"A SMALL HAPPINESS" - a prisoner's story from Fuchu prison, Japan

[Yon Sen]

"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.

======

[Jiminy]

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

[Rachel]

Fantastic!!

Looking forward to reading the rest of it too!

A big PTO welcome for Yon Sen and Jiminy.

Rach xx

[BrandNewGirl]

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

Nance

[Yon Sen]

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...

[DLM]

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?)

[Yon Sen]

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.

[Yon Sen]

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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.

======

[nimuay]

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

[Yon Sen]

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

[bmac]

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.

[Kay]

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.

[Yon Sen]

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."

[Yon Sen]

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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.

======

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.

======

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.

======

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

======

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.

======

[Yon Sen]

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



(hehe what was that about being obsessive?)

[Josh Yoddy]

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

[Yon Sen]

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

[Yon Sen]

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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.

======

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.

======

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.

======

[Rachel]

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

[Kay]

Waiting patiently! LOL!

[MRS.WHATLEY]

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

[Yon Sen]

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

[Yon Sen]

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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.

======

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?

======

[Rachel]

Great Stuff, as ever!!

Feel like I'm there with you.

[Yon Sen]

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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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