What a Puzzle! : Culture: How we approach maze craze points up yet another difference between Americans and the Japanese.

The 25 contestants were poised and ready to go when one wondered aloud: “Do you think it’s better to take the stations in order or just as they come?”

“I’m going to get through however I can,” confided another.

When the starting signal sounded, the racers stampeded through the gates. At first, all was confusion, with dozens of feet pounding the pavement in a dead run. Then the sound of the hoofing receded into the zig-zagging corridors of the gigantic, wooden-fence maze.

Twenty minutes and 35 seconds later, the competition was over: Todd Greenley, 16, of Petaluma, had won. Raising his arms in triumph, Greenley, who has been unable to walk for most of life because of cerebral palsy, attributed his success to a motor-driven wheelchair that had helped him negotiate the maze’s tricky turns.

“It goes super fast,” he explained before collecting a mug, T-shirt and other assorted booty.

Thus ended another weekly competition at the Wooz, a new kind of amusement park imported from Japan. Its main attraction is an acre-wide labyrinth of green walls; customers pay $5 apiece to run through it like rats in a laboratory.

But somewhere en route to California, an interesting change occurred. In Japan, where such mazes have been popular for several years, people view them primarily as personal, mental challenges. In the hands of Americans, the labyrinth phenomenon has become a competitive sport.

The Wooz (an acronym for Wild and Original Object with Zoom), it seems, has become yet another wonder showing the deep differences between the Japanese and Americans, whether at work or play.

“People come in here and race each other,” said Larry Friday, the maze’s marketing manager. “You’d expect that on a ball field, but it really surprised me here.”

John Ho, the facility’s program planner, said: “Americans are more aggressive. They move faster. They’re more competitive. They really get serious when they run through the maze.”

To accommodate its customers, the Wooz now conducts weekly, monthly and annual competitions, some offering major prizes. Those completing the basic maze course in under 40 minutes are routinely offered free admission to a second puzzle. Armed with time cards, runners enthusiastically record the speed of their passages by punching one time clock when they start and another when they finish. In between, they try to wend their way to four separate stations where they mark their cards with rubber stamps to prove they have completed the course.

Labyrinths, of course, are not new. They have been part of history since the Greeks. Their myths hold that the first labyrinth was built by Daedalus, a famous architect and inventor, to confine the Minotaur, a ferocious monster, half man and half beast. Heroic Theseus traced his way through the maze, killed the monster and found his way out by following a skein of thread he had unwound as he entered.

During the reign of England’s King Henry VIII (1509-47), courtiers and families are said to have frolicked in the maze at Hampton Court near London. It was formed by yew trees placed in a tall hedge. The maze, one of about 60 in England today, remains a popular tourist attraction, navigated by more than 250,000 visitors each year.

The Japanese maze craze, which at its height featured more than 200 commercial puzzles, began in 1984 when leisure-time companies discovered customers would pay handsomely for the experience of walking through man-made labyrinths. Sun Creative System Inc., based in Nagoya, decided to introduce the concept to Americans by opening the Wooz in 1988.

Built at a cost of $13 million on 12 acres off Interstate 80 between Sacramento and San Francisco, the labyrinth is one of only a handful in America; its operators say it is one of the largest.

When the maze opened almost two years ago, its operators had no idea what to expect. Familiar only with the Japanese penchant for solving difficult mental puzzles, they kept the early configurations simple to avoid confounding Americans.

“We want to learn how Americans think,” the company’s president, Tetsushi Hirakawa, was quoted as saying.

In retrospect, marketing manager Friday now says, they needn’t have worried. Since it opened, he said, more than 300,000 customers have visited the Wooz.

Its configurations, changed monthly according to computer-designed patterns, now are as difficult as those in Japan. On an average summer Saturday, the maze attracts as many as 1,500 customers, Friday said, adding: “Sometimes I’m amazed. I can’t believe that people just keep coming.”

They do so, he theorized, partly because they’re manifesting a deep-rooted human need to solve problems: “For most of us, the day-to-day problems aren’t solvable in a day. This is a problem that is solvable in an hour or two--you can come here and feel like you’ve finished something.”

Albert Marston, a USC psychology professor, has a different idea about the public fascination with mazes: “There is a quality of controlled scariness to it,” he said. “You can get lost, which is a fear we all have from childhood. This is a way of challenging that, yet safely, because you know you’re going to get out at some point.”

But for Japanese and Americans, the maze--and leisure and other life activities--are experienced differently, experts report.

“There’s not the same emphasis on individual competition in Japan,” said Patricia Riley, a USC professor who acts as a consultant to Japanese firms and has written on differences between American and Japanese management styles. “Japan is a much more collective society; people work together in groups and have a much more cooperative notion of the world. The sort of challenges that are apparent tend to be challenges within themselves rather than against other individuals.”

This also reflects itself in Japanese recreation and sport, said Dale Toohey, a physical education professor at Cal State Long Beach; he has traveled extensively to Japan and other Asian countries to gather material for his articles and lectures on the cultural aspects of sports. “Sports is an extension of society (and) Japanese tend to (approach them) more as a personal challenge.”

Examples abound. Traditionally, observers say, Japanese have tended to excel in solitary pursuits, such as martial arts, flower arranging and tea ceremonies. Like mazes, they require personal discipline and can be viewed as a means of mental or spiritual development.

In recent years, as more Western leisure activities have drifted eastward, the Japanese, experts say, have tended to change them in unique ways.

For instance, baseball, which has become a national obsession in Japan, has more of a team orientation, with less emphasis on individual heroes. Pachinko, a popular Japanese game patterned after U.S. pinball, encourages players to pit themselves against the machines, rather than human opponents, as occurs in America.

Even Japanese golf addicts tend to devote more time to perfecting their games and less to competing than do their American counterparts. “You can barely pass an intersection there without seeing someone practicing his golf swing,” said Michael Shapiro, a New York writer who last year published a book titled “Japan: In the Land of the Brokenhearted” based on the four years he spent living in that country. “It’s a solitary pursuit of perfection, an attempt to do it the right way, to work hard on it. They are practicing for a degree of perfection, knowing that they will never be able to (reach) it.”

Bill Vendl, who as CSULB’s director of campus recreation has made several trips to Japan to observe recreational trends, says he sees the differences reflected on many levels. Contestants on Japanese television game shows, for instance, will “practically kill themselves” to perform difficult stunts just to see if they can do them; compare that to Americans, who will compete only for large sums of money or to “beat their buddies.”

And while Japanese universities tend to organize such noncompetitive student recreations as kayaking, hiking and rock climbing, he said, Americans, if they encourage such activities at all, turn them into sporting events.

As evidence, Vendle cited a recent conference he attended in St. Louis, where university recreation directors discussed making rock climbing more competitive with time deadlines.

“They’re covering the same territory,” he said of the two cultures, “but Americans view it as competition and Japanese view it as recreational activity.”

Which is, more or less, what happens at the mazes, where Japanese tend to compete against the labyrinth, while Americans compete against each other. That holds true, Wooz operators say, among almost every element of their American customers, including senior citizens, Boy Scouts, college fraternity members, the handicapped, teen-agers on dates and families with small children.

Although the Vacaville maze has only about a mile of maze corridors, it takes the average person 1 to 2 hours to complete, walking 3 to 5 miles in the process, said general manager Sabrina Ho. The longest time recorded: 5.5 hours; the shortest, slightly more than 5 minutes.

Generally, she said, children do better than adults because they’re less analytical and more action-oriented. Yet Alan Chu, the unofficial Wooz record holder, attributes his maze success to a combination of logic and intuition. “What I try to do is put myself into the brain of the (designer) . . . and try to figure out how they made the patterns,” said Chu, 33, a Marin County computer programmer. “I apply some sort of logic and intuition to it. There are certain rules about how you create a maze--the paths can go to some points and not to others.”

His efforts were rewarded last year when he placed first in the Wooz’s annual maze competition and won a five-day trip to Japan.

For most people, though, the lure of the Wooz has more to do with its immediate thrill rather than any hope of future reward.

“It makes you go in circles,” said Sharice Perkins, 19, of Richmond, after what seemed to her to be hours of shuffling up corridors leading to other corridors. “My legs hurt.”

Said James Lee, also 19, of Lodi: “My equilibrium is pretty messed up. I feel like a drunken mouse searching for the cheese at the other end.”

Operators say the only accidents they have involve people running into each other at blind corners. To lessen the dangers of panic, they have installed clearly marked exits for emergencies; they also put in a rest area with a soft drink dispenser at the maze’s center.

Still, not everyone is impressed with the Wooz.

“It isn’t that great,” said Brian Vian, 17, of Fairfield after only 30 minutes in the puzzle. “I thought it would be a lot more interesting. My only problem is that I saw a good-looking girl and started following her, and then she got lost.”

Gabriel Quijas, 14, of Sacramento, emerged from the exit after more than 40 minutes, only to declare in a loud voice that he never wanted to repeat the experience.

“It’s kind of boring,” he said. “You have to cheat to really get through it. All things considered, I’d rather have gone to a movie.”