~~~~~~~


BUTTERBURRING

Last weekend a nice fellow from the village came to the door and asked me if I wanted a forest. He had heard I was a firewood person and he was clearing an acre or two upmountain, and would I like to have the wood, and I did not by any means say no, who wants to let a forest go to waste, so by way of pointing out how things can get sidetracked in Spring, yesterday evening of a sunny day Echo and I set out for a lumber run when I noticed the very first jinchoge blossom had opened.

I bent to take in that rich fragrance and noticed below it and slightly to the right a bright chartreuse flame-shaped bud emerging from our very own front flower bed, when the annual nickel dropped: it was fukinoto (butterbur: Petasites japonicus) season!

Knowing how fast news gets around on the sansai (mountain vegetables) grapevine, we immediately went and got a nice basket and headed off to our favorite secret butterbur-harvesting locations, where we looked for quite a while, heads down, searching for something we hadn't lost, feet poking gently through the new growth beneath the brown weeds of Winter for those little shy light-jade gems until we had about ten of them so we could have 5 each for dinner, you don't want to eat too many at a time (can be toxic, if not properly prepared), not that that many come up at a time anyway, these plants have an ancient intelligence that has clearly served them well (we never weed butterbur that has managed to grow), but anyway they'll be emerging here and there for the next few days, and we'll get our share.

Butterburring is a fully meditative activity, you have to slow way down when looking for them, especially when you have a few already in your basket, filling the air with their tantalizing fragrance; all that slowness and closeness to growth gets you thinking about plant wisdom, how carefully the little bud puts up its guard and picks its places, how it knows the right time and temperature, just as the jinchoge does, to emerge in all newness...

I'm sure there are dozens of scientific answers to all these questions and more, all couched in international standard nomenclature, that satisfy the hunger for question food, but touch nothing of how butterburs long, long ago became us and we them, how we know each other so well now whether we know it or not, and how that awareness is nearly as satisfying as fresh-gathered fukinoto tempura with rice on a chilly Spring evening...

I'll get the forest over the weekend.

~~~~~~~


SUBSCRIBE TO KOIZUMI

Japan's Prime Minister is going to start an English version of his weekly email magazine
touching on things political and cultural. The Japanese version, the best-known email magazine in Japan, has 1.7 million subscribers and is one of the best-subscribed e-mail magazines in the world. Signups for the English version of the Koizumi Cabinet E-mail Magazine start March 11.

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TRANSPLANTING ROSEMARY

Tilted over all Winter in her too-small clay pot, and then in early Spring her long slender green-hope branches, tipped with glowing blue flowers, tangled with weeds and debris from the winds of winter, some branches even laying on the ground and overgrown, how bedraggled she was!

So many times throughout the winter I would be out gathering firewood and see her laying in the snow, blown over by the wind, and I'd straighten her up, try to find a wind-sheltered place for her and the pot she was outgrowing despite my carelessness, but each time the winds would soon catch the tips of her long branches and set her over again.

Then came this fine Spring day and we'd both had enough. I got out the tools and dug a generous hole in the best and sunniest corner of the garden, cleared out Rosemary's branches, freed her tangled roots, set her straight upright and firmed her in with her very own soil. How proudly she stood now! Straight up from the ground toward the sky, just as she'd always wanted, every branch a reach of life, her flowers now a bright blue garland in the sun.

~~~~~~~


HEY BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?

US public debt, to the penny.

~~~~~~~


"MULTI-FACETED TRANSFORMATIVE DEVICES"

Good grief. Leave it to the academics to mummify the fun right out of it.

"He started investigating what people do with music players because he realised it was an area that had been neglected by other students of culture."

Au contraire, m'sieur; took you quite a while! I guess you haven't read this, written several years ago by a student of culture.

~~~~~~~


snow or shine
crow got only
that one black suit

~~~~~~~


AURORA WEBCAM.

~~~~~~~


HARUURARA THE LOSING RACEHORSE: JAPAN'S HERO

She's lost 105 races so far, and not won any. "Fans identify her losing streak with their own difficulties at a time when Japan has long suffered recession... We feel we can work hard again when we see her racing desperately for the finishing line."

She's heading down the stretch... Will she ever win?

~~~~~~~


GROW YOUR OWN

We're all aware that the agrochemical industry is working not primarily for profit, but for the good of humanity, particularly in third-world countries, where for example they shipped all the remaining inventory of paraquat for sale cheap, back when it was outlawed in the first-world countries ("...workers were not wearing every piece of protective equipment required for mixing and loading of paraquat: 'a rubber apron, rubber gloves, a full face shield, rubber boot coverings, and a waterproof hat or helmet.'" [BurmaLibrary] Sounds safe enough. How's your salad?), where it was initially tried by the very first unknowing consumers (who's gonna tell us, the agrochem lobbyists?), until strange things began to happen of which little has been said (have you heard about them?) and then even more of the same thing happened to uneducated third world farmers, but that was even less newsworthy. Nothing like a big synthetic carpet to sweep things under, we're all part of a global agrochemical experiment anyway.

You gotta love their approach to problems. For a long time the agros were spraying crops with powerful herbicide to kill weeds, but the herbicide was so deadly (didn't seem to affect the taste of salad, though) that it also killed a lot of the produce. (Consumers just got allergies of unknown origin, inexplicable tumors, birth defects of uncertain etiology and other items on that very long list of diseases with no proven relation to agrochemicals).

So did they stop spraying and figure out cleaner, more organic approaches to the problem? No, time is money, no profit in that. They took an approach more in keeping with their attitude toward us consumers and our world: they altered the fabric of life. That way the changes would be cheap, permanent, ubiquitous and most importantly, patentable, i.e., profitable. What they have done is to GENETICALLY MODIFY your salad/grains/beans to make them resistant to the herbicide! So now they can spray that stuff till the cows don't come home and birds fall from the sky, but your food will still be standing! Isn't that delicious lettuce?

The reason I bring this tasteful subject up is that Japan is strongly opposed to importing any GM foods or seeds, whereas China, historically renowned for the welfare of its masses, is very interested. Not that anyone can now close Pandora's box, but things should get interesting over here. In the meantime, get that salad away from me, please; I'll grow my own.

~~~~~~~


A VISIT TO MESON

With Spring only a couple weeks away, woke up this early morning ready to do some gardening and groundwork around the house beneath a big blue optimistic sky with a bright golden sun just beaming down and warming all endeavors, looked out the window had to rub my eyes but it wasn't my eyes it was snowing hard, a goodly snowfall on the ground already. So puttered about indoors, then for lunch went up the road on the west side of the Lake to check out Meson, the new restaurant offering chef-prepared French country-style nouveau cuisine up in the woods between Hira and Omimaiko, and where you can stay in a log cottage. The price was very reasonable for the tastefully prepared, healthful and delicious food, the place is beautiful and the folks very friendly. Have to go there more often. Highly recommended if you're traveling this way. Here's their website.

~~~~~~~


BUSH USES DEAD BODIES SELECTIVELY

"As the nation headed for war last year, President Bush "clamped down" on the media, extending and expanding a controversial policy that banned reporters from photographing flag-draped caskets of soldiers killed in combat. The White House said the policy was enforced to "spare the feelings of military families." Yet, in the very first television advertisement of his 2004 campaign, the president has blanketed the nation's airwaves with an image of "firefighters carrying a flag-draped body" from the 9/11 wreckage at Ground Zero."

This is the guy who refused to testify in open session before the 9/11 commission!

More on the most cynical US presidency ever, probably...

More in this vein from the firefighters at the IAFF, w/ thanks to kbibb

~~~~~~~


JAPAN KEEPS ITS PLACE ON THE CUTTING EDGE

"With an electronic whir, the machine released a dollop of "peach body shampoo," a kind of body wash. Then, as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home's new human washing machine..."

This is what we all may be in for, if we live long enough... Think I'll stay in the mountains.

~~~~~~~


"icy@hot@mountain@feet@poet"

Someone somewhere on this bright blue marble subjected that eclectic phrase (sans @s)to a Google search and when the results came up there was Pure Land Mountain right on top, above even Carl Sandburg and Robert Service: makes me freel right proud, in an eclectic sort of way...

[And once PLM was Google-spidered, it became the ONE and ONLY site with that phrase on it, which fact I'm trying to undo with the @s; can one undo a spidering, de-spider, revert to prespidered status? Advice welcome.]

~~~~~~~


NOT EATING AS A FORM OF FASTING

Elbowed aside from these humble chronicles by the mysterious affair of the flaming feet, I've hardly been able to get a word in edgewise for the past week, to mention for example the fact that for said week Echo's hot feet have taken her up north to visit her folks and Kasumi's family, with its world-famous twins, while I keeping the homefires burning and devolve into the big-course-load collegiate sloven I used to enjoy being (does one ever truly depart the summits of slovenliness?), eating simple fast-cook one-bowl meals interspersed with emergency junk food (hey, I'm not fussy) and rationalizing dirty dishes (they're only for one person today as well; I'll do them all tomorrow).

While having neither an interest in satisfying every single little nitpicking healthy food-craving whim of this endlessly hungry beast, nor in any case the desire to take all that time to figure out how to feed it properly (and just one individual, even if it is me!), beyond maybe the occasional single-bowl meal aforesaid, I've come to realize under the auspices of this odd hunger how much I still don't know, not only about the more detailed kitchen-y aspects of yours truly and the finer culinary secrets of Echo, but also about all the finer processes of Japanese cooking, not to mention where everything is and who I really am, what life is all about, when do we eat, where did Echo hide those cookies etc. You can learn a lot from not eating.

~~~~~~~


RADIO VOX POPULI ROX

Since for so many years I read my rambles/flashes/poems in public at the renowned but alas no longer extant (and original) Kyoto Connection, I've been thinking about reading some of my posts/rambles aloud to post here as audio files, and will one day, if the vectors thereof should align; but in the meantime, here is a very pioneering idea, though the vox must not be too popular... Wonder who does the screening...

SUGAWARA V:

In which Echo walks fire, the cosmic joker reappears and Bob succumbs to the pun of a lifetime.

Last time, you remember, having missed the key shot of the priest firewalking I was perfectly positioned in firm resolve to capture the key shot of Echo firewalking. I should mention my tacit assumption that the cosmic practical joker had done his work, had his bit of fun with us and was even now attending to greater mishaps elsewhere.

Echo was at the end of one of the two long firewalker lines, so it would be a while before she was to hotfoot it; I could scan the scene at my leisure. I watched as grandmas walked through fire, grandpas, priests, truck drivers, young mothers, rockers, you name it. I looked here and there, taking it all in: the sweating fire managers, flying sparks, a group of firewalked ladies with pantlegs rolled and fire-tenderized feet mincing very gingerly over the sharp gravel on their way back from the fire to the foot-washing bath behind the pickle-selling tents, a trough filled with black water surrounded by naked feet and people whispering Ow Oo Ow as they washed off their sizzling soles and tenderly put their socks and shoes back on.

I glanced quickly back to Echo's line, to find out how far she had moved ahead: she wasn't in the line. I would have sworn...looked at the other line. There was no other line. The priest was waving to those in the long line, asking them to move to the empty line. Echo had already done so, and was at that very moment walking resolutely across the embers, Sam Peckinpah directing: just as Echo was about to step out of the shimmering heat waves on the other side of the fire I--raised-my---camera---in---e-v-e-r---s-o-o-o-o---s-l-o-o-o-o-w---m-o-t-i-o-n and snappedjustonequickperfectshot. In the photo, I managed to capture the left leg of Echo sticking out of the nose of a cosmic joker agent who had just at that moment stepped in front of the lens. Such is the particular firewalking photo record of that day, which I will needless to say not share with you here.

Echo soon returned mincing over the gravel, holding her footprinted parchment, saying, "Wow! That was hot!" Upon my asking why that was a surprise to her, she said that she had planned to sort of trot quickly across the coals, but the priest who stood at the head of each line to keep things going in sacred regularity, as well as to keep folks from chickening out-- or worse, giving up in mid-walk-- said something into each firewalker's ear, then when the furnace was clear gave each a hard shove of ki in the small of the back to send them firmly on their way across the searing expanse. It turned out that what he'd been saying, and what he said into Echo's ear, was: "Don't run. Walk slowly and evenly across." So Echo had to walk as though strolling casually through a blast furnace.

As she washed the ashes from her practically hissing feet in the black bath and put her shoes back on, and as we walked (she gingerly) around the shrine a bit before returning to the car for the drive home, Echo began to speak meditatively on the nature of pain: how, although this pain she was feeling in her feet right now was just like conventional pain-- it had all the earmarks, so to speak, and was irritating in the extreme, like all the everyday pains-- she could not relate to it as she did to the usual pain, couldn't be negative toward it, because it was kami related.

The objective in standard self/pain relations is to make the pain go away; this pain, in contrast, was self-chosen, indeed inflicted for sacred purposes, and was therefore itself sacred; so she had to respect it, sort of even savor it as being positive in nature, and accruing benefit with its extension, so in a way she had to enjoy the suffering, nurture the pain. This went against every instinctive principle, affording an illuminating gestalt on the reality and illusion of pain. I had to agree with her; it was indeed an interesting perspective on pain, though I would not pursue the matter further by going home and sticking my foot in the woodstove or striking any part of my body with a hammer.

In closing, I must make a brief comment regarding the courage of Echo and all the others I had seen confront the fire. I must state for the record that of all the many who stood in line to do the brave deed, whether grandparent or teen, when the time came to walk the embers, not a single one got cold feet.

~~~~~~~


EVEN FUNNIER THAN GIGGLING IN CHURCH USED TO BE.

SUGAWARA IV:

Feet of Flame

I've noticed a funny thing about firewalkers in general: if you're going down a street, any street, you'll never be able to point to this person or that and say with any conviction: this individual is a firewalker. You simply can't pick a firewalker out of any crowd. This basic truth was very forcibly driven home to me as I stood there studying the surprisingly large number and wide diversity of the folks who filled the long and steadily extending lines of imminent firewalkers. But oddly enough, all of them had rolled up their low dresses and pants legs to protect them from the heat, while leaving their feet unchanged!

Of course there's the spiritual purification aspect involved in all this, but if you held my feet to the fire I could very quickly think of several dozen more agreeable ways of getting pure. This need to voluntarily subject oneself to a technique highly favored by torturers throughout history escapes me completely, much as wealth does. The firewalking folks that were lining up as if for free ice cream were young old, male female, all walks of life, tall short, heavy light, healthy unhealthy, in suits dresses jeans, all forthrightly queueing to walk through the fire, even very senior citizens, who were doubly brave in not being able to walk fast, lightly or with any certainty in one direction; who in fact were in danger of spiraling into ash. But on they went.

I could only conclude that there's simply nothing that sets your run-of-the-mill firewalker apart from other folks, except a certain unknowable quality hidden deep within that surfaces only when there's a very large bed of hot coals nearby in the open air, which for some reason (perhaps stemming from an experience in early childhood, maybe it's genetic), brings on a craving to place the extremely sensitive soles of one's feet into extended contact with a very effective and renowned pain-causing phenomenon.

You can therefore imagine my surprise when Echo came out of the closet and said: "I'm going to firewalk," and I realized that I was married to a latent firewalker; even more worrying, that perhaps to her I was a form of fire. Suddenly I was much more of a foreigner than I'd thought.

When Echo went to get her firewalking parchment, though, they told her that the parchments had all been used up; as every year, there were way more firewalkers than parchments. A fire can only scorch so many feet, after all. Shortly afterward, however, there was an announcement that a few more parchments had been found somewhere (probably on some firewalking parchment scalper), which announcement caused a small riot near the parchment stand when all the wannabe footburners swarmed to get parchments. Echo, having been strategically located as a result of her previous attempt, was one of the lucky few to get one; only about a dozen or so were available.

So Echo got in the long fire line and I waited in the perfect location with my camera so as to be sure not to miss the second key shot of the day, events regarding which, and overall closure of this warm event, will be related in Part V.

~~~~~~~


SELF-EVIDENCE

Just received (and quickly!) a very welcome book shipment I ordered from Amazon in the States. Buying foreign books in the bookstores here is a rather pathetic experience; their buyers seem to select books by throwing darts at pages of odd catalogs. It's in English, what the hell.

Among the books just received is the superb Ben Franklin biography by Walter Isaacson, and the translated poems of Han Shan (Cold Mountain) (a single copy of the Ben bio might show up in Kinokuniya bookstore in a few years, to be snapped up immediately at twice the Amazon price and never re-ordered; the Han Shan: never; it's Chinese, after all), whose pinup portrait, together with his buddy Shih Te (a copy of the original that hangs in a subtemple of Daitokuiji), has always hung above my desk.

The trouble with most poetry translations is that they're not translated by poets, but by academics, and the result is frequently terrible, a disservice needless to say to the poets themselves, who, mostly being dead, have little say in who is handling their words. The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Translated by Red Pine, Copper Canyon Press) is an extremely welcome exception.

Leafing through the Ben book, I came upon a photo of an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, with editings by Ben and others. Where Thos. Jefferson had written "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" Ben had crossed out "sacred and undeniable" and interpolated "self-evident" (he made few other substantive changes), the phrase that has since become the spiritual "navel" of the document and seed of so much thought-freedom. I'd always assumed that it was Jefferson's phrase. Thanks Ben, for that profound foresight.

~~~~~~~


YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN A FEW MILLION TIMES.

SUGAWARA III 

In which Guji Takes a Bath and Firewalks, Author Misses Key Shot

After the prayer blaze got going real well, because he had to stand close enough to be responsibly sacerdotal the guji got a bit hot as he chanted and had to call in some fire controllers to splash some water on the fire so he could finish without bursting into flame; then when he had done and returned to his chambers the prayer managers took over, carrying out from the Shrine and throwing onto the high holy blaze the bundles and armfuls of the thousands and thousands of smaller written invocations written on waribashi (disposable chopstick)-sized pieces of cedar, which took quite a long while, then it was all let blaze freely.

The guji then reemerged, dressed coolly for that cold day in nothing but fundoshi and a short cotton coat for the water ritual in which he bathes and purifies himself for the firewalk to come, for he is to be the first to walk through the fire, as his ancestors have been doing for centuries. After sitting on a straw mat in nothing but the fundoshi, splashing himself thoroughly with water and praying toward the fire, the guji then dressed in white robes and stood before the fire barefoot, chanting to psyche up his feet for the heat to come, while the fire blazed down to coals and the fire managers hooked and towed away the large smouldering logs, leveling out the heat-shimmering embers into a level walkable area of embers some 30 cm deep, ringed with crowds who kept their distance from the heat.

Echo and I had by now managed to grab a seat on one of the small ceremonial stools the first priests had used, and I squatted beside her waiting for the key shot from the optimal angle, when the guji would walk barefoot across the flickering coals. This took a while, as the timing was everything; my legs were complaining as I angled for an even better knee-level shot of the imminent first step into the fire, my photomanic movements causing Echo to shift her stool slightly, such that one of the brass-tipped back legs came heavily to rest on the big toe of a suited fellow standing right behind, causing him to react loudly, necessitating seated/squatting bows of apology from us, and when I turned back around the guji was on the other side of the fire without the slightest sign of pain on his face, and all the lay firewalkers had begin to line up on this side of the fire, parchments in hand (upon which to impress their ash-black feet when they'd made it through the embers), bare feet waiting their turns, which all took place in Part IV.