I’m ashamed to say that I have made hardly any Japanese friends while living here, but one for whom I have genuine affection is Mr Heaven Valley, even if I don’t manage to meet or even talk to him on the phone very often.
Mr Heaven Valley was assigned as my Japanese teacher when I enrolled in a class having moved to Tokyo in the spring of 2004. At the time, he had recently retired from his job as an engineer and decided on teaching Japanese as something to keep him both socially and intellectually stimulated. To be honest, he wasn’t a particularly good teacher in the conventional sense, but he often invited myself and fellow beginner Mr Vancouver to go hiking and sightseeing, and even after I relocated to Ibaraki, we kept in touch and would meet for days out – at the iris festival in Itako, for instance, or to climb Mt. Takao, which is easily accessible from the centre of Tokyo but a literal and metaphorical breath of fresh air by contrast.
Mr Heaven Valley and I would visit hot springs together, chase elusive views of Mt. Fuji, and eat exotic food (despite my protestations, he always insisted on paying the bill) – the famously poisonous fugu (puffer fish), for example, or kamameshi (a dish of rice, vegetables, and so on cooked at your table in a mini-hot pot over a tealight). And while we were doing so, he would not so much teach me Japanese as use it and allow me to do so in return, thereby providing me not with instruction but immersion, which is a far more enjoyable and effective way of learning.
At one point he attempted to combine his language skills and local knowledge with some like-minded retirees, who began advertising themselves as volunteer tour guides, and when friends of mine came to visit from the UK in 2006, I asked if he could show them around Tokyo for the day. Despite being half his age, they found themselves exhausted by his whistle-stop schedule, and just as much as the fact that I enjoy Mr Heaven Valley’s company and find him easy to talk with about life, death, and everything in between, the quality that really intrigues and astounds me about him is his boundless energy.
We recently met for the first time in over three years and as expected, I was treated to lunch, a meandering tour of various parts of Tokyo, a history lesson, plenty of language practice, and a test of physical endurance. Admittedly, I did walk the five kilometres from Tokyo Station to Roppongi Hills to stretch my legs after the bus trip from Ibaraki, but by the end of the day I had clocked up more than 25,000 steps on my Garmin, and Mr Heaven Valley was by my side for at least 15,000 of them.
The last time we met – and the last time that I saw Mr Vancouver before he moved back to Canada – Mr Heaven Valley mentioned that he thought his wife might be in the early stages of dementia and since then, sadly, her condition has gone downhill, to the point that he is now her full-time carer. A home help comes a couple of times a week and he can leave her in the house on her own for a few hours, during which she will spend most of her time sitting in front of the TV, even though she doesn’t really understand what the programmes are about any more.
In actual fact, Mr Heaven Valley and his wife share their house in the fashionable district of Nakano with their son and his family, but the son is busy with work, the grandchildren are grown up, and Mr Heaven Valley is reluctant to ask his daughter-in-law for help. I asked if he had considered putting his wife in a care home and he said there were some nice ones nearby (a baby boomer who was employed by the same company for his entire working life, I get the feeling he receives a pretty substantial pension), but didn’t want to do so until it was absolutely necessary.
Apart from taking a walk around the neighbourhood every day, his way of letting off steam – what he calls his kakuseizai (覚醒剤/methamphetamine) – is a motorbike that he keeps vowing to give up but can’t quite bring himself to do so. A Japanese model that was originally sold in the US and re-imported, it measures speed and distance in miles instead of kilometres. ‘I was going to sell it when I turned 80,’ he said. ‘Now I’m thinking of selling it when the clock reaches 30,000 miles. It’s done about 28,000, so it’ll only take me a few months, but I’ll probably think of another excuse to keep riding it.’
Mr Heaven Valley came to meet me after I had looked around the exhibition of Tezuka Osamu’s Hi no Tori (Phoenix) at Roppongi Hills – I had assumed we might go together, but he confessed when we met that he had no interest in manga. This being Tokyo, I had been rather excited about finding a good vegan restaurant for lunch and looked at some recommendations online, but after a disorientating half hour or so wandering around the shops, escalators, and gardens at the base of the Roppongi Hills skyscraper and trying to work out where the hell we were on Google Map, settled on takeaway poke bowl salads – his with chicken and mine with black beans.
Having bypassed an Italian coffee festival that was also taking place in Roppongi, he suggested taking a taxi to Hama-rikyu Gardens, where we drank matcha green tea and ate Japanese sweets, surrounded by foreign tourists and in a tea house on wooden legs that reached out over the water from the banks of an ornamental pond. Usually you will see carp in ponds such as this, but the one at Hama-rikyu is tidal and home to smaller, less colourful varieties of fish. The park also featured a moat-like channel in which shōgun and their chums used to hunt wild ducks which had been lured there by domesticated ones trained for the purpose.
Neither the cherry blossom or wisteria were flowering, but the gardens made for a pleasant walk and as we passed between the green-leaved cherry trees, Mr Heaven Valley explained, ‘Tokugawa Yoshimune made hanami (the cherry blossom viewing festival) into an event to keep the ordinary Japanese happy, and most of the cherry trees in Japan are the Yoshino variety, which was cultivated, not native. They deliberately planted them along riverside embankments and dykes so the people looking at them would tramp down the earth, compact it, and make it stronger against flooding.’
Another short cab ride took us to Rainbow Bridge, which had been a big hit with another foreign friend – an American who used to teach Mr Heaven Valley English. The view of the bridge from afar is well known, and it is illuminated at night to stand out against the surrounding high rises and harbours, but few people are aware that you can walk across it, which is what we did – not beside the expressway on top, but an ordinary road on the lower tier.
Peering over the edge of the fence at the waters of Tokyo Bay way below, I wondered if this was a popular suicide spot, as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco used to be.
‘A few years ago young man hijacked a plane,’ said Mr Heaven Valley. ‘For some reason, he wanted the pilot to fly beneath Rainbow Bridge. Fortunately they managed to stop him.’
The walk across and as far as Odaiba-kaihinkōen Station took at least an hour, so we dropped in at a noodle restaurant for Mr Heaven Valley to get some dinner. Thus reinvigorated, he was still going strong as I searched for souvenirs in Tokyo Station and went to the 7-Eleven to buy some food for the bus home – like my friends from the UK all those years ago, this time it was my turn to be exhausted.
Mr Heaven Valley’s two younger brothers recently died within a few months of each other. ‘They both went in the ideal way,’ he said. ‘It was very quick. I’m 83 now and whenever I meet anyone, I always tell them to be prepared for the fact that it may be the last time.’
‘I’m sure you’ll live to be at least 100,’ I said, and I really wasn’t joking. Mr Heaven Valley’s retirement may not be as carefree as it was when we first met, but I am fully confident that I will see him again in Tokyo for more walking, talking, teaching, and learning.
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