The Melting World

Son and I took our first hat-less jaunt down the more-or-less melted sidewalks last week in an east-side neighborhood.

The crisp view of the Daisetsu mountains is here for your viewing pleasure. This mountain range is called the Playground of the Gods (Kamui no Mintar) by the Ainu.

anonymous artist – Outsider art exhibit at local library

I haven’t had the chance to get to this place lately. Been traveling about and reading books on the treatment of the peasant class during the pre-modern and modern era of Japan. Once again, I am opening my eyes wider to what is in the hidden history of Japan and starting to recognize important interconnections with the history of the Ainu here in Hokkaido and to the poor all over Japan and, ultimately, the world.

It seems to me quite obvious that the controlling power base tries to define as many differentiating (and often arbitrary) characteristics of others to weigh in as losers against their own perceived supremacy of group characteristics in order to justify the continued unequal and inhumane treatment of those ‘undesirables.’

The undesirables are meant to stay undesirable, in other words. Thus, the under-class has a role, it seems in part, to keep the elites feeling superior and justifiably self-righteous.

I have always found social history much more fascinating than the standard fare drilled in young minds. The book I mentioned I am in the process of reading above is Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes by Mikiso Hane. He argues that the road to modernization for the majority of Japanese was slow, and wretched, filled with disease, starvation and discrimination. I recommend it, but of course it won’t be a cheerful read! More like a bucket of ice water thrown on a sleeping bear.

I also met a woman scholar yesterday who trained at SIT in Brattleboro, VT, and is now an intercultural trainer. She built a website recently to open the dialogue up within Japan on multicultural issues. It’s entirely in Japanese but here it is! I was thrilled to see this sort of positive action being taken within Japan.

My son said, What you think as a problem,
think as a skill. To speak a language no one knows –
but for me – crushes dandelion dust under my chin
and love’s butter seeps into my marrow as deep as those
who utter moo, meow, and ba-ba
black sheep have you any wool.

No arf, no peep, no neigh, a rare choo-choo.
Those sounds carry no impact
on the current state of planet earth
or guarantee happy thoughts when old.

To be in the realm of non-language may be a gift
from me to you. A reminder that words fly
and never land; they spill and dissipate.
Toward emptiness all speech crawls.
When I look at you with all my love
limitations of the tongue shall melt away
like ice painted to the branches of trees.

(anonymous outsider art at the local public library)

The hawk hovers above the courtyard and knows
that the earth is awakening. It is mindful of the movement
below the soil, the stretching of limbs and the assembly-line
yawns. Rivers rippling past creaking bones.

Any animal with a nose knows the same. The wind kisses
each face awake with the thermal smells of melting snow and loam.
Butter on morning bread melts faster, luxuriously
releasing its frigid opaque form. Everything stirs.

And the sounds! The eaves of every man-made box plink and plonk
a free-style jazz of tin cans, wooden spoons, and stones shaken in jars.
Such music sets us free. Snow on rooftops slips on invisible shoes and leaps.

Small feet patter the earth as if millions of children trapped inside
brick schools and steel factories broke free. Horizon is a far distant fence
in a field of mud and seeds. Hearts thump chaotic bliss and bodies pulsate
heat and breathe. The deity manifest in the hawk surveys the earth spinning

toward Spring. In its tendons and in its wings, it sees a brimming lake below,
overflowing mirror of sky. Near the surface, fish glide by on silver fins.
In the center of yellow-black peonies reveal a multitude of opening eyes.

Faith doesn’t materialize in human breath,
in an utterance of Sanskrit or ancient Hebrew or
in the foam at the top of a tall glass of milk
directly brought from the udder to your lips.

Faith has more to do with silence than speech,
more with the open spaces among the notes and words.
I have never seen it, unless it might be those floating
colored specks a child sees, eyes closed, when facing the sun.

Grass turns to velvet. And ants, beads of lapis lazuli.

There’s another kind of faith people like to talk about,
while chasing azures with nets, but it never fills the soul
with triumphant towering clouds or human wings.
At best, it stuffs the mouth with cotton and sedulously
sets copper coins on man’s closed eyes.

Let go of the notions of acquiring hope via the holes
of the body and re-frame the journey by hoisting
an ax to the five gilded frames of your world. Chop away!

My advice, at surface, appears noisy, violent, extreme.
But if you took my initial advice to heart
then it’s in the pause before and after where belief
cradles your head and whispers your wordless name.

Lean into the silence
of a cut lemon and dance to the symphony
of an orange tree in bloom. Faith roams freely
the earth, the body, the mind. No shadow slows it down.

When three hawks flew by in straight lines
I knew something must be done straightaway
to pull the thread taut and flatten the seam
of the quilt. Enough unraveling!

We have a world here before us of drizzly snow
and shiny black branches against white sky.
Something is being said in Chinese
and it’s time to translate the text.

Underneath the grey sedimentary lines of snow sleeps
a tiny red mitten. Its owner has a song to sing
that only those who love him hear.
It sounds like the voice of an angel,

an archangel, and not Gabriel who’s busy
dictating the Qur’an and visiting Mary. And it’s not Varuna,
the Sky God of Sun and Rain. 1000 eyes watch without sound.
Listen. Maybe it’s Pleiades or Paramita or Norway Pine.

Does the name matter? If the song sung is plein (sailing)
or peleiades (flock of doves), will you still dance with love?
Everyone dances who loves this child, and that’s why we’re here,
tugging your hand. We keep the hearts safe, under here.

The telephone won’t be answered in seven languages.
The last sip of coffee grows hearty limbs and
stands as a lemon tree atop a hill in Rio.
There are boxes humans make of windows and homes, a child.

Even the car in repose is a box with something almost human inside.
Walls don’t smile or laugh or give hope. The trees speak quickly.
One blink and the fractals shatter unread.
The message spreads like a blue flame searing

across the palm of my hand, up collarbone, beneath my tongue.
Ask the red mitten! She’ll tell you that to be lost
in snow is fine with her. She has memories of being
whispered to, and she grasps the words inside the very fibers

of her being. She has nothing else left
to hold. There is the pair of eyes, large as bowls
filled with black ink, and inside them
a boy lives a life those who love him need near.

In the space of one of the hawk’s wings is a tear
from a crow who wanted its home to itself, not in the mood to share.
If it’s a tear or a tear doesn’t matter to the branches right now.

To be saved from this world you must first
bury yourself in the snow, close your hands over
your ears and hum. A blue glass bottle is today.
The white sky signifies infinite hope.

Last week I spent three days at the foot of Daisetsu-san, the highest mountain in Hokkaido, for an intensive English learning camp with some of our students.

One afternoon during a break I trekked up the road, passing only the occasional cross-country skiier. The snow began to fall in thick flakes, coating every adhesive part of my clothing with whiteness. The rushing hotspring-laced river curled around the path, orchestrating each step up the hill. I imagined if the snow fell any heavier a person could easily get lost in the woods, but I didn’t feel afraid at all. I felt at home in the warm absence of human beings.

T. composed a 6-minute song all by himself two days ago. It is his first independently composed song, though he has sung backup on other songs of my husband’s.

A friend emailed me some info on throat-singers from Tuva (an independent area in the Tunna Mountains of southern Siberia and northwestern Mongolia) today, and reading about it triggered my memory of my son’s song.

Hmmm….maybe he, too, is singing at some harmonic tonal levels we cannot hear?

Check out some Tuvan throat singing here: http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/tuva.html . In particular, I found this one clip amazing; and, yes, this is the human voice, and not John Coltrane’s trumpet in “Naima” as I first thought!

T’s song:

Pranatronic had been working on some vocals when T. leaned over to the microphone (I mean, we’re talking, he really was mouthing that microphone–it got all soggy!) and started to sing this tune. To me, it is a very peaceful and meditative song, although if you wait until you get past the 5 minute mark, then he gets into creating some final and rather bizarre high pitch sounds, like a baby trumpter swan. And a very wild baby trumpter swan at that.

Link is here.

Here, also, is a very short video clip of that latter part of the song production process. Both of these are big files, so they may take a while downloading.

Please enjoy!

Okay, everyone, here is an actual documented photo (courtesy of my husband’s cell phone, hence a bit fuzzy) that we have two actual foxes as our downstairs neighbors. One was reclining atop the bicycle shed, while this one was nosing about the snowy field.

My husband tossed him some bread, and he jogged over to eat it, taking close scrutiny of my husband’s, a.k.a. ‘the food-giver’s’, visage.

A small painting by me of St. Nina Simone, The High Priestess of Song
(February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003)
Pianist, Composer, Performer, Arranger, Singer

Nina Simone’s voice is inseparable from my growth as a human being. In my days as child, listening again and again to the haunting rendition of House of the Rising Sun, I crouched face-to face with our very basic record player and watched the album wavering and bobbing in lopsided circles. Although I didn’t comprehend the significance of that House until I was a teenager, I knew the sadness of the character’s fate, and identified with it.

In my teenage years, I discovered more of her songs to love, singing along in my bedroom to a cassette tape with Sinnerman, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (a critical song to have at such an age), Mississippi Goddamn, Strange Fruit (much sadder and dramatic than Billie’s), Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out, and Kurt Weill’s Pirate Jenny. And, of course, her version of one of my most favorite songs of all conceptual time, I Put a Spell on You (also done by the incomparable Screamin’ Jay Hawkins), expresses so much what a lovely mess love is.

In the past months since we got a new used car with a multiple disk CD player, I have been listening to her sing as I drive to and from work: over and over I hear Save Me, Ooo Child Things Are Gonna Get Easier, and Talkin’ about a Revolution.

Whenever I’ve introduced her music to friends over the years, many imagine at first listen that she is a man, with a man’s voice, and–more than the timber of her voice–I think she carries inside her songs a power and a defiance not normally anticipated in a woman singer (or a woman), and thus, due to her formidable presence, her words resonate stronger than most singers, male or female. She didn’t hide her power, ever.

She has for me the deepest, most somber voice of the human heart–a voice of pain, righteous rage, and wacky humor all rolled into a weighty punch that demands the ears to sit down, be still, and listen. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, indeed. She was unafraid to shout for justice in the Civil Rights era and beyond, she resolutely refused to be typecast, and she remains a soul alive in song. We truly need more of her strength in this world.

She left America in 1971 and lived in Europe and, finally, France for the rest of her life. She couldn’t stand the omnipresence of racism in the States. She would have been the first woman classical pianist of African American origin (she had to drop out of Julliard to support her family when her benefactor stopped support) had it not been for the prejudice and blindness that still afflicts so many in the USA. Rather than ‘cure’ these people, she said, ‘the hell with ’em” instead and made her own way. I respect her for this decision to be herself, to see herself only as an indefinable, unique artist.

An excellent article (with a moving blog posting in the side-bar by another writer) about her continued impact on modern songwriters can be found here.

A good website on her bio and work is here. It looks like a musical tribute for her is traveling around Europe, too. Wish I could see it.

She is quoted as saying: “Through my life I made a world for myself…and the best thing of all is that I’m still happy to live in it, after all these years.”

I want to keep feeling this way about mine. Her words give us the strength needed to live a life less ordinary.

(Wikipedia. Copyright from creative commons, but link’s dead!)

Snow falling, falling on the fields, the trees, the streets, on the sculpture of a nude woman in bolero hat. Her hat transformed into a dramatic puff of a Russian Silver Fox hat, her melting blue copper limbs lined above with the white fur of fresh snow.

I didn’t have a chance this winter season to sing my ode to snow until today. A bitter, dry cold spell stretched on and on, and the snow on the ground hardened and turned unforgiving, no longer a joy to shovel. The snowflakes remained trapped in the tight fists of blue skies, waiting for the moister, warmer breath to release the gift of snow. Now it falls in those long feathery sighs I love…

My husband believes a fox has moved into the veranda below us. He has spotted her red body out in the field out back, and he has seen footprints leading up to the veranda and suddenly the prints end.

Foxes in Japan, called kitsune, get a mixed reception. They are seen as tricksters, as messengers of the rice gods, shape-shifters, usually entering the bodies of women, especially through the breast or fingernails, or so I’ve read. For the Ainu, the fox, like all things on earth, be it rock, plant, or animal, is a god from the other world who has come to see how humans are behaving, to walk among us, and if we deserve it, the fox may leave us with some fur before traveling back to be with the other spirits.

I am entranced with the beauty and dignity of foxes, their solitary ways, how they stop along the edge of the field with their elegant long legs and stare directly into my eyes as I pass on my bicycle or in my car. They seem to know what we humans are all about, and they don’t fear us, as perhaps they should….

I am sad that some of their homelands, the open fields around our building, have been shorn and paved, with cement foundations then poured for those square pre-fab homes, whose bulking forms appear within days. Instant neighborhoods. It is not surprising to me that a fox might have decided the abandoned veranda below us as the better option. I hope the quarters are cozy and pleasant.

My husband, along with Watanabe-san on the first floor, has the habit of tossing rice and bread scraps to the crows and other creatures in our field, so perhaps this is another pragmatic reason, besides the shrinking habitat and my admiration for their amber silhouettes, to elect to be our neighbor. Let’s hope the snowy field behind us remains wild, free to be as it is for the fleet feet of our new neighbor.

I had a dream a few years back that an unseen force, shall we call it a ghost?, picked me up by the back of my bed clothes, and I hung placidly in its invisible jowls. Such dreams seem ｓｏ　real, physically felt, and I am always wearing exactly what I had chosen to sleep in. I remeｍber feeling at peace…

I have also been visited by an old man, in tattered fisheｒman sweater and knit cap, weaving and laughing beside my bunk at a youth hostel in Lagos, Portugal (housed in a former army barracks on the most SW point of ‘the old world,’ or the place 14th C Europe believed to be the end of the world). I was just 18 and backpacking through southern Europe　at the time. I felt ｍｕｃｈ　better when two young, female backpackers came in later that same evening, chatting about how relieved they were to have arrived at last, to sleep in bunk beds a few down from mine. When I awakened the next day, I was the only one there ａｎｄ, clearly, only my bunk bed had been slept in.

In my bedroom in our apartment now I awoke one evening to see a Japanese woman with no face in a long white flimsy gown dancing in circles, spinning as she straightened and lowered her thin frame. She transformed into a small boy my son’s age, floating upward with its neck skewed at a sickly angle, as if it were hung. I am not one to be afraid of ghosts really, but I shouted, Go Away!, since the hanging child disturbed me a great deal. My husband burned incense and hung a tiny god’s eye in the corner where the ghosts had been…and ｔｈｅｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｇｈｏｓｔｓ　ｗｅｒｅ　no more．．．

Cleaning the floor at school and making ink paintings.

Some pics I got back from my son’s school. Now he’s on break until April! One is of mochi making day, the other of lunchtime.

This is the first book-length work in English I’ve found to comprehensively explain Wajin-Ainu power relations: Siddle, Richard. (1996). Race, Resistance, and the Ainu of Japan. London: Routledge.

And what a book! It details the complexities and contradictory historical records about the Wajin conquest of Hokkaido and the impact on the Ainu, who are Hokkaido’s (or Ainu Mosir’s) Indigenous people.

I am enjoying learning about this history because it is so important for me as a member of Japanese society to know this, especially since I hope to have my students (future public school teachers) learn these truths, too. Right now there are only 2 sentences about the Ainu in the just-released 2006 mandatory history textbooks of compulsory education (Thanks to Kitty Dubreuil for showing me that!). One of those sentences is in a footnote. This is deplorable, but not surprising, given the myth of hegemony the government steadfastly defends to this day.

Many parallels between the Wajin’s systematic and socially constructed marginalization of the Ainu and the colonial systems marginalizing other Indigenous peoples in the world can be found.
For example, when Wajin first entered Ainu Mosir, they were mostly men who were very poor and often exiled convicts. Ainu women were often raped after their men were sent to work as forced labor (at gunpoint) for the fish fertilizer work camps very far from their homes. The children of these violent encounters were considered Ainu and were brought up by their mothers alone.

Stories like these fill me with anger, but more than that, fill me with the determination to make sure my students know this sad history and not cloak Hokkaido history as a ‘pioneer’ history of brave men entering ‘no man’s land.’ The Ainu were here and are still here, and the silence needs to be broken via inclusive history education in the schools. I can’t understand how the Japanese government can get away with such silences and lies. I guess all power systems pick and choose a history suitable to maintaining their privileged status, just look how the current US president stubbornly sits on his throne of thorny lies.

I recommend this book to all folks interested in Japan. Siddle has done a good job at revealing the dirty little (and big) secrets of the Wajin power games.