autumn tactics

With some trouble, I open the window and turn off the embalming cool of the air conditioner. It’s in the upper seventies and cloudy, a typical late spring Saturday with moderate traffic.

The buses come regularly and often, stopping outside of the guest house three stories below. Nearby someone is intermittently running a ban saw and children squeal with joy across the street. An old bicycle’s brake whines to avoid hitting a kindly old lady, largely oblivious to the bustle around her.

My head is slightly swollen and stuffed with menthol tissues, another night of too much beer and cigarettes. The lump in the back of my throat is easy to ignore, the gentle throbbing behind the peaks of my disheveled eyebrows is strangely satisfying; a kind of half-conscious telekinetic massage.

Today I have three meetings in order, mostly photography and exhibition related. Then tomorrow a photo shoot at Zushi beach and a date for mayhem and villainy with Rob.

But first I must start with enjoying this glorious day of low grade hangover in placidly busy Tokyo. The atmosphere is far too stimulating.

Counting the days ’til summer…

This is the view looking down my street to the west. Depending on the time of year and weather, the sun gets low enough to cut through all the air pollution and make a glorious golden light, which reflects at just the right angle off of the sound-dampening panels on the outside of the highway. In person it’s actually much, much, more beautiful, and much, much brighter; so bright that you’re nearly blinded by the reflection. But the computer monitor is a poor medium for portraying such majesty, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Tokyo is a city of endless fascination. The rivers and sandlots, the storage rooms and offices, a sea of billboards and dingy katakana signs. Houses apartments are packed together like a tacklebox, an endless array of multicoloured plaster, concrete, and tile. I could devote a lifetime to exploring it all and never discover a fraction of its secrets. Families and grocery shopping, torrid affairs and love hotels, a panolpy of rust, plastic, sin, and perservance all under the bleary eye of a tired sun.

I board the train to the airporte at Shinjuku and impulsively swallow down an inari and tarako onigiri set with takuan. Wrestling off the cap of my blythe green tea I take a few strained belts. Muscles still coiled from the rushed disarray of morning, I put on m hopelessly broken headphones and try to calm myself down with some Final Fantasy piano concertos. The start of a journey and so much angstful longing for the good old wandering romantic me, I wish I were riding the train in the other direction, back to my ramshackle commuter bicycle. But this is the start, thirty hours of travel and forty-nine in Los Angeles. Four days of a businessman’s solitude.

I’ve been coming back here for six years and every time I arrive it’s electrifying and wondrous. How can i never tire of it all? The trains, the rivers, the tired danchi and sagging pachinko parlors that go zipping by. Massive highways, father peddling by with small children in baskets, the endless landscape of twenty million silent individuals is arresting. JR, Sumitomo, Sankyo, Daiei, Coco Ichibanya. Neon, acid rain, pressed uniforms and courteous bows. Love, drama, and decay.

So, it’s Friday evening, on the last working day of the year. The office is clean, my bags are packed, and it’s just a few minutes until we all go out for dinner. Considering the occasion, I’m wearing contacts and my corduroy blazer with the suede elbow patches. I’ve received comments ranging from “cool” to “lit professor.”

Tomorrow morning I head out early for Narita, and then it’s just about the shortest flight you can get to the eastern seaboard; twelve and a half hours direct to Dulles in a new 777. If I can score a window seat, I’ll be set.

Goodbye, 2008. Goodbye Lips and Disaster. From here on starts the bounenkai, the annual year-end party to forget all the troubles of the past. Sayonara.

Japan is SOO polite, that even the toilet paper rolls thank you for using them when you’re done.

“まいどありがとうございます。” == “We appreciate your business.”

Through the quiet countryside, far from the bullet trains and shouting storefront hawkers, I ride home through a melting rain.

Rice fields, toylike pickup trucks and elegant thatched rooves, the features foreign but the experience somewhat familiar. We pass through a grove and the sea appears, next to me. Gentle waves crash on porous rocks and somewhere, far past the blurred horizon are whispers of Russia.

Kururi trickles, drops, and plucks, a flock of small birds take off from a bushy dune. The train punches through a series of mountains and I flick through my travel playlist, searching for something fresh that suits my mood. The girl sitting next to me gets up and heads to the next car and I land on Coltemonikha, the train breaks back into daylight and waves crash just meters off to my left.

The reverb hangs around forever like a haze, the drum machines pop and synthetic cymbals crackle, rising to a rush and everything falls silent for a measure until Kate Sakai’s windy, sampled voice draws my heart back into cocoon.

I don’t know what to expect, nor do I really care at this point. Any time I can get away from Tokyo and the Yamanote line, it’s a success.

This weekend I have come to the Chubu region for the first time, running through Niigata straight to the Sea of Japan and down the coastline to Toyama. Like most of my domestic trips, I have rough goals of studying Buddhist relics and middle class life outside of the metropolis.

The buildings, trains, land all bear a faded magenta tint. I wonder if it’s particles in the air, left over from Toyama’s prewar shipbuilding industry. Everything feels like late afternoon the Midwest, and the open spaces suit my brooding mood. Last night I sat alone on the concrete steps of the fishing pier and watched the sun fall across the horizon to eventually be consumed by the sea.

I feel tired, but satisfied. My senses are dulled enough that they filter out most of what’s going on around me, but the quaint, cheery courtesy of the people I interact with pops through and fills me with a rich, complete feeling.

Smoothing out the waves…

Obon is the Festival of the Dead. Though obon traditionally fell in July, it varies from region to region, and the generally accepted period is now three days in the middle of August. Nearly all corporations offer their employees obon break, though it isn’t a national holiday. Obon is one of the two big family vacation times, the other being New Year’s, when people usually tend to return to their parents’ house. This returning to one’s origins is not for only the living, but the deceased as well. Families’ ancestors’ spirits return the their graves, and their kin assemble to pay respects. At the end is a lovely festival of lights to help lead the departed back to the world of the afterlife.

I don’t have any blood relations in Japan but when I first started out here I met some very dear people that to me were family, so traditionally every summer for obon I would go back to the beginning, to Nara, and visit with them.

But times change and people move on. All of the people I grew up with in Kansai are moved or estranged, so going back now has become little more visiting with ghosts in another victim of urban sprawl and over development. It’s just as well because in recent years I’ve been working too much to really notice.

So the saying goes, “Obon mo shigoto da ze!“, which means “Obon is also work!” This is a play on a classic drama Hisatsu shigotonin where the original saying goes　something along the lines of, “Shigoto no ato wa shigoto da ze!“, which means “After work comes work!” This tongue-in-cheek line is comedy that rubs the wrong way, since so many of us in Tokyo are bound and chained to this work-centric lifestyle anyway. Nowadays the particular place it I notice it though is on pachinko ads in the trains.

2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of film series “Otoko wa tsurai yo” (It’s Tough Being a Man). The protagonist, Tora-san, deserves a proper post to himself, but here’s a shot from the Yamanote line platform at Shibuya displaying the cool countenance of Japan’s perennial hard luck lover.

My cherry tomatoes have also come of age the last couple weeks, though for the most part it hasn’t been a good harvest at the Ventura farm this year. I didn’t do any cultivation research in advance so I guess this is what I get. I know I can get more out of my crop; things have just been so hectic I don’t have time to do much more than water at midnight and in the morning. The tomatoes tasted okay; not superb, but passable. When steamed the carrots were half-decent as well.

Though the particular date often escapes me, summer always brings the terminal feelings associated with my anniversary of living in Japan. Another cycle is spent; I’ve been here five years. I don’t know what is right anymore; I act but with so much less anticipation. I’m so tuned and adept at certain things but so blind to a myriad of others that I used to entertain. It’s like being in a crowded room with hundreds of people talking all at once but over time you unconsciously develop the habit of filtering them out one by one, until it’s as if you’re the only person for miles.

The first place I lived was a weekly mansion in Takaido. I bought a used mint green Ralph Lauren oxford for five hundred yen and I wore it to work the first day after nicking my Adam’s apple shaving in the morning. The photographs I took then were beautiful to me, but now looking at them I can hardly believe that they’re mine. It’s like seeing yourself at a party as a stranger.

I am exhausted, completely exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally– in every way imaginable. A single pint of beer makes the following day almost intolerable. It seems that 85% of my life is muscle memory, and my brain is eternally drugged. I keep thinking to myself, if I just eat a little healthier, if I just change the position I sleep in, or how I hold myself when I walk, it’ll all come together and I’ll feel like I used to, like I barely remember.

I’m learning, but how much and at what cost I can’t keep track of any more.

Too tired to sleep…

[I just noticed that this is post 700. Seven hundred in just a little over five years; though the last nine months the rate has really slowed.]

The last several days have been…vintage Rusty. Assumptions, preconceptions, goals and limitations. Extremes are still my master, I soon forget my rules and principles. But oh how the fire burns! As the flames shrink, a deeper heat, an enduring one swells within. What have I learned other than my own weaknesses ad nauseam? Small things. Small beauty more timeless and sacred than my petty aspirations. Stories told by captivating old men, designs for a home to confuse invaders and protect one’s family, through time I slipped– centuries of valor, betrayal, honor, and poetry.

Fujiwara, Yoshitsune, bakufu, and Basho… Tokugawa, Ishiguro, Aoyagi, and Odano. I hiked through knee deep snow under a canopy of dormant sakura. I ate kiritanpo and dojou nabe, visited half a dozen bars and snacks in one night, faltering only at the end. I talked with locals about the Minamoto, matsuri, wabisabi, and satisfaction with life. So many mysteries unresolved, shades of light exposed then drowned out in unfolding darkness. So many questions, so much uncertainty; like the fickle weather of Kakunodate: ten minutes indoors and a crystal blue sky becomes a swirling snow storm.

I watched all four hours of Gone with the Wind, witnessing the horrible self-defeating tragedy of mankind and the eternal yearning for fantasy (ignorance of truth). Satori seems scarce at first but perhaps there is something deeper here to bring to heart.

My first day, New Year’s, took me to Hiraizumi in Iwate. I forgot a number of important items but managed to hack something together with parts from the Ichinoseki ekimae Lawson. I also had oden from a konbini for the first time. It wasn’t bad. After arriving at Hiraizumi, I got set up in my room by 3:00 and then headed out to take as many pictures as I could before dark fell on the quiet, snowy town. I ended up going to Chuusonji and had a cup of amazake while watching the hundreds of temple goers stream up Gogatsu no Saka for hatsumode. I returned to my ryokan at dusk and spent a blissful half-hour spacing in front of a roaring gas furnace before an enormous supper. Though I planned to get a lot done in Photoshop at night, the touch pad combined with some ridiculously grainy Ilford Delta stymied my efforts. It took an hour just to perform dust and scratch removal from fifteen mediocre shots.

Afterwards I gave up on the PC and watched the TV for a couple of hours, the standard New Year’s celebrity shows, before turning in early for the night.

Wednesday I got a lot of mileage out of my day hitting all of the historical sites in the center of town before I had to leave at two. Transfers at Ichinoseki and Morioka were subdued, not many people in Japan travel on January second. I spent half an hour lay over each time and stood on the end of deserted, hulking, hangar-like station platforms watching a sunburst melt over snow-covered warehouses.

Basho came to Hiraizumi to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Yoshitsune’s death. It was then, seeing the open fields, all that remained of the once great Fujiwara monuments, that he wrote the famous haiku to sum up mankind’s fleeting glory.

Natsukusa ya (Ah, summer grass)
Tamedomo ga (All that remains from the ruin)
Yume no ato (of warriors’ dreams)

Though I always turn off my iPod when I enter a temple or shrine, I’ve spent most of my time walking around listening to the solemn half of the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack. While this is fitting, reinforcing the muted, cold atmosphere I half-wished to find on this trip, this is not completely fair. Music, like any other form of art, can be used in recreation to serve us. We see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear, and we feel what we want to feel. Walking around with headphones all the time reinforces any barriers we already have built up around us, encased in our our little private bubbles. This cannot continue for very long without adverse effect.

So I took off the headphones to leave my mind to idle though. As I further realized when walking through the jukai of Aokigahara, it’s not long before I start making nonsensical remarks to myself, quoting movies and books, frequently in an absurd voice. Before stopping for afternoon tea I wondered aloud if Basho talked to himself three hundred years ago, and if he did, did he quote popular theatrical comedy of the day, pausing to chuckle at how amused with himself he was?

Today I’m starting out on my four-day tour of Tohoku (northeast Japan). I’ve been planning it for days, and set got so many pieces of the puzzle put together in advance, but somehow still managed to first miss the train I hoped for by oversleeping, and then fail to estimate what time it really was and had to run to the station to make the next departure on time. In the process I made quick grab-and-run decisions that I may end up regretting in the next couple of days. The first of these is bringing the 5D, the second leaving behind my tripod. I also forgot the Holga and my positioner. I also declined to bring the Happy Hacking keyboard with me, which leaves me with only the working set of keys on the WinBook (this does not include escape, five, six, zero and consequently right parenthesis]. But all twenty-six letters of the alphabet work, and my current login password doesn’t contain any of the dead keys, so I’m fine as long as the five-year old Li-Ion battery holds up. At least I didn’t pull any boners like leave the power supply at home. I’ve done this with cameras before though.

To get back to the actual trip, I’m travelling to Tohoku, in particular Hiraizumi in Iwate prefecture, and fan favorite Kakunodate in Akita. One of the many challenges in this journey is time management, many in the realm of transportation. In Tokyo where the Yamanote line comes every two minutes, in the country trains come once an hour, and if one’s transfers don’t line up nicely with the sparse number of departures, a nice long fifty minutes or so is spent in the cold staring off of the station platform into rice fields. Today I have to transfer four times to get to my destination, and in the end I have a fifty-minute layover to travel one station. Maybe I’ll get a bus. Maybe I’ll decide to tough it out and walk. Who knows. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get a seat on the bullet train. Maybe not and I’ll be standing. That brings to mind one more thing I forgot to bring: a book.

When I first came to Japan, I spent the better part of my first year answering questions like, “Why do you like Japan so much?” or, “How come you have to live so far away?” And I did my best to convey my nascent feelings of destiny and dreams, and awe; but I routinely fell short of conveying a fraction of the unregulated emotion I had streaming from my heart every second I spent here.

Now it’s 3:36, I’m dead tired and my strength to do anything but collapse is quickly waning, but I am in a position right now to explain it more sufficiently than normally I have the impetus for, so I will fight exhaustion for another thirty [seventy] minutes and write. Today was Saturday, and in many ways not so different from any other, but nearly everything I did was an accent to my motivation to live in Japan.

Last night after getting off of the phone with my mother I prepared for bed and acquiesced that I could watch part of a movie before falling asleep on the sofa and thusly did so. I set an alarm for something like 6:30, but in between torn dreams of unrequited passion that became 8:30. I rose to the shrill crescendo of my old monochrome Toshiba keitai, and spent the first two hours of the day (unintentionally) getting roped into futzing with scans and photo sets more intensive than my computer can handle at the moment. I had plans to go to Horiuchi to get a score of prints for friends and myself, but in doing the math I realized what I wanted to print would cost over three hundred dollars, and so started thinking seriously about buying my own printer and consequently a new computer (briefly a Macintosh until I calculated it would end up costing twice as much as the 5D).

Around 1:00 I went to lunch in Yoyogi, and then headed to Shinjuku Nishiguchi to pick up some film before my trip tomorrow. I locked my bike up in front of pachinko parlor Gaia and in a dazed sort of mood made my way slower than usual through the crowd to look at electronics and the like.

You’ve probably been to any number of Circuit Citys or Best Buys in your life, but at any given time there was never more than a few patrons per aisle in the store. In Tokyo there are commonly more than eight customers per square meter in any centrally-located spot of commerce. This is something that after first arriving exhausts you. But as time goes on it’s not other people all around to avoid but just so much denser an atmosphere– rustling tree boughs and bushes along the winding path to one’s destination. Most of the time I’m incredibly goal driven and take note of this phenomena only half-consciously. But every once in a while I completely give up on time and efficiency and shuffle along idly with only a vague sense of some task to accomplish. It’s at these times that I prickle with the cool shock of from realizing all the everyday differences between this land and the one I grew up in. Here there are so many human beings, buzzing about with a torrent of agenda like so many determined bees. An ocean of wealth and capitalism, and a swarm of tautly smiling, suited staff to guide and direct.

While at Yodobashi I gazed with focused contemplation at a sample photograph borne from the Pixus 9500 inkjet printer until a beaming girl wearing a black Canon windbreaker and matching mini-skirt interrupted my study to ask if there were any questions I had about the product. Half-considering how completely she could really allay my concerns about reflectance range, I politely replied no and said I was just looking. She then nodded and warmly added that if there was anything I needed to just ask, before scurrying away and being absorbed into the writhing mass of commerce I was stationed within. I looked at the oversized sample prints and thought to myself that if my beloved Canon really intends to sell this product line to “professionals”, they wouldn’t distribute questionable testimonies of this quality, smiling to myself before moving on.

After buying my standard ration of high speed film from the gangly, brush-headed clerk in the print department, I had a brief conversation with a crooked-toothed girl at Map Camera about release cables for the A-1. Despite the fact I was interested in a two dollar piece of used wire, she was extremely attentive and sure to give me every chance to examine the device before my purchase. It’s probably the greater part of being lonely before my time, but I always end up trying to extend such interactions as long as possible, to share in some spirited common interest for a few brief moments before I’m out of the store and left again to my own fragmented thoughts.

On the way home I was moved by how clear the autumn sky was and remembered Sister Charles remarking that the October heavens were always the purest blue. When I got home I had a long list of things I intended to do but instead felt quite drowsy and after playing with my release cable for a few minutes fell asleep on the sofa again with the Pixus 9500 product guide spread across my chest.

When I awoke just before five o’clock the sun was desperately clinging to the tops of the Nakano skyline and I rushed to get a few unsatisfactory pictures from the 5D before the day vanished all together. Afterwards I flipped through a couple channels and ultimately settled on the kindergarten television show Pitagora Switch on the Japanese equivalent of PBS. Scooping up the last of some thawed salmon pasta gratin I gathered my bags and set out for Honmachi.

My former neighbor Kimura-san is a big fan of the Swallows’ manager, Furuta, and this weekend is his last series of games as he’s retiring. So I bought a pair of tickets in advance and invited her to the special event against the Dragons where a memorial video reel was due to be played between innings. It was standing room only and we ended up in the last few rows of the upper section behind the home bullpen, but the stadium is small so we still had a fairly good view of the action. Indicative to how things went this season, Chunichi kicked the snot out of Yakult, despite my best efforts of cheering along with the inflatable thundersticks we received upon entering the stadium. In the bottom of the seventh Furuta activated himself as a pinch hitter. With that well-scripted move the already emotional crowd exploded into a frenzy. On the wrong side of a 8-0 shutout he scored a hit early on in the count and the stupid cynical part of me that’s festered with age wondered how much respect and honor for one’s seniors were put into the pitches thrown to the Swallows’ aged catcher. In the bottom of the ninth he got on base again and then a well-placed hit from center fielder Aoki scored Furuta, the only run in an otherwise dismal game. But everyone in the park loved it, my honored guest tearing up at the sight.

After the game we went for Kimura-san’s favorite kind of food, ramen, and had a repast far beyond what I was capable of consuming. It was a nice, warm finish to what should have been the end to my day, but I’m a sucker for old friends and duty. So after bidding Kimura-san good night I went to an izakaya (bar) near where I used to live to give my respects to the owner. A number of old acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a nearly a year were there, my arrival stirring up a fair amount of conversation. Japanese are markedly more sensitive to foreign nationals than Americans, probably as the island country has remained isolated for thousands of years with a near perfect homogeneous population. I chose my compliments carefully, ate my “sa-bisu” dishes with a broad grin, and did my best to encourage the owner’s college-age daughter to overcome her discouragement and believe in herself.

Around midnight all of the other customers had gone home and though I was still in the mood to chat, I knew it was time to leave so I bid the owner good night and got back on my bicycle. Again, I was exceedingly aware that I really should have gone home given the next two days ahead of me, but there was still one establishment I was indebted to and really needed to make an appearance at, considering the fortune of being close by.

So I went to the Lounge Maki once again, a small, old “sunakku” situated above the grocery store where I used to shop. The pub is one of many expiring drink-and-conversation bars where a generation of salaried middle-aged men stop to find a little solace after the war zone of work and before the battlefield of home. The grandmotherly owner, Jun-san has always cared for me; she stayed up with me until 5:30 on my birthday, in an awkward time when I had nowhere else to go or anyone to share turning 25 with. Again, though it wasn’t my birthday, I received two pair of Burberry socks, withdrawn from a locked chest reserved for only the best customers. I accepted the present in chagrin and listened to her talk about her family and modern day child rearing in Japan until well past three.

On the short trip home between Honmachi and Sangubashi I came across a policeman headed the other way. Of course he waved me down because the headlight on my bicycle is broken, and I’m sure he didn’t run across many other potential inquiries in that part of town so late at night. However, as always, the officer was kind, courteous, and warm, conducting his business while affably carrying on a conversation. We talked about baseball and Furuta’s retirement, in addition to the standard fare of how long I’ve been here, how good my Japanese is, etc. After checking the bicycle’s registration number he apologized again for detaining me and with a smile bid me good night. I am blessed to live in a country so tranquil.

When I first moved abroad, I wanted to show everyone how special I was, I wanted people to notice what I did and get validation for it; much more so than when I was in America. For in coming to Japan, I was a child once again, and needed the approval of someone, anyone, for anything so I could feel like I was good and belonged. But as the years have passed I have learned something a little more complicated, and perhaps not so much uniquely Japanese as human. In living here I’ve acquired what an honest person can pick up almost anywere, but something markedly invaluable — compassion. When I do things for myself, I do them alone, but when I am around others I increasingly try to choose my actions based on what I guess I can do to serve those close by, those who’ve been so unflaggingly kind to me.

A song, or a drink; a smile, or an inquiry… I use the knowledge I have gained and the instincts in my heart to find doors to those around me. Living in Japan is perhaps not more about tradition, or obligation, or empathy than any other country, but being here has helped me learn to appreciate and embrace them.