A Wooden Clog

The light gold setting sun, like our steamer, was lingering sluggishly in the harbor. The grey gates of the warehouses on either side of the harbor were securely shut. The afternoon hubbub of voices had died down and fitful gusts of evening wind would rise to send the messy piles of straw ropes and dust whirling from the wharves.

Silently leaning on the ship railing, I found myself surrounded by an endless dull void. Time was ticking away minute by minute and darkness was gathering around me.

Raising my head abruptly, I saw a wooden clog floating on the water not far from my ship. It had turned darkly brown after being soaked in water and kept moving slowly with the rolling waves as if it were laboring out of the harbor toward the vast sea.

O my friend in distress! How did you know that I was leaving on the quiet? How did you know that I was reluctant to part with my friends – friends that had once worn on their feet? O now you had leaped into the water to escort me through the long voyage?

For several years previously, on those dull, black long nights, as I lay awake with a gloomy feeling of emptiness, the only thing that would keep me company had been the raindrops pattering on the tiled roof and the moonlight outside the paper windows. I would hear on every sleepless night wooden clogs clattering past the cobbled road before my building, sounding clear and firm. It was unlike the hateful thudding of Japanese officers’ military boots I had once heard on the Dongdan drill ground in Peking. It was also unlike the clip-clop of leather shoes on the feet of Japanese officials and VIPs in the lobby of Peking Hotel. It was the clear and firm sound of wooden clogs worn by the working people of Japan, rain or shine …

Resting my head on my clasped hands, I visualized, in the midst of the clatters, all those in wooden clogs: sad and haggard elderly men and women wearing short garments under white overalls; aggrieved workers in overalls and peasants in straw rain capes; young men in college caps and girls in short skirts, all looking dejected and perplexed … I had often come across them here and there in town in the daytime. Now they seemed to merge together clattering past my building.

“My friends in distress! Where is your hope in this dark long night? Where are you bound for in your clattering clogs?” that was the thought in my gloomy mind as I lay wide awake, tossing and turning restlessly.

All that happened over a decade ago, but I always think of the wooden clog floating on water near the Yokohama wharf. To me, it symbolizes the working people of Japan. It also reminds me of my several years’ sojourn in Japan and arouses a host of complicated feelings in me.

I have since twice re-visited Japan. I realized on both occasions that the Japanese people are not only my friends in distress, but also my comrades-in-arms. While my co-travelers brought back treasured souvenirs of Mount Fuji or cherry blossoms, I came home with a collection of small, nostalgic toy clogs …