The Melting World

The past weekend I took a brief trip to Tokyo, and it’s such an enormous, chaotic, mad elephant compared to our slow and peaceful existence in the Hokkaido mountainside. Oh yes, I was glad to come back to fresh air and quiet, but I really love Tokyo, too, for its vibrant energy and for its most excellent people watching opportunities. It appears as if some people in Tokyo have thrown off all their fashion inhibitions, and it’s great to see the results, like men in glittery ballroom gowns and horn-rimmed glasses and teenage girls in French Maid costumes with green knee socks and yellow platform sneakers.

I attended a very hilarious and moving documentary, “Recolonize Cologne,” by Sun-ju Choi, a Korean ex-pat director in Germany, about Germany’s colonial history in Africa and about the mistreatment of immigrants from Cameroon. It was part of the Refugee Film Festival, held at the Swedish, Italian, and French Embassies.

One of my favorite parts in the film was where she cleverly used Lego characters to re-enact the invasion and deceitful tactics of the German companies/government in Cameroon – adding irony and wit to what was a horrible and inhumane campaign. She managed, with a low budget, to capture the innate idiocy of claiming superiority over others.

I also loved her idea to have the main narrative involving an impromptu public performance of a Cameroonian German, who was carried through the Cologne streets in a makeshift throne, shouldered by stereotypical, blonde-haired Germans, acting as a reincarnated Cameroonian king. The King then staked claim to a small part of the public square, with those velvet ropes seen in movie theaters, and named it the Nation of the Multitudes. He then passed out his nation’s universal passports to the bemused and puzzled crowd, declaring them free to travel, work, and live wherever they wished in the world.

Along with the passports, his ‘servants’ passed out hot potatoes wrapped in tinfoil to the onlookers as well because, his ‘page’ announced simply, “we know Germans like potatoes.”

I just looked for an English link on the film, but only found one in German, but I did discover a multilingual site working on the behalf of migrants and refugees in Europe here.

As my family was clambering into the car outside our local megaplex shopping center, the sky told us to stop and stare.
Wow!

–An injured horse flees the US bombing of Baghdad–
(Image taken from here)

I was asked about six months ago how I can be an anti-war idealist in light of what horrible things happen in our world. I was asked how I can say, for example, that war is wrong, when it was the way in which someone like Hitler had to be stopped. It’s a difficult question.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, trying to formulate why I feel any act of violence against another human or living thing is only a worsening of the situation. And it comes down to my inner voice. I can’t see the good in violence, and I can’t support or condone it, even though I can understand why some people prefer it, having moral justifications for it and perhaps financially thriving from it.

I admit the line gets fuzzy when I think of issues of self-defense, and if I became a victim of violence, or if I saw someone harmed, I would quickly move into response, of course. But that response is not violence in and of itself, it is a reaction to direct oppression. I believe people who practice the resistance of non-violence will in the end create a better world rather than a worse, even if they must lose their lives in the process. This is a gift that people like MLK, Jr., Gandhi, Biko, Nkrumah, and Jesus leave for us to learn from. They are humans, with faults and weaknesses like us all, but they chose the tougher path of peace and love.

I do not, however, feel war and killing people ever creates a better world, and many, many innocent people are killed in the process, many people are left injured mentally, physically, and spiritually, often losing their loved ones, and thus denying the world of so many unrealized lives. I will never be hawkish, as I find no wisdom or joy in bullying. I imagine the pain of all the people who have lost their children to war. How can anyone call these lost humans ‘collateral damage’? I cannot.

A great haiku poet, Taneda Santoka (1882-1940) wrote the below haiku during the war between Japan and China that broke out in July 7, 1937. No one in Japan was allowed to oppose this conflict, and all poets were supposed to support the war in their poems. Yet, because he was jobless and homeless, Santoka was free to express his true feelings.

Marching together/On the ground/They will never step on again.
Futatabi wa fumumai tsuchi o fumishimete iku.

Winter rain clouds–/Thinking: Going to China/To be torn to pieces.
Shigurete kumo no chigireyuku Shina o omou.

Leaving hands and feet/ Behind in China/ The soldiers return to Japan.
Ashi wa te wa Shina ni nokoshite futatabi Nihon ni.

Soaking wet,/ Quietly returning/ The remains of six hundred fifty.
Shiguretsutsu shizuka ni mo roppyaku goju hashira.

Sweat trickles down/ The white boxes.
Poroporo shitataru ase ga mashiro no hako ni.
(Translations by John Stevens)

Let us hope for love and reason to win out over chaos and hate. I conclude that, yes, I believe in the power of non-violence and in the actions such belief necessitates.

I am here at work early, earlier than most folks, and when the sun rose at 3:30am, I did, too.

I am wondering if I have entered that stage I’ve heard the elderly often do, of waking early without the need of alarm clocks. Normally, I am not so eager to rise up in the morning, but these days I have no choice: my brain is up and active without any prompting.

I like waking up early, though, because the rare gifts of silence and peace settle over the world. I step out on the veranda and in the field the grass sparkles with dew and the clouds drift across the bright blue sky calmly, as if nothing bad ever happens. The neighbor’s rooster says it’s true.

Even if this quietness is not always at my side throughout the day, at least now – when most people are fast asleep, dreaming their fragmented and shuffled pieces of past, present, and future – I have that overwhleming sense that all is well and all will be well, too.

“If you zoom in too close, a spiral appears to be a line…” I’ve said this before, and now I realize it’s my life.

The ties you think should have been broken or at least disintegrated after so long an absence hold firm. The prodigal daughter takes a road that ends up where she began.

Come to think of it, I am always dreaming of the land I came from, where people dig for ore in their sleep, where the violent punch of waves turn rocks serenely round, where sweetgrass grows and no one mows it down, where the loon calls and you return home to earth again.

Rain
Rain Rain
Rain Rain and more
Rain
for the past three days.

Hokkaido is not supposed to get a rainy season like the rest of Japan, but it seems to me as if we get it, too, but without the uncomfortable high temperatures found on the main island. I don’t mind rain, however, because it slows me down and at least where we live the lush scents of freshly-cut sweetgrass and lilacs and clovers intensify and the myriad of greens deepen inside the birch tree leaves, the pine needles, and the grasses. Green filled with an inner light. Then those azeleas turn their lanterns on and lead me down the path toward silence.

On our veranda, my son bathes in the sun in that quiet beauty before dusk.

As Dickinson wrote, some moments we see “a certain slant of of light.”

Here my family witnessed the gold glow of the setting sun. Such moments make a life worthwhile.

If only the world and my mind could be as peaceful as my son looks right before he wakes up in the morning.

In a few minutes I will be that person who walks around the classroom actively waving her arms and speaking at a volume unnatural. This is teaching, or rather trying to get others motivated to teach themselves.

But now in a spare moment of solitude and window light, I am as quiet as the books and ceramic cups. The words I form here to fill this space are only to motivate me to find a better path to be-ing. The way is actually quite simple and clear, yet it seems I need to be reminded of it daily….

An inescapable event for anyone attending schools in Japan, the annual Sports Day, which was held this Sunday. Here my son shows off an example of the sports day fashions. I, of course, got an extra added gift of sunburn.

All in all, it was a surreal, and completely humorous event.

Sorry I couldn’t film the big dance number where all the parents and kids wore gold streamers on their wrists and we frantically flailed our arms and legs about in circle formation to a song that had a curious word-addition to the chorus: “Hallelujah.” I’m not sure what the rest of the song was about at all. Either way, it was serious blackmail material…best kept undocumented.

How did we end up in these elf outfits exactly? Well, the race entailed putting on costumes stuffed in a colorcoded bag and then we had to run about 50 meters to unstack some plastic cones and then race back to tag the next group of lucky nursery school parents/child. I think my husband is the best elf of us three.

A and T chilling during the long-winded sports day opening ceremony.

My son content after bubble blowing by the river side. Maybe the bitter soapy taste made his lips a bit puckered though, or else he wants a kiss.

Last week Arashiyama was the setting for the Chi-nomi-Shiri-Kamuy-nomi, an Ainu ceremony of prayer to the gods and blessing of prayer sticks. The ceremony was led by the local Chikabumi Ainu.

Here are the foods prepared for the gods.

Here I am with my son and the inimitable Fusa-san and some of the ladies.

Here Ota-sensei (L) blesses the new prayer sticks with Kawamura Kenichi (R), the leader of the Chikabumi. The sticks are called Inaw. The inaw are carved into birds who will then fly the prayers to the chosen gods (lIwasaki-Goodman & Nomoto, 1999, p. 223, in Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People, Dubrueil & Fitzhugh, eds.).

Here are the opening prayers conducted inside the chise. The male elders and other respected male leaders said prayers, while the leader’s wife poured the sake. I didn’t see the entire ceremony because my son decided to shout his own prayers out loud and so I thought it best he do that outside.