A Cultivated Kinship
Member David Beeman reflects on a fondness for Japan forged over more than four decades.
David Beeman’s assistant wanted some advice. It was 1989 and real-estate prices were still skyrocketing.
What did he think of her and her new husband’s idea to take advantage of the booming market with a 100-year mortgage on a downtown Tokyo apartment?
“I said, ‘First of all, have you ever seen a building in Japan that lasts 100 years—other than a temple?’” recalls Beeman, a sales executive with credit card giant American Express at the time. “She still thanks me for talking her out of that.”
Sitting in the Club on a recent weekday afternoon, the American Member is at once nostalgic and reverent about those economic bubble days in Japan, symbolized by flashy purchases, luxury brand stores, overseas vacations and exorbitant fees for golf club memberships. The nation was too immersed in the excess to notice the economic hardship around the corner.
“I left at the end of ’89, which was perfect timing because everything fell off a cliff,” says Beeman, 64. “I had a few American friends who were left here, and they were really struggling through the ’90s.”
Having nurtured a relationship with the country over more than a decade, Beeman knew he would be back. As a child, he grew fascinated by East Asian cultures thanks largely to a museum containing examples of Japanese art and artifacts nearby his Kansas hometown.
After his sophomore year at Harvard University, where he studied with, among others, Japanologist and scholar Edwin Reischauer, Beeman spent time between his junior and senior years, in 1977 and 1978, living with a host family in Kiyose in northwest Tokyo.
(Image: David Beeman at Tsuwano Castle, Shimane Prefecture, 1978)
For the accomplished student conversant in academic Japanese, the first bout of culture shock didn’t take long to surface.
“I got off the plane and I could tell you how the rice paddies glistened in the sun like stones on a go [game] board,” Beeman says with a smile. “But the first day I had to change trains in Ikebukuro and I had to ask someone for directions, I had no clue what they were saying. I could ask the question, but I had no clue what the answer was.”
Beeman would spend the next several years working in translation and progressing through business school, with stints in Japan and the States. As the ’80s began to ramp up, so too did the rate of transformation wherever Beeman looked in the Japanese capital.
“Each time I came back, Tokyo looked like a different city,” says Beeman, who was a Member of the Club with his wife, Donna, in the ’80s. “The amount of new buildings. The amount of growth. The number of new stores. The size of the shopping centers. It was becoming a [premier global] city. It was jumping a tier.”
Nothing gold can stay, however, and economic growth is never assured. As Japan was embarking on its so-called “lost decade,” Beeman found himself back in Tokyo in 1999 and wandering into a café with a colleague for lunch. Almost every table was taken, but few people were eating. Many were sleeping. Some were passing the time with comics and newspapers. There was no business deal chatter and none of the energy that had electrified the city 10 years before.
“That just told me the economy was dead,” Beeman says. “That was such an extreme difference from ’89.”
(Image: Donna and David Beeman in Kyoto, 1988)
The economy has since recovered and Beeman is once again living in Japan, a place for which he has developed a deep affinity.
“I may be more comfortable living [in Tokyo] than in New York,” he says. “My personality fits, I think.”
That’s not to say that Beeman never longs for a slice of life from back home. When the stress of working in a foreign country boiled over or a misunderstanding with a colleague caused more frustration that it was worth, Beeman would call up a fellow expat and head to the Club for a much-needed “America day.”
“We’d sit at the old bar and have a cheeseburger with fries and a Budweiser” he says of the tradition that continues today. “It meant we were escaping for the moment, and the Club was our getaway.”
Economies may wax and wane, but life’s simple pleasures endure.
Words: Owen Ziegler
Top image: Donna Beeman
