He had it coming

I've come down with something. I think Craig and Dad brought it over with them. It's a condition that's exacerbated by having such a significant part of my old Canadian life here in Japan for such an extended time: telling me stories of the people I used to see all the time. It's a sickness you can control, but--just like going out without a jacket--I don't take care, and I start having dreams with Amandas and Allisons and Garcias and Lindsays in them. It puts the chill in me, and when i should be taking nice Japanese vitamins, I wallow instead in foreign junk food like Canadian tunes from Amy. And, at my last possible opportunity to kick this thing by getting to bed at a reasonable time, i elect to stay up, emailing with friends who i feared had forgotten about me, and they assure me that I'm very much still on their minds.

And--just like that--I'm afflicted. It's the antithesis of the Wanderlust, and there's just one way to say it:

I miss you.

Year's Ending

I hope that, wherever you find yourself in the world, you have yourself a よいお年お.

You know I'll be thinking of you as i stand here, alone on a mountain top, crammed in with hundreds of my closest strangers. My brother and dad crapped out after all our temple hopping today, so its just me and the crowds and 17 monks and their 74-ton bell here in Kyoto.

But between the clouds, the moon is full, and when the clouds do come, they bring me snow: dusting down in the yellow floodlight. It's come down all the way from Hokkaido tonight, little white pieces of home to keep me company.

It's just over two hours now before year's turning here, on the other side of the world. Gong will go the bell, and gone will be the first decade of this brave new millennia.

I hope this beginning finds you well, and just maybe, if you listen closely, you'll catch the faintest echoes of the Chion-in bell in the night, chasing the change around the globe.

広島県 (Of Hiroshima)

For all my anxiety about making sure this trip went off without a hitch and my brother and father were rested, fed, and happy, it's only gotten better since leaving Hokkaido. For all my adamantly proclaimed love of snow and winter, as we flew in over the geometrically perfect, man-made island of Kansai airport, and the sun glinted in the window off the waves of the inland sea, I started to yield to the idea of a temperate winter. And then on the train from Kansai in to Shin Osaka, as the Kansai craddle from which all of Japan was born whipped by outside the window, I marvelled that the trees still had leaves. Coming out of the grey-white dark of Hokkaido, the prospct of warmth and sun and growth seemed so distant as to be fantasy.

But here it is, and it warmed me. On that train, I was hit by sentimental waves of Greece and Scandinavia and Estonia and London, and in the midst of being buffeted by them I realized this adventure of ours had really begun.

Our hostel in Hiroshima was bare bones in that livably Japanese way, with our own toilet, sink, and futons, but little else that wasn't shared. It provided dad with coffee and Craig with facilities for pursuing his ongoing mochi addiction.
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Hiroshima itself has been two worlds:

Yesterday: sunny Miyajima.

The sacred island that man couldn't set foot on until he built a colossal, vermillion Torii gate in the water off its shore through which boats could approach in deference.

A knot of hills and temples, possessed by its island spirits embodied in the curious yet indifferent deer that stalk the crowds of visitors, searching expectantly for their offerings.

And the mountainside sprawling complex of Holy that is Daishou-in temple. A place of Buddhist worship infested by lawn-gnome-like Chibi Buddhas: oriental leprechauns that have studied the stoney disguises of the tanuki. When you look upon them, they are statues frozen in comedic, almost mocking poses.

And when you turn your back, they gambole off between the rocks and plants of this massive zen garden. They play hide and seek with monuments and shrines many times their size: springing them upon you as you turn corners and hiding them away as you try to capture the wonders with your camera.

As the night falls on Miyajima, these diminuative Buddhas descend from their mountain home to light the stone lanterns along the shore and to shoo the deer back into the forests.

Lastly they spark the great bulbs that set fire to the Floating Torii, assuring that its reflection glows in the rising tide and burns itself into the minds of the footsore and windblown visitors as they leave Miyajima on the last of the ferry boats.

Today: The A-Bomb Dome and Peace Park of Hiroshima city proper: grey before the coming rain.

The last sun of yesterday disappears behing a slate of cloud as we descend from the tram, the irradiated remains of the former prefectural office full before us without any build up or any reveal. You don't wander down a path to find the A-Bomb Dome. There is no coy game of cat and mouse where the path approaching it gives you fleeting glimpses before revealing the full of it. It's just there. Vivid and whole and undeniable. The ruins, mere meters from what was once the epicenter of man's greatest folly of curiosity, they seem almost a sculpture of destruction, an image carefully fashioned to embody the archetype of a ruin.

Every protruding, twisted girder; every heaping of rubbled masonry, a flourish of a brushstroke intending to make the meaning of this oeuvre explicit.

It is more monument than any amorphous blob of modern art could ever be. And in my mind it brings down an avalanche of images:

The shockwave hurtling down from a height of 580 meters to strip away the majority of the prefectural office like rags or flesh, leaving only the current skeleton of steel and rock; the firey ball of plasma boiling down in the shockwave's wake--a vivid visual of fire passing through the metal remains of the dome, like smoke through a latticework.

The birds that now roost among the ruins of the A-Bomb Dome; pidgeons still picking hopefully through the rubble; something like starlings perching on the metal work of the actual dome and flitting to and frow among the standing remains in a flock.

Thousands of people being reduced to atoms, the trauma and absolute nature of their destruction going so far as to undo the very boudaries of their spirits so that both the molecules of their DNA and the shadows of their souls begin to overlap. And in the heat and the dark, as everything that once composed them is forced upwards into the azure sky, they fuse. Thousands of souls all rising together; a vast, sentient thing that rides the winds away from the inferno. The one, eclipsing soul of Hiroshima's dead.

Enola Gay, learning of that daft son of hers' last attempt to do something to make her proud. She, rolling her eyes and shaking her head with a morbid laugh, wondering if that ol fool will ever learn.

Modern Myths: Urban Warming

A little while back, Saff made an observation about how the snow seems to be disappearing from the cities. He mused that they must have become too big and busy for significant snowfalls. I was inspired by the vein of wonder in what he was saying: the implication that the snow-free condition may have more behind it than a simple environmental equation of car exhaust, snow plows, and residential gas-burning heaters.

What Saff got me thinking about was whether this might be an affliction of the soul of the city as well, rather than just an environmental affliction of it's body. If the idea that a city could have a soul seems alien to you, seek out Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In it a phenomenally gifted Italian author of whimsy muses about the personalities of cities in the guise of conversations between Marco Polo and the Emperor Kublah Kahn. The near-personifications of the cities are so smooth and vivid that I used them as lullabies for a time. Or you could seek out the Sandman volume Worlds' End (Saff could better tell you which specific issue of the comic), wherein Neil Gaiman explores the dreams of cities and the consequences of them ever waking.

Both authors lend a personality--a soul--to cities that is greater than the sum of their streets and inhabitants. And when we talk about the fact that cities are no longer getting snow in the way they once did, I wonder if it's not an affliction of these synergetic souls. It's something about the cities' peoples being so constantly busy and in such a hurry. It whips up the air in a way, a metaphysical exothermic buildup of shit that needs to get done. The hardships and worries of all these people crammed into such a small area spill over into the cities' slumbering minds, and the anxiety burns in them like a fever. And, even though the citizens are rushing here and there all day long, they pass one another as silent ships, their only communications the binary strings of cell towers that glow red in the night from all the traffic flowing through them.

Perhaps the cities have grown and developped into a thing that is the antithesis of snow.
Snow: that natural element, meant to sanitize, slow, and insulate. Now it will only linger for any reasonable amount of time outside the cities, where the lives of people proceed at a pastoral pace slow enough to allow the snow to stay.

And if this is more than just urban warming? As the souls of the world's great cities fall sick with this fever of progress, burning across the skin of their concrete and ashphalt, they are the lymph nodes of the greater world, and through them the fevrile infection spreads to the world itself. Global warming, not as a consequence of carbon but as a spiritual affliction that we've inflicted on our world through the fervrent speed at which we've come to conduct our lives.

Could the snow be just a sympthom: an early harbinger of a more malignant sickness gone unseen?

'Twas the night before Christmas...

...and all through the town,

every creature was stirring

even the Jones clowns.

With Craig in his bandana

and me in my gi,

we'd just arrived at the dojo

to do Kendo for free.

When out on the floor

there arose such a clatter

we sprang to our feet

with hopes of making it louder.

Children did run

and hurl balls with glee

screaming their lungs out

for Kurage and Me.

Shinais were laid

round the centre with care

in hopes that some violence

soon would be there.

We stretched and we armoured

we men'd and we do'd

Children with Miura

and Shinkai with we.

Okay. Maybe I should just let the photos tell the rest of the story.

Modern Myths: Cold Cellar

As the snow really piles up in Furubira, I see the ‘ba-chans dealing with it by dumping it down into the crevase-like open storm drains. The drains run along the roads on either side and are covered by concrete slabs with slots between them to allow drainage.

However, the slabs aren't so large that you wouldn’t be able to, say, drag one of them off to expose the deep, trough-like drain below. And this is exactly what the ‘ba-chans do. They prop the slabs up, like giant cement trap doors, at the edges of the square, black holes in the otherwise perfectly uniform whiteness of the hard-packed streets and sidewalks. I watched as whole snowplows full of white powder vanish down the square voids with the efficiency of those Acme-brand, moveable black holes from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

There’s something arcane about it for me: the dumping of all that snow down those holes; out of sight, out of mind, and with no indication that it’s piling up or that there will ever be any end to those cavernous spaces under the streets.

I picture a massive cold cellar; an icy furnace beneath Hokkaido that is stoked with snow by the shovelful throughout the long winter.

And, at the height of the hot Japanese summer—when the people of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu are quickly turning to puddles in the oppressive, humid heat—in Hokkaido cooling breezes blow forth from forest caves and river beds. They link up to the expansive ice caverns beneath the island, where there is still snow that has sat unmelted since the times of the Ainu—ice that is older still, from down dark paradigms of time, to back when these islands were ruled by something other than men.

Keeping up with the Joneses

It's the first day of winter here, and it's still snowing. Blizzards raged across my mountain top high school all day, dropping at least six inches of snow. I got to watch the progress in water breaks from my day of playing soft volleyball on a team with some of my students. They were, of course, phenomenal, and we very nearly won the tournament that had been organized for our end of semester sports day. A highlight had to be that one of the kids on my team was named "Genki," so when he made a particularly heinous serve/spike, I would delight in screaming "GENKI DESHO!" at the top of my lungs. It's a Japanese pun that basically equates to "it's good, I tell you!"

As I left the high school, the storm appeared to have dried up for the day, but it had done it's job as my deep footprints from my wandering about in the haka yesterday had completely vanished when I walked through today on the way to the BOE. The extra few inches on and around all of the tombstones is bringing them ever closer to being erased. The bottom, tiered portions of them have become amorphous blobs that are seamlessly flowing into the thick layer of snow on the ground around them, and their growing white afros are growing dangerously close to the snow on the ground. I imagine that when the two meet up, from above and below, the memorials will be gone entirely, leaving what was once a graveyard as an undulating mass of white.

By the time I had finished putting in an appearance at the BOE, the snow had started up once again, coming down in thick pellets like hail, looking almost like corn raining down in the green-yellow glow of the parking lot lights. A couple of these weird pellets piled up in my outstretched hand, and when I crunched them between thumb and forefinger, they felt like the world's smallest snowballs. And, of course, as I write this now, it is still snowing outside.

That ain't really the point of this, though. I try to make these things pertinent or theoretical or at least interesting in some vaguely literary way, but I'm throwing all that out into the snow tonight. In just under 24 hours, my father and my brother will be landing in Tokyo. Though on a conceptual level I've known that they would be visiting me here in Japan for quite some time now, I think the emotional impact of it is catching up to me pretty late in the game--as is often the case with me. I'm only now feeling the implications of all this: of them being in a country where they've got no hope of speaking the language. Of me getting to see them in just over a day when they land at Chitose near Sapporo and I get to be their obnoxious, Canadian welcoming party...

I'm kind of freaking out.

It's part awesome. They're going to be here, in my podunk, little, snowy town. They're going to have the chance to see how I live here. I'm going to have the opportunity to show them Japan. Together, we're going to see Hiroshima and Kyoto and Tokyo for the first time. And, what's more, we've never done anything remotely like this together, us guys, since way back when Craig and I were rugrats. The Jonezer Family Vacation. Keeping up with the Joneses. Something like that.

And it's part terrifying. I'm not sure what "ready" is supposed to feel like, but I'm pretty sure this ain't it. I've got a notion of what I'll do with them up here in Hokkaido, but once we get down to Honshu and Kansai, I haven't the foggiest beyond hotel reservations. I mean, I've got brochures and guidebooks, and you can't sneeze in Kyoto without having to apologize to something old and historic and uniquely Japanese, but I still feel like I should have some epic schedule of Japanimated fun drafted up.

Well, if nothing else, it will be an adventure. I suppose that if I can manage to keep them fed, alive, and rested, they'll be fine with whatever we get up to as they are both remarkably laid back people.

But...yeah. That's me tonight. Ecstatic and terrified. Blown away and concerned. Thanks for putting up with it. I promise to get back to something interesting soon.

Relentlessly Beautiful

It's been snowing in Furubira for almost a week now. From time to time, the pace of it slows and the sun cracks through the clouds to set fire to the reflective white of it all. I'll go to bed with the last few flakes of the day drifting down, and I awake in the morning to a driving whiteout, what purchase I was able to effect by shoveling last night completely burried under all that's fallen as I slept.

All of the angles in this place have come to curves under the unrelenting accumulation. The solemn, standing stones in the haka have come to better resemble overiced cakes.

Poles have sprouted teetering white affros, and the trees are like molecules or solar systems: their boughs turned to bulbous white planetoids.

The snow piles up, vast and deep, like glaciers or continents on the slanted metal roofs of houses. As the kerosene stoves burn, heating up the houses, these continents of powder go sliding down the inclines and fall to the ground with whomps that you feel in your chest. I closed my closet door a little too forcefully the other day, and i could hear the impact of it echo in the breaking up and sliding of the snow on the roof above, felt the muffled whomps in my chest as it all cascaded down into the yard. While walking through town, you have to be careful not to walk too close to the buildings least you should be lost, burried utterly in one of these avalanches from above.

With the dwindling amounts of dark peeking out from under all of the white, it's like the world is slowly being erased, leaving only blank, white paper behind—the negative-space wet dream of some impressionistic artist.

For someone who loves snow as much as I do, this is some kind of freak Christmas miracle. For all my years living in Canada, I don't know that I've ever had the opportunity to witness this much snow. Riding into Yoichi today on a bus out of Sapporo, I almost missed my stop because the town had become so bulbous and white as to be alien. It makes me wonder as I prepare for the arrival of Craig and my father on Wednesday if their impression of Hokkaido might not be one of an Antarctic marshmallow land of snow. I wonder if, were they to return in the summer months, would they be able to recognize anything of this place from their first, snowy impression. Of course there would be the mountains and the ocean to orient them, but, with another possible 40cm of snow forecast for tonight, I wonder if it might not finally succeed in entombing the mountains and the ocean as well, turning this place into one undulating, uniformly fluffy sheet of white.

I took advantage of a break in the snow today to get out and take some photos of Furubira in the snow. I've included some of them here, but there are a few more in a new Flickr set.