Between wombs

On leaving Japan for my mother church

Torii gates are said to symbolise spiritual birth

Out of the steam room, into the rain. Watching out for the elderly fellow-bather whose pre-dip drinks had emboldened to ask the gaijin some rather personal questions earlier that afternoon, I headed for the shallow floor-bath. I lay in it with my back in the warm water while the breeze cooled my body, looking up to the wooden rafters.

Nobody would disturb me there. Usually, it does not bother me if people do. I enjoy conversations with old men who often claim, as today, never to have spoken to a foreigner before. In the izakaya, they often lead to a flourish of meishi or the exchange of Line details, never used again. Under the present circumstances - more aquatic, less dressed - such niceties were happily impracticable.

Happily, I say, not just because of the line of questioning, largely physiological – not knowing the Japanese for “that would be an ecumenical matter,” my default response became “you’d have to ask my wife about that” – but because that trip to the baths, my weekly 500 yen drop of paradise, would be the last for some time. I was in more a ruminative than discursive temper.

Two days later, I am aboard an Asiana aeroplane via Seoul to London Heathrow. Thence it is a twenty-minute to the parish of St Margaret of Antioch, Iver Heath, where, D.V., I am about to become Rector. My four-year sojourn in Japan is over, and a new mission awaits.

I’ve written in passing about the Japanese baths before as a segue into my habitual musings on dragons, but my thoughts while supine were not this time so serpentine. Rather, as all the naked men silently stretched and idled at the edge of my myopic eyes, their Asian bodies smaller than mine and hairless apart from nature’s sporran, the dominant image was of the womb.

Nicodemus once asked, “can a man enter into his mother’s womb and be born again?” The baths in Japan answer with a metaphorical yes. A man in Japan can leave off his toil, strip off the business suit or overalls which define his adult hours, lock away the enslaving black glass icon, and slip out of time into the maternal comforts of this prefab Lethe. Women bathe too, of course, but separately, and their baths are a world on which I cannot comment, except to surmise that theirs is a different kind of leisure. Warmth, drink, a paradoxical moment of uninhibited isolation marks a harder contrast, I suspect, with the clothed Japanese man’s colder world of form, fealty, control, concealment and enforced communitarianism. The gurgling cocoon of the ofuro offers instead a social world stripped of form, where one can be most alone while closer than ever to others, closer to identity (unless one is 5’10” with a red beard). Solitude in proximity, dependence without ratiocination, a mini-break to the edge of the void: yes, womblike, I think.

But – in another sense, Japan itself is a womb whose men, particularly, are loath ever to leave: a womb redesigned and perfected by generations of bureaucrats to nourish the man just enough to keep him slaving for company and country, just enough to keep him fearing abandonment by either into the cold air outside. His masters will work him until he drops, with predictable regularity, back into the womb of the bath or the bustling izakaya. But then, these delights are so cheap and excellent, so much better than outside Japan, and her streets are so calm and clean. The lavatory seats warm your cheeks and wash your anus. Are you sure you want to leave the warm water behind?

The baths more famously manifest a strong Japanese taboo against impurity, kegare. This, too, is symbolic of the wider society, which remains pristine as long as the national bloodstream is not watered down too much by outsiders who will sully and dilute it. Sure, some Japanese cannot live in this system, and drop out of school and work to live alone, making their homes into labyrinths of rubbish because they cannot face the labyrinth of bureaucracy needed to dispose of it – but so much collateral damage has to be expected. Even the purest water drowns. Among a myriad live births one has to expect a few still ones. You cannot build a pyramid without some workers getting crushed between the stones. The gods will not be cheated of their due.

Ah, Japan, my second mother, how I love you. How I love your monoculture, your national pride, your indifference to the outside. How I relish avoiding all the conflicts that float around your fleshy walls out there in the Anglosphere, aloof to it all. No protesters here, no flag waving, no stabbings, no inappropriate displays of public aggression. Why not cling to your breast forever?

There is the uncomfortable fact that I can enjoy all this only because I am a foreigner. To live in Japan as a Japanese man would be a different matter. A loner like me would have been among those crushed in the stones. I have the privilege of being a foreigner, and more, the right kind of foreigner. Were I from another Asian country, or African, or applying for asylum while being forbidden to work and earn, my life in Japan would be different. The Christian film director Thomas Ash will show you something of their stories. He will tell you that our second mother adopts very selectively. That is her right. I have chosen to avail myself of it knowingly, with a love that is tolerant of her defects - perhaps too much so. Her flaws are better hidden than my country’s and easier for me to ignore.

So, when I cut across the red line on the floor at Immigration, that last umbilical stretch, I blink back tears. The official waits in his incubator on the other side.

“Are you not coming back to Japan?”

Well, yes. But next time, not as a child, but as a guest. So, easier just to say no.

He punches a hole in my Residence Card, voiding that trophy hard won in COVID times. That is it. No more words, just a quick wave to hurry me on.

Goodbye, second mother.

For now.

I hope to re-enter Japan, in God’s time and not my own. But now I have to leave her womb awhile and grow. I’m looking forward to returning to the full nurture of Mother Church in all her glory, to be fed at her breast more plentifully than jealous Japan has allowed. She does not brook competition for her affections.

But the womb of the Church is different from that of Japan. The baptised enter the Church’s womb not to stay there, permanently embryonic and content, anxious about going outside, but to emerge, purged finally and fully, ready to be driven forth by the Lord Spirit into the wilds where demons dwell. My country, colonised by devils of anger and discontent, is just such a mission field. I go back to fight for the honour of Mother Church in my native land.

Yes, there is sadness about leaving behind a land I love, friends and parishioners, my family home. There is fear of rejection, hatred and barbarism. Yet there is also excitement and hope about meeting new brothers and sisters in Christ, serving under an orthodox bishop with a strong evangelistic mission, revisiting the ancient places of prayer and pilgrimage, and better playing my part in the spiritual war that besets my people and the world. It will be good to have a parish of my own to nurture with Scripture and Sacrament. I look forward to preaching and teaching in English far more and to sharing that with you here. I will also be freer in what I can say in public, and hope that you will find that spiritually helpful. When God sends me back to Japan in due course, as I hope He will, I pray that I will be better spiritually nourished, battle-tried, wiser and readier to know and do whatever His will for me is there.

May St Margaret of Antioch pray for her church in Iver Heath and for the conversion of our nations. May she pray too for the missions in Japan, especially the Missionary Order of St Augustine. And of your charity, may you please pray for me, my family and my new parish also. May our Risen Lord bless you.