I flew to Japan September 7th for a 3-week visit with my friend and colleague Hiroko Juni. It was my eighth trip to Tokyo to teach music at her Studio Arsis vocal ensemble workshops. I also had the delightful opportunity to perform with her a cappella octet, Tokyo Voices. This was the first music event during my trip, and it was the evening of September 11th in Japan, at that time of year 14 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time.
There was a typhoon passing through, and it was raining heavily most of the day. We took the shinkansen (bullet train) up north of Tokyo, and then a long cab ride, to the performance location. They called it a junior high school, but it was more like an away-camp for a specific age group. It was wonderful for me to meet and sing with the other members of the group, for the first time in over two years. We gave a lovely concert for the kids, who sat on the carpet in perfect rows. It was a nicely eclectic mix of Japanese folk songs, pop songs, and classical pieces. Because the first tenor had a cough, I was pressed into service to sing the solo in the King’s Singers arrangement of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” – in the original key, which was quite high for me! I just sang it with feeling as best I could; the other singers embarrassed me with compliments.
Those of us who were traveling together had some more conversation on the long ride home. It had been a very nice evening of music making, and well paid. As Hiroko and I rode the elevator up to the top (11th) floor of her building, she got a call on her cell phone. It was Ayako-chan, with whom we’d just been singing and riding the train, telling us to turn on the TV and watch the news, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center …
So, like so many New Yorkers, we saw it all on television. At the time we got the TV on, both planes had crashed, but the towers were still standing. So it was quite obvious (to anyone, no matter what language you speak) that this was a deliberate attack, but beyond that, any other details were impossible to imagine. I began madly composing an e-mail, on a computer in the room, to friends in NYC to make sure they were all right. When the first tower collapsed, that was the moment the whole world changed. Nobody could have pictured it happening that way before that moment. (Yet how many of us had dreamed or imagined similar disasters befalling the twin towers during their 29-year history? I vividly recall dreaming, years before, that they had fallen over, making a huge, horrible bridge across the river.) But now, in real life, one of them had collapsed straight down, and I began to contemplate the world with only one World Trade tower. The collapse of the other one was every bit as incomprehensible as the first – and surely more damaging to life and architecture. I began to express my dread of America’s wrath turned on the perpetrators. Every single message or gesture of kindness and peace I witness since that day brings a little relief from that fear, but it’s still there.
It was after 3:00 in the morning in Tokyo by the time the news slowed down enough that I decided to go to bed. Exhausted both from lingering jet lag and from the shock of terrorism on my home, I slept for 4 hours and in my dreams forgot all about what I had seen on the television. Every morning for the rest of my stay I watched the evening news from America. It was a grim but necessary ritual. I saw one piece of video tape of the falling towers taken from some distance uptown, and at the end of the shot, the camera swung to the side – and I saw the storefront of Village Cigars! So now I know what the collapse looked like from my neighborhood. I figured that’s close enough, thank you.
At first I thought I’d rather avoid the whole subject of the attacks at our upcoming workshops, but really it was unavoidable. The looks of concern and kindness on the faces of new Japanese students when they found out I was from New York City were very moving. Being 7,000 miles away, there was nothing I could do about it but send words over the internet. I knew what had happened, and yet I was in such a different world. And my return was scheduled for September 27, by which time there was no problem flying back into JFK airport. It was very strange karma.
I braced myself for a shock at some point in my journey home, but none came. I couldn’t even see Manhattan from the airplane, because of the angle we were flying at; I saw an extraordinarily beautiful sunset instead. The only tiny clues in the subway that anything was different were (1) the service notice on the wall of the station was printed in much smaller type than usual, listing almost every train in the system, (2) a guy on the train was looking at a recently-printed map with an obvious absence of service in lower Manhattan, and (3) the A-train skipped Chambers St. I thought maybe when I exited the subway at West 4th St and walked down Sixth Avenue, I’d be shocked by the absence of the towers in the view. But there were many other buildings down there with lights on; it was basically the same. Things in my neighborhood were strangely normal. The only big difference was that I could only get 3 channels on the TV, without cable. Before I left town, I had carefully closed my windows, and even covered my computer for the first time. Strange.
The next morning, Friday September 28, I knew I had to take a walk downtown and see ground zero with my own eyes. I had taken many long walks down there this past summer; in fact, the last time I went there I had stopped for a long time to regard the towers from the ground. (I was discouraged from going up to the observatory in the last few years by the $13 ticket price.) I recalled how I’d traveled into the city with my folks in 1973, when the towers were first finished, and taken photos up the side and the corner of one tower with my little camera. The corner photo in particular drew many comments; it looks kind of like an endless runway. And that last time I saw the towers, I thought again about what a strange concept it was to have a building soaring so high, straight up from the street. I always thought, Why is this okay? Eventually I bade them farewell and walked on down to Battery Park City. I didn’t imagine that was the last time I’d see them, and yet, I had deliberately said farewell, even touching the sheet metal with my hand like it was a shoulder.
Now that I was finally back in town, the red zone around ground zero was still large. I walked down Sixth Avenue, and by Walker St I could smell the concrete dust. At Duane St I had to detour to the side, and I found my way to lower Broadway. The sights of ground zero were gruesome, but distant; the security was tight as a drum, fearsome and reassuring at the same time; the onlookers were clogging the sidewalks of Broadway even before 8:00 am; the smell of concrete dust was instantly upsetting, and the dust and bits of asbestos on the empty buildings east of Broadway was truly a sad sight. I made my way around the south side for more views, constantly careful to show my seriousness, especially near visitors who might be getting frivolous. At that time Battery Park City was closed to non-residents, so I had to go back east to walk home. But within another week I was able to walk around the west side and see up close the sadly damaged Winter Garden pavilion and corner of the American Express tower.
One day, perhaps my fourth walk downtown since September, I happened upon several pieces of the outside shell of one of the towers, piled up about 4 feet high, on the side of West St at W. Thames St. It was a chilly morning and nobody else was around. I walked right up to them – I could have touched them but I decided not to – and examined them closely. The metal was twisted and sheared from the collapse, and you could tell which edges were made by the blow torch. The other edges, bent and browning with rust, resembled clay more than steel. It was the closest thing I’ve had to a personal experience with the day of terror. I am still a little bit frustrated that I can’t find a way to feel the impact of what happened here in my city. It’s all second-hand, like on television. On Saturday September 29, they reopened the observatory at the Empire State building for the first time, and I just had to go. The line stretched outside the building and halfway around the block, and it took about 90 minutes to get all the way up, but it was a joy to do it, and celebrate the fact that this beloved building was still standing! Then, looking toward downtown from the 86th floor, the scene was just like on the TV news: The twin towers are just not there, and there’s a cloud of dust rising in their place. Anticlimactic. What really happened?
Of course the new Day of Infamy was a constant topic of conversation, even between strangers who previously wouldn’t have said anything to each other. One day I traded stories with a man who had actually been outside working in a garden on the Upper West Side that morning, and had no idea what had happened until he turned on the TV that afternoon. So in a way I was glad that at least I had seen it live on TV. At least the moment was real, if not the violence. Then I read about the kind of trauma that survivors near the site have been dealing with, and I realize No, I don’t really want to know what it felt like. No, my strange vantage point halfway around the world was somehow suited to me. I hated to leave Japan (even more than usual) because I knew life would be harder at home when I got back. But I knew it was necessary for me to come home, and contribute what little I can because this is where I live. And life turns out not to be that much harder than before – the bonds of friendship are automatically strengthened, and now after 3 months, people are still happier just to see each other than they used to be. We’re the same people in a different world.
Mark Johnson • 10 December 2001