To my great relief, I learn that the cell block has two private bathrooms, meaning Digger and I won’t be scrubbing each other’s ballsacks after all.
Digger drops his boxer shorts to his ankles then kicks them up and snatches them in midair before popping into the bathroom on the right.
A young guard shuts the door behind him. Checking his watch, he makes a notation with chalk on a small slate hanging on the wall and sets a kitchen timer on the door of the bathroom.
Turning to me, the guard asks for my number.
“Rokuban,” I answer resolutely.
Bewilderment flashes across his face. “Rokuban?”
“Yes, I’m Rokuban.”
“No, no, no. Not your number, your cell number? What’s your cell number?”
“Sorry. Cell Number Twenty-four.”
The guard ducks into a supply room of sorts adjacent to the bathrooms. A moment later, he emerges holding a razor with a label that says: “C-24”.
Considering all the indignities you are forced to endure when tossed in jail, it is remarkable that they go to the trouble of providing a clean razor blade. I tell the guard thanks and take the razor.
A shave is just what I need to start feeling human again. I’ve got the beard of my Lebanese grandfather: three days without a shave and I start looking like the Missing Link. Wrap my head in a red and white-checked keffiyeh scarf and I could pass for a hashish farmer in the Beqaa Valley.
A timer rings and a middle-aged man covered in tattoos emerges from the bathroom on the left and starts toweling himself off.
You’d think there would be far more men in their early twenties populating the cells of Japanese jails, but the vast majority of jailbirds I’ve seen so far has been in their forties and fifties.
“Rokuban, it’s your turn. You’ve got fifteen minutes. The timer will ring when there’s five minutes left. When you have finished taking your bath, refill the tub with hot water by turning the red handle there on the left. Got that, Rokuban?”
“Yes.”
“Right. On you go, then.”
“Thank you.”
I drop my boxers, and, after folding them neatly and placing them in a plastic basket on the floor with my other things, I step into the bathroom.
“Top off the bath when you’re done,” the guard says again, closing the door behind me.
The bathroom is an unremarkable room—a rectangular box, encased in black concrete. A single low-watt light bulb, covered with a blackish-green sheen of mildew, hangs from a ceiling. There’s a showerhead at chest level and a faucet closer to the floor. The bath itself is a perfect cube, filled to the brim with piping hot water.
I give my body a scrub down using one of the half bars of soap and hand towels I brought with me from the cell. Without the anti-dandruff and conditioning shampoos or moisturizing shaving gels I’ve been pampering myself with all these years, I have to make do with the soap.
After rinsing myself off, I climb into the tub. The water is scalding hot, more appropriate for soft-boiling an egg than resting your weary, defeated bones in. Worse yet, the detritus of the dozen or so inmates who have also lowered their hairy arses into the very same bathwater floats on the surface: hairs, scabby bits of skin, dandruff, and, most unsettling of all, something that looks like congealed sperm.
Just above the bath is a large window that looks out onto a clump of trees in the courtyard. It’s not much to gaze upon as you bathe, but better than nothing.
Across the courtyard, beyond the trees, is Cell Block B, the first floor of which houses what appears to be the kitchen, a barber shop, and other facilities.
Inmates in the same white t-shirts and gray caps as Gilligan form two lines, at the head and tail of which are guards. One of guards barks out an order causing the prisoners to start counting off, voices full of vigor. God only knows where they get their enthusiasm. Another order is shouted and the prisoners begin marching in line, arms flapping in unison like army recruits in boot camp. Then, with a “Forward-ho!” they march out of sight.
The buzzer rings. I’ve got five minutes to wrap things up.
I climb out of the bath, rinse off with cold water, and dutifully refill the bath for the next person.
When I step out of the bathroom, the kid with the shaved head from Cell 25 is standing butt-naked in the corridor, clutching his toiletries with his left hand, his fishing tackle with the right. He bows humbly to me, then to the guard, then bows again as he steps into the bathroom after me.
I towel off and put on the fresh pair of regulation underwear and tank top. I feel like about thirty-two bucks fifty, which is an improvement because I was feeling like shit when I woke up.
There’s a scale nearby. Stepping on it, I weigh myself. 82kg.
In the Free World, which includes only two countries beyond the shores of the United States—Myanmar and Liberia—where the phenomena of the natural world continue to be based upon the mass of a grain of barley, I weigh 181 pounds.