Years of Poems and Spirits

Four years ago’s trip to Europe … blogged on BlogSpot. Tried to consolidate to here.

WordPress has a wonderful Import feature that can “suck” the old contents and comments in without any problem. Also added some pictures to some entries after uploading them online.

Don’t know whether Google will index newly added old entries? This one is an additional handle then. Here it is, our 2004 European Trip blogs, dated 2004.08, 09 and 10.

Continuing my stream of consciousness. Listening to Depapepe’s version of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. In a silent autumn night.

Visited Colin and Carrie at Susami (周参见), a small fishing town near the south-most tip of 本州岛 (Honshu).

Rural Japan may be declining but is nevertheless clean, well maintained. Compared to rural China, rural Japan is a place to escape to, not from.

After visiting some parts of rural China, it is hard for me to imagine a poet will find any spark there–I just can’t see 白居易, sitting amongst the trash, dust, non-stop construction, walls and buildings painted with bold slogans (mostly family planning related), would have the stomach to invite a friend to join him for a drink while waiting for the snow to fall (refering to the poem quoted in the last entry).

Had coffee and cake in a village cafe. The owner used to be a “salary man” in a agrichemical company in Tokyo. One day he had an epiphany and decided to get out of Tokyo and its crazy life. After he settled down in the village we visited, he built his own house, cultivated a garden and had two dogs. He recently built a canoe and invited Colin to join him in a race.

This is not a Starbuck-ish cafe. I believe we were sitting in this gentleman’s living room, with one wall lined with books from floor to ceiling. Outside of the window, a local flower (bell-shaped bright yellow) has just peaked. He opens this “cafe” only during the peak season so neighbors can come in, enjoy the flowers in the garden and taste the organic pastries and coffee. This is where Zen meets PoMo.

Carrie once wrote a very nice piece of the midsummer night’s frog croak in their backyard. To her, it is a total annoyance (particularly when they invade your apartment en mass). But to me, that is the setting (adding some rain drops maybe) for ancient Chinese poems.  I never thought I could relive the pastoral life portrayed in those poems. But I did in Susami.

Susami is a small town. The size of 3×3 city blocks maybe? When I walked in, it was already dark and very quiet. There were so few street lights, the town seemed to be lit by the vending machines. Streets are narrow and the houses are nicely laid out.

There was a lovely, strong smell of cedar. Timber is another industry that still sustains the community and the surrounding mountains is full of cedar trees.

Had a beer with Colin and chatted late into morning. Next day, we rode bikes on mountain roads to visit towns deep in the forest.

The roads are really narrow. On steep slopes it is down to just one lane. Still, there is no potholes on the road. None. Broken guard rails all have warning flags planted nearby. Most of the hill side are covered by retaining walls made of solid concrete.

You don’t see a lot of Japanese flags anywhere. But I guess the Japanese version of “patriotism” is in how good they take care of their own communities.

The tunnels: perhaps a legacy of Japanese government’s public spending, we passed quite a few tunnels. In late afternoon, when the setting sun shining through a short tunnel, I felt I was riding into a portal to another world. Reminded me of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), when Chihiro wandered pass the abandoned temple entrance.

Abandonment: Susami is “shrinking”. Population is declining, due to both continued urbanization and aging. The elementary school Colin taught is closing. An middle school next door has been closed for years. When I first saw the middle school building, a chill ran through my back. It was somewhat ghostly even under the mid-day sun: everything inside out is in perfect order. The library, the chemistry lab, the window doors and the clock: everything is in read-to-use mode. It is as if the students suddenly disappeared right before we arrived.  I guess I wouldn’t have been this touched had I not been so used to the urban sprawl in the States and in China.

Colin and I walked along a logging road deep into the woods. The cedar trees are tall and dense, only rarely did we see native plants. Again the hill side of the road is marked by endless retaining walls (made of stones this time), some of which, according to Colin, may be hundreds of years old. Occasionally, we saw abandoned houses buried under heavy foliage. Once, even an abandoned car.

Just back from a trip to Japan. My first ever. Enjoyed it immensely.

It is also a very tiring trip–not only it was short and compact, but I was left with so many impressions and had so many thoughts, it is now quite an overwhelming task to write them down.

I tried to take notes on Euro and Brazil trips but gave up on Xin Jiang. The history and culture of the ancient West Realm (西域) was just too high a mountain to scale.

But Japan is different. I feel like I am floating in thoughts, ready to write them down. But don’t know where to start. So I will try a different tack …

I will start with a poem that can best summarize my trip:

绿蚁新醅酒
红泥小火炉
晚来天欲雪
能饮一杯无

Thought about “一花一世界” but the above poem is more secular and existential.

I was fortunate enough to have experienced both the Urban Japan (Tokyo) and the Rural Japan (Susami)

The Urban Japan:

Tokyo is a very crowded place but is surprisingly clean and quiet. The only exceptions are occasional foul smells from underground sewage and the ubiquitous door sensor chimes.

Tokyo is the epicenter of urban living. Urban living in general is about constantly generating symbols, meanings that are trivial but full of subtlety. You define who you are and which “tribe” you belong, by choosing where to shop for cloth, for shoes, or where to get what pastry from which bakery, let along to say your choice of restaurants and bars. It is something Pagans will never understand.

The Tsukiji fish market (築地市場) is the best-kept secret from mass tourism. It is a photographer’s heaven. One can never appreciate Japanese seafood culture without visiting this market. I saw more creatures from the sea there than from any aquarium I have been to. Yet the place doesn’t smell fishy at all–just tells you how fresh the products are.

Japanese food is the opposite of Chinese food: healthy, lean and single-themed: you can trace most of the flavoring ingredients to one single item–soybean.

Japanese are relentless in their pursuit of perfect appearance: young ladies apply makeups (mostly moderately) and dress stylishly. The Brazilians like to show off their bodies but not their faces, the Japanese are the opposite but with the same intensity.

Tokyo is perhaps the best indexed city in all the places I have been to. Not only every subway stop, but every exit of every stop is marked by numbers. Tokyo’s public transit is denser than the spider webs outside of my window, yet once you understand how it is indexed, you can get around without knowing any Japanese.

Japan is clean. Very clean. Wherever you go–construction sites, store front, subway entrances …–you don’t have look hard to find a spot to put down your backpack. This is especially amazing consider how few trash bins are on the streets. I bet everyone walking around me have some trash in their pockets.

Japanese may use plastic wraps rather liberally, they have a first-class recycling culture that totally offsets the excess. Here are the categories: glass bottles, plastic bottles, paper, burnable trash and landfill trash. Public trash bins don’t always label which hole is for what–that is why I often had to carry trash back to hotel.

The recycling schedule is quite complicated (I will try to get a copy). It should be programmed on cell phones and PDAs to remind people.

All Japanese seem to use one kind of cell phone: thin, large screen shell phones.

Tokyo public transit has everything: bus, light rail, subway and train. One thing to note though: subway is privately run. Every company is called a “line” and has several “routes”. You don’t always get the integrated, city-wide subway map at the stations.

The subway entrance at Shiboya (渋谷) happens to be the intersection of several lines. Song and I had no idea when we walked in. Suddenly, torrents of people coming from all directions and caught us in the middle. For a second, I had a sensation of drowning.

As a tourist from America, I made two mistakes during the trip:

1. Movement: ALWAYS stay on the left–particularly when riding bicycles! Never make sudden movements without looking first. In front of Asakusa Temple (浅草寺), I tried to take a picture and stepped backwards (without looking). Boom! I bumped into an old man. And that is not the only time. After all, Tokyo is a much more crowded place than most places in America.

2. Passing food using chopstick to chopstick: I was told that is a very inauspicious move–people only do so when picking unburnt bones from ash urns.