"My solitude grew more and more obese, like a pig..."
--Yukio Mishima

I teach conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese "imperial university" where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets.

Ever since I first reluctantly mounted the bamboo podium, back in the days when this was the richest country in the world, my campus has been under occupation by platoons of boys who call themselves "cheerleaders." Seeming to grow like bunions out of the karate and judo teams, they're too bristly to get laid, so they scream and march a lot, and flail their arms around. They're seminarians of a sort, practicing to be full-blown Hirohito worshipers like the ones you often see barreling down the Japanese street in vast black sound trucks, blowing out everyone's ears with maniacal martial music.

I can understand a few guys with halitosis, low-average IQ's and overbearing personalities getting involved with this. Their western counterparts would be frat rats. But this is an entire army. At my place of employment, they recruit underclassmen by literal arm-twisting, to the silence of the dean of students. I think he approves secretly of this return to militarism among the otherwise politically flaccid youth of Nippon.

The cheerleaders spend their time frenziedly rallied under giant rising sun flags and blood-colored banners emblazoned with reversed and righted swastikas. To the accompaniment of a mammoth bass drum, which is beaten to death like an evil seductress, they march outside my classroom windows and chant jingoistic songs from the thirties and forties -- or rather howl them, so loudly as to damage their throats. It always sounds as though several have grapefruit-sized nodules hemorrhaging on their voice boxes already, but still they never let up. In this fundamentally sadomasochistic sodality, tumors are an inducement to strain even harder. The impression is of an orgiastic sexuality, just barely sublimated.

Christ knows I'm not the best judge of this sort of thing, but it seems to me that these unhappy kids aren't the only ones here who come down a bit off-center in the orgasm department. Or am I just belaboring the obvious? If all was erotically four-square in this country, would there be such a thriving market for the flesh of anonymous sex slaves from the former member nations of General Tojo's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? As it is, a whole gate at the Tokyo airport is devoted to offloading jumbo jets full of "foreign entertainers." A certain amount of whoremongering is universal, of course. But, in Japan, matters pertaining to horniness and its alleviation get a lot more peculiar.

For example, there's no such thing as a urinal without a full view of the user and his unit, through strategically placed doors or windows or both. And every tourist who stumbles off the beaten path has been subjected to their exclusively male exhibitionism: those bare-buttocked lunar- and harvest-festivals, which the inverted genius Yukio Mishima found so inspiring; and the naked scramble for the amulet in the local temple, with thousands of sleek young men howling lesions into their larynxes, under banners whose meticulous calligraphy reads, not KNOW THYSELF, but LOSE THYSELF.

I have a slightly homophobic, but lovable old colleague, a permanently exiled Brit, who recognizes certain parallels to a well-known ancient culture. Classical Greece, with its select corps of geisha-like hetaerae, also did not allow the majority of its women to become fully human for fear of their multi-orgasmic power. So the men were forced to rely on each other for stimulation, and shared their most intense moments naked in the gymnasium, with all the anality and, therefore, sadomasochism such a situation engenders. My grumpy old colleague rides this train of associations further, to the point of claiming that, "like all members of essentially homoerotic cultures," my honorable hosts are narcissists.

I am forced to report that is true of the immigration officials, at least. They preen themselves on their racial purity, to the point of denying the sanctified privilege of permanent residency to such a splendid hominoid specimen as me. After nearly a decade and a half, I'm still on a one-year visa. Yet, if you steel yourself and look around in the omnipresent communal bath houses, you will see legs almost as hairy as mine, and pubic bushes such as are simply not found on the Asian mainland. Except for the lovely golden-brown Filipinas, whom they find attractive enough to force wholesale into indentured prostitution, the Japanese are the extreme Orient's most "miscegenated" people (to use the cheerleaders' own pet term in translation-- impermissible in polite Western society for at least three generations).

When the sun goes down, my furry little pupils repair to their reinforced concrete dormitory and wrench from their throats an orgy of screaming. They're supposedly rehearsing the venerable school song in preparation for a visitation of old and distinguished alumni. But it's just formless retching, convulsive and inarticulate. It's nightly throughout the first two weeks of each semester, this aberration, and lasts without respite till three in the morning, and takes the place of studying or talking or drinking or, certainly, anything most Occidentals would define as non-metaphorical sex. In the morning, the boys, fortified with caffeine and nicotine, always have square knots yanked in their vocal cords, suppurating thickly enough to preclude participation in my conversation class. The dean of students urges me to respect this, because all night they've been "doing their best and trying hard and displaying enthusiasm." When I ask, "Trying their best to accomplish what?" all I get is an inscrutably averted gaze..

As if this wasn't enough (enough of what, for Christ's sake?), the cheerleaders impose still other forms of domination and submission, of mindless austerities and chastisements. The thinner recruits are always shirtless as they tromp and stomp outside my classroom, and are forced to go barefoot, even in the dead of winter, because it tickles the sadistic glee of their revered ancestors in the spirit world to see their toes turn black with frostbite--or something approximately metaphysical like that. The upperclassmen are shod with traditional wooden platform sandals, the only footwear in the world more uncomfortable than bare feet, and they wrap themselves in strange, early Showa-period military uniforms of dark-blue wool, stifling on the bleakest November day.

They are nothing less than apprentice Shinto-fascists, well-scrubbed super-patriots, directly descended from the infant-eviscerating imperial troops whose antics brought a couple of atomic bombs crashing down on everybody's head fifty-five years ago. If any of my colleagues or neighbors have made that ominous connection, they're too polite to mention it.

Sometimes the boys seem to be auditioning for their elders. A journeyman rightist will trot and waddle on Jiminy Cricket legs alongside them, holding up a decibel meter and shaking his head in critical disgust at the cheerleaders' paltry vocal performance (just paltry enough to neutralize my lecture through the window). The full-fledged master maniacs discreetly follow in their city block-long sound truck, which is occasionally draped with a squinty-eyed, bunny-toothed, Hitler mustachioed portrait of the dead emperor-though their more mainstream counterparts in sophisticated places like Tokyo and Osaka consider this public flaunting and flapping of God's image to be gross sacrilege.

Two of the lower-ranked cheerleaders will struggle to keep aloft a vast banner. Strung on bamboo poles fifteen feet high, clearly visible from my vantage point at the professorial pulpit, it howls some such measured lyrical strain as follows:

MISCEGENATION FOR AMERICA, PURITY FOR DAI NIPPON!
DAI NIPPON IS A TINY RICE PADDY; AMERICA IS A TREELESS PEAK:
FLOOD CONTROL IS PARAMOUNT!
A MYRIAD OF YEARS! A MYRIAD OF YEARS! A MYRIAD OF YEARS!

They always climax with a bit of wisdom received directly from the loose lips of the current prime minister:

WE ARE A DIVINE NATION WITH THE EMPEROR AT OUR CENTER!

MISHIMA

The poets who paint and sing and shove these lines in my face never meet any difficulty penetrating the university's front gate. The old porter genuflects them in, bowing so deeply that his brow ridge audibly bops the rim of the open sewer which moats the place where I've been condemned to waste my remaining days. To uninitiated eyes, the rightists appear to be little more than lecture-disrupting noodle-Nazis. But they are treated with all the fear and deference due to a sacerdotal caste - which, of course, is exactly what they are: celebrants of an autophagous Eucharist.

And, yet, lately there are signs that their eager acolytes, the cheerleaders, are dying out as a phenomenon at my school. I've always been one to hail the withering of priestcraft in any form. But, considering who is replacing them, I think I might sort of miss the weird little pricks.

Now their big bass drum is not beleaguered quite so vigorously or often. Instead, unmuffled motorcycles idle everywhere, making it even more unpleasant to breathe than usual. Working-class punks from the neighborhood vocational high school, the so-called bosozoku or teen bikers, have been admitted - no, seduced and sucked - into the higher education system. And their wholesomely nihilistic presence makes all religio-patriotic display seem quaint, even cute.

With their spiked tangerine-flake hair, tattoos, nose- and nipple- and navel-rings, and all the other courage-boosting mutilations of tribal warriors, these arriviste "bozos" lend the collegiate scene a hellish quality, reminiscent of genuine varsity bashes at Heidelberg and other centers of learning on the European continent. Sneaking behind a Styrofoam incinerator now and then to mainline their methedrine, these honest, burping degenerates are the only people on campus, besides my curmudgeonly old colleague and me, who know how to behave like scholars in real countries. They speak quietly to one another, and do not even look twice as I lurch past on my way to the language laboratory. I hear no genocidal slogans or nationalistic sentiments from their brown-painted lips. They have more mature, or at least cooler mannerisms than the dwindling leaders of cheers, who watch them from a safe distance with unconscious admiration and metaphorical penis envy.

How can the complexion of the Japanese matriculator be changing so drastically in such a short time? If this wasn't the proverbially hyperfecundant yellow race, one might almost wonder if there has been a sudden decline in the supply of eighteen year olds. Is the bottom of the demographic barrel being desperately scraped? Well, as a matter of fact, I have been told that my school hands out admission certificates in the railroad stations, stapled to free packets of mini-kleenex to persuade people to take them. A lot of the incoming freshmen would have been better advised to use the latter and discard the former for the sad joke that it is.

With the graying of this society (potential baby-makers would rather window-shop), college entrance requirements are steadily being lowered. The two classes of youngster become less distinguishable, as buzz-cut kamikaze nerds with red polka-dotted megaphones morph into gutter punks toting contraband Italian stilettos. By this time next academic year, I will be confiscating paint thinner and zip guns from the customary knot of blackness that tends to form against the back wall of any classroom, Japanese or foreign.

Unlike my native colleagues, I do not dread this development. It will be my professional apotheosis: my jackbooted teaching style will finally come into its own. Besides, if I'm still here when it happens, that will mean my position hasn't been rendered redundant, in the meantime, for lack of interest, and I haven't been sent home to manage a convenience store, there to dodge the semiautomatic fire of New World bosozoku.

These scooter-trash dope-fiends are not so much taking over Japanese academe as seeping up from below, and supplying by default a vacuum left by the infertility of their betters. As it is, the top two floors of our classroom building have been sealed off and allowed to sink into cobwebbed desuetude, and the remaining desks barely have a thirty percent occupancy. To walk down the corridor is creepy even for a former desert dweller like me. I miss the Caucasoidophobic rants as the shuffling sound of my regulation slippers rebounds off the vacated linoleum.

To grasp the sheer apocalypse I'm prophesying here, you must understand what blood lines have always meant in "this backwater called Dai Nippon, this lightless cranny of the modern world," as my politically incorrect limey colleague calls our adopted home. The natives' spiritual development has been arrested at a point similar to that of the very early Jews and Greeks. They cannot imagine the deathlessness of the individual soul, which suffers or rejoices eternally according to its own deserts. Instead, like the rank-and-file members of the Troy and Canaan expeditions, they've always cherished hopes of blood immortality, of descendants countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore, even unto the umpteenth generation, and so on and so forth, with no shortage of great-great-great-, etc., grandchildren to maintain your effigy in the household shrine and feed your numb ghost with the smell of burnt sandalwood. Hence the adulation of their own well-chlorinated gene pool, and the rabid chauvinism that actuated the cheerleaders back in the days when my university, and Japan itself, seemed to be flourishing.

The old chestnut, "Blood is thicker than water," translates directly into their idiom, and seems to have been coined independently. If pressed, an habitué of Christendom, whether pious or not, will at least feel obliged to allow that the blood under consideration should ideally be that of humanity at large. But in this country it is invariably taken in the much more circumscribed sense. And what strikes our ears as a stale cliché has, until recently, lost none of its piquancy here.

But now they appear even to have lost faith in that pitiable and dangerous deoxyribonucleic delusion. Their own uniqueness and superiority have evidently become matters of indifference, unworthy of perpetuation. Japan's current "negative population growth," according to my disgruntled old colleague, is the expression of an unexampled moral degeneracy. "Here is a people so exhausted and shortsighted," he sputters, "they've sold what little dangling scab of a soul they had for a shopping spree."

In amelioration of that perhaps borderline-racist statement, we must glance at our surroundings. The geography of this archipelago is so cozy, the mountains so tiny and green. Rivulets of sweet water trickle gently from feathery bamboo groves. Hornets are the most dangerous animals. Maybe we can excuse the natives for never developing a spirituality beyond the gutless Zen. The only reminders of Providence's down-side are occasional typhoons, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, as impersonal as nature gets, and just random enough to encourage mindless totemism.

I find myself forced to agree with my crusty colleague on this point. The level of spiritual attainment on these islands is as low as any I've encountered in my random stumblings from the Far West to the Far East, including the white-slum Sugar House district of Salt Lake City. But what right have I to be surprised to find them just as theologically inchoate as the polygamist cultists who founded my hometown? What should I expect other than yet more anemic religiosity on this side of the Pacific?

Read your Second Book of Kings, where the Israelites' backslide into degenerate Canaanite cultism is disdainfully described: "On top of every high place and under every big tree, shrines appeared." Then take a drive through the Japanese countryside and see if you can begin to count the shrines. And visit some of them. With their thatched roofs and splintery altars stacked high with citrus, are they not merely modified tiki-huts? These children of the Mikado should not be classed among the major Asian civilizations. They're island-hopping Polynesians who paddled their canoes a little too far north, and wound up over-financed by us.

If you unshade yourself from under the big tree, and traverse the high place, you will probably come to a temple outright, which is to say a fane dedicated to the local third-hand style of Buddhism. If this temple happens to be located in my depopulated and depressed neighborhood, it might very well look at first glance like an abandoned garden, poinsettias drooping over everything. It will be enclosed by four nostril-high walls, wattle and daub, topped by rotting pine bas-reliefs of fox demons scarfing fried tofu.

A greenish carp pond will send small belches of airborne murk to sink in around the graven lineaments of pagan idols, called jizos, nearly featureless under the granite pudge, looking like neonate Buddhas or Gary Bauer. Stacked at their toeless feet will be baby toys, canned food offerings, and mandarin oranges caved in like bottled fetus-heads in high school biology labs.

A dozen questions will pop into your mind about the pink bibs on those jizos: where do they come from, what do they signify, what invisible hands mend and replace them, and why are they the only elements of this scene that receive any kind of maintenance? This temple yard is such an obscure place of devotion that the food offerings have long ago been carted off by crows and mountain-roaming derelicts. But, even so, someone has been by to replace the bibs. They're pink as the bolt in the fabric store.

In answer to your questions, hear now the time-honored words of Japanese grannies preparing their granddaughters for womanhood: "Once you've contrived that he should cease to be, all you need to do is place a little piece of fish, or perhaps a dab of pork gristle, between the lips of the youngster after you expel him, before you burn him. He will not become a Buddha as a result of this dietary indiscretion. He will return to the cycle of metempsychosis, his tiny soul and penis 'recycled,' as your mother says of milk cartons and plastic bags. Perhaps, with any luck at all, he and not some other youngster will return to your household when the time for parenthood is riper. And if you're inclined to feel sentimental, stitch a few cozy pink bibs for the baby-sized jizo figurines in the temple yard."

I don't want to come on like the above-mentioned Mr. Bauer (heaven forefend I should get such a licking), but I need to point a few things out here, purely for the sake of cultural context: there is not enough demand to persuade Nipponese pharmacists to shelve the latest oral contraceptives; rubbers are unwrapped less often than miscarriage is procured (retroactively in no rare instances); far more bouncing bundles of joy get liquidated than are permitted to feel the smoggy sunshine on their sweet little cheeks.

Meanwhile, another wing of classrooms at my place of employment is scheduled to be surrendered to the spiders. And guess whose job it is to mop up after the few howling sons of Tojo who manage to dodge and duck down the birth canal more-or-less intact.