Atomic Sushi

The academic new year started on April 1, International Fool’s Day. One brilliant morning a few days later, the wind caressing and the sky a deep blue, I made my way to Tokyo University’s department of philosophy as a new visiting professor. I found myself fondly, and perhaps a little vainly, imagining the rousing welcome I might be extended by my future colleagues and students, but what I actually encountered was more like a crash course in the nightmarish excess of Japanese bureaucracy – that noose around the neck of the Japanese nation which it so tolerates, even craves. For before I could be allowed to do anything so incidental to a professor’s life as exchange ideas with colleagues and teach students and worry about the curriculum, it was first my inviolable obligation to become a real person in the Japanese sense by compressing my life onto a bureaucrat’s hard disk, gaining my virtual reality.
The administrators began by demanding that I sign a declaration promising to be a loyal and honourable servant of the Japanese State. Submitting to this demand immediately unleashed a torrent of further requests. Among other things, I needed health tests to certify that my body fluids were unobjectionable and my body solids in good order, a declaration from my landlady about my accommodation costs, a certificate proving that I had attended primary school, a document registering me as an alien, and a diagram to illustrate the exact route I intended to take when travelling from home to university, and then from university to home again.
I hastened to provide the last of these on the spot, in the naive hope of stemming the bureaucratic onslaught by a relentless display of loyal goodwill. Like most appeasement strategies, it was doomed to failure. Three officials bent over me, intently scrutinizing my efforts to produce the vital diagram. After a moment or two they started to confer. The tone was disapproving. Politely, but strictly, I was told that although the drawing of a single arrow was an appropriate method of depicting my train journey into central Tokyo, it certainly wouldn’t suffice when it came to representing the walk from my house to the station; indeed, for such a purpose it became clear that a single arrow was not only inappropriate, but derisory. That part of the route would need to be more accurately drawn, and to scale, so that the exact spatial relations of the streets would be clear. I was advised to ask my landlady to provide this map, since a foreigner who had made the journey only once would be unable to achieve the necessary precision.
The matter of the health tests had been ongoing for several months. While still in London, I had received an e-mail spelling out in detail what was required from me, from stomach and lung X-rays to blood, urine and faecal analyses. My local doctor had dispatched a clean bill of health to Tokyo long before I arrived, but the state-employed medical technicians who pored over it hadn’t been fobbed off by his summary report. Now, on my first day in my new position, I was asked to submit to a battery of follow-up investigations: for example, I was to provide a sample of my stools for comprehensive chemical analysis. This sample, I was told, should be obtained by carefully scraping a turd along its entire length – “not just one centimeter, Dr May”. We also came to a consensus that I would scrape the turd around its girth, at three equidistant points. To keep me on the straight and narrow I was supplied with a little coloured diagram that graphically illustrated the most effective!
way to undertake this complex operation, in which a smiling tellytubby-like figure deftly sampled something that looked like a withered brown banana with a device resembling the little plastic spoon on a tub of ice-cream at the cinema. I burst out laughing, not just at their anally-retentive pedantry, but also at my fellow professor who looked steadily more tortured by the task of rendering all these technical instructions into English. I wish I hadn’t laughed. I shouldn’t have laughed. It was no laughing matter, as I was firmly told by the administrator.