Monthly Archives: January 2015

Connections

by in Death, Family, Identity, Love | 7 Comments

Featured imageReflecting on the passage of another New Year during a late night Shinkansen trip back to Tokyo, I wrote this as an elaboration to something that I once left on a private forum at another website. I had originally decided not to post it here, as it seemed just a little too personal. But I’ve decided otherwise in the compassionate memory of Ann, a kindred spirit.

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The New Year is an important social occasion in Japan. Most of the country shuts down, people travel, friends and families come together, and temples and shrines become the centers for ceremonies. For me, the familiar pattern starts on New Year’s eve when I meet with several old friends. Usually, we’ll go to a “live-house” to hear some music and enjoy the energy. Afterward, we’ll travel to a shrine to watch joya-no-kane, the 108 tollings of the temple bell, and attend the night’s celebrations. Then, the first and second days of the New Year, I share visits and meals with various family, and perhaps attend some local events together. And on the third day, extended family traditionally converge for ohakamairi (お墓参り), a gathering at the family tomb.

Late morning in the countryside, we assemble above an expanse of rice fields bounded by hills covered in a gently swaying bamboo forest. Then walking together through a light rain, we follow a road to an old monument that looks across the carefully cultivated land below. There are many names carved into its old central stone, with characters in black to mark those whose bones lie beneath, and red for those who yet do the remembering. Elder family remove old offerings of flowers, burnt incense and sake, while those able haul buckets of water up from a canal. Then, we take turns washing the stones before new offerings are placed, incense lit, and an elder matriarch carefully recites a Buddhist sutra. My name is not inscribed upon this place, as I am “tōi kazoku”, distant family. Even so, I touch a column of darkened characters, and remember…

Despite a typically reserved, Japanese sense of social decorum regarding emotional expressions, my father and I were always very close, even during my horrible, rebellious teenage years. A compassionate Buddhist whose childhood was cast in the unforgiving wreckage of total war, whatever might have been left unsaid was somehow reflected through his demeanor. And, I was his first child. So that while he was always very kind to all of his children, I somehow suspected that I was the recipient of a few additional sentiments.

The last time I talked to my father was over a bad telephone connection at my home in Thailand. I had returned to ChiangMai only a week earlier, recovering from an illness that had left me hospitalized in Phnom Penh after six-months softened in the Cambodian heat. Despite the gaps and static, it was a nice call. He was about to depart the US for a visit to family in Japan, and said that he just wanted to check-in on me before he left. I told him that I was starting to feel much better, that things were going well in my life — and that I loved him.

It was about a week later while sitting at a desk in my little house in ChiangMai, writing of my time in Cambodia and how it had changed my feelings about sharing my life with someone else, that I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sensation that I could only describe as “absolute and unconditional love.” I actually had to stop what I was doing for a few moments as it swept over me. And afterward, I wondered what had just happened. But considering the subject of my writing and my rather less than entirely sound physical condition, I attributed the episode to a spontaneous hormonal malfunction, or perhaps even a few short-circuiting neurons.

Very late that night, I received the call that my father had died several hours earlier, right around the time I was sitting at my desk. A coincidence — perhaps.

—

For a brief time, my family spanned five-generations of mothers and daughters. My mom’s mother dearly loved her great-great granddaughter (my grand niece). “Ba-ba chan” is the Japanese children’s expression for grandmother, and it was the term the family reserved only for my mother’s mother.

My grandmother acknowledged several times how she wished she could give her great-great granddaughter a bath, but she was far too frail. She died several years ago, when my grandniece was about 18-months old. But the family kept my grandmother’s home for a long while afterward, taking time to withdraw the material accumulations of a family history from its spaces, and to say goodbye to the memories.

My grandniece first started talking about six-months after her great-great grandmother died. And a few months later, my sister and my niece and her daughter stayed at the old house one last time. That evening, my niece gave her daughter a bath. And as they were leaving the room, my grandniece looked back toward the tub, waived and called out, “Bye bye ba-ba cha!”

—

During college, I had a Vietnamese friend who once told me about her grandmother who had fled Vietnam at the end of the war. She said that for many years, her grandmother had lamented that she would die in America alone because her husband had been buried in Vietnam. Her husband’s spirit, she felt, could not find her so far from their ancestral home. Then one morning, she happily announced that he had visited her in a dream, and so they were together again.

I dreamed about my father several times for a few years after he died. One time, I even told him, “You know, you’re dead. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Hontou desu-ne,” he replied. A rhetorical, “Really?”

—

Despite being an overtly secular society, Japanese culture respects a typically east Asian social tradition that there exists a metaphysical connection between people whose lives become entwined (entangled?), even after death. And many believe that young children still bear some connection to the Buddha-nature, or the nothingness from which our spirits and all material reality emerges, and to which it returns.

I can’t say that I know, or even believe that any of this is true. But I like the ideas. I like to think that my dad let me know how much he loved me, and that he hung around for awhile until I was ready to let him go. I like to think that my grandmother had a chance to wave a sweet goodbye to her great-great granddaughter. I like to think that our loved-ones and our ancestors watch over us, and that our lives somehow amount to more than the sum of their moments in this transitory existence. Or perhaps, as someone once said, such thinking is little more than so much “sophomoric bullshit.”

The voice of a rebellious teenager telling her father that his faith was merely ridiculous superstition still rings in my ears. The words were neither insincere nor meant to cause harm; they were merely an assertion of my emerging self. But I still regret them. It would take me another lifetime to realize the transcendental nature of human experiences like humaneness, compassion, and love, and I would only briefly get to share this discovery with my aging father over a crappy phone connection. And maybe that’s the point of those monuments to the souls who live in our memories.

Temple bells toll in the promise of another New Year, but we lose our places as the pattern becomes ever more vague. So we trace the outlines of names through the past, and bear witness to the connections. And despite my own starkly faithless existence, I manage to feel just a little of the quiet magic that my father seemed to understand so well. Perhaps the truth of such matters is simply how we choose to see things, the existential sentiment captured in the last words of a film from the 70’s…
“Life is a state-of-mind.“

Greener Grass, and Lightness Traveling

by in Boundary Behavior, Luminous Aether | 2 Comments

It’s the earliest thing I can remember, I think… I could roll onto my side and extend my hand to touch what I had discovered to be within my reach. They were the familiar toys of an infant, and I had found that there-ness in vision corresponded to there-ness in touch. So I labored to grasp a spinning butterfly. But I couldn’t. I could see it, and so I knew that it was there. But whirling about as it rolled inside a transparent sphere, I suddenly understood that it was in a different space. It was in a place that was separate from my own — a place that I could know about, but that I couldn’t touch — and, I wanted to go there.

They go back pretty far, my memories, bits and pieces anyway — well beyond what Sigmund Freud called the “infantile amnesia” stage. And I’m pretty certain most are reasonably accurate, since many events were also recalled by someone else. My older sister also remembered my excitement as she held me when I was the only one to see my father as we drove past him in our car. And I remember her lifting me up to the sink, and pulling myself up to stand, and my father discovering that I had taught myself to walk, and my first realization that I could form a word.

Farther back, I remember peering up at my distraught mother as she handed me over to a hospital nurse when I was an infant. Unable to speak, I endeavored to communicate reassurance in the only way that I could — by crying. But recognizing a miscommunication, I went abruptly silent. Decades later, my mom would also recall the strange episode as I described it to her from my own perspective. But I remember even more from that adventure, a journey to the other side of the door into the hospital’s pediatric ward.

Harvard Medical School psychologist, Deirdre Barrett, wrote that early recollections among females is an indicator of dominance. (Note for Pam, should you read this: Dr. Barrett also wrote “The Pregnant Man.”) And maybe dominance does play a part. But my own intuitions tell me there’s something else at work in that which has become stuck within my memories… nomadic genes, or an ancestral curiosity, perhaps?

Wandering off to explore the hilly passages of our west Tokyo neighborhood at the age of three, it would be hours before my fearful but contrite mother and the neighborhood’s “chuzaisho,” or residential policeman would find me. But two-years later, home itself would abruptly and unapologetically wander across the Pacific, and I would again learn to speak and to master the mechanisms of motion. Then reaching out to touch a summer sea and winter snows, I would inevitably stray once more.

Since those times, many of the family homes have changed. Some have moved, others were abandoned, and there are a few new places where the kindred gather. But these days, it seemsFeatured image that I am merely an occasional, though always welcomed guest — or a mourner for those who labored to keep the hearth so warm. Paths converge at a shrine above a rice field where the family gathers its ashes.

Having decided to sell the house I’ve been returning to for the last ten years, someone asked if it bothered me. “Of course,” I replied. “It means I have to sort through all the crap that’s accumulated over the last decade.” The dust that settles while sitting in one place too long becomes as ballast, a burden on lightness traveling.

So, the too many square-feet of possessions reduce to that deemed worthy of guardianship. And with one final, almost ceremonial act of purification performed by the maintenance guys who clear the pine needles from the roof, the last burden is lifted. A few days later, stagers from the brokerage house fill the vacant spaces with more things, fake possessions so that it will look like a home — someone’s home, anyway. Not mine.

“Home,” it’s a curious idea. It’s a place where we recognize the things that accumulate around ourselves — objects, surroundings, faces, feelings… the featherings of a cozy nest. It’s safe, and it’s comfortable. But it’s also a place of habituation, a form of memory that allows the world around a person to go unnoticed, like the sound of a heater on a cold night. And I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

I’ve traveled enough to understand what it means to survive in a place where no sound can go unheeded, and where habituation can mean death — or worse. And there is worse when one yields to despair. Promise moves sights to focus on other places — places that can be seen, or perhaps merely imagined — just not touched. But that won’t keep people from trying.

Warm rain falling on a rice field; there was never any greener grass. And these days, my seasoned joints appreciate a thick futon, and I will put an extra piece of oak into the wood stove on cold nights. But the rumbling heat and the dancing firelight from within keep me awake at the edge of the darkness, and I hear some untamed spirit call in the distance, from another space. And I reach out, and I want to be there.

Fire, Fear and Trembling

by in A List, Boundary Behavior, Culture, Death, Existentialism, Fear, Identity, Japan, Philosophy, Risk | 6 Comments

“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily.  To not dare is to lose oneself.“
~Soren Kierkegaard

“Yakudoshi” is the variously interpreted Japanese tradition of unlucky ages. And in the little mountain town of Nozawa Onsen, the generally agreed upon ages of ill-fortune for its men are those of 25 and 42 years. So in an annual ceremony of defiance known as the Dosojin Matsuri (道祖神祭り), a tall, mushroom-shaped shrine of grass and bamboo is carefully-constructed in the upper reaches of the town. And on the night of January 15th, the town’s 42-year old men, whose ages spoken as digits in Japanese sound like the expression meaning “to die” climb to its top and dare the villagers to burn it down. Below, the town’s unlucky 25-year old men are tasked the dubious honor of defending this ceremonial tinderbox from a drunken onslaught of townspeople carrying torches.

While I’m not particularly superstitious about my age, it does seem that I’ve reached the point where I have started to feel the losses of close friends. A few years back, a long-time friend from my high school days and her boyfriend were killed together in an avalanche while attempting to ski a couloir in the Sierra Nevadas. I had long ago settled into a more risk-managed approach to my own back-country skiing, but I can’t fault her judgment. She understood the risks, probably far better than most, but accepted that they were worth the payoff. And in that regard, everyday human existence involves some degree of risk-benefit analysis at the individual level.

Most of the time, the risks we take are relatively small and well-understood — a new purchase, a managed activity… But sometimes the exposure is greater, and the demand for accurate analysis becomes more significant. Unfortunately, humans aren’t always very good at assessing risk. It seems to be a part of human-nature to mistake our own sense of control over risk-taking for a lowered exposure to risk itself. And conversely, we have a powerful, instinctive aversion to involuntary risk, even when it’s extremely low. We see this in feelings about flying versus driving, and in the basis for much in daily behaviors from speeding on public streets to smoking a cigarette at break time.

This is a commonly cited error in human judgment (particularly among actuarial statisticians). But the individual assessment of risk versus benefit isn’t simply a matter of arithmetic; the value of a life is rather more complicated than a mere tally of years. There’s an elusive, yet crucial, qualitative aspect based in each person’s subjective experience. I would forget this for awhile after college, along with my father’s words to me as a teenager (loosely translated from Japanese), “I have no advice as to what you choose to do with your life, a doctor or a ski-instructor. Just be certain that you have the passion to do it well.“

Regardless, simply performing my role as a soulless facilitator and obedient consumer, a thin veneer of happiness-from-security had covered my eyes. About the only thing that even whispered “passion” at that point in my life was the motorcycle hiding in a corner of my garage. And so I took a different kind of risk in a search for some meaning beyond, and made a leap.
It was a very long way down.

Several years later, I would be living in southeast Asia when word would arrive that my father had very suddenly died.  And with three supportive friends accompanying me back to the place of my birth, I would experience the rituals of his two-day long, Japanese Buddhist funeral while recovering from a combination of sleep-deprivation and Dengue.

Toward the end of such ceremonies, the living take turns placing the cremated bones of the dead, one by one into the container that will be placed beneath the family marker. The bones are moved by pairs of friends or relatives, each using a pair of “hashi” (chopsticks), one willow and one bamboo, symbolizing the transition from birth to death. The partners may choose a bone that represents something significant to them, a vertebra to represent the Buddha, a piece of skull for intelligence, or a rib for protection. My future husband and I moved the largest leg bone we could find. My father was a traveler.

But the traveling lasts not an eternity, as I was suddenly reminded again last summer. Losing one of those compassionate and treasured companions who had accompanied me at the end of my father’s journey, Harry was one of the most adventurous people I’ve ever known. Having skied remote couloirs in the Canadian Rockies, traveled the African continent by motorcycle, and climbed caves in the mountains of northern Thailand and Laos, he had a rare passion for experiencing life. Regardless, his own journey would end in a moment of quiet.

Ultimately, there is no method of risk-aversion for death. The finite quality of life created by our own mortality is at once a great weight and a great inspiration. It might be an unpleasant thought at first, but to accept life as a limited condition motivates the pursuit of quality while we still live. The journey itself becomes the purpose; the real risk is thinking that one can somehow “stay put.” In the words of Robert Duvall’s philosophical cowboy character from the film, Broken Trail, “We’re all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth ’til death. We travel between the eternities.”

So we’re all travelers; only our chosen routes differ. Regardless, we ultimately arrive at the same destination. And if that’s the case, then the real assessment of personal risk should be based in how to make the move, in the quality of the journey, in the passionate experience of life itself. It is to watch our momentary footing and decide where and how to step, and when to make the leaps. So perhaps it’s to that end that the Japanese have a fair number of traditional festivals (“matsuri”) that involve at least some degree of significant risk.

This year, snow fell as the first of the torch-bearing townspeople approached through the gathered crowd, and the 25-year old men determinedly pushed them back with a combination of youthful energy and long sticks.Featured image The men atop the shrine defiantly hurled snow and tufts of grass at the threatening crowd below, even as more men with torches pushed their way closer. The fiery, alcohol-fueled melee lasted for about an hour, eventually covering the 25-year olds’ faces in sweat and soot before exhausting their inevitably futile efforts. And then, a little after 10:00 PM, came the fateful conflagration from which it seemed everyone just barely escaped.

A half-hour later, I could feel the heat among the intoxicated crowd as the towering shrine collapsed in a shower of sparks. But it was more than just the flames that filled the atmosphere with energy; it was a cathartic recognition of survival, a realization that every moment of life in fact cheats death. And in that way, it was an invitation to each of those who had witnessed this fiery spectacle to face their own fear and trembling, and thus work out a means for salvation in the here-and-now. It is to dare to live, and to know in that moment that we are alive.

CO2 and Suffering

by in Japan | 19 Comments

Flight_in

Another 5,000+ air miles spewing CO2 into the stratosphere, and I am again reminded just how much energy Americans waste. Upon arriving at my little place in Tokyo, I pull on a sweatshirt as a buffer against the chill while noticing that my house-mate, Yuki, has replaced all of the lighting with LED bulbs (which to be fair, have been available at reasonable prices in Japan for many years). Regardless, the first thing I do is run about 250-liters (65 gallons) of scalding-hot water from an on-demand heater into the soaker tub. I salve my conscience by tossing my travel laundry into the nearby washer/dryer that will re-use some of it for a rinse cycle after the bath’s third use by Yuki’s daughter. Efficiency isn’t exactly an American tradition, but that doesn’t mean I can’t play the game.

While I winter in Japan, Yuki usually does some extra driving in her Japanese-sized, Toyota, mini-SUV. As much as I prefer the relative comfort of the Shinkansen (“bullet train”) when traveling between cities, lugging ski gear up to the Zao and Nozawa onsens (hot-springs) makes driving an option rather less likely to result in breaking Public Transportation Rule-of-Etiquette number-16 (“Please do it on the mountain.“).  Nevertheless, it’s difficult to ignore that she fills up at fuel stations with five-dollar-plus per gallon gasoline, which by my intuitive estimates should burn-through about 30,000 yen ($250) over several days of touring the countryside. But her responses to offers of cash to offset the expense reminds me that Yuki isn’t an American.

Based upon what will need to go into the tank of my self-propelled Howitzer for the drive home from the airport when I return to the States, perhaps I should be forgiven the miscalculation — if not the waste. In contrast, Yuki’s car could get us just about half way back to the US on my American-sized estimate. The little 4×4 has but a forty-liter (10-gallon) fuel tank to feed its mere American motorcycle size, 1.3-liter motor. And by her own admission, she usually fills it only half-way to save weight for going up hills — and as an excuse to stop occasionally for snacks and to use the toilet. Granted, it doesn’t have the ground-clearance of my comparative monster-truck back home. But getting the car stuck in the snow simply provides an excuse to watch a couple of sturdy young men lift it out.

While in Tokyo, as in most Japanese cities, there isn’t much need for a car though. Mass transportation is an integral part of the infrastructure for the prefecture’s 13-million or so residents, all of whom can apparently be packed into just three trains during the morning commute. No matter, a constant stream of precisely-timed rail traffic efficiently connects every ward, with stations sometimes spaced walking distances hosting trains every few minutes while swarms of buses course between. And at that, reaching one’s destination is simply a matter of deciphering the Gordian-knot of rail lines, interchanges and stops. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the Japanese feel free to drink so much, especially after work — also explaining the rolling parties that can characterize a late-night commuter ride home.

And this also reveals much about how the Japanese manage to power an ultra-modern nation on half of the per-capita energy consumed by Americans, all while committing an apparently significant share of its now nuclear-deficient electrical grid to blasting 160 decibel rock-music through the nights in a vast network of strobe-lit, secret underground nightclubs. Put simply, the Japanese are willing to suffer — cramped apartments, gutless cars, frigid nights, packed commuter trains, rain-soaked bus stops, ringing ears… The world is becoming an ever more crowded place in which to vie for resources, but the Japanese culture already reflects centuries of practiced adaptation to that reality. And if that’s the case, we Americans are doomed — although we probably won’t notice the end when it happens.

Americans are perhaps better at feigning an interest in the welfare of all mankind, but we are at heart the accomplished consumers of that which contributes to our own comfort. And yeah, I’m an American too. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that the first thing I’ll do upon returning to my home in the States is to turn its fracked natural-gas fueled forced-air heater up to Toasty Gaijin setting before throwing some of the local forest into my wood-stove. And after weeks spent sleeping in a thick hoodie in rooms feebly warmed by the heated floor under my futon, may six-feet of wet snow slide from the roof onto anyone who stands between me and an impenetrable blanket of luxuriously soothing air oozing from every vent in my American-sized Fortress-of-Solitude.

Perhaps it’s a Buddhist thing for the Japanese, suffering being the First Noble Truth. On the other hand, we Americans prefer to put off the suffering part for as long as possible — and then simply drown it out with excess. It may not be particularly cooperative, efficient, or refined. But, unlike that Japanese “salaryman” passed-out across the reserved seating of a late-night commuter-train, we also don’t need to break Public Transportation Rule-of-Etiquette number-2 (“Please do it at home.“). Now if I could just figure out how to get the several-thousand liters of drought-rarefied water filling my hot tub powered up to steamy Japanese onsen temperature…