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People would probably find it bewildering if they knew that when he was young, he was afraid of sharks.
It's pretty damn annoying, frankly, because as it is most people find it bewildering that he's interested in marine biology in the first place, so there ends up being a sort of two-step process in play and both steps of that process involve people finding him strange. First they think he's weird because he likes reading about starfish and cephalopods and the migration patterns of endangered whales. Then, once they've got their heads wrapped around that, they're back to thinking he's weird again if he ever says that there was a point in his life when he found any aspect of the ocean apprehensive or even terrifying.
What he doesn't tell them is that it's half his family's fault, and half Steven Spielberg's — though naturally he blames his family more.
It began with a trip to California, which is where his great-grandmother lives. He never really saw much of his great-grandmother when he was a kid, and maybe that's why the few occasions when he did spend time with her end up standing out so brightly in his memory. He vaguely remembers a plane ride that felt like forever, a plane that they boarded in the evening when he was tired so that he would sleep in his mother's lap through most of it. There had been sunlight when he'd woken up, and he remembers his mother telling him they'd crossed a whole ocean overnight. He'd opened his eyes once, somewhere in the middle of it, and glanced toward a window whose sun shutter had been left up either by mistake or by design, and all he'd seen on the other side of it had been the dim lights along the airplane's wing, and pinpricks of stars, and black velvet darkness all around.
There had been an ocean down below them almost the entire time they'd been in flight, he'd learned after they'd landed. It had been down there below them, down through the darkness, thousands of kilometers down just to get to the surface of the waves — and even then, it would still be even more thousands of kilometers beyond that just to get anywhere remotely close to the bottom.
It would've been a long way to fall, he remembers thinking, and even after the fact the notion had made him feel cold despite the warm California sun.
His great-grandmother is also his mother's grandmother, sort of like how his grandparents are his mother's parents. It's hard sometimes to think of his mother as a person that way — that she's not just his mother (a fixture in his life, an aspect of the scenery, a supporting character in some story centered around him), but also someone with her own relations and memories and perspectives. At the time he hadn't understood why he and his mother were crossing an ocean to get to California in the dead of night, but looking back on it now, it's easier to see that it was a trip for his mother's benefit and not his own. It'd had nothing to do with him, really, and everything to do with his mother; for some reason he'd been unaware of, she'd decided to take a vacation to visit her grandmother, and so it was only to be expected that she'd brought her son along with her when she went.
(He recalls being confused by his great-grandmother, the first time he'd seen her. His mental image of great-grandparents had been of short, wizened people with gray hair and spindly bodies, not of bold red lipstick and dark sunglasses and thick black hair flowing all down her back, marred only by a single streak of gray.)
But the point is, he and his mother had gone to California together, and he had been five years old on that trip, and his great-grandmother's husband had apparently worked in the film business, and long story short, Hollywood at that time had been practically wallpapered with posters and advertisements for the premiere of Jaws — all of which together had created a hilariously disastrous combination.
The sight of one of those posters had been his earliest recollection of a shark: the blunt nose, the oblong mouth, the rows and rows of sharp teeth. The poster made it look huge in comparison to a human being, a monster the size of a semi truck looming in the deep and preparing for a kill.
And because it was only one glimpse of one movie poster, for the most part, he'd been fine. It hadn't given him nightmares, and it hadn't made him cry. But every time he'd gotten near standing water of any variety — bathtubs, swimming pools, the seaside, particularly deep puddles — sooner or later he'd catch himself thinking of that unsuspecting swimmer with the monster approaching from down below. And of course, in his memories, the recollection had distorted somewhat, always in the direction of the more horrifying: sometimes the jagged teeth were dark with use, and sometimes the clear blue water tinged red and black around its mouth. But no matter the details, the fundamental premise remained the same, burned into the back of his thoughts with a simple, irrational association:
Where there is water, there might be sharks.
It was an impression that stayed with him for the better part of a year. Days turned into weeks and into months, and he caught himself thinking of it every time without fail — or at least, he did until at last someone eventually figured out that his reluctance to take a bath was attributable to something more than simply being six years old in the vicinity of a bathtub.
There's a story there too, of course. He remembers it had been one of those rare and precious days when his father was home from tour, which happened more often than people seem to assume given the demands of his father's career, but still sporadically enough that having Dad home for a little while was a special occasion to be savored. Bathtime had rolled around on a night when his mother had been engrossed in the sappy predictable plot of some TV movie, and so rather than make her get up and interrupt her ability to see the story through to the end, his father had volunteered to handle bathtime for her for once. She always took care of it when he was away for work, his father had said cheerfully; it was about time she had a night off from the routine.
He remembers peering over the side of the tub to watch it fill, seeing the water grow deeper and deeper with every passing moment, and scrutinizing it every step of the way. At that point it was almost a ritual, a good-luck charm, as though his vigilance was necessary to ensure that a shark couldn't somehow sneak in to lie in wait for him during the two seconds he'd taken his eyes off the water. He remembers standing there, unmoving, absently holding his breath while the water poured in, and that was when his father, unsuspecting, had casually asked him what he was doing.
He'd never told his mother about the sharks, for some inexplicable reason. Maybe it was because his mom is the affectionate, overbearing sort, and she would've wanted to try to prove to him that his fears were unfounded in some way. Maybe it was because he didn't want to be cuddled and comforted and assured that he was safe, so it was just easier to just claim it was nothing and suck it up, hiding it from her just to save a little face.
But when his father had asked, for some reason it had been different, and he remembers that the truth had ended up slipping out before he could quite hold it back.
His memories of his father are always scattered and random, few and far between. He's never been an everyday constant presence in his life, not the way that his mother is. But there's one thing about Sadao Kujo that always stands out in his recollections of the man, and it's this: his father is one of those people who always seems to know exactly the right thing to say in any given situation, like it's just effortless to come up with precisely the right words to set someone at ease.
(It's something he envies about his father, because it's a trait that doesn't seem to be hereditary.)
So there he'd been, six years old and standing guiltily at the side of the bathtub after his father had caught him watching for sharks, waiting for the mollifying assurances that he'd been sure were on their way.
But when his father's response had come, it hadn't been "don't be ridiculous" or "there are no sharks in there" or "your imagination's getting the better of you, little man".
What he had said was, "That's freshwater, though. Sharks only live in salt water."
And then, of course, all notions of sharks in the bathtub had immediately gone by the wayside in favor of a much more pressing concern, which was finding out how exactly his father knew this extremely vital detail about sharks in the first place. He'd claimed to have read it in a book, which of course had instantly made Jotaro curious about what else had been included in the book, and he'd ended up so preoccupied with needing answers to these incredibly important questions that before he'd quite realized it, he'd been neck-deep in the tub and halfway to clean because all of his focus had been on listening to his father tell him facts about ocean life instead.
(Before he'd left for tour again, he'd brought Jotaro a stack of books about sharks. He still remembers the glossy pages filled with full-color illustrations, and the short paragraphs interspersed throughout with headers like FUN FACT and DID YOU KNOW? But most of all, he remembers discovering that his father had been slightly incorrect, because Carcharhinus leucas and members of the genus Glyphis are both able to swim in fresh water, but by that point he was far too engrossed in his reading to remember to fear their possible presence in his bathtub anyway.)
As ridiculous of a memory as it is in retrospect, there'd been a valuable lesson in his temporary fear of sharks — one that actually had nothing to do with marine biology, and everything to do with fear. The image of Jaws on the movie poster had been frightening because it had played to a fear of the unknown; the bodies of standing water had seemed apprehensive to him as a child because there was no telling what might be lurking at the bottom of them. In the end, it hadn't been the shark he'd been afraid of, not really. What had rattled him was just the not knowing.
And indeed, the more he'd read about the amazing variety of creatures that reside in those kilometers upon kilometers deep beneath the surface of the water, the less fearsome it all had become. Suddenly the vast unfathomable ocean and its inhabitants weren't just a blank space marked on a tattered map with a question mark and a "here there be monsters"; it had become a world in its own right, no different than a city or a country filled with people of all different shapes and sizes.
Sharks have been around for four hundred million years. Sharks can drown if they stop swimming because they rely on that movement to pump water over their gills. Sharks sense blood in the water because the presence of blood changes its electrical conductivity, which sharks can sense through electroreception. Some sharks don't even hunt; they filter-feed on plankton that collects on their teeth.
And for all that sharks may be deadly predators, their own greatest threat to their well-being is — humanity.
But his favorite fact about sharks, the one that has always stuck with him through the years, is this:
If you encounter a shark, you don't want to come off as passive and afraid, or the shark might perceive you as prey and decide to try for a bite. But you don't want to take it too far to the other extreme, either, because aggressive behavior might provoke the shark into responding in kind. It's that calm middle ground between the two that you want to achieve, the comfortable medium between prey and threat: you want the shark to read you as a fellow predator, another of its kind, and lose interest in you because of it.
Turns out — as he'd discovered firsthand in his teens, when he'd found that easy medium and somehow ended up with all the girls wanting him and all the guys wanting to be him, and every punk on the street getting out of his way when they saw him coming — that's a method that works on fellow humans, too.
And the thing is, human beings have come up with a vocabulary of words that they use to describe people with behavior like a shark's. They call them tough, vicious; they say they're cunning and ruthless. They say they're cold; they say they're emotionless. They say they're rapacious, predatory, dangerous. They use words that come with connotations of fear. They give the impression that as far as these people are concerned, it's either flee for your life or get eaten.
Surviving Dio Brando on a warm night in Cairo had been a little bit like surviving a shark attack.
But human beings have a lot of misconceptions about sharks, too, and while Dio Brando had fit that vocabulary to a tee, the truth of the matter is that when it came down to a fight, he wasn't nearly the apex predator he'd evidently thought himself to be.
Once upon a time, he might've had better luck with that — but unfortunately for him, these days Jotaro's not afraid of sharks.