If the shoe fits
“Size 30?! No, we don’t have anything like that. I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said the wrinkled old store clerk lady, sucking in air through their teeth and shaking her head at a slight angle, as Japanese people do when they are in some unresolvable quandary.
In Canada, I wear something between a size 10 and 11. In Japan, this came to size 29 or 30. My feet are also wide, 4E, so that flippers might seem redundant when I swim. My shoe size is above average in Canada, but not inconceivable. In Japan, however, you’d think I was a candidate for the Guiness Book of World Records.
was bigger in most dimensions than most Japanese, other than sumo wrestlers.
I was bigger in most dimensions than most Japanese, other than sumo wrestlers. As a thoroughbred third-generation Japanese-Canadian, I share their genetic parameters, so I blame it on my diet, or lack of one. And it’s not just me. Looking at family photos from both sides of the Pacific is like looking at before and after shots in a weight watchers ad. During my three-year sojourn in Japan, I lost some weight, but my feet stayed the same size. And it was the size of my feet that was such a big deal.
In Japan, when you go into someone’s house, you always take off your shoes and the hosts usually have slippers for you to wear. Even at the marine lab where I studied, or in the schools I visited, you took off your shoes and put on guest slippers, usually something soft, smell-resistant and plastic. Taking off your shoes helps keep places cleaner. Maybe it is also a physical manifestation of the Japanese distinction between honne, the inner self who deals with those closest to you and tatemae the outer self who deals with everyone else. The problem for me was that the guest slippers were always too small. “My gosh, you do have big feet, don’t you,” they would say with an incredulous chuckle. I walked around on my tip toes in them, fearing that at any moment my loaners would burst at the seams.
crammed my toes into wooden soled platform sandals and skated across the slippery wet tiled floor to the refuge of a urinal.
In addition to outside footwear and inside footwear, you also have washroom footwear. In Japan, washrooms are usually dedicated to the toilets, even in homes. And you wouldn’t want to contaminate the rest of the building with whatever might be on the floor in the washroom. At the lab, I didn’t use the washroom often enough to make it worth keeping yet another pair of slippers. So every time I went to the washroom, I crammed my toes into wooden soled platform sandals and skated across the slippery wet tiled floor to the refuge of a urinal.
Another habit I adopted was living without socks. The summers regularly reached the mid-30s, so going sockless made sense. The winters, however, hovered between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius and sometimes even made it down to zero. But the elementary school kids to whom I taught English, remained sockless and even wore shorts all year. “It toughens them up,” said my supervisor, apparently in all seriousness. The Japanese traditionally put a lot of value on gaman—putting up with stuff. So I did the same. I wasn’t going to let these little kids out-gaman me.
was about to leave my friend’s place and felt something funny in my shoe. A spider the size of a Toyota pick-up crawled out.
With all the getting in and out of footwear, I gradually became proficient at “de-shoeing” backwards so they would be in the right position when I left. But I soon squashed the back ends of my runners from putting them on without untying the laces properly. I realized that slip-on sandals would be more practical than sneakers. They would be easier to get on and off. I discovered another advantage the time I was about to leave my friend’s place and felt something funny in my shoe. A spider the size of a Toyota pick-up crawled out. Sandals would not be such inviting hiding places for creepy-crawlies.
For a while, I wore “health sandals” that have nibs on the bottom to massage your feet. My Mom sent them to me from Canada and it was nice to actually have something in my size. They tend to smell after a while, I suppose because of the accumulation of dead skin between the nibs, but they were stimulating. Sometimes them. I thought they were great until one day, I was involved in a community karate tournament. I had pretty much worn the skin the soles of my feet felt tingly even when I wasn’t wearing off the soles of my feet from shuffling around on the hardwood floors all morning. I had only these over-stimulating sandals to wear and could hardly stand up in them. Some cute female friends had come to cheer me on or perhaps watch me get beat up and so of course I was obliged to entertain them afterward. That was a day of intensive gaman training.
You can make do with slippers that are too small, but not boots. For work, I needed rubber boots for my regular excursions to the seashore to the examine the state of my specially marked barnacles. The boots I brought from home were thick black monsters, too hot to wear in the summer and too heavy for leaping about on the rocks. Through the fishing co-op, I was able to find nice light, white boots made for walking. They were comfortable enough for scrambling about the seashore in the hot sun and squatting to measure dozens of barnacles at a time.
y nimbleness on the badminton court rivaled the ballet-dancing hippos in the original Fantasia .
For play, I needed shoes for playing badminton. Every day at five, the other grad students and sometimes our profs gathered in the driveway of the lab to play. Eventually, we progressed to the community centre to play every Wednesday afternoon. It was a much needed recreation in a town too small for a movie theatre. I found the shoes at a sports store in Kumamoto city, the capital of the prefecture, three hours away by car. I was thrilled to find a nice, light blue nylon pair with white stripes and an excellent tread for only the price of about two months rent. In them, my nimbleness on the badminton court rivaled the ballet-dancing hippos in the original Fantasia.
After three years in Japan, I had become quite comfortable with all the fancy footwork. When I said my sayonaras, I left my badminton shoes and sandals in the shoe shelving at entrance to the lab, so I’d have something to wear if I ever came back. I was leaving some of my heart and some of my soles. That was ten years ago. By now, even the sandals must have spiders in them.
This article was originally published in the February 2001 issue of The New Canadian.