Monthly Archives: November 2021

Last Gasps of Excitement

by in Boundary Behavior, Culture, Death, Fear, Hmmm..., Japan, Politics, Risk | 19 Comments

“Hanabi”(花火, lit.: “flower fire”), or fireworks are an ancient Japanese tradition, originally used to drive away ghosts and evil spirits. They’re still a common summer activity throughout the country, with fireworks seen nightly in various locations. Perhaps most notorious, however, is the “Gion Matsuri” fireworks festival in Toyohashi.  It’s a 450-year old tradition of “tezutsu hanabi”, the firing of hand-held, gunpowder-filled, bamboo cannons into the sky, creating a shower of sparks that rain back down onto the participants.

And yes, it’s just as dangerous as it sounds, something like holding a rocket engine / potential bomb in your bare hands while it spits molten sulfur and burning white-phosphorus into the air. And yet, as many as 4,000 participants gather at the festival, each with their own, home-made cannon. The celebration was originally a rite-of-passage testing the bravery of young men, but there are no such restrictions on contemporary participants.

These kinds of dangerous festivals and activities are fairly common in Japan. The “Danjiri Matsuri”, shrine-cart racing festivals give a whole new meaning to reckless driving.  During the “Dosojin Matsuri” in the little mountain town of Nozawa Onsen, the town’s 42-year old men dare an onslaught of drunken townspeople to burn them alive.  And several participants may be seriously injured or killed in the sexennial, “Onbashira”, 10-ton log sliding festival.

But Japan also hosts the melee sport of Bo-Taoshi, and it’s a place where ordinary people can be found day-hiking on active volcanoes or along snow-covered mountain ridges with thousand-meter drops on either side.  Perhaps it’s just a manifestation of natural selection.  But if you want to take your life into your own hands, Japanese society will accommodate your wishes.
—

Around the time I returned to the US in 2004, “choppers” were a thing. Loud, obnoxious, uncomfortable, ridiculous, dangerous… these were the motorcycle equivalent of an over-sized, fluorescent middle finger screaming, “Screw it all!” Or maybe they were just a last desperate grasp at freedom from the regulations of a politically correct, everyone gets a trophy, don’t let your kids get dirty, keep everybody safe, nanny society?

APHIS, CFPB, EPA, FDA, FTC, NHTSA, OSHA, TSA… More than 70 federal regulatory agencies (pdf warning) employ hundreds of thousands of people to write and to implement regulations that keep Americans safe.  Each year, they add about 3,500 new rules to a list that now fills over 168,000 pages!  The United States is a country in which emotional or physical discomfort can be illegal, where “micro-aggressions” are actually a thing, and the self-acceptance of risk can result in virtual excommunication from society!

My motorcycle is just a Japanese 650 with some overnight bags… no middle finger whatsoever.  Still, a fourteen-hundred mile road tour during my college years on an old Ducati 900, a sport bike with a thin seat and racer-crouch, toughened me up to a little protracted discomfort.  It seems the self-inflicted sufferings of my youth prepared me for getting older. And if that’s the case, the US is in big trouble.

My patience with self absorbed, 20-something flakes and drama queens has lately waned. I’ve stopped worrying about the “sensitivity” and the “triggers”, and started responding with some hard truths, things like: Most people who enjoy life have suffered for it… or else they’re suffering to pay it off.  YouTube isn’t a success and happiness reality show.  Nobody actually gives a crap whether or not you find meaning in your life.  And yes… life tends to go badly, regardless, if you’ve never developed any self-discipline.

My grand niece calls me “ida-oba”, short for “great aunt”, one of those older folks who tends to hang out around the Asakusa part of Tokyo during celebrations. Still, I greatly enjoyed coverage of this year’s youthfully unrestrained Halloween in Shibuya, as well as South Korea’s, Itaewon area of Seoul.  Despite the overtly checked nature of East Asian societies, the massive public displays were untempered by obligatory offense at silly cultural stereotypes (the Buddhist monk dragging a gigantic cross was hilarious), occasional exposed breasts, or the guy in the giant inflatable penis.

Americans just can’t have fun, and I think that’s a big problem.  People who aren’t allowed to laugh or feel a little excitement in their lives tend to resort to less healthy things to light up their existences… alcohol, drugs, TikTok, politics, or rioting after the local tax-funded sports franchise wins a championship. And if there’s one constant in America’s belligerent hooligan history, it’s rioting.

In 1773, it started with a bunch of politically-incorrect Boston party-goers who dressed up like Native Americans and proceeded to trash the overpriced merch aboard a British ship.  Should we be surprised that two-hundred fifty years later, the revelers dress up like village idiots and vandalize the US Capitol?

A frustrated CDC announces that Americans are doomed because we didn’t stop breathing in public or contribute enough to Pfizer’s market volume. So what’s the point of sheltering-in-place now that The End is nigh, the checks quit coming in the mail, and there’s a wild-ass street party down at the next intersection?

Should we be likewise surprised that a bunch of bored, safely masked American youth decided it would be fun to get together and loot a Louis Vuitton, Nordstrom’s, and Best Buy, and then end the night at the local marijuana dispensary?  In the 70s and 80s, bored American, “Devil’s Night”, Halloween revelers painted Detroit’s night sky a pumpkin orange by setting fire to whole blocks of abandoned homes, “akiya” as they’re known in Japanese.

More than 800 of these ghost-infested crack-houses were turned into celebratory bonfires during three-nights of festivities in 1984.  The American safety pundits were appalled; but I’m seeing a missed opportunity.  In Japan, they might have called it the “Akiya Matsuri”, and turned it into an annual festival and tourist event.  In the US, it could even have included the firing of hand-held, gunpowder-filled, auto-loading cannons, raining a shower of lead onto the participants.

Sure, it would be just as dangerous as it sounds.  And yet, I suspect thousands of eager revelers from all over the US might gather at such festivals, all bringing their own cannons.  Once a rite-of-passage testing the bravery of young men, today’s version could be open to anyone as an all-inclusive celebration of natural selection.

Echoes of Severed Strings

by in A List, Boundary Behavior, Family, Identity, Loneliness, Love, Mom, Music | 23 Comments

I’m in the process of moving my home office from a bedroom at the side of the house into a brighter, but rarely used guest room / family room at the front. It’s been rather involved, requiring some remodeling, new electrical and lighting, and pulling Internet and Ethernet connections under the house. Over the last week, I’ve been finishing up the new space with a great deal of painting… lower walls, chair rails, upper walls, doors, trim, baseboards, built-in shelving… It’s actually been quite meditative.

Perhaps it was just the music playing in the background as I was painting this evening, pieces by the pianist/composer, Hania Rani.  But I ended up thinking a great deal about my mom. The beautiful music reminded me of listening to her playing the family’s old, grand piano when I was a child, a magnificent instrument that would end up at the center of our broken relationship.

My mom grew up with the piano, a rare, Steinway “Hamburg C” that dated back to the 1920s.  She had learned the traditions of Western music on it when she was young, as was customary in her family. As the oldest child and having fairly mastered its play, it was handed down to my mother a few years after we moved to the United Stated in the mid 1970s. I still remember laying on the floor of the living room at six-years old, utterly enthralled by the sound of my mom playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies, and Chopin’s Raindrop.

A grand piano is a commitment. The instrument was moved twice… before its loss, and with great care and effort. Just getting it into our first house required removing and replacing the entire back patio door, as well as some of the fence into the back yard. Getting it into our next home was rather less involved, but the movers still spent an entire day getting it carefully relocated and set up. And then there were the visits by the piano tuner every few months.

I was very familiar with all of this, as I too was expected to learn the traditions of Western music on the instrument. My piano teacher was Miss Cole, and she came by twice each week to give instruction. She was young and patient, and I liked her. Between her visits, I was expected to practice for about an hour each day, and my mom would check in on my progress fairly regularly. She’d try to help whenever I became stuck.

But I wasn’t my mom.

—

Among my earliest memories is a recollection of my mom starting to cry as she handed me off to a hospital nurse. I could understand what the people around me were saying, but I couldn’t show that I understood. The nurse was telling my mom that I would be okay, and I wanted to tell my mother that she didn’t need to cry for me. So I tried to communicate in the only way that I could. I cried too.

Many years later, when I related the memory to my mom, she recalled her puzzlement when my cries had very suddenly stopped. I had recognized my mistake… but too late. The next time she would see me, I was in the children’s surgical recovery ward with my entire left arm in a cast.

There was a great deal my mom never shared with me. Shortly after my mom died, my older sister related what a different perception she had of our mother. My mom was still young, and apparently a little wild when my sister was a kid. My sister was eight years old when I was born, and she said it seemed to change our mom.  It was as though she had found “home”.

My birth wasn’t, however, perfect.  At some point, perhaps a gene malfunctioned, or a recessive trait manifested itself.  Or maybe a cosmic ray hit some DNA.  But for whatever reason, I was born with a structural defect to my left hand, hence that post-surgical arm-length cast to prevent me from trying to use it for anything while it healed.

It’s not something that most people would notice, and it’s certainly not a big deal in the greater pantheon of various life-altering birth defects.  But it did leave me with a somewhat less than fully functional hand… sometimes painfully so.  My fingers were never going to move in the way that my mother’s could, no matter how hard I tried.  The beautiful aural landscapes my mother painted into my childhood would remain forever just beyond my grasp.  I wasn’t my mom.

The only thing worse than telling a child that she can’t do something is the ultimate defeat of arriving at the knowledge as a truth.  Years of frustration weren’t helped by watching my older sister rapidly progress to competence.  Even my younger brother moved on, sometimes performing short pieces for family.  Eventually, I demanded that I be allowed to quit the lessons; but giving up was never a familial option.

I didn’t want to destroy anything, only to share the intensity of my frustration at the constant reminders of inaccessibility.  In my mind, demonstrating that I was angry enough to accept the consequences of leaving the piano in an unusable state until the tuner could be summoned to replace some strings would be enough to make the point.  But a not quite eleven-year old mind doesn’t grasp the structural mechanics of a cast iron harp intended to hold tens-of-thousands of pounds of tension.

I was surprised at how easily my father’s serrated bandage scissors cut through the first dozen or so trios of the piano’s 230 strings, the seventh octave snapping across the soundboard like frightened birds.  In retrospect, I was probably fortunate not to have been seriously injured in the process.  But then there was another sound, the discordant report of fracturing metal as the cast iron of the irreplaceable upper harp suddenly broke… and with it, the connection to the music of my childhood.
—

Echoes, Pink Floyd

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where’s or why’s
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can?

And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
No one speaks and no one tries
No one flies around the sun

Cloudless every day you fall
Upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky