autumn tactics

December means bounenkai end of year parties. Alcohol, mayhem, and people you’ve just met. Oh yes.

of standard train travel. That’s how long my trip is this morning. Starting at 5:45 am. I could have taken the shinkansen and been there in just over two hours, but somehow it just turned out this is the way I chose.

Inefficient by design.

Originally I planned to stay up in Minami Aizu in my tent last night, but typhoon William sufficently washed out those plans so to speak. So I spent Monday, my first day off in nearly a month, getting acquainted with FFXII, which I quickly became hooked on and spent most all day playing. I did, however, scurry out of my blanket and tatami combination long enough to get a fairly nice bit of closing time shopping done, picking up a Snow Peak mess kit to go with my compact gas stove that I received from Rodney, as well as much needed replacement cargo straps for my Ferrino hiking pack.

Black and white film, foma RC paper, and too much imported beer. Another warm chat with the always bright checkout girl at Yamaya.

Though it’s very nearly gone from my everyday life, there are times when the magic of first coming to Japan returns for a fleeting moment like a faded odor from a childhood jacket. I exit Akihabara station and having fifteen minutes to transfer, scan the area sleepily for a convenience store.

The montage of unfamiliar signs; the nearly empty streets of early morning; the lack of time being relevant… Like a drunken bee at dusk, I stumble down into an Am/Pm for some sandwiches and token omiyage. My groggy gaze lingers on the neatly presed-together legs of a girl reading a magazine.

Royal jelly. Beauty tea. Otsuka pharmaceuticals.

Entering into the subway for a minute I am uncannily lost. The mulitple branching stairwells lead to the same platform and remind me of Silent Hill 3.

There are times when Japan doesn’t feel like Japan, usually times without architecture. The majority of people on subways at six in the morning; it could be almost anywhere. Bums the world around have similiar mannerisms, free from the pall of ethnic strata, more or less. But it rises… oh how the rays fall so corn yellow on the sea of crescent-tiled rooves. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a morning, it’s almost foreign to me. Three hours on a single section express train. The low sun is so reserved and distant.

Power lines, ginkoes, and scaffolding. Wet streets and danchi.

Sister Charles used to say that the skies in October were the bluest all year. This always filled me with a senseless kind of pride, simply because I was born in October, even though this had little to do with me.

Today is October the 27th. In three days I am going to be thirty years old. I wanted to spend a lot of this month celebrating and reflecting on this, but things were busier at work than October usually is and I had no time for much of anything. However, leaving that aside this week will be quiet and mostly reserved. I’ve been thinking of life and how simply you can change it. I could still be with the same someone a number of someones, but that doesn’t suit me now. To be honest, I see others making those kinds of commitments and I wonder are we so much in charge of our happiness? I used to think that finding someone and falling in love was rare and magical, something to desperately dream of. But after twelve years of dating, cheating, and heartbreak, I’m not sure I believe in courtly love anymore. Only the inexperience of relationships can lead one to search and hope for love. Now more than anything, love feels like a choice, the driving forces of which outside of loneliness or security I can’t fathom. I don’t say this because I’m bitter, I say it because I really can’t see it any other way. If that is innate cynicism, then I am sad and forlon that I made an environment to change me this way.

In Japanese, koi and ai (love viewed from the perspective of fancy and devotion, respectively) are separate things. My senpai at work once described koi as a feeling/circumtance, whereas ai was an action. Maybe in experience I’ve lost the ability to feel koi, but I’ve learned in practice what ai takes.

Does anyone over the age of thirty fall in love? Why do people marry? Why do people choose to remain with one person? I think the answer must exist, and if I talk to enough people I’ll find out this is just like any other question of human behaviour. I just need more outside influences to help me find peace in myself. It’s not impossible, just too ill-defined a problem space.

Rain. Fields. Cool autumn wind.

The rain in Fukushima is steady but light. If my mother were here, she’d say it’s a good day for ducks. Even though the weather maes taking pictures difficult, the overwhelming power of the countryside buoys my spirits. Rows of vegetables run into crimson and yellow underbrush. Tractors and very plain utility shed dot the landscape. Terraced fields of cur rice build into hillsides, and carpets of wet leaves reflect the occasionally passing car.

Once you change trains at Soga, it’s not so bad. The Sotobo Line is about as classic JR as you can get: the curved headlight mounts and compartment seating. Inner Chiba feels close to country; the rice fields and roadside bars, the waiting at stations and leisurely lumbering pace.

It’s not polite to say so really, but there is an overpowering atmosphere that causes me to label Chiba as depressing. It’s virtually always overcast or hazy, endless flat tracks of land strung togetehr by giant warehouses, outlet centers and parking lots. The entire infrastructure is drab and tasteless, not in a charmingly classic way, but old in a “lost future oh I could have been something” kind of way.

The trains and stations are just as depressing, stations just far enough apart that it seems you should get somewhere for all the time, but no, it never changes. The same faded, pastel people at every station, the same deflated expressions. They live in Chiba, they know they’re trapped by family or cheap real estate or a lost promise of tomorrow. The lost dreams of the once righteous now quiet Chiba, acquiescence drains its residents daily like it does me just riding this train. The endless hours they spend waiting in traffic for the most mundane of errands weigh upon every eyelid in the prefecture.

Kanagawa is infinitely more interesting and Chiba knows it.

The last time I came to the Fuji Lakes it was late 2007, just after my birthday– the last weekend of the year that Koyodai Camp Site was open. I got the entire campground to myself. Fifty-two bungalows and four bathrooms all to myself, so that I may read The Dharma Bums and enjoy the rich reds of Yamanashi in autumn. This year I’m a little early, but there’s already a brisk chill in the air. Last time I visited Asian Kung-fu Generation, this time it’s the soundtracks of Merchant-Ivory and the Kinks. Riding the stuttering Retro Bus to Saiko, the wilted buildings interspersed with renovated roadhouses zip by. The bus stops in the middle of a school trip. Dozens of students clog the streets laughing, pushing, and carrying on.

A trailers buried in weeds rests comfortably in front of a wind-surfing shop, wetsuit gently twisting in the breeze.

Work has reverted to the Saturday/Sunday combo mode again temporarily, so most of my plans this weekend were squashed. However I did manage to leave on Sunday around 4:30 so I could visit my friend Daisuke’s restaurant in Edogawabashi. He’s in the process of renovating the new building for business, and selling excess dishware in the process.

I met some new people and made friends. It’s hard for me to remember names off the bat until I get someone’s personality lodged in my mind, so I try to associate faces with kanji (brother 聖也、sister 麻衣、father 弘).

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.

Red and blue carp streamers rejoice for children’s day all across the land. Long life, health and prosperity. The universal desire of all living things to avoid suffering.

I chug through the mountains (literally) in a two car train of the Nowa Line, an amblign journey through the heart of Tochigi prefecture where every stop is named after one onsen or another. OVerthe Yunishikawa reminds me of the Potomac, then in an instant I am swallowed up again by the mountain. Start to finish, thirty kilometers or so, straight north for an hour, ears popping, to change trains again at the southern tip of Aizu. Break free for a moment, pass over a shallow stream, yellow with sulfur, you can almost smell the springs. Then in a flash back to inky darkness.

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…