LIGHT AND DARK AND LIGHT

Here and there in the grains of photos remaining from that time you can see the blurred outline of a person, sometimes with a child or even two, walking where the way was once familiar, but now was the bottom of an incinerator the size of their city, still burning through them even as they walked, perhaps to escape the heat of all the nothing that remained...

At other places in the mass of the ashes of a hundred thousand lives turned into wind and rain you can make out the speck of another one still living, bent over searching, sifting in vain through blackened flakes of what once was life, once a place of daily living, where now nothing stood, where all was flat and dark, dust and fragments of death...

After the fires died, first the relatives came seeking their loved ones, one mother searching for her daughter who that morning had gone into town early so she could pay the rent on her way to work, but the mother never found her daughter...

That mother and all the others - fathers, sisters, sons, daughters, brothers - wandered for days, weeks, the rest of their lives in their hearts in those ashes of a city of families, passing by in their dreams those passengers on the train who were charcoal statues in their seats, or those still just alive who wandered also, in search of death that waited only days away, or those who had left their instant white shadows on the flash-darkened stone of the bridge or the building when they'd joined the unseeable light...

All of it on that August morning-- every ash of bone, every unheard scream, every sear of pain or cry for love, every tear of life, every atom of vapor that had been a person-- all of it, is in our voices now...

If It Hadn't Been for the Potato Famine

If it hadn't been for the potato famine I sure as hell wouldn't be here writing these lines, wherever they're leading, nor would my brother and sister be living their good lives in California and Florida, respectively, may their lives be full of joy, though if not for the Great Hunger that would be moot, would it not. In the current but limited understanding of the meaning of it all, nothing wonderful can happen to you if you haven't been born.

My mother and father, too, would not have been my parents without the potato famine, or even parents at all, if they themselves had not been been born from non-great grandparents who hadn't been birthable either, because their would-have-been parents, suddenly not suffering extreme starvation, thanks to complete faminelessness, were instead living good history in the bliss of a bounteous mid-19th century Ireland, prospering on a healthy diet - including potatoes - and having well-fed Irish families whose respective sons and daughters never met by chance in a tragic diaspora.

Centuries later, from the auld sod to a mountainside in Japan of all places - where as the traveler in the family I finally settled down - I think often of the sacrifice of those families back then who, after heart-rivening consideration, scraped hunger into pence and then into pounds to send off in steerage the healthiest, best-suited young family member, whom they would see nevermore but who might survive, sailing away beyond a life's horizon to the lowest rung of NYC, who then lived far enough along time's thread to meet and pass these genes down the unbroken line from all those folks who had gone before, whom I'll never know, though now and then I glimpse them in the mirror.

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.

BECOMING ARCHAEOLOGICAL

I don't feel all that Jurassic, but archaeologists are already digging up relics from after I was born, a time shrouded in the mists of history along with my early playmates the Neanderthals and other formerly youthful individuals, including for example Julius, Marc and Cleo, with whom I am now aggregate, though I didn't know any of them very well until fifth grade or so. I entered this world in - let me adjust my stone calendar to Julian - 1940CE, not long after the ice age that followed the late Pleistocene, which comprised my school years. 

My eyes still work, so I was just reading the news on one of these newfangled computers, it uses what they call "real time," to differentiate it from the other kind. It was saying how some archaeologist - a field that started before I was born, believe it or not - had found items from a tragic fire of long ago, greenhorn readers apparently having to turn their mindclocks nearly all the way back to WWII to realize the chronospan involved: archaeological artifacts from - which archaic period is that? The 1940s? - Wait, was there time then? 

Yes, grasshopper, there was; we had hourglasses to prove it. And I was there, already walking and talking in the early language of those days, the archaic one spoken by Whitman, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, Mencken et al., famous paleoauthors of whom (or is it all-the-way 'who' now?) you may have heard. By that time I was going to school, a fairly recent phenomenon, where they had stringent language and grammar requirements and taught handwriting - perhaps you've heard of cursive? 

We practiced the Palmer Method (crucial for careers and professional respect in a world now archaeological) with a "nibbed" pen dipped into "ink" in an "inkwell" that was inset into our wooden "desktops" (the original kind). The inkwell had a little sliding cover and was fashioned entirely from slate, of all things. Plastic was just becoming a word. Nibbed pen calligraphy was so much more elegant than ballpoint is; the concept of elegance, like history itself, has lost quite a bit of steam (an old idiom) and relativity since Archimedes and I first played marbles together, back in the good old days.

NOBUNAGA'S CASTLE

Went on Sunday to a mountain across the Lake to check out Oda Nobunaga's Azuchi castle digs, he wasn't there, hasn't been for several centuries now, nothing left on that mountaintop but huge stone foundations that cast the eye into high fortifications and the mind into standing guard outdoors in high twisting corridors of stone on savage winter nights alert in the dark of long before electricity, listening through the howl of the wind for sounds of conspirators edging up through tilted blackness, and only three years after all that magnificence was built, Oda made his biggest mistake, got cornered at a lowdown temple near Kyoto's Gion district (still a pleasure center today), and slit his own belly rather than be captured by an upstart, and the very next day the plotters burned those brand-new golden towers, those treasure walls down to the bare rough stones I saw on Sunday, overlooking vast holdings that belong to no one after all, is what the ruin says, and only ten days later Hideyoshi carried out an amazing forced march and sent the surprised plotters themselves to where Oda and his fabulous dream-filled castle had gone, and there 400 years later was I, standing on a post stone 30 meters below where Oda's candle-lit tower room had risen into the night with its painted walls, broad doors open to the vastness beneath the stars, no one there today but some elderly visitors stumbling to the top of what's left of the foundation to exclaim on the view from here, in fact one can see much much farther in so many ways from such places as this, royal chambers in the air where once were trysts and plottings now repossessed by the crowns of trees, the fights of crows and how fickle is power, as one's boot fits the wear in the time-tilted grand steps of stone a nation once climbed, in obeisance now as far from here as Nobunaga is...

REAL STREETS

Every real street began as a footpath between places worth walking to, later widened for horse and cart and speed and then there were sidestreets, and avenues added in full-blown urban ad hocness to spell out whole cities all the way from foot to car to bus and truck and airport, air streets above the world city, the streets now memorable lines in the long story that is the city, veins in the living urban body, source of its nourishment, character and voice, people, houses, machines, metaphor for going, being, neighboring, community, membrane of private/public, face of the neighborhood, streambed of commerce, other half of home, the street is what the old folks lean out the windows or sit on the porch or stoop to gaze upon, remember the streets of their days, common property, the favorite memories of a former city kid are memories of the street, where all the meeting happens, all the socializing happens, all the growing happens, graffiti museum, streets too evolve, remember they were all once just dirt, even only a short time ago, look at the old pictures preserved in the museums that make people go Ah! The street as mythic theater, and as common voice, marketplace, festival, playground, way to elsewhere, to school, church, work, the way home, the way away, to other streets in towns and nations full of streets and towns of their own, on the street where you live, where happen miracles and terribles, potential stage of tragedy and comedy and romance every minute, and the streets of old cities, old Tokyo gone with the war, and the streets of old Kyoto with their old houses with the fold-down benches on the front for folks to sit on and watch the world of the street pass by too are gone to tv streets. Shijo, Main Street, Champs Elysees, Broadway, Unter Den Linden, Rodeo Drive, the beat, street smarts, street value, easy street, La Strada, the long brown road, life’s proving ground, the heart of the art, the way, the Tao, the Tao is a street, the way of all streets; streets are faces, streets are voices, and beneath the streets are streets above streets…

Slightly altered from Kyoto Journal #55, STREET Special Issue

THE SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT RAMBLE

Here it is December already and there is no snow on the mountains, the oak tree still has green leaves on it, we haven't had a single frost and my potatoes think they're in Hawaii, despite the black hole in the world economy. I too, when I'm working outside, am soon down to my t-shirt when it should be snowing, and as I work I have the distinct feeling that glaciers are melting, ice sheets are shattering, polar bears are disappearing and Eskimos are developing beachfront...

Of course it could all be just a centurial anomaly or something, as the folks who know as little as anyone else insist; besides, what do we mere mortals know about the history of anything, really, short term as we are, just a few gossipy fragments of surmises here and there written down as gospel, either way we don't really know what we're talking about, we can't even explain our own desires or the ice ages, or even the words we say about them, though our minds know more than we do.

The puzzles nevertheless are ongoing, like the strange lack of acorns and other nuts (excluding human) in the northeast US this year, and the disappearance of tuna and sharks from the sea and certain birds from the sky, what does our knowledge really know, the sun's getting weird, the solar system prefers to be alone, the galaxy is acting quirky, galactic clusters are accelerating away from something, space is bent and now they've sensed some strange attractions from outside the universe as we call it; so what else is new, is this all normal, are we having guests, should I put my shirt back on?

EXALTATION

Yesterday morning I was over on the other land clearing up the last of the new firewood, my eyes looking at the maul and wedge, the grain of the oak sections I was manhandling or among the downed branches for limbs of worthwhile size, hunched over and gazing downward all the time, without thought, rapt in the mu of continuous and autofocused labor, when for a break while edging my way through downed branches I stretched, looked up and there beheld, rising into the blue, all the gold of the tall old ginkgo tree that stands beside the pond, arms spread wide as though reaching to embrace the sky, reveling in existence like an exulting dancer covered in golden feathers tingling in the air--

All that bright and sudden yellow alone amid the evergreens-- it stopped me in my tracks, snatched my emptied mind from mundane tasks and filled it to the brim with things that made me reach for understanding, comprehensions beyond the brackets of my life and its reaches, it was splendid to stand there, as if new, before such living beauty, beauty offered without reward. This was a wild ginkgo, in its native autumnal costume.

Perhaps the most anciently originating tree species surviving today - a living fossil in fact - ginkgo [from the Japanese gin (silver) + kyo (apricot)] must have been showing their gold to empty air, in the eons before we humans came along with our burgeoning capacity to enjoy-- and that's where it hit me, right in that capacity. It wasn't art, it wasn't scenery, it was just a tree but more, arms reaching for heaven just as ours still do in the reflex of high emotion, an ancient stance for both tree and man-- I just stood there and looked at it long where it stood, a single yellow tree against the dark green mountains, but what a gift to a tired man, a break from labor, an opening of mind, an exchange of languages ancient before my time...

It was almost as though the ginkgo had been standing there quietly all along, holding its pose, waiting-- somebody's gonna look up any minute-- wait-- wait--- now: there, he's turning: ta-DA!! It was like that, it was a communication that happened, I don't know why or how, and likely never will, but the ginkgo was telling me in unmistakable terms about humans, color, dance, trees, art, time, knowledge, thought, communication, history, life, patience, it's a long list, and just days from now that golden gift of leaves will all be fallen. I have to go back again. Why does this tree want to tell me so much?

FOR U.S. ELECTION DAY, 2008

Excerpts from the diary of Elizabeth Dixon Smith, a pioneer woman migrating with her family to Oregon, started April 21, 1847-- excerpts here [original spelling and absent punctuation (with sentence break-pauses I can't reproduce here)] are from the latter part of the journey, waiting to portage down the Columbia River:

Nov 18 my husband is sick it rains and snows we start this morning round the falls with our wagons we have 5 miles to go I carry my babe and lead or rather carry another through snow and mud and water al most to my knees it is the worst road that a team could possibly travel I went a head with my children and I was affraid to look behind me for fear of seeing the wagon turn over in to the mud and water with evry thing in them my children give out with cold and fatigue and could not travle and the boys had to unhitch the oxon and bring them and carry the children on to camp I was so cold and numb that I could not tell by feeling that I had any feet at all we started this morning at sunrise and did not get to camp untill after dark and there was not one dry thread on one of us not even my babe I had carryed my babe and I was so fatigued that I could scarcely speak or step when I got here I found my husband lying in Welches wagon very sick[...]

Nov 20 Rain all day it is allmost an imposibility to cook and quite so to keep warm or dry I froze or chilled my feet so that I cannot wear a shoe so I have to go round in the cold water bearfooted.

Nov 21 rain all day the whole care of evry thing now falls upon my shoulders I cannot write any more at present[...]

Feb 2 to day we buried my earthly companion, now I know what none but widows know that is how comfortless is that of a widows life espesily when left in a strange land without money or friends and the care of seven children -- cloudy

Feb 22, 23 [...] to day we left Portland at sunrise no one to assist us we had to leave one waggon and part of our things for the want of a teem we travled 4 or 5 miles all the way up hill and through the thickest woods I ever saw all furr from 2 to 4 ft through with now and then a scattering cedar and an intolerable bad road we all had to walk some times I had to sit down my babe and help to keep the wagon from turning over when we got to the top of the mountain we descended through mud up to wagon hubs and over logs 2 feet through and log bridges torn to pieces in the mud sometimes I would be behind out of the sight of the wagon carrying and tuging my little ones along sometimes the boys would stop the teams and come back after us made 9 miles encamped in thick woods found some grass unhitched the oxon let them feed 2 hours then chained them to trees these woods are infested with wild cats panthers bears and wolves ... we made us a fire and made a bed down on the wet ground and layed down as happy as circumstances would ad mit[...]

***

When you realize the courage and risk, pain and effort, trust in one's own powers that went into building America, you can only hope that we of this day have inherited that courage, that that power is still in good hands...

From COVERED WAGON WOMEN, Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849

WAITING FOR MY TRAIN

Standing on the rush-hour train platform today heading home from the big city, for the ten minutes or so before my train came I looked individually at the folks crowding the opposite platform waiting for their train (each of us thinks of the train as our own: I was standing on my platform, waiting for my train), mostly working men and women, with some travelers and their luggage, some elders, a few kids, many teenagers, on their ways here and there, all standing neatly in their lines for their doors to their trains, some reading, some chatting, some laughing or staring at cell phones, some far away in thought, some sad looking, some depressed, many tired or simply zoned, some worried--

And then as if I were looking at a work of superfine art in a metamuseum the picture suddenly opened up to me and I saw what the artist had in mind: that each of these people and faces and lives had a long and unbroken history back through their forebears all the way to the beginning of time, that was slipping by unremarked and unrecorded at this and every moment and always had been, and always would be, as long as human life lived on, and that if you left out what was common to them all-- the quotidia, the rote repetitions of daily life-- what astonishing tales would remain!

What a story and stories were there in all those current minds and endless pasts, concealed and unspoken!! Each of these lives and all its moments was richer in beauty, tragedy and comedy than the greatest plays and stories ever written, and what we call history is but a wisp of a vapor of this vastness-- a biased, uneven, selective record of all that has in fact been lived and felt and known-- and what then is fact? History-- our guide and justification-- is as thick as the print on a page, as fixed as the image on a movie screen.

Then came the thought that this epic, of all these people and all their lives (so few of the all that are!), all their moments, countless moments in their length and depth and feeling (how do you count a moment?) were passing unseen even as we stood there, waiting for our train.

From the Archives: April 6, 2002

MEANDERING

Coming back from the local country dentist (who is a very good dentist by the way, and cares much about his patients as individuals, unlike the high-turnover blurry dentists in the assembly line at the big clinic way up in a high building in the heart of the city), I decided not to take the main and faster highway back home, but to meander a bit in search of the kind of moments one can only come upon in mid-meander, and so took the narrow winding road along the Lake.

I would thereby also get to see the old thatched-roof cottage again, where the beauty of its aged wood and the stone path to the door were discreetly revealed by elegant bamboo fences and the gracefully sloping arms of ancient red pines, and I could feel that old spirit, one of those last embers of the old Japan, like sitting close to a fading loved one, moving closer to a dying fire.

It was a beauty of a day, more like spring than early February, the Lake on my left meandering too (large bodies of water pretty much do as they wish), along the very road, elbowing in where it could its sapphire beauty. I tended to go slowly, it's impossible to meander at high speed, and anything more than an amble is a waste of meander. So I often had to pull over to allow passage of folks bizarrely in a hurry on a slow road, likely in haste as well to get through life itself.

Then I was at the turnoff for home, and hadn't seen the old cottage, so I turned around and went back. In its discreetness, the shy place sometimes evades the seeker with the mildest distraction. I looked carefully, but still couldn't find it; then I found that where it had been was now a pile of dirt and rock and torn-up moss with a caterpillar tractor beside it, all surrounded by a temporary fence.

The centuries-old red pines were gone, the moss-bordered stone pathway was gone, the thatched roof was gone, the old house was gone. I felt my throat close up, it was very like a death I was feeling, that I would never see that old house again and wonder at its history and be inspired, or admire the beauty of its building, sense the strength of its long long time right there before me now.

Likely there would be a quick new factory-made lakeside cottage going up there soon, take a couple of weeks to build, model B perhaps, maybe model D. Thus do souls starve and die, in worlds without spirit.

DARTBOARD

Just asked Mick a dartboard question on The Blog Brothers...
Time awaits...

JAPANESE ROOTS

"Just who are the Japanese? Where did they come from and when? The answers are difficult to come by, though not impossible ― the real problem is that the Japanese themselves may not want to know. Unearthing the origins of the Japanese is a much harder task than you might guess. Among world powers today, the Japanese are the most distinctive in their culture and environment. The origins of their language are one of the most disputed questions of linguistics. These questions are central to the self-image of the Japanese and to how they are viewed by other peoples. Japan's rising dominance and touchy relations with its neighbors make it more important than ever to strip away myths and find answers."

Excerpted from an impressive summary
of the mystery that is Japan,
by Jared Diamond.

Looks like it won't be a 'mystery' for long though...

FOUND POSTER, MIDDLE AGES SPORTS CLUB

YE OLDE COACHINGE TIPPES

Yea, and in ye game of hoope, seek not so much to honor ye rules of ye game as to perfect ye undetected personall fowles, wherein thy points count even while jamming ye defense; yet avoid like ye plague ye airballes thereof.

Forsooth, though ye three-pointe swishers be most worthy in ye eyes of ye benche, yet flashey slamme dunkes are not to be foresworne as expressing ye attitude whilst sticking it in goodly measure to thy opponent, which is, let us countenance it, ye point of ye game.

Also, leap not, except it be higher than thy opponent, who will otherwise swatte ye ball away quicker than ye committer of maternal inceste.

And be it said that in ye hardeballe, if ye pitcher seeketh to syke thee out, to set thee back on thy heeles, to cowe thy spiritt with ye duster, be thou not afeared, but rather raise up thy batte and gallope toward ye mound in righteous haste, ye while casting loude imprecations toward ye pitcher regarding ye species of his mother; that thou wilt as well rippe his armes off and aroint ye bat up his nether parts and suchlike threatenings, which if thou dost catch ye fiende, thou shalt in facte assay to do, thereby to maintain thy sporting integrity, that in future all pitchers shall think two times before assaying to duste thee back.

And if thou art at bowles, or yet at golfe, as thy opponent addresseth ye pinnes or ye tee shotte, give thou tongue at that moment to a lusty cry, such as "Watch out behind thee!" or "Hark ye goodies on yon damsel, wilt thou!" so as to keep thy score in ratio more suited to ye wager.

Lest the aforesaid be an insufficiency, see that it is thou that keepeth score, for at bottome lyne ye pen is mightier than ye balle, for damme shure.

Lo, regarding any game whatever, heed not the sayers that it is better to playe than to winne; for thou can verily bet thy fundamente that thou art giving eare to losers.

And forsooth, forget thee not that ye final tally is ye point of ye entyre emeffynge endeavore.

Ye Coache

R. Brady

MINDWEND

Driving down the mountain last night in the 5:30 darkness I had to wend my way through hundreds of junior-high kids in their Russo-Japanese war military uniforms mobbing the road from their school, and as I was wending my mind wended too, wondering if these kids ever connected with the short-lived military victory implied in their 100-year-old uniforms, and then it said: these kids are getting out of school at 5:30? After dark? Then it remembered that that never happened when I was a kid; back in those days (how can only yesterday be history?), school events happened strictly in school time, never in life time (apart from some pleasurable activities like sports games and dances); anyway, I bet these kids can really read and write and do math and know history (such as their government chooses to teach it) and geography, and they sure didn't look grumbly or complainy about the long hours they'd just put in, they didn't look down-in-the-life like their fathers do heading home from an office at 11 pm, they were having a good time, brief as it might be, things are gonna get harder for them, in Japan it gets pretty dog-eat-dog in high school and beyond, but they're up for it, looks like; then down at the station the guys, now out of sight of school, precisely lowered their pants to mid-hip so as to look like US rapper wannabee imitations of ghetto kids imitating beltless high security prisoner icons of multiple felony coolness, so cultures aren't all that separate anymore, or as discerning as we like to think, bet these kids can't read or write as well as their parents, then this morning I saw a couple of older kids by the art college spraying each others' spiked hair red before going to class and I thought that maybe from now on kids will do what they want with their lives and it's gonna get dark a lot earlier than anyone expected, though that view may just be an increasingly functionless byproduct of my antique education, like my fountain pen...

TRUTH OF ADVERTISING

Saturday went to the impressively located Otsu City Museum of History to see an exhibition on the history of Japanese advertising from the Edo era to the 1950s or so, the ads (from woodblock prints and old wooden signs to lithographed posters and signs of paper and metal) to no surprise predominantly promoting drinks and pharmaceuticals and insecticides.

One poster showed a sexy young lady ecstatically spraying her immediate 1920 environment with deadly chemicals; another promoted an earlier version comprising a bent straw through which the kids of the household could blow, spraying toxic chemicals on the insects hovering around their elders, such fun!

But back then there were few rules; thus the surreal sight of a poster featuring a dainty woman in kimono driving a big beer truck in 1911, another young beauty in kimono touting rubber cement for men to repair their bike and truck tires with, another featured a naughty flapper girl with skirt hiked up to here holding yet another beer. In perhaps one of Japan's earliest e-commerce posters, a kimono'd woman talking on a wooden wall phone in a lithographed poster for a Tokyo kimono shop says "For the finest in kimonos, dial 18"! It was totally rad when it came out, much like what is totally rad now.

Things have changed in some major regards, though, the big illnesses then being syphilis and worms; also, the image of Bismarck was a big draw, but the general concerns then as now were bad complexion, bad breath, indigestion, headache and dandruff, one brochure touting a "medico-chemical oily tonic for dandruff scales containing cholestero-lecithin"; another blithely promoted the World Congress for Leisure Time and Recreation in Hamburg, July 23-30, 1936, with the very concept of leisure about to undergo blitzkreig, as evidenced in the wartime propaganda posters (which the Japanese visitors seemed to avoid) shouting how America had killed Japan's friends, and picturing art-deco Japanese bombers swarming over art deco American industrial sectors, others idolizing the kamikaze who stood gazing infinitely into the wind; yet others promoted Japanese war bonds, a bad investment, as things turned out.

There in a several room nutshell was the truth of (not in) advertising (and its bedfellow, politics) anywhere in the world, at any time. I left hoping that visitors weren't viewing the exhibition as merely a cute but simplistic version of a now mature and reliable medium, but as evidence that advertising is no nearer the truth now than it was then.

THE FOURTH

Well the fourth of July came and went, completely unremarked throughout Japan, by me too, just another day, until for some reason I looked to find what the date was and saw that it was THE FOURTH and at once up into the night sky of my past rose and burst the intrinsic fireworks that I guess all American expatriates no matter how long expatriated carry around in their psycholuggage, even if they've forgotten about certain of the contents, and suddenly as you're looking for your occamic razor or parfum d'etre or something, there it is, the strange paraphernalia of patriotism, that the deep expatriate sees is a modernistically shriveled vestige of long-lost tribalism.

In the momentary strangeness it felt almost as though the fourth was some sort of 'natural' metaholiday, and always had been for all races throughout written and unwritten history, but then of course history is as we make it. Still, there came that antique surge of whatever it was that used to surge back then, youth's native excitement at the prospect of the day I guess, acquired from all the festivals and picnics and clambakes and pigouts that had impended throughout my formative years, leaving a kind of tending in the inner grain of the creaking tree I've become.

And all these years down the line, having seen all I've seen and learned all I've learned about life and place, time and human nature, all the mellowing and crystallizing I've done, and all the realities that have impinged with their fragrance and thorns, here it was after all, at this moment up here in the mountains above Lake Biwa, just a regular old sunny day English speakers call Saturday and Japanese call doyobi, in what English speakers call July and the Japanese shichigatsu, in what most of the rest of the world calls 2002 and Japan calls Heisei 14.

Echo and I went swimming in the Lake, celebrating life, a much bigger topic. Freedom is not the gift of government. Conversely I don't remember ever getting excited at the emperor's birthday when I was a kid in New York; in fact I'm still not sure when it is, or what it means to be emperored; who needs nobles is not noble.

MEANDERING

Coming back from the local country dentist (who is a very good dentist by the way, and cares much about his patients as individuals, unlike the high-turnover blurry dentists in the assembly line at the big clinic way up in a high building in the heart of the city), I decided not to take the main and faster highway back home, but to meander a bit in search of the kind of moments one can only come upon in mid-meander, and so took the narrow winding road along the Lake.

I would thereby also get to see the old thatched-roof cottage again, where the beauty of its aged wood and the stone path to the door were discreetly revealed by elegant bamboo fences and the gracefully sloping arms of ancient red pines, and I could feel that old spirit, one of those last embers of the old Japan, like sitting close to a fading loved one, moving closer to a dying fire.

It was a beauty of a day, more like spring than early February, the Lake on my left meandering too (large bodies of water pretty much do as they wish), along the very road, elbowing in where it could its sapphire beauty. I tended to go slowly, it's impossible to meander at high speed, and anything more than an amble is a waste of meander. So I often had to pull over to allow passage of folks bizarrely in a hurry on a slow road, likely in haste as well to get through life itself.

Then I was at the turnoff for home, and hadn't seen the old cottage, so I turned around and went back. In its discreetness, the shy place sometimes evades the seeker with the mildest distraction. I looked carefully, but still couldn't find it; then I found that where it had been was now a pile of dirt and rock and torn-up moss with a caterpillar tractor beside it, all surrounded by a temporary fence.

The centuries-old red pines were gone, the moss-bordered stone pathway was gone, the thatched roof was gone, the old house was gone. I felt my throat close up, it was very like a death I was feeling, that I would never see that old house again and wonder at its history and be inspired, or admire the beauty of its building, sense the strength of its long long time right there before me now.

Likely there would be a quick new factory-made lakeside cottage going up there soon, take a couple of weeks to build, model B perhaps, maybe model D. Thus do souls starve and die, in worlds without spirit.