, Ni, San,”  she said, guiding his hand through the three main strokes. Those were the strokes, Charlie knew, that became a syllable with meaning.

     He never missed his calligraphy class even though he took some teasing from the guys at the news office, who couldn't understand his wanting to take a "handwriting" class.  But for Charlie, those Wednesday afternoons became a way for his mind to play with the characters he formed.  And he liked the nonstop English version of postwar Japan that chattered forth from Mashiko each time they got together for a lesson.  Perhaps some day he'd write a book about her life.
        
    Today, Mashiko was talking about the compensation that the government was going to pay to Japanese,  who had been placed in internment camps during the war.  Her husband, a U.S. citizen, had just received notification of possible reparations.   Mashiko explained what she would do if the U.S. government gave her husband twenty thousand dollars.

     “I would send some of it to my family in Japan, she said, “because of the hardship they went during the war and after it.  It was the government that wanted war and territory.  My father, an officer, lost everything in the war.  Barely escaping execution, he was imprisoned for a long time.  Back in our village, we had no food and the yen was worth nothing.  What can you buy with nothing?  We nearly starved.  All we ate was sweet potatoes.   My sister never married. Most of the men in our village were sent to the Philippines.  They never came back.”  Then she said, laughing quietly, “Maybe we should be getting the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars from Japan for putting up with the war.”
 
    “Do those characters several times now,” Mashiko said.  And Charlie did, listening.

    “I was lucky,” she said, “I met Akira Yamada.  His family had been out of the camps some years by then, and in l946, he traveled to Japan to start a pottery business.  The ancient Shigaraki kiln was near our village.  So one day, I was lining up our shoes outside, and he walked by. I wondered what he was doing there.   I bowed, and he bowed, and we began talking.  My mother came out then, and she invited him in for tea, and we kept talking, and finally, we got together. We married, stayed one year while his business got going, and came to the United States in 1947, and he brought his business with him.  At first, all the pottery was marked “Occupied Japan.” Then each piece sold in the United States just had “Made in Japan” on it.   Akira is happy, retired.  And here in California, we have a good life – a family -- children and grandchildren.

    Charlie couldn't listen to the rest of what she was saying.  He had to concentrate on how to get his brain and hand to work together.   He moved his brush, practicing strokes in the air before him. The power of the written word.  But in Kanji.  His downstroke looked like it was running away from the character. He focused on the strokes for “hito" or “person.”  Thank Heavens he didn't have to learn all of the Japanese language to take calligraphy.  He'd be in remedial Japanese for sure.  This way he was holding his own, keeping up, practicing his characters every Thursday evening after he turned in his Saturday column.  It was a relaxing reprieve from, what he called, his“heavy-duty” column.  He knew his was an unusual job --  keeping the paper honest.  Hard work.  If there were a complaint that something wasn't true, say a person’s character was maligned, he'd get to the bottom of it, and not just write the retraction.  He’d also get on his hobby horse of journalistic responsibility and deliver important, at least he thought them so, pieces on what makes responsible journalism and what makes it important for a reporter to have empathy for the person he writes about.  That was his last column.  His editor expected lots of flak over that one. Said it should generate lots of letters to the editor.

      But Charlie was waiting for his major story to be printed.  The one that would really blast the print media itself, and take it to task for altering people's lives, and actually creating reality instead of reporting it.   Lots of reporters were quick to tout each headline as gospel truth, with a litany of facts to back them up, but by the way they structured  headlines and articles, they actually created gossip and opinion that became real.  But he was discovering the truth of it all.

    University researchers had helped him scan hundreds of titles and newspaper articles.  He had come to an alarming conclusion:  that the media, like the government, fed on its own power, and could now be seen as a bulging carnivorous beast that devoured people's lives.  The media thrived on telling half-truths to go with lurid headlines.  Always something selectively missing of the total action and event. What had started as a feeling about the salaciousness of news reporting had become a jarring reality for him. It would be his piece de resistance, and in four weeks, it would come out in the national section.

    Mashiko was asking him to do something.  She repeated it.  “Charlie, you are not holding your brush correctly, you need to hold it just so, then push down here."  She pushed down.

     "Then lift and turn."  He lifted and turned with her hand helping him. "Then, downstroke to the end, san."  She pulled his hand down, and lifted it as best she could, but his last stroke still ran on, instead of tapering at the correct angle.

     “It should be a smooth rhythm,” she said.

      Mashiko talked on about the war.  "My father used to tell us about how the news of the war was censored and manipulated, and how he didn't even know what was happening on different fronts or at home.  Often, he had to guess.  Most of the time he said he guessed correctly, but he said that some of the others didn't make the right decisions.  They'd send people to fight a battle in a certain place, only to find that they were outnumbered and poorly equipped. Supplies were low in l944, but the papers never said anything.  They kept haranguing people to contribute to the war effort by sacrificing their gold, and other metal goods to make into weapons.  All of our precious heirlooms went to be melted down.  Nothing was spared.  Even our ancestral samurai swords from the sixteenth century disappeared.
 
     She shook her head.  “It was a crime for us not to know what was happening,” she said.  “The war was going so badly.  How could my father be an officer and not know that?  Or maybe he knew and wasn’t allowed to tell us.  Somebody should have said something to us.  News coming by radio or telegraph wasn’t good enough.”

     Making more ink, Mashiko rubbed the inkstick back and forth on the stone.  Charlie could see that these letters today would not be winning any Japanese penmanship award.  He took a sip of green tea.
     "Mashiko, I am not doing well today.  I must have too much on my mind.  Let me ask you, do you think that a newspaper should have to print everything that happens during a war?”
      She hesitated only a minute.  Her head bobbed up and down, and she bowed at the same time.  "Yes, everything must be there, there can be no secrets from the people."

     "But do you mean that really?  I mean, some things ought not to be printed, certainly if there is a war, you don’t want to give the enemy your strategies,  but Charlie saw that he was pre-empted by the head still bobbing up and down, and the brush placed in his hand again.

     "Now, one, two, three," she said.  “Everything, Charlie, must be open, otherwise, how will the people know what is going on?”     Charlie watched his hand make a character, the first, second and third stroke.  At last he was getting this one.

     "But what if people aren't honest in their reporting like in Japan and the stories aren't true, do you want this avalanche of information reported, and then misinterpreted?” he asked. “And if you have all this information tumbling over itself, who will kept the reporters honest?’

    Charlie hoped to get Mashiko to give in a little to his point of view.

    But she wouldn’t.  "Yes,” she said, “it is important for all the news to be out there, but then" she smiled, and said, “there are people like you to keep the press honest, you are the ombudsman for the press, and it's up to you to keep other reporters honest."

     Charlie sighed.  The present was not the past, or maybe it was.  Mashiko was starting another character.  A new one for him.

    "I am an experiment,” he said.  “Not all newspapers have someone like me to keep the facts straight.  I am a rarity."

    His brush and hand were guided through this set of strokes.  This one was more complicated.  It was "na" for name.
 
     "What is in a name?" Mashiko asked.  "So very much, you know. If I hadn't had the same name as my father, I would have been all right after the war, but I did, it is a terrible legacy left to me, from an officer who lost the war.”

     Charlie listened.  This concern of one person like Mashiko for names and connections, part of anybody’s story. He’d start his next piece with a title like "Making Connections:  Finishing the Story," and he'd talk about half-stories being half-truths and that without the whole story, reporters are nothing, just gossip mongers, never getting the story right, sending words from one person to another through print--miniature lies that eventually scatter across the page like Japanese characters being read horizontally instead of vertically.  Totally incomprehensible.

     His character for "na" looked about average he thought.  Not like Mashiko's.  He tried one character by himself while Mashiko made more tea.  Then he looked down at his watch.

     "Excuse me, I must be going."  He picked up the brush, rinsed it carefully, made a point on it and wrapped it in his cloth holder, and placed the inkstick in a plastic bag.  Then he picked up the inkstone and got up to wash it out in the kitchen, but Mashiko took it quickly from him and washed it and dried it before he could say anything.

     "Mashiko, it’s the name that matters after all," he said.  “It’s what we call something, the label, and how we describe that label is important.  Maybe that’s the connection."

     Mashiko bowed.  "It is the person and the name, the “jin” and “na,” and it is how we are all interrelated."

    They headed to the door, and Charlie put on his shoes.  Mashiko had closed the door, and Charlie walked to his car.  It’s not enough to be accurate in a story, it’s also important to be empathetic.  First, the article on connections, then the article on feelings.  He would have to spend a lot of time with each of them. He had to get it right. He couldn’t bang this one out in a few hours.  His hand made the strokes for “jin” and “na” in the air, then he turned on the engine.  As it started, he realized that he was sketching his article out in his mind.  Now it would be a matter of making the writing precise.  For some reason, he could never quite explain to the office folks, he felt relaxed, solving a puzzle as he drove home.  Two characters in one hour.  Not bad for a beginner.