Rabbi Moti Garmach, Kyoto, Japan - Part 2 - Section A

00:21 Speaker 1 What do you do there? Have you got a week? Tell me a little.

00:24 Speaker 2 Well, Jews are coming all the time with questions, mainly about food. Japan is a very difficult country for people who keep kosher, because they add pork fat to everything here. It’s something they... You might find vegan places, but it’s hard to figure out what’s what—everything is mixed together. So food is always an issue. People who come and want to eat ask what they can have, how to manage, and so on.

01:03 Speaker 1 Tell me, Kyoto—

01:04 Speaker 2 Because people come for a short time.

01:05 Speaker 1 Where is Kyoto on the map of Japan?

01:09 Speaker 2 Well, we’re... Japan is shaped a bit like a banana.

01:17 Speaker 1 I mean—yes, it’s islands, right? It’s a group of islands.

01:21 Speaker 2 Right. There are three islands, three islands or more, broadly speaking. The main island is where Tokyo and Kyoto are, and it’s shaped... Tokyo is more... Say, here’s Kyoto, here’s Tokyo. How do I explain it? They’re both toward the south.

01:42 Speaker 1 At the bottom end of the banana.

01:45 Speaker 2 No, not at the end. Toward the lower end of the middle of the banana.

01:51 Speaker 1 Okay. What characterizes it? What makes it important?

01:55 Speaker 2 It’s very important, because in a sense, all of Japan is Kyoto. To make a very loose comparison, if Tokyo is Tel Aviv, then Kyoto is Jerusalem.

02:08 Speaker 1 Ah.

02:09 Speaker 2 All the history, all the... Until 160 years ago, there weren’t cities in Japan, only villages. Everyone was a farmer, part of a tribe.

02:25 Speaker 1 People working the land.

02:27 Speaker 2 Yes. And the only people with status were the people who lived in Kyoto. Kyoto was where the entire upper class lived—the bureaucrats, the nobility, and so on.

02:43 Speaker 1 So what do Jews or Israelis do there? Why do they come?

02:48 Speaker 2 To see Japan, really. The culture is so different from what we know. It’s like another world, another reality.

03:02 Speaker 1 In what way? In how they see the world?

03:07 Speaker 2 In every way. You see it in punctuality, in people’s character, in honesty, in cleanliness, in the quiet. You don’t hear someone’s phone ringing in the street.

03:21 Speaker 1 That doesn’t happen.

03:22 Speaker 2 That doesn’t happen. There’s no shouting. There’s no...

03:24 Speaker 1 If you’re in a meeting, a phone won’t ring?

03:28 Speaker 2 I’m not talking about a meeting. In a meeting, it wouldn’t even occur to anyone to let a phone ring. I’m talking about riding a bus. On a bus, phones don’t ring, and people don’t... They call a ring a “shameful ring.” You’re always supposed to put your phone on silent. If you buy a phone in Japan, they sell it with a feature that makes a sound when you take a picture, because privacy here is so, so important. And how can I put it? It’s very... Everyone has their own space. People don’t look into each other’s eyes. You could say each person lives in isolation. They do have places where they come together, but work is the most important thing. They live for work. Work is everything. They choose a kindergarten based on the school, the high school, the university, and already from there they start aiming for a particular university, for the degree, for the job, for the position they’ll get. So work... How do you say it? There’s a very strong outward calm. Everyone looks very relaxed and serene. Even when they’re going through things, they have a way of switching gears. A fellow told me on Shabbos—someone who’s married to a Japanese woman, a non-Jewish Japanese woman. Yes, yes, non-Jewish. The moment she learned she was pregnant, she stopped that very day, that very hour. She never touched cigarettes or alcohol again. They’d met while traveling, in places where...

05:38 Speaker 2 Yes, there was smoking and drinking. But the moment that happened, she flipped a switch, and that was it. It’s been fifteen years and she still hasn’t touched any of it. So what is family life like there? Well, you don’t see much of it either. For those who get married, it—how do you say it?—gets in the way of work. And not everyone who marries wants to start a family or have children, because children are an added burden and even a bit embarrassing—the noise they make, the responsibility. So that’s another step. It’s not that there are no children. You see them on the street and at schools, of course, but overall Japan is in a very dangerous situation. The prime minister has already declared it a national problem. Absolutely. And it’s the country with the most elderly people, because people live long lives here. They eat very healthily, but there’s no one to look after them. So they’re moving toward using robots in as many fields as possible. But yes, that’s the situation. To begin with, a large proportion of local husbands and wives sleep in separate rooms. What do they do? Sleep in separate rooms. For extra security? No, because each one leaves for work and comes home at different hours. And again, there’s privacy, not disturbing the other person, and each one has their own way of arranging things. So... In other words, Japan isn’t built around family life. Is that what you’re saying? There’s no time. There’s no time. People work all the time. People are tired all the time. They’re basically always at work. They’re like soldiers: whatever needs doing, they do, and they do it as well as they can, all the way. They don’t get overtime pay, and they stay late. In a teachers’ room, if one

07:50 Speaker 2 of the teachers hasn’t finished grading the tests, the other teachers won’t go home, because they don’t want their colleague to feel that she has to stay late while they leave. So everyone stays late. And it’s like that in every profession. Everyone is constantly thinking about the other person and how that person will feel. “Sorry I’m breathing next to you. Sorry I’m looking. Sorry I’m...” There’s this constant awareness of the other person’s space. And we’ll never fully understand them, because we’re foreigners. We think differently and don’t see the whole picture. The Japanese have a language among themselves, a language of expressions and looks. They understand one another without words.

08:40 Speaker 3 So have you learned a little Japanese?

08:43 Speaker 2 A little. Not much, because, again, we’re here, and we got started late. We’re now beginning our fifth year here, and three and a half of those years were during COVID. So we haven’t mixed with people outside that much. And again, Japanese people don’t have much time to talk with you. They also won’t initiate a conversation if they’re worried they won’t do it well, or that they’ll find themselves in an awkward situation. So if I don’t know English a hundred percent, I won’t try to speak it. I’ll say, “I don’t know English.” Yet every student has successfully completed English studies at school. Give them a difficult book in English and they can read it and understand the words, but they can’t speak it. The people who taught them couldn’t speak it either, and they don’t get the practice. You see it in music too. There are lots of musicians who study music and learn to play all their lives, but they’ll never play in front of others. Because... “I haven’t earned that qualification. I’m not at that level. I’m not confident enough to do it in front of other people.” And where can they practice music, given the concern about making noise and disturbing someone else? You have to rent a karaoke room to practice playing, or go to a university on Sundays, when nobody’s there and you won’t disturb anyone, or go down by the river. You wouldn’t do it at home, because the houses here are made of wood, so they’re not well insulated.

10:29 Speaker 3 The houses are made of wood because of the earthquakes, so they won’t collapse on someone.

10:36 Speaker 2 No, because today everything is built differently. Concrete and steel have advanced too. They’ve learned all the techniques for protecting against earthquakes, so you don’t need wood for that. On the contrary, I think wood is less suitable today, and they don’t build new houses out of wood. But with the older houses, when they made the transition from wood to a regular house, a different kind of house, it took a generation to realize they also had to do—what’s it called?—proper insulation. So a lot of houses aren’t insulated. All the houses that aren’t new, the ones built when they switched to Western-style construction. Apparently no one explained how to do it. That’s what I’ve heard here, anyway. In short, Japan is really, really fascinating. I heard that one of the presidents—I don’t remember, the president of some country—came here for a meeting, and the prime minister of Japan asked him, “What is it that foreigners get so excited about? Why do they come to Japan in such numbers?” There really are enormous numbers of foreign tourists here, to an extent that’s hard to understand. In China now, for instance, I spoke to a Jew who came from Beijing. There are no minyanim; there isn’t a minyan for Shabbos. Before COVID it was fine—there were businesspeople, and there were always a hundred people. But tourism certainly hasn’t returned there. Japan, though, has always been a tourist destination, and now even more so because the yen has weakened so much. Before COVID, for a dollar you’d get a hundred, a hundred and nine yen. Now it’s almost a hundred and forty. So you get almost forty percent more for the same dollar, and the trip is easier and cheaper. So people—

12:32 Speaker 4 But you said some head of state was excited about that.

12:36 Speaker 2 Right. Sorry. So the prime minister asked him, “What is it? Why are all the tourists coming to Japan?” And what did that head of state answer? “If I told you there was a place with extraterrestrials, with aliens, wouldn’t you come visit? That’s why we come here.” Really. The whole way of thinking, the whole system—everything is unlike anything we know. It’s like another planet.

13:05 Speaker 4 Yet you see that a Jew married a Japanese woman there. Seemingly, those are two very, very distant worlds, as you describe it.

13:13 Speaker 2 Yes. The thing is, they’ve now divorced—or separated. It doesn’t work all that well. Of course, not because of... As the Rebbe explains, a Jewish soul has a positive charge, and there’s another positive charge, and positive and positive don’t work together. Each person has different energies, and some energies don’t connect with each other. That isn’t good for the Jew, and it isn’t good for the non-Jewish woman. But especially when we want the Jewish people to grow—we still haven’t returned to the number we had before the Holocaust. If we were sixteen million Jews before—

13:50 Speaker 4 I’m not even talking about that. I’m asking, we have families—

13:53 Speaker 2 But mentally, how does it work? A lot of the time it starts well, or looks good, but it doesn’t... It’s very hard because the mentalities are so different. The way of thinking, what matters and what doesn’t—everything is so different...

14:15 Speaker 4 What are you doing—

14:17 Speaker 2 My chairs are outside right now.

14:19 Speaker 4 Go ahead.

14:19 Speaker 2 No, I can hear thunder now. A typhoon is supposed to arrive... Its peak here in Kyoto is tomorrow, tomorrow evening around this time.

14:30 Speaker 4 And what will happen then?

14:32 Speaker 2 Well, as we said, the number of tourists keeps growing, and on Shabbos the house can’t hold everyone anymore. So we’d seat people outside, but it was very hot there, so we rented a tent for a while, with air conditioning and everything. But a tent in a typhoon—you might find it at the neighbors’. So we started taking it down and haven’t finished. We need to finish taking it down this evening.

15:02 Speaker 4 So you’re on pins and needles right now—is that what you mean?

15:06 Speaker 2 No, the storm isn’t supposed to come until tomorrow, but there are chairs out there, and the rain could start.

15:15 Speaker 4 Do you have people helping at the house besides you and your family?

15:19 Speaker 2 We do, for a few hours on certain days. Again, as we said, Japan is a different country. We’ll get to the fact that before this, we were on shlichus in India, and we experienced—how do you put it?—a complete 180-degree shift in mentality. India is perhaps the most extreme place in the world in one direction. Maybe there are places in Africa like that too, but I haven’t encountered them. Japan is the complete opposite in every respect. Here, too, someone who comes to work often isn’t coming for the paycheck. They come for something to do, for the work itself, for the experience, to meet foreigners, to practice their English, to meet Jews. Everyone has their own reason. It isn’t a matter of someone who... Say coffee gets spilled here, and there’s someone working as a waitress and helping with the cleaning. When she’s asked to help clean up the black coffee spilled on the carpet—on the floor, the carpet—the young man needs to take responsibility. He’s the one who spilled it, the Israeli traveler.

16:36 Speaker 5 What’s that? You know, that’s a statement I’d buy.

16:42 Speaker 2 That’s true, but you have to grow up that way. If you don’t, then you don’t have that... the right expectations. If you weren’t brought up that way, you often see people get up from the table and not clear up after themselves because someone else will do it. It’s a habit people bring with them. Fine, it all depends on how you were raised, but here it’s so deeply ingrained. Schools don’t have cleaning staff.

17:18 Speaker 5 Ah.

17:19 Speaker 2 In schools, the children are responsible for cleaning. It’s divided by classes and by shifts, but there are no cleaning staff. All the children mop and sweep and do the cleaning. School is almost a kind of army. The same goes for sports—the amount they do and the kinds they do. They crawl on the ground in nearly freezing temperatures, wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts, as part of high-school sports. If you suggested that to someone at a high school in Israel, they’d call in—I don’t know—the State Comptroller and make a whole scandal. Here it’s normal. So there are things like that.

18:05 Speaker 5 Let’s go back to your roots. Last time you told a really remarkable story about your parents and a bit about yourselves. Now let’s go back a little. You’re young children, growing up with a father whose whole day is devoted to this, and you yourselves become involved. Tell me a bit about your childhood, the Talmud Torah, the yeshiva—which yeshiva you first attended, where you went afterward, and the beginnings of your desire to go on shlichus.

18:38 Speaker 2 Right. So we...

18:39 Speaker 5 As many details as possible.

18:42 Speaker 2 Right, as much as I can remember along the way. We grew up in Kfar Chabad, as we mentioned last time. I don’t remember.

18:52 Speaker 5 We talked last time about how you grew up in Kfar Chabad.

18:55 Speaker 2 My father asked the Rebbe about it. My parents wanted to live in Beit Dagan, where their shlichus was. When you live in the place itself, your whole impact is different. The Rebbe answered that they should consult the administration, and the administration decided they should live in Kfar Chabad. Kfar Chabad is a village of one hundred percent Chabad chassidim, a real Chassidic hothouse. Everyone around you is an observant Jew, keeping Torah and mitzvos; that’s the atmosphere. Everyone is centered around the Rebbe. It’s a hothouse, but the atmosphere is also very family-like and full of activity. Just a second. Mom, do you want to check on the rain? We might have to stop if it starts raining, because all the chairs outside have fabric seats. So we...

19:48 Speaker 5 I understand. We can take a short break.

19:51 Speaker 2 Yes.

19:54 Speaker 5 We can. Moti, can we take a short break?

19:57 Speaker 2 Yes.

19:58 Speaker 5 And then continue. Do you want to pause for a few minutes?

20:01 Speaker 2 Yes, yes. I’ll just check.

20:03 Speaker 5 Absolutely. We’ll do that. Okay, Moti, so you brought in the chairs from [unclear].

20:11 Speaker 2 Yes. No, no. We changed the tent to a sturdier tent that we fitted with air conditioning and everything. So the rain has only just started now. The storm is supposed to be tomorrow.

20:24 Speaker 5 A typhoon for you is like a hurricane in the United States, right?

20:29 Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. And this is the season for it—the heat, the cold, the directions the air comes from. It happens every year. Japan is prepared for all kinds of natural disasters. Japan’s real enemy is nature: earthquakes, which cause tsunamis, volcanoes, fires, windstorms. That’s what they prepare for.

21:01 Speaker 5 Where are there volcanoes there?

21:04 Speaker 2 What? Wow. What?

21:09 Speaker 5 Where are the volcanoes?

21:13 Speaker 2 Mount Fuji is a volcano too.

21:15 Speaker 5 That’s a big one. Is it far from you or close to you?

21:18 Speaker 2 It’s closer to Tokyo than to us. But it’s a red mountain. There have been... there have been a few incidents. You don’t know enough about them, but...

21:33 Speaker 5 Well, I hope those are things you won’t need to know about. G-d forbid. I’m certainly not wishing for you to get to know a volcano up close.

21:41 Speaker 2 Once, the previous time we were here in Japan—I mean, the first time—was after the tsunami. Ten years ago. Six months after it. There had been an earthquake that killed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people—tens of thousands. And what it damaged, what people were most worried about, was the atomic plant. What’s it called?

22:11 Speaker 5 The nuclear power plant.

22:16 Speaker 2 Yes, the nuclear plant. Right. Anyway, we came then with Rabbi Binyamin Zarai[?] to offer support and help to non-Jews. All right, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

22:28 Speaker 5 Yes, let’s not get ahead of the story. Let’s go back a few years. You’re children, living in Kfar Chabad.

22:35 Speaker 2 Right, Kfar Chabad.

22:36 Speaker 5 And your father’s committee decides that they need to live in the village, that you need to live in Kfar Chabad. So you grow up in Kfar Chabad, and as you say, it’s a greenhouse. It’s a place where people don’t exactly feel like getting up and moving, and they’re rather sleepy when it comes to outreach.

23:02 Speaker 2 Yes. You could even take that further. There’s a joke about a community with ten Jews, where the minyan always started exactly on time: Shacharis at seven in the morning, Minchah at five. Always. Never a miss. One day a new Jew arrived in the community. He asked, “When’s Shacharis? When are the prayers?” “Shacharis is at seven tomorrow.” Okay. He gets there at seven. He waits and waits. Seven-fifteen. At seven-twenty, he finally davens alone. He thinks, maybe this community isn’t always so punctual. Later he goes to the grocery store, meets one of the guys and asks, “What happened? You said there’s always a minyan at seven!” “There always is.” “What do you mean? Nobody came!” “So what, without me there wouldn’t be a minyan?” When there are ten, everyone feels responsible. When there are eleven, each person figures the other ten will manage without him. So what happens when all the Chabad chassidim are in one place? Everyone figures someone else will do the work. When you go out, it’s on each person. Someone else made a joke about that too—a riddle.

24:11 Speaker 5 I think Yechezkel—Yechezkel, what’s his name? Yechezkel Sofer put it well. When we’re together, Chabad chassidim together, it’s like manure in one big heap.

24:25 Speaker 2 Manure.

24:25 Speaker 5 It’s no use. Only when you spread it over the ground does it start to be useful.

24:31 Speaker 2 It makes things grow.

24:33 Speaker 5 It makes things grow. Yes.

24:35 Speaker 2 When it’s all together, it stinks.

24:36 Speaker 5 Exactly.

24:39 Speaker 2 So no, it’s not—it really is a place—

24:41 Speaker 5 You didn’t feel that it stank? You didn’t feel there was—

24:44 Speaker 2 No, of course not! Of course not!

24:45 Speaker 5 Some problem?

24:47 Speaker 2 It was a fun place. All the children were together, going out to—Shabbos was Shabbos. If you saw a car on Shabbos, that meant something had happened, something wasn’t right. There was no such thing otherwise. And it was a village with a cowshed—cowsheds. It had been built as a workers’ village. When I was a child, there were still a lot of agricultural fields. After cheder, we’d walk past the cowshed, whether to help or play or look around, or just out of curiosity. We’d go through and smell the cows, the goats and sheep that Bertovsky had, and Rivkin’s cows. In short, it was an interesting life. Farbrengens. There was always a Chassidic atmosphere. On the other hand, at home the concern was always directed outward: What’s happening? What’s next? Which holiday is coming up? What do we need to do? What do we need to plan? We’d sit together and plan the activities. My father and the children would think: What should we do? What new attraction can we arrange for Lag BaOmer? How do we bring more children to camp? There was always something to do. One person would do the design, another would do something else. We were all in it together.

26:20 Speaker 5 How many did you say there were—eight siblings?

26:22 Speaker 2 Eight. Eight siblings. So everyone was involved. Yes, four brothers and four sisters, and everyone was involved. Anyway, at some point they opened—Beit Dagan originally, I think we mentioned this, was ninety percent—sixty percent Yemenite and forty percent Moroccan. That was the core of Beit Dagan. And my father, with his Australian accent, really fit in very well. He cared about each person and whatever they needed. And a shul wasn’t needed—there were so many shuls. You’d come by from time to time on Shabbos. We once spent a Shabbos in Beit Dagan. It happened. But—

27:11 Speaker 5 How many residents do you think Beit Dagan had when your father started his work there?

27:16 Speaker 2 It was already a local council, so more than a thousand.

27:20 Speaker 5 About eight thousand people.

27:22 Speaker 2 I have no idea, Aryeh. I suppose something like that. I don’t know how many there are today. They’ve built a few more neighborhoods since then. Not many, because Beit Dagan is very hemmed in. On one side it has Highway 1, Jerusalem–Tel Aviv; then there’s the Ramla–Tel Aviv road, the old Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, Highway 44, Latrun–Tel Aviv. So it’s basically confined between the two roads, a main road, and the other three sides.

27:53 Speaker 5 On the east side.

27:54 Speaker 2 And Kfar Chabad. Exactly. So Kfar Chabad and Beit Dagan are competing over who will take all the land between them. But the available space really is getting smaller and smaller. Kfar Chabad has expanded its neighborhoods, and Beit Dagan has almost—there’s a neighborhood they’ve now built next to the gas station, and already about ten Chabad families have moved in. It’s so close you can get there by bike.

28:21 Speaker 5 Ten Chabad families live in Beit Dagan.

28:24 Speaker 2 Yes, with the aim of doing something there.

28:27 Speaker 5 Your father has help there now.

28:30 Speaker 2 Yes, but again, these are people who came from Kfar Chabad and work in Kfar Chabad. In other words, they’re really only there on Shabbos. And it’s a neighborhood somewhat removed from the town, so they have another minyan there. They do more things... That’s also part of the greenhouse atmosphere. I mean, that’s how it is today. You don’t actually need a badge and a sign to be a Chabad House. In any apartment building in Israel, you might have twenty families you could do so much with—invite them to a Kiddush and invite them over. We’re jumping ahead, but today, living in Beit Dagan, you meet someone in the street on your way home. “So, have you heard Kiddush yet? Come home with me now, hear Kiddush, have something to eat, and then go on your way.” It’s that constant awareness—keeping an eye and an ear out for the people around you and seeing what they need. Not everything has to be an event with [unclear]. Just—

29:36 Speaker 5 Just a person’s presence in a place. You meet someone in the street and say, “Shabbos shalom,” or “How are you?” or—

29:44 Speaker 2 Absolutely.

29:45 Speaker 5 “How’s your health?” and so on. That already creates the reality of shlichus.

29:50 Speaker 2 Today one of our Chabad relatives lives in Beit Dagan. His children are connected too. And—another story, about someone else who said, “Rabbi Shmulik, your father saved my life.” Now, what does “saved my life” mean? What happened? He said that in 2008, with the whole downturn, he had a lot of businesses and everything collapsed.

30:22 Speaker 5 Wait, wait, explain that, because people don’t always understand what you’re referring to. What happened in 2008?

30:29 Speaker 2 The 2008 financial downturn in the United States. The whole collapse, a worldwide collapse.

30:34 Speaker 5 You’re talking about something that started in the United States?

30:37 Speaker 2 No, no, it didn’t matter. It affected all kinds of businesses. He had a lot of stores, so everything—he lost a lot and went into debt. In his personal situation, it was hard for him to cope with all the debts and everything, and he thought of taking his own life.

30:55 Speaker 5 Hashem protect us.

30:56 Speaker 2 Hashem protect us. He left the house like that, completely withdrawn into himself. Then my father happened to be walking down the street to put up some notice. He was passing by in the evening and said, “Good evening, how are you?” and gave him—he didn’t know much about him, because this wasn’t someone he knew well. He just said a few words to him that Hashem put in his mouth. But those words stayed with him. He said to himself, “No, I can’t do this.” He stopped himself and told my father what was troubling him. My father doesn’t even remember when it happened. But that’s what it means to be on the move, always focused on your purpose. The truth is, some people always have a sign in front of their eyes: “How can I always be doing something?” And others act without thinking, “How do I get into action?” They’re simply alert to what’s around them. They live it so deeply. They say that when a shoemaker walks down the street, he sees shoes. Someone who works with glasses sees everyone’s glasses—not because he’s looking for them, but because it matters so much to him. It’s what he lives. And that’s how my father is: he lives the mivtzoim. When he sees any Jew, he’s looking for what he can do right now—how to offer another word, another mitzvah, more mitzvos that connect them to Hakadosh Boruch Hu.