"Yon Sen" is Japanese for "Four Thousand". It's the prefix for all prisoner-numbers given to foreign inmates in Fuchu prison.

I wrote this story towards the end of my time in Fuchu, in the winter of 2006-07. It's a bleak, paranoid, obsessive-compulsive look into solitude, nihilism, equanimity and raisin bread.

It'll probably take me ages to type out: I'll aim for at least one entry a week. Here's how it starts.


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A Small Happiness


One of the young guards who barked like puppies bounded into the open doorway and yelped.
“Attention!” he shouted, in Japanese, “Number!”
The foreign prisoner mumbled something in English that was small and spiky, like a hedgehog. He gave a slump that was worth nearly half of a bow.
“Good job!” shouted the guard, always in Japanese, and saluted.
Playing soldiers, the old man from Portugal had called it.
The guard slammed the door shut and moved onto the next cell. “Attention! Number! Good Job!” Temporarily the noise retreated down the cellblock, as each foreigner from Eight Factory was locked down for the night.

The cold air of cell West-3-306 greeted its returning occupant with what felt like a comfortable enough lack of bad vibrations.
For a brief moment he was entirely unobserved, while the young guard was busy slamming doors. He sprang to life, pouncing on his wastepaper basket, diving through the carefully-arranged pre-scrunched tissues that served to keep the cell-searching teams at bay, and instantly he knew which tissue to pick out - the one with a double twist in the corner - and he stuffed it into his pocket without even pausing to check whether he had the right one. He would open it later: it contained a kite that the really tall American had delivered that morning. Then he retrieved his kinako. The kinako was a glorious golden treasure, and in such a small flat packet it was ideal for burying deep in the folds of a blanket. He knew exactly into which fold of the blanket to slip his hand - darting, snatching - and for a brief second his fingers knew the elicit pleasure of being wrapped in a blanket before bedtime. Then they were out in the cold again, clutching their prize, before tossing the golden packet onto the shelf beneath his desk where the guards couldn’t see it; and his fingers were empty and his head was full, thinking of how he could make a sweet creamy paste with kinako and yellow green tea in a plastc cup and spread it on his ekmek like honey while simultaneously he was planning his cleansing ritual and visualising the fastest most efficient movements needed for maximum cleaning with minimum freezing; and he was preparing his fingers for the sharp sting of icy water that awaited them. He had to be fast: it was nearly ekmek time. And as he scurried toward the basin at the back of his cell, somewhere in the front of his heart he felt the stirrings of an emotion that, if left unchecked, had the potential to grow into a small happiness. He was unclean.
The water from the tap was so cold as to be offensive; but he had to wash his hands, and face, and hair, and neck, and inside his ears, and inside his nose.
Quickly he tore off the socks that were dirty (dirty from the factory’s changing room); and he felt the cold of the cell’s lino floor seep right up into his bare feet as he tore off his uniform and changed into clean underwear on top of which he pulled more underwear and extra t-shirts (against the prison rules) on top of which he pulled thermals and then a second set of thermals (against the prison rules) and then pyjamas (before bedtime? definitely against the prison rules) and - puffed-up and padded, wearing every item of clothing in his possession - he somehow squeezed back into his grey prison uniform as quick as was possible before the cold could swallow him and before any guard could catch a glimpse of his forbidden undergarments. He left his bare feet on the floor a moment longer. The gaps between his toes took a breath. It was one of only four times in the day that they wouldn’t be imprisoned in nylon socks: frostbite season had come around again. The moment passed; he pulled on his indoor socks and then his dirty socks. Of course, both pairs looked the same, superficially, but one had good vibrations and one had bad. (Dirty from the factory’s changing room.) It was important to remember which was which, as one would be coming into bed with him and the other would be sleeping on the floor like a dog. When you can only wash two pairs of socks a week, you think about these things. He washed his hands again.

Throughout his hurried decontamination the foreigners from Seven Factory had been returning - he could hear them but not see them - down at the other end of the cellblock. Now all the convicts had been safely locked down, the loudspeaker announcements began.
“Announcement. Roll-call time. Bla bla bla sit down. Bla bla bla eyes closed; no talking; no reading....”
He had to return to the front of the cell. Once there, he gave a belated welcome to the new books he had just received. One thing he would not be doing tonight or any night soon was drawing up a List of Reasons to be Happy. But if he were to do so, the fact that his country’s embassy had just sent him five paperbacks would in fact not be high up on that list. Generally, he tried his best to build good relationships with his books - they were his friends and his teachers and even his lovers - and he should have been more hospitable towards these new faces since he’s been informed of their arrival. However, the embassy sending five new books now, in the middle of December, seemed like they were sending a five-word message: Sorry, no transfer this year.
Abruptly, unforgivably, all air within and without the cell was assaulted by the gross distortion of a man’s voice yelling into a loudspeaker. “ROLL-CALL READY!” (What kind of a man yells into a loudspeaker?) On cue, at the end of the cellblock, three guards also yelled, throwing as much testosterone behind their screams as only small frightened men in military uniforms know how. “ROLL-CALL READY!” Their voices crashed against one another in a vile anti-harmony. The distorted loudspeaker exploded again: “ROLL-CALL!” The guards followed suit: “ROLL-CALL!”
Up and out across the entire prison, the cacophony spread: over the cellblocks and over the sick-men blocks; over the laundry and the kitchens and the never-talked-about geriatric block; over the mildew-soaked punishment block and the shiny new administration block; over the pitiful exercise yards where the ghosts of once-healthy men ran in ever-decreasing circles trying in vain to catch their long-lost breath; and out further the violent screaming flew, over the rows of brooding, looming, sleeping-dragon empty factories that lay siege to them all.
“ROLL-CALL!” It fed back on itself and its own self-proclaimed power. It was primitive psychological warfare: the triumphant howl of the biggest monkey in the tree.
The three guards at the end of the foreigners’ cellblock moved into their next phase.
“NUMBER!” whack-crunch! “NUMBER!” whack-crunch!
When his turn came, antagonism filled the small glass hole in the cell’s door - peaked cap, narrowed eyes, over-promoted jaw - and demanded of him, “NUMBER!”
He returned the volley, blocking the invading noise and flinging it back out of the door before it could pollute his sanctuary. He let loose his spiky English obscenity, heavier this time, darker. Four times a day for six hundred days he had heated it and hammered it in the fires of his mouth: a schoolboy taunt in his native tongue, crafted and sharpened until it took a similar outer form to the Japanese numbers that were demanded of him: in place of the numbers, he submitted abuse. It was childish of him he knew, and prickly, but it was a defensive tactic in a bitter mental struggle and it seemed to work. Two wrongs didn’t make a right but somehow they countered each other, leaving an uneasy truce in the fragile air around the glass hole in the cell’s door where the battle took place every morning and every night.
The first two guards disappeared from view, as quickly as they had arrived. He braced himself... whack-crunch! The third guard slammed the handle of the door, hard, checking the lock was secure, firing off one last sonic battery, and glared in through the reinforced glass. The foreign prisoner did not glare back. During roll-call he never let them look into his eyes. He offered them no way in; or rather, he offered them no way to take anything out.
Seventy-nine times “NUMBER!” was demanded. Seventy-nine times door handles were whack-crunched. Finally the raiders gave one last triumphant cry - “FINISHED!” - and they were gone.


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and raisin bread............................Saiys it all just there. jimmy

Fantastic!!

Looking forward to reading the rest of it too!

A big PTO welcome for Yon Sen and Jiminy.

Rach xx

Welcome to PTO Yon Sen and Jiminy! Looking forward to reading more of your experiences.

Nance

Thanks for the warm welcome ladies. it's an amazing site you've got here: must have taken so much work? hope you like the story.

Hello Jim! i know you remember the raisin bread! it was the most exciting thing that ever happened in there - that's why i wrote a whole story about it...

Welcome to PTO Yon Sen and Jiminy!
Yon Sen:your chilling story has left me with a hard knot in the pit of my stomach ...so well-written, so descriptive that I felt like I was there too.
Looking forward to hearing and reading more although I know it will be difficult. (BTW- what is ekmek and kinako?)

Thank you DLM, that's really kind of you. "Chilling" is a great word, because the sory does try to give a sense of the cold air aswell as the cold vibes. I'm sorry you felt like you were there too - it's not a nice place to be! Hehe you'll have to wait to find out about "kinako" and "ekmek". Well there's not much suspense to be had in a tale of one man eating one bit of bread so enjoy the mystery while it lasts!

A word on format: I copied-pasted that text in, but realised afterwards that it had lost the indent at the start of each parpagraph (and italics: the sixth sentence should read: < Playing soldiers, the old man from Portugal had called it. >)

So to make it a bit easier on the eyes I'll put a gap between each paragraph. Thanks for your support PTO.

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two

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It was time. At last he permitted a fluctuation in his carefully-cultivated equanimity. Chances were, this was to be the high point of his week. Not that he would allow any high point to rise significantly above zero. Emotions are like a sine wave: turn up the volume and the peaks will grow higher but the troughs will go lower. Maybe that could be fun - outside, in that other place, in that other life - but it was dangerous in here. In here, highs and lows were fuel for manipulation. When you live in a system of “privileges”, never admit that you like something, or you’ll suffer when they take it away. Or worse, you’ll become attached to it, however small it may be, and through fear that you could lose it you’ll betray yourself and you’ll betray your friends.

The storm of food trollies that had been gathering at the end of the cellblock began its rumbling advance, and before long it broke upon him. It was even better than he could have expected. The bread trolley was full not of the usual smooth, plain, white bread rolls but of bumpy, lumpy chunks of raisin bread. Not raindrops but snowflakes were falling tonight.

The chunky raisin bread that had settled on his plate surprised him, but he regained his composure in time to receive also a pot of yellow green tea, half a bowl of soup and a plastic tray that contained a couple of spoonfuls of curry and a tofu burger. All were cold except for the tea. The burger was boil-in-the-bag and was still in the bag but was not still boiling.

He would have to return the tray in no time but the bread plate and the soup bowl and the tea pot he could keep until morning. So quickly he emptied the contents of the tray into the soup bowl. He washed the tray (the water was so cold as to be offensive) and returned it to the hatch at the front of the cell. He took what heat he could from the teapot before it was lost to the December night, pressing his hands against the warm copper in a doomed embrace, feeling its temperature drop faster than that of his fingers and face. Only then did he feel ready to contemplate taking some pleasure from what remained before him.

There was no chili in the curry - it was neither hot nor hot - but he didn’t expect there to be. There never was much to distinguish ‘curry’ from ‘stew’, other than the smell. Nevertheless, it seemed to him with the first two spoonfuls of soup-tofu-curry that he could be on his way to feeling at ease.

Then the announcements launched a fresh offensive. It wasn’t the regular-as-clockwork Japanese announcements this time. The tell-tale click and hum of a tape recording indicated that here was something deemed important enough to translate for the benefit of the foreign population. That meant it would be even harder to ignore. Loudly it began.

It was a foul noise: an unhappy recording of unwilling foreign prisoners reading unpleasant directives to an uninterested audience. Rattled out of spluttering speakers up and down the cellblock, the noise squabbled with the clumsy clattering and clanging of the trustees who were still banging bowls, trays and teapots. The two competing rackets rocked the airwaves with a series of violent clashes.

He groaned, carried his bowl of tofu-curry-soup to the front of the cell, and turned an ear to the small grille in the door, straining to make sense of the echoing cacophony. In Thai, Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin the announcement shook the air. In Cantonese, Farsi and Spanish it continued. As the turn of the English translation approached, so did the thunder of a returning food trolley, rolling and booming, obscuring any hope of his finding meaning in the tape recording.

Somehow though, the thunder passed before the English translation could really begin. And so:

“Announcement. December sixteen Saturday will be Karaoke Competition. You must to go your toilet before Karaoke Competition. You cannot to go any toilet in time of Karaoke Competition. You cannot to talk with other prisoner in time of Karaoke Competition. You cannot to make the unsuitable noise in time of Karaoke Competition like shout or cheer or whistle. You must only to clap your hand for end of every song. If you to talk with other prisoner or to make unsuitable noise you will be punished. Thank you.”

He raised a fist to strike the door. But how could he ever release to the outside what was raging inside? The cold fist barely made contact before dropping limply back to his side. The feelings dropped too, like pennies in a well, down to a place within him where too many feelings had dropped already. That place was dark and septic and he despaired of how he would ever be able to safely flush its contents away.

He retreated, defeated, and took stock: a third of his tofu-soup-curry had been lost. He’d spooned it and chewed it and swallowed it but he hadn’t really eaten it, not in any meaningful, I’m-eating-my-dinner kind of a way. He still had plenty left however, and most importantly he still had the ekmek. He didn’t know what raisins were called in Turkish. His eyes strayed over to his English-Turkish dictionary. It was within arms reach (everything is within arm’s reach when you live in a jail cell) but he stopped himself. Later, he would read books. Now, he would eat dinner. He took another spoonful and attempted to focus the broad gaze of his consciousness down to that one narrow point.

Korean. With one step of the foot and one flick of the wrist a guard had passed the cell and switched on the radio and was already passing on to the next cell and now the radio was shouting in at him in Korean demanding that he go to the toilet before Karaoke Competition and he was crying out obscenities in English around a mouthful of sodden boil-in-the-bag tofu pleading for the noise to stop and shaking his head in misery before he was even fully aware of what was happening. Mercifully, the guard decided to hear him. (They had a history - the guards and he.) The glass in the door flickered again with the blue of uniform. With a click of a heel and the flick of a switch the Korean was gone.

Throughout the year, day and night, the announcements were unrelenting: distorted projections of the world as seen through the microscope of Japanese prison bureaucracy. That world was a frightening place. It teemed with petty horrors made monstrous by narrow minds. Announcement. January first Monday is New Year Day. You must to clean your cell... Announcement. January second Tuesday you will receive Japanese rice cake. You should to bite well and eat carefully not to choke up your throat on it... Announcement January third Wednesday you will receive small snack. You must to finish small snack before evening meal. You must to return plastic package of small snack out from small door of cell before evening meal. You must not to eat small snack on bed. You must not to wear glove or ear warmer at time of eating small snack... Announcement. Some foreign prisoner make noise at time of watching television. In particular in soccer. You must not to make noise at time of soccer or any time of television. If you to make noise you will be punished. If you to make noise in soccer, soccer will be finished. Announcement... Announcement...

He still had nearly half of the soup-curry-tofu remaining when the loudspeakers - back to routine now - demanded: “Put out leftovers! Put out leftovers!” The trustees and trollies trundled past again and snatched away the plastic tray and slammed shut the metal hatch. That was the official end of the mealtime.


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Yon Sen, it is not a nice picture that your words make, but beautiful, none-the-less.
Welcome!

Thank you , Nimuay, you're very kind. I'll try to post another little bit on wednesday.

Your story is to be commended and of real interest to me as I have a son there. Look forward to reading the rest. Pleased you are home.

Hello and welcome to PTO Yon Sen! Thank you for sharing your memories with us. I am enjoying your story but am so sorry you had to endure something so terrible.

Thanks guys, i wanted to put this up on PTO particularly for the folks who want to know more details about fuchu. i know there's not much info makes it out of that place. bmac: you're not alone! i have some idea of what your family's going through, and i KNOW it will come to an end. One time i got a letter that said:

"One day this will all be a memory."

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three

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His next mouthful was in flagrant contravention of prison regulations. The prison authorities were not renowned for their willingness to compromise, but for the time-being there was a shaky cease-fire in place that seemed to leave some foreign inmates in peace to finish their dinners after the official end of dinnertime. By the standards of Japanese prison life, this was enlightenment itself, and it was a concession not to be taken for granted. Now, as he did every mealtime, he looked out of his window across to the next cellblock, where Japanese prisoners lived. Like a bank of television screens in a shop window, the same scene was playing out in rows and columns of identical windows. The Japanese prisoners were all on their feet, washing dishes and clearing away tables. They worked together in production lines, hurriedly passing plastic bowls and trays between themselves to be scrubbed and rinsed and dried and stacked: every man had a job to do and he did it with speed. The Japanese prisoners lived in communal cells, each one home to between five and nine men. Each man in the cell was given a number between one and nine to indicate his rank - one being the highest - and according to his number he was assigned different jobs to do at these times of rushed activity, from pouring the tea to scrubbing the toilet.

As it did every mealtime, the sight made him thankful for his solitude. He shook his head, as if to dislodge a clot of memories that was caught up inside.


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When he was first moved to this prison he had been held for a month, before induction, in a communal cell, together with eight Japanese men. That was after a year of solitary confinement elsewhere. Having spent so long sailing through the open spaces of his own mind, being washed up on those foreign cultural shores had not been the homecoming that he needed.

He had found the mealtimes particularly difficult. It wasn’t that they had been unpleasant exactly; rather they were devoid of pleasure; non-pleasant. Trapped between the twin production-line tasks of frantically preparing the tables and then frantically clearing them away, the act of eating food was reduced to its bare essentials. The edible contents of dishes were to be transferred to stomachs. There was no time for chewing, and certainly no time for talking. The only sounds were of slurping and gulping and of the rattle of plastic spoons on plastic bowls. Dinner was not to be enjoyed: it was to be finished.

Japanese prisoners lived, he had rapidly come to believe, according to a philosophy of extreme stoicism which bordered on outright masochism. The spirit of repentance was alive and well in this penitentiary.


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What of his own philosophy though? What of his quasi-nihilistic rejection of others’ definitions of virtue and vice? His stubborn fight to achieve equanimity? Didn’t he in fact drive away from himself the few available chances at joy that even the stoics embraced? Soon, having cleared away their dishes so efficiently, the Japanese prisoners would be reclining on their futons and laughing at their televisions, while he would still be perched on a wooden chair with the television defiantly ignored. Wasn’t he indulging in his own warped brand of masochism? And why? In futile pursuit of the base pleasure he somehow hoped to find in a lump of bread? And didn’t that just contradict his striving for equanimity? Worse, because of its futility, didn’t the whole effort just leave him unhappy at his own inability to be happy?

As if to underline his questions, he found that he had reached the end of the curry-soup-tofu. Hating himself for doing so, he compulsively scraped at the sides of the bowl and scavenged around the rim, craving every last drop of nourishment.


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For induction, he had been sent to the Training Factory, where they tried to persuade his feet. Left, left, left right...


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The Japanese prisoners in the other cellblock, having finished their post-feeding cleaning frenzy, began loudly to gargle, snuffle, cough, retch and spit. It was a nauseating chorus more worthy of a tuberculosis ward than a prison. Disturbed, he closed his window. (He kept it half-open, enduring the chill, in an attempt to encourage the worst of the curry odours to respect his privacy.)

With its window closed, cell West-3-306 seemed at once to improve the quality of its vibrations. The temperature perhaps rose a fraction and the decibel level certainly dropped a fraction. Into its cold air its occupant, without realising, released a small sigh. The sigh may have been one of relief - relief that the cell’s door and window had cut him off from what lay beyond them; but it just may have been a sigh of contentment - contentment with the simple treasure that he had succeeded in hoarding.


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The end of that penultimate paragraph should read, "(He had kept it half open... "



(hehe what was that about being obsessive?)

We should meet up so I can hear the gory uncensored version
xx

The uncensored version isn't too gory; it just drags on for 3 years! ;)

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four


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Ekmek. When he was talking to himself (and for all but four hours a week he had nobody else) he referred to bread by its Turkish name, partly in memory of the toothless Japanese speed addict. A large proportion of the Japanese prison population could be described as toothless speed addicts. However, he had come to remember this particular toothless face more clearly than most by virtue of the fact that it was often pushed within inches of his own, repeating the same miserable inanities on a very limited two-day cycle, throughout that first month in the communal cell.

Bread was served with dinner on four nights a week: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. All other meals came with rice, or very occasionally (some Wednesday lunchtimes)with noodles. Thus on any given day a man could either say that there would be bread for dinner that evening, or that there would be bread for dinner the following evening. And the toothless Japanese speed addict would indeed say so, without fail, every day. Today bread! the poor man would announce, leaning his disfigured face right in close until it eclipsed everyone else’s. Or: Tomorrow bread! It was his favourite conversation opener seven days a week for each of the five weeks they lived together. Some days he would manage to repeat it a dozen times before dinner finally arrived. He could even use both phrases on the same day, on Saturdays when he could say Today bread! all day long until dinner, and then continue with Tomorrow bread! until bedtime.

He never saw the toothless addict again - they were assigned to different factories on different sides of the prison - but what was particularly miserable about the experience was the way he knew that the toothless addict was only vocalising thoughts that could be found in the heads of most of the prisoners (himself included), day-in day-out; and he would often hear the same phrases repeated by other hungry men right across the prison. Today bread! Tomorrow bread! Those words always sounded equally miserable in Japanese or in English.

Bread, however plain and unsatisfying, came as a welcome break to the otherwise near-continuous monotony of white rice. This was not the only reason why the prisoners came to anticipate it with such excitement though. When bread was served it would usually come with other small imitations of the Western diet - a dollop of jam, or of marmalade - or else with something from the sweeter end of the Japanese diet - sweet beans, sweet pumpkin - and so when the prisoners knew they were getting bread, they knew there was a chance that they would be getting sugar too. You come to see how addicted you are to sugar when it’s taken away from you and then offered back in tiny servings.

So he tried to prevent himself from ever sounding like the toothless Japanese speed addict. He tried to prevent himself from speaking that way and he tried to prevent himself from thinking that way too. He didn’t want to admit to others or to himself that he was full of such a strong yearning for such a small happiness.

Later, for reasons that were now almost forgotten, he had begun to teach himself Turkish. In an effort to learn the new language he had tried to apply it to his environment - by learning the words for wall, door, locked door, etc. - and before he was conscious of the implications, he was pacing about his cell forming future-tense observations about food, in Turkish. Sanctions-busting thought routines, prohibited from using English or Japanese to speculate on bread rations, saw in the new language a loophole and quickly began to exploit it. Today bread! Tomorrow bread!

He had let it pass. He was learning a new language, and if that involved confronting hungry monsters from the id then so be it.


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This Thursday’s piece of ekmek was beautiful. It was four inches long, one-and-a-half inches wide, and it stood a little over one inch tall. (This was a super-size ekmek, for prisoners over six foot tall. According to prison regulations, the length of prisoners’ bread was dependent upon the height of their heads.) Not only tall but glamorous, it wore its raisins all about it like sequins and cockney pearls.

He longed somehow to deny it its transience, to love it forever. When it was gone, there would be nothing of beauty left in his life. So he gazed at it, loving its complexion; he fondled it, loving its curves; he kissed it, loving its scent.

Yet despite these outward displays of affection, he only really loved the bread in the same way that he loved his women. It was not real love, but covetousness. He only loved it because he wanted to make it his. And so he broke it, at the end closest to him where it was most vulnerable; and he actually saw four, premature squirts of saliva shoot uncontrollably from below his tongue as he was opening his mouth, preparing ravenously to take all that beauty from the world.

He abandoned his equanimity.

She was his consort as he sailed the still waters of prison monotony, and she held him close when they had to weather the storms and treacherous undercurrents too. But were all the highs and lows to be avoided so religiously? Couldn’t he try to surf a little when the conditions looked good? Here was a wave that promised to lift him up a little, and maybe he wasn’t so scared of being sucked back down in its wake after it had passed. Sometimes the only way to go was to go with the flow... Ride this out, as the Chicano had said.


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After induction, he had been assigned to Ten Factory. There was just one other foreigner there: the Chicano, who became his closest friend in the prison. The Chicano had already served eight-and-a-half years - one-and-a-half of those years in Ten Factory with no other foreigners - and was due for parole that Summer. He was ghetto-raised and prison-educated. He spoke in an idiosyncratic blend of American slang and German philosophy. (It was the Chicano who introduced him to Nietzsche.) He was full of cryptic one-liners and offbeat wisdom, accumulated over too many years of being an intelligent man trapped in nine circles of nonsense. They had such little time to talk (with over twenty-three hours a day of enforced silence) but sometimes the Chicano would smuggle between their cells a book with pencilled notes in the margin, or write him a kite on a scrap of paper wrapped in tissue and pass it over in the factory changing room. On one of those kites he had written:

For now all you can do is ride this out, and do your time like a souljah.


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Amazing!
The minutiae that hypnotise and confound us.

It is especially true about the sugar cravings.

Can't wait to see if there is more to come!
Rach x

Waiting patiently! LOL!

When Yu In Prison Do You Do All The Time Or 80%

It depends on what you've been sentenced for. Men in for robbery burglary etc. tend to be let out earlier - 62% i think was the earliest i saw - a Colombian doing 3&ahalf for burglary. 72% wouldnt be uncommon though, even for the same crime.

Drugs cases tend to be kept in for longer. (Murder too.) Used to be 66% a long time ago but over the last decade i think the amount of time served has gone up & up. 82% was the earliest you could hope for when i was there. Realistically between 85% and 89%. One American did way over 90% - drugs case - but he was in & out of the punishment block loads.

On punishment, yes it does count against you if you really got a big file, and especially if you haven't apologised for any of it, or worse you've appealed complained etc. but to be honest most all foreigners get in trouble there pretty frequently so they kind of expect a certain amount of history. Anyway i knew on e iranian who did about 4yrs with not one incident and he still did over 85%

Oh, and you do have to admit guilt to the crime you were sentenced for. If you keep denying it you'll do 100%. That's official i asked a high-ranking officer on the record.


Transfer on the other hand is 33% minimum - most blokes did over 50% before there was any sign of it. It drags on and on there's always something holding it up. However it was improving with each flight back. The British Embassy were particularly good at pushing the process as fast as possible.


Busy few days but i'll type the next bit of the story up tomorrow night :)

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five


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They were riding again, the ghosts of past days and days yet to come. They came to lassoo him, dragging him away in their chains from the present, where he wished only to sit and eat his dinner in peace. Buddha said not to get lost in the past, for there’s nothing you can do to change it, and not to get lost in the future either. Buddha said to keep yourself rooted in the present moment - he was quite insistent on that point.

This present moment, containing as it did the first bite of raisin bread still fresh in his mouth, was a moment in which he particularly wished to keep himself rooted. However, one problem he always faced at times like this was finding somewhere comfortable to rest his eyes. When he was trying to seat himself properly at mealtimes he invariably wriggled himself round ninety degrees across his seat so that he could lean against the wall instead of the sado-masochistically straight back of the little wooden chair. This position had the disadvantage however of turning his head away from any food that was on the table, presenting him instead with the gaping mouth of the toilet which sat right at his feet. The toilet was stained. It was not the ideal view to encourage one to keep all faculties rooted in the here-and-now.

If he turned his head to the right, he could see food but beyond that he could see the glass in the door, where regularly the blue flash of uniform would flicker and bring with it the potential for unwanted conflict.

When trying to get away with minor breaches of the prison regulations (like trying to eat dinner beyond the end of dinnertime), he believed it was best to adopt the ostrich approach to security, and to bury one’s head in the sand or at least to turn one’s head away from the door. Don’t let them see you seeing them seeing you. If they see you seeing them seeing you breaking the rules, they will then be obliged to confront you. Better to give them the chance to walk on by, each of you pretending to be ignorant of the other. He frequently avoided eye-contact with his captors.

Then if he couldn’t look to his right, at the door, and if he couldn’t look ahead, at the toilet, he would look to his left, out of the window. Apart from the TV-shop effect of the stacked communal cells, there were a few quiet, calming sights to be found out there: two-and-a-half trees; an oblong of grass; a slice of sky. Sometimes there were birds.

However, it was dark out of the window now, at ekmek time, on the last Thursday before the Solstice. It was dark inside his memory too. At this time of year it was inevitable that he would be thinking again of the old man from Portugal.


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The Winter Solstice was the old man’s birthday. He was born on the shortest (darkest) day of the year - an appropriate birthday for such a dark man - and he grew up during a dark time for the Portuguese nation: the dictatorship. He barely said anything about that time; he only named it, as though that were enough to describe its rotten flavour. And the way he said it was enough to make people shudder. Actually the way he said a number of things was enough to make people shudder.

He was a very tall man with good posture for his age, standing a clear head above most of the Japanese. He had an angry, angular nose that had somehow refused to stop growing long after the rest of him had given up. He had two dark puffy bags hanging from beneath his eyes, as heavy as plastic sacks after a messy Christmas party. Above them his cold eyes were a blue as pale as a midwinter sky after a snowstorm. Each one of the many lines in his face ran in the opposite direction to happiness. If ever he tried to fold them into a smile the effect was painful and unconvincing. He spoke with a swampy South African accent, his words at once both sharp and blunt.

But I’m not a soldier, the old man had said in response to the Chicano’s earlier words of wisdom. In turn, comments like that led the Chicano to conclude: He gots no game. And yet the old man did have a fair point: he certainly was not a soldier, and of the three of them (he had been the next foreigner assigned to Ten Factory) he was the best qualified to know. As a young man he had been conscripted to fight for the dictatorship, and had been shipped away to Africa. He had never killed a man, he said, but had hurt a few in interrogation, and hurt his own soul in the process.

So when the Japanese prison guards barked every morning and every afternoon left, left, left right, marching their captives between the cellblocks and the factories, commanding and saluting and pretending to be what they weren’t, and when every man in line was stepping to the hateful rhythm and wrestling with his own angry demons, the old man from Portugal always appeared to be wrestling with the angriest, darkest demons of them all.


======



This was a fine piece of ekmek. He didn’t want to be thinking about the marching. He could blame the system for how the marching would trample over his mornings and his afternoons but he had only himself to blame when he allowed it to trample over his own thoughts and his evenings, after the tick-tock rhythm had stopped. Better to think of the burst of sweetness when a raisin turns its insides out.

Then, by loudspeaker, he was told to: “Begin lying down! Begin lying down!”

For most of the day, until the relevant announcement, it was forbidden to lie on the bed, forbidden to sit on the bed, forbidden to put feet on the bed, forbidden to so much as touch the bed. Penitents were expected to sit still: on the floor in Japanese cells; on the wooden chair in foreign cells. Convicted criminals were deemed unfit to decide when and when not they could have something soft beneath their backsides. Guards patrolled the cellblocks all day, ready to pounce on any scoundrel who may dare to think otherwise.

This evening the announcement was an hour early: for most days of the year it came at six o’clock. Under the new, enlightened regime however, a few extra bedtime hours were handed out magnanimously during the hardest of the winter months. Presumably the authorities hoped that such benevolent gestures would cut down on frostbite and sickness.

In response to the early announcement, a few men on the foreign cellblock released a couple of forbidden whoops and cheers. The muted celebration was stillborn, tumbling lifelessly into the cold. Which was more miserable, he wondered briefly, that a minority were so delighted to be granted such a petty concession, or that the majority simply obeyed the command in their usual state of silent obedience?


======

Great Stuff, as ever!!

Feel like I'm there with you.

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six

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He turned again to look out of his window, knowing exactly what he would see. On cue, every prisoner in every communal cell was making his bed and changing into his stripy pyjamas. A time for everything and everything on time. One of the least unpleasant things said of the Japanese by foreigners was that they behaved and expected others to behave like robots. Whether that was fair or not, that it was repeated so frequently was just one of many indicators that, in this prison, East met West with very little accompanying love and understanding.


======



If I ever catch any of these b******s in Africa, said the old man one day, I’ll feed them to the f*****g lions.

Africa was the old man’s home. After he completed his military service he decided not to return to Portugal, and settled eventually in Johannesburg. He married an Afrikaner woman who gave him a son and a divorce, and later he married a Canadian woman who took him to Canada. There he missed Africa and missed his son, and so one night told his wife that he was going out to buy cigarettes. He had seen the move on Canadian television a week earlier and had admired it as a clean getaway with guaranteed results. He took a taxi straight to the airport and never returned. He opened a bar in Johannesburg, drank it into the ground, began smuggling diamonds, helped out his first wife as their son grew up, and stashed away as much cash as he could. Most of it he stashed into casinos and brothels.

The Chicano, who had a black babymomma waiting for him back in L.A., was not too impressed with the old man’s South African stories, and told him so.

OK, the old man replied, Apartheid was bad. But back then, everything was bad. At least, everything I’d ever seen was bad. War was pretty bad! Everthing was. Except Canada maybe.

In the first couple of months that he spent at the factory, the old man was unable to win much friendship from his younger companions. His thick, sticky accent was a barrier; so, too was his physical inability to smile; but he had something else about him, something less easy to define but just as real, something that would act as a catalyst for emotional entropy. It was as though those pale eyes could suck away life and love from their surroundings. Talking with him was like stepping out into the cold with no coat on. (When your only winter clothes are a Japanese prison uniform, you step out into the cold with no coat on every day.)

He had not read as much philosophy as the Chicano, but the old man was nonetheless an intuitive nihilist. He rejected every aspect of the prison’s petty morality outright, without hesitation. Each time his companions explained to him any aspect of Japanese prison life (his old brain, having mastered Portuguese, Spanish, English and Afrikaans, had no room left for Japanese, and so required constant translation), his response was invariably a single word, aspirated and drawn out until it stretched for three syllables: f - * - *k. In the mornings, when asked How are you? he was more expansive: F*****g sh*t.

At break times the old man would read the newspaper intensely, and would occasionally lift his fierce nose above the pages to offer comment and analysis. He became alarmed when he learned that the Japanese had entered the space race. When the aliens come, he once said in all seriousness, What happens if they meet a Japanese spaceman first? They’ll think we’re all like that and blow up the f*****g planet. He took offense at Japan’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council too. Imagine if they got the chance to run the world the way they run this prison! They’d make slaves out of the lot of us! He often likened the forced labour in the prison factories to slavery.

Maybe it’s your karma, Viejo. Said the Chicano. Did you have much to say about slavery when you were in South Africa?

There’s a difference between Apartheid and slavery, the old man replied. Then he attempted a mischievous smile. Slavery is what you had in the Land of the Free, and, to his other companion: The Land of Hope and Glory too, eh?

The next foreigner to arrive at Ten Factory was a Russian-Israeli. The breaktimes got even better.


======



He always tried to eat his food as slowly as he could. Simultaneously, though, he had to maintain the appearance of trying to eat it quickly, incase prying eyes grew impatient. So when he was eating from a bowl he always held a spoon above it intently, as though he was just about to shovel away furiously all the remaining slops; when he was eating ekmek he always kept the next piece ready in his hand, held aloft as a visible offering to the omniscient spirit of repentance. Unfortunately, however, this practice served to convince his own subconscious that he was in a hurry far more effectively than he suspected it convinced anyone else. When his conscious thoughts strayed, as they invariably would, more automatic subroutines took over, and instructed his mouth to chew and swallow with haste, because they had signals coming though from the hand reporting a backlog. Attempting inwardly to relax whilst attempting outwardly to appear distressed, and thus becoming inwardly more distressed, was just one of the many paradoxes in which he would often flounder as he struggled to navigate safe passage through this whole bizarre experience.

Still, no matter how far he allowed his mind to wander, instinctively he always kept his appearance in check, in the ever-present knowledge that he was being watched - if not now, then any minute now - that is the paranoid certainty of every man behind bars.


======



He got his first taste of the sour ethics of the punishment system when he was caught talking with the Russian-Israeli at the factory. The guard called the guilty pair to the front, and asked them what they were talking about. They denied that they had even been talking at all. The guard picked up his little plastic telephone and called for them to be taken away. It was that simple.

In the section administrative block they were sat in boxes: individual cubicles that were like lavatories with a bench instead of a toilet. Take away ‘water’ from ‘water closet’ and you’re left with ‘closet’. The foreign prisoners called them boxes. Each box was three feet wide by three feet deep, cold, dirty and claustrophobic.

He and the Russian-Israeli were sat in two boxes and left to worry. They found time to call to each other when guards’ footsteps were far enough away, and they agreed a story. He was taken into a small room, interrogated by a senior officer, given a warning, and eventually returned to the factory, once the Russian Israeli had been through the same process. It took most of the day. After, he learned that the reason they had been removed from the factory was not that they had been caught talking but that they had failed immediately to apologise and to give the factory boss a full confession. In your country, don’t you apologise when you do something wrong? the senior officer had asked him.

Yeah, we apologise in our countries, said the Chicano later, when they found a moment to discuss the drama, but only after we done some truly nefarious sh*t.


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Rach, you were there with me xx

This is awesome and I look forward to the next writings.

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seven

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The Chicano, after eight and a half years of learning the hard way, was the foremost authority on prison rules and how to break them. You can run game on these fools, he told him, but you gots to do it surreptitiously.

Running game was the way the Chicano maintained his dignity under the eroding forces of compulsory conformity. He passed books and magazines between cells; he held rapid-fire dialogues with men from other factories during roll-call and after lights-out; he smuggled soap out of the factory to feed his own and others’ obsessive compulsive disorders (this lockdown sh*t has gotten me so I even feel violated when cats try to shake my hand); he sent and received a steady stream of kites, like a cellblock postman, keeping up the flow of news and emotional support between the factories; he stole food from the factory canteen, where he worked, hid it in the dishwasher then shared out the spoils when the guards changed shifts. Under the Japanese regime, these were bold moves.

Somehow, the Chicano hustled his way through his last two years in the prison without once being sent back to Investigation. (In the preceding years he had been in and out eleven times.) He was finally called to a parole meeting in May 2005. He made parole and they told him he’d be out by July. Against his better judgement, he wrote to his family in June and told them that he’d be home before his son’s birthday in September. The reply came back that his son was literally jumping with joy. The prison held him until mid-October. In his last kite, he wrote: All this time, I never let the hypocrisy infect me. On the contrary, it only made me raise my game.

With his friend gone, he was left to spend the winter with the old man and the Russian-Israeli. The two had swiftly polarised one another into antagonistic positions on the great glass-half-empty-half-full debate, leaving him to struggle between the two, just wanting to tip the whole dammed glass away. The Russian-Israeli was just starting an eight-year sentence, and each morning in the factory changing room he would grin and say: One more day to the freedom, man! with bright enthusiasm, as though he intended to keep saying it every morning for the next two thousand, nine hundred and twenty-one days. The old man retreated into the newspaper, and his nose could be seen rising above its pages less and less as each of those days went by.

He made no effort to draw the old man out from behind the paper, and spent more time with the Russian-Israeli. Sometimes, when the old man did venture forwards again, he even ignored him, keeping himself immersed in different conversations. He found it too draining to look into those pale blue eyes. He feared that they would leech his heart and leave him empty. He feared that they would age him. He only had a small stash of energy to see him through the winter, and he knew it wasn’t enough to share around.

There were some days he started out so low that he knew he had nothing to lose, and then he would venture to trade a little cynicism with the old man, while the stakes were low; but he was younger and replenished his energy reserves faster, and when he did so he hoarded them, and again left the old man alone in the dark.


======



The bread in his mouth had been rounded up and herded into the enclosure between his left cheek and his lower-left teeth. Trying to take some pleasure from his food had become especially problematic since he’d broken his last fully-functional chewing tooth. (The high point of September had plummeted so far, so quickly.) Now he tried to keep the bulk of each mouthful secure in his left cheek, hampster-style, away from the danger zone on the other side. He did his best to chew everything thoroughly on the left side of his mouth, but his teeth there were so riddled with cavities they were as hollow as smugglers’ caves. With ease the food mocked his efforts and escaped through holes and tunnels and channels. Nevertheless he determinedly molested it with his tongue, groping each morsel in turn. His teeth were rotten and neglected but his taste buds were sill rampant and insatiable.

From time to time, frustrated at his failure to grind the food by regular chewing, he would push small quantities of it forward to a place between his front teeth - before his lower-front teeth and behind his upper-front teeth - and would flatten it between the two sets by pushing his jaw forward. This was perhaps the most effective option left available to him, but he tried not to use it often for fear of ruining his front teeth too.

The prison employed one dentist for all of its three thousand inmates, and then (according to rumour) only once a week. Everybody suffered. Notably bad off were the speed addicts, of whom there were plenty, who were already suffering from Crystal Meth Mouth before they checked in. However, nobody was immune to the double whammy of medical negligence and poor nutrition. (Over the course of a year, each prisoner received just three litres of milk, six pieces of fresh fruit and four pieces of frozen fruit. Vitamin supplements were prohibited.) And the toothpaste was lousy.


======



There were some sights in prison that he wished he had never seen and, having seen them, wished he could forget. One was the sight of the old man’s face swollen up so bad from a rotten tooth that his head looked set to explode.

He and the Russian-Israeli had been translating for the old man since the Chicano left, so they knew the story: toothaches since the summer; request forms filled out five months ago; receiving aspirins and being told to wait his turn; more toothaches; more request forms; more waiting... Then one morning he’d heard a commotion as he was leaving his cell. The other men were lining up ready to march to the factory, but were daring to break rank to turn around and they were daring to break the silence to gasp; and there was the side of the old man’s head bursting out so far it had closed one eye, stretched one nostril, pulled one corner of his mouth, and twisted one ear until the earlobe was pointing forward.

The guards shouted at the men to shut up and get back in line, and marched them all out into the cold like it was just another day. It was just another day. The old man himself, who for all his bluster was always too frightened to disobey orders, fell into line with the rest of them and marched off to work. And then nothing happened except the same old everything.

With a breaking heart he watched the old man work through the start of the day (like a slave) until he could take it no longer and belatedly raised a new fuss on the old man’s behalf, this one fussier than the last, and then raised another, even fussier, after that other fuss had been extinguished. It was nearly lunchtime before anything happened. In the end, somebody - not the dentist - drained the fluid from the swelling, fed the old mad a couple more aspirin, told him to keep on waiting for an appointment, and sent him back to the factory.

When he had first seen the old man’s swollen face that morning he had been disgusted. Later, he had been disgusted at his own disgust. Much later, he became disgusted with something worse: his whole withdrawal from their relationship. Slowly, reluctantly, he began to question what it was that he found so difficult about the old man’s company, and whether that really justified his behaviour. When he found an answer, he became only more disgusted with himself.

He had injured a knee chasing fitness around the exercise yard. No matter how desperately he wanted to start running again, the knee stubbornly refused to heal. Thus he found himself spending exercise time walking slowly around the yard with only the old man for company as the younger men raced past them in the cold.

There was a lone crow sobbing in a naked tree on the day the old man told the missing chapter from his story.


======



On a roasting, sweaty bus with a leather pouch of diamonds bouncing against his chest, the old man sat watching his telephone screen for a signal as he approached the South African border. The signal came to the telephone before the bus came to the border, and the old man called his stone man to say he was on his way. The connection let the telephone ring for too long. When he answered, he sounded badly uncomfortable. He told the old man to ring his ex-wife. The old man did so, and that’s how he learned that his only son had died. Motorbike accident. No helmet.

He was your age.

Jammed between strangers on the bus, he couldn’t cry. Approaching customs with the illegal diamonds around his neck, he couldn’t cry. Walking through Johannesburg, still he couldn’t cry. Instead, he gave up on life. He threw his bank account at whiskey and women until there was nothing left. He borrowed money hoping that he’d die before he had to pay it back. He didn’t die, so the loan sharks gave him a delivery of stones hidden inside African drums to carry to Japan.There were no stones: Japanese customs quickly found the marijuana. They faked a confession and the old man from Portugal got six years.

He was your age.


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Walking slowly round the exercise yard that winter’s day, he caught a rare glimpse of his own mean heart. He saw the reason why the old man’s presence had always made that heart bleed: the old man was the same age as his own father. When the guards barked and screamed and made the old man march left, left, left right, when they made the old man work like a slave, when they gave the old man an aspirin for a five-month toothache, and when they saluted - playing soldiers - and locked the old man down every night, in a parallel universe they were doing it all to his own father; and the mere possibility that such a thing could ever, ever be possible was enough to tear him apart. He didn't have the strength to look into those eyes because he didn't have the strength to look into the world and share its cruel secrets.


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You the man steve. Raisin bread, glad to be in a cage on your own, taking appreciation in the solitude, watching those clowns conforming to the restraints of the pecking order 1 to 7. all bullshit, but hit home when i am feeling, as we would call a tad nostalgic, fond they are not though, Keep it up.

You have my tears freely, unashamedly, undoubtedly, my heart and soul, all given unto you for this protrail of how shit REALLY went down. Also to our "Chicano friend", well discribed, gone now, free. AT LAST, but steve, make no mistake NEVER FORGOTTEN. All I wish is that I was as articulate as you................................Ademi still in. No protection, Will see to it personally that he id freed. Brother to brother and for all that is sick and wrong about Japan.........................................Forg ot untill today what it was to cry, for that I am truely gratefull.. J

mate i still haven't cried. Still not ready i spose. You had a year's head start on me: maybe it'll take me that long.

Yeah for all the brothers in and out - NEVER FORGOTTEN

You know what though, Jiminy, Katy, Rach, everyone who's taken the time to read it, that's all i could hope for x

From the Mainichi Daily News:


Fuchu Prison inmate commits suicide with chopstick

A Fuchu Prison inmate in his 50s has committed suicide by stabbing himself in the head with a chopstick, prison officials said over the weekend.
The man stabbed himself in the back of the head with the sharp end of a broken chopstick on the night of Feb. 19.
He received treatment at a hospital in the Tokyo suburb of Fuchu, but died Sunday morning in the Fuchu Prison infirmary. An autopsy will be carried out Monday at Fuchu Police Station.
Prison officials said the man, whose identity has not been revealed, started serving his sentence at Fuchu in March 2006.

That is a tragedy. How hopeless and helpless he must have felt.

Yon Sen, glad that your wonderful contributions are helping others' journeys.

When the tears are ready to be born, they will come. But only when your mind knows it is now strong enough to begin to grieve for yourself and the others left behind.

WOW.......... I am speechless.
It is wonderful to have you here.

softie

Touching, amazing and terribly sad.......May he rest in peace.

Yeah. Treat people like animals, and the human body, mind/soul, just says " Thats it" all over.................. Never was there, not even close. In my book, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.......I'm out, my oppressors are still in, blindly lead by the confines of the never ending mind f£$k which is the Japanese Penal system. Still, where I was, Has had a overwelming influence of where I am going and what I aspire to be. Thank you Fuchu, but go f£$k yourself too. sorry, censor that.......

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eight

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When the only communication you have with the people around you is conducted in nods, winks, and half-finished whispers, your brain becomes cluttered with incomplete files. All those trains of thought that never arrive at their destinations: they’re shunted into sidings where they wait to be collected, full of claustrophobic passengers begging to disembark.

Don Juan taught that we must suspend our internal dialogue. But which internal dialogue did he mean? the one we have with ourselves, or the one we have with everyone else?


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He was thrown out of Ten Factory after he got caught passing a book to the loud ex-marine who had nothing to read. It was January. He was caught passing the book after returning to the cellblock from the twice-weekly shower, and his hair was still wet. Sitting in a cold box he became ill almost instantly. That was when he decided that there would be no apologies or confessions ever.

He was taken away to solitary, in the punishment block. There, he did twenty-one days ‘Investigation’: alone in a small cell, sitting on the floor making cheap paper bags for expensive department stores. In theory he was allowed his books. He didn’t get them. When the Investigators spun his cell, they counted more than his allowance of personal books, some of which he had sinfully failed to return to Custody of Articles after their thirty-day limits, and so the Investigators returned his entire hoard, overdue or otherwise, back to Custody to teach him a lesson. He spent the next three weeks with a newspaper, a notepad and a pencil.

He gave no apology, no confession. After Investigation he got ten days’ ‘Punishment’. They took away his newspaper, notepad and pencil, and told him to sit still from breakfast to dinner every day. Most prisoners in Punishment had to sit on the floor. As a foreigner he got special treatment, as the Chicano had taught him what to ask for, and the officers reluctantly brought him a legless, backless, wooden block that they called a chair. He sat on it for ten days, then he was taken to Nine Factory. (As opposed to the loud ex-marine, who got seven days’ Punishment and was then returned to Ten Factory, in recognition of his apologetic repentance.)

Of the twelve months in 2006 he spent a total of five in solitary confinement - in Investigation or Punishment, there was little difference between the two. He would last only a few weeks in each new factory before being caught - eating food against the regulations; speaking in a foreign language against the regulations; keeping items in the cell against the regulations - would give no apology and no confession, and bring down upon himself the maximum punishment each time.

Along with most of the other foreigners, he found the Japanese attitude to confession deeply disturbing. The officers expected the inmates to confess everything, always, and to surrender every name. Confession was prized as an ideal in itself, aside from its practical use to the administration. Like Winston Smith in Room 101, the prisoners were expected to betray one another not just for information on their petty breaches of petty regulations, but to break their personal allegiances. Love Big Brother and only Big Brother, and denounce your fellows to him frequently to keep your love pure. War is peace; treachery is a virtue.

The majority of Japanese inmates cooperated fully, unreservedly. Over and again he saw Japanese men picked out from the factories and interrogated, and then watched in disgust as their friends (or enemies) were picked out minutes later. From what he could gather there wasn’t even an equivalent slang term for ‘grass’, ‘rat’ or ‘snitch’: men simply expected to be delivered by their own companions for punishment. There was no surprise or even irritation, let alone the violent reprisals one would expect elsewhere in the world. For the foreigners, such a lack of ‘code’ was most upsetting.

There was a ‘code’ however, it was just different to that to which the foreigners were accustomed, and difficult if not impossible for them to understand. Part of it was a deep respect, even love for authority. Confucius was Chinese but his vision of a society based on rigid superior-inferior relationships was a great influence on Japanese ethics. So too was the ‘Bushido’ - ‘way of the warrior’ - ethics of the old samurai, including their near-masochistic desire to repent for all their failings.

He was unable to understand what was ticking away in the heads of those around him. Whatever it was though, he was aware that there was some underlying, incomprehensible philosophy that was responsible for the more extreme aspects of life inside the prison: the daily left, left, left-right marching; the twenty-three-hour-a-day silences; the good job zeal of the slaves at work; the ceaseless must, must not, can, can not rules and orders and announcements that left him crushed and breathless. He was deep-sea diving far too deep and ready to implode under the pressure.

What made it all so incomprehensible to his Western mind was not so much that the captors were eager to impose such strict order, but that the captives were s eager to have it imposed. There was no dialectic between the powerful and the powerless. Both sides of the equation were pushing in the same direction: down; down; flattening; crushing. They say Bow, you say How low?

Most of the japanese prisoners weren’t even thinking of their parole when they bowed down to the system: for many there was no parole. The prison held hundreds of repeat-offenders and gang members who knew from the outset that they were to serve their entire sentence. They had nothing to lose and yet they still marched like soldiers; they had nothing to lose and yet they still worked like slaves; they had nothing to lose and yet they still obeyed orders like robots. They had nothing to lose except...

They had nothing to lose except their honour, the honour of accepting their punishment with a bowed head and a repentant heart. They had nothing to lose except their stripes. Six months good behaviour got them a white stripe on their sleeve. Two white stripes got them a green stripe. Three green stripes got them a star. They had nothing to lose except their coloured badges: white for the bad boys, green and then red for the good boys. And what great privileges did the stripes and the badges earn the good boys? For what great pleasures would they betray themselves and their friends? The stripes earned them nothing and yet they wore them with pride. The badges were worth more: an extra piece of cake; an extra letter home; an extra hour’s television.

There was one man in Seven Factory with four stars on his sleeve: twelve years of good behaviour. Along with the other red badge boys, once a month he got an extra piece of cake and a fruit-flavoured drink.


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nine

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A rogue morsel of raisin bread saw its chance. Taking advantage of his concentration’s lax vigilance, it broke through to the right-hand side of his mouth. There it assailed his broken tooth, stomping on the loose, inner half of that tooth, bending it down against the gum. That brought his concentration back sharply. Oddly, as the broken tooth was pressed inwards, he felt no pain, only the memory of pain. Instinctively he had frozen in an emergency shut-down of all movement, mid-chew. He held the pause.

Something was wrong inside his mouth.

Fleetingly this time, at the speed of thought, and despite his renewed - urgent - awareness of the present moment, the memory of another troubled mouth repeated on him.


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He never did find out if the old man from Portugal got his bad tooth fixed. They hadn’t even seen each other for most of the year: no sooner had they begun to bridge the chill between them, over those shivering walks in the exercise yard, when he’d been sent to Nine Factory and then to Five Factory, meaning he'd spent the Spring and Summer on a different level of the cellblock. In the Autumn, after a 42-day stretch in solitary (singing, Wake Me Up When September Ends), he got assigned to Seven Factory, meaning he was back on the third level of the cellblock, same as the old man.

After lock-down at the end of each workday he’d pull the moves that the Chicano had taught him: he’d stand at the front of his cell, pretending to adjust bed sheets or laundry, or cleaning the little hatch beside the door. That way he could keep his face close to the glass when the foreigners returned from other factories, his face fixed in a smile ready for the golden moment when a friendly face might file by. Or, if his factory was returning after the others, he would count off the doors until the cells of men that he knew, give a cough to let them know he was approaching, and slow a little as he passed them, in the hope that they would be waiting at the front of their cells too. With those passing sparks of recognition, the foreigners tried to keep the flame of human interaction alight, in the darkness of their solitude, passing it between them like an olympic torch. A cough, a smile, a nod: these were their meagre reminders to one another that they were not alone.

So he saw the old man again for two seconds each day. Also he saw that the Colombian cat burglar was sharing a cell with the really tall American. Then he didn’t see the Colombian cat burglar any more (Investigation). Then he saw that the old man had moved into the double cell with the really tall American. So now the old man had someone to talk with and to share with. Perhaps the old man had thawed a little in the Spring, warmed a little in the Summer, mellowed a little by the Autumn. His smile though, framed in the door to his cell, was still broken - like cracks in the glass.


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That lack of pain worried him. He couldn’t remember when the tooth-bending had ceased its hurting: some time in the last week he guessed. Until now the pain’s absence had been passively welcomed, but thinking about it, there was no good reason to suppose that his mouth had healed itself. Broken teeth don’t just patch themselves up.

It was more likely, now he allowed the chilling thought to reach into his consciousness, that the inner half of the tooth - the loose, useless slice of bone that flapped helplessly against his gum like an open door in a gale - had finally been abandoned by the rest of his mouth, and cast away from its connection with the nerve.


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He remembered the date because he had written it in his notebook: the twenty-eighth of September 2006. It had been another one of those Thursdays when he had lost control of his equanimity, under the destabilising influence of the whispered news that had spread through the factory: it was to be a raisin bread Thursday.

He was in Seven Factory then, a double-sized factory of a hundred and thirty men, thirty of them foreigners, where he had a fair-sized cluster of comrades about him. Like him, they grudgingly allowed a glimmer of light to shine on their day, with the thought that there could be something sweet for dinner.

The shouting of the guards at the end of work, the routine humiliation of the strip search in the (dirty) changing room, the left, left, left-right march back to the cellblock, the lock-down, the roll-call and the announcements: he had stepped through them all in a dangerous state of raised expectations, waiting for his treat. And after a dozen mouthfuls, a raisin pip had piled into a rotten filling in a rotten tooth, driving the filling through the centre of the tooth like a chisel splitting wood along the grain.

So he waited until the next day, Friday, when it was the correct time to request a request form. He filled in the request form that night, explaining his problem, explaining that he now couldn’t eat properly, explaining that he feared it would get worse if neglected, pleading even for urgent treatment. He waited until the following Monday when it was the correct time to submit the request form. He waited some more. He made a note of the date because he knew what would happen, or rather he knew what would not happen; and when, on the tenth of October, the old filling inside the broken tooth shattered into pieces and fled the scene of the crime, into a getaway mouthful of rice, he requested another request form and he made another entry in his notebook, knowing that the one was just as likely to bring him any help as was the other.


======



Nearly three months later, the pain had stopped, and he admitted to himself that he had lost half of a tooth.

He moved on. At some unremarked-upon point in the last few minutes he had taken the bite that left him with less than half of the ekmek remaining. He had let it go without entreaty to stay, without fond farewell or tearful goodbye. Like the tooth, it was gone and he was powerless to change that. Now he had little to remind him of the feast he had so recently spread before him. The ekmek was well into middle age, embracing its own mortality with each passing mouthful; and he had been miles away from home for the best part of their relationship.

A wild horse unchecked by the bridle, said Buddha, must soon drag the man leading it into a pit.

He often remembered those words, but the more he tried to rein in his mind, the faster it ran away.


======

Still riveted!!!

Feeling the tooth pain. Have you had it fixed since?

Beautifully written, sadly told.

It seems that the Dharma served to help you through your ordeal. I hope that since you've been out you've been able to maintain and further cultivate that equinimity and conscious peace.

Best wishes, with sincerity.

Slight misrepesentation on our 3 star general, but other than that spot on.... Oh how I was into that raisin bread! Used to save my butter in the mornings( at risk mind you!!) for 2 days to make it much, much more........ahhhh.

Sorry. Unfair to mix our general up with the others.
Kit tung maak, Pii. Khaw hai chok dii.

Hehe saving the butter got me in big trouble one time - part of the bust that got me the 42 days: It was at the end of the Summer "Holidays" (like a roasting hot stretch in solitary but with a bit of TV). We were coming back from the showers and i saw an English bloke in his cell (Hare Krshna from 9fac). I'd thought he'd transfered already but I'd recently heard otherwise in Mass. So i saw him there, weeks and weeks after his transfer date, but he wasn't looking up so i called his name. Bang! the guard turned round and saw me raise my hand. Investigation!

They told me they could let me back to the fac if i just give them the name of the friend i was waving at. No. So they send me down the block and spin my cell.

They find:

1. a clothesline i'd made from sentaku tags stretched across the back of my desk. It was so i could wash & hang up underwear (BIG offense - but for the Summer 'Holidays' they lock everyone down for the six hottest days of the year, with four sets of underwear. What do you do?)

2. A chess set made from bits of paper. I'd woken up that morning to make a move in the game I was playing with a Canadian across the way, ready to tell him my move when we went to shower. (There was 1, was it 2? showers in those whole six-day Summer stretches) Anyway I'd got my chess set out from its envelope where it was pretty safe, and left it on my desk hidden behind my photos teapot etc., but they'd come to get my fac for first shower - 8am or whatever - and i was unprepared. lax security! left it on the table.

3. Portion of margarine!!! Also out of its hiding place, just sitting on the shelf of the desk.


Jokes when they interrogated me about it. Told them it looked like innocent margarine but actually it was C4 and i was planning to strap it round me and blow myself up in the fac. Haha i laughed but they didn't. Told them the pieces of the chess set were really blotting paper dipped in acid and i was selling it in exchange for more explosives. They didn't laugh at that one either.

Clowns they'd brought the digicam into my cage and everything - taken photos of the margarine etc. as Evidence it was all printed out neat in my file. HOW can you take that seriously??? i had to wind em up. 12 days Investigation 30 days Punishment.

Back on the wing i kept on saving that butter though...

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ten

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He shifted his weight a little on the hard, wooden chair. He re-crossed his legs, propping his left foot against the base of the toilet to stop himself from slipping down any further as he leant back against the wall. The wall was becoming colder; the chair was becoming harder. His exposed knuckles were fast approaching their bedtime, when they would demand tucking into their gloves. He too needed tucking in. Without woolen blankets he would be unable, physically, to sit in the wooden chair much longer before the shivers started.

So it wasn’t so sad, really, moving now towards the final act of this dinner. He had to bring it to an end before long, besides, as he wanted to be well settled in bed for the start of the movie. American movies were shown twice a week, on Sunday mornings and Thursday evenings. That was what made Thursday evenings better than the other ekmek evenings. Not that he liked to admit even that much to himself any more.


======



Six Thursdays earlier, at the start of November, was the last time he had permitted his emotions to run hotter than lukewarm. He had paid for the mistake.

Half way through the day, he had been called out of the factory for a long-awaited visit from his embassy. It was no ordinary visit either: his Vice-Consul had brought him his papers to sign, finally requesting transfer back to prison in the UK.

He had been waiting a long time to sign those papers. Japan kept hold of her captives like a bitch pitbull clenching her teeth. She insisted that any foreign prisoner wishing to transfer (providing their countries were signatories to the transfer agreement) must serve a third of their sentence before they even begin to request transfer, let alone expect anyone to begin making the necessary arrangements. The maths behind it were decidedly dodgy, too. According to the Japanese calculations, he found that he had not served a third of his four-and-a-half year sentence until October 2006, two-and-a-half years after his arrest in March 2004. Two-and-a-half into four-and-a-half was a particularly long third.

So he had done his time, like a souljah, until October, and then until November, and then he signed the papers with the British government. The British authorities told him that they were pushing to get him moved before the end of the year. Before the end of the year. That had been his hope for a while; but it was just the latest in a long line of hopes that, across those two-and-a-half years, he had stretched to breaking point, one after the other. Each time his hopes had snapped, he had been left clinging to nothing. Thus he learned that it was better to reach for nothing, to hope for nothing, to clutch at nothing; it was better to let go, to try only to drift down the middle of the stream, a safe distance from hope on one bank and despair on the other.

Yet at times the current would drag him away from the centre. And so it was when he came back from signing his transfer papers and the Irish lad in Seven Factory said to him: You’ve got the look of someone who knows he’s getting out of here soon; and he had raised his expectations up off the factory floor and he had skipped his way through the shouting and the stripsearch and the left, left, left-right; and while they were marching past the bath house, he had actually admitted, out of the corner of his mouth to the Irish lad that he liked Thursdays because - and he had even said the word (because the Irish lad didn’t speak Turkish) - because Thursdays meant both bread and movie; and when the guards had ordered the foreigners to march on the spot, outside the cellblock in the cold, going nowhere but left, left, left-right, he had flapped his arms about like a rag doll and stomped his feet crookedly, feeling too alive to be playing soldiers with the other zombies; but when you’re unarmed, climbing up too high just makes you an easier target; and the Seven Factory boss had seen him marching like a clown and had shouted his name; but he’d ignored his name and kept on clowning; and so he’d been sent straight to Investigation and ate his ekmek cold and late and sitting on the floor; and he’d missed that Thursday’s movie and all the movies in November because there’s no TV in the Investigation cells - there’s no nothing in the Investigation cells - and the charge against him was disobeying the officers’ instructions even though the only instruction had been his name shouted at him and he had got fifteen days of Punishment and then got sent to Eight Factory in December. His hope and emotions went back into hibernation.


======



The Japanese prisoners in the cellblock opposite had long since finished their retching and spitting, and he had closed his window on them anyway, but now the unhealthy Iranian in the cell next to him began to do the same. Somehow the sound could travel through reinforced escape-proof earthquake-proof concrete. He knew from experience that it would continue for at least ten minutes. The unhealthy Iranian was sick. The sound of the unhealthy Iranian retching and spitting was enough to make everyone around him sick, too.

He put down his raisin bread and waited for the noise to pass by. Immediately, annoyed at the lapse in his paranoid awareness, he picked up the raisin bread again, and resumed his posture of feigned hurry.

As if to remind him of the ever-watchful eye of authority, somewhere down the cellblock the patrolling guard raised his voice: “Forbidden! Forbidden! Bla bla bla that’s forbidden!”

The muffled sound of a convict shouting back through the grille in his door came back in response. The guard raised his voice higher. The argument took wings and flapped blindly about the cellblock, looking for release but finding walls and locked doors. It crashed into the echoes of its own frustration. Inevitably it lost its struggle with itself, broke a wing and tumbled down through the cold, remorseless prison air. It gave some last feeble convulsions and died.

The pad of the patrolling guard’s footsteps picked up again, louder, somehow bigger, as though it had been feeding on the frustrated energy of the argument. It passed by cell West-3-306, holding hands with a flicker of blue, and slowly faded again into the night.

The unhealthy Iranian retched, coughed, groaned, coughed, retched, hawked and spat.

Arguments in this sad place were short, weak and doomed to go nowhere. There simply weren’t enough calories to burn.


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Amazing, each time I start to comment on these writings I seem to be at a loss for words......

Me too!
That HAS to be a first!!

This is great, thanks so much for sharing with us.

Rach xx

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eleven

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Coming out of Punishment this last time he had blundered into some confrontations of his own, in the mornings, with the guard who had learned English in America.

That guard dealt with the English-speaking foreign prisoners, and also played a lead role in the early-morning shouting outside cellblock West-3. He spoke near-perfect English (he was the only guard who could), and he could be polite and reasonable in conversation. However, when it came to screaming left, left, left-right at the foreigners he was like a school bully pushing children about in the playground. He pitched his voice high and insistent, like road-rage car horns in a traffic jam.

In the Punishment block there was no early-morning shouting and no marching; it seemed that playing soldiers was an honour fit only for the truly virtuous penitent. The bad boys at the end of the East wing were already lost souls with no help of redemption. For the most part they were left to sit out their Punishments in silence. Somehow, according to his stoic philosophy, it was an extra humiliation for the fallen samurai to be denied the chance to display his remorse in every submissive left, left, left-right step that he takes.

Thus returning from solitude to the sonic barrage of daily life in the West wing was always difficult. It was especially unpleasant when the guard who had learned English in America was on duty.

He had not responded well to that guard’s rush-hour hooting: not at seven-thirty in the morning in the cold; not when that guard singled him out and called his name and ordered him to straighten his arms when marching; not after he straightened his arms and then the next day the same guard ordered him to straighten his fingers. Being ordered to straighten his fingers had been more than he could take. They had argued briefly, unconvincingly. The guard had taken him out of the line and back to the cellblock but, instead of sending him straight to Investigation, had given him the chance to calm down and go on to the factory with the good boys. He had taken the chance, mentioning to the guard that there were only two weeks until Christmas. The guard who had learned English in America probably assumed that he would want to stay out of the Punishment block for that time. He would have been only partly right.

In fact, he had been working towards a monumental decision about the Festive season. He was planning to spend Christmas on the Punishment block. All that remained to him was the issue of how to get there with the minimum time to serve, and how to time the bust right so he wouldn’t lose his books before the New Year. That wouldn’t be possible if he lost his cool so soon, not over the playing soldiers thing again.

So after a couple of days marching to the tick-tock rhythm of daily life on the wing, the flicker of individuality, briefly rekindled by the oxygen of solitude, had been extinguished again. In the mornings his feet fell into step with those of the zombies; he straightened his arms and he straightened his fingers; he even offered an apology to the guard who had learned English in America. The guard backed off, hooting again at all the foreigners indiscriminately - nothing personal.

After a week in Eight Factory, that guard came to see him on other business. They talked politely about some of the many lengths of red tape that were stretched between him and his transfer out of the country. At the end of the conversation, the guard said to him: So you can stop pretending to be crazy now. He said it twice - like he had been rehearsing it - then closed the dialogue and walked briskly out of the factory.

Stop pretending to be crazy - and pretend to be what instead? The comment disturbed him, and the more he looked for the reason why it disturbed him, the closer he came to seeing what it was about the whole prison that disturbed him. More than the militarism, more than the austerity, the masochism and the cruelty - he could take all that and more and still stand tall - what really disturbed him was that men like that guard actually believed that it was all so Right. It was all so Right that the guard didn’t merely believe that any man who rejected so much as the smallest, straight-fingered part of it must therefore be crazy, but that no man could really be that crazy and so must only be acting crazy. By that reasoning, even the non-believers can be counted with the believers. Right is self-evidently Right, and is proven as such by the absence of all dissent.

That fever of conviction could be seen burning in the eyes of all the guards. In some, zealous, dangerous, it burned brighter than others. The Eight Factory boss, though, was as unaffected as any guard conceivably could be. In most prisoners’ eyes, he was the best of the lot.

He’s the best sh*t we’ve got, said the Israeli with metal in his leg from the war in Lebanon who used to pass kites with the Russian Israeli until the Russian Israeli was transfered to a different section and never seen again after instructing a guard to suck something that you’re not supposed to instruct prison guards to suck.

The Eight Factory boss was often smiling and hardly ever shouting, he spoke to the convicts politely, with warmth even, and he went lightly with the whole playing soldiers routine. He stood out as an individual from all the other guards, and as a decent character, and he deserved better than the comment from the Israeli with metal in his leg.

He got on well with the Israeli with metal in his leg; he got on well with the boss; he got on well with the Mexican who played decent chess too. He also got on well with the important Japanese convicts in the factory, thanks to connections he’d made in the other factories, and he’d already been ‘promoted’ to the better side of the factory. If he was to keep his head down and serve his remaining time quietly, this would be the best factory in which to serve it.

It was a pity, then, that he would be leaving so soon.

When he had come out of Punishment, the first thing he had done in the factory was to double-check the calendar with the boss, who had confirmed his suspicions: Christmas had been cancelled. It was like a bad tabloid story: December the twenty-fifth would be a normal working day.

He wrote a request form informing, and not requesting that he would not be marching to the factory on Christmas Day, official holiday or not. As a compromise he offered to spend the day in an Investigation cell over on the East wing, folding paper bags, like the Israelis do on Yom Kippur. It was not a request, but the reply came back prompt enough anyway: Request denied.

The Mexican who played decent chess was going to work on the twenty-fifth: for him the evening of the twenty-fourth was more important. Likewise the Colombian who spoke no English or Japanese (speaking through his Mexican interpreter). The Filipino, and the Congolese physics student who had tried to smuggle two kilos of hashish inside hollowed-out textbooks to pay for his tuition fees, were the only other Christians in the factory and they were going to work too. (The French junky with special needs whom the other foreigners called Dummy shook his head and put his two forefingers before his face to form an ‘x’ - from the corners of his eyes, across his nose, to the corners of his mouth - and he shook his fingers in time with his head, turned quickly and departed in silence, still shaking. He’s Muslim, said the Filipino, by way of translation.)


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I check every day to see if you have come by to write some more for us........thank you.

Thanks Katy you're so sweet :o

~~~ HAPPY EASTER PTO ~~~

Thanks for making it over a thousand views


:thumbsup:

xxxxxx

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twelve


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As time chewed its way through the calendar’s twelfth month (in Japan, even the months had lost their names), the ghost of Christmas present stalked the foreign cellblock. In prison, it is possible to keep your mind, body and soul in a peaceful state, free of suffering, but only on a maximum of three hundred and sixty-four days of the year.

Peeling his problem-solving skills out of a book of sudoku puzzles, he had spent the first three weeks of that twelfth month thinking hard about how best to avoid a Christmas spent working in the factory. The very idea was unacceptable: all that remained was to find the least painful way to escape it.

He had been able to ask the old man from Portugal. Since moving to Eight Factory he had been in the middle of the cellblock, near to the foreigners from Ten Factory. Cell West 3-306 was the cell next to the cell opposite the cell that held the old man and the really tall American. He could see them when they stood near the glass, at roll-call twice a day. The old man looked pleased at the reunion, in his midwinter way, with his cracked-glass smile and a bony thumbs-up.

In the mornings, the Colombian cat burglar and the really tall American collected the dirty laundry for Ten Factory: this meant being brought out of their cells ten minutes before everyone else, to collect underwear from the cells’ hatches, fill the laundry sacks for carrying to the factory, and then being locked down again briefly before the march to work. Two foreigners from each factory did this, each workday morning. It was a new system. For the foreigners, it was the new postal service.

The Colombian cat burglar got in the first delivery, a week previously, flicking in through the hatch a rolled-up kite the size of a cigarette butt, wrapped up tight in a precious elastic band, resuming half a conversation they’d been having in the same way two months previously. He’d replied the next day, putting his laundry out of the hatch at just the time the Colombian walked by, their hands snapping together and then quickly apart.

Over the weekend he’d written a kite for the old man, but Monday and Tuesday the guards had been watching the really tall American who had only been able to collect it yesterday morning. The reply had come back today: he had quickly wrapped it in tissue and buried it in the wastepaper basket like the Chicano had taught him. Checking to see how much more time was left, he had caught sight of the old man and swapped a hasty thumbs-up through the glass. Then he had taken the packet of kinako - also given to him that morning - from under his shirt and slipped it through the folded blankets on the end of his bed. The blankets were a less secure hiding place than the wastepaper basket - not that they had failed him yet - but the punishment for having the packet would be less than that for having the kite.

Inside the packet was a golden, powdery mix of soy flour and brown sugar. It was served very occasionally for breakfast, to be mixed with rice. It had a sweet, nutty taste; it turned plain rice into party rice; mixed with a little yellow green tea it made a sticky paste to sweeten up ekmek too. However, food on a workday morning always had to be eaten at the speed of sound (the speed of the sound of the Put out leftovers! announcement that came five minutes after serving), with no time after breakfast for the unrepentant chewing of food indulged in by certain foreigners after dinner. So he stashed the kinako away to be enjoyed later, and when the trustees came to collect the empty packet, he gave them the empty packet from last month, which in turn had been exchanged for that of the month before, going back to the time when the compulsory return of kinako packets was not so strongly enforced. He kept the empty packets flat between sheets of paper.

And then came the shouting.

Every day the shouting was the same. From what he could gather, it had been the same for a hundred years. Today it was the same. The guards gathered into a hunting pack at the end of the cellblock, and at the signal of the pack leader they began to bay and howl. In unison: Seven Factory! Ready for work! Then, split into lone hunters, opening up each cell noisily, nastily: Crunch-whack! Leave the cell! Crunch-whack! Leave the cell! Crunch-whack! Leave the cell! Do not talk! Face the wall! Do NOT talk! Then the pack leader: Seven Factory, attention! South side, turn right! Advance! North side, turn left! Advance! Face forwards! (The juniors counted: One, two, three... twenty-nine, thirty. Seven Factory, thirty men! Their leader shouted back: Thirty men!) At ease! Begin rubbing hands! (This last command was a special treat for the winter months. During the coldest time, the prisoners were permitted gloves inside their cells but not outside. The consequent need to prevent their fingers from seizing up in the cold air had been corrupted, like everything in this place, into a ritual act of compliance, to be performed on command, en masse.) Rub faces! Rub ears! Stop! Attention! Forward march!

Left, left, left-right! Left, left, left-right! Left, left, left-right! Left, left, left-right...

Eight Factory! Ready for work! Crunch-whack! Leave the cell...

The shouting ploughed on, all day, every day, through the rocky soundscape of the prison. There was shouting for men to count in to the factory, to bow to the boss, to recite the Monthly Life Guidance Motto, and to recite the Five Points (1. Always be honest. 2. Sincerely repent. 3. Always be polite. 4. Keep a helpful attitude. 5. Be thankful.); there was shouting to perform synchronised exercises, to sit down, to put hats on, and to read out the Safety Rules in unison; there was shouting to power up the machines, to count out tools and to check each man in each section was sitting correctly. These were just some of the shouts necessary to perform before work could even begin: and there was an almighty shout when that happened. Then there was the shouting for each section when they were to use the toilet (four times a day), drink yellow green tea (twice a day), count out, march to the exercise yard (once a working day, for twenty minutes, under the new, enlightened regime), march back, count in, start up the factory again, stop again, count again, eat lunch, count again, start again, request request forms, finish work and, eventually, spend exactly sixty seconds washing feet in a trough of cold water before bowing to the boss and counting out of the factory.

In the course of each working day, from crunch-whack! in the morning to whack-crunch! in the evening, there were three hundred separate shouts per factory, not including the tick-tock beat of the marching.

It would be a joke, the elephantine roaring of these rats, but it was rarely funny. When dogma and zeal make a mountain of every molehill, it’s hard to laugh when you have to keep climbing.

He felt like Kafka, hopelessly trapped, tangled in an absurd web of red tape. He felt like Yossarian.

He felt like Zarathustra, and every time he was sent to solitary and every time he was brought back, when he faced his own devils, alone, and when he faced the prison mindset, surrounded, he remembered the words that Zarathustra spoke:

I go among this people and keep my eyes open: they do not forgive me that I am not envious of their virtues. They peck at me because I tell them: For small people, small virtues are necessary.

I am polite towards them, as towards every small vexation; to be prickly towards small things seems to me to be the wisdom of a hedgehog.

But ask my foot if it likes their melodies of praise and enticement! Truly, to such a measure and tick-tock beat it likes neither to dance nor to stand still. They would like to lure and commend me to small virtue; they would like to persuade my foot to the tick-tock measure of a small happiness.

I go among this people and keep my eyes open. They have become smaller and are becoming ever smaller and their doctrine of happiness and virtue is the cause.


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Brilliant!
As ever.

Party rice! Whoo hoo!

You make me sigh in sorrow...

Wonderfully written.......moving as always. Thank you for sharing....

Hi PTO :)

Sorry i've been awol over easter - got caught up in the details of the outside world.

Also got stuck trying to explain that Nietzche quote. Let's see if it comes out any better this time.

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I think it was the Penguin Classics translation of Nietzsche's 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' that we had in Fuchu. It was full of many years of convicts' scribbled notes, underlines, thoughts and rants. (The most scribbled-in book there, though, was 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X'.) My good friend the Chicano ordered the book for me from the prison library. He had read all the Nietzsche he could find, but he told me that this one was special. I read it slowly, copying loads of it into my notebook. The first time I got sent to Investigation, when they took all my books, it was the notebook with Zarathustra quotes that was all I could keep with me. I memorised the 'small happiness' quote there, and kept it close.

Eventually, it inspired this whole short story. A couple of the convicts' scribbles said that the old Penguin translation of the book wasn't good enough. So I've since looked up a couple of alternative translations. The one below seems to be the most common.


XLIX. THE BEDWARFING VIRTUE

When Zarathustra was again on the continent, he did not go straightway to his mountains and his cave, but made many wanderings and questionings, and ascertained this and that; so that he said of himself jestingly:

"Lo, a river that floweth back unto its source in many windings!";

For he wanted to learn what had taken place AMONG MEN during the interval: whether they had become greater or smaller. And once, when he saw a row of new houses, he marvelled, and said:

"What do these houses mean? Verily, no great soul put them up as its simile!

"Did perhaps a silly child take them out of its toy-box? Would that another child put them again into the box!

"And these rooms and chambers--can MEN go out and in there? They seem to be made for silk dolls; or for dainty-eaters, who perhaps let others eat with them."

And Zarathustra stood still and meditated. At last he said sorrowfully:

"There hath EVERYTHING become smaller!

"Everywhere do I see lower doorways: he who is of MY type can still go therethrough, but--he must stoop!

"Oh, when shall I arrive again at my home, where I shall no longer have to stoop--shall no longer have to stoop BEFORE THE SMALL ONES!"

--And Zarathustra sighed, and gazed into the distance.--

The same day, however, he gave his discourse on the bedwarfing virtue.

"I pass through this people and keep mine eyes open: they do not forgive me for not envying their virtues.

"They bite at me, because I say unto them that for small people, small virtues are necessary--and because it is hard for me to understand that small people are NECESSARY!

"Here am I still like a cock in a strange farm-yard, at which even the hens peck: but on that account I am not unfriendly to the hens.

"I am courteous towards them, as towards all small annoyances; to be prickly towards what is small, seemeth to me wisdom for hedgehogs.

"They all speak of me when they sit around their fire in the evening--they speak of me, but no one thinketh--of me!


"This is the new stillness which I have experienced: their noise around me spreadeth a mantle over my thoughts.


"They shout to one another: "What is this gloomy cloud about to do to us? Let us see that it doth not bring a plague upon us!"


"And recently did a woman seize upon her child that was coming unto me: "Take the children away," cried she, "such eyes scorch children's souls."


"They cough when I speak: they think coughing an objection to strong winds --they divine nothing of the boisterousness of my happiness!


""We have not yet time for Zarathustra"--so they object; but what matter about a time that "hath no time" for Zarathustra?


"And if they should altogether praise me, how could I go to sleep on THEIR praise? A girdle of spines is their praise unto me: it scratcheth me even when I take it off.


"And this also did I learn among them: the praiser doeth as if he gave back; in truth, however, he wanteth more to be given him!


"Ask my foot if their lauding and luring strains please it! Verily, to such measure and ticktack, it liketh neither to dance nor to stand still.


"To small virtues would they fain lure and laud me; to the ticktack of small happiness would they fain persuade my foot.


"I pass through this people and keep mine eyes open; they have become SMALLER, and ever become smaller:--THE REASON THEREOF IS THEIR DOCTRINE OF HAPPINESS AND VIRTUE."

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thirteen

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He closed his eyes. He unscrunched his troubled face; he unhunched his shoulders; he unbunched his fingers. He let out a breath, and with it he let out the hauntings of the ghosts of the past. Passionless, breathless, thoughtless, he slipped easily through their chains. He found a new breath waiting for him: he drew in its crisp air, recycled it, released it and instantly found another.

Now, right now, he opened his eyes afresh and they were witness to his beautiful raisin bread. He saw how sugar from its raisins had caremalised on its surface, tanning its skin. He saw how its pale innards were little-cloud fluffy.

Tenderly he picked a ripe portion, escorted it to his lips and introduced it to his tongue. He sealed his lips; again he closed his eyes. With his tongue and with his teeth he could see all the colours of all the tastes of all the textures of the bread’s rolling landscape - all inside the world of his left cheek.

He let it - this little bit - sit there where he could keep it entertained, as he nibbled crumbs from it little by little and mixed each nibble with a little trickle of spittle. Tumbled down its hillsides landslides became mudslides became marshes. He munched. His tongue dug beneath the mud, where it found mounds and mounds to be ground and pounded, parted then pressed again. Peacefully eating each piece pleased him completely. Each piece of the feast released new yeasty treats. (At least, to his heart, it had the feeling of a feast, for a few fleeting beats.) Meditatively, he made the mountain into a mess of melting morsels, and mashed the morsels into a moving mouthful of mixed memories and traces and tracks of tears and tricks of the tongue to be teased and taken from his tired teeth, unglued from his gums, gulped... and gone.

That was a god bit of bread. When he went to tear the next piece, however, he caught sight of his hidden packet of kinako. The distraction caused him to let go of the reins, only for a moment, but his thoughts saw their chance to escape and they pulled free, trotting ahead without him, away into the future. It stretched out suddenly, invitingly, before them, the future did, with all its unplanted meadows and unpainted canvasses of possibilities, maybes, could-bes and one-days.


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He had an unopened packet of kinako, all of his own, to do with as he pleased (albeit in secret, out of the glare of the gaze of the watchers.) He could eat it tomorrow, with half of the Friday-night rice, and have a little TGI-tastes-sweet party, interfering with the set pattern of culinary ups and downs that would otherwise sink to a naturally low point at the end of the week. Or he could resist that temptation, leave the Friday-night rice un-partied, and save his kinako for the Saturday-morning rice: it would go further mixed with a bit of Saturday-morning seaweed soup. He knew that recipe well. It would let him channel the sugar rush into movement, so he could push a little harder in the mid-morning, when the convicts were permitted to exercise in their cells for half an hour. He could use the extra calories for that.

If it was summertime, he would have saved the kinako to mix with Sunday-morning rice, and then chewed that slowly during the Sunday-morning movie, as though it were a bowl of popcorn. This Sunday however he would be watching the movie tucked up in bed, under three blankets: the convicts were permitted that luxury at certain times in the winter, but they could take no food with them.

Thus the week stretched before him, exciting him with all its new opportunities. If he could save his treasure until Tuesday, he could mix it with yellow green tea and spread it onto Tuesday-night ekmek, like he had been planning to do with the Thursday-night ekmek before the happy surprise of the raisins.


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Six O’Clock arrived with two fanfares from two radio stations trumpeting into battle up and down the cellblock, fighting to read the news in two different languages. Tokyo FM flew the Japanese flag; it struggled valiantly against the American Armed Forces Network. He couldn’t decide which was more unpleasant, the noise of the Japanese or that of the Americans, but he didn’t have to decide as he was always given both.

He rarely if ever listened to the radio in his cell anymore. He found that the vibes of the American Armed Forces chimed a little too harmoniously with those of the Japanese prison system. He was sure that Yossarian would have agreed.

He had no control over the speakers outside his cell though, or of those in his neighbours’ cells, and so he had to accept that his window of quiet time was now officially closed. An hour had passed since roll-call. He was a slow eater.

Another fanfare trumpeted. The nightly talk show begun, “Where America comes to talk.” America came to talk every night, for an hour, sometimes for two or three. He had very nearly finished his ekmek. The unhealthy Iranian coughed, retched and spat again.


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He wasn’t going to get out of here before Christmas. He knew that. He had accepted it before the five new books came round. He had already passed two Christmases behind Japanese bars; he had the strength to pass a third. And yet he was not prepared to be crunch-whacked ordered marched stripped shouted worked worked shouted stripped marched ordered whack-crunched. Not on Christmas Day.

As he had tried to explain to the Israeli with metal in his leg, Christmas was all that was left of his religion, in his culture, in his country. It was a lone, craggy old rock solitary in a rising sea, clung to with frantic desperation against all reason except the very reason that it was against all reason: if the people of his country let go of it they would have nothing left but reason, and they would surely drown. He couldn’t let go of Christmas.

So he would throw himself back into Investigation. He would throw away his smiling boss, his companions, his chess, his exercise, his television and his bed. And when Investigation was concluded and he was sent to Punishment, he would throw away his books too. That was all he had to surrender: that was the sum total of his ‘privileges’. It had cost him more than one mealtime of distracted deliberations, but he couldn’t shake the belief that he would be less of a man, that he would lose one more piece of himself, were he to let go of Christmas just to keep hold of those ‘privileges’.

Working prisoners of Japan unite: you have nothing to lose but your Thursday-night movies.



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When are you going to publish this in book? This is chilling, sad and yet wonderful to read.

I am always amazed when I read what you have written. Very intriguing to say the least. Thank you!