Summertime in Kinki

Summertime in Kinki –

skin slack carcass-like,

head dislodged from spine.

Wee bugs gnaw

at our better judgement.

A yellow cat pasted

to a leather chair

like a WW2 egg

fried atop a tank.

Summertime in Kinki –

sunrays, winds, showers.

Yet it is money talks:

wind farms axed, panels

sparse, river dams on hold.

Summertime in Kinki
when the initiative balks.

from last night's gig at Urban Guild, Kyoto

Gone Off the Rails

The other day I am riding on the train to Osaka. The train is at full speed when it suddenly starts braking and hooting and the sound of something like broken glass under our feet is heard. It feels and sounds a bit like your bicycle skidding on the gravel (now I wish I had my IC to record it). After a noisy clutter, a sudden calm. Our train has halted on the Aikawa bridge. It is a sunny, crisp winter day. Ducks are motionless specks on the river surface. Very little moves, outside or inside the carriage. After about a minute we see a driver (presumably) and a young woman in uniform run past our window towards the rear of the train.

Inside, there is pregnant silence. A single young woman breaks it: she rings up her employer to announce her lateness (talking on the mobile phone on Japanese trains is rare and is normally met with mute contempt). Commuters try to avert each other’s eyes, perhaps unwilling to recognize traces of concern. But the more one tries not to notice the more perceptive one becomes. So I end up detecting those slight body movements which are inevitably interpreted as anxiety tics, being somewhat perturbed myself.

Ten or so minutes pass. Passengers are fidgety and growing tense, expecting to hear some sort of nerve-soothing announcement from the conductor. The driver and the same young woman in uniform run past the window in the opposite direction, towards the front of the train. The announcement finally comes on. It is rather a brief one, informing us of a ‘human accident’ – jinshin jiko. This phrase is commonly used in Japan and it usually refers to a suicide on the tracks. If there indeed was one, they must have promptly dealt with the body. But how? The train nevertheless moves on to everyone’s relief. The accident though has upset both the driver’s timetable and the driver himself, as the train horn switches to its loudest mode and is frequently applied for no apparent reason for the rest of the journey.

People throwing themselves under trains is commonplace in Japan. On average up to thousand such deaths each year. These acts are normally considered a public nuisance, if not a taboo. They go unreported in the press. The train companies can claim a compensation fee from the family of a person who committed suicide for disruption in service. Most people prefer not to think about it, and are more likely to give way to their petty annoyances about the delays that these unfortunate acts inevitably bring.

As for the ‘suiciders’ (why has this word not gone mainstream I wonder), these people are supposed to be considered failures. More often than not they are regarded as a disgrace to their friends and families. One of the most common cited reasons for suicide is people’s inability to cope with the pressure at work (the pressure to succeed is probably more conspicuous in Japan than anywhere else), which can lead to one losing their job and the overwhelming feeling of insecurity and unworthiness as a result.

So I got to thinking about success and failure, and that perhaps the line between a success and a failure is much thinner than most people like to think. Who knows how many people who consider themselves successful are in fact potential failures, how many of us unbiased train commuters are potential suicide cases? Is the old adage true then, that failure and success are on the opposite sides of the same coin? Who or what has exactly gone off the rails here? The felones-de-se? The train driver gone berserk with his horn? The thick-skinned society? Or me, writing this rubbish? As Bob Dylan sings on Blood on the Tracks, ‘Everything is a little upside down’. Almost nothing is what it seems to be.

All this talk brings me to two of the most famous fictionalized train suicides: Anna Karenina’s and Celia Johnson’s in Brief Encounter. Actually only the former one is a suicide, the second a rather glorious, failed attempt. The 1935 version of Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo is still the most satisfying one. If ever an actress’s eyes were so expressive!!

The coffee shop scene in Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) on the other hand never fails to lure a tear out of my eye.

On Awaji Island

Climbing the Mount Mikuma to Sumoto Castle and Back

by a designated footpath reserved for the slightly adventurous — if the adventurous means wearing Columbia shoes, nibbling the potato chips, pausing to catch breath between bites and swallowed up syllables, if the adventurous means gesturing there’s a songbird in the bushes, as it crosses the path at a safe distance and hops off out of sight leaving us to notice how the earth layers (the strips of land having been shaved off by bulldozers) have exposed the roots and crust ducts to the naked eye, the eye that leads us up to the cryptic white blotches on several tree barks – the birth of fungi?

On the hilltop, you take a snap surreptitiously: my shaved head from the back as the panorama foreground. Your ocular cunning surprises.

The castle grounds unpeopled. A tea room, its one door open, dark inside. A woman dozed off with her back turned, panda-like. The fried octopus rolls are advertised, not to be seen or sniffed.

The castle fenced-off by the restoration work signs. Curiosity gets the better of me as I hurdle over the metal bars — anticipating your law-abiding, scolding look — and climb up the wooden staircase for a glimpse of the castle’s interior: the paint peeling off the walls, the window bars rusty black; the whole place abandoned to its natural decay. I take the opportunity to imagine my nail-scratching the black bars down to their bloodstained bones.

On the way down the path feels much steeper. A polite nod to a man walking uphill. Knees hurting. My near-calamitous fall. More nods to more unnamed birds. Your birdlike chirping.

At the foot of the hill you point to the public toilet. It takes me a few seconds to recall I wanted to pee back up the path. We stroll along the beach fancying the sand belongs to us. In the distance children’s excited voices: 'Unagi! Unagi!' I pick up a ball of sand the size of a marble, about to pocket it, as a souvenir. 'Leave it' – you say – 'it wants to become a grain.'

April 02, 2011 

Is It Ethical to Suffer?

The images of the Japanese calamity are overwhelming not only by revealing the vast physical damage but also by reminding us once again that humans are mere toys in the hands of mother nature. ‘Like toys’ was the often repeated phrase on people’s lips, here in Kyoto and probably elsewhere, as we watched cars, ships, houses being tossed about like children crash theirs in anger or boredom. The tectonic plates were either bored or very angry indeed on March 11^th. People spared by the wrathful tremors stood silently in awe and disbelief. On television, it was as if we were watching a high-budget disaster movie from the comfort of our armchairs, largely unable to find a suitably emotive response (the reminiscences of 9/11: as one of the Twin Towers has just collapsed a woman is screaming, ‘What the hell is going on!!’).

I was glued to the screen for the first couple of days but once my ahs and oh my gods started to sound less personal and more like united voices of democratic concern, I decided enough was enough. Not quite ‘mad as hell’, but I sure couldn’t take it any more: the horrifying headlines, the nuclear explosions, the misery in the north, the scares, the confusing charts, the mixed messages, the cautious experts versus the alarming voices of the news anchors. I was weary. So on the third day I ventured out to meet a friend. I didn’t care any more that the Fukushima plant was very much touch-and-go as yet another explosion was lurking round the corner. Jerry and I decided to go to the riverside, of all safe places. The Yodogawa riverbank was a perfect antidote to the claustrophobic environs of the past days. We brought out guitars, alcohol, poems and spent that afternoon jamming, drinking, chewing the fat. Maybe we chose to be there so that if someone asked us years later, ‘Where were you when the reactor 2 blew up?’ we’d say, ‘At the riverside, drinking booze’.

Watching other people’s misery on the television for hours on end gave me a consoling, if largely false, notion that I was being compassionate and concerned (if one wants to show compassion one should donate money to charity). On the other hand, my running away to the riverside despite the potential danger to my well-being, however infinitesimal, was a potentially self-destructive act, verging on nihilism. Yet it made a perfect sense to me. Our perception is at the same time an evaluation, and every evaluation, being subjective, results in a choice, be it moral or immoral (what is ethical over here may be less so over there). What would your average ‘neo-nihilist’ have to say about this? Let’s look at what a certain philosophy student wrote on ‘Philosophy Forums’:

It is logically impossible to derive an "ought" prescription from an "is" description or a value from a fact. For example it may be a fact that we have evolved compassion to aid our survival. But from this fact it is impossible to derive the value that one "ought" to be compassionate. Such a transgression of logic is as invalid as deriving the value that one "ought" to be aggressive from the fact that we have evolved aggression. Morality then is not based on reason but on sentiment which is both biologically and culturally conditioned. As Hume stated : "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." (It is not contrary to reason, it is just highly unusual).

[…] We perceive what is of value to us. Nihilism per se is impossible due to human nature. But different things are valuable to different people and different creatures. Therefore this account is known as neo nihilism. Objective morality is an illusion and like religion is a means to control others.

[…] To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy... Philosophy has a horror of discussions. It always has something else to do.

http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/metaethics-neo-nihilism-37641.html

To revert to the common suffering. In case you haven’t had enough of tsunami pictures, here is my pick of some of the most enduring ones. In the case of large-scale catastrophes, the aerial shots, the mid shots and the close-ups are all equally effective: buildings on fire, people being rescued or not rescued, people stuck in traffic, people tucked in street corners for the night, a man pondering a remoulded landscape, the elderly staring nowhere in particular. And then, the toys.

You can download hundreds of similar images in a large zip file (235 MB) here (if you can get past the uploader’s idiotic comment).

Japan Woes

Nicaragua, 1979. Popular uprising against the misrule of the President Somoza (of whom the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, ‘Sure he’s sonofabitch, but he is our sonofabitch’). In the course of the next couple of years the civil war led to the deaths of some 5% of the population, and a deposition of the president after a 43-year dictatorship, the longest period of the state-sponsored terror in Latin American history. The post-revolutionary mood in the streets was one of unhinged celebration of the new-found freedom, whereby people expressed their contempt for conventions and rules at every possible opportunity. This was in particular manifested through the mass disregard for traffic rules. Here’s Norman Lewis, quoting a policeman in Managua, from the excellent travel essay ‘Beautiful Bean-Stew Faces’:

‘It happens all the time’, he said. ‘They’ve all gone crazy about freedom, so wherever there’s the chance to drive the wrong way down a street, they do. The latest crazy thing is that traffic lights are supposed to interfere with personal choice, so they are tearing them down all over the town. They are out to prove we’re really free’.

This reminds me of a Serbian idiom, ‘ko da su s lanca pušteni’, literarily means ‘as if they were unleashed from the chains’. By contrast, in Japan hardly anyone is on a mission to prove they are free or independent. This very much applies to traffic and driving. On March 11^th I was watching live pictures as tsunami mercilessly wiped everything in its path. The fluid mass of debris was approaching a line of cars orderly waiting in front of the traffic lights. The drivers would be very much aware of the nearing onrush of water. Yet not a single car moved! Or not until the big wave was so close that the cars suddenly found themselves scrambling for the dry patches of land. But by then it was too late.

We think of stoicism as a very British virtue – all Blitz spirit and 'women and children first' – but would we react to a disaster with the kind of resilience the Japanese have? – Ian Jack, The Guardian

Anyone who has been to Japan or met a Japanese person would have been familiar with their general distaste for personal conflict or the showing of personal initiative. Here, the name of the game is respect for privacy, team work, collaboration. These attributes are particularly apparent in smaller communities, villages, towns, companies. In the aftermath of the nuclear leaks, the sense of allegiance and self-sacrifice yielded some astonishing results in Tokyo where the previously announced power cuts never materialized due to the fact that people dropped their electricity consumption by such margin that not only the cuts proved unnecessary but there was in fact a surplus of energy! Yes, hard to imagine something like that happening in the UK.

In Tōhoku, however, the picture is much bleaker. Japanese fortitude and composure has been pushed to the limits by the multifold disaster – earthquake, tsunami, nuclear crisis, the ensuing supply difficulties, the rescue operations hampered by snow and freezing temperatures. After a week of living on the verge of starvation and with shortages of water, fuel, heating, electricity, and medical supplies, there have been first reports of angry exchanges and even punch-ups among the locals. No reports of looting as yet. No doubt in many countries these would be a norm much earlier on. And it doesn’t help that most of the afflicted are the elderly – Japan being an alarmingly aging society, with more than a quarter of population over 65 years old.

In the meantime we can only dare imagine what it feels like to live under such conditions – on a daily, hourly basis. Some would say, at least these people have been spared their lives. Then again how much of a consolation is that when no help is in sight? One middle-aged woman, who lost two members of her family together with her house, said: ‘I am alive, but I don’t know if that’s good or bad’.

In response to my recent email to a colleague, a teacher in Kyoto like myself, in which I asked how worried he was about the current threat of nuclear contamination, Shaun talked about his general concern and quipped how this part of Japan [Kansai] feels like a different country, rather disconnected from the northeast. ‘Different country’ is certainly one way of describing the apparent normality to be found on the streets of the ancient capital. People go about their business. Shops, restaurants, bars, pachinko parlours are all teeming with punters and customers no more and no less than usual. The city trains and buses are running on time (compare Tokyo’s lines, either cancelled or operating with reduced service). The only thing out of the ordinary are these small bands of activists who are to be seen, and especially heard, lined up at busy street corners and outside the larger train stations, incessantly chanting so as to draw cash donations from the public. Oh, and today I noticed that in my local department store they have partially switched off lights in certain less-visited shopping sections.

Speaking of lights, I’ve been thinking how Japanese post-war hefty reliance on, and investment in, nuclear power must seem now rather ironic, also bearing in mind the Hiroshima and Nagasaki catastrophes. That Japan has decided to build so many nuclear plants is a direct result of the country’s paltry allotment of natural resources. The nuclear power has become the major source, accounting for about 29% of Japan’s energy.

Meanwhile, people living in the northeast as well as in the Kanto area (around Tokyo) remain very concerned about the imminent future, and understandably so. There is an ongoing poll in the Japan Times online, dubbed ‘Stay or go’, which looks like this:

And here is how the votes stand only a few minutes later (March 21^st ):

You can check how the votes develop, and vote yourself, here. At least most foreigners have somewhere to go to. The poll would surely look different had it been conducted solely in the Kansai region, where I suppose gaijin do feel safer. Yet, should there be another major explosion at the plant, god-forbid, the worry-wrinkles would inevitably set upon the faces of my fellow Kyotoites.

A fellow poet living in Osaka presented his poem few months ago in our writing workshop. The title was ‘Post-Nuclear Pasta’. My favourite bit is this post-apocalyptic moment when the speaker explains how things were 'before':

We used to have tomato sauce for our pasta,

I tell the dull kid who lives on the other side of the scorch-marks.

He was born just a few months after the hot flashes.

He’s got weepy eyes and a cauliflower nose.

When I tell him we used to eat tomatoes and that they didn’t have

hard, crusty skins neither, he snaps, “You’re off your Geiger counter!”

Little did the author know how topical the stuff would soon turn out to be. The poem must be pulsating like a GM tube at the moment. Well, here’s a map which shows how the counters are pulsating in the north of the country. Note the useful comparisons with the radiation in daily life. Click to view larger size.

March 21^st, 2011

the lure of a hot spring

Japanese public bathing is sometimes referred to as hadaka no tsukiai (‘relationship in nude’). The idea is to lose clothes and forget about one’s age, status, background etc. Naked we are all equal. My recent visit to Arima onsen, located just north of Kobe city, was an opportunity to experience this relationship, or what Monthy Python’s Terry Jones, as a famous nude organist, once qualified as ‘two separate strands of existence, the essential nudity of man.’ And I came up with a poem which I am gladly sharing with you.

ARIMA

I am a double stranger here.

Here’s my Caucasian face

which by definition interferes

with the custom-held peace.

And here is my alien body.

So I play a double of myself,

a hairy-chest version in a documentary

hastily titled ‘In Pursuit of Health’.

I must heed the spa’s etiquette

to avoid that extra bit of attention –

how to arrange clothes in a basket,

how to undress in slow motion.

Guided by instinct and common sense

I screen my member by a hand towel,

take a splash in some suspense,

perch on the bath-edge like an owl,

then casually slide into hot bubbles –

all of which a called for attitude.

Here, no one’s asking for trouble.

They invest in relationships in nude.

At first, every ripple seems sacred.

Every leg movement, each glance,

each spatter down to a droplet:

that’s how begins a bath romance.

I get bolder as body gets warmer.

I move into an enormous teacup

in whose faintly green corner

a camomile bag bobs up.

Then it’s a kinsen, the iron bath.

It sports a kidney bean colour

and I want to laugh

as I fart into its rusty splendour.

I slip into a transparent ginsen

yielding to its smell of bleach

as long as I’m able to discern

my own foot within reach.

But after a while the mind

gives in to visions in the heat:

a man’s bald, jagged behind

I construe as a Hellenic sculpt.

Soon I arrive at a melting point

that reels me about like a drunk:

scorched, gutted, dehydrated –

head, limbs and trunk.

I slump on a deck-chair

and watch my wilted self steam

in the winter air.

At last stripped of self-esteem

I lie here god knows how long

under the cold twilight sky.

Only now I yearn to belong,

my social ineptitude to justify

and it’s to do with a mere gesture

like my refusal to stare,

or adopting a posture

of a foreign, ignorant bear.

Sadly, it is time to leave

at this most defenceless hour.

I hope that all of us believe

that after our exit shower,

taken in front of everyone

and no one in particular,

each of us will have done

our best to absolve the other.

We imparted our scruples

to the water. The water

changed us back to mortals,

by this much lighter.

 

February 13^th, 2011

Here are some photos of hot springs in Japan from the past. I always find historical photos vastly appealing. They evoke a sense of harmony, at times mystery and lost innocence, and most of all the unspoilt, uncluttered beauty of people, buildings, artefact. These particular images appear to be in public domain, and come from kinouya.com, a lovely site dedicated to old photos/postcards of Japan. There are dozens and dozens of them: to browse more photos click on the fifth button from the top, then click on the picture of a ship. The site is both in English and Japanese.

 Hakone Dogahisma Onsen

 

                                                                        Noboribetsu Onsen

                                                   Kinosaki Onsen, c. 1910

Click on photos to enlarge.