Two Sundays: The Souls of Cities

or “Two Sundays: Sunday The Second”

This should likely be retconned back to here to go with the other Sunday, and I'll do that eventually, but I figured I'd post it today as I likely won't be posting much while I'm off in Van, and some of the Torontonians might be interested. Also, it's not Japan-related, but it is meant to contrast with that other Sunday. Though I took my sweet ass time agonizing over this, all of these thoughts materialized concurrently with all of that sweetness from the Sunday spent camping.

In Canada, or Toronto, specifically, Sunday was spent in tense anticipation of the kind of madness that had gone down the day before under the cover of the G20 protest. The kind of stuff I came home to find out about my city couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the leisurely, amicable weekend I had just spent in Japan. Witnessing the coverage of everything that went down in Toronto, I find the whole thing depressing and perhaps even a little sickening. It’s been kind of haunting me since, like a nebulous storm cloud over my head, and the first time I tried to sort through what I was feeling and thinking was in an email to Saff.

Sorry, sir. Was away all weekend when all the G20 stuff/messages from you dropped. I looked at all your tweets and a bunch of the pictures you took, and it only served to depress me, so much so that I've been completely unmotivated to read any of your blog posts.

You see, I'm a pretty passionate guy, and I can set myself on fire when it comes to ideas or certain beliefs, but...I don't know. I can't get behind either side on this G20 thing. I'm angry with the security force for making my city something it's not, but I'm angry with that black block bullshit for doing the same. If it's true that the cops were baiting the black block to legitimize themselves, then I'm pissed at the black block for being stupid enough and juvenile enough to take the bait and revel in the opportunity for destruction. They ruined everything, and they single handedly damaged the image of all of the other peaceful, legitimate protestors. The conflict seekers and the drama queens baited the police and cast their shadow over all the people behind them with real things to protest about.

I think it comes down to the fact that these people described themselves as Anarchists, and I don't think I can ever get behind Anarchists. I don't care what end they're trying to justify with their means: in my eyes they are devoid of beliefs. Their only god is chaos: their only moral, destruction. Anarchy is a cop-out masquerading as beliefs. To have beliefs, you have to be accountable to something.

If you’ll permit me a tangent, it reminds me of a university course I took in the Rhetoric of Dissent. As a group project, we were asked to start our own resistance movement. There were anti-smoking groups and anti-cell-phone groups and anti-meat groups, but the one I’m remembering now was the “X” group. It was populated by the hipsters and the counter-culture kids in the class, and it was…well I don’t really know what it was. It was anti-anti, I guess, and thinking themselves clever the group did little in their presentation other than sit at the front of the class, doing little, delighting in how much more clever and ironic they were than all the rest of us with our predictable, so-very-yesterday causes. They were the black block of our class, and they were a cop-out. They took advantage of their freedom, and they worked towards nothing. They claimed the nothing to be their cause, to be their end goal, but all they succeeded in accomplishing was a void. They insulted everyone who had come to that class with a purpose, and they mocked the authority of our professor.

The black block anarchists are as unwelcome in my city as the riot cop darth vaders that clashed with them. The only way I can adequately express my distaste for both sides is by saying I want them both to not exist; I want them all teleported to Mars where they will never again trouble Toronto the Beautiful.

At the same time, I don't want to dwell on this. It has affected me more deeply and more inexplicably than I would have thought it had any right to. I'm not someone who comes to depression naturally, but this has depressed me. Even if the Toronto police/the security force were unconstitutional and truly cruel, and even if there is some way they can be held accountable for their actions, I don't care.

I don't give a flying fuck.

The damage has been done to the soul of a city, and to drag it out with investigations and finger pointing and attempts to justify the violence and the cruelty will do nothing to heal that bleeding gash in what our city is.

A lot of people fucked up in all of this, and the Free City, as you call it, was the only one that paid the price for those fuck ups. No matter what either side tries now, after the fact, to validate their actions, it will never make it up to the city.

The main point that came out of all this, though, for me was the idea of the Soul of the City. Maybe that can be the kind of thing worth posting up here; the kind of thing worth sustaining with the madness of Toronto as an illustration. The notion of the Soul of the City if something I’d touched on before, with dutiful thanks to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Read this book. Why haven’t you read this book yet?) and Neil Gaiman’s Worlds’ End.

If cities were to have souls, they’d likely be mostly people-based. There is the city’s architecture and its infrastructure and its ecology, but I’d like to think these constants compose a body, and it is the people who breathe the life into that body. That being said, without the body of architecture and infrastructure and ecology, those people would be other than what they are within the body of the city.

Just as the souls of cities can become hot, running fevers that infect their bodies, they can become protective. Even if they’re composed of thousands if not millions of individuals, the souls function as one. The many, fractured views of what the city should be that are held by those millions of individuals average out and harmonize into an overarching identity just below the surface of the city. Its soul lives in their beliefs, in their impressions of what the city is.

And when the city is threatened, this collected soul reacts.

In Berlin, Germany, a hundred or so German Nationalists (Neo Nazis) need a cordon of officers to protect their freedom of speech as a crowd of thousands of ordinary Berliners gathers around them to silence them. They are the soul of the city, demanding that the same mistakes should not be made again.

In Tallinn, during the Soviet occupation of Estonia, the Estonian people in the capital created their own, non-soviet radio station and would broadcast from the former legislature building. A group of hundreds of Russians, possibly organized by Soviet authorities arrived to ring the building, attempting to force their way through the gates to silence the Estonian voice within. The radio station sent out a call to the city, telling it that their freedom was under siege. And it was the soul of the city that responded. Thousands of Tallinn residents of Estonian descent peacefully descended on the legislature building, ringing in the Russian protestors with a force dozens deep. In the end, Estonian police had to escort the Russians away through the gathered mass.

In each case, the city defended itself through its latent soul: through the tiny magic that it holds in the minds of its residents—a guarding enchantment disguised as municipal patriotism and an investiture in the clear notion of “home.”

However, when a violent darkness descended on Toronto, and it needed its soul to protect it, that soul was drained away. The foolhardiness of the few was favoured over the averaged wisdom of the many. Ahead of the G20, great walls were erected through the heart of the city, obstructing its natural flows and pushing the residents that made up its soul out of the city’s heart. Soldiers were fashioned out of peace keepers: they were armed, they were encased in armour.

I think John Cruickshank, Publisher of the Toronto Star, said it best in his article immediately following the madness over the weekend in Toronto. I think it was the following statement from him that set me off down this contemplative path about cities and their souls. I think it was the following statement that was the only sanity I’d heard in all of this:

“The only force that can prevent vandalism and mayhem in a city is the presence of its population.”

The soul of the city responds.

When the city is in peril, its citizens move to protect it.

When the nihilistic black block infiltrated our city, we didn’t need riot cops: we needed civilians, living in the city and making it alive as they do every Saturday and Sunday. In the presence of civilians—in the presence of the soul of the city—violence and anarchy will not be tolerated.

And let it not be the case that people think the black block as the only threat to this city—the only force that the soul of the city would have rejected. Though the authorities would tell you that they emptied the core to protect the civilians, I don’t doubt that they made this decision to protect their force of Darth Vaders as well. Just as the Soul of the City would not have tolerated the black block, I very much believe that it would not have tolerated the gas-masked and plexiglassed black cops, either.

Gah. I’m not sure what this was meant to be, and I know it has little to do with Japan, but I’ve agonized over it for long enough, so here it is as it is. Here’s hoping something in it speaks to you, even if it isn’t as artfully wrought as it could have been.

Two Sundays: Icebergs

or “Two Sundays: Sunday The First”

This is the first of two related blog things about Sunday because Sunday was very much two days for me: one in Japan, and one in Toronto. The Toronto bit has got more thought to it, and it is on the way. However, for now, here’s the first Sunday:

In Japan, this weekend was spent with the other HAJET kids (Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers), “camping” at Shinshinotsu, which is maybe forty-minutes-to-an-hour outside of Sapporo and just a short drive down the road from Heather’s town. I say “camping” because it was more pitching tents in a well-manicured park, as seems to often be the case with Japanese “camp sites.”

There were meetings carried out in cavernous town hall halls, and there were informational seminars carried out in gusty, faux castle turrets. When we weren’t meant to be doing anything, the glaring sun drove most of us to cling lazily to the shifting shade or to try and eek out some sweaty peace in our tents, which had become less tents and more solar ovens.

A highlight was definitely Saturday afternoon, when I and Norther Rep Doug took up the challenge to man the grills and feed the other 54 HAJET members and friends who were in attendance. We took to it like Japanese fast food chefs, letting our calls of “IRASHAIMASEEEE!” ring out across the campsite, confusing all of the Japanese folks who had made the mistake of camping next to our gaijin settlement.

And then it was Sunday, and we washed off some of the sweat from the night before in the nearby onsen before saying our lazy goodbyes under the grey, muggy day. I rode home with Heather for as far as her town, then the rest of the way with Perry and David—other ALTs from my part of the Shiribeshi sub-prefecture. The sun came out on our ride back out west, along the Sea of Japan, and I dozed in the back of David’s tiny red Toyota while he and Perry talked a bit but were more often comfortably silent in the front.

Stopping just outside Otaru at a Seicomart for some mint Crunky, David asked if I ever bought bananas from Seicomart, and if I, too, felt guilty about forgetting the 20円　banana coupons they were constantly handing out. He talked about how he had been so unnerved by the silent brow-beatings he received from the high-school-aged employees of his local Seico when he forgot his coupons that he would actually set out for the Seico, realize he intended on buying bananas but had forgotten his coupon, and he’d actually walk all the way home to get it before heading on to the kombini.

It was an insignificant anecdote that I could empathize with, but it stuck with me until later that evening when I emailed David to thank him for the ride. In the cast of that Sunday night—which was all mountain-eclipsed sunsets, and fragrant seaside humidity, and old men at the pool asking for English lessons—the banana coupons caught on something and hauled up a thought that I hadn’t been looking for. It was a beautiful thing, though, and it seemed to highlight the kinds of weird, deep, but ultimately fleeting relationships that us JET/ALT kids form with one another. What’s more, I think it’s likely the perfect thing to say after a weekend spent amongst my adopted foreigner family over here, a realization that I had about my relationship with David but which could have easily applied to a large segment of the people with whom I spent the weekend.

“When I think back to the seemingly insignificant detail of your story about forgetting Seico Banana coupons and having to turn around to go back to your house for them least the Seico employees should yell at you for your carelessness, I realize how very much we have in common, you and I.

And that detail is insignificant, and it could be the kind of thing I have in common with a lot of other ALTs in Hokkaido, but there's something about it that seems salient today. There's something in it that makes me keenly sadder about your decision not to recontract. For all of my excitement for you and for Ari and for Stanford, a sentimental, selfish part of me is going to miss car rides with you, David, and miss discussions of forgotten banana coupons. They are the pedestrian crystalizations of the kinds of relationships that we ALTs form in this place. They are the tangible tips belonging to the deep icebergs of emotion that go floating off into the blue when people in our kinds of situations part.”

Red & White

Heather recently informed me of a striking chromatic difference between Japan and North American/Western society.

In Canada, and America, and likely most of the European nations, it is understood that white and black are binary opposites: chromatically as well as philosophically. Were you to try to illustrate the concept of a binary to someone, it is likely that the first example to come to your mind would be “well, it’s like black and white, really.”

In Japan, however, it is white and red that are opposites, and not white and black. Such a chromatic revelation is not so shocking in a country that had to invent the notion of green—or midori—as the result of foreign influences (before green was just another shade of blue to the Japanese, and traffic lights are still considered to be red, yellow, and blue). However, the fact that red and white are opposites becomes necessary context when you realize just how often the two colours appear together in this society. The Japanese flag, of course, is the most obvious use of red and white. However, there are also the graduation ceremonies in the schools, wherein the rooms are ringed with white and red striped curtains. And in the day to day, my elementary students, from first grade to six grade, all have reversible red/white caps hanging from hooks on the sides of their desks: ready to be deployed in any activity that calls for splitting the class into teams.

One such activity occurred on the weekend of May 29^th at my elementary Undokai (school sports day), which saw the entire student population divided down the middle into two teams: Red and White. Each team had representatives from every grade, and when certain grades were competing, the remainder of the team would form the cheerleading squad: maniacally waving their team’s colours and following along in the pre-set, full-body, preset, foot-stomping, hat-waving red or white cheer routines.

The closest approximation for an Undokai that we have in Canada is a Track & Field Day. And such a comparison would be apt when it comes to the Undokai’s X-meter-dash and relay events for the students. However, such a comparison fails to capture the importance of the Undokai as a community event that sees student’s entire extended families coming out to cheer them on (indeed it seems to be, in a way, mandatory for parents to show up for the Undokai, and they are encouraged to arrange vacation if they usually work weekends). The comparison to a normal Track and field day also fails to capture the rest of the Undokai events, which are best described as delightful madness. There are tug-of-wars, and piggy-back chicken fights, and yosakoi-like dance numbers. There are caveman races and weather races, family races and beer bottle races, koi races and ball races. And—my personal favourite—there were dress-up-like-a-sarariman-and-act-out-getting-sloshed races. It was that last that caused me to exclaimed, when I was finally able to get my laughter under control, “God DAMN, I love this country!”

But coming back to the Japanese binary of Red and White for a moment, I wonder if it might not be a purer binary than Black and White: if it might not be better able to illustrate the notion of a binary: of opposites.

I fear that our own western white and black has been too tainted by the associations with other binaries that we’ve muddied it in. White becomes associated with ideas like light and good and air and life. Black, in opposition, is associated with the conflicting notions of dark and evil and earth and death. Black and White, in western society in specific and, likely, in the English language in general, have become value judgments and no longer a simple chromatic binary. To assign either colour to someone or something is to risk contaminating it with these further binary associations or residual meanings.

In Japan, if you’re not white, you’re red. At the end of the day, those students at the Undokai are wearing white hats that are also red hats, and the others are wearing red hats that are also white hats. To change from one to the other is only a matter of inversion: of taking the hat off, changing it, and putting it back on. And, in the end, it’s just a hat.

To transition from Black to White in western society requires far more work. If you are black then you are the absence of white. You carry all of the negative, unclean associations with the black. Should you wish to change sides, to ascend into the white, so strong are our society’s peripheral associations with these two colours that, even if you succeed in changing, your previous colour will cling to you like a phantom miasma. It is like trying to mix white from black when dealing with pigments: no matter how much light you pour into the dark, all you will ever accomplish will be grey.

This is a theoretical discussion dealing with abstracts and is not meant to be a commentary on race. That being said, with the way that talking about someone being white or black aligns so easily with western notions of race, perhaps the race issue is the purest example of the implications of, and inherent dangers in, western society’s classification of the colours Black and White. Just as the Japanese arbitrary aesthetics decided that red and white would be opposites, so, too, did western arbitrary aesthetics draw race lines in Black and White.

Modern Myths: The Dragon

A dragon slumbers beneath the Japanese archipelago. If you were to look at the profile of the islands from space, you might be able to see the shape of it in them. Then again, you might see anything but a dragon and wonder what fit of creative madness spawned the legends of this beast.

Regardless, in Japan there is an old myth that the islands are actually perched on the back of a sleeping dragon. If you humour the idea, screw up your eyes, and look at a map of Japan from across a crowded room, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of it. And, if you did, you might further conclude that, were these islands to be a dragon, the shape of the island of Hokkaido would be the best fit for a dragon’s head.

It’s not just the shape of the islands that lends credence to the myth. There is also the fire at the heart of Japan: the fact that our string of islands is just one more line of volcanoes in the pacific Ring of Fire. When you remember this, what better symbolic creature is there for an archipelago with magma boiling away at its core than a dragon?

Grandiose Japanese storytellers would dust off this old myth at parties to impress foreigners. They would say that the islands of Japan rested on the back of a sleeping dragon, or that a dragon slumbered under the islands, or that the islands themselves were a dragon. It was the Dragon that brought luck to the Japanese: the Dragon that would sustain them through their hardships, the storytellers would claim, hardly believing the thing themselves but reveling in the wonder it bred in the eyes of their audiences.

It was a fun little bit of myth and it never had any real consequences until back in the 1940s when someone had the idea of building a train tunnel from Aomori to Hakodate, joining the island of Honshu to the island of Hokkaido with a fixed, underwater rail link. Clever men bored beneath the Tsugaru Straight, holding nothing back. With their clever machines they dug three separate tunnels. When their clever machines couldn’t advance, they resorted to clever alchemies of channeled fire. And when even their powdered explosions failed to clear the way, they moved the stone by strength alone. They dug their tunnel deeper than anyone else ever had, they dug it longer than anyone else had ever imagined. They even built shrines to their own cleverness in the bowels of it: the only two train stations to ever be built beneath the ocean floor, each of them housing museums to safeguard the records of the men’s exploits.

All the while, it is doubtful that any of them thought twice about what they were doing. Their minds had grown sharp and quick over their years of schooling, grown to places where kappa and tanuki and obake were figments: unrealities meant to scare children straight. Those minds were so filled with cleverness that they had little room for story—for myth—and few among them remembered the tale they’d been told in their youth about the Dragon beneath Japan.

The Dragon, for its part, remembered.

And when those clever men completed their tunnel, linking the north and the south, and sent through the first trains on March 13, 1988, there were others who remembered, too. The people who used to tell the story of the Dragon to impress foreigners at parties, they wondered what if there really was a Dragon? What if Hokkaido was its head and Honshu its body? Wouldn’t this newly opened Seikan tunnel that bored so deeply through the rock beneath the islands be a slit across its throat? Would it not demand some sacrifice for the insult?

The Dragon’s ire was slow in building. It came gradually as Japan moved into the 1990s, and the nation found the luck it had been riding since the 1950s drying up. The bubble burst, and Japan descended into financial turmoil that lasted long into the new millennium. All the while those same men who would uproariously tell the tale of the Dragon to entertain the foreigners began whispering it to their Japanese friends, speaking suppositions about whether all this financial upheaval after so much gain might not be the Dragon finally turning on the Japanese people.

Now the sons and grandsons of those first clever men labour industriously to bring new wonders to the Seikan tunnel: the lightning miracle of Shinkansen. By 2015, they aim to traverse the tunnel ever more rapidly, ever more frequently. And the storytellers—now old and grey—begin to wonder what new ire the Dragon will manifest at this fresh insult—how the Japanese people may be made to understand the danger of sacrificing myth to the modern.

Up on Shakotan Dake

Today I climbed a mountain with my boss and a band of aging Japanese mountaineers. I'd been wanting to climb this particular mountain, which I can almost see from my house, since very soon after I arrived. In his continuing tradition of taking me on interesting adventures, my boss arranged the whole thing with a local climbing/hiking group, and we set out at 7:30 on Sunday morning. The weather couldn't have been better, and we were able to make it up in 4 hours, take about an hour for lunch at the top, then back down in 2 hours. Here's a cross section of the kinds of things you run into on a mountain:

Climbing Shakotan Dake with Jicho, I knock a staccato rhythm on the rocks with my bamboo cane as I cross. But it sounds a little more hollow than I’d hope: like there might be caves down there hiding Tanuki or Tengu.

At altitude, birch trees grow low and twisty like mangroves, more horizontal sprawl than towering pillar. Looking down on the world from on high gives vertigo impressions of concavity, of the earth curling up beneath you, and you out over it, until you might just be able to glimpse the unders of rocks.

From up there, where we break for lunch on the peak, we glimpse the standard hallmarks: the now-old friends: Yotei, Niseko An’nupuri. The near-centenarians in our group prove hardier and more versatile than I: cracking beers and lighting tiny gas stoves to cook themselves sumptuous summit suppers. I gulp down water for the heat and onsetting headache, and I dine on the lembas bread of the Japanese: Onigiri. Rice balls wrapped in seaweed with protein-packed, fishy cores.

Up here: still snow, but there’s a change of scene in the green. The Hills of Hokkaido, more Amazon or Andes, and not the Japanese Northern Outpost. No longer the birthplace of winter.

From up on Shakotan Dake, Furubira behind us is barely visible. The elevated plain could be an island in the sky, for at its cliff edges the low-lying coast is overlaid with kiri: low-lying mist that sits like clouds. Throughout the day, it recedes slightly, and we can catch sight of our town, of neighbouring Bikuni. However, by the time we shamble back down the mountain, sweaty and spent, and drive back down to the coast, the kiri is as thick and grey as ever, and it shrouds us in on our way to the onsen.

Yosakoi is

Yosakoi is madness.

Yosakoi is forward motion.

Yosakoi is colour and music and light.

Yosakoi is a thing with a life of its own: a synergetic, Frankensteinian abomination of the fishing-inspired dance that birthed it. Yosakoi is the void that was filled by the surface-shy, but deep-down-explosive Japanese soul. Yosakoi is one voice expressing itself in a multitude of languages and dialects and idioms. Yosakoi is a rough framework for imaginations that express themselves best in rhythm. Yosakoi is the Will-To-Performance of a people.

Yosakoi is your visual definition for “genki.”

Yosakoi is energy uninhibited.

Yosakoi is fire.

Engaru and The Looking Glass

Last weekend Lindsay, Becca, Roz, myself, and the majority of the Hokkaido Association for Japanese Exchange Teachers (HAJET) Prefectural Council headed to President Simon Daly’s place in Engaru for our first, full, officially meeting. The Important Business Bits of the weekend went far better than I could have ever expected (not that I was expecting them to go particularly badly or anything). The Natural Beauty Bits of the weekend are better shown below (coming soon) than described here. The Childlike Wonder Bits of the weekend require a description, though, as the fact that one of Simon’s kiwi-born children only knows how to answer the question “how old are you?” with “Ni-sai!” is only the tip of the uniquely childminded iceberg.

While the Daly Children were up, we served as canvasses and mirrors for their imaginations: Grumpy Bears when we shut the doors of our side room to keep out their early risings; monsters and extraterrestrial ninjas constructing edible moons out of the intergalactic cheese of cosmic cows. We arranged names for ourselves from random strings of guttural noises.

When I told the eldest daughter that she looked like a princess in her dress, she replied that such an observation must make me a dragon, and I should do my dragon duty by chasing and trying to devour her. In my spontaneous dragon voice, scarce more than a gravelly whisper, I informed the child that I had been a dragon for longer than she could understand, that I was forced to take on my present, boy-shaped form centuries ago to escape the persecution of those like her who thought of my kind only as killers and savages.

I told her that dragons abducted princesses only so the princesses would be their friends: so the princesses would cook for them, and clean their caves, and deftly weave the kinds of little beauties that scaly dragon claws could never manage. The dragons would tell the loved ones of the princesses that they’d eaten their daughters because the dragons knew those people wanted to believe it, making it easier for the dragons to be left alone.

In becoming a mirror or a canvas for these children, all of us who still held on to our inner kinder saw the children as mirrors for us as well. While reflecting on how fluidly the telling of the dragon’s tale came to me, the two mirrors aligned, and I tumbled into their infinite regress. I started to wonder if it might not be true: if I might not have been a dragon this entire time and had forgotten, or if it might not have been a previous life.

Perhaps all of us little boys who fantasize about dragons and dinosaurs descended from them—perhaps we had always been them. And all the little girls: might they not have been the faeries and the unicorns and the birds? We, the Thunder Lizards, and them, the Airy Spirits?

What if I had previously been a tree and a dragon and a god?