Honest, We’re not in the Japanese Red Army

     I’m still not quite sure how it came about, but I once ended up travelling around Korea with three Japanese men and two Pakistanis. I was on my third trip to Japan at the time, and had already spent three years there. My Japanese visa needed to be changed, and I had to go to Korea to do it. I decided to take the overnight ferry from Shimonoseki to Pusan.

     Most of the other passengers seemed to be middle-aged Korean men who were suffering from sea-sickness. The Japanese and Pakistani men stood out almost as much as I did, and somehow we all got to talking. We started off with seasickness (none of us had it, for which we were heartily thankful), then after we’d exhausted that, we moved on to Japanese-Korean relations, the advantages and disadvantages of living in Japan, and language learning in general. We were all students of foreign languages and we all spoke at least some Japanese – after a fashion –  and even after we got off the ferry some eight hours later, we were still going strong. By this time, I had developed a crush on one of the Japanese lads, so I decided to tag along with the group. I had nothing better to do, and they didn’t seem to mind.

     It turned out that none of us had firm travel plans let alone reservations. All we had was a vague idea of tooling around Pusan, maybe heading up to Kyongju, the ancient capital, then up to Seoul and back down to Pusan again, staying in inns – yogwam – or perhaps youth hostels, along the way. The fact that we didn’t have any reservations or carefully planned itineraries didn’t bother us in the least: we all agreed that travelling was a lot more fun that way.

     The Japanese men, Hiroshi, Shu and Manabu, were a few years younger than I and all law students. Deeply aware of Japan’s history of aggression in Korea, they were keen to learn Korean and start having meaningful interactions with ordinary Koreans as soon as possible. The two Pakistanis, Abdullah and Mohammed, were cousins. I didn’t much like Abdullah: he was a flash, shallow fellow who bragged excessively about the fast-and-free lifestyle he had been enjoying in Tokyo for the past two years. He had a two-pack-a-day smoking habit and a penchant for Scotch whisky. His broken Japanese was so fast-paced that we all had trouble understanding him, but he made not the slightest effort to slow down or monitor his speech. Mohammed, his cousin, was serious and quiet. He had only been in Japan for two months, so his Japanese ability was still minimal, but he spoke so slowly and carefully that we tended to understand him better than Abdullah.

     I got on Abdullah’s nerves right from the start. He was thirty-five, I thought I heard him say, and because he had a few white hairs and a certain rather worn, haggard look to him, I did not question this, though the shallowness of his conversation definitely suggested a certain immaturity. Later in the evening, I made some reference to his comparatively advanced age and he was all outraged denial. Not thirty-five! he spluttered. Twenty-five!  Watching him polish off a large bottle of duty-free whisky and brag that he drank that much every night, I made a mental note never to drink the hard stuff again. Mohammed sat quietly and watched his cousin, a sad, pained look on his face.

     It was summer, and swelteringly hot even in the morning. Stepping off the ferry, we were hit by a blast of hot, exhaust-laden air. As we tried to find our bearings, the smell of kimchee – Korean pickled cabbage with a strong garlic component – was easily as overpowering as the heat.  People smiled at us in a good-humored way; they elbowed each other as if to say Ah look – foreign travellers – let’s be kind! We passed women selling watches, students clutching book-bags, businessmen in suits.  In the oppressive heat, I really felt for the businessmen in suits.  Straight away, we made the decision to save Pusan for our return trip. We would take a bus up to Kyongju first: perhaps it would be cooler.

     It wasn’t. Not only was Kyongju just as hot, the two-hour bus ride there was exhausting and my window wouldn’t open. We were all big on economizing, so instead of taking the air-conditioned express bus, we’d opted for the cheaper local. What with my fixed-shut window I soon regretted this: if the heat was suffocating, the cigarette smoke practically made me swoon. Every single Korean man on that bus had a cigarette in his mouth and if he didn’t, he was either lighting one up or tapping one out of a packet. Amazingly, none of the Japanese boys smoked and neither did Mohammed, but Abdullah more than made up for the rest of us. 

    On the bus to Kyongju, we learned that Mohammed had been sent by his family to try and encourage his wayward cousin to return to the straight-and-narrow path – and to Pakistan – so far with no success whatsoever. Abdullah’s Japanese visa had expired and, like me, he’d decided to get it renewed in Korea. Mohammed felt that he had no choice but to follow his cousin wherever he went and do what he could to try and keep him out of trouble. By this point, I think he’d pretty much given up on getting his cousin to reform and was focussing more on damage control.

     It was while we were waiting for a bus to take us to our yogwam in Kyongju that my Japanese friends and I realized just how profoundly different the two cousins were. We were standing in front of a shop, on a corner, when Mohammed suddenly looked ill and passed his hands over his face.

  ‘What is it?’ we asked, concerned. Mohammed kept one hand over his face and gestured weakly with the other. We saw that we were standing in front of a butcher’s shop, the display case full of hanging carcasses. Pork. We reckoned it was pork because of the pigs’ heads:  at least eight of them leering out at us in pale rubbery pinkness. Abdullah was scornful of his cousin’s squeamishness. He’d seen plenty more pork than that, he exclaimed, and it didn’t bother him a bit.  He’d even eaten it. Big deal!  Mohammed looked as if he were going to burst into tears.

     At the reception desk in our yogwam, a Japanese backpacker gave us the eye. ‘You’re not all together are you?’ he wanted to know. Manabu, one of the Japanese lads, acknowledged that we were.

   ‘Her too?’ the backpacker queried, pointing his chin at me.

   ‘Me too,’ I confirmed. 

The backpacker puffed out his cheeks and stared at us all again before posing his next question.

‘I don’t suppose you’d tell me, but you’re not with the Japanese Red Army, are you?’

We all laughed and shook our heads, but over the next few days it was obvious that the backpacker was convinced that we were. He would take discreet peeks at our reading material and nonchalantly wander by as we were talking.  We must have been a huge disappointment to him: I was working my way through a Japanese girls’ novel for junior high students and the rest of my companions confined themselves to Korean phrase books or newspapers. No Little Red Books, no Communist manifestos or even mild socialist literature, and although we did talk about politics, our language limitations meant that our conversation was never on a very high level.

      Despite the fact that I made a point of keeping to my own room, Mohammed clearly disapproved of me – a single woman travelling about on her own, a Westerner with bare legs and arms. He spoke very little to any of us, in fact, as he doggedly trailed after us. At night he would sit miserably nursing his glass of barley tea while his cousin ordered bottle after bottle of beer.

   During the day Mohammed accompanied us on our excursions to museums, burial tumuli and temples, dutifully reading the inscriptions and explanations, but you could see his heart was not in it. He didn’t want to be in Korea; he took little interest in his surroundings. All he wanted to do, quite obviously, was get his cousin straightened out and go back to Pakistan – a forlorn hope, as he certainly must have realized.

     Hiroshi, Shu and Manabu sat with their Korean phrase books and practiced for hours on end. How much is this ink stone? they recited together. Might I have some more kimchee? they chorused. Abdullah had no intention of learning any Korean. ‘If they can’t speak English, I’ll find someone who can!’ he scoffed.

     On our last night in Pusan, we went out for a big meal together. We ate meat (not pork) and garlic roasted over a grill with plenty of kimchee and washed it all down with beer. (Mohammed brooded quietly over his cold barley tea.) I felt a little sad:  I’d found out that Manabu, the object of my admiration, had a girlfriend back in Japan.  

   All of us were thrilled that we had managed to learn a little Korean, especially Shu, who had found a history textbook for high school students and, with the aid of a dictionary, was slogging his way through the Japanese colonization of Korea. Abdullah, however, made it clear that he had other things on his mind than language-learning.

     ‘Tonight I will find a woman,’ he announced. ‘I have heard that there are many, down by the harbour, and they like real men, men with hair.’ Here he gestured proudly at his bony, but indisputably hairy, chest, and discretely looked around to make sure that all three of the chest-hairless Japanese fellows had heard. ‘I have heard of a place where the women are very beautiful, very cheap –’ he leered, completely oblivious of the looks of shock and embarrassment on all our faces.

    I stood up at this point and announced my intention to retire for the evening. I fixed Abdullah with my sternest, most school-marmish look and told him to finish his sentence after I left the room.

     All the way back to Shimonoseki, Mohammed was my firm friend and ally.