TRAVEL TOKYO PROSE

MY HUSBAND and I did everything that tourists are supposed to do in Japan. We caught shy Mount Fuji blushing purple behind the clouds. We dragged our luggage down a thousand tiny steps and through a crowded depot, then lunged into a bullet train without a half second to spare. We squatted beside a leathery-faced man and stared, as he stared, into Kyoto’s “Garden of Nothingness,” trying to understand the sea of swirled white sand and dark stones, but suspecting that we didn’t. We ate our quota of sushi, and we witnessed ceremonial tea.

But more treasured than our several hundred slides, six cotton kimonos, zoom lens, binoculars and cultured-pearl bracelet is the small slice of Japanese spirit we’re now able to recall. In their tiny island nation, where the average apartment measures only 8-by-ll feet, the people exude a tranquillity that has become as stereotypically Japanese as the natives’ love for cameras and blondes. It’s their peace of spirit, their mastery of the art of making small pleasures large, that is so enchanting and so worth the trip to Japan.

As Texans, we admit to an almost genetic propensity for admiring the greatness of bigness, but a tour of Japan is a study in the opposite. Well-tended details are de rigueur. Instead of hubcap-sized slabs of beef and half-pound baked potatoes, Japanese meals routinely are works of art, often garnished with fresh flowers and arranged in the style we Westerners tout as nouveau. Shrubs and trees are groomed into geometric perfection, and white-gloved cab drivers are commonplace. The headrests in Japanese taxis are covered with white lace shams; the upholstery, more often than not, is spotless.

The vocations of the people also reflect their meticulous nature. At our hotel, one young woman’s job was to stand ready to tap her foot on the mat in front of an electrical door to open it as guests approached. On a tour of Tokyo, we noticed another young woman in uniform with only one responsibility: greeting and bowing to passengers as they boarded the bus, then greeting and bowing to them again as they disembarked. In a park, we watched men suspended by ropes painstakingly plucking weeds from between boulders in a massive stone wall. In a three-acre open field, we saw workers squatting with scythes in hand, hacking away at tiny clumps of weeds that a hand mower had left behind.

Most Americans would have a hard time satisfying themselves by attending to so many details. Such fastidiousness might be considered monotonous and unfulfilling. But in Japan, homogeneity breeds the most success. There, we were told, “The nail that sticks up is hammered down,” which is a considerably less encouraging forecast for the individualist than the American proverb, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

We won’t try to pit American ingenuity against Japanese self-control, but we do know that because of their attention to minutiae, the Japanese provide jobs for all but 2.7 percent of their 120 million people (compared to our November 1983 8.4 percent unemployment rate). At the same time, the Japanese give a lasting impression that theirs is a country that works-on time and with pride and efficiency.

Whether or not a foreigner can read menu prices or has any idea what he has ordered, he can be sure that the food he receives will look almost exactly like the plastic representation of the dish in the restaurant’s front display. We appreciated those small deeds of dependability, and we found, too, that trains and buses run almost maddeningly on time. Baggage will be transferred, as promised, to the airport by 9 o’clock. If the light is green for the pedestrian crossway, a driver is not likely to plow you down. Japan is as bewil-deringly and delightfully foreign a land as we can imagine, but because of its carefully obeyed rules and its people’s love for doing things right, it’s an easy country to explore and enjoy.

We flew direct to Japan on a Thai Airways 747. Any flight to Japan is bound to be long and tiring, but Thai has managed to cut the usual flight time to only 13 hours from Dallas via Seattle to Tokyo on a route they call the “Great Circle Express.” Other flights route through San Francisco or Los Angeles on domestic carriers before departure from the West Coast to Tokyo. We flew Thai’s Royal Executive class, only about $100 more expensive than economy and worth the difference with wide, reclining seats and free drinks. Slippers, hot towels and comfortably timed meals also helped ease the long trip.

Lodging in Japan comes any way you like it-expensive or inexpensive, modern Western style or traditional Japanese. We traveled every couple of days during our two-week visit, so that we would be able to spend our nights in an assortment of hotels. We were anxious to stay in a ryokan (a Japanese-style inn) but were relieved upon our arrival that we had chosen to stay the first few nights in Tokyo’s high-rise Westin affiliate, the Akasaka Prince Hotel. Although we had slept comfortably for several hours aboard Thai, we were still lagging during our first couple of days in Japan; the elegant Akasaka (which opened in March) was just Western enough to refresh us after long days of trying to absorb countless new sights and sounds.

During those first days in Tokyo, we felt occasional pangs of guilt for returning to our room soon after dinner to throw off our shoes, take a hot Western-style shower and slip into our fresh cotton yukatas, the kimonolike robes the Akasaka laid out for us each night. The most pleasant part of the day may have been the late evening hours we spent sipping green tea and plotting our next day’s attack on Tokyo while looking out a huge picture window lining one wall of our room. From there, we watched the traffic and neon lights of Tokyo’s Akasaka district. From eastern windows of the hotel, the Imperial Palace, with its 300-year-old East Garden, is visible; to the southeast are most of Japan’s major government offices, including the Diet and the prime minister’s residence, where President Reagan recently stayed.

Tokyo is three-deep in shops to see and restaurants to try. Japanese department stores are famous for their selection of everything from furniture to groceries. Department stores are worth seeing simply because of their tremendous size, but the merchandise is very often identical to that found in large American stores. The difference in the Japanese department stores (Mitsukoshi and Takashimaya are two of the best) is in the basement; you’ll see, smell and sometimes sample an amazing collection of just about every foodstuff available in Japan. These are excellent places to buy gifts of tea, confections and spices.

Since the Japanese entertain guests in restaurants much more often than in their homes, it’s no wonder that the people of Tokyo eat out more than people anywhere else in the world. A Japanese “salary man,” as an ambitious young executive is called, traditionally works a long day and eats a late dinner out with business associates. Even during the week, restaurants are often crowded until 10 or 11 p.m. with groups of businessmen.

Prices and selections in Tokyo restaurants are tremendously varied. An American cup of coffee might cost $1.50 and a glass of orange juice $2, but three steamy bowls of noodles served with chicken in a broth cost, with drinks, less than $3 and was more than we could finish.

Sometimes it’s a mistake to climb aboard a tour bus and entrust a full and precious day to the whims of a guide, but if you don’t in Japan, you’re almost sure to miss some spectacular sights as well as the benefit of some direction. The Japanese Tourist Board’s “Dynamic Tokyo Full-day Tour” provided us with quick and lively introductions to gardens, temples, shopping areas, a pearl gallery and other attractions in Tokyo and helped us decide which areas we wanted to explore further and which tourist spots we wanted to skip.

We spent very little time actually on the bus. Lunch at the Chinzanso Garden Restaurant was included in the price of the tour. The restaurant, which was once the private property of Baron Fujita, is surrounded by a thick, hazy rain forest and stone paths that wind through the trees to a Japanese shrine. The scenery is very close to what we imagined Japan to be-including a bright red footbridge. The lunch provided with the tour wasn’t the boxed lunch you might expect, but a Japanese-style feast of barbecued chicken, beef and pork prepared at the table along with eggplant, green pepper and com on the cob. We also enjoyed Japanese Tourist Board tours in Kyoto and Nara, and we found them just as informative, enjoyable and reasonably priced as the one in Tokyo.

From Tokyo, we rode a train to Hakone, a small resort town surrounded by forested mountains (including Mount Fuji) and hot springs. The lovely Fujiya Hotel in Hakone was established in 1878 and has hosted such celebrities as the Duke of Gloucester, John Foster Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower, not to mention Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. This hotel offers many Japanese traditions in a Western atmosphere; it was here that we enjoyed our first steaming mineral bath and hiked across steep Japanese mountain paths to a waterfall. The Kikka-so restaurant across from the Fujiya served us a beautiful full-course Japanese dinner that included a sampling of several different fish and meat specialties with rice and many different vegetables in our own private dining room.

The farther we traveled from Tokyo, the more we saw of the Japanese people’s charm. We always felt underdressed. Japanese women dress up in suits with matching pumps for Saturday outings with the children as well as for shopping trips in town. In some parts of Japan, especially later in our trip when we visited the Himeji castle (about 55 miles from Osaka, where the miniseries Shogun was filmed), the people were equally fascinated with us. American tourists are still novelties in rural Japan; we posed for pictures there as often as we asked people to pose for ours. Several times, Japanese students approached us, explaining shyly that they were members of an English-speaking club and asking to “have conversation” with us. Usually the conversation was limited to favorite rock musicians and movie stars, but one young man caught us a little off-guard when he asked why the United States bombed Hiroshima.

After leaving Hakone, we traveled by bullet train to Kyoto, where we stayed for two nights in the New Miyako Hotel. Kyoto is slower-paced than Tokyo and is the home of Kyoto Handicrafts, a seven-story emporium that seemed to have everything Japan offered together under one roof: jewelry, silks, electronics, ceramics and a large and very reasonably priced selection of woodblock prints.

Kyoto was the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years, a fact the people there are quite proud of and not eager to let you forget. The city is a better blend of old and new Japan than Tokyo, and it remains the center of Japan’s traditional industries. Temple gardens, 1,650 Buddhist temples and at least 400 Shinto shrines give sightseers plenty of challenges, but perhaps our favorite tourist attraction, Deer J?ark, was 30 miles south of Kyoto in Nara. There, nearly 1,000 tame deer, which once were revered as messengers of the gods, roam about temple grounds and nudge tourists for food.

Penalties for harming these deer are still stiff, but in the old days a person convicted of killing a deer was put to death. In those times, when a man sought revenge on an enemy or his household, he would kill a deer and leave it on his enemy’s property for the authorities to find. Because of this, heads of households traditionally rose early to check their lawns for dead deer. Many a wise man, upon finding a dead deer on his property, would save his own skin by dragging the carcass next door onto a neighbor’s yard. With this tradition, our guide said, came the phrase “passing the buck.”

From Kyoto we traveled to Osaka, a large businessman’s city much like Dallas. We stayed at Osaka’s Royal Hotel, and we found that although Osaka has few tourist sights, the city is a convenient base for visiting the port of Kobe, the Inland Sea, Kyoto and Nara.

Osaka was our last stop in Japan, but our description of the trip is better ended with a description of a night spent in Kyoto at the home of a Buddhist priest. This opportunity was specially arranged through the Japanese Tourist Board. It happened that the family with whom we stayed in Kyoto had never hosted tourists in their home, and neither we nor they were quite sure what to expect. They spoke almost no English, but after much sign language and after we removed our shoes, the mother-in- law led us down a winding narrow hall to our room, one of the temple rooms usually reserved for pilgrims who came to worship. It was vacant except for a coin-operated television, a wastebasket and a small, low table already set for us with tea and rice cakes. That night, we closed the rice-paper sliding door that led out into the hall, arranged our futon on the tatami mat floor and slept very well.

We were constantly overwhelmed by the unfamiliar customs and tongue of the Japanese, but once in the Buddhist family’s home, we couldn’t help but notice that our priest, before beginning his prayers just after dawn, sneaked a look at the sports page; that in a room just off to the side of the altar was another room with a pingpong table; and that the children, reluctantly, were learning the proper way to brush their teeth. A Mr. Tooth poster-printed in Japanese-was tacked to the bathroom wall.