Whirligig

November 27, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 11 Comments 

The train tracks lead­ing away from Gumyo, the lit­tle town I am liv­ing in now. The pho­to­graph doesn’t show you the in­ces­sant noise of the high­way nearby, though.

Rain­drops spray across the train win­dow, the reds and blues and greens of street lights and neon signs, splayed across the glass panes, run like bleed­ing dyes, shim­mer­ing. The wind out­side whips the wa­ter across the sur­face, dis­tort­ing the night scene, tug­ging and streak­ing it, un­til the re­flec­tion of my face within the black­ness is mixed like paints into the lights of pass­ing neigh­bor­hoods. My good eye stares into a void, twixt the light and dark­ness, day and night, in­no­cent mak­ing out with know­ing. It is within this ball of calm­ness that the train hur­tles through the empty hours, the lim­ited ex­press, des­ti­na­tion: last call of the sea­son. Leaves fly up in the train’s wake, whirling like bats, cold, help­less, and final.

A town still asleep at dawn

House roofs and apart­ment build­ings, tele­phone poles and high ten­sion wires, train sta­tion plat­forms lined with dour-​​faced com­muters wear­ing black coats, neon signs and clang­ing train cross­ings, all of them whip by out­side the train win­dows. Peo­ple nod off op­po­site me, oth­ers read books, or stare blearily out into the dawn grey. I fol­low their gazes, seek­ing… what? Clouds and birds, the sky un­tamed, rain im­mi­nent, a puff of cool air from the open doors when the train stops. It seems the years in Japan have al­ways been char­ac­ter­ized by the clackity-​​clack of train tracks, and I have al­ways been fol­low­ing the single-​​file pro­ces­sion­als along the rail lines, or wait­ing on plat­forms as my white breath dis­pells in the late au­tumn air.

The main road from the sta­tion takes a slight de­tour along the train tracks. Here is where I dis­cover the other face of Gumyo, the side that must once have made up the whole town here be­fore the high­way by­pass ran roughshod right over the heart of the town.

Home seems far away all the time these days. Four weeks have passed since mov­ing out to Chiba. The two pairs of pants and two shirts that ac­com­pany me for the week out at the guest­house, the heavy lap­top com­puter with its ret­inue of hard dri­ves, mouse, A/​C adapters, and note­book of se­r­ial num­bers and pass­words, the draw­ing case that holds a few pens and pen­cils for draw­ing and its sis­ter jour­nal, the two books I’m read­ing (I’ve been try­ing to get through “Queen of the Night” by Ar­turo Perez-​​Revert, but have been so tired that I al­ways end up nod­ding to sleep on the trains as I at­tempt to read it), the change of socks, un­der­wear, and t-​​shirts, the toi­letry kit, the di­a­betes kit, the cam­era, and ex­tra, warm jacket… are be­gin­ning to out­stay their wel­come on my back. I wake each night to the slap­ping of a stranger’s slip­pers shuf­fling to the toi­let out­side my bed­room door, sit every night with strangers at the din­ner ta­ble in a room dec­o­rated with gold-​​plated clocks and cheap Chi­nese paint­ing prints and dom­i­nated by a huge, wide-​​screen TV al­ways run­ning the same news pro­gram again and again, while these strangers puff away at cig­a­rettes and over­load on bot­tles of whiskey and shochu and vodka, and wait for strangers to fin­ish in the bath­room so I can brush my teeth. It’s as if my life is not my own and my home back in Tokyo a place where some­one else has moved in.

The first rays of the sun graze the brood­ing roof of a farmhouse.

Rem­nant of a town long gone. As I en­tered this area there was lots of wind and flap­ping sheet metal and rot­ten wood. It was too early to see most of the towns­folk, but those who had hauled them­selves out of bed greeted me as if I was a reg­u­lar neighbor.

A care­fully tended grove pro­tected from the wind by thick hedges and wind­breaks. Noth­ing moved, the leaves seemed to be hold­ing their breath.

The key turns in the lock, wak­ing the tum­blers in­side, and al­low­ing me to pull back the creak­ing door. The air within the apart­ment is warm. An aroma of cook­ing curry greets my nos­trils. As the door bangs shut be­hind me my wife steps out from be­hind the kitchen door and smiles. She looks both tired and sad, but full of life, as always.

“Wel­come home,” she says qui­etly, in that self-​​assured way that al­ways makes me feel safe. “Put your pack down and take off your shoes.”

I lower the pack and feel the weight of the day lift. Every­thing is fa­mil­iar. My wife holds out her arms to re­ceive an embrace.

“How are you?” I ask, a lit­tle shy.

She smiles, know­ing there is no need to an­swer. “I’ve made some curry,” she says.

“You look tired,” I say. “Have you been sleep­ing okay?”

She low­ers her head and forces her smile. “Same as you,” she says. “It’s strange here with­out you.”

“Yeah,” I agree. We stand hold­ing each other with­out say­ing any­thing more, let­ting the sound of the wind rush­ing against the win­dows and the tap danc­ing of the wa­ter boil­ing in the pot in the kitchen play against one another.

A fal­low rice field still hold­ing rain­wa­ter from the storm the night be­fore. Mist was ris­ing over all the fields

I couldn’t be­lieve this was the same area I had been grum­bling about for the past three weeks. The far­ther I ran the more the old towns drifted back into sight.

An old wooden shrine listed as part of the “Kanto Fureai no Michi” (Kanto Plain Com­mu­nal Road), a foot­path that arcs from the far side of Tokyo, up over the north along the Tani­gawa range and ex­tends down along the east side here, a dis­tance of over 400 kilo­me­ters, much of it in the moun­tains and through back­road coun­try­side. I never knew that Gumyo was the place where the path came to an end. So in many ways I had reached the End of the World…

…and found the Well…

It was dawn again. The wind still blew, but colder now. My pack bulged with the es­sen­tials again and sat by the front door. I lifted the pack, switched off the hall light, and pushed the front door open. A cold fin­ger of the wind wrig­gled its way in­side and lifted the cloth hang­ing over the kitchen door. Be­fore it could ex­plore fur­ther I stepped out­side into the dark­ness and pushed the door gen­tly closed be­hind me. I didn’t bother us­ing the um­brella… it would only snap out of shape any way. The train was wait­ing, so I hoisted the pack into a bet­ter po­si­tion, and headed to­ward the train station.

My wan­der­ing took me away from the main roads into fields that welled straight up out of my childhood.

I love it when the tar­mac slowly erodes away and turns to dirt, and then fi­nally just pe­ters out .

The risen sun stream­ing light on a patch of onions.

Much of Japan once looked like this. I re­ally miss walk­ing along such roads. Now that most peo­ple rely on cars and the by­paths no longer con­nect lit­tle en­claves that once held the strings of com­mu­ni­ties to­gether, there is a sense of des­o­la­tion and empti­ness, as if these places no longer hold value. All eyes now turn to Tokyo. As more rural com­mu­nites turn into these dy­ing land­scapes, the fu­ture of Japan seems to hold no cen­ter. A city with­out its sur­round­ing past, a rural com­mu­nity with­out its rea­son for being…

I Sing of Birds and Dream in Neon

November 18, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 12 Comments 

(Pho­tos taken with my cell phone cam­era)

It was like float­ing in space. The dark­ness spread out in all di­rec­tions, un­mov­ing sea of ink, its edges and breadth punc­tu­ated by dis­tant neon signs, dot­ted lines of iso­lated street lamps, and far­away glow­ing house win­dows. In the mid­dle of the dark­ness, here, where my feet en­coun­tered the as­phalt, a chilly wind in­sisted upon re­mind­ing me of the path I had taken from my tem­po­rary new home some­where back there. I had in­tended to make a round­about cir­cuit of the rice pad­dies that sur­rounded the uni­ver­sity where I have now been work­ing for the past three weeks (has it been three weeks al­ready?), fol­low­ing the god-​​like point-​​of-​​view of the town map, but be­ing the mor­tal of lim­ited per­cep­tion that I am, some­where in the dark I got lost. Just like when I lose my bear­ings in the moun­tains I stopped in my tracks and stood cast­ing about for some­thing fa­mil­iar. But there was noth­ing to turn to, not even the path it­self. In­stead I was float­ing upon black­ness. Twenty min­utes into my run and my first ven­ture into this un­fa­mil­iar land­scape and al­ready I was hav­ing an out-​​of-​​body experience.

More by feel than aca­d­e­mic cer­tainty, I tip-​​tapped my toes along the fronds of grass at the side of the path and slowly made my way back the way I had come. The path sloped down into an ir­ri­ga­tion ditch at one point and I could hear the trickle of wa­ter down at the bot­tom. The sky was vast above, the stars more spare than usual, as if com­pet­ing for at­ten­tion with the neon lights. Soon I heard the rush of cars on the main road nearby and the switch to gravel on the path. I found one of the street lamps and headed to­ward it, even­tu­ally get­ting back on the main, paved lanes and jog­ging the rest of the way to the university.

Dawn view of the uni­ver­sity where I work.

When I swung the door open the brisk au­tumn air grabbed me and slapped me awake. A gib­bous moon floated in the glacial blue of the morn­ing sky, and a mo­ment later a spar­row hawk arched over the white disk, its wings beat­ing heav­ily. It was an omen. And for the first time in days I felt a loos­en­ing in my chest, and I took my first step into the neigh­bor­hood that shed its sense of dis­lo­ca­tion and dread. The sun had not quite nudged its pâté over the edge of the world, still wait­ing, per­haps for me to find more space and more dis­tance. So I started on my sec­ond foray into the rice fields.

The train sta­tion which serves the uni­ver­sity. The train line is so small it only has four sta­tions, and trains come but once an hour.

Every­thing was dif­fer­ent with light added. The dark car ports and sin­is­ter dog­houses, pointy rooftops and fence doors bang­ing in the wind, all had ac­quired a bit of color in their cheeks so that it now seemed pretty and do­mes­tic. Even the dry crackle of dead grass at the verge of the road, which had raised the hairs on the back of my neck two nights be­fore, now wafted up the sweet smell of veg­e­ta­tion. Here and there lo­cals strolled with their dogs along the road­side or hur­ried through their morn­ing health walk. And every­where, sim­ply every­where, sang and flut­tered birds. Birds, birds, birds, like a a re­gal pro­ces­sional for the sun king.

For the first time in over twenty five years I spot­ted a bull-​​headed shrike (La­nius bu­cephalus), first by its slightly hys­ter­i­cal chat­ter, and then by its heavy, twitch­ing leap­ing from branch to branch to tele­phone wire. Fur­ther on, also a long-​​missed friend from my early years of bird­ing, the sky shrilled to the breath­less melodies of sky­larks (Alauda ar­ven­sis), as they climbed higher and higher, singing all along, into the blue un­til you could no longer make out the tiny dot of their hov­er­ing wings and then came div­ing down as if to strike the earth, only to pull away just be­fore reach­ing the ground. In the first twenty min­utes I filled up my note­book with a dozen old fa­mil­iar names I hadn’t seen in a long time: gray heron, cor­morant, yel­low wag­tail, kestrel, eared grebe, lesser golden plover, yellow-​​breasted bunting…

So this place wasn’t so bad af­ter all…

Sluice gate for rice paddy ir­ri­ga­tion. Leav­ing the main col­lec­tion of houses of the town be­hind, the land opened up here. I could even smell the salt on the air from the ocean ten kilo­me­ters away.

Sign warn­ing women to be care­ful of grop­ers and ex­hi­bi­tion­ists. Kind of took away some of the in­no­cence of the rice pad­dies be­yond. And gave it a bit more real history…

When the sun came up and sliced its yel­low knife across the fields, I joined my shadow com­pan­ion for some pan­tomim­ing fun.

Here and there some of the tra­di­tions re­mained from the Chiba (the name of this pre­fec­ture) of old. It is a land of wind and storms, and tra­di­tion­ally every­thing around the homes was pro­tected by high hedges and is­lands of wind­breaks. To­day the un­pro­tected mod­ern houses and slap-​​dash way of build­ing the high­way by­passes com­pletely ig­nore the ear­lier aware­ness of this rather brusque land­scape. Dur­ing the runs there were few places to get get out of the wind.

I’d wanted a place to go for long walks and I found it. Now I needed to take the time to slow down and look more deeply.

I re­turned to the guest house still glow­ing with the pump­ing of my blood and the heat of sun against my reti­nas. Be­fore en­ter­ing the en­clo­sure of the hous­ing de­vel­op­ment though I stood atop the over­pass that climbed over the train sta­tion, the high­est point in the im­me­di­ate neigh­bor­hood, and sur­veyed 360 de­grees, the ex­tent of this new place I had taken a step into. For bet­ter or worse, this was home for now. A lot was about to hap­pen, with some wrench­ing changes, but it was off to a good start. The float­ing had stopped and I had set­tled back on earth. The thing was, could I keep from slip­ping back into the long years of wait­ing I had just molted my­self of? Each day now would be baby steps, but new. Per­haps it is good to some­times pare your­self down to the es­sen­tials and see where they take you.

Gremlins

November 11, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 8 Comments 

Sorry every­one for the re­cent dis­ap­pear­ance of my com­ments writ­ing field. I haven’t a clue what has caused this and I’ve been go­ing through all my plu­g­ins and ad­min­is­tra­tive hoochie-​​koochie try­ing to fig­ure it out. A real waste of a per­fectly good weekend.

To top it off I seem to have at­tracted the un­re­lent­ing at­ten­tion of some hideous track­back spam­mer who has every day been send­ing hun­dreds of spam to my site. I’ve tried every­thing to stop the bas­tard, in­clud­ing turn­ing on be­ing logged in to com­ment, but I can’t shake him. And last night, by chance, I dis­cov­ered that the ba­thy­bius has seen fit a few weeks ago to hack into my ac­count and cre­ate an unau­tho­rized folder with spam links there. Aaaaar­rrrgggh­hhh! I’d like to….!

Give me a few days to fig­ure this out. I’ve been sit­ting here half the day and I re­ally need to get out­side for some fresh air.
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Up­date:

Phew! Got the com­ments worked out. Seemed like I in­stalled a cer­tain plu­gin a lit­tle while ago that set my front page to a sta­tic page. That’s part of what I want to de­velop in the site, but not with the set up I have now. It should be work­ing now.

Bile

November 6, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 9 Comments 

My apolo­gies to every­one who reads these pages, for my long ab­sence. I just moved to a new place (al­beit tem­po­rary hous­ing for now) and started a new job at a uni­ver­sity. The whole start has been so har­row­ing and busy that I had no time for even my own thoughts, let alone writ­ing here in the blog. I would prob­a­bly have ended up writ­ing about all my com­plaints about the ab­solutely an­te­dilu­vian (and feu­dal) Japan­ese uni­ver­sity sys­tem. Since I want to keep this blog as sane and con­tem­pla­tive as pos­si­ble from now on, I de­cided to wait un­til my heart had set­tled down into the new lifestyle be­fore I wrote about what’s hap­pen­ing. I want to start a new sec­tion called “Com­pass Walks”, in which I start out in a new land­scape and try to learn about its nat­ural per­son­al­ity, but since I haven’t had a mo­ment to my­self yet and haven’t even taken one walk yet be­yond an evening run one time, I still don’t feel I can write an hon­est as­sess­ment of the new place I have ar­rived in since I haven’t had a chance to re­ally con­cen­trate on us­ing my senses there yet. So al­low me, for now, this bit of a com­men­tary be­low, how­ever dis­taste­ful it might be to some.
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To­day, af­ter a more-​​or-​​less media-​​slanted se­ries of so-​​called “fair tri­als”, Sad­dam Hus­sein was sen­tenced to death. I am no fan of the death penalty, be­liev­ing it to be lit­tle more than an emo­tional re­ac­tion of re­venge that has no place in a jus­tice sys­tem, in which people’s per­sonal feel­ings to­ward an ac­cused per­son should have no bear­ing on the out­come of a ver­dict, and so per­son­ally the ver­dict seems mean­ing­less, in that noth­ing was learned, noth­ing bet­tered, noth­ing gained for so­ci­ety, Iraqi or the world. I have no af­fec­tion for Hus­sein ei­ther, how­ever, and so feel am­bigu­ous about the ret­ri­bu­tion that Iraqis right­fully claim for his pun­ish­ment. He has done some aw­ful things to which he should be held ac­count­able. His pass­ing will leave no hole in the land­scape of hu­man morality.

But from what du­bi­ous be­gin­nings Hussein’s down­fall pre­cip­i­tated. Like Robert Fisk I feel that all the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions that the United States and Britain used to at­tack Iraq nei­ther make right hav­ing at­tacked a sov­er­eign, non-​​threatening coun­try in the first place nor ex­cuse the dis­grace­ful way in which Hus­sein was dragged through me­dia and used as Bush’s scape­goat. By America’s own too-​​oft-​​touted stan­dard of “in­no­cent be­fore proven guilty”, Hus­sein should at least have been given the ben­e­fit of the doubt in his own trial and, con­sid­er­ing that he was sup­pos­edly tried for crimes against his own peo­ple and not against a sin­gle Amer­i­can cit­i­zen and there­fore only the Iraqi ju­di­cial sys­tem should have been in­volved, the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment should have had ab­solutely no say in what went on in the trial. That so of­ten dur­ing the trial the Amer­i­cans were con­sulted and their ul­ti­ma­tums heeded made the en­tire af­fair a grand farce, a pub­lic hang­ing in the town square of Amer­i­can me­dia discrimination.

If the stan­dards used for con­demn­ing Hus­sein are to be con­sid­ered just and in­evitable, then Amer­ica and Britain and any other coun­try which falsely ac­cused and then went ahead and at­tacked Iraq against the wishes of the ma­jor­ity of na­tions in the world, then it stands to rea­son that Bush and Blair and all other min­is­ters in­volved should also be stand­ing trial for “crimes against hu­man­ity”. Nearly every ac­cu­sa­tion used against Hus­sein to bring him to trial ap­ply di­rectly to Bush and Blair, most es­pe­cially Bush with his Hitler-​​like rail­ing against the United Na­tions dur­ing the lead-​​up to the Iraq War. Not to men­tion the scale at which Bush com­mit­ted his crimes.

And yet, Bush is get­ting off scott free, no one able to lay a fin­ger on him, the Amer­i­can me­dia pro­tect­ing his im­age as if it were above re­proach. The Iraq War is now openly and al­most uni­ver­sally rec­og­nized as hav­ing been wrong, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple have “need­lessly” died, and now the Amer­i­cans are talk­ing about pulling out, leav­ing Iraq in a truly dis­mal state, much worse than any­thing un­der Hus­sein. Why is it that there are no uni­ver­sal calls for Bush’s an­swer­ing to his crimes against hu­man­ity? Why is it that my writ­ing some­thing like this con­jures up fear as I write it, echo­ing the same re­pres­sion that Hus­sein used against any of his de­trac­tors? Can any­one ex­plain to me ex­actly how Bush is any dif­fer­ent from Hus­sein? Or how Blair is any dif­fer­ent from Wormtongue?

These last few years have turned me into a re­luc­tant cynic. I trust very few peo­ple now, even some peo­ple whom I for­merly called friends. The tragedy of New York, but much more so the crimes of the Afghan and Iraq Wars have given me glimpses into the hu­man heart that I never re­ally be­lieved be­fore. In some of the en­su­ing ar­gu­ments about go­ing to war, ar­gu­ments with peo­ple, every one of them Amer­i­can, whom I would be­fore have counted to al­ways be there no mat­ter what, peo­ple with whom I made pre­cious mem­o­ries dur­ing my years in the States, sud­denly the di­vi­sions in be­lief left rents that, even af­ter three years have never healed. I saw the ug­li­ness in peo­ple, of what war claims of people’s hearts and minds, of the af­ter­math of rhetoric and me­dia pro­pa­ganda, how peo­ple can be­come so com­mit­ted to their idea of the truth that they be­come blinded to the bonds of friend­ship and love that once had crossed bor­ders un­heeded (and I’m in­clud­ing my­self here). I am bit­ter with hav­ing lost friends, peo­ple who had meant more to me than the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for war would ever match. The lies and de­cep­tion that brought on the shaky world view we live with now, though they seem dis­tant and un­re­lated to our per­sonal lives, have in fact af­fected each of us very deeply, in ways from which we may never be able to ex­tri­cate our­selves within our lifetimes.

If for noth­ing else, I con­demn Bush for hav­ing taken from me the trust and loy­alty of friends, for hav­ing sown the seeds of doubt and fear. I con­demn him for hav­ing brought to the world a sense that there is more evil in the hu­man heart than good­ness and beauty, for hav­ing made the word “ter­ror­ist” a part of our daily vo­cab­u­lary. I con­demn him for hav­ing forced so many of my very close Arab and Moslem friends to live by look­ing over their shoul­ders. And for, though all my life be­fore I have never car­ried any kind of hate within me, to­wards any­one, for the blind­ing, word­less fury that erupts through me every time Bush’s face ap­pears on the tele­vi­sion or in a mag­a­zine, a face now so re­pug­nant and so as­so­ci­ated with war, hypocrisy, in­tol­er­ance, ir­re­spon­si­bil­ity, and de­struc­tion that I have to turn off the TV the mo­ment the vis­age ap­pears be­fore I lose my cool.

Hus­sein has been con­demned to death, but noth­ing at all has changed, ex­cept a greater sense of world weari­ness and sadness.