WAITING FOR THE LIGHT

On a drive down to the lakeside road early Saturday morning, I was waiting for the village traffic light to change when I saw a boy on his way from the train station to the junior high school, also waiting for the light to change.

He was standing there alone in his world, as we all do at such times. Wearing his sports uniform, apparently on his way to practice, he began to do incipient teenagey things: wriggle one shoulder, then the other, making his uniform fit his new body more perfectly, then flicking his head this way and that to fling his hair into the just-right random position, then fingering his forelock to casual perfection, tweaking his posture, fiddling with all those things I remember fiddling with back at that age, not possibly decades ago.

Leaving the uneasy edge of certain childhood and entering the bewildering dawn of the outer self-- what a journey that was: standing this tall for hours in front of mirrors, pursuing the unattainable form in the ideal shirt, perfect pants of precise fit, these shoes and no others, all of a style that would last forever, every waking moment the focus of a new-life look at this historic and invaluable instant: gleaming shoes, hair combed per minute, rat-tail comb in pegged pants back pocket, as I recall in flashes...

Then three junior high girls from the train came up quietly behind the boy and stood there at a discreet distance, remaining silent lest he turn and behold them and then what, and began doing the female version of the same choreography of hair care and mini-twerks, not one of the four wondering, any more than anyone does at that age (and beyond), "What is causing this odd behavior? Why am I doing these things?" These are not questions we get to ask, or even conceive of-- until perhaps decades later, while maybe waiting for the light...

Cultures are formed around these cosmos-driven, reflexy things. If we were placed in full charge of them we would never have evolved this far, let alone have developed the simple, cogitative, aggregative sapience that evolution has permitted us, assuaging some living need in us to deal - if only in a limited way - with such fundamental concepts as sex, subsistence and society, all of which we're still having global problems with. We are new to this, after all; as a species, we're not even out of beta yet, really...

Those tweaking, flicking, twerking kids are doing big work.

Kyoto Journal issue #79 

- An Unfamiliar Home - 

is now out!

Kyoto Journal issue # 79

 #79 is out! 

Includes selections from Pure Land Mountain; 

also, check out Japan postcards from the early 1900s

Slingshot

Speaking of RPGs and how viral they are, working their way into our collective DNA somehow, as childhood seems to become narrower, more circumscribed, less broadly dimensional-- Kaya, Mitsuki and Miasa do have their own little video gameplayers that they indulge in now and then in evenings or on rainy days (little kids running through meadows of lollipop flowers, gumdrop orchards with cute little animals), but while they’re at our house we keep them going in the physical world, handling tools and tasks, rocks and dirt, trees and fire, so they get a  good actual workout. Their bodies by now are straight and strong, growing like the thoroughbreds they are, their lives a blend of the actual and genuine imagination.

Got me thinking, though, that when I was a boy way back just after WWII (!) when 'virtual' was still but a rare and narrowly used adjective, the year-round hands-on toy was a slingshot. At least for the boys. Not for girls. Never saw a girl with a slingshot. Here in Japan, I’ve never seen any kid at all with a slingshot-- until the other day, that is.

The trio and I were working outside clearing brush and moving stones when I sensed Kaya walking along behind me in an odd distraction, staring closely at an oddly forked, wispy twig fragment with some rubber bands knotted here and there around it: it looked distantly like... like... I asked her what it was and she said that she was making a slingshot.

She had no idea that she was speaking to the upstate NY Tri-City Slingshot King, who reigned during the latter 40s and early 50s, when bicycle inner tubes were still made of actual rubber and could sling a marble right out of sight. My ever-ready weapon of increasing strength got me in some neat instances of trouble. I could put a marble through a car window at 50 yards-- not that I ever did, mind you, at all, ever, other than out of curiosity. By and large I was a defender of the downtrodden, apart from the occasional irresistible perfectly popping street light... it was a kid version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, on a more civilized miniscale.

I remember being taught how to make slingshots by a mysterious elder slingshot master from the previous century (i.e., the 1800s) (!), who lives in my memory the DaVinci of slingshots-- not a relative, nor an acquaintance, don’t remember where, a neighbor of a cousin, maybe, but he knew his stuff, possessed sling lore dating back to when kids used their slings to get food for the table. He took the time to show me, went into mystic detail on how to make the finest slingshot: from when to find the perfect hardwood tree fork - oak is good, hickory, maple, cherry is good, too, if weight is a concern - to using natural rubber, found only in bike tire tubes (not car tire tubes) or big rubber bands, along with string and leather, cutting grooves into the fork wood to keep the rubber straps from slipping, and so for years I made my own slings, using old shoe tongues for the leather patch...

I realized that I had never seen a kid in Japan with a handmade slingshot, not in 40 years, and I would have noticed. Hadn't really thought about it to any depth all these years, but never ever have I seen a girl anywhere in the world with a slingshot, and here in Japan was my preteen granddaughter trying on her own to craft a slingshot for herself! I asked her where she'd gotten the idea but she didn't have an explanation, she'd just thought of it out of the blue. What the...? I had no idea slingshots involved DNA.

So what could I do at such a momentous moment but show her how to make a slingshot? We looked for and cut a good-looking cherry fork, I looped together some doubled rubber bands for the sling, cut a leather patch from the back of an old holey work glove I'd been saving for no logical reason, the old DNA being ever vigilant as to imminent slingshot possibilities...

Then when they twins saw the results, they each had to have one, so I got busy passing the lore on down the ages as it has always been passed down, and with the oaks just then shedding acorns all around there, the trio could get pocketfuls of excellent ammo and before going home they were even out in the dark, wearing headlamps, gathering acorns from atop the moss, filling their bags with great shot.

Miasa, the shy twin, had earlier put an acorn in her sling and took her very first shot, up into the sky toward the crown of our tallest cedar tree and launched that acorn right over the top! She was amazed, thrilled and proud at what she herself had done.

What actual joy in their eyes at such an occurrence in the real world, at their own hands! As opposed to the thumby joys in a gameplayer, hunched over, staring absent into dimensionlessness, young lives at a time...

I muse now over the possible viral effects of introducing a trio of uniquely empowered young females into the Japanese culture. One effect that the slingshot girls enjoyed realizing is that now they’re planting oak trees all over the countryside.

Never Forgotten

The Days of the Dead (Obon) are with us again, as are the dead themselves, the beloved dead, and its good to have them around in spirit, visit their graves, pour water over the stones to cleanse the weathering of the past year, then give the beloved some of their favorite life snacks, leave a sip or two of sake, everyone so busy at these nationwide spiritual tasks during this time of year that once all have returned to their own home towns and their own home graves, the trains are empty. 

I get on in the morning and there are only 3 of us in the car; the streets are 'empty,' the offices too. Nothing much gets done there except the dead-end stuff, finalizing all the done-deals. Apart from the many renowned and WOWy firework shows and the lively nighttime Obon dance, it's quiet everywhere, as though we're getting a taste of death itself, which is a good thing for the living to experience every year, a few-day span of focusing beyond what we know; that's part of life too, after all, that soft wall. 

Living is dying and vice-versa, we can't really draw a precise line between them; sure, we pretend to, we have various stages and levels, phases and definitions - legal, medical, common sense - but we don't really know of a true beginning or end to any of it, the reason for our ignorance in this regard being simply that we haven't sufficient perspective in our merely living lives; we can only weigh what we can prove. 

This what we living conjure up, returning once more to the Days of the Dead: not just the memories of the beloved-- how they lived, what they looked like, their personalities, good and bad points, how they talked, what they spoke of, what they valued, their strengths and weaknesses... We do all that as in a mirror of memories, seeking a glimpse beyond into what must be the truth of it, but that is not vouchsafed to us in the special narrowness of being alive; we must wait to learn what is not forgotten...     

It Made Robert Wonder

We were sitting at dinner the other night, serving the last of the salad - which Miasa was about to finish up - when her sister Mitsuki said "Mitsuki wa mada tabetenai!" ("Mitsuki hasn't eaten any yet!"). I had heard this J-syntax countless times before, but for some reason I heard it literally for the first time, and it dawned on me that Mitsuki was speaking of herself in the third person! This form of Japanese is used mostly by females, toddlers to teens; not by males or older women.

I wonder if that is a cultural practice in any other language, and what effect that subtle sublimation of the "I" might have on the socio/psychological development of the female self. She is thereby enabled to consider and speak of herself as another person! This unique structure seems to be a sort of semantic means of averting negative emotional response to actions that would otherwise be seen as overtly selfish (by saying "I want x"), focusing any social negativity on a target abstraction out there in the semantic ether that bears one's name, but is not one, exactly; rather it is a selfless third entity, apart from oneself, a sort of cavitation in the emotolinguistic sea. It is only used in that specific way; Mitsuki wouldn't say "Mitsuki saw a great movie last night," a declaration of past action that would beget no possibly negative reaction.

Offhand I know of no other language in which it is traditional to distance selfness with such facility, pretty much enabling one (at least a young female - and why only females?) to speak of oneself as an additional member of the group... I know of no other culture wherein the power of politeness drives the need to make an other of oneself (only young females!), so as to deflect any negative reactions toward overt "I"-ness. I try to sense the difference between me saying: "I haven't eaten any yet!" and me saying: "Robert hasn't eaten any yet!" But as an adult male American semantic alien, it doesn't work for me; I can't 'feel' it, even in the slightest way.

Whence in long-ago Japan was such a word structure inspired to appear in a moment's discourse - and be understood! Be approved! Be carried on into the future of the language as useful! Apparently, when it was first said, no one went "Huh?" They accepted the distancing, and the need for it.

Given the cultural changes now ongoing in Japan, I suspect that this subtle usage, like the need for it, may disappear before too long; thought I'd mention it.

You Talkinna Me??

This morning I was out doing the usual early Saturday round of little chores that build up during the week. I'd earlier scattered the kitchen refuse atop the compost pile - now nearbelow the cherry tree - and was bucketing the last of the wood stove ash from the ash heap to scatter along the feet of the biwa (loquat) and natsume (jujube) trees, the blueberry bushes and the mountain azaleas that line the inner road, then to sprinkle the last of it all atop this morning's compost. 

The bucket was heavy with damp ash; I was just passing head down beneath the cherry tree when a blast of raucous sound from above made me look up. There in the branchy shadows blustered Mr. Crow, who owns this turf. Japanese crows can be uncomfortably loud even from a hundred meters away, but Mr. Crow was right there, yawping in my face. He wasn't flying away, as he normally would have done from this sudden proximity; he was staying put, hopping mad on a low branch: I had entered his dark presence just as he was planning his daily breakfast selection from the compost buffet, freshly laid out for him below. There was beaksome orange peel, onion skins,  tomato trimmings, cabbage core, tea leaves, broccoli stems, eggshells, you name it, all interlayered for Crow delight, what a feast it would be-- then I blundered into the picture and he became the essence of umbrage.  

I just stood there staring at him; he just hopped there, flaring and glaring. Then he raised his head and let out another blast, whoa loud under that canopy of leaves. Crow had never confronted me directly in this way, or this close up; only a couple of meters separated us. This was a bit too near even for my taste. I stared at him some more. He tilted his head and fixed me with his blackest eye: was I gonna get the hell out of his face or what.

For me, the next move was clear. I'd been waiting a long time-- about 35 years, actually. "You talkinna me??" I said, in my best Nooyawkese. He looked dumbfounded. "You talkinna me??" louder this time, more ominous, more threatening, half a step forward, just like De Niro, except this was for real. The big crow beak hung open in dark disbelief, like he could not believe his ears; like he'd seen that movie too! And I was using that very trope, out here in the -- semiwild, which was Crow's alone! What was Crow culture, then, if this was also an element of the human... whatever?

I seemed to sense a deep rift in the crow cosmos; a psychic shock wave passed through me. Crow looked here and there to his heavens for affirmation, as though he'd just read all of Nietzsche or its corvine equivalent. He gave a little croak upward. Forget about the select breakfast buffet. Human and Crow had just had a cultural exchange. We had crossed a line; there had been a merging of artistic elements. If this got out, things would ever be the same. 

The question now was, would Crow tell the others, or would he keep this bright secret for his own? Mumbling to himself, he flew off into the upmountain forest, likely to a distant higher branch of contemplation where he could be most alone-- as though he had to think about it. I'm sure he'll keep it all to himself, like that whole thick slice of bread he got not long ago. He'll never share this historic experience with another crow; crows don't do such things. 

But humans do.     

KYOTO JOURNAL DIGITAL NOW OUT!  

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TIME BEFORE TIME

Culture changes perceptibly even over just a few years, like children and language - things are quickly no longer square or groovy and many of us remember a lush, no-Internet world - but the change seems to be accelerating lately, now that I've lived long enough to have had my childhood seem much nearer the stone age. 

That's how prehistoric the present era feels now for a child of the 1940s, a time that at the time was current to the max with essentials like marbles, yo-yos, mumbledy-peg, trolley cars, typewriters, mimeos and carbon paper, clickety-clickety standup phones with five-digit phone numbers, young men in fedoras, grandpas in derbys and high-lace shoes, women in odd-feathered hats and long dresses; there was penmanship with steel pens dipped in school inkwells with slate tops, there were stenographers, dictaphones, telegraph wires all the way across the nation and teletype internationally, horse-drawn wagons delivering milk, bread and ice, there was no tv, "plastic" was a new word, and the old styles, language (Don't say "ain't"!), culture and mores, social borders-- racism, sexism, everywhere, everyone smoking cigarettes, cigars, pipes, heavy social drinking, normal obesity, litter was the norm, penny candy, cigars, spittoons, the list runs on like time...

I was prompted to recherche those temps perdu when I saw in a film clip an old-school British journalist with all the attendant perceptions, blinkers, mindsets and perspectives, back in the mod 1960s asking the young and sassy, off-the-wall Bob Dylan a rhetorically baroque question, the kind of question that even then was so Edwardianly orotund and sesquipedalianly circumlocutory that when confronted with it, or rather wrapped in it, Dylan uncharacteristically became so sympathetic to the asker as to not be his usual journosassy self, and as I listened to the question unfold I too felt sympathy for that elder statesman of journalism, attempting to speak as though the past fitted perfectly into the right-nowness of his moment, he assuming that he could position this young musical upstart relative to the post-Victorian pantheon of marble-halled literary icons and empirical ideals, that he could understand in his horseback-telegraph-spittoon-historied way what was now going on around him like lightning on vinyl. 

In his long professional life he himself had perhaps at last become his own ideal of the Edwardian journalist, hadn't felt the need to make any serious self-adjustments since then and here he was, speaking from the distant past to the distant present. I suppose I'm much the same by now, how can one tell as one rambles on...

There is always a special preserve for the youth of the day, but the changes since 1940 have been more radical than any before in history (atomic bomb!) (iPad!) and have caught many unprepared, like that senior journalist at the peak of his game, whose name might as well have been "Mr. Jones." 

Used to be that small adjustments were enough-- a fancy new harness, a bigger bustle, the latest height in a beaver hat, or a new pair of spats to get one through a goodly period of modern living, but this acceleration is new to the cutting-edge elders; we must now adjust more quickly and to greater extremes than any of our foreparents ever had to. How does one adapt to warp speed from the penny-farthings of yesteryear?

I trust the mind, though; as it always has, it will find and learn new ways of keeping up with the new tools it has made,  especially in the coming and coming young ones-- but this need for accelerated adaptation is becoming exponential, presenting a more interesting challenge than ever before to elderfolk, who no longer sit in armchairs crocheting or reading the local gazette while listening to the radio in the evening; now every day they dive headfirst into the global infosea, living Moore's Law. There's no shore to information now, which is as it should be, since there’s never been a shore to our hunger; we are, after all, living headlines. 

A most exciting time to have such a lengthy past.

THE NATURAL THING

Not long ago I saw a Japanese tv program in which the audience reacted to the astonishment of a Saudi Arabian visitor to Japan who was profoundly amazed at everyday Japanese conveniences and practices. 

I too was shocked to see the foreigner's awe at beholding the small parking buildings, the yellow traffic flag method, the floor-polishing schoolkids, the wet-umbrella covers etc., but I've been here a long time and such impressive things have become invisible to me. After living here all this time, though, I'm still a newbie, as this morning proved.

While heading for the farm store after breakfast, and having driven about halfway down our winding one-lane mountain road, which has the local junior high school at the bottom (where you take a left or right to get into the village and thence onto the main lakeside road), I noticed ahead the bizarre phenomenon of a large mass of -- whiteness, moving up the road toward me. For a few dozen meters further I still couldn't tell what it was down there, I had never seen such a thing on the road before... As it and I drew nearer, I could finally make out that it was all of the school's baseball players in their white uniforms, many dozens of guys from about 11 to 15 years of age, running up the mountain in a training exercise; must be a new coach... 

Needless to say, their numbers filled up a great length of the roadway, and in a section where the paddies are high-fenced on both sides against wild animals; how could we pass each other? Surely the teams couldn't be expected to turn around and run all the way down, then back up again? Looked like I might have to back up the twisted road, which would be difficult and take a while; whichever way this went, those guys puffing and sweating at the edge of stamina wouldn't be too happy at my intrusive presence. 

Despite my time here, my western mind was kicking in at this unknown occurrence, seeing what it might expect out of old-home habit, projecting, anticipating the vibes... I could not foresee, in this new circumstance, what spontaneously came to pass: as the red vehicle and the white mass were about to merge, the big puffing, sweaty teen crowd magically disappeared, as each member pressed tightly against the fence all along both sides of the road, opening a comfortably wide gauntlet through which I could easily pass.

As I did so, and in awe moved slowly through them, they all said, over and over (in polite Japanese): "Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Sorry!" Even for me, that was so far from what I had been alienly expecting; I rolled down the window, put my hand out and waved and yelled thanks and apologies to them in return, and it felt good. 

It was in fact - as they had shown me - the natural thing to do.

*

via http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/

TERRITORY OF THE HEART

So then sometime down the time road there you are, going along as you always have, the way you went through youth, parenthood and age since you became an adult and had to begin making decisions of ever greater importance and complexity, all the way through study, travel, marriage, family, economy, kids leaving home--

And through it all, one big fallback has been the perspectives you gained from the words and examples of the elders met in your own life thus far; but in my case, it was only up to a point. For a while now, in terms of one aspect of life experience, I have been in no man’s land-- as solo as I can get, because I never had a father or a grandfather or any other who had resided in Japan, married into a Japanese family, had a son and a daughter, a daughter who also married into a Japanese family and had children.

It's hard to find the full foresight for this, so thus one day you run into the soft but impenetrable wall of the fact that as one-half of an international marriage and the singular chain of events that have led to this moment, you are an international grandparent, of grandkids who are more products of their native culture than their mother and way more so than I, and who completely speak another language than my mother tongue. With all the mystery that attends such a state. No Wikipedia entry for that. New territory of the heart...

Wondrous place.

PURIFIED

We all got purified not long ago, when Echo and I, daughter Kasumi and granddaughters Kaya (12), Mitsuki (10) and Miasa (10) went for a purification ceremony up north at Shirahige, the storied old shrine on the western shore of Lake Biwa with the iconic tori out in the water before the shrine gates.

We go to Shirahige most years for hatsumode, but the purification ceremony is a different thing altogether. I didn’t think standard all-purpose purification would be possible in my case, given my checkered past, but I was party to the event, so there it was...

I figured the Shinto priest would have to get another haraegushi - a bigger one - to wave over me, a special one of my own; I was thinking the standard one might turn black like fax paper on a hot plate, he’d have to get a megawand maybe, or more than one; it could get expensive...

We sat there in the unheated little anteshrine as the silversilked priest with his tall black-lacquer hat began the intoning ritual, mentioning from the scroll our names one by one to the Gods, importuning Amaterasu and the others to intervene on our behalf regarding purity of body and soul, seemed like he got into a bit of an argument there when he reached my name, raised his voice a bit, and was that really thunder up there, a god arguing -  maybe it was just a really gargantuan truck going by, or a landslide - the clouds also seemed to be getting pretty dark and roily, but that might have been psychological... The mood had been a lot milder when everybody else was being mentioned, sweet little birds were tweeting from gentle little clouds in a high blue sky at the girls’ names, so guess it was best I went last when we had to get the roiling and stuff over with...

In any case I guess the priest had some pull, things calmed down eventually and the deities allowed him to proceed. He put down the scroll and got out a pretty sizable haraegushi - broke out the two-hander - swished it over us moving from head to head, finishing up over me for quite a while, sort of a full historicospectrocorporeal cleansing, down to the roots. Nobody else present really had those kind of roots.

As the priest wrapped it all up at the end while we sat facing the simple wooden altar with its twinkles of gilt and brocade, my new purity evoked in me the sudden contrasting of old catholic memories; I began to wonder if the fulminant church laughter I remember so well could also occur in an ancient and revered Shinto shrine, or was it a cultural thing after all? (Those devils never depart.) So when the ritual handclapping rhythms came around - and this being KMnM’s first time getting purified - Miasa wasn’t expecting the slowness of the latter rhythm and, clapping loudly and prematurely in the deep holy silence, she began to manifest that seedgiggle I remember from my long-ago altar boy gigglejelly days. To help things along, I leaned over and with one raised eyebrow wagged a stern finger in her face, saying one must not laugh in the shrine, so she did not surface again for quite a while, doubled over and biting her knees that way... I was feeling purer by the minute in the great and unremitting gigglejelly that is the universe...

I remember thinking as I became purer, gazing at the carpenterial detail of the small chapel: they cared so much, the carpenters of so long ago; every joint, every curve, every scroll and support, the selected and honored wood grain, the complexity of curvature was phenomenal, how much they cared was evident everywhere in that structure, ancient as it was, and where in the neoworld do you see anything approaching that selfless level of spiritual intensity manifested for the common man from the life time of several anonymous individuals, working alone with their own craft for meager reward, unknown even now for the inspiring beauty of their work. Nor did distant future renown matter to them, nothing mattered but the utmost beauty and quality of which their hands, minds and skills were capable, the “How could it be otherwise” character of their timeless craft...

The whole experience made me as pure as can be expected, purity in later life being, in my case, largely an acquired quality...

THINGS YOU MISS WHEN YOU LEAVE JAPAN 

A quick list of things I shall miss about Japan :(: (self.japan)

submitted 11 hours ago by grooviekenn

Background: I grew up in Japan and have been living in the US for the past 15+ years. My grandmother passed away in May and so I returned to Japan after being away for many years. Here is a quick list I compiled of things that I will miss about Japan when I go back to the States tomorrow.

(via http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/ )

THE MYTH OF THIS MORNING

Tuesday morning came wrapped in a fog like the one in which Japan got started way back before history, and who knew what was going to happen this time. It was far thicker than the standard fogs you see on all the folding screens, that obscures less important details of famous events; it was a MythoFog of the kind that was there when Amaterasu Omikami and her troublemaking brother got to stirring up the ocean, resulting in Japan, among other things.

The morning's similar potential was not lost on me when I set out from the house on my Mythic Motorcycle and began to roll downmountain into eternity or the morning train, whichever pertained, wending my way through what might lead to a whole other country and culture or who knows what in this day and age, nobody really bothers to intuit that stuff anymore, all the mythothings that can get started on a godly whim...

We have conventional non-mythic fogs up here all the time, living closer to and sometimes inside the clouds as we do, but when we head on down to the flatlands we soon enter clear air, morning fogs hereabouts generally being temporary affairs that evaporate soon after sunrise. This fog, though, had a lot more going on, it seemed to get more mythic as I plunged down the road into the fog of meaning, which wasn't damp like the usual fog, even though it was cold like the hand of history on your neck, with more frisson than those fogs they attempt in the horror movies or that Dickens and Bronte wrote of to such great effect, so in my head there was a Victorian quality blended with some Japanese godplay in a complexity that is hard to describe...

In brief, the portent was major. As I slowly rolled down through the deep gray and blessedly monkeyless silence (they know what's going on), curving left and right, back and forth, all the way down, something in me kept expecting some kind of mythic event. It would have been a lot harder if I didn't know the road, but even so I had to go slowly in case a Japanese deity appeared... Can you imagine the scandal of a collision with a foreigner on a motorcycle, that would be one for the holy books...

Finally I got to the station where I was not surprised to find that it too was in the fog - in fact right at the bottom of the fog - and it too was silent-- no train sounds, no announcements of delays or cancellations-- Was I really here, this was my hand before my face was it not, no sound of other people walking and talking, no godsilks rustling, there seemed to be no one around, sometimes I'd hear what could be a footstep, but who really knows in the early phase of a myth, so I locked up my bike as usual, got out my ticket, felt my way through the mist blanket to the ticketwicket, wicketed my ticket and there was no one on the other side, all was silent, wrapped in the muted strivings of the gods...

I climbed the stairs to the platform, which disappeared before me; I walked on as usual, in faith that there was a platform there, I too became invisible like the mountains in front, the whole range of mountains right there in front was invisible, and the Lake in back, the big Lake just there on the other side of the invisible platform was invisible too... We were all invisible now, a state it is well to take seriously...

In the myth of the moment I went and occupied my conventional waiting spot there at the heart of The Fog of infinite hearts, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and there I waited in what once was time for what once was a train, but there was no train... Still no train... Then some other hopeful commuters appeared like miracles out of the fog, spiriting past me to their trainwaiting spots; we waited in our collective invisibility.

After about half an hour an announcement came vaporing out of the soup that the express train - which doesn't stop at our humble rural station - was about to come through, the one that, 10 minutes before my usual train, comes roarblasting past at 80 miles an hour only inches from the platform, quite a stimulus on a normal morning...

But I couldn't hear anything, standing there right beside the track, maybe the muffled bleat of one of the goats that lives on the property down there beside the Lake or a goddess was doing something, then came a rumbling like a giant slow pushcart grinding along a hard road and the morning express came pushing into our part of The Fog, rolling through at about grandma bicycle speed, interior all lit up in the foggy dim, the folks in the cars like passengers in an airliner going through clouds, staring out the windows with big eyes at seeing ghostly commuter figures there in the air on what must please god be a platform, waiting for a train... or maybe they were rapturing their way to heaven... Imminent myths can do that to a collective mind in transport...

Our own train finally came pushcarting out of the generative fog - it was crowded by now - stopped before us, opened its doors, took us into its light, closed its doors and rolled on slowly through vapors that diminished like the past as we grew older nearing the big city and buildings became visible; turned out that a well-developed civilization is still out there...

Need I point out that what was about to happen, mythwise, is still about to happen, fog or no fog, so be ready...

THE TREETOPS OF THE SOUL

The other day Echo was telling me that when you get up in the morning it is beneficial to the health to say OHAIYO GOZAIMASU!! (GOOD MORNING!!) or OSU!! (MORNIN'!!) loudly and deeply from the hara as the monks and the martial arts students do, as being stimulative to that primal source of ki (spirit energy) for the entire being, and I could not but agree, with the proviso that on certain mornings, such as Mondays, there is no particular reason to get all that excited or pepped up about anything, that's life, give it a rest.

Then later as I was whistling my way through a task or two as has been my wont for my entire life (well, ever since I first managed to whistle and didn't want to stop, from then on polishing my whistle to its whistliest), I realized that whistling whenever a whistle is willing is also a very good thing for the hara and the general mood of oneself, and possibly of others, if one is a good whistler. Extending this thought over to the cultural realms, I came to realize that no one ever whistles here in Japan, I am usually the only one doing so in the silent crowd, for which I am now and then likely looked upon as being a bit daffy, but as a traveling whistler through multiple cultures, I don't mind at all.

Whistlers usually don't mind at all-- it evolves in their natures, whistling being somewhat of an absently showoffy thing, when done right. That's another of the powers whistling bestows upon the whistle-blessed. In the States, especially when I was a kid, I used to hear folks (by 'folks' I mean men in this case, and politically correctly; women never whistled, except while they were little girls trying out new stuff, or later maybe in private, and that still seems to be true) whistling all the time: garage mechanics, mailmen, milkmen, paperboys, even guys just walking alone down the street with no particular objective (whistlers are right at home without objectives); I have never seen such a thing in Japan, even among foreigners.

I suppose that whistling, wherever it is done in earnest, is thought of as such a solitary endeavor that one doesn't seek it in others, listen for it or even think about it: it is just a matter of tuneful happenstance, unlike attending a performance by the New York Philharmonic, for example.

But whistling is a sure sign of contentment, of essential comfort, of the primal joy that can be found in simply being from top to bottom, adorned only by the curlicues of a whistle that dances upon the air like birdsong from the treetops of our souls, a song to sound out to your footsteps or the tool of your labor, even if the tune is one of the old standards, played on the instrument you always have with you.

Of course you can compose your own melodies ad libitum if you're of such a mind, as most whistlers are. That's another of those great unsung pleasures. And if you can't whistle, then you can get a flute or a recorder or a penny whistle or a harmonica and bring your music into the world wherever you go. You can give birth all your life, you know.

TIME BEFORE TIME

Culture changes perceptibly even over just a few years, like language does - things are no longer square or groovy and we all remember no internet - but the change seems to be accelerating lately, now that I've lived long enough to have had my childhood in the stone age. That's how prehistoric the present era feels now for a child of the 1940s, a time that at the time was impressively current with essentials like marbles, yo-yos, trolley cars, typewriters and carbon paper, clickety-clickety standup phones with four- or even five-digit numbers, with all the young men in fedoras, the grandpas in derbys, women in odd hats and long dresses; there was penmanship with steel pens dipped in school desktop inkwells, there were stenographers and mimeographs, horse-drawn wagons delivering milk and ice, there was no tv, no everywhere plastic, and the old styles and language (don't say ain't), culture and mores, social borders-- racism, sexism, everywhere everyone smoking, heavy social drinking, normal obesity, litter, penny candy, cigars, spittoons, the list runs on like time...

I was prompted to recherche those temps perdu when I heard in a documentary film (Scorsese's No Direction Home-- Recommended) an old-school British journalist with all the attendant perceptions, blinkers, mindsets and perspectives (he may well have interviewed young Churchill), there in the mod 1960s asking the young and sassy, full of beans, off-the-wall-out-in-left-field Bob Dylan a rhetorically baroque question that meandered along a familiar old path wound with vines and blossoms framing a white picket fence before a little cottage with maybe a portrait of Disraeli above the mantel, the kind of question that even back in the 60s was so shakespeareanly orotund　and sesquipedalianly circumlocutory that when confronted with it, or rather wrapped in it, Dylan oddly became so sympathetic as to not get his usual sassy, and as I listened to the question unwind I too felt sympathy for that elder statesman of journalism attempting to speak as though the past fit perfectly into the right-nowness of that moment, assuming that he could pinpoint this young musical upstart in the Victorian pantheon of marble-halled literary icons and empirical ideals, that he could understand in his horseback telegraph spittoon way what was now going on around him like lightning on vinyl. In his long professional life he himself had no doubt at last become his ideal of an Edwardian journalist, hadn't felt the need to make any serious self-adjustments since then and here he was, speaking from the distant past to the distant future. I suppose I'm much the same by now, how can one tell as one rambles on...

There is always a special preserve for the youth of the day, but the changes since the 1940s have been more radical than any before in history (I was　born before the atomic bomb!) and have caught many unprepared, like that senior journalist at the peak of his game, whose name might as well　have been "Mr. Jones." Used to be that small adjustments were enough-- a fancy new harness, a bustle, the latest height in a beaver hat or　a new pair of spats to get one through a life, but this acceleration is new to us cutting-edge elders; we have to adjust more quickly and to greater extremes than any of our foreparents ever did. How does one adjust to extreme changes at this speed of life?

I trust the mind, though; as it always has, it will learn new ways of keeping up with the new tools it has made, especially in the coming and coming young ones-- but this need for speed of adaptation is becoming exponential, so presents a more interesting challenge than ever before to elderfolk, who no longer sit in armchairs with ashtrays beside them and read newspapers while listening to the radio in the evening; rather they dive headfirst, over and over, into the global infosea. There's　no end to news now; we are living headlines. A most exciting time to be of advanced years.

THE EFFECTS OF PROTRACTED MONKEYLESSNESS ON WESTERN CULTURE: A Brief Analysis

Can there be too much monkeylessness? Up until  yesterday I would have answered hell no, give me even more monkeylessness than I have now! But perhaps I can't really be impartial on this question, since I come from a historically monkeyless culture that - apart from politics and finance - has no experience with truly guiltless intelligence. The continuous monkeylessness of the West, I now suspect, has put the West at a deep cultural disadvantage, one that Westerners aren't even aware of, largely owing to their endemic monkeylessness. Sort of like genetically never having been exposed to measles.

The above question posed itself to me the other morning while I was waiting for the train, when my thoughts drifted to my innate desire for monkeylessness vis-a-vis the startling intelligence I have perceived in those beasts, who exhibit ancient patience combined with the original lack of conscience, yet bearing in themselves at least the surface manifestations of guilt, like their merely facial expression of the smile-- so much like loan sharks and politicians...

Recently I had gone through weeks- months, in fact - of monkeylessness, and, being a child of the West, was growing complacent raising mushrooms; I was no longer on my toes. I'd get a couple baskets of mushrooms in today and a couple tomorrow, "there are too many, so I'll get the rest over the weekend," I'd mumble to myself in a monkeyless stupor; it was then that the monkeys struck. They knew. They'd been waiting. And watching. Their scout saw me complacently take off on the motorcycle and according to his database I'd be gone all day; then they waited for the red car to leave with Echo inside, when they stuffed themselves at leisure with most of the rest of what in my monkeyless fog I'd naively thought were my mushrooms. I had fallen for the simian ploy, and so had learned once more. By these subtle stages have I become less Western, drifted more toward the other side of the Never the Twain Shall Meet boundary-- which no one to my knowledge has ever attributed to protracted Western monkeylessness.

On the other hand with its opposable thumb, monkeys are integral to Asia and its religions; thus the reality of monkeyfulness and dreams of monkeylessness have intrigued monkey-plagued Asian philosophers since the dawn of civilization, and may go a long way toward explaining the inscrutability attributed to these regions by the chronically monkeyless West. For with the presence of monkeys comes the deepest, most formidable aspect of "Where did we come from": "What is the difference between man and beast?"

Over the millennia, monkeyful societies have perforce pondered the in-their-face fact of natural intelligence in natural combination with natural consciencelessness. Europeans, Americans and Middle Easterners, in contrast, have never had to confront this daily reality in all its nakedness, never had to deal with the deeper implications unrelated to nature/nurture. Thus there are no monkeys in their holy books or shrines. This may be why they needed powerful, angry gods, strictly stipulated commandments, hardwired messiahs and suchlike.

It is my thesis, cursorily examined here, that much about the East that the West characterizes as inscrutable has to do with what I call the Simian Index, which concept I may pursue in future, if I ever start an anthropological career, and lots of luck on that one; or I may not, depends on whatever. I was, after all, raised in a culture where free will is heavily promulgated, though I have since lived and traveled for over three decades in rampantly monkeyful cultures that are less individualistic and more collectively serendipitous, so at the moment I'm not sure of my true place on the Simian Index, but I'm definitely closer to something.

TO SAY NOTHING OF A LA MODE

Every nation is renowned for not having certain things. One of the things Japan is famed for not having is cherry pie. At least in this blog. It's been two years now since I had any cherry pie, a salacious, not to say orgiastic, event that recurred serially when I visited the US and cherry pie was everywhere. I could hardly stick out a fork without hitting a cherry pie. Can one ever forget one's native pastries?

In that pieful eden I couldn't wander in one of those hangar-like corner supermarkets without coming upon rows and rows of racks and racks of cakes and cookies and donuts, real donuts, soft and spicy, not the merely sugared image, plus of course pies of all kinds of berries and fruits, nuts and custards and creams, cherry pie comprising a large number of the whole-crust and lattice-crust versions dripping gobbets of ruby juice and displaying their crustily inimitable deliciousness; still, I had restraint-- I only bought one or two at a time, rarely three or four. Discipline is always with me.

To this declaration of currently chronic pie deficiency (which seems to intensify as the weather becomes chillier and visions of juice-laden crust come rising from the delirious depths), some goody-goody type folks might later elbow-comment: Oh you can get pies at a lot of places in (name Japanese city of multimillions), but I'm not talking about ittybitty acculturations that cost fifty dollars, I'm talking about those huge, deep creations of the cherry-pie making god-families who for hundreds of years have been making pies that are as far from tofu as you can get and cost six or seven dollars.

Not that I have anything against tofu, I love tofu, always have, enjoy it regularly, a great food and highly nutritional in its way, but only one small spec on the dietary spectrum. Like life itself, nutrition and the diet inhabit vast spans that call for commensurate balance, not the piddling balance of food that is merely said to be 'good' for you. I'm talking big scales here, transcending just the body-- cosmic balance is the ticket, and in my book a big thick wedge of that ticket is cherry pie.

Here in the pieless island nation, after each cosmicly nourished return from the cherry pie continent my dreams were crowded with flying cherry pies and land-based cherry pies you could climb onto bearing a cosmic hunger, with a spoon like a shovel. (Pay no attention to those pieless old Freudians over in the corner.) Two years without cherry pie can do that to a man. To say nothing of a la mode. Of actually chocolate ice cream.

STARS ON THE GROUND

Interesting, watching western celebs get interviewed for Japanese tv by reporters who don't speak English or respond to English or its tonal, facial, manual gestures and intimations, but work through an interpreter on the side whom the audience does not see and the celeb does not address, so for the less manic celebs the general PR boilerplate is thereby minimized and the usual dross falls away so you hear only Japanese questions asked, with the celeb's English replies and subtitles edited in for the response, and as all the usual nuancing is no longer of value, the celebs become more neutral, culturally isolated, no longer rely on polemic manipulations etc., so are more personal, open and 'normal,' less guarded, like Michael Moore the other night, he wasn't 'on' the way he always is, thinkingagendathinking, he just chatted, no psychic drumrolls, no showmanship, seemed like a nice concerned guy you might have sat next to in a bar in Flint...

FILM ON DOLPHIN HUNT STIRS OUTRAGE IN JAPAN; TOKYO FILM FESTIVAL COPS OUT

"Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception at the festival — a round of applause broke out at the end of the film — it is unclear whether it will spark a wider public debate. Whale and dolphin hunting is considered an important part of Japan’s traditional livelihood and culinary culture, a practice to be defended against foreign interference — even though only a minority of Japanese eat whale meat, and even fewer eat dolphin.

The Tokyo Film Festival initially rejected 'The Cove' as too controversial, but reversed its decision at the last minute after lobbying from Hollywood heavyweights like Ben Stiller, who has taken a personal interest in it. The festival, however, screened a disclaimer stating it had nothing to do with the film’s production.

'The feeling here is that the world needs to respect cultural differences,” said Testsu [sic] Sato, a professor in environmental management at Nagano University. 'Why should there even be a debate on this issue?'" Full NY Times article

That's not the feeling everywhere. The same argument has long been used to preserve cultural traditions that are today widely acknowledged to be abominations. Some cultures abominate longer than others.

And "eco" is THE buzzword in Japan nowadays...! Even politicians use it!

Japan dolphin hunting town threatens to sue over 'The Cove'

Japan dolphin town defends hunt as film debuts

Record of a porpoise trip to a more enlightened island...

FOREST TRASH

It was clearly a crude simian that invaded my garden briefly on Friday while I was at the office, as I discovered on Saturday morning; so very unlike the sophisticated Littlefoot, who purloins so neatly and considerately.

Judging from the vegetoforensic results I obtained in the aftermath, this hairy clod pulled up a baby carrot, just looked at it, threw it on the ground saying I don't want little carrots, I want big carrots, don't you know who I am, then did it again and again until there were no more upsetting carrots in the ground, they were now all over the place uneaten, then he spotted a largish green tomato in there among lush tomato vines, pulled apart the vines, grabbed the tomato, ripped it off the vine and broke other vines too this way and that, looked at and bit the tomato, threw it on the ground at his feet and said ptah, I don't want a hard, green tomato, I want a juicy, red tomato didn't anybody know I was coming, this garden sucks, where are the tomatoes and carrots I deserve, somebody better do something about this, and tore up some more tomato vines, threw them around, crudely elbowed the tall, slim and unoffending sunflowers aside while coming and going, like he was using a Tokyo subway or something, crassly leaving the innocent flowers toppled in situ-- no class, no sense of order or discipline, no concept of neatness, no pride in one's species and culture-- so unlike the elegant thief Littlefoot, the Cary Grant of simians.

This was just a lowlife, uncultured simian brigand, gaucher than you can get even in Hollywood-- what some apes call forest trash. Or so I hear.