Category Archives: A List

The Dragon in the Darkness

by in A List, Boundary Behavior, Culture, History, Japan, Mystery, Risk | 12 Comments

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath .“
― William Shakespeare, King Lear.

Prompted by an earlier post regarding the Princess Takiyasha, I decided to make a side trip to the Shinto shrine where she was said to have acquired the power to take revenge for the death of her father. The particular shrine is a part of the “Kifune” shrine complex, located in the mountains to the north of Kyōto, not far from the site of Kurama-dera. 

The “kami”, or Shinto deity that is said to occupy the shrine, and consequently the one whom the princess would have called upon, is that of “Okami-no-kami” (淤加美神), also known as “Kuraokami” (闇龗).  Kuraokami is a significant Shinto deity whose origin is explained as an unintended consequence of the anger of the primordial god, Izanagi.

According to Japanese mythology, the gods, Izanagi and his sister-wife Izanami, were the last of seven generations of primordial deities formed from the union of Heaven and Earth.  Izanami would give birth to the Japanese archipelago as well as many of the Japanese deities of nature, including the sun goddess, Amaterasu.

Among the very last of their offspring, however, was Kuraokami. Japanese mythology records that she was born from the blood of the diety, “Kagu-tsuchi”, the god of fire. When his beloved Izanami was burned to death during Kagu-tsuchi’s birth, Izanagi became enraged and killed his son. But some of Kagu-tsuchi’s fiery blood dripped from the hilt of Izanagi’s sword, falling into the sea, giving rise to Kuraokami.

Kuraokami is considered an extraordinarily powerful deity of winter and of the north, of great storms, rain and snow, strength, power, and protection, and is said to dwell in dark canyons. Regarding the kanji, or Chinese-derived logographic characters used to reference the deity as “Okami-no-kami” (淤加美神), the first two represent an ancient Japanese allusion to a dragon, while the last two symbolize a “beautiful god”. In English this might translate as, “Beautiful Dragon God”. The kanji for “Kuraokami” (闇龗) translate literally as “Darkness  Dragon”, referencing the darkness of the canyons in which the deity is said to reside.

“Ryū” (龍) or “tatsu” (竜) are common, contemporary Japanese terms of general reference to dragons. Unlike the fire-breathing dragons of Western culture, the dragons of East Asia have long, serpentine bodies, don’t require wings to fly, and are usually associated with water. They are nature spirits, rarely concerning themselves in human matters other than as an indirect consequence of their actions. Tatsu will, however, accept worship and sacrifices, sometimes involuntary, and may choose to occupy shrines maintained as sacred dwellings.

Tatsu are among the most ancient creatures in written Japanese mythologies. Fused into the ancient water deities from earlier Japanese traditions, they were adaptations of the dragons from both Chinese and Indian mythologies. Written accounts of tatsu as “Okami” (龗), including Kuraokami, appear in the Japanese “Kojiki” (712AD), and the “Nihon-Shoki” or “Nihongi” (720AD).  Okami are the great dragons, the kanji for such deities alluding to the powers of rain and snow, and the sounds of thunder.

To call upon Kuraokami, the Princess Takiyasha would have engaged in “ushi no toki mairi” (丑の時参り), or an “ox-hour shrine-visit” (between 1:00AM and 3:00AM). This is an ancient Japanese curse ritual, performed in various forms for millennia.

A Shinto shrine is typically said to be the exclusive domain of the deity it houses during the hours of darkness. Consequently, shrine visits and requests for blessings ordinarily take place during daylight hours (or before 5:00PM). Visits during the hours of the Ox are considered most likely to awaken a deity’s “ara-mitama”.

“Mitama” is a Shintō reference to an aspect of a spirit’s power. For example, nigi-mitama is the power to create harmony or unity, and saki-mitama is a power of blessing. But the ara-mitama is the power of power over others, and especially that of vengeance. Edo-era descriptions of ushi no toki mairi traditionally depict a lone female, dressed in white, and wearing three lit candles upon her head.  The ritual often includes the nailing of an effigy onto a sacred tree, and is repeated over at least seven nights.

The Kifune Shrine in Kyōto is famously associated with ushi no toki mairi, which according to some accounts was performed twenty-four times by the Princess Takiyasha. And while the shrine isn’t open to the public during the hours of the Ox, it is open after dark (8:00PM).

The Kifune Okumiya Shrine, or the “Rear Shrine” in the northern mountains of Kyōto is fairly well known, but not so easily accessed.  From Demachiyanagi Station on the Eizan Electric Railway in the city of Kyōto, it’s possible to reach Kibuneguchi Station at the lower split of the canyon leading to the line’s last station at Kurama. From there, the rail line continues up the right canyon. However, the Kifune Rear Shrine is about a 30-minute walk along a narrow, one-lane road up the left canyon.

Reaching the shrine entrance and climbing the long, but well-lit, ancient stone stairway, I reach the inner shrine well after sunset. The little island of man-made light in an otherwise impenetrably dark wilderness gives the entire place a beautifully mysterious atmosphere.

Imagining the illumination cast by little more than a trio of flickering candles, the moving shadows might have concealed anything… perhaps even a brilliantly glistening dragon hidden within the darkness.  Such unseen proximity to the immensity of a force-of-nature, created from the blood of fire itself and the power of the sea, at once magnificent and terrifying in its indifference…
to dare awaken such a being.

Woodblock Print (ukiyo-e):
Etchû Province: Takiyasha-hime, from the series The Sixty-odd Provinces of Great Japan
「大日本六十餘州之内　越中　滝夜叉姫」(Dai Nihon rokujûyoshû no uchi)
Utagawa Kunisada I (1786–1864)
Edo period, approx. 1845 (Kôka 2)

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

August 19, 1945

by in A List, Boundary Behavior, Japan, Politics, Science, War | 36 Comments

“What is history but a fable agreed upon?“
-Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenell, L’Origine des Fables (Of the Origin of Fables), 1728.

Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II is usually ascribed to two factors, the invasion of Japan’s northern territory of Sakhalin by the Soviets, and the dropping of two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, there remained a faction among Japan’s military that wanted to fight on to the very last, leading a civilian army wielding farm implements if necessary.  Starting in June of 1945, this will was reflected in a propaganda campaign ominously called, “The Glorious Death of One Hundred Million“.

Leaders within the United States were well aware of this.  They understood that a direct invasion of Japan would have taken years with perhaps a million Allied casualties, and resulted in the deaths of many millions of Japanese civilians.  Against this backdrop, President Harry S. Truman had to make the terrible decision to allow the US military to employ the use of atomic weapons on Japan.

The ethical implications of Truman’s decision can be debated. But as Japan remained a nation guided by a military leadership that had unleashed untold devastation and suffering across Asia and the Pacific, no nation upon which it had declared war could accept anything less than its unconditional surrender. 

It’s often stated that the United States’ use of the two atomic bombs in World War II was a bluff. The first was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, and the second on Nagasaki.  But it wasn’t clear if any more of these weapons actually existed.  Due to the known difficulties in refining the particular type, or “isotope“, of Uranium intended for use in atomic bombs, many Japanese military leaders and scientists suspected that the Americans had no more of them.  And ironically, had the Japanese known just how painstakingly slow and difficult the refining process really was, they could accurately have concluded that the US had but a single atomic bomb.

In fact, the US had expended nearly all of its supply of very slowly accumulating, “enriched” Uranium-235 in the heart of just the relatively simple atomic bomb that exploded over the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.  And this underscores the significance of the atomic bomb dropped by the B-29 “Bockscar”, detonating 1,800-feet above the dome of the Urakami Cathedral in the city of Nagasaki just three days later.  What the Japanese didn’t know was that at White Sands in New Mexico, American scientists had functionally demonstrated an atomic bomb that used another element altogether to generate its explosive chain reaction.

The bombs that exploded both in New Mexico and over Nagasaki utilized a man-made element, Plutonium. Both of these bombs were extraordinarily complex mechanisms, designed to very precisely implode a sphere of Plutonium-239, and relatively plentiful Uranium-238.  Despite their complexity, the use of these materials meant that these bombs could be created almost as quickly as they could be built.

It’s a common misconception that there were no more atomic bombs.  In fact, the next one had already been moved to Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands, and was ready to be dropped on the 19th of August.  After that, another could have been dropped on the 1st of September, and two more were nearing completion. Had Japan not surrendered, at least four more cities could have been obliterated by already existing weapons. And by October, more would have been available at a rate of about one bomb every ten-days. 

Historians have never concluded which cities would have been next, but it’s likely that Kokura with a population of around 130,000 would have been the target for the 19th of August.  Located at a strategic passage between two of Japan’s main islands, it was the original target for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.  And as with Hiroshima and much of Nagasaki, Kokura was among few cities in Japan spared the firebombings that had incinerated virtually all of the country’s larger population centers by that point in the war.  But lack of visibility over Kokura due to cloud cover and smoke from a previous day’s incendiary attack on the adjacent city of Yahata had compelled shifting the plan to its secondary target. 

Whether or not the US would have bombed Tokyo is debatable. There was little of the city left standing in the wake of repeated firebombings. Military leaders had considered killing Emperor Hirohito and his inner circle by bombing the Tokyo Imperial Palace. However, political leaders in the US didn’t want to risk leaving Japan without leadership for negotiations. The seaports at Yokosuka in Tokyo Bay might have been targeted.  And it’s possible that Sapporo or Hakodate on the northern island of Hokkaido might have been destroyed as warnings to an approaching Soviet military. Fortunately, all of these remain in the realm of mere speculation.

At 12:00 noon on August 15, 1945, the Japanese people heard the voice of the Emperor of Japan over the radio for the very first time in the, “Jewel Voice Broadcast”.  Speaking in the formal, rarefied language of Japanese aristocracy, many commoners needed to hear translations of the emperor’s announcement that Japan would accept the Potsdam Declaration, effectively marking the country’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. Explaining this decision, he in part referred to the atomic bomb. “…the power of which to do damage is truly incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.“

To Perish in Contentment

by in A List, Culture, Death, Environment, Existentialism, Family, Fear, Fiction, Hmmm..., Humanity, Identity, Love, Luminous Aether, Risk, Science | 18 Comments

“生於憂患，死於安樂”  (“Strive in hard times, perish in contentment.”)
– Meng Zi (371-289 BCE)

It was in the tenth month of 2351 that I decided to die. It was a drawn out and well-considered decision, yet required almost two decades to validate with The Assembly.  Bureaucracy, it seems, remains among those ageless things, endlessly pondering itself as if to scorn the frightened bird of time’s passage.

The day of my dying arrived the same as every other. But in those years, the procedure could be carried out only at the central office of the Ministry of Bio-Data.  A microscopic tissue sample served as my physical contribution to a history, its infinitesimal record of my existence instantaneously frozen.  And then, the tiny pinprick of death, the protein that would forever seize the bio-machines that so perfectly maintained the singular repository of genetic information within each of my cells.

Those artificial molecules unique to just my DNA would be forever broken, tagged as “alien” by my own immune system.  Each of the cells that compose my body would then live and die as they had when nature prevailed over human ingenuity. Biological mechanisms evolved through eons of natural selection would continue replicating the chemistry in which was contained the blueprint of my physical existence. And they would do so with amazing accuracy.

Even so, it wouldn’t be with the unvarying precision of those proprietary bio-machines that had bestowed practical immortality upon each of the Earth’s twenty-five billion scintillating lights of humanity. Those mechanisms of nature would occasionally make mistakes, and some would accumulate. I would age in ways that would be seen. And I knew what it looked like.

The woman was with her young daughter. The little girl was perhaps a few years old, her unseasoned eyes focused upon a world where everything was still new. The energy seemed to transfer to her mother, though I knew… everybody knew that the woman was dying. Bit by bit, entropy was stealing away the very pattern of her being.

She is almost certainly long dead by now, though I still recall that moment clearly.  Leaning down to her child, she spoke and pointed into the distance.  I could see the girl’s expression change as her eyes fixed upon something that I couldn’t see.  But in that moment, it dawned on me that I was witnessing genuine immortality, a conveyance of something beyond the mere physical patterns of molecules.

Human knowledge had taken us as far as it could. Technological discoveries starting in the mid 21st-century had fundamentally altered the human condition. The struggle to survive in an over-stressed  environment had resulted in the development of cleaner and more efficient technologies.  The first practical nuclear fusion changed everything.

The cheap, clean and seemingly endless energy these compact reactors provided allowed for the entire world’s electrification.  But more importantly, they provided the energy necessary for the mass-manufacture of fertilizers, and for water desalinization. Food and clean water ceased to limit populations; but it didn’t bring equality. That would come with the development of neuro-prosthetics.

A group of mathematicians among the early adopters of computational brain implants developed “Quantum Geometry”, presenting physics and cosmology with the foundation for a single, concise description of the workings of our universe.  Technologically-enhanced intellect and its free access to information went on to become the “great equalizers”, but only among those willing to abandon the past. The last clinging vestige of distinct cultures withered as anachronisms before the pragmatic power of knowledge.  Near the end of the 21st-century, human society would first unify within an early form of what would come to be known as, “The Assembly”.

Around that time, the sciences also converged upon the lonely conclusion that humans are almost certainly the only sentient life in the universe. But by 2100, there were almost fourteen-billion of us.  Save for the few thousand adventurous spirits precariously scratching out existences on the Moon and Mars, we had spread into every corner of the planet.  And we were about to become immortal.

Lifespans had already been extended such that the vast majority of deaths were due to accidents, unusual genetic diseases, or rare cases of suicide. Nearly every organ in the human body could be easily replaced with a machine or re-grown in a lab, keeping the bulk of humanity just ahead of death by the effects of old-age.  And then in the very early years of the 22nd-century, “the last science” prevailed over even that, with the development of template DNA polymerase.

These human-made molecular machines, each version created specifically for its individual host, would replicate that person’s DNA with absolute precision. They could even counteract genetic errors inherited from birth, and repair the occasional mistakes made by a cell’s natural biological machinery.  In 2116, the first few humans ceased aging.

Within a just a few years, the process had become available to nearly anyone.  Death itself rapidly faded into anachronism.  It was around that time, in my fifty-sixth year, that I had a template created for myself.   Not long after, access became a guaranteed right to each of the more than 18-billion humans by then straining the last of those once seemingly inexhaustible resources the Earth had to offer.

The Lunar and Martian human colonies remained small, limited to their own resources as the Earth had none to spare.  Humanity had become Earth-bound, held down by the weight of its own needs.  Images of the early-mid 21st-century re-entered the public consciousness as humanity searched for a way to keep that which it had created for itself, the reassurance of a comfortable life in which nothing changed.

Still, the ponderous gears of governance churned slowly through the subsequent decades, until The Assembly eventually finalized the attachment of a responsibility to the right.  At twenty-five billion, it was agreed, humanity would have reached its earthly limit.  And thus for the fleeting wing-beat of almost two centuries, a world without the spark of youth has been the price of immortality…

And immortality, the price to bear a child.

Washing the Rice Bowls

by in A List, Death, Existentialism, Family, Loneliness, Luminous Aether, Philosophy | 17 Comments

A close friend from my college days, “Lia”, contacted me a few weeks back to let me know that her mom had died. It wasn’t unexpected. Well into her nineties, she had been in poor health for the last few years.

After a long phone call, I sat in silence for awhile. Then, I went into the kitchen and took my time carefully washing some good, short-grain, sweet, sushi rice. A single serving and some filtered water went into the cooker. What emerged went into a lone, blue rice bowl.  I ate the rice in silence.

And then, I carefully washed the bowl.

—

I met Lia’s mom during either my first or second year in college in southern California.  Lia was a Chem, and I had a couple of classes with her before I decided to ditch the idea of a Pre-Med. She was also a fairly serious student, though surprisingly adventurous in her free time.

On several occasions, I accompanied Lia to her parents’ home, usually after her father had been admitted to the hospital due to a recurring leukemia. She’d look in on her mom and make sure that she was alright. And then Lia and I would head off to do something together.

Lia would always apologize for the side-trips, but I really didn’t mind. Her mom was an intelligent and curious person, and I liked talking with her. One Fourth-of-July, I even accompanied Lia for a family gathering at her parents’ home.

The years in college passed, and Lia moved on to a career and a graduate program in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, I finagled my way into my own thing. But we stayed in touch, getting together several times every year. It was just around the time I’d started my own graduate work that Lia’s dad died. She said that she was surprised how much it had affected her.

A few months later, I was making one of my twice-weekly trips down the I-5, shuttling some mechanical parts from my project through California’s central valley. It was a hot and gray summer day, and the air-conditioner on my old Toyota pickup consisted of a spray-bottle filled with water and a rolled-down window through which a familiar stench assaulted my senses.

I still remember the moment as I drove past Kettleman City, which was at the time a literal pile-of-shit. I looked over to see the cattle populating a vast feed-lot next to the highway, standing shoulder-to-shoulder upon a mountain of their own excrement. Suddenly, every uncertainty and self-doubt, every second-guess or frustration, every fear of utter failure flooded into my awareness like the smell of inevitable slaughter. This was my life.

A few hours later, I dropped off the parts at Cal Poly Pomona, where they would be re-machined according to a twice-weekly schedule. Their replacements in the rotation were loaded into the back of my old truck, ready for the trip back up in a few days. And then, I sat in the college parking lot, overwhelmed by the thought of driving through city traffic back to my place near the university. I just couldn’t go any further. And then I remembered that Lia’s mom lived not too far from the college.

For the next several months, I stopped by to visit with her at least once a week, usually right after my Cal Poly drop-offs. Most of the time, I would only stay for an hour or so, long enough to decompress from the tedium of my drives. But there were a couple of times when we talked for hours, sometimes eating dinner together while sharing stories about our lives. One night, she asked about my Buddhist upbringing, curious how it had colored my perspective of life. My response was to share a parable that my dad had told me when I was young…

A devoted young monk had come to a monastery, committed to finding enlightenment. To this end, he had taken upon himself the task of meditation upon rubbing bricks together until they were as polished as mirrors. Of course, this was an impossible task, and so the monk meditated constantly. Day and night, he rubbed bricks together, scraping them back-and-forth until they were ground into dust.

Eventually tiring of the young monk’s incessant grinding, the other monks went to their teacher, imploring him to do something. The perpetual noise was keeping others awake at night and interfered with their own meditations. And the new monk neglected the temple, contributing nothing while creating a terrible mess. And so the teacher went to speak with him.

“Have you found anything in your meditations?” he asked the young monk.

The young monk responded that he had not. “I don’t understand,” he continued. “I have committed myself entirely to this meditation, but it has not brought me any closer to enlightenment.”

“Perhaps you are meditating on the wrong thing?” advised the teacher.

“Then upon what should I meditate?” asked the young monk.

His teacher raised a hand toward the monastery. “What needs doing?” he asked.

The young monk was puzzled, but looked around and saw a stack of rice bowls next to a wash-basin. “The rice bowls need washing,” he replied.

“Then wash the rice bowls,” implored his teacher.
—

It was around a year later, my graduate work since finished and having moved on to another project in Seattle, when a mysterious box arrived in the mail. Inside was a single rice bowl, and a note from Lia’s mom. She thanked me for coming to visit her during what she explained had been a low point in her life, after having lost her husband. Convincing her to “wash the rice bowls”, she said, had given her something worthwhile upon which to meditate.

I wrote Lia’s mom a long letter that night, letting her know that the favor had been reciprocated.  In a moment of lost direction, it had allowed me the chance to see my own rice bowls.

And then, I called my dad.

Sacred Places

by in A List, Altitude, Hmmm..., Identity, Japan, Luminous Aether, Philosophy | 13 Comments

“In Japan, people have worshiped mountains since ancient times. These days, I enter the hills wishing to be accepted by the yama no kami, the mountain gods. I ask to return safely, to be given some experience of beauty and to be taught some good way to shape my own life.”
– Kei Taniguchi, translated from Japanese by Hiko Ito

—

Kurama is the last station on the Eizan line, north from Kyoto. The line’s route negotiates the beautiful Anba River canyon up to the little mountain town, scarcely more than a small collection of houses and businesses along each side of a single-lane road.  In the middle of town, not far from the station, is a broad stairway that marks the start of a route up the mountainside.  Hidden high in the forests to the north is the Buddhist temple of Kurama-dera, first established some time around 800AD.

Kurama-dera is actually a fairly well-known temple complex due to an October fire-festival that takes place at Yuki-Jinja, an adjacent shrine. But it’s also known among some for its place in the history of “Reiki”, a type of energy healing practice.  The temple currently belongs to its own “Kurama-Kokyo” sect of Buddhism.  But in the years before 1949, it was associated with the “Tendai” sect, which allowed for a syncretic relationship with native Japanese Shinto beliefs.  And in 1922 it was recorded as the location where Mikao Usui, or “Usui-Sensei”, was said to have rediscovered Reiki.

Japan’s tacitly secular society discourages most Reiki practitioners from revealing much about their beliefs, which are broadly considered to be little more than a pseudo-science. But the friend I was accompanying up the mountain that day had decided to share her beliefs with me after a curious experience with a nasty morning headache – my own. Enthusiastically, she had encouraged a day trip to Kyoto, and then up to Kurama-dera, where she had suggested that I could experience the source of that energy for myself.

It’s about an hour-and-a-half hike up the mountain to the temple complex. But the forests above the town of Kurama are incredibly serene and beautiful, so frequent stops added about another half-hour to our journey. The temple itself is a collection of shrines and buildings on a large terrace that overlooks a forested valley. Located directly in front of the main temple building is a large hexagonal pattern of flat stones known as the “Kongoshō”.  At the center is a triangle, a spot said to be a focal-point of the mountain’s energy.  At my friend’s urging, I stepped forward onto the triangle.

—

During one of my early undergraduate years of college, I took two lower-division general education classes during the same quarter, Introductory Philosophy and Introductory Clinical Psychology. Toward the end of the quarter, I started asking both of my instructors questions that had surfaced while attending the other’s classes.  The questions hinged mostly on the nature of “reality,” and emerged initially from discussions of hallucinatory experiences.

Later in my education as a physics major, I’d find that the entire topic of “reality” is something of a taboo. But during my earlier, ill-considered pre-med years, it was rather a subject of much interest.  My clinical psychology teacher frequently reiterated that the experiences of patients, regardless of how maladaptive they may seem to an observer, were entirely “real”.  And my philosophy instructor once explained that my question was, in fact, the point of his own doctoral thesis. “Reality” as we experience it, he asserted, is merely something the mind creates to represent whatever consistencies are relevant to its own existence.

Ironically, it was during a physics lecture that I suddenly understood what my old philosophy instructor was saying. Physicists are by nature reductionists, endeavoring to apply some “theory of everything” to describing the universe in terms of a most fundamental set of rules. However, physics often finds that two completely different approaches will converge upon the same answer.  As the physicist, Richard Feynman, observed, “…I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways.”

It all seems rather suggestive of the proverbial, blind men describing an elephant.  Even in physics, when differing approaches yield the same, consistent and meaningful result, each perspective, no matter how apparently different, is said to be a valid description of the same thing.

—

Shinto is an ancient Japanese religion that recognizes a multitude of sacred places, from mountains and rock formations, to springs and trees, and even some human-made objects. Each is seen as the dwelling place of a “kami”, a sort of spirit that resides in that place.  Shinto is a religion of few prescribed rules, mostly regarding one’s spiritual intent. Aside from that, it has no body of religious law, written scripture, founder, focus of worship or of reverence, and only a very loosely-organized priesthood. Shinto is instead a religion of personal experience.

Shinto’s sacred places are recognized by their effect upon the human psyche. This might be something subtle, such as the conspicuousness of a thing… a particularly old tree, an unusual formation, or a source of pure water. Or it might be the more profound feeling elicited by something extraordinary… an imposing forest, the view across a valley, or the impressive form of a mountain. In Shinto, these experiences are seen as a connection to the infinite world of the gods.

The “torii” gates of a Shinto shrine represent a boundary between experiencing that infinite world and the finite world in which we exist. But even if one isn’t particularly spiritual or religious, Shinto’s effect upon the Japanese cultural perspective, including Japanese forms of Buddhist thought, is to validate the importance of direct experience. This is one of the reasons, I think, that Japanese account for a disproportionate number of travelers and adventurers. And while it might not be the intent of those Japanese explorers to commune with the gods that motivates such experiences, it is understood that those experiences will change a person.

—

One night, when I was a teenager, I slipped quietly away from the social and physical light of a campfire at a local beach, and walked alone in the darkness of a moonless night out to the invisible edge of the restless expanse of the Pacific Ocean.  Such unaccompanied proximity to the unseen immensity of an overwhelmingly powerful darkness was at once both terrifying, and irresistible. That visceral experience of the thunderous voice of an otherwise utterly indifferent and unknowable universe was the first time I had ever experienced how truly infinitesimal, and amazingly unique is a human life. I returned to that campfire a different person.

We are, each of us, the collected multitude of experiences from which we construct our own versions of reality. And from those experiences, we each come upon our own sacred spaces. These are the places where we find meaningful connections between ourselves and that which gives rise to our existence. So for each of us, those places may have different meanings, and different sources.

Standing upon the triangle at the center of the Kongoshō at Kurama-dera, I closed my eyes. And though I would have been delighted to have found otherwise, I felt… nothing.  My friend was reassuringly understanding though, explaining that not everyone does.  And she went on to say that even for those who do feel the mountain’s energy, the experiences can vary greatly.  I understood as well.  Each mind finds its own way to represent that which is relevant to its own existence.

The Japanese saying goes that, “If you think there is a spirit in the tree, and there isn’t, then it’s just a superstition. But if there is a spirit in the tree, then it’s a fact.”  It’s a subtle reminder that we all too often focus on the unimportant parts — that regardless of one’s perspective, it’s still the same experience.

The invisible waters that have washed over me have simply come from different places, my own flyspeck light of awareness suddenly caught up in that of which it is a part.  More often than not, the locations where I’ve found those sacred connections have surprised me… among the mountains, but also in the dirt next to a highway, in a temple and in the lobby of a skyscraper, standing in darkness next to the ocean…

—

—

—

—

On the Beach at Night Alone
— Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
—
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
—
—

Autumn View

by in A List, Culture, Death, Family, Japan, Loneliness, Love, Luminous Aether, Mom, Photography, Verse | 8 Comments

Late October placed me back in Japan, reminding me why autumn has always been my favorite season. The air was cool and clear, occasionally scented with a pleasant fragrance from the draping orange flowers of kinmokusei (金木犀). An unfiltered sun angled through the sky, its stark light intensifying the essence of a brightly colored landscape, a magnificent parting display of nature’s kaleidoscopic grasp on life.

Momijigari (紅葉狩り) is the Japanese tradition of autumn-leaf viewing, dating back to the country’s Heian period (794 to 1185). Standing at the entrance of an ancient temple surrounded by this fall backdrop, it suddenly felt as though I had been swallowed up in some kind of immense beauty. It was a tangible feeling, a pleasantly emotional appeal to peace and calmness – a sort of message of release that despite the approach of winter, “Everything will be alright.”

A Shinto priest might have said that I had been touched by a spirit who resided in that place at that moment, a powerful “ō–kami” – perhaps Tatsuta-hime (竜田姫), the Japanese goddess of autumn, also known as Akibimi. Maybe.

Metal in the Asian traditional five-elements of nature is represented by the season of autumn, and by the direction west — that of the setting sun. During the early Heian period, Tatsuta-taisha was estabished as the sanctuary shrine for the goddess, Tatsuta-hime.  Among the “Nijūni-sha“, the twenty-two most important Shinto shrines, it was located to the west of the ancient Japanese capital city of Nara, on a small hill near the Yamato River.  Most of its grounds are covered by the same, colorful autumn trees that blanket the adjacent “Tatsuta-yama” (竜田山), the mountains where the goddess was said to have resided after falling from the heavens.

The autumn leaves of the Tatsuta River basin, which empties into the Yamato river just upstream from the shrine, are famously beautiful. Great flows of brightly-colored late-autumn leaves in the Tatsuta and Yamato Rivers were once considered to be the embodiment of Tatsuta-hime herself as Akibimi (秋美見), literally “autumn-beauty view”.

These extraordinary autumn displays were first written about in the Manyōshū (万葉集), the “Ten-Thousand Leaves Collection”.  The oldest existing assemblage of Japanese poetry, it was created some time around 759 AD, during Japan’s Nara period. It’s thought that most of the collection of some 4,515 poems so far translated from their ancient Japanese forms consist of works dating back as far as 600 AD. The anthology is among the most treasured compilations of poetry from Japan’s history.

Verse 499

From the far beginning of heaven and earth
It has been said from mouth to mouth
That life is uncertain;

When we look up to the plains of heaven
The bright moon waxes and wanes;
On the tree-tops of the mountains,
Flowers bloom with spring.
In autumn, with dew and frost.
The colored leaves are scattered in the wind.

So is it with the life of a man :
Rosy color fades from cheeks,
Black hair turns white.
The morning smile is nowhere found at eve.
Looking at our life’s changes,

Unseen as the passing wind.
Ceaseless as the flowing water,
I cannot stop my tears streaming
Like floods on the rain-beaten ground.

Even the silent trees flower in spring.
And with autumn shed their yellow leaves.
Because of this world,
So changing.

Myth associates Tatsuta-hime with early versions of what would become the Tanabata tradition, as the facilitator of lovers meeting in the heavens. Represented by the stars Altair and Vega, the two were able to meet upon a bridge of frost that Tatsuta-hime created to cross the river of stars in the Milky Way. But then the goddess was plunged to the earth when Tentei, the god of the heavens, saw that the two lovers no longer tended to their works. Residing in the mountains that bear her name, Tatsuta-hime became the earthly deity of dyeing and weaving, and of the autumn winds. First turning silk threads into the colors of autumn, she then blows it all away.

Kneeling beneath a great tree, its still autumn leaves watch silently from below a pale sky as I fulfill one last familial responsibility to my mom; it seems like the women in my family have always left in autumn. I don’t know if there is really a goddess residing in this place, but it certainly feels occupied by something more than mere memories and a grove of trees yielding to the onset of winter. The myths surrounding Tatsuta-hime also portray her as a bringer of water and of harvest, though work-wearied and longing to sleep. But afraid to leave the world in the care of winter, the earth became stuck in a perpetual autumn until the gods convinced her that, “Everything will be alright.”

—

Tatsuta-hime carrying water through the snow. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c. 1845.

Admiring autumn leaves in the Tatsuta River. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, c. 1842.

—

Work

by in A List, Culture, Hmmm..., Humanity, Love, Philosophy, Science | 16 Comments

A_Rose_is_a_Rose_510—

—

I never really gave much thought to “work” when I was young. My job was simply to be a decent student, and that wasn’t all that difficult. So when I first went off to college, it was with the frankly naïve intent of studying medicine. The choice was mostly due to familiarity; it was my father’s trade.

Unfortunately, it was also a personal ambition barely sufficient to motivate persevering through two, miserable quarters of pre-med general chemistry. So by the end of that second quarter, a more carefully considered change-of-major landed me in the Physics department.

Years later, assessing options for a graduate program, the kinds of studies that led to academic careers mostly converged into a single discipline.  A tantalizingly seductive approach to a “Theory-of-Everything” had swept through university physics; and thereupon, cloistered tribes of professors had rushed to publish themselves into an institutional dead-end. Fortunately, I had the clarity-of-mind to listen when a couple of hushed subversives quietly advised that I avoid the rabbit hole.

So the graduate path I chose instead took a less scholarly route, responding to a practical problem. It was a first foray into application through engineering, and I found that I really liked the idea of producing something tangible. It was science actualized… tool-making, refined through untold millennia into exquisitely-polished technology. It felt to me like art. And ultimately, it was profitable.

I’ve worked a lot with machines ever since. It wasn’t always intentional. While I was living in Southeast Asia, I became pretty familiar with blown-off legs. The condition is a common, long-term consequence of farming war-contaminated mud in a landscape salted with millions of landmines and the unexploded leftovers of cluster bombs. As a result, I learned a great deal about knees.

From an engineering perspective, knees are one of those numerous human examples of either natural selection, or of intelligent design by a deity apparently qualified only to wield Crayons. Considering its placement at the ends of two levers and its use in the propulsion of an entire body, the joint doesn’t have enough cushioning, range-of-motion, or reinforcement. And its forward bending, “plantigrade” hinge makes it inefficient for running, puts the joint in the way while climbing, and exposes it to impacts.

There’s a reason knee injuries are so common in humans; they’re an engineering disaster.  But the problem with replacing a human knee isn’t that it’s so difficult to design something that functions as well, or even better. Rather, the trouble is in getting it to function in tandem with the frail, organic mess that constitutes the rest of a human body.

As evolutionary contrivances, we’re essentially Rube Goldberg contraptions, kludged parts precariously hauling around a few gallons of rusty salt-water and the associated structural and chemical machinery demanded by the need to keep some 170-billion delicate brain-cells alive and entertained while swimming in a fragile, two-quart aquarium.  The arrangement sufficed to a level of reproductive viability in the natural environment. But now we live in the IKEA age.

Technology attempts to solve our shortcomings with sometimes surprising, if not unintended results. During my brain’s usual, self-affected, four-shot infusion of espresso this morning, it was also entertaining itself by listening to a truly brilliant MIT-engineer/friend as he described his own amazement upon viewing a machine that at first seemed to be rendering a thin piece of wire into dust.

The machine was an electron-beam mill, and it was carving microscopic parts.  His surprise wasn’t caused by the machine or what it had created; he was familiar with the technology and its capabilities. Rather, it was the result of a sudden realization that technology hadn’t simply made some form of human labor obsolete… it had made it superfluous.

He went on to describe his own sudden realization that this machine hadn’t taken away a single human job. Instead, it was doing something that no human could ever have done with any amount of skill. In this case, microscopic examination of one of those bits of “dust” revealed a precisely rendered gear.

The first human technologies, perhaps sharpened sticks and usefully-shaped rocks, simply made our own labors more economical. They made our reach farther, our strength more concentrated, and thus our utilization of energy more efficient. And efficiency is the prime-mover of natural selection.

But every tool that nature provides a body: a stronger beak, thicker skin, longer legs, bigger eyes… also comes at a cost: more energy, greater complexity, less adaptability…  However, when the benefit of a new adaptation exceeds its cost, then the investment is evolutionarily profitable, and the investors proliferate.

A complex enough brain, however, allows a species to very rapidly create solutions — and to abandon them just as quickly when they become a burden. That first sharpened stick trumped a million-years of physical evolution — with a disposable adaptation. Controlling fire would give us back-door access to the very rules of the game.  A few hundred-thousands of years from that stick, the blink of an eye in Earth’s history, and nearly eight-billion humans are testimony to the evolutionary power of our control over technology.

But the tools themselves have also evolved and become more efficient. They no longer need a human hand, and the collective fires blaze with far too much heat for people to gather around. They’ve started to think and to create on their own. They do things that no human could ever do, or will ever do. They have their own needs. And some of us now find a place, though perhaps not so much purpose, in making sure those needs are met.

Humanity thrives by its innovation, at least the part with access. And the result is a seemingly unlimited choice of things: things we buy, things we use, things we do, even the things we are. The descendants of those sharpened sticks and glowing coals now give us efficient access to unlimited “friends” and endless distractions, on-demand, disposable, and cheaply replaced.

So where does that leave us?

My engineer-friend is an optimist. So two-hundred lettuce-pickers are put out of work when the computer-driven, GPS-guided harvester arrives. It was back-breaking work anyway, and it benefits everyone when food-production becomes more efficient. It’s a misguided bond of duty to think that misery and hardship somehow bring salvation, even at fifteen-dollars an hour. And there are more important things to do, things that don’t involve things.

Perhaps.

Technology is rapidly approaching a point where much human labor will simply be superfluous to the survival, even the prosperity of humankind.  So perhaps we will instead be able to turn our efforts toward ways to thrive.  And in that spirit, we can choose to re-define the nature of “work,” and what gives our work value.

Passion and the creation of a common history are the two great binding factors in what we call “love.”  And now, our tools extend our reach in new ways, re-defining the idea of “community”.  We no longer need to adopt the family caste or its traditions, or marry the people we grew up with. We don’t even have to follow the family trade.

So maybe the truly important jobs in a fully technological society should revolve around expressions of the human spirit, and in the creation of a shared progress toward well-being.  This kind work will always, by its very definition, be the domain of people.

Perhaps.

But then those same tools that increase our social reach also conspire to dissipate its force into a chaotic tide of unlimited possibilities.  And things too easily obtained become just as easily neglected, thrown away, replaced.  Eight-billion people adrift in a sea of things, without purpose, searching for answers in the wrong places. And therein lies another possibility, of cloistered tribes and grim Theories-of-Everything, of forbidding mud and artificial knees, of the profitable, the indifferent result of natural-selection… superfluous humanity.

Photo: The sensitive hand of a robot developed to assist hospital patients and the elderly at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sugano Laboratory at Waseda University in Tokyo.

Voices

by in A List, Altitude, Boundary Behavior, Dad, Death, Existentialism, Family, Fear, Humanity, Identity, Japan, Loneliness, Love, Luminous Aether, Risk | 13 Comments

“The gods don’t allow us to be in their debt.
They give us sensitiveness to beauty in all its forms,
but the shadow of the gift goes with it.”
― L.M. Montgomery

Resting in the high mountain hut at sunset, drinking a warm tea, I could hear a partial conversation on a radio — one of those radios that beeps at the end of a statement to let you know that the other person is finished talking. I couldn’t discern Summit all of the conversation; but the voice on the other side wasn’t coming down. It was calling from the top of the mountain, saying that the person who had brought the radio would be returning. But the voice intended to stay alone through the night. It was very insistent.

It was an unusual voice, at least for one speaking in Japanese, a language where strong assertions are ordinarily veiled in euphemisms. There were no euphemisms, no uncertainties. I could sense the vulnerability of desperation.

Beep. There would be no more discussion.

—

I usually remember my dreams. An occasional imagery is that of running fast enough to lean into the wind and touch the ground with my hands.  And then, I can pull myself along even faster. I recognize the sensation from my waking life — that of riding a motorcycle. And I can fly, or at least float…like being buoyed upon the sea. 

Ironically, I’ll sometimes fear falling from my footings upon a precariously high place, something I don’t ordinarily feel when awake. It’s the unease of something inevitable, eventually compelling that I accept fate and allow myself to fall.
I discovered when I was still quite young that I would never feel the ground.

Conspicuously absent from my dreams, however, are people that I know — at least those with whom I can still speak in this world.  The gods of my subconscious shield those daylight relations from such intuitions.  But the censors who watch over my sleep don’t seem to much worry about those who remain only in photographs, or in memories.Walkway

For years after he died, during a time when I still needed to hear his voice, I could talk to my father in my dreams. I talked to him many times. And then one night we stood together at the top a path, someplace comfortably Japanese. Moss grew in the joints of an ancient stone wall that held back the earth to one side where it led gently downhill. I don’t remember our conversation, only the realization that it was unimportant. And that was when I said to him…
“You know that you’re dead. You’re not supposed to be here.“

“Hontou desu ne,” he replied — a rhetorical, “Is that so?“

That was the last time we spoke.

—

A wind from the Sea of Japan was blowing a thick fog up the side of the mountain as the radio went quiet. Two men stood up from the table where they had been talking. Even from across the room, I could feel the cold as they passed through the doors to the entry vestibule. Through a window, their headlamps bobbed and flickered into the rising gray toward the route to the summit, eventually disappearing into the swirling mists of an encroaching darkness. It was getting late.

Sleep comes quickly, its shadows illuminated by a world not as it is.  I am trying to return home, trying to get back to the place where my roots will hold me to the earth — keep me from falling. I’ve followed this route many times before, traveling roads and passes familiar only in my dreams, heading west, away from the Pure Land, toward a calling sunset. I cannot travel quickly — cannot lean into the wind. It’s always a long and wearisome journey, without conclusion. But this time is different…

I arrive at the dead-end street and come upon the house where I lived as a teenager.

Standing at the edge of its domain, I stop. Everything looks the same; but it isn’t the same… Someone else lives there now — someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me.

Passing through a vacant edifice, I am no longer welcomed, a ghost among ghosts unable to see each other or to communicate. Into the old back yard I come to a familiar hillside, but find myself balanced at some precarious edge. Looking down uneasily, toward the city, toward the sea, calling, softly, a voice — and then a distant beep.

I fall.

—

Awakened to night, a dim light punctuated the darkness. A faint shadow rose from the table by the window. Earplugs muffled reality, but I could just make out the sound of wind gusting against the side of the shelter, or of mysterious voices — perhaps both. Then, a barely audible beep; a distant deity had spoken. What it had said, I couldn’t apprehend.

I closed my eyes, pulled the top of my sleeping bag up over my face, and allowed the gods of my subconscious a do-over.

We started down the mountain before sunrise. Looking back toward the summit, it cast a looming black silhouette against a red-streaked sky converging into a darkness inhabited by slowly fading stars. Below us, the mountainside disappeared into a pool of clouds accumulated in the stillness of morning. We began to ski down what we could.

A short time later, we paused as a rapid pulse reverberated up the canyon. The echoing heartbeat announced a helicopter, its dark form struggling for purchase against the thin air. It rose slowly, like a heavy spirit in the pale light, upward, toward a hidden sunrise. I could see the cross on its underbelly.Helicopter

As it disappeared toward the summit, an unsettled voice resonated in my thoughts. Someone had been calling out to me during the night, my own mind disguised as a place that I once knew. It was trying to tell me something important, a message of frustration with my own awareness.  My subconscious had apprehended some critical loose thread, and it was trying to keep me from pulling on it… trying to keep my daylight world from unraveling.
Where was I going, and why was I trying so hard to get there?

Of moments bathed in Heaven’s light, and choosing not to look away; it was the narrative of a fear I couldn’t rationalize during the day. Like the voice over the radio, the invisible undercurrent of an attachment rushed beneath a thin veneer of ice… the lonely choice to hold steadfast to the severed end of a cord while perched through the night atop a precarious height.
But there was no one coming to my rescue.

Balanced upon a hill of vacant memories, clinging to something that I know never actually existed. Want for a love that’s unconditional and everlasting, a connection that would never allow me to fall — not the kind of anchor grounded in youthful fantasy, or a God-of-Desperation to bear the weight of misfortune and poor choices. Rather, a stillness to hold those fires of life, the incandescence of their momentary experience… refuge atop the fragile illusion that what we come to love can be made to last forever.

I bathe in the radiance while I can, moments of unfathomable beauty — until the night when it all disappears.  This is all there is; life can’t be run backward at any speed.  So I embrace the warmth and hold my love close for now, reconciled to the knowledge that passing dreams and memories are the inevitable price of such connection.

Sleep at the hot springs comes tempered by alcohol and antihistamine, deep and dreamless.  The gods of my subconscious have spoken.

YariSunrise

Visitors

by in A List, Culture, Japan, Luminous Aether | 12 Comments

I acquired my apartment in Tokyo rather more than a decade back. At the time, I thought I might be in Japan for awhile, and it seemed like a good idea to get myself set up in a place of my own. The purchase was an unexpectedly complicated introduction to the Japanese approach to business transactions, including its tradition of “appreciation money.”  But after two-and-half years in Thailand and Cambodia, multiple rooms and an indoor kitchen… and a Japanese-style soaking tub seemed like some long overdue luxuries.

Mamacherry_XingThe apartment is in a smaller building in Tokyo’s, Katsushika district, near the city’s northwest boundaries with the Chiba and Saitama prefectures. I settled on the area, which is actually on the opposite side of the city from where I lived as a child, after seeing an adjacent park, Mizumoto-kōen. The park is among the largest in Tokyo, and is the largest with a water feature. It has many, beautiful trees including various cherry-blossoms, and its north end is heavily forested. And a wide, winding lake fills an Edo-era irrigation channel that separates the park from Saitama Prefecture’s rather smaller Masato-koen. There are areas from within its boundaries where a person would see little evidence of being within an urban environment.

Katsushika, however, wasn’t where I first looked at apartments. My original searches were mostly in Tokyo’s west side, including the city’s somewhat notorious Roppongi district. Adjacent to several foreign embassies and not far from the part of Tokyo where I lived as a child, Roppongi is nowadays known forRoppongi its night clubs, international population… and occasional sordid crimes. It seemed like a vital and interesting area, though I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to be in such constant proximity to so much activity. Decent properties in the area were also expensive, even by Tokyo standards. And that was what brought about my first encounter with the Japanese real-estate practice of “jiko-bukken,” (事故物件) or incident properties.

The term, “jiko-bukken,” is an ambiguous euphemism, similar to “jinshin-jiko,” (人身事故) or human-body incident. This is an expression used to indicate a death in a public place, such as from a traffic accident or suicide by train. Likewise, incident properties are essentially residences where people suffered unnatural deaths — murders, suicides, serious accidents, drug overdoses, or deaths due to abuse, inattention or abandonment. And in Japan, there are various regulations regarding requirements that such occurrences are disclosed to subsequent buyers or tenants, usually for a period of from five to ten years after an incident. More recently, websites have also started to list their locations.

Traditional Japanese culture includes many customs regarding the deceased, whose spirits may be perceived to linger and to affect one’s fortunes in this life. And there are also many traditions regarding ghosts and spirits who may take up occupancy in objects and locations. Consequently, unusual or traumatic deaths can beApaato understood as a significant characteristic of a property that might also carry with it the psychological, if not spiritual inconveniences of a potentially unwelcome visitor.

Thus understandably, incident property status for a residence may also result in a reduction of an asking price, sometimes by as much as fifty-percent. However, during my early searches for a place in Tokyo, I didn’t know anything about this. I simply observed some unusually inexpensive apartments listed as jiko-bukken, which I assumed to be something like the aftermath of a plumbing disaster or cooking dinner by smoke-alarm. Adding to my confusion, agents were also generally reluctant to give out much information without first getting a commitment, as in appreciation money, for a showing. Eventually, however, I managed to get a broker to take me to a fairly nice apartment in the Roppongi Hills area that had apparently been available for quite some time at far below market value.

TubI did think it a bit odd when the woman opened the door and let me in, but stayed in the hallway while I wandered through the apartment alone.  Agents usually went along to describe some of a home’s characteristics — room-sizes, accommodations, storage, views… It was a nice place, and I expressed interest. But not seeing anything wrong with the apartment, I wanted to know why it was priced so attractively. So back at the agent’s office, she printed out a sheet and handed it to me across the table. I could only read about half of the Japanese on the page — but I could understand enough. Skipping the details, I realized there was no way I’d ever have been able to relax in the bathtub.

At any rate, a week or so later, I saw Mizumoto-koen and the newer apartment building near its south entrance. I pondered the place for about a day, mostly while walking the neighborhoods around the park. At the time, the area was what Americans might term a “working-class” neighborhood where people still produced things. Down and across the main street was a wrought-iron shop with a machine-shop next door. And between them and a laundromat was an old bath house. Nearby were several small bars, a corner restaurant with a single table, a dessert shop, and a lively mom-and-pop grocery store. I appreciated the atmosphere. But it was while walking along a path in the park when an old man going in the other direction gave me a friendly smile that I decided to buy the place.

My current housemate and long-time friend, Yuki, had first encouraged me to look in the Katsushika area.  She had a good government job in the district, and liked some of the area’s old-Tokyo style neighborhoods. One neighborhood around the nearest rail-station, about two-kilometers from the park, still has narrow, brick-paved sideKanamachi streets lined with small shops, bars and tiny eating and drinking establishments. A little farther to the south is Shibamata, an area made famous by an old TV/film character and now frequented by Japanese tourists. And not far from there, a hand-pole ferry still shuttles passengers across the Edo River while express trains speed across a bridge in the background. But it was the park and the area around it that hooked me.

Regardless, about a year after buying the apartment, I took a job in Canada, and then eventually moved back to the US. However, I decided to keep the place in Tokyo as somewhere to call “home” in the city where I was born, usually staying there for a couple of months each year. But the big, usually empty dwelling begged to be warmed by some friendly spirits, and so I invited Yuki and her then young daughter to share the space. And so for the last decade, she and her daughter have been the souls whom the neighbors and the local police who staff the corner koban recognize as its residents. Nowadays, I am acknowledged as a mere visitor.

The_HoodMuch of the neighborhood has changed greatly since I first arrived. Excepting the laundromat, the small, family businesses are all gone — though a good-sized, back-street Korean market still operates a few blocks to the east. Some locations where old shops once stood are now occupied by tall apartment buildings, and much of the area has become more “upscale.” Only the park is the same, its trees just a bit larger. Morning runs along its walkways, paths and trails seem timeless. The cherry blossoms come and go each year; the trees fill with leaves, and then change colors. It’s only the rhythm of my own footsteps that pass more slowly.

I return to the apartment ready for a long bath to find that Yuki’s daughter has grown into an assertive teenager. The only way I can remember the little girl is to look at photographs from a different time. Gradually, she has learned to be independent, how to move beyond the only home she’s known for most of her life. Fortunately, she has a close relationship with her mom; and so I go out to the balcony while the two of them discuss something. Looking across the street, a chain convenience-store occupies the place where the little family-owned grocery store used to be, and I wonder what happened to the older couple who used to run the dessert shop on the corner.

Mizumotokoen_autumnI know better than to hold on too tightly — as do most Japanese. Change is inevitable; it’s a fundamental truth. Voices waft up from the street below as a door slides open behind me.  “Kanojo ni ki o tsuketaiga… mō shōjode wanai.” (I want to watch out for her, but she’s not a little girl anymore.)

I shake my head in understanding. At some point we all become visitors. The secret, it seems, is to remain welcome.

—