Practical Things

17 Days…

There’s been little time today for wistful recollections of the city I will soon leave. Most of the time was taken up by practical needs and errands. Most likely the list of things to do, to wrap up, close out and end is on schedule, but that doesn’t allow any complacency, and every now and then I get a little jittery about the list. Despite that, while in Shibuya taking care of some things, I did allow myself a short span of reminiscence while eating lunch for the last time at one of my longtime regular restaurants. It’s just a short walk from the site of the photograph above.

Before leaving home this morning I packed two boxes of ink and fountain pens, one just over six pounds, the other right at fifteen. My plan was to take the boxes to the post office and send them to Florida by air mail; that was the plan until I learned the cost would be $160 for the two boxes to go by air. That was out of the question, so I settled for sending them by surface mail for $96, and a long boat ride of about two months. I tell myself I can get along fine with only six fountain pens in the meantime. Another box of ink will go with everything else on April 20th, and two or three bottles will go in my luggage. Fortunately, I have ink in Florida.

Forty-five minutes at the post office dealing with that, and I left happy that everything else, apart from the iMac, will go via a private shipper. The iMac has to go by air a couple of days before my departure, and at twenty pounds will be costly.

In the afternoon I said goodbye to my barber, a fella who has cut my hair for the past several years. Since first coming to Kugayama I’ve always gone to the same shop, but in all that time six different barbers have cut my hair, one by one eventually moving on. I will sorely miss my times at the barber shop here, always a relaxing and pleasant experience. Nothing at all like a quick clip, bye-bye. Even children get a shave here, though it’s one of the things I wave off. But I do enjoy the shampoo, the pampering and the attention to detail. I suppose it’s steep at the equivalent of $42. Never had the experience, but I’ve heard that barbers in Taiwan wash your socks while you’re getting a haircut.

Meanwhile, wet spring weather in Tokyo makes it hard for people to get out and enjoy the cherry trees, which are at the height of blossom this week. Drizzle doesn’t make for comfortable flower-viewing, and surely prevents most from spreading a blanket under the trees with a few friends. The cherry tree in the garden just below me is a late blooming mountain cherry, so not yet in fullest flower. Apologies for the poor photograph.

The Way of the Brush

18 Days…

The old Nozawa photos yesterday got me thinking about the hours of practice, the reams of paper and rivers of ink that characterized my study of Japanese calligraphy. Like many of the traditional Japanese arts, for the serious student, dedication to long practice is essential, and something I never imagined before picking up a brush.

An interest in Japan came late to me, somewhere in my mid-20s, and it first came in the shape of brush writing I found in books, and soon after in museums. I had a job shelving books at the local library and so soon learned to associate the 900 numbers on a book’s spine with Japan. My first experience of stopping to look closely at one of these 900 books came with a book full of Japanese calligraphy. Unable to read even the tiniest part, its fluid beauty captivated me, and I wondered at the possibility of learning how to write such elegant “words.”

Calligraphy was only the beginning, and several years later here I was in Japan and among other things, looking for a teacher. A couple of weeks after moving into the old house in Komae, I asked around and learned that a calligraphy teacher lived at the other end of the street. And so, I met Motohashi-sensei.

For two hours each Saturday over the next eight years, I sat with cramped legs, along with two other students under the watchful eye of Motohashi-sensei, writing and rewriting countless hundreds of times basic Chinese characters and Japanese kana. Each week there was a new assignment, something meant to be practiced diligently at home. It was a slow and often grueling process and just when it seemed I was getting it right, showing some modest panache, the teacher would toss it aside soaked in her orange corrections and encourage me to try again.

Some years later my teacher moved to an area about two hours distant, and the Saturday lessons became a six-hour affair—two there, two studying, and two hours back home. I managed to stick with it another two years before saying goodbye to those faraway lessons. Regretfully, after the years of regular study and practice, I ended my formal study and gradually even stopped practicing.

In the years since, there have been occasions when I inked a brush and wrote some pages, but I no longer have the strong urge, that first desire to write with brush and ink that was born in the 900 aisle of the public library.

Nozawa Days

19 Days…

You know how it is. You have a plan or an idea to sit down and do something very specific, but five minutes into it you find yourself hopelessly diverted, and the hour passes with you accomplishing little more than dusty hands and the stirring of old memories, like pleasant phantoms that have come half way back to life. That happened to me this morning when I set myself to clean out yet one more box of ‘junk.’

No notion of how the letters and photos got into that box, old and mostly yellowed stuff crammed between ten year old bank statements and long out of date work records, but there in the middle were letters written by me to my mother as far back as 1964. (I got the letters back after her death.) With the letters were some brittle old black and white photos of my dog, Sabre, but mixed in with those were some Tokyo photos from years back. How all this stuff came together in one box I can’t tell. However it was, my idea of cleaning out a closet was forgotten while I sat happy in the dust and faded images of bygone days.

My focus over these past few days has been on Tokyo, and some of the things that come to mind as I make arrangements to leave after many years here. So this time also I will stay on that theme as I rehash some thoughts and pictures of the place I lived before moving to Kugayama. Arriving in Tokyo in 1982, I rented an old house in an area somewhat far out called Komae, where I stayed for two years. The Komae house was okay, but in time I wanted to be closer to the center of Tokyo, so left Komae and rented a small apartment in an area called Nozawa, not too far from Shibuya. The apartment house had just been built, and I was the first person to move into one of the four apartments. Small though it was in comparison to the house in Komae, I was happy there and made myself a comfortable little nest fairly bristling with ‘things Japanese.’

It was during the time of studying Japanese calligraphy (brushwriting) and trying hard to write haiku poems in Japanese. Total immersion in the culture was what I had in mind, but there are always and forever conditions that force you to the surface of reality, and make that word ‘total’ a relative term. In any case, I was happy to now and then visit the nearby Shakey’s Pizza and regain a mouthful or two of Americana. But most often, with the pizza swallowed and forgotten, I was happiest trying to live like a modern Lafcadio Hearn, one well-known American who spent years immersing himself in Japanese culture. This lifestyle worked to a degree enough to make my days both interesting and worthwhile.

Probably the apartment in Nozawa had little to do with the outcome of anything, but still it was for me a welcoming place to come home to, a comfortable nook wherein to read my books and practice my calligraphy. I remember one day while practicing, managing to tip my suzuri, or inkwell over, and suddenly there was a flood of jet black ink soaking into the tatami mats. But my teacher had taught me one important little homemaker’s tidbit: If you get to it quickly, after wiping up the black ink, rub the tatami with grated radish and that will little by little remove the black stain from the tatami. Works on clothing, too.

Photos: (1) a paulownia wood tansu, or chest of drawers with a bookcase on the right, (2) a low table I used for practicing calligraphy, with a desk on the right, and (3) a sheet of my calligraphy in the old manyo-gana style of writing, written at the black table.

Tokyo Elegy

20 Days…

Thoughts a little low, not so bright today, and maybe a good match for the cloudiness of Kugayama’s sky. It’s one of those times in the days leading up to ‘Sayônara, Japan’ when I dwell on the things I will miss about my 10,000 days in this country. On the other side of the fence are the things I will not miss and likely be happy to leave behind, but that isn’t on my mind this day.

In the past ten or twelve years Tokyo has finally become the cosmopolitan capital it always aimed to be, and is now fast moving beyond the urban ugliness that was once unmistakable. I will miss watching, witnessing the growth of a city I love. In moving to a small town in Florida, I will miss the fire and energy of Tokyo, city of 13,000,000.

I will miss walking the streets of this endless city. In the first years of my stay here, I walked everywhere, willingly losing myself among unnamed streets hardly wide enough for the smallest car. This was my way of discovering the flavor of different areas and neighborhoods and of stumbling upon the unexpected. I learned too, that trains and subways would lead me to more surprises and eventually teach me something about the city from a another perspective. No, there is no doubt I will miss the trains and subways which many call the finest system of urban transportation in the world; certainly it boasts the most efficient and dependable timetables anywhere. Twenty days will find me dependent upon a car to get about.

My very slight worries over living on the shaky edge of a big earthquake will be replaced by greater and more tactile fears of a hurricane roaring out of the Atlantic and smashing down my home one more time.

Sure, I will miss chatting with Aoki-san next door, will wonder how Mr Hata’s garden below is shaping up for its summer glory. And I will wonder too, how half a dozen friends are faring in the city I left behind.

Then and Now

21 Days…

Going about the business of making ready to leave Japan, my thoughts seesaw with images and memories of now versus then, the ‘then’ in this case being my early years in this country. It doesn’t matter where you are, Timbuktu or Tokyo, New York or London, the landscape, the people and the customs change, sometimes greatly over the passage of years. In that light, there are aspects about the Japan of 2010 that are almost unrecognizable when held up against my memory of scenery and customs in 1982.

In those days I saw most things Japanese through rose colored glasses, and was ready to argue that little fault could be found in the far eastern world I had come to. Very probably, for the first three years here I walked about in a state of cultural intoxication, wide-eyed and willing about things I would later come to look askance at. It didn’t bother me then that the Japanese were not as quiet and reserved, or as spiritual as books had taught, or led me to believe. It didn’t disturb me that many drank to the point of throwing up on streets and train platforms, or that half the people, children and adults read comic books voraciously. I saw all friendliness, harmony, public safety, a deep well of colorful tradition, and in most people an appealing curiosity about Americans like myself. I was passing through, living in what I could only call heaven.

Sure, in time I came to notice things that fogged, or jostled the prettiness of my rosy view, but it was becoming clear to me that these people, these Japanese, had—for all the warts and past sins—built a stable and comfortable society where thoughts of others were always in mind. And it didn’t take me long to learn that as a foreigner, I enjoyed exemptions from the norm, that my misspoken Japanese or faulty manners were excused as natural for non-Japanese. (It took a few years more for me to learn that this was in fact a kind of discrimination, and included a faint whiff of superiority.)

Things change, as I said. Ask me now and looking around at this society in 2010, I would tell you that the Japanese thoughtfulness I once admired is gone, and that the younger Japanese could teach college courses in how to be selfish without the least thought of others. I could be wrong, could be harsh in my view of things modern, but I lament the loss of history and tradition, the stripping away of older appreciations and understanding of their own cultural values. Perhaps that’s why I describe myself as a person looking for the lost.

I’ve been fortunate to have friends here who were willing to indulge me in my old-fashioned Japanese enthusiasms, to guide, lead or show me the things I sought, and to overlook the frequent faux pax, or my often silly pursuits. Sad now to think that a few of these friends have been lost, or put out of reach, much like the old and faint shadows of Japanese culture we sought together. Where are they now?

Photo: Facing pages from the 1898-1907 Japan Diaries of Richard Gordon Smith

Formerly Lost & Found

22 Days to Go…

I struggle under a veritable wall of books, already nine full boxes sorted for the trash. Not many, but a few at least were hard to let go, most of them being whimsical buys at some time years ago, on subjects with no lasting interest (Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land of the Ants). Stacks of language books, Japanese and Thai, texts useful in their time, but now little more than unwanted bulk. I am sending on to Florida as many art books as I can, but the full complement is out of the question. Such books are not only large, but too heavy to consider shipping. Of course, all my fountain pen books, as well as back issues of Stationery Hobby Box already have their boat tickets.

Surprised today by a treasure of old LP records I uncovered at the bottom of a box. I had wondered once or twice what had become of my records of Japanese music of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Well, now I’ve found them and will send them to Florida, but not certain how I will get the music from record album to MP3 format. Obviously, there’s a way.

Spent time on the telephone today with the Dept of Water, electric company, cable TV office, The Japan Times and my Internet service provider, finalizing the shut off dates and payment of the last bills. On Monday, I must remember to do the same with the gas company and Softbank, my iPhone carrier.

The two largest closets now 100% empty. Some of the contents of those closets is stacked around the apartment, though all ready for either boxing or the trash.

On schedule, I think.

The attached photo is what the neighborhood looks like now in all its cheery cherriness.

Babel-Like Confusion

23 Days on the Calendar

Wonder if it’s the preoccupation with packing and preparing for departure, but these days I wake at around 6:00 a.m. and get up soon after. Certainly no reason to get out of bed so early, since I have no obligations other than to myself and the work of packing.

The sorting continues. Junk in this apartment is endless, and if I allow myself to be philosophical about it, it reeks of wasteful extravagance, sinful accumulation and an evil enslavement to ‘things.’ I honestly don’t know how I’m going to make my way through the mass of completely unneeded accumulated rubbish that is jammed and packed into closets. The number of boxes for shipping continues to grow, like some shaky reminder of Babel and Old Testament confusion. And the books… This morning I uncovered yet another forgotten three stacks. More fodder for the book burners unfortunately. If I shipped all the books in this apartment back to Florida I would have to move my bed out onto the patio. Doris Day and patio madness ain’t in it.

This morning great piles of old clothing, things not worn in years, got bundled into old cloth bags, and carried out for the scheduled pick up. Hard for me to get the days right in the city’s pick up plan, their schedule of what goes out on what day of the week. There is almost the feeling that the guys dislike certain categories of trash and leave behind things they don’t want to bother with, despite my adherence to the schedule. But this time we agreed, and when I looked out a while ago all the bags of old clothes were gone.

I packed nine glasses, six of them Japanese, three American, and all very old. It would disturb me greatly should any of them get broken in transit, since all are irreplaceable. Somehow I’m confident they will be okay in their cushioned bed of paper, plastic and soft cotton. Only a handful of breakable items remain to be packed and I’m now left to eat off three dishes, with one fork, knife and spoon, and to drink from a giveaway glass.

Happy about being able to give away a big stack of calligraphy supplies, the ink cabinet, and a George Foreman Grill. The first is too much and too heavy to ship, the second too big, and the third a duplicate of one I have in Florida.

Pulling stuff out of dusty old boxes this morning I came across the ‘Tilted Barber’ postcard. Something about it is close to perfect.