Squatting Lightly On the Earth

Oak tree standing beside the Maine coast, U.S.A., 1987.

This is the twelfth installment of the bi-weekly topics at Ecotone: Writing About Place. This week’s topic is Protecting Place. Please have a look at other contributions to the topic, or join in the discussion yourself.

With Russia’s official declaration earlier today that it would not ratify the Kyoto Treaty, because the treaty would limit its economic growth, a confirmation of the blindness and madness of the human world seems to have taken root and the shoots of the consequences will hereby officially make its first, introductory cough. The leaders (and, by association, the populace) are not taking the health of the planet seriously. You really have to question the sanity of people who fail to make the connection between the air they breathe and their own survival. This is the only place we have and yet we go on drunk, oblivious to all warnings. Nothing short of a super-hurricaned, multiple tornadoed, giant tsunamied, mass flooded, collapsing mountains, global food deprived catastrophe will seem to carry the clout needed to ring the bell in people’s heads that we are not going to survive this assault on our world.

The knowledge to care for our home is there. We know what to do, if we would only wake up. People like Bush focus on utterly petty concerns like the conquering of Iraq, but completely ignore the evidence of one of the most climactically disastrous years in history. Mass flooding in the States. Unending rain in Japan. Record-breaking heat waves throughout Europe (more than 10,000 people died in France alone). Uncontrolled wild fires in Australia. A new, unprecedented and fearsome drought in northeastern Africa. Huge super typhoons and cyclones in Asia. Unexplained mass dying off of mackerel and sardines due to new oceanic fluctuations. The entire, enormous island of Madagascar on the verge of an environmental collapse. The first melting of the permafrost in Siberia since before the last Ice Age. The breakup of the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf…

What are people waiting for? Why do we deny that a problem exists? It’s like we have gotten caught up in a drunken party and are ignoring a great blaze burning right in our home, ready to bring the whole house down.

I was working for an architecture firm in Boston back in 1989 and one day was sent to measure and evaluate a site for a new holiday resort. I drove alone to the area, passing through wooded hills and New England style farmland. The hill where the resort was proposed stood overlooking a small lake and the surrounding countryside, with barely a break in the trees. I sat and ate lunch, sitting on a log and gazing at the clouds rolling by overhead. Birds twittered and sang in the tranquility, quiet enough to hear bees buzzing and grasshoppers zithering in the grass. As I sat there, the feeling that this place was perfect just the way it was crept up on me. More and more the prospect of walking around the site with a measuring tape and taking notes about the attributes and problems of the site in terms of architectural needs seemed like a foolish and unnecessary exercise. I did the work as expected, but as I drove back to Boston I resolved then and there that I would not be one of those contributing to the further degradation of the world’s already beleaguered natural places.

It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with architecture. Done the right way, architecture can help create extraordinary and integral human artifacts upon the land that exist almost as an extension of the land itself. Most traditional farming communities around the world have developed vernacular designs that work closely with the habitat they exist in, often enhancing the human presence within the landscape. One of the most ecologically balanced, human-altered landscapes in the world is Tuscany, in Italy, where a medium was reached, by which the natural world and the human world could co-exist without destroying one another. Traditional Japanese settlements worked much the same way, often with a buffer zone, a “commons” (zoki-bayashi or sato-yama), where wild animals dwelled and human interference was minimal. Such communities often continued for centuries with little or no deleterious effect on the land. Tokyo itself, when it was still named Edo, was once the largest city in the world, with over a million residents, hardly producing any waste, its water clean, its coastal fish the pride of the country, and nearly everything was reused.

These examples show that humans can create settlements and use local resources wisely, without destroying the delicate balance.

Ecologically efficient rural communities continued mainly because the amounts of resources they consumed and needed for upkeep were small compared to the ability of the landscape to provide, and also because they had time to become familiar with unique local issues of climate, terrain, feeding capacity, and so forth. With time many of these communities came up with unique solutions to problems that only experience could help recognize. The northern New England landscape was once plowed under to plant crops, but the poor soil and rocky conditions eventually caused many homesteaders to give up and move back to the cities, later to be replaced by livestock oriented farming.

Once human settlements began to grow, however, and the demand outstripped the resources, all the problems associated with modern development took over. The problems are so huge today that just attempting to figure out where to start to tackle the issues can leave one reeling.

Architecture itself has fallen into the trap of glamour and riches, often leading the drive into bigger and bigger projects, with less and and less thought given to the consequences. And yet there are architects who have thought deeply about how we might address the issues of huge populations, destruction of natural habitat, overrunning of space, and over-consumption of resources. During the 60’s Christopher Alexander and a group of back-to-the-land thinkers at U.C. Berkeley developed the idea of “The Pattern Language”, a kind of encyclopedia or almanac of typological precedents used throughout human history for dealing with local conditions or architectural needs. The book of the same name, “The Pattern Language” lists and diagrams hundreds of patterns and ideas that a modern day architect or settlement builder can browse and use within a design context. The genius of this idea is that it takes into account local differences and allows an individual to tailor a project according to individual needs. It is almost the opposite of the standard modular cookie-cutter designs that dominate most large scale development.

Another project that has been developing steadily since the sixties is the Arcosanti project, an ecological town in the middle of the Arizona desert. The brainchild of Italian architect Paolo Soleri, the town is being built by volunteers who develop solutions to onsite problems as they move along. Almost 40 years in the making, the project aims to house an entire town of 5,000 people, while using a minimum of resources and attempting to become an extension of the landscape itself. The idea of using a ecological town stems out of the premise that, if contained in a limited space, the population will cause minimum damage to the surrounding land, while providing all the needs for its inhabitants. Whether or not this idea will succeed remains to be seen.

Malcolm Wells, an architect living in Massachusetts, and with whom I was in contact for a number of years while I was still an architect, is one of the most influential architects promoting “green architecture” (See his book “Gentle Architecture”). He believed that it was important to build human settlements and buildings that put the environment first, so much so that he advocated building designs that actually incorporated the landscape as part of their construction. He proposed cities with forested roofs and subterranean streets to get cars out of the way. He is most famous for his underground houses which, when approached, look like gardens dripping with flowers, grass, and trees.

View of walkway to the dining room of the Hotel Fufu, designed by the Japanese architecture firm, Team Zoo. The area to the left, covered in grass and trees, actually covers an entire underground hall, complete with skylights and clerestories, vents and rafters. Above the Enzan Valley, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, 2002.

Shortly before I returned to Japan I had a conversation with Malcom Wells on the telephone. He had just finished apologizing for not being able to take me on as an apprentice, when I asked him what advice he could give me for getting started as an architect, especially in green design. He first replied that I should make sure to get a thorough background in all the essential fields of architecture, such as construction, drafting, structure, materials, typology, history, project management, drawing, and design. Then he said one last thing which has remained with me to this day, and which defines how I want to approach all the work that defines my commitment to the natural world:

He said (at least to this effect), “Forget the new sites and new developments. Forget trying to break new ground on pristine land. Instead, find the ugliest, most polluted, most badly damaged strip of earth you can and dedicate yourself to bringing it back to life. Find the beauty in it and revive it. Coax wild animals back to inhabit it. And when you’re done, be able to say that you helped the place to grow more healthy and beautiful than it was before it was destroyed.”

This is what the preservation of the world ought to be, I believe. We need to learn to be healers. If nothing else, we can start small, right here where we stand.

Ritual

Sketch of dead female Calliope Hummingbird found outside my house window, Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A., 1981.

Lisa of Field Notes posted an account of her encounter with a dead raccoon that had been hit by a car and how she was moved to stop and take it off the road. The story reminded me of Barry Lopez’s essay “Apologia”, from his book, “About This Life: Journeys to the Threshold of Memory”, and both Lopez’s essay and Lisa’s struck a recurring chord in me.

Just the other day I was walking to work and passed the crushed and flattened body of a pigeon that had been hit by a car and run over multiple times, until it was recognizable only by the splash of its grey feathers.

So many animals I’ve seen downed by cars, all over the world. In Japan it’s mainly birds and large insects, hit by cars or ramming into windows and street lights. In America it’s raccoons, squirrels, skunks, armadillos, deer, opossums, seagulls… In Europe it’s hedgehogs, badgers, pheasants, foxes, jackdaws… I still remember finding a badger in Northumberland, its paw still soft and warm, like a baby’s hand, and blood leaking out its eyes. I called the animal rescue service; there was, of course, nothing they could do.

On my walks I try to keep an eye out for where I step and for creatures that might benefit from a bit of helping hand. Grasshoppers, spiders, cicadas and cockchafer beetles sprawled on their backs, even bold-faced hornets, all get the tip of my finger to grab onto and hitch a ride into the verge bushes. On the trains, when a butterfly or hoverfly find themselves baffled by the false lights and cannot find their way out, I will swallow my embarrassment in front of all those unconcerned people (who nevertheless shriek when the insects get too close) and lift them to safety. Bees and wasps always present an entertaining diversion, because no one around me can understand how I would risk getting near them. It’s not risk for me, though; if you know how to move and to anticipate them there is no danger. I have never been stung. Can’t say the same for the people…

But the numbers of the dead always outnumber the living.

Perhaps the most searing memory of roadside death occurred while I was still living in Oregon, back in 1984. I was driving with a friend around the Dexter Lake area just after sundown. My friend was talking and driving and not keeping her eye on the road. Suddenly there was a loud thump on my side of the car. My friend slammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a halt. We opened our doors at the same time. I stepped out onto the tarmac and looked back. From the darkness came a high pitched screaming, like a woman with a very high voice. I trotted toward the sound and came upon a raccoon writhing on the ground, her stomach split open and her guts spilled over the pavement. I kneeled down, horror struck. My stomach heaved.

From behind came my friend’s voice. “What is it?”

“It’s a raccoon.”

“A raccoon? Is it hurt?”

“Yes. It’s not going to make it.”

A short pause. Then, “Well, let’s get out of here then. It’s cold. And that sound is awful!”“

I didn’t say anything. The raccoon continued screaming and writhing, aware of me, and attempting to drag itself away. Its urine had spilled out. Suddenly across the road, from the grass I saw two pairs of eyes… her cubs. They watched unmoving, without a sound.

I stood up.

“What are you doing?” asked my friend. “Come on, let’s go!”

“I’ve got to do something.”

I stepped into the grass opposite the cubs and felt around for a stone. I quickly found one that fit in my grasp like a loaf of bread. The screaming behind me cut off, followed by quick gasps.

I stepped back onto the road, wielding the stone, and made my way over to the raccoon, who was sprawled halfway across the road now, a trail of blood painting a wet swath on the asphalt. I knelt down beside her and reached out to touch her fur. It was warm and soft, like down. Her ribs heaved quickly. Her tongue lolled from between her teeth. Her breath wheezed now.

Closing my eyes I lifted the stone and brought it down on her head. I felt the crunch of the bone and the jerk of her muscles. I lifted the stone away and stood up. Silence. An awful, nauseous hole bored into my stomach. I lifted the stone and tossed it into the grass, then kneeled down again, ripped out a wad of grass stalks, and then lifted the limp, wet body. As gently as I could, I carried it toward the cubs, but they dashed away at my approach, one of them mewling quietly. They disappeared into the surrounding shadows.

I lay the body down in the grass, away from the reach of car-strewn dust, under a blackberry bush. With a stick (I just couldn’t bring myself to do it with my fingers) I did the best I could to push the innards back into the gash in her abdomen. I sat back on my haunches and silently apologized to her, tried to find words to make some kind of recompensation. What came out was an awkward, self-conscious prayer. Then I stood up and headed back to the car.

I said nothing to my friend, just wiped my hands on the dry grass, got in and waited for her to join me. Without a word she started up the car. We made a u-turn and headed back to town.

Nineteen years later that event still flashes through my mind. It was perhaps one of the most authentic experiences I’ve ever had with a wild mammal. And one of the most troubling.

I am still unsure how to utter a proper prayer.

India ink and scratchboard drawing of young male raccoon skull. Body found and moved off the road in Lincoln, Massachusetts. A year later, returned and found the skull. Cleaned it in bleach. Drawn in Watertown. Massachusetts, 1988.

Fingers in the Loam

Driftwood log washed up on the Oregon Dunes State Park beach, south of Newport, Oregon, 1984.

Lately I’ve been wondering a lot about the direction I’ve taken in my life. Here I am living in a city (Tokyo) that, while safe and stimulating and quite airy and quiet compared to, let’s say New York, or Boston, or London, still strays about as far from the kind of environment that I thrive in as I could have chosen. My work, aside from struggling to make it as a writer (not an easy thing to do from Japan if you write in English) and illustrator, teaching English in the evenings is fulfilling in that I love my students, enjoy the company of my colleagues, and have discovered over the years that teaching brings out the best in me, and stirs up both the desire to distill what I know in younger people and to learn from them in return. But that is not where I started out from or where I first set course for when I headed to the University of Oregon back in 1978, fresh from Japan. I look back and try to filter out all the fascinating elements that kept building up the layers of my learning and maturing to the bedrock of the person I always felt myself to be. The grasp of my existence that withstands even the hardest winds. And always I come back, basically, to two words: Nature and Words. When all else falters I can always count on these two concepts and ways of making sense of the world to wait for me at the bottom of the barrel.

I have always known these things as essential to who and what I am. My first glimmerings of awareness of the world around me inevitably arise, with an intensity often blind to other things around, framed in the light of how the natural world looked or how things were said. The most intense memories nearly always hover around natural places or creatures or around books that I’ve read or conversations that I’ve engaged in. Numbers seem to get filtered out, as well as all the popular attractions that other boys always go gaga over, like flashy cars, cushy jobs, team sports, or irreverent talk about women. It made me strange to boys and men around me, and even today many men don’t have a clue as to how to begin a conversation with me, and I often feel I have nothing to say in return. My heroes as a child were Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau, and George Schaller. None of the men or women that I knew did anything close to these three.

After studying creative writing, literature, geography, and ecology (with an apprenticeship in animation under animator Ken O’Connell… he was quite disappointed with me when I left, and I often regretted the decision since then), all of which I loved, for some reason unknown to everyone in my family and close friends, I decided to study architecture for graduate school. I’m not sure of the reasons myself, except that I imagined some kind of marriage between art, social work, and sustainable development (not yet a term at that time). There was also an unspoken need to satisfy a restlessness in my father whenever he spoke to me about what I was planning to do. My talk of writing and my lifelong love for wild animals, especially insects, never seemed to elicit the reaction I was hoping for, but when he heard that I had been accepted into architecture school, his voice changed. I still remember the way his eyes lit up the first time I saw him upon returning to Japan for the summer. It was only just two weeks ago that I learned that he had dreamed of becoming an architect when he was just out of high school.

Architecture didn’t work out. While the studies were fascinating and the tumble of new ideas and the breadth of learning needed to develop into a master at this craft staggering, I never had the patience to sit for hours debating the orientation of a structure’s axis or to put up with the penis envy of all the star (almost always male) students and teachers. I soon discovered that, like Antonio Salieri, I could pick out and appreciate good design, I just didn’t have the knack for organizing spatial elements in a way that brought out the soul of a project. I found no joy in the process. It was always a struggle. One of my fellow students once remarked, when he came into the studio at 3:00 a.m. and found me cursing at my conceptual sketches, “If you dislike it all so much, why don’t you just give up? It doesn’t make sense to torment yourself like this.”

Still I persisted, convinced that it was only lack of knowledge that made me feel so frustrated and empty. I went on to live in Boston, where I struggled for five years to make it as an architect. Only three jobs came my way, one of whose bosses laid me off after one month, in favor of his nephew, who had never studied architecture. On my bicycle commutes to work along the Charles River, more and more something else began to rear its head inside me, a ghost from the past, drawn by the nighthawks swooping over the evening waters and the ice breaking up along the banks. I began to arrive late at work, drawing looks of disapproval and a few warnings from my manager.

During a month-long bicycle ride from Denmark to Paris all the voices from that earlier time when I felt I had been absorbed, body and soul, into the exercises of fulfillment that characterized close encounters with wild places, exploded into my awareness like a flock of skittish ducks. I knew what had been missing, knew what I ought to have been about. I returned to Boston heady with change, but scared. My boss, a nice man, overworked, with never enough time to see his newborn daughter, took me aside and said, “I hate to do this, but your heart just isn’t in architecture. I’m going to have to let you go. I would think seriously about what you want to do with your life.” Harsh words at the time, but perhaps the best advice I ever got.

It took a lot of sucking up my pride and working at dead-fisheye jobs to gradually swing the prow away from architecture. After all, there was all the money I had put into the studies, and all the years of self-prestidigitation to overcome. Japan harbored the old beginnings of my first foray and so back I went to pick up the string where I had dropped it. I’ve written my first book, decided that I want to teach, and am full of certainty that I want more of authentic time in the natural world. It is all there.

Perhaps, as Fujiko Suda expresses in the concept of “shu-ha-ri” used in the development of one’s thinking in marital arts, I had to go through all that to be able to come to this node that I am standing on right now. Like making a run around the rim of the volcano only to come back to this point. I’ve gathered all the tinder and kindling I need to start the fire; I know what I want to cook and then to eat. All the husks and peels have been pared away, and everything that I have built up until now has been discarded. My knife is poised and I must kill the Buddha.

But, damn, it’s hard taking that step! I’m terrified of that fall, without a bottom. It’s so much easier and familiar to just wait here, like a wolf whose cage has just been opened to freedom, afraid to step outside. My eyes know that there is nothing to it, but the hippocampus recoils. The mind is not always in agreement.

Perhaps I’ll just wait until tomorrow.

Nature Boy

Female Luna Moth resting under a branch shortly before the evening flight, Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, 1994.

Fred from Fragments From Floyd first made the call to people to try their hand at this exercise, an expression, in verse, of your origins. ( Fred’s version ) I first discovered it through Pica’s version in Feathers of Hope, and a little later from Bill’s version in Prairie Point. It’s a delightful exercise and, like Fred, I encourage everyone to try their hand at it themselves, and either post it on their web journal, here in the comments, or over at Fred’s. Here is the basic format: I am from…

Here is my version: ( “Nature Boy” was the nickname that I was given in elementary school and that stuck with me until I graduated from high school. I hated it in the beginning, but have come to feel that it describes me very well )

I am from cobblestone streets wet with oak leaves,
from the tantivy of pigeons circling.
From Tante Luise’s soft fingers grasping a worn potato knife
and Oma tiptoeing by the window sill, watching pedestrians.
I am from terra cotta roof tiles and forests of chimneys,
from a grandfather clock chiming at midnight.
From cherries and plums and dewey blueberries in bowls,
from echoing stairwells and the acrid bite of coal and potatoes in sacks.
I am from Opa’s tar-stained fingers grasping a hazenut stick,
from stock still hares and barking roe deer.
From an open top Morgan purring down the Autobahn,
from clanking trains pulling into iron framed halls.
I am from Mama’s worn diary and sepias of country lanes,
from Papa’s white lab coat and Vespa touring the tarmac.
From ship smokestacks gliding atop a levee,
from a first kiss in the westering sun.

I am from brick walls laced in ivy,
from mantis nymphs spilling down a papery shell.
From smashing a neighbor’s igloo and squirrels clattering along eaves,
from a blue blizzard toppling my friend, a weeping willow.
I am from the tales Joseph told of elephants in Rhodesia,
from the Planet of the Apes and a bone tossed into space.
From hoola hoops and Hot Wheels,
from pansit served with yams and cranberry sauce.
I am from candle balloons filling the air and cherry bombs in toilets,
from Auntie Soli dancing the tiniklit, between bamboo poles.
From Josh’s sister abducted and never seen again,
from Tatsuro’s Egyptian cartoons and Bitsy’s flying tackle with a kiss.
I am from a short-eared owl staring from a barn roof,
from the white teeth of children in a black Brooklyn school, streets shouting, “Integration!”
From horseshoe crabs washed up on Jones Beach,
from hoary firs standing silent as I land.

I am from limestone walls bulging from muscling zelkova trunks,
from sweet straw mats and shoes kicked off by the door.
From cicadas electrifying the summer haze, making trees speak,
from wooden sandals clip-clopping along train platforms.
I am from helmeted students shouting, “No war!”,
from pantomiming five comedians on black and white TV.
From shaved ice with melon syrup and glass balls punched into bottle necks,
from the girl down the street who never said hello.
I am from Jonathan shouting, “Jumbo Jet!”, everyone rushing to the window,
from Peter’s water pipe and my bloody nose.
From a family of foxes pausing on the dirt road up north,
from rhinoceros beetles and luna moths and azure-winged magpies.
I am from hitting tennis balls at a wall, sobbing and wishing for friends,
from jam-packed commutes and girls in sailor uniforms.
From lying beside the Okhotsk Sea with my brother, watching Perseid meteorites streak the wide ink sphere,
from clouds drifting across the face of Fuji, crowning her in white.

I am from the North,
I am from the West,
I am from the East.

Is there time, still, for the South?

Fresh Snow

Logs and reeds in Shirabiso Lake, Yatsugatake, Japan, 2003.

For anyone who has driven their car to a trailhead, hoisted on their backpack, and stepped away from the tarmac onto a path leading a week through a region cut off from help or convenience, the first sense of how big the world is and how small each of us are might feel quite familiar.

The Discovery Channel aired a documentary the other night reenacting a possible scenario of what it might have been like for the first Siberians to cross over the land bridge into the Americas. Most likely they had no inkling that in the vast continents ahead of them not another human soul existed, that they were the very first people across. At the time of the land bridge, with no sea to drown the highlands, it must all have seemed just a continuation of the Siberian land mass itself. But for me, living in the confines of crowded Tokyo, with dreams of wandering some expansive steppe with not a human figure or even a tree in sight, I envy those people no end.

Just the sheer self-reliance they exercised in order to survive in a harsh environment with giant animals that no longer exist today mocks the knowledge I have worked at over the years for my little forays into the mountains and on long distance tours. So much of what I know and feel proud of relies on highly technical materials and gadgets, almost all of which I know next to nothing about making myself. While I do possess knowledge about basic survival and could probably survive a winter snowstorm for a few days, I have never hunted, never made my own clothes, never had to slog for months on end through snowdrifts and wild, uncharted mountains. I think of arriving on the shore of a new continent, with nothing but the animal hides on my back, the hunting tools I’ve fashioned, and the lifetime of intimate lessons in animal behavior, moving in the terrain, and working in life saving cooperation with others, and realize just how far from the mechanism of living I have actually strayed. Put me in the same position and that shore would seem like a death sentence, vast, unfriendly, unforgiving, and indifferent.

In spite of knowing how inadequate my skills in surviving in the natural world are, I can’t live without nature and remain happy or fulfilled. This Tokyo world I live in gathers a sterile amalgamation of concrete, steel, and structure, excluding most of what makes the real world whole. I live here like a drone, performing my function in the hive, but otherwise useless and utterly dependent. I think back on the wonder I carried about all living things around me that filled childhood and can sense that the function of that wonder was to drink in the living world and learn how to participate in it. The wonder allowed me to learn without feeling it was meaningless or irrelevant. It must be something much like the native enthusiasm for hunting in cats and dogs, or the urge to beat their wings in fledgling birds. That so many of us have been breeding the wonder for nature and the wholeness of living within its sphere out of our experience seems to invite a kind of personal ecological death.

One day I would like to step onto a distant shore and set out across the unknown with just a spear and my companions. And feel my confidence lapping at the shores of wonder and the eternal.

A Sip or Two

Japanese Maples aglow in the autumn woods of Okutama, Japan, 2000.

This is the 9th installment of the ongoing essay series at Ecotone: Writing About Place. The current topic is Coffee Shop As Place. Please drop by and read other contributions, or feel free to submit your own essay.

Gathering around the water hole to share each other’s thirst must be as old as time itself; nearly all communal creatures do it, from willows crowding the river’s edge, to ants at a strip of spilled water on a baking pavement, giraffes and elephants stepping to the swamp’s edge, to moose at the forest boundary and brown bears swiping for salmon. Water is life and water is the common denominator. We humans have perfected the art of carrying the water off and slaking our thirst in relative safety.

Coffee shops, tea shops, bars, pubs, taverns, beer halls, all promote the drink, and like our thirsty savannah ancestors we flock to them as if bidden to partake of the fountain of youth. There we sit bantering, flirting, watching, spilling our hearts and ideas, contemplating, laughing and crying together while the essence of our lives trickles down our throats. Sitting in a coffee shop you get the impression that in spite of the time occupying a chair, the human drama unfolds right before your eyes. You can sit for hours watching, just simply watching, and the time seems filled with meaning.

Three coffee shops in particular have made impressions in my life, the Beanery in Eugene, Oregon and Cafe Algiers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, both in the U.S., and Ben’s Cafe in Takadanobaba here in Tokyo. They each harbored times in my life during which great changes were taking place both in my heart and in my outlook.

The Beanery was a college coffee shop, located right outside the University of Oregon campus. I passed by it every morning when I headed to my undergraduate English courses and later, in graduate school, on my way to architecture studio. Altogether it accompanied 9 years of my life, and as I matured from a wide-eyed eighteen year old straight off the boat from Japan to a 26 year old man who was transformed by the wild mountains and trees around the town, I also watched the Beanery change from a remnant of the hippie movement into a popular gathering place for yuppie bohemian wannabe’s.

My years at the University of Oregon were some of the most memorable in my life, with hordes of friends filtering by each time I stepped out of my dormitory room or apartment. And yet they were also filled with apprehension and self-doubt as I struggled with my place and identity coming from a childhood growing up in Japan, where I intensely disliked the humiliating arrogance of the Americans I went to school with. I was living in the very country that bred the people who forced the 75% of students in my international school who didn’t come from America to study seven years of American history, one year of world history, and half a year of Japanese history, to play American football and basketball when most wanted to play soccer, to take secondary roles in the musicals that the school held every year because the main roles had to feature white characters, and even to have our non-Anglosaxon names made fun of because they happened to sound funny to the Americans. I carried all these resentments and cautions with me when I went to America and was struck quite dumb when I found out that people in America are not like the Americans I knew back in high school. It took a number of years to realize that I could actually relate to a lot of Americans and even become intimate friends. When the first white American woman actually professed that she was in love with me, I couldn’t believe my ears; me, a dark-skinned, skinny half-Asian, who in the first few years in America just didn’t get what Americans were laughing at so hard at the dinner tables because the jokes seemed so black and cruel, loved by a white American woman? It didn’t seem real.

The hours that these friends and lovers spent with me at the coffee tables, hours and hours of talking until the secret places of my heart and mind, that I had never shared with anyone in my life before, no longer seemed so unusual or vulnerable, mingled with the stories that my friends shared with me, and the friendships became bonded. Coffee and tea ran with humanity, with messages of understanding. The caffeine brightened our recognition of one another.

Boston brought all that glittering camaraderie down. Out of work, nearly penniless, with no friends, I spent a lot of time wandering the streets of Boston and Cambridge, looking into shop windows and sitting along the banks of the Charles river, watching nighthawks dive and rowers slicing the shining waters. After rent and food, what little change I managed to save I used on books and for cups of precious coffee at some of the coffee shops around town. I especially savored my time in the dim, smoky warrens of Cafe Algiers right near the center of Harvard Square. All sorts of characters gathered here, and the nooks and crannies allowed you to hide for hours engrossed in a book. I met various people here, some of whom became valuable friends who made Boston easier to bear. One time a woman wearing a white shawl noticed that I was reading Peter Mathiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” and she took a place next to me to discuss why she thought Mathiessen was a cruel, irresponsible man for leaving his son alone back in America just after his wife died. It was a long, stimulating conversation that to this day I have not forgotten.

Cafe Algiers helped nurture a certain boldness and willingness to be a bit tougher as I struggled to survive in the city. It countered the great anger that overcame me at times when I continued to fail to find work as an architect. It was one of the places that helped me realize that perhaps I wasn’t really cut out to be an architect and that the desire to write, which had always pushed its way into the forefront of my ambitions since I was a boy, might better serve my bent. In the cafe I met the kind of people I enjoyed working with, spending time with, talking to. They were the people with whom I could scheme and plan for the future. As coffee splotched the napkins upon which we jotted our ideas, the limitations of the lighting of the place curbed the early rush into becoming an architect further and further into the demands of my scribblings.

Boston never really panned out, in spite of the keen friendships and sublime bicycle rides on those cold, winter nights. When a drunk roommate broke down my bedroom door one evening and threatened to bash my face in, and the police came swarming all over the apartment threatening to bring us all in (and even my girlfriend refused to come over afterwards to offer some comfort), I felt that it was the last straw. America was just too unhinged, too accepting of unacceptable behavior. My brother had recently been hit by a car and the driver had refused to apologize (which was all my brother had asked for), and she had had enough money to hire a better lawyer than my brother could afford, so she didn’t even have to pay my brother’s hospital bill. My mother had been mugged, twice. My uncle lived homeless in Brooklyn. My brother was attacked by some teenagers, beaten, and his bicycle stolen from him. I bicycled along the Charles river one afternoon and watched, helpless, as three teenage boys accosted a woman on her bicycle and demanded that she hand it over to them. When she refused, they moved in to beat her, only to be stopped by two huge, football-player-like men, who warned the boys to stop. The boys sneered at them and said, “You can’t touch us. We’re juveniles. If you touch us you’ll get time. If we go to jail, we’ll be out tomorrow.” One night, while working a part-time, graveyard shift job as a giftshop clerk at the Park Hotel in downtown Boston, a character, a young white man, came sidling into the store and started furtively shoplifting chocolate bars. When I asked him to put the bars back, he slipped a pistol out of his pocket and pointed it at my nose. “Ya gonna do somethin about it, punk? Why don’t ya fuckin’ Ayrabs go back to where ya came from, huh, mother-fucker!” He ran off, leaving me so shaken I collapsed to the floor. When my helper, a black woman two years older than me, returned from the toilet, all she said was, “Man, you sure ain’t got no street smarts, kid.” There wasn’t even mention of calling the police. And behind all this was the Gulf war, cheered on by most of the people I saw around me, and so little thought of that on the day that America attacked Iraq, while working part time in a bookstore, hearing the announcement over the store’s intercom radio, I dropped the books I was carrying for a customer and whispered in shock, “They actually attacked Iraq. They actually started the war.” The customer kicked one of the books and growled, “I don’t give a shit about any goddamn war! Pick that shit up and finish getting my order for me.” And mumbling to the side, “Goddamn Arabs think they own the world.” Words like that tend to stick, no matter how misguided you know them to be.

And so I returned to Japan, left my girlfriend behind, my friends, my hopes of being an architect. When reaching Narita Airport in Tokyo, the broken connection hurt so bad that I immediately grabbed a phone and tried to reassure myself of my girlfriend’s faith in me… she had no words, no assurances that she would be waiting for me to return. And what right did I have to expect that? I broke down sobbing in the middle of the arrivals area, hundreds of strangers staring at me in puzzlement. It was perhaps the most humiliating moment in my life. And an ignoble return to the country that had imprinted itself upon my childhood and adolescence.

I settled down, got married, eventually finding a place to live in Tokyo. Architecture became a distant dream. I began to spend lots of time up in the mountains, walking, thinking, living close to what I had always imagined I understood best. I started and finished my first book. That book was born in the third great coffee shop of desire: Ben’s Cafe in Takadanobaba, a student dominated area in west part of Tokyo proper. I went there nearly every day, sometimes for hours, to sit and write and write and think and write some more. Three thick notebooks were filled with hand scribbled words. After finishing the writing for the day, I would sip a cup of cocoa and converse with the New Yorker owner Ben or with the two Japanese waitresses who were both studying art. It seemed I was making a few friends here in Tokyo now.

Then in 2001, a week after a personal tragedy, while sitting and talking with the owner, the news hit over the radio. Ben didn’t react at first he was so shocked, but when he recovered he turned up the volume and the distinct words, “At roughly nine o’clock this morning a plane flew into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.” We sat listening, speechless, neither the bite of the words quite real, nor the bright lights and drifting cigarette smoke of the coffee shop. Ben began to babble with another American in the room, repeatedly scrambling over to the computer installed in one corner of the room, to check the news. But I didn’t hear much of what he said. My only thought was of my mother, who lived in midtown Manhattan and my brother in Boston. I rushed home and fumbled with the telephone, dialing the number several times, but each time getting only a busy signal. I got my brother right away and he was okay, but I couldn’t get through to my mother, and my brother hadn’t been able to contact her either. For five days this lasted before I could get through. When I finally did, her voice was shaken and so full of fear that a great, great rage awoke in my heart. At all people who would either cause or influence events that would make my mother so fearful and and so overflowing with tears. To find out what was happening I stopped by Ben’s Cafe every afternoon before work, and asked Ben what he had heard. The place was abuzz with ex-patriot Americans trying to make sense of what had happened.

As the buildup toward another war began and the world seemed as if it was on the verge of coming to an end, the fear and anguish of all that was happening seemed about to burst out of me. One evening, while sitting with my Japanese students out in the terrace of Ben’s Cafe, one of the students, a young woman who had a difficult time comprehending all the to-do that Americans were inundating the world media with, asked me why I was taking all this so personally and with such conviction. “You’re much too serious.” she said, much too flippantly. I turned to her, and before all the students all the apprehension melted into grief and sorrow and helplessness. I had a duty to be their teacher and to protect my position, but just being human was all I could manage. I broke down, once again in public in front of many people I didn’t know well, and it seemed as if the tears would never stop. My student, the woman, held my hand and comforted me, and sat just saying soft words, as did the other students. It was their first experience of a foreigner in pain.

And so the coffee shop protected me and healed me. The draw of the watering place and its power to remind you of life. The place where the community gathers to remember that all that matters is that life goes on and that it is beautiful enough just to watch.

In the final half hour at Ben’s my student friend stood up and went into the shop. She came back with a new mug of cocoa, set it down in front of me, and smiled. “Maybe this will make you feel better,” she said. Perhaps language is a barrier that is often difficult to get past, but the magic of a warm drink between the palms, a sip or two of elixir, and no words need be spoken; we can understand each other perfectly well.

Autumn Grey

Lacquer Vines on the trunk of a Beech tree, autumn, Oze Marsh, Gunma Prefecture, 1994.

It is time to turn on incandescent lights while the skies harbor the new arrival of nimbus clouds. Summer has passed, giving way to the slow grip of winter. I sit further back from the window, drawing inward to the map of my mind. Soon excursions will issue challenges from the tips of my shoes, kicking through the bones of leaves, and leaving a wake of assurance and regret. Grasshoppers and mantises shrivel into leaves. Lizards and toads incorporate the earth, like clods of inchoate dreams. The abandoned cries of dun minded birds ring out from the quivering branches, unchallenged and brave, small breasts held out towards the inevitable cold. And the light, which heated the rooms of my summer reveries, fades into sleep. Sleep and stillness. The ship heading into a grey and silent peril.

White Torrent

Steep trail in the hinter regions of the Tanzawa Mountains, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, 1994.

The sky split open and dropped a thunderous deluge earlier this afternoon, making the noon sky dark as evening. The rain came down so strong the air turned white with mist and a cascade of runoff pummeled the leaves of the two-year old avocado tree growing in the corner of the garden. The courtyard between this apartment and the one across flooded ankle deep and the raindrops shooting into the standing water rattled like a thousand eggshells breaking in plastic bowls. In the midst of it a lone cabbage butterfly fluttered between the Japonica bush and the overgrown lot beyond the wall of my garden, dodging the raindrops like a soldier under fire. Thunder rumbled overhead, but never broke, the sky invisible through the veils of drizzle.

I sat with the window wide open, on the leeward of the apartment, while on the other side the window sustained a wild lashing, almost as if some desperate person were flailing at the panes, attempting to break in. The drafts of cool air and the continuous roar of the rain, accompanied by a steady dripping upon the wooden cover of my neighbor's cement mixer set me to gazing at the sky, mesmerized by the shifting mist and the white noise of the streaking pins of raindrops. Time ceased. I forgot where I was.

Then, suddenly, the sky parted and all was still, but for the lingering dripping of leaves and eaves. The water on the ground drained away. My neighbor, a short, elderly man who appeared at odd times, stepped out and stood contemplating the wet concrete in front of his door. He picked up a pair of drenched rubber boots and dumped out the water. Then he stepped back indoors.

The sun sliced through the grayness and spilled color over everything, as if switching from a black and white photograph to a color slide. The false acacia in front of my window glowed orange in the late afternoon angle of sunlight. One cricket tentatively tried his wings then fell silent. And the swelter of the morning, now washed out, swept back into my room like a minty breath, inviting me to celebrate the coming of evening.

It reminded me of Germany and classical music. Any moment now I would hear my grandmother, Oma, yodeling from the back room, "Dinner is ready! Come on now, it's time to eat!"

And I got up, though there was no one there, and retired to the kitchen. The sun faded into a steely blue. Night life began, with the yellow aura of light bulbs.

Gibbous Moon

Northern Puffin frantically beating its wings as it launches itself from a cliff and tries to make a soft plummet to the sea below, The Shetlands, Great Britain, 1995

I have still to retire to my bed, though the moon is well past high and its light fingers through the edges of the curtain. Walking home from the station earlier, fresh from my evening of work, the all-enclosing halo of the train's interior lights shielded the moon from sight until I was out there, under the shadows of the bamboo grove and the buildings. And there it was, like an unwinking eye, the moon all swollen and cold, a white dagger to my surprise. When not dismissed as commonplace, the moon can whisper like a mountain, of slow skies and creaking trees, a falling dollop of indifference. Or a mirror. I stood and stared, not sure if I should stay or turn on home.

Weltschmerz ("world pain")

Alders lined up along fields to protect against the constant winds in Holland, 1995.

In the past two weeks a lot of discussions have arisen around me focusing on our spiritual and psychological conditions in the world today. My father and I discussed, on the phone, the necessity of reorienting our attitudes and expectations. At Ecotone there is a very interesting discussion going on about mobility and identification with place. At Cassandra Pages a discussion has ensued about the necessity of individual expressions of relating to a place. And Fujiko Suda and I have been exchanging e-mails about the disorientation of growing up in disparate cultures. Her post about such a small thing as riding a crowded train in Japan stimulated many thoughts in me about individual versus collective consciousness and how we, in this burgeoning, 6 billion-plus, human tide we tumble within, must learn to change our minds.

Beth writes "Somehow I feel that the past two years have been one continuous episode, starting with September 11th. I've been unable to escape the sense of being surrounded by suffering, and it doesn't really matter if it's personal or on a world scale." These words struck with particular poignancy because they express much of how I have been feeling these past two years. A worldwide despondency has overcome us all, a sense that something might be coming to an end. When I told my father about how I've become reluctant to write about all that has happened in the last two years because I inevitably feel that my words remain helpless, he responded by saying, "It is talking about it that will bring about changes and understanding. I am not angry about the New York tragedy, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but profoundly sad. All that is happening is as human as we can be and it is utterly sad to see us so unable to come to terms with our natures when, supposedly, we should know better in the modern world."

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist monk in Canada, in her book "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times" writes,
"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
"To stay with that shakiness––to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge–– that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic–– this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation–– harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.
"Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, "Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?" Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, "Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to go to war?"

I resolved two months ago to do the best I can to take the fork in the road toward practicing peace, down to the very tips of my fingers when I would do my best to refrain for lashing out even at a spider on the table or a mosquito biting me. Perhaps not everyone would see things this way, but for myself that is the discipline I need to follow if I am to truly understand peace. And to take people as they come, no matter how distasteful or frightening they might be. My biggest challenge might perhaps be to stop myself for a moment and truly see Bush as a fellow human being. Just thinking about this makes my stomach churn, but if I am serious, I will practice the exercise, for there is no other way to come to terms with the aggression and the fight or flight response within me.

At the same time I've been attempting to follow a path of simplicity and have found it remarkably difficult to implement. So many requirements around us, and temptations, chip away at what could so easily be accomplished with a minimum of fuss and equipment. Just attempting to throw belongings that I don't need away is like a pack rat's nightmare; I seem to panic at the onslaught of emptiness.

At the heart of the matter lies the willingness to confront the mirror and perceive that wraith that is our personal identity. It resides in the places we dwell in, shuttles back and forth between self and world around us. If we can only recognize that each and every individual in the whole world ripples with the winds of perception and awareness, that the little flame might so easily be snuffed out, and that every person holds the sight of their present position as precious, perhaps we might understand one another with more compassion and empathy.

Beth writes: "In fact, I sometimes think we are the aberrant ones, thinking that technology and money can fix every problem or deficiency, and losing the ability to find solace in nature, realtionship, and simple living." Few of us in the ultra-developed world have any inkling of what real poverty and deprivation and basic survival (real survival, where you have no choice and the wrong turn means death) are like. When I traveled to the Philippines in 1992 I went armed with 10 years of university, studying third world development, and the arrogance of someone who thought he knew what should be done. What I saw and learned shocked me to my very core. A friend, Francisco Sionil Jose, the well-known Filipino social novelist, there took me to visit and get to know people who live in Tondo, Manila's huge ghetto, and Smoky Mountain, the__ now removed by the Philippine government for publicity reasons (but replaced by another)__ literal mountain of garbage that scavengers built their homes upon. It's beyond words to describe the clash of perplexity in my mind, arising from the juxtaposition of that awful, awful smell, the sight of little children rummaging in the filth, and such unforgettable scenes as ramshackle piles of cardboard shacks in which people live, hanging over the banks of a river so cluttered with human debris and dead animals that the water could not be seen, while a little girl sits with her bottom poised over the bank, shitting into the drinking water, while at the same time meeting these children who never tired of smiling and laughing and singing, while mothers sat at the edge of smoke blasted highways proudly washing clothes and their husbands stood beside them washing from basins, and there was always someone beside you who cheerfully asked how you were and where you were from. The confusion of emotions and ideas that developed from these enigmas forever changed my views of poverty and hope, and left me little sympathy for the aloof elitists of the Filipino rich, and no sympathy whatsoever for people who whine about conditions in America, a place so sickeningly wealthy that there is absolutely no excuse for the poverty and violence and ignorance that does exist in America.

What happened on September 11, 2003, in New York (yes, other things did happen in other places in the world on that day) was an awful, awful tragedy. Anyone who saw those indelible images will always feel the tremor of horror that they invoke. And for any people who were in proximity to the catastrophe (yes, there were people other than Americans who watched in terror and afterwards felt the deep grief), especially Americans, even two years of distancing from the event has still failed to soften the pain of what happened. So much anger and denial and obfuscation has followed that it is now difficult to disentangle from the morass and see the pain for what it is.

And yet the pain and confusion and sense of loss are something that perhaps Americans need to go through. It is an awakening, and awakenings are often limned in pain. What showed its ugly head in New York was the telltale heart of an identical pain that people in other places have carried in silence for a much longer time. The news and those who would choose violence for solutions to any complicated, social dilemma prefers to paint the faces of those who committed the crime as monsters, inhuman agents of that obscure term "evil". But painting monsters as an adult carries no less penalties than a child hiding from nightmares under the covers: monsters cannot be understood or defeated unless you choose to turn around and face them, talk to them as being the same as you are.

Perhaps part of the initiation into adulthood requires some kind of immersion into pain. Almost every rite of passage ceremony in the world employs some kind of painful act that awakens the individual into an awareness of the responsibilities of being part of that world that surrounds them. In many ways America has been dreaming an adolescent dream for so long that it has almost forgotten that it is part of the world as a whole and that its often oblivious, bull-like infancy has come to an end. Americans still talk of the "Forefathers" as if waiting for a berating, unable to forge ahead and think for themselves, preferring to indulge in old dogma and to languish in something that amounts to idolatry. So many of them take something like the New York tragedy and fail to see it in its worldwide, social context, taking no time to comprehend that nothing happens in a vacuum, that what others do is all human, no matter how awful it is, that men flying planes into buildings in New York is exactly the same thing as men dropping mega-bombs on a residential area in Iraq, that all these human foibles are all forged upon the past and on the attitudes that one people decided to adopt. Most Americans still haven't taken responsibility for their own past actions towards people in other countries, even those Americans who react with knee jerks to criticism of "all" Americans... thinking that holding peaceful convictions and marching in rallies makes an iota of difference to an Iraqi mother whose baby was just blown to bits by an American bomb.

Perhaps it is that Americans are learning what it is to live in the world and that the world is full of pain, Weltschmerz. That America's idyll existed only because of insulation from the real world, both geographically and in their not being required to socially interact with people of other nations. That Rambo and the Terminator are inappropriate models for living in a world community and that in the modern world there are no more remote islands to escape to and all people must learn to participate in a world community. If anything, the proximity and familiarity of the pain of New York ought to teach people in the most decisive terms what it feels like to be wronged, to have death visit even your most undeserved innocents, and just what exactly others in other places feel like when you inflict pain and wrongs on them. Everyone is responsible; that is the cost of true, untwisted democracy.

As much as song, pain can cross borders to give its message. If approached with an open heart and an attitude of reception, pain can teach us to see. And if the message gets through, then the world as one place, shared by all, a teardrop in the Void, will recognize itself as a living being, subject to death and sorrow, open to the perception of beauty wherever we may find it.

Frodo

Rose Window, Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain 1988.

This is the seventh installment of the bi-weekly collective essay topics in Ecotone: Writing About Place. This week's topic is Ancestral Place

I came across my first copy of "The Fellowship of the Rings" from J.R.R. Tolkein's "The Lord of the Rings" in 1974, when I was fourteen, while browsing a musty old used bookstore in London with my father. He mentioned the book in passing and I picked it up, curious. Since we were headed for Germany in a few days, I decided to buy the entire set, so that I would have something to read while in Germany. Little did I know that these books would turn over my world and grab a hold of something in my heart that to this day has never left.

The summer of 1974 etched itself into my memories in a way no stretch of time ever did before or since. It was the summer that my parents toured Scotland and left my brother Teja and me with my grandparents in Hannover, Germany. My grandfather, grandmother, and great aunt, whom we called respectively "Opa", "Oma", and "Tante Luise", had planned a summer of travel and adventure for us. We spent a few days at a pension in the Harz mountains, where Opa took us on long walks in the woods and my imagination bloomed with images of Elves and Dwarves and Dryads among the great oaks. For two weeks we stayed at a summer camp along the northern Elbe River, where I fell in love with my first girlfriend (and one of my oldest friends) and experienced my first kiss. In Hannover Teja and I took skulling lessons on the broad expanse of the artificial lake, the Masch See. In my grandparents' apartment the rooms filled with the aroma of boiled German potatoes, rolled cabbage, fresh sauerkraut, and rotisserie chicken. The grandfather clock on the wall chimed on the hour. The coal cellar at the bottom of the echoing wooden stairwell wafted up its breath of chilly air and the acrid smell of carbon and stored gunny sacks of potatoes. The voices of my grandparents and great aunt fluted through the rooms as they bantered, laughed, and bickered in German, a language that carries the texture of time and warmth for me. And all the while, whenever I had a chance to sit or lie back uninterrupted, the Tolkein books occupied my attention and loyalties. The world of the Ring sank so deep that, one evening, while walking back with my newly returned parents, from an outdoor Handel concert at the Herrenausen Gardens, I could swear I glimpsed a band of Dwarves marching amidst the woods surrounding the Gardens.

It took me years to recognize that something about Hannover stuck with me and described a solidity in my world that the actual sifting of day-to-day experiences never seemed to coalesce. While writing my travel book about bicycling through Europe alone in 1987 it came to me just how much the spirit of the people and the town of my birth rubbed off onto my inner chalkboard. I came to realize that much as you might like to imagine that your past is a blank, or that the places you sojourn in or pass through never leave traces, in reality all the places you awake in draw scratches in the slate that forms you. Each place speaks through both its landmarks and the voices of the people and creatures that you have encounters with. It is as Gregory Bateson described in "The Ecology of Mind": all existence is a shifting of balance... nothing that happens is without significance or consequence.

While exchanging comments with Fujiko Suda over her recent viewing of the first movie "The Fellowship of the Ring" and her observation that in both the movie and the books Frodo never really made an impression on her, I spent the evening reminiscing about those first weeks with the Tolkein characters and why they seemed at the time to infuse in me an identification with the German landscape. The books invoked a yearning for connection with a place that I, with my life divided between Japan, the U.S, and Germany, never could quite grab hold of. The books took each of the characters away from the places they held most dear and which defined most succinctly who they were. The interesting development occurred in Frodo himself, who, of all the Fellowship characters, most wanted to follow in the footsteps of Bilbo Baggins and who perhaps least fit into the Shire's social structure. The further he wandered from the Shire, however, the less defined he became, and the more ephemeral and lost he seemed. For readers such as Fujiko Suda and me, Frodo never grew into a really likeable and identifiable personage... he just flickered out and turned to ashes, it seemed. On the other hand, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, who characterized the very soul of the Hobbit people, and who least wanted to leave the Shire, all began to grow and develop into more than their original counterparts, until all the strangeness and need for calling up heretofore unused emotions sculpted them into characters in full bloom. Frodo didn't seem to really learn anything, or even lose anything, perhaps because he carried little for the reader to identify with from his ancestral home.

I often wonder if that sense of identity and that sense of place, including knowing the ancestors who shaped you, arise out of being washed in the waters of familiarity with a community. Familiarity takes time and as such a drifter, by definition, cannot accumulate enough duff to be able to express the richness of a place. I've spent more than half my life living in Japan, including my childhood, and in many ways it speaks through the timbre of my vocabulary and in my body language and temperament. However, few Japanese myths or folktales have ever evoked such strong sense of identity that the myths, legends, and folktales of Europe have. The same goes for American folktales... somehow they never awoke excitement or longing in me and I easily bored of reading them. The Lord of the Rings breathed European mythology and as such sang the very notes of place that had me devouring the story. I needed something in the books that had to do with place, had to do with a long line that stretched back into time forgotten. And yet, today, I still haven't found that sigh of relief in knowing exactly where I am and exactly where I wanted to be. Like Frodo the uncertainly hangs around my neck like the Ring.

I envy those who find no crack in the mirror of the place they inhabit and who can, without a moment's hesitation, look around them and see their ancestors and feel the grounding. The place where your heart discovers rest cannot ask for description; it just knows, because all the voices down the ages rise up in one chorus. The place of belonging is a sound, not a name.

Rejoicing in Being Alive

Climbers waiting for sunrise on top of Mt. Fuji, Japan, 1994.

I was watching an animated samurai drama late last night after returning from work, in which the samurai hero admonishes a woman comrade for wishing to die. "I can't stand anyone who takes life so cheaply," he snarls before turning his back on her and walking away.

It got me thinking. Look outside and life takes on a myriad of forms. Like probing fingers it pushes into every possible mold to form itself. We like to think of ourselves as somehow unique and God-chosen, but really we are just another expression of all that is dancing around us. Like notes in a cosmic opera.

And the spark that sustains the breath of the marionette in each creature can be snuffed out like... THAT! All it takes is a little pair of scissors.

I think that samurai was right. He wasn't being arrogant or macho. He wanted someone he cared about to value the precious gift of living. It is the most precious gift we have in the world. Every day we should take a moment to reflect on this. To stand still and acknowledge that the heart is beating. To look out the window and remember that you hold something flickering within that allows you to partake of the light of the rising sun without. To recognize the flickering flame of life in every creature around you, no matter how big or small. To dare to nod to the eventuality that the flame will extinguish, and that it is all right. Rejoice in the brief moments we have! So brief, so beautiful and exquisite, so rare.

Fading

Creeping Pine skeletons in the mountains around Kurobegoro (with Sofu Peak in the background), the North Alps, Japan, 2001.

The days are noticeably growing cooler. The songs of the crickets have lowered into a sluggish pitch as the musicians struggle against the temperature. For some reason the non-native Rose-Ringed Parakeets (Psittacula krameri), with their lime green, winged javelin-like bodies, have been congregating around the telephone wires and tall Zelkova trees around my neighborhood, and the mornings and evenings have been punctuated by their piercing shrieks. Parrots and parakeets most definitely belong to the area above the forest canopy... when you see their darting, vigorous flight it is hard to imagine them pent up in a cage ever again.

The light recedes earlier now, too, and children in the neighborhood scatter back into their homes earlier. It is a pity, because it seems as if the children had only just begun to grow dark and their limbs to grow firmer with their days outside during their short summer vacations. It had taken most of the summer for them to venture into the neighborhood and play with the other kids. Now the TV's and video games have recaptured their victims and the slow degeneration of the children's summer bred muscles will begin anew. When the tide of darkness neeps high enough and the cold keeps people locked up indoors, all the afternoon shouting and laughing in the neighborhood will die away to concrete silence. Perhaps the children in this neighborhood bump around a little too much for me during the days when I'm trying to work here at the computer, but at least they reminded me of things being alive.

My late night returns home from my night work will soon again have me arriving on my street, standing outside my apartment building under the sulfur light of the street light, listening. Listening for others and hearing only the wind or the distant, passing thump-thump of the commuter train. The lights will be on in the surrounding house windows, but no silhouettes in them. It is often hard to believe that this is one of the most crowded cities in the world; so often the streets resemble the watchful facelessness of a mausoleum. Perhaps I feel this because I seek the ghost of humanity in the streets. And perhaps I seek this humanity because the same streets of my children told more stories. People were out in the streets more and more drama occurred as a result. Somehow the lure of modern conveniences in the home has separated people from one another.

A friend of mine recently responded, when I asked her if interacting with her neighbors was important for her: "The people around me are strangers. I have no interest in their lives and want them to show no interest in mine. What goes on with the person next door is of no concern to me. I would rather that we pass each other by without even looking at one another. The place I live is just that: a place to live. My friends are elsewhere and my activities take place either in the privacy of my home or where my friends and colleagues are. The area where I live is only for convenience."

These words sent a shiver up my spine and left me feeling disoriented, though I'm not exactly sure why. Her words make sense on a certain level and even carry a measure of precaution necessary for living in such a big city, especially for a woman living alone. But I can't help but wonder over what is missing in the words. It is as if the very place we live in, that we inhabit, has become nothing but an abstraction. Our connection to what sustains us, the giving of the Earth to our survival, seems not to figure in the evaluation. Surely if we are to survive the oncoming hardships of a deteriorating habitat we must learn both to identify with the places we dwell in and to learn to share our lives and needs with our neighbors, both human and non. Such essential basics as food, air, water, shelter, and health all require our cooperation and a deeper level of concern and affiliation with our surroundings than we have now.

This has been one of my deepest, most consuming concerns over the years and one that seems disproportionately difficult to discuss with others, especially neighbors. Another friend asked me recently why I feel such a disillusionment with my sense of self-identity. Perhaps the roots lie in this question of abstract versus concrete identification with the place we live in. If you can't name every tree or tell the yearly patterns of wind blowing or know where the best water is in your valley, doesn't that mean that you don't know where you are?

Islands in the Sky

Clouds scudding over the Sudbury countryside, England, 1995

( This is the 7th installment of the ongoing Ecotone: Writing About Place bi-weekly discussions. Please see the other essays contributed: Islands and Place )

From a jet plane the Earth sits under the hard mirror of the sky. The Sun glares down, its one unblinking eye pitiless with power, seeing all, the vast film of water, air and rock. Indifference beats upon any harborer of precious fluids, hissing admonishments to turn tail and burrow into the nearest cleft. To a watcher in space the blue marble of the planet might at first seem stillborn, but if it watches carefully the swirling surface would give away the secret: like milk roiling in a cup of coffee clouds belie both a smoldering heart and a mind fanning the idea of regeneration. The clouds themselves would give birth, like whales in an ocean of air.

The land that clouds inhabit lies forever just out of reach. I might brush the clouds during brief passages along the crests of mountains, and when gazing out of plane windows they whip by like shreds of cloth or spread out below like slow herds of buffalo, but forever they remain denizens of the troposphere and I only a guest, fit only for momentary appearance or required to press my face to a porthole, sealed like an astronaut.

Clouds possess the insubstantiality of ghosts and as such offer proof of the existence of dreams and imaginary kingdoms. You can see them and yet pass your hand through them. Castles and pots of gold vanish with the first shift of the wind. The mind instinctively seeks out corporeal definition, seeing familiar faces and rabbits and dragons, but blink your eyes and the forms have billowed out into abstractions, confounding your potter's hand.

And yet I have witnessed the towering mountains and valleys of the cloud realm. The planes I have perched in passed among the walls like slivers of glass, crawling amidst halls of divinity that humbled the voice whispering within as I peeked out. Bergs of vapor rolled across sheets of metallic sea, trawling their nets while some god harpooned the void with spears of lightning. Clouds have uttered the most titanic sounds I have ever heard, the vibrato in their bassoon vocal chords plucking the very air of its emptiness. And clouds have given me dantean visions of perdition, such as the memory of a night time New York City glittering at the bottom of a well of circling thunderheads crackling with electricity and flashing with gunpowder.

They move in the tier above me, casting their huge shadows on the windswept hills, and softly reminding me of my mayfly existence. Like islands in the water ocean gaps define their hierarchy, and for tithe they only require that I close my eyes and take that leap of faith. All islands require faith in navigation, clouds require unremitting belief, or you end up falling. As if nothing were there.

The Last Day of Summer

Ptarmigan in summer plumage on the lookout, Notori Peak, South Japan Alps, Japan 1994.

Appropriately it is raining today. A sprinkly, spitting kind of rain that crackles upon the leaves, not a real threat to open windows or lithe grass stalks. The extended family of paper wasps, though, that have been building their little queendom under the lattice screen at the side of the garden, huddle against the paper of their nest and moon at the grey scene, too chilled to make the effort to check on their young.

An hour ago the earth jiggled a violent mashed potato as she shivered... perhaps she was still wearing that light summer dress.

The jungle crows seem to have contracted a mass phlegm attack as they guard the telephone poles and wires above my apartment... every now and then they have been clearing their throats in the most oyaji-like, and un-crow-like, way ("oyaji" is Japanese for "middle-aged" man. It has derogatory connotations, with images such as a predilection for young women, getting drunk too much, orneriness and bull-headedness, conservatism, balding, puns, even harking up phlegm and pissing at the sides of streets... it is an image of older men that does them a great injustice, but it is a big part of Japan's popular culture right now).

Bench warmer leaves of the false acacia and zelkova trees in my garden have started blushing yellow, the misfits at the lunch table.

Mars, who has been showing off in the night sky all summer, will have to sit back behind the cloud curtains tonight. Even stars need to take a break from the greatest show on Earth.

Me? It is as if a vaporous hand passed over my lips. I sit by the window gazing, mostly at the insistence of the falling rain. There is nothing to say. The thing to do is wait for nightfall and then, simply, fall asleep.

Gaseous Clouds

Caldera lake of Shirane Volcano, Kusatsu, Japan, 2001

The window is open and through the screen drifts the music of various crickets all rehearsing for the Autumn Gala. The repetitious strokes of the Common Cricket, the melodious. liquid-like warble of Teleogryllus yemma, the slow-sawing buzz of Loxeblemmus doenitzi, the high-pitched, metallic twitter of Ornebius kanetataki, and, later this evening, the non-stop, ringing vibrato of the non-native tree cricket Calyptotrypus hibinonis, which fill the trees like the chorus from the Aida, a musical rhapsody just above your head.

The summer has just about spent itself. The light that bathed the rooftops, pavement, tree canopies, and exposed soil now filters through increasingly gathered ceilings of clouds, and shadows fail. The other night, while sitting in my classroom waiting for my students, a frightening thunderstorm hit central Tokyo, the rain lashing down in torrential sheets, and the thunder and lightning whiplashing across the night sky in a mad fury, the likes of which I had never experienced in all my life. It was so violent that it caused a blackout in part of the city and stopped the central Yamanote commuter line, the lifeline of the entire city, to stop dead for two and a half hours (I will not get into the implications of blackouts occurring in three major cities around the world within the space of one week, though I suspect that the American government is going to announce, in the near future, the imminent attack of aliens).

Perhaps the rain arrived to wash away the detritus of accumulated desires, and to make way for clear decisions. Certainly I've been debating with myself the purpose and merit of online journal writing and even the legitimacy of including computers in so much of my daily life. None of this is real. The connections are tentative. The rewards illusory. All of the hours that the computer screen demands of my attention and intelligence seeps away the undeniability of a real touch, where fingers bridge the space between souls. Once again it is on this side of the window that I sit, while the vitality that I love gives birth, eats, sleeps, and dies beyond the screen. Like a vacuum cleaner's receptacle the material goods accumulate in the corners of my room, but it is never really satisfying. I yearn for authentic experiences of being alive.

Being in touch with a lot of wonderful and interesting people through this journal provides a connection with people that otherwise I would never have come to know gives some legitimacy to using the internet, and yet sometimes it seems I spend more time with these wraiths of distance than I do with real, live people. E-mail has supplanted hand-written letters and the synapse is instant, and yet during my letter-writing days I stayed in touch with more of my friends than I do now. My mailbox now sits empty and hollow day after day, with no one, including myself, making the effort and slow contemplation of writing a letter. I still much prefer a letter over an e-mail. There is something reassuring and warm about holding an evelope in your hand, ripping open the flap, and sitting down somewhere to rove your eyes over the ink scribbles. E-mail is perhaps so easy to dash out and the numbers of contacts in the address book so numerous that there just aren't enough hours in a day to keep in touch with everyone, not to mention the build up of received messages too frequent to allow much time to deliberate the information and slacken the pace to the slow, amorphous revolutions of the heart.

Last week, in response to my last post, a good friend suggested that I need a child in my life. He is the third person to qualify this about the next step I should take. His words stopped me dead in my tracks. He had a point. In spite of recoiling from the dent such a step would make in my present circumstances, when I thought back on how I thought about children over the years, I realized that much of my time I spent "planning" for creating an environment for a growing child. When I ponder tossing out old books I stop myself, thinking that I need to have a library that would surround a child and open up the world that books gave me, as my mother and father provided for me as I grew up. When I think of nature or taking time in the mountains I often contemplate walking with a child and showing what I love so much about being out there. When I meet a young student at my school whose family has united in weekly outings and activities and who seems so uplifted by the companionship of her family members, I again think of the rewards of fatherhood.

But I resist. It seems my life is directed inward at a elusive destination where one of the dominant sensations is an indefineable hunger. I rove the internet seeking connection, but end up securing nothing but endless links. The computer screen swallows time and humanity like Fenris gobbling up the moon, always disguised by its never-fading illumination and dazzle of colors. I am a moth battering against a light bulb and if I continue much longer my wings will shred to tatters and the night will weaken before I can remember what moths flew at before artificial lights tricked them out of their freedom.

So what am I doing here? Can I use this medium to make a worthwhile difference, truly, non-selfishly, with honest intentions, non-self-congradulating, non-self-evading, meat-on-the-bones authenticity? Or is it just lather, a cover up of the stories that matter? At the end of my life will the time and energy that I spent here make any sort of difference? If not, why waste what little time I have on Earth playing with illusions?

The whole evening air is filled with the music of crickets. It will only last a snatch of the Autumn passage, but it is all in earnest, all directed toward the serious business of living to the fullest.

_________

Fujiko Suda goes into this subject, too. Please refer to her post: How It Changed Our Lives So Far

Watery Window

Still life at the edge of the trail, Hakuba, Nagano, Japan 2001.

All spring I had been anticipating the ten-day break of August this year, for a chance to escape Tokyo and spend a nice long period walking up along the ridges of the North Alps. My pack was loaded, all the food prepared, and the route mapped out. I even went to bed early the night before to make sure that I was fresh for the exertion.

When I woke up the windows were quaking with the muscling blows of a typhoon. I peeked out from behind the curtains and found the false acacia in my tiny garden being thrashed to and fro like a wet towel. A muffled roar descended from the rooftops and broke over the eaves with splashes of whistling. Clouds raced through the sky like scudding ships.

Two days this lasted. The news reported landslides throughout the country. The second morning I walked down to the river near my apartment and found the banks overflowing, brown soup sliding by just under the high water mark. Flotsam danced among the eddies, shreds of reeds and torn up clods of earth, lone soft drink bottles, aluminum cans, tumbling, sodden magazines, and once a Nike running shoe. I stood on a bridge, listening to the driving rain spatter against the stiff material of my waxed-cotton jacket.

The next day the sun broke through the cloud cover for exactly one day, steaming up the city like making crab dumplings, and the passage of water through all the fissures and cracks in the land sounded like a waterfall.

But this lasted only a day. The rain returned without a thought for all the Tokyoites who had been saving up their money for the vacation. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday... rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. It was like filling a glass with water in the sink, turning away, and forgetting that the glass was overflowing. My garden converted into a mosquito pond. The head high sunflowers lined up at the edge of a small farm plot down near the river began to turn brown from rot. My hiking boots put on warm jackets of white mold to fight off the chill. In spite of the August calendar dates, November was rising in my soul. I took to walking down to the river every afternoon to check the water level. The tow path had disappeared. Spot billed ducks, trailing their now almost fully grown chicks, paddled vigorously at the sides of the river, pecking at bits and pieces of vegetation that floated by. The drum beat of raindrops tapping the shed roof outside my bedroom window became the rhythm of my night's dozing.

The vacation has now drawn to a close and the rain has let up, but the urge to throw my backpack over my shoulder and take off down the road still inflates my lungs. It is hard to breathe for the persistence of walls. The acacia in the garden has bent over double from too prolonged weight of water and will need cutting. Perhaps tomorrow. I have had no sky over me and my mind still thinks it is evening. The yawns come in waves. And I feel so sleepy.

The Smell of the Sea

Foghorn on the Sumburgh Head Lighthouse, the Shetlands, Great Britain, 1995.

In the last two weeks three times the air has carried the smell of the sea through Tokyo. Tonight was another such night. In all my years living in Tokyo never before have I smelled the ammonia and seaweed and salt away from the coast. It was like a subtle reminder of where I am, where all people in Tokyo are, but which is so easily forgotten amidst all the concrete and rush.

Tokyo.. once called "Edo"... was once famed for the variety, excellence, and freshness of its fish. The best fish was referred to as "Edo-mae", sort of an equivalent of the American Grade A beef. During the Edo Period the docks and piers and wharfs and landfills that block the city's access to the water today existed only in some dreamer's mind; many of the waterways extended quite far inland, and the smell of the sea must have been a daily ingredient in Edo's sea breezes.

To add magic to the briny air, I've been watching the TV series "Horatio Hornblower". As a boy I loved seafaring stories and would devour such books as "Two Years Before the Mast", "Treasure Island", and "The Mutiny On the Bounty". While other kids put together plastic racing car and robot models, I took my tweezers and rigged the intricate sails and masts of such tall ships as the Cutty Sark, the Golden Hind, the H.M.S. Beagle, and the H.M.S. Bounty. I still dream of one day learning to sail a yacht and crossing the Pacific. I would love to spend one night out in the middle of the ocean, lying on deck, and watching the stars.

This month "Pirates of the Carribean" will start. The sea has hoven into my shores this summer. The salt spray is calling.

To All the Trees that I Have Loved

Tree watching over a dolmen, Funen Island, Denmark, 1988 (I'm not sure what kind of tree this is. I think it's a beech, but if anyone knows, I'd be grateful if you'd inform me)

This is the fourth installment