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KANAZAWA, Japan -- A tear wells up in Richard Curtis's eye as he slumps in the back seat of the red fire engine, looking out at a squad of volunteer firefighters practicing marching formations.
He was supposed to be practicing with these men, his Japanese colleagues, as he had done last year. But after a reporter who planned to write about him started asking questions, Mr. Curtis ran head-on into the kind of barrier that often turns love of Japan into bitterness among longtime foreign residents.
The day of the practice, he was told he couldn't participate with his unit, which calls itself Bababundan. So while the unit marches, Mr. Curtis watches. "Bababundan has accepted me like no other organization I've been a part of in Japan," says the 35-year-old Mr. Curtis, who was born and raised in Napa, Calif. "And at the same time, joining has led to my worst experiences with prejudice here."
Mr. Curtis has done many of the things that make volunteer firefighting in Kanazawa a strange and fascinating adventure. He has participated in the traditional Kaga Tobi, in which firemen do acrobatics atop ladders. He was trusted to help hold the ladder. Each January for the past two years, he has stripped off his uniform with the rest of the Bababundan boys and plunged into the Sai River, as part of a winter ritual in which the city's volunteers shoot water hundreds of feet into the air over the icy rapids. Each year, for six years, he had become more and more a part of the group, helping with tasks such as fire-prevention education and maintenance of fire hydrants. The unit's younger members, he and they agree, had begun to look to him for advice.
But he has never been allowed to fight a fire. At every step of the way, he has been affected in some measure by a Japanese law that bans foreigners from all municipal positions that "exercise administrative authority" or provide a means "to influence public opinion." Volunteer firefighters represent Kanazawa City when performing their duties, so Mr. Curtis can never be more than a mascot to the group.
He has lived in Japan for 12 years, works for a Japanese textile company, is married to a Japanese woman and has a three-year-old daughter who is a Japanese citizen. But unless he becomes a naturalized Japanese, he can't drive the fire trucks or participate in official ceremonies.
That Mr. Curtis got as far as he did makes him a novelty: His unit believes he may be the only foreigner to have joined a volunteer fire department in Japan.
Security Issue
Exclusionary laws, which most often affect the lives of more than 600,000 Korean and Chinese residents of Japan, are necessary, the government says, to ensure that public officials have Japan's best interests at heart and that they work to guard national sovereignty. Local fire-department officials say they must go along. City officials outside the fire department decline to comment on Mr. Curtis's exclusion. "We don't want to emphasize that aspect," explains Tetsuhiro Mukai, a city spokesman.
Mr. Curtis had little notion what he was getting into while soaking in a public bath in the summer of 1992. In the tub, he struck up a conversation with Tatsuo Yamamoto, a volunteer firefighter. In his fluent Japanese, Mr. Curtis peppered Mr. Yamamoto with questions. Later, over beer, Mr. Yamamoto suggested that Mr. Curtis join. "We needed the help," says Mr. Yamamoto.
When Black Is White
A few days later, a pumper truck pulled up to Mr. Curtis's apartment, sirens blaring. Inside were Mr. Yamamoto and another firefighter, who whisked Mr. Curtis off to the tiny firehouse for an odd initiation ritual. Mr. Curtis faced Bababundan's members on tatami mats. Bowing on his knees, surrounded by black-and-white photos of Bababundan's chiefs going back to the turn of the century, Mr. Curtis got his first lesson in the ethos of a Kanazawan fireman.
"Chief, what color is this?" Masaru Tsuda, the deputy chief, asked Chief Fujinobu Hosokawa as he pointed to a white chopstick wrapper.
"Black," replied Mr. Hosokawa.
"What color is this?" Mr. Tsuda bellowed at Mr. Curtis. "Black as night," said Mr. Curtis, and he was in.
Or so they thought, for a glorious while. Mr. Curtis says he learned more about Japan in the next year from the members of Bababundan -- men such as Mr. Tsuda, who hawks crabs in the local fish market, and Kazuo Sakai, who works in an industrial bakery -- than he had during the previous six years he had lived in Japan.
The district is the kind that made fires, and the men who fight them, the stuff of legend in Japan. It includes a century-old teahouse, dozens of shrines and temples and several of the last remaining working geisha houses in Japan. Tofu shops and fishmongers still line the narrow, winding alleys, selling wares from wooden storefronts. Neighborhood volunteers walk the streets in the evening, as is old Japanese tradition, clacking two sticks together to remind residents to put out fires. Nearly everyone in Bababundan's unit was born here and expects to die here. Mr. Curtis learned how to roll hoses so they could be quickly thrown on firefighters' backs and run down paths too narrow for trucks to go.
Now Bababundan members are planning a trip next year to Mr. Curtis's hometown in the U.S. They each put 10,000 yen ($70) in a kitty every month to pay for the trip. Over beers, they debate ways to get a ladder aboard the airplane so they can perform the Kaga Tobi in America. "In his heart, in our hearts, he's one of us," says Mr. Tsuda.
Don't Bother Trying
To be one of them in fact, though, is a different matter. Japanese officialdom has continued to confound Mr. Curtis's efforts to truly join. The Kanazawa City Fire Department, which administers the 49 volunteer units and 1,050 volunteers that augment its professional forces, says officials at the Fire and Disaster Management Agency told them when he first became involved with the volunteers, and again this month, that it wasn't worth sending Mr. Curtis's application along to them for approval.Early this month, department elders told him he shouldn't participate in certain unofficial events that he has taken part in over the years, such as the winter plunge into the river. It turns out, he wasn't supposed to have taken part to begin with. Mr. Curtis sees some hypocrisy in Kanazawa's official creed, which hangs framed in the firehouse: "Open your heart as a window to the world, and the future."
A week after Mr. Curtis sat in the fire truck as his Bababundan buddies practiced, he now watches them file into this year's reaffirmation ceremony from his seat with members of the Ladies' Auxiliary Club. The band plays John Philip Sousa marches. The Japanese flag flies above. Mr. Curtis, again, is downcast.
At moments like these, Mr. Curtis remembers something Bababundan Chief Hosokawa told him the night he retired a few years ago as Kanazawa's longest-serving volunteer firefighter ever. As they waited for a cab, Mr. Hosokawa, who joined Bababundan 44 years earlier after returning to Japan from a POW camp in Singapore, told him there are Japanese who prefer he not join the department.
But, he told Mr. Curtis, "don't let them make you quit."
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Added July 30, 1998