INSIGHTS FROM ASIA
99
JOURNAL
travel, revisited
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TRAVEL, REVISITED
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Travel, Revisited Ken Rodgers
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The Train to Agra / Ruminations John Brandi
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Agra Station Renée Gregorio
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Arrival: An excerpt from A Walk in Japan Bernhard Kellerman, translated by Robert Blasiak
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Leave No Trace Prairie Stuart-Wolff
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Still Life Pico Iyer
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What You Want to See An Excerpt from Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku Natalie Goldberg
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Escapes and Escapades Hans Brinckmann
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Taketa’s Chikuraku Bamboo Lantern Festival Alluring artscape meets community revitalization Kimberly Hughes
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The Boy in the Dark Nigel Triffitt
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Where Tea Stirs Remembrance Siddharth Dasgupta
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Poems from 7 + 2 A Mountain Climber’s Journal Luo Ying Of Mountains, Resilience, and Cups of Tea Jeff Fuchs
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Cultural Compromises / Letting Yourself be Guided Robert van Koesveld
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Virtual Journeys Joji Sakurai
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On Location: One Approach to Travel Writing Chad Kohalyk
POETRY Annapurnas Again, Yuyutsu RD Sharma Canal, Greg Pape A Woman’s Papers Flying in the Wind, Amy Uyematsu
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The Big Picture Birds’-eye Overviews of the Japanese Archipelago Ken Rodgers
Thinking Logically: Cycling from Africa to Asia Elliot Rowe
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Let Your Waters Wash Down Experiencing Fukui’s 1,200-year-old Omizu-okuri Shugendo Festival Edward J. Taylor
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Spiritual Tourism: A Confession An excerpt from Revolutions of the Heart: Literary, Cultural & Spiritual Yahia Lababidi
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Walking to Laos Scott Ezell
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ENCOUNTER The Polka Dot Pumpkin of Naoshima Island Mormei Zanke
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READERS’ STORIES Time Travel, Rebecca Otowa Visiting Seoul, Teo Wei Ger Small Guide, Big Heart, Rachelle Meilleur A Japanese Shrine in Taipei, Matthew Krueger Wandering Senses: An Autumn Journey in Nara, Robert Weis
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OUR KYOTO Tales of Bamboo Wild and Tame Winifred Bird
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IN TRANSLATION From the Hyakunin Isshu Translations by Naoko Fujimoto
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Translating the Elliptical On Kuniko Tsurita’s The Sky is Blue With a Single Cloud
Collin Mitchell and translator Ryan Holmberg 172
HEARTWORK Documenting Minamata with Eugene W. Smith Jennifer Teeter interviews Kyoto activist Aileen Mioko Smith
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STORY The Return Of Lafcadio Hearn Roger Pulvers
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REVIEWS
218
RAMBLE A Prayer for Wayfarers Robert Brady
FRONT COVER Pereval Toguz-Tro, between Jalal Abad and Kazarman, Kyrgyzstan Photograph by Elliot Rowe BACK COVER Storm Approaching Nachi Photograph by Mark Thomas
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travel, revisited
I
F THE PAST IS A DIFFERENT COUNTRY, where things are done differently, so now—with national borders closed by the ubiquitous menace of the current pandemic—is the future. Especially in terms of travel. In the autumn of 1982, not long after arriving in Japan on a working holiday visa, I traveled alone from Kyoto on a series of trains, then hitch-hiking, down to a tiny coastal village beyond Ise. My Japanese language skills—virtually non-existent. My purpose was to attend the annual once-only production of a local farmers’ traditional post-harvest bunraku puppet theater. The evening performance, at the local shrine, was attended by everyone in the village; I was the only non-Japanese present, singled out to be photographed with the cast at the close of the show. The whole event was, to my newbie eyes, other-worldly. Old men revealed the skills of master puppeteers. A stern grey-haired tayu chanted narrative. The second act was memorably performed by eager junior high school students, training to carry on this local heritage. Villagers reacted to dramatic high points by yelling praise and hurling snow-storms of paper-tissue-wrapped coins at the stage. Light rain pooled gradually in blue plastic sheeting stretched overhead, sporadically dumping over the audience; no one cared. During a break, through the window of the community hall I saw the elders intently reviewing scenes on a small TV hooked up to a VCR player. By taking that trip I discovered vital aspects of Japan that I had not previously imagined, and the trajectory of my life changed forever, without me even realizing it.
N
OT SO LONG AGO, for anyone who could afford it, international travel was easy. Make reservations online, apply for a visa too if needed, pack a few essentials, hustle onto a plane. Arrive someplace halfway around the globe, show up at preselected accommodation suddenly conjured into 3D reality, dive into local culture, see sights, meet people, photograph everything. Learn new words, discover new tastes, find new concepts. Some destinations spoke to us, urging us to dig deeper, to come back again, and to try and express our impressions in our own words or images.
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In gathering material for this issue, our intention was to look again at the phenomenon of travel—which essentially pursues a deeper understanding of the world’s diversity, either as a plunge into the unknown, or a deliberate immersion in a known unknown. We also wanted to reconsider how travel is reported or discussed in travelogues or online, and to re-imagine the future of travel, after COVID. Will new technology enabling virtual sightseeing satisfy a new generation of armchair travelers, or will a surge in domestic tourism be matched by a flowering of local cultures celebrating uniqueness in crafts, cuisine, local history and heritage, interpreted by truly local guides? Everything has changed. What better time to rethink travel? To create a new lexicon of discovery, new navigational waypoints into the unknown? The writers and photographers featured in the following pages present personal observations connecting in a variety of ways with a multitude of places. Perceptions that extend our experience, refreshing our vision of the world, and our place in it. —Ken Rodgers
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Romantics about to visit India, be warned. If you don’t like having the cushion pulled out from under you, the mind unraveled, every rational plan sabotaged, best to stay home.
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the train to agra / ruminations JOHN BRANDI PHOTOS BY JOHN BRANDI AND RENÉE GREGORIO ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN BRANDI
WHILE LIVING A LIFE DEEPLY EMBEDDED—since the early 1970s—in a back-country canyon in New Mexico, long-time KJ contributor John Brandi’s twenty books (plus journals) also cover his unhurried travels in India, the Himalayas, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Indonesia. His writings are often in the form of haibun, observations interspersed with haiku. “Wandering,” he says, “is an act of renunciation, and of solidarity. Traveling, a practice and a process; a temporary state of exile, neither for escape or entertainment, in which one seeks source and renewal in the inevitable mysteries of place and people.” Usually accompanying him on the road is his partner, Renée. The following excerpt is from his India Journals: Vol. III, from 2009.
T
he 6:15 Shatabdi Express leaves Delhi Station on time. Our bogie fills with sunlight and the smell of ink as porters pass out The India Express—followed by tea and boxed omelets. The Shatabdi trains are the best of India’s trains, cheaper than hiring a car or flying, more comfortable and safer than buses. The fare includes a/c chair cars with reclining seats, meals, newspapers, and drinks. The trains are fast, punctual, and make very few stops—inconvenient if you’re village bound. There’s not the color and brouhaha of hard-bottom third-class trains, but those agonizingly slow locals are only doable for the fun of an occasional short run. Bronze light, pewter clouds. Deluged fields, smoky green. White herons stand motionless, royalblue rollers skim the reeds. In the swales cattle give off steam. A temple spire appears, its pennant limp in the haze. No mind No mind No mind, the track rattles. But the mind is there, and thoughts wrangle. The train’s roll and sway and repeating clickclack sets memories in motion. Renée and I made a beeline for Old Delhi after arriving at the Indira Gandhi Airport, but very few Indian vacationers or business people would do the same. Too crude and frenzied, too much of the “old and in the way.” The Red Fort, the hectic bazaars are not a priority for the eager-to-get-ahead generation busy with spreadsheets and Skype deals. Forts, mosques, collapsed havelis are ghosts of failed dynasties—sights reserved for foreign tourists.
Besides, to see them one must wade through dire poverty, and the unnerving fact that absolutely no progress has been made to resolve such poverty. The India we pursue is the one the Indian wishes to avoid—parts of the cultural anatomy that bring embarrassment or apology. Much of what we’re after—things made by hand, architecture erected according to the laws of geomancy, cooperative fields worked with an intimacy unknown to commercial farms, a group of women enjoying the benefits of the micro-credit revolution—is shunned by the eager-for-profit clan. Anything non-profitable, or not profitable enough, is irksome to the technocrat with his master plan, who sees a double-ikat weaving perfected by a tribal artist not as technology, but as a time-consuming “craft.” Part of the old ways. In the face of slick, quick, and upgraded stands Thoreau: “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only dispensable, but hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” The pleading beggar pauses for the ring of his mobile. A few years ago, when Renée and I told a student from Shanghai that we were bound for the hill-tribe area of Southwest China, she looked at us with a grimace, as if we were going to the wrong China. “Oh, those places. Not Han people. Not China.” On kyoto journal 99 | 7
leave no trace TEXT AND PHOTOS BY PRAIRIE STUART-WOLFF
A
fter so many years of living in this same rural corner of Kyushu, I still stumble upon sights I’ve never seen before. A wrong turn on a drive to a nearby town took me down a narrow country lane. Camel-colored fields stretched into the distance lined with rows of ripe barley, their spiny heads like fat caterpillars reaching for the sky. The harvest was underway, and in fields stripped bare, farmers burned the stubble. They kindled fires at opposing ends of a row and watched over as the flames bore towards each other. Leaving a blackened strip in their wake, the flames met in the middle, embraced in a final leap, and smoldered out. I am drawn to this cycle of impermanence. Fields are sown, the harvest reaped, and the land laid bare again. In the kitchen too, when we cook efficiently and eat with gusto, we leave no trace. I savor those moments just after the meal has ended. Our plates sit before us and all that remains is the memory of flavors and feeling satiated, nourished, and whole. It is a simple moment, subtle and profound. Though I arrived more or less by happenstance, I often feel it was fated that I come to Japan. I immediately felt a deep resonance, captivated from the start by the broad and tangible relationship to the natural world that flows through the spiritual, aesthetic, and culinary practices here. The rhythms of daily life encourage balance between the needs and desires of humans and the powerful forces of nature that daily render blessings and affliction. An inherent reverence for the phenomena of the physical world dictates many aspects of daily life from the design of interior and exterior spaces and the appreciation of light and shadow to the crafting of
I often feel it was fated that I come to Japan. I immediately felt a deep resonance, captivated from the start by the broad and tangible relationship to the natural world that flows through the spiritual, aesthetic, and culinary practices here.
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Photo by John Einarsen
W
E HURRY DOWN THE TWO FLIGHTS OF STAIRS and step onto the street. Which avenue shall we explore today? It’s another radiant blue spring afternoon in suburban Nara, but everything is quieter than it might be, and the deer in the park downtown are looking a little bewildered: where are all the cameras and crowds? Our town—our planet—seems to be holding its breath; life is going on as normal, but there’s something more tentative, more hushed about it now, as we turn our back to our six-apartment yellow building and venture out onto a reborn world. We decide, my wife and I, just to walk down a main drag in our modern, Western-style neighborhood, not somewhere we’ve ever had reason to go before. Within four minutes, we come to the end of the silent residential street, all Californian houses with biggish gardens,
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set back a little from the wide, spotless road. In front of us, astonishingly, is a thick bamboo forest, a misty outline of hills in the background. In front of that, lines of cherry trees, flowering resplendently in the early April sunlight. Uguisu are teaching their young to sing, the details of which Hiroko has just absorbed in a book; we stand at this junction, three blocks from the apartment where we’ve lived for more than twentyseven years, and wonder where else in the world such beauty could be found. The next day, it’s a walk to the shrine, twenty minutes (down a hidden flight of stairs) in another direction; then to the Aeon supermarket, twenty minutes up a hill, beside the shuttered health club. No need for trains or buses during this season of still lives; our feet can take us to one continent after another, day after day, in corners of the neighborhood we’ve never thought or sought to visit.
still life PICO IYER
Of course we know that we are among the fortunate; already millions are losing lives and loves and livelihoods. But if the best thing we can do for them is stay at home, why not find in our home a paradise? Hiroko is reading as never before; the sound of her chuckle reaches me from the next room. I’m leaving my desk each day by 3:00 p.m., so we can take another long walk before returning to a life of uncommon constancy. No visitors from abroad, no half-wanted nights out; we can turn off the lights and listen to Handel, watch the yellow moon rise above Mount Ikoma. We can hear what’s not moving. We’ve never enjoyed the cherry blossoms as we do this year; impermanence is a cause not for grief but gratitude, so far. The fact that everything dies is the reason to live wide-awake; to take nothing for granted and to find our joy and wonder right here. Most years, we reserve one day for
A few weeks ago, we were sailing around Antarctica, losing our breath to sublimity every afternoon; now we’re feeling almost as bright a sense of discovery here in the suburbs, sweetened by the joy of unexpectedness.
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taketa’s chikuraku bamboo lantern festival alluring artscape meets community revitalization
KIMBERLY HUGHES PHOTOS BY SOLVEIG BOERGEN
W
E SET OUT THAT LATE SEPTEMBER morning with the spirit of wanderers, meandering through the sprawling green fields of the Mount Aso caldera in northeastern Kyushu. Enjoying the breeze from the open car windows as we drove, we had only the loosest of itineraries—and no expectations. Consulting a guidebook, we discovered that an old bathhouse had been converted into a café and art gallery in the nearby former castle town of Taketa. Intrigued, we did not hesitate to take the longer route toward our evening destination on the southern Miyazaki coastline. As we emerged into Taketa from the Kuju highlands, we noticed several artistic-looking establishments. Reaching the converted bathhouse, we saw 16 stone Arhat (enlightened Buddhist) statues carved into an adjacent hillside, each face curiously indescribable. The retro-style décor, warm woods, craftwork, and splashy art pieces spanning the two floors inside the Art Space Café Okura Shimizuyu confirmed that our earlier intuition had been on point. After a scrumptious lunch of plump udon noodles, we chatted with the café’s manager, Adachi Katsutoshi,
who told us that the establishment had originally been a family-run business of miso, shoyu and salt during the 1800s, and was then used as a storehouse for rice. The operation was turned into a sento (bathhouse) following the postwar land redistribution under the U.S. Occupation, before being converted into its present form as a café and gallery in the late 1970s. Adachi then showed us around Shioya, an adjacent warehouse complex, where we were joined by the café’s owner Hattori Shinji. We learned that the town held various events that attracted artists and other creatives to the city from around Japan and even beyond, including the Taketa Art Culture festival and Art Craft Fair in Taketa. Our hosts told us that they planned to convert Shioya into a guest house, wine bar and live music venue in time for the upcoming Chikuraku bamboo lantern festival, held in Taketa every year in mid-November. Town officials had come up with the concept of illuminating the entire town with the ethereal ambience of bamboo art structures for three consecutive nights, they said, which would also achieve the functional task of encouraging the surrounding forest’s long-term health by thinning out the increasingly dense bamboo groves. kyoto journal 99 | 37
POETRY
a woman’s papers flying in the wind from hokusai’s “36 views of mt. fuji” AMY UYEMATSU
I Seven travelers on foot hold onto their straw hats with these unexpected gusts. One is a woman with arms extended, helpless while her papers scatter and float away— As trees bend and leaves rip from branches, she won’t forget a steadfast Mount Fuji.
II All of my ancestors came from Shizuoka, the prefecture south of Tokyo whose boundaries straddle the land where the volcanic Fuji erupted 100,000 years ago. I probably know this beloved mountain best because of my love for woodblock prints, my favorite art form, never tiring of Hokusai’s masterful “36 Views.” I will never know if my grandparents who emigrated to America in their twenties, ever climbed Fuji before leaving Japan.
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But I do know Grandma Kuni wrote poetry like many issei, sending tanka penned in kanji to the Rafu and Kashu Mainichi, bilingual press in L.A. Like those papers lost in the wind in Hokusai’s woodblock, none of the poems my grandmother wrote were ever saved.
Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshū Ejiri), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)
III I’ve been told I look like the grandma who wrote tanka, though she never learned English, never talked to her Americanized grandkids.
Would I tell her I finally saw Mt. Fuji in person—the October sky so blue after dense morning fog, our guide saying again how lucky and rare.
Would she be surprised that I’d one day turn to poetry, even reveal family stories she might want to keep secret.
AMY UYEMATSU is a sansei (third-generation Japanese American) poet and teacher from Los Angeles. Her five published collections include the most recent Basic Vocabulary (2016) and The Yellow Door (2015). Amy taught high school math for 32 years. Currently, she leads a writing workshop at Little Tokyo’s Far East Lounge.
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thinking logically: cycling from Africa to Asia ELLIOT ROWE PHOTOS BY ELLIOT AND MAYU ROWE
W
E WERE EATING PORRIDGE AGAIN FOR BREAKFAST—IT WAS CHEAP BUT MONOTONOUS. I was working in a sales job but not making many sales, my partner Mayu didn’t have a visa that allowed her to work legally, yet we were still trying to save most of the money we were earning. Our life cycle was to work, save and travel the world. When the cycle brought us back to the office, our passion was still off wandering elsewhere. Thankfully each weekend we’d reunite with it, out in the wild places, hiking and camping. Cape Town was our new home, a nature lovers’ paradise, but very edgy, even in 2014. Apartheid had left deep scars and we were struggling with the dayto-day realities of it. That morning we were hatching a plan to leave. With little money, we thought the most sensible— but at the same time the most ridiculous—idea would be to cycle all the way to my parents’ home in England. Basically, we both knew it was one of those entertaining fantasies that couples conjure up and never follow through with. Late as always, I put my bowl in the sink and skateboarded down the hill to the office. However, when I got back that evening Mayu was in internet overdrive, having discovered there were literally thousands of people actually travelling the world on bicycles! We were a newly married couple, but strangers by no means; we were still young, yet somehow we’d been through a lot in our short time together. Meeting in our naive youth made it easier to grow together. Our goals seemed to align very easily. The seed of cycling across Africa had been planted, now all we had to work out was how. Before we were married we had lived in London. Neither of us had ever slept a night in a tent, or walked any great distance, but somehow I got the idea that I wanted to go hiking for months on end in the biggest mountain range in the world, the Himalayas. Mayu’s visa had run out and to my surprise she needed no persuasion about the trip. A week after landing in India we started our first hike. Unfortunately it was cut short because I got altitude sickness. The second was meant to be an overnight hike; it turned into three days, due to poor fitness. That somehow gave me confidence to tackle a longer hike, which resulted in us getting lost for two days without food. Luckily, we were rescued by a local man and woman gathering wild roots in the forest. There we were in a magical Himalayan village, cold and hungry, but feeling reborn and thanking the higher forces that we hadn’t perished
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Cycling would give us the independence to stop anywhere we liked, and to go as we pleased. But I needed to learn bicycle mechanics, and Mayu needed to learn how to ride one.
in the mountains. Our hosts were people I’d heard of only through documentaries about distant lands. They had no commercial interest in us, but they lovingly prepared us a meal and ate only after we had finished, and gave us a bed and a place to wash. It was an overwhelming act of human kindness from complete strangers, something that neither of us had experienced before, and it happened because of our vulnerability. The idea of cycling up through Africa was a scary prospect for both of us, even though by now we had clocked up many nights camping in the mountains and dealing with rough weather. Having a fairly good grasp on how the body worked, any problems could usually be remedied by either sleep, water or food. The well-being of a bicycle, on the other hand, was a complete mystery, and Mayu hadn’t even ridden a bike with gears. When we did a test run on some local gravel trails in Cape Town, on the first downhill section she panicked, jackknifed the front wheel and flew over the handlebars. Going by bike, however, made sense for practical reasons. Africa was severely lacking in decent public transport networks and driving was financially way out of our reach. Cycling would give us the independence to stop anywhere we liked, and to go as we pleased. But I needed to learn bicycle mechanics, and Mayu needed to learn how to ride one.
S
IX MONTHS LATER WE WERE STANDING AT OUR FRONT DOOR FOR THE LAST TIME. We looked ridiculous. My bike weighed almost 60kg, laden with useless stuff that I’d decided was essential. Riding down the hill into the city centre our handlebars were shaking violently—this was the first time we’d tried cycling fully loaded and I couldn’t believe how differently the bike was handling. Thankfully after some time our brains auto-corrected the steering, and we were no longer overcompensating for the weight.
Above: NamibRand Nature Reserve, Namibia; next page: Spiti Valley, India
The beginning of the trip was physically challenging, but unbelievably beautiful. Namibia especially, a vast landscape void of people, with settlements sometimes a hundred kilometres apart. We shared the road with giraffes, warthogs, onyx, elephants, springbok and more. Namibia is certainly developed for tourism—the country hosts a whole range of luxury resorts and private game parks. Tourists come from all over the globe for safari, but some also come for hunting. We drifted in and out of contact with the tourist industry; often the only place we could easily get water for our onward journey would be a campsite set up for 4x4 holiday campers. These places were often a day or two apart, separated by vast expanses of shadeless dry savannah. It felt strange camping next to a family tent that was well furnished and equipped with all the mod cons you’d find in the average house. We, on the other hand, would be sitting on the ground cooking something fairly bland on our petrol stove. But getting back to basics put us in touch with simple pleasures, like a cold carton of mango juice after two days of drinking warm water.
By the third month we reached a place that some people had told us was ‘the gates of Africa.’ It was exactly that. A fence called the Red Line crosses the width of Namibia to protect the country’s wealthy cattle farmers. It’s a red line on the map that quite literally separates white from black. In the South the large majority of cattle farmers are white, and free to trade meat on the international market, from their vast expanses of fenced farmland. North of that line the majority of cattle herders are black and fences are nonexistent. Cattle are left to roam wild, which, along with disease, means that their meat cannot leave the northern part of Namibia. South of the fence we had been hosted by several kind people; much like in South Africa they were reasonably wealthy and lived in large houses on fenced plots of land. Above the red line we saw a stark difference: the gates of Africa opened up to extreme poverty, where people lived in mud huts in the poorest conditions we had experienced to date. Southern Namibia had seemed empty because everyone was here in the North. kyoto journal 99 | 63
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY SCOTT EZELL
walking to laos I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god— T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
All photos by the author
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A man in the depot lot held a rough pen drawing of a landslide. “Too much rain,” he said, “the road is washed out.” He refunded my ticket money, and told me I might as well take the express bus back to Hanoi.
I
RIPCORDED FROM HANOI north on a day train, with the usual bovine sentience of slow-train travel, looking out the window at nothing and into my own skull at nothing, as girls in white blouses with long black hair glided by on bicycles. The land spread flat and red, stitched and awled with industry of various sorts, and traffic crawled insecticine and metal along the roads. We arrived at Lao Cai train station in Vietnam’s northwest mountains an hour before dusk. My eventual goal was to meet up with a friend in Luang Prabang, Laos, a few days later. I sat and drank a Hanoi beer while tourists filed from the depot to waiting buses, then walked out into the oblique slide of sun across the green slopes and the cracked concrete parking lot and hired a moto taxi to drive me the hour west to the hill tribe town of Sapa. The sky was clear blue and
streaked with silver clouds, shards of rainbow were strewn all through. In Sapa, it rained all night. The mountains were shrouded in gray when I woke early and drank a cup of coffee and walked up the hill to the town square, then took a moto taxio [sic] to the edge of town, where the bus would pause long enough to take on a poet in the rain as it clunked on west. I huddled beneath a piece of plastic tarp with a woman making fried dough balls until a bus came with a conductor hanging out the door hollering “Lai Chau!”—my destination. It didn’t stop but slowed enough for me to jump aboard and join the movement and momentum of the hulking machine into the hills. We jounced and swayed for ten hours, the road a series of potholes and ruts, a concatenation of debris, a succession of landslides, just a narrow track bulldozed through, as if we were driving through a landscape that was perpetually falling. We ascended into fog, wound up switchbacks for two hours, then down into a valley of emerald rice terraces and silver rain. We arrived in Lai Chau, a Vietnamese town in the middle of Hmong and Thai tribe settlements, a crossroad of cellphone shops and scrap metal collection lots. Hill tribe women in splendiferously embroidered clothes walked up and down streets alongside motorbikes and trucks with baskets full of corn and squashes strapped to their backs, with woven tump lines around their foreheads. But they were somehow not “of” the town; the market sold manufactured goods from lowland factories, a mandala of polyester. Next day I went to the depot to catch a bus to Dien Bien Phu, the town just shy of the Lao border where the French lost their Indochina war in 1954. Five minutes after we pulled out of Lai Chau I realized all I’d had to do was get a mile out of town and I would’ve been in heaven, a misty
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY SIDDHARTH DASGUPTA
where tea stirs remembrance Without much fuss, the Irani cafĂŠ has managed to become part of Indian culinary folklore, entrenching itself within the consciousness of specific cities over the past century. But in a current landscape dotted with fast-food hegemony and the rapid erosion of lazy afternoons, is nostalgia enough to carry forth its legacy?
All photographs by the author unless otherwise credited
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T
HE CITY IS YET TO AWAKEN. Some of the streets and smaller bylanes stir with barely noticeable pockets of activity— newspaper being bundled and wrapped for neighbourhood-specific deliveries, singleshutter bakeries spreading out their wares for the nightcrawlers and the early morning workforce, a few packs of dogs out to cement their territories, that sort of thing—but not much else. Dawn is on the verge of exploding. Soon, its mellow orange flood of flickering warmth will have encroached upon the eastern fringes of the city, before quickly swallowing everything else in its wake. Here at Café Yezdan though, life is already in full swing. In the constricted quarter that serves as an open kitchen, dough is being kneaded, doused in flecks of flour, and brought to rise on the time-tested profundities of habit; an anticipated menu of food duly emerges. The two young men handling the task go about things with the clockwork dexterity of doctors at surgery. Arriving at my table, variously, are buns both impossibly fluffy and hard as a rock, laced with fresh cream and dollops of butter that sizzle beneath the sway of heat. The lingering effect of something so simple is anything but. It’s nostalgia, pure and simple. A remembrance, hinged on place and flavour. Sipping from my glass cup filled three-fourths of the way with breathlessly hot, spice-kissed Irani chai, I recognise the fact that this is the exact same feeling I’m accosted by every time I step into a storied Irani café (and each time I’m welcomed by its sibling—the often intertwined Parsi restaurant). It’s gooseflesh and childhood; it’s heritage and laughter; and it has nothing to do with how many times you end up frequenting a café, but everything to do with how often its smells and memories creep up on you without warning as you embark on your journeys through life.
It’s gooseflesh and childhood; it’s heritage and laughter; and it has nothing to do with how many times you end up frequenting a café, but everything to do with how often its smells and memories creep up on you without warning as you embark on your journeys through life.
POONA WITH A DASH OF MASKA In my hometown of Poona (a name I prefer over the official Pune, for reasons wedded to emotion and wistfulness), roughly three hours from Bombay (preferred over Mumbai, for much the same reasons), the broken bricks and fading stonework of Café Yezdan have seen and delivered much. As I savour my chai, my eyes drift towards the café’s interiors, now flooded with early morning light and a nearly full house. My bun-maska has long been wiped off. kyoto journal 99 | 87
The desire for virtual escapes is universal, powerful and ancient. Virtual reality is the latest and most technologically enabled iteration of armchair journeys that have gripped humanity since before Homer.
virtual journeys JOJI SAKURAI ARTWORK BY ALEX MANKIEWICZ
The pandemic has boosted interest in VR tourism as a possible alternative to real-life travel. Do virtual journeys open new horizons of discovery or undermine authentic experience?
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T MAY SEEM ODD TO BEGIN A REFLECTION ON VIRTUAL REALITY TOURISM AT AN OLD-FASHIONED ONSEN IN BESSHO, flipping through pages of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles. This Nagano hot spring town, a mere hour away from home, lends itself to full presence in place and moment, and endless surprise within the familiar. The polar opposite of ogling brightly-plumed Amazonian toucans through an Oculus Rift. Yet in some ways this is an optimal setting for exploring the advantages and limitations of VR tourism, which has made headways into mainstream life as COVID inhibits global travel. The pandemic has accelerated virtual trends already underway— including telework, remote education and digital healthcare—and VR travel is one of them. Rather than accentuating a dichotomy, however, a place like Bessho can invite us to return to basics of the notion of virtual, freeing it from its moorings as a digital buzzword. My tattered copy of Tanizaki, for example, is just as much a virtual journey as a VR trip to Madagascar, with a different interface and content delivery protocol. To dwell a moment further on this thought, the protagonist Kaname in Some Prefer Nettles develops an obsession for the Arabian Nights, as an escape from a life of paralyzing indecision and erotic unfulfillment. (In fact, he scours the unexpurgated English translation for all the dirty bits, a quaint ancestor to one of VR’s obvious popular uses.) The desire for virtual escapes is universal, powerful and ancient. Virtual reality is the latest and most technologically enabled iteration of armchair journeys that have gripped humanity since before Homer. Like Aladdin’s Lamp, it’s a magical box for yearning and discovery, perhaps (one day) teasing
and provoking the imagination in ways not unlike the Arabian Nights. And virtual reality will only get better. Technologies such as Oculus represent not the culmination of the immersive experience but the infancy. Full-body “electro-tactile haptic feedback” suits are under development that will enable people to take walks on Mars, abseil down live volcanoes, or swim alongside rare dolphins in ways that seem surprisingly “real.” COVIDinduced mobility limitations bring this day closer, channeling innovative energies into unmet needs. There are myriad compelling practical merits of virtual tourism, too. Climate strategies gain as virtual journeys reduce flight demand. VR democratizes travel by allowing almost everyone to experience exotic locations. It enables the bed-ridden to enjoy a Venetian gondola or even a bungee jump. Meanwhile, Kyoto and Florence will find reprieve from over-tourism, even as qualified guides find VR opportunities to rebuild businesses. Above all virtual travel ushers in the prospect of limitless possibility. It allows one to visit places too dangerous for tourism, such as the Syrian desert, or those closed to visitors, such as France’s Lascaux caves, with their fragile Paleolithic masterpieces. Time travel (or something resembling it) becomes a possibility, with immersive experiences of ancient Rome or Maya civilisation. NASA has already seized upon the potential, offering VR tours of star systems. kyoto journal 99 | 121
ENCOUNTER
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the polka dot pumpkin of naoshima island MORMEI ZANKE
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N APRIL 2019, MY MOTHER AND I TRAVELED TO VISIT A YELLOW POLKA DOT PUMPKIN ON NAOSHIMA ISLAND, KAGAWA, JAPAN. The pumpkin in question is a fibreglass art installation by the contemporary artist, Yayoi Kusama. Her Infinity Net paintings—large canvases with thousands of tiny dots—were a sensation in postwar New York and positioned her as a leader of the Pop Art movement in the 1960s. “My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots—an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net,” she writes in her autobiography Infinity Net. “How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life.” Kusama’s polka dots have followed her throughout her prolific career and on to the yellow pumpkin installed in 1994 on the Benesse Art Site, Naoshima Island. It is roughly 2 metres in height and circumference and sits on a concrete pier on the southern tip of the island, overlooking the Seto Inland Sea.
Last year, my mother visited me during my one-year stint as an English teacher in Hyōgo Prefecture. The trip to Naoshima, specifically to see Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkin, was at the top of my mother’s list of attractions she wanted to see. She has always been avidly interested in contemporary art, and when she saw an article about Yayoi’s yellow pumpkin she said she felt drawn to it. The image of it on her computer browser beckoned her. The sunflower yellow pumpkin against the aquamarine sea is fantastically alluring. In Infinity Net, Kusama describes why pumpkins initially spoke to her: “I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness.” It was a combination of curiosity and enchantment, which led us to rise early one Saturday morning to travel from the small town where I was
We forgot ourselves for a moment in the unexpected serenity. Entranced by our surroundings, we walked closer to the water’s edge. As promised, the yellow polka dot pumpkin materialized fifty metres east down the beach.
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stationed, Aioi, to Miyanoura, a western port on Naoshima to see the fabled pumpkin. In my travel diary from the period, I find a saved piece of paper with our itinerary: 7:57 AM JR Line from Aioi to Okayama 8:24 AM Marine liner from Okayama to CHAYAMACHI 9:10 AM JR Uno port line from Chayamachi to Uno 10:00 AM Ferry from Uno to Naoshima, Miyanoura
I wrote Chayamachi in all capitals to remind myself of this important transfer. In Japan, you often only have one minute to switch trains. Passengers will stand at the ready behind the train doors and when they open, everyone spills out like one stretched amoeba, migrating across the platform and safely into the doors of the adjacent train. In Uno, we took a ferry to Miyanoura. On the upper deck we watched the horizon as distant islands slowly pulled into focus before moving back into the periphery. I stood at the railing, mesmerized by the V-shaped wake trailing behind us, the assertion of the boat on the water’s placid surface. How easy it is to make patterns and watch them repeat into infinity.
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OUR KYOTO
WINIFRED BIRD
tales of bamboo wild and tame An abridged excerpt from the forthcoming book, Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes by Winifred Bird, published by Stone Bridge Press
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N A QUIET RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOOD on the southwestern edge of Kyoto, wrapped around a garden enclosed in persimmon-colored earth walls, stands a hundred-and-fifty-year-old restaurant where one can eat an eleven-course meal featuring bamboo shoots in every course. Yes, the red carpet lining the dim hallway is faded and the face of the kimono-clad waitress who leads you down that hallway to your private dining room is forbiddingly solemn, but I know of no other restaurant in Japan that so deeply reveres takenoko, as the Japanese call bamboo’s tender new sprouts. The high priest of this shrine to bamboo is Yoshinobu Komatsu, fifth-generation scion of Uoka restaurant. Komatsu is a man obsessed, perhaps even possessed, by bamboo. From morning to night, spring to winter, he mulls its cultivation, harvest, preparation, potential for transforming the world, and general excellence. Over the several days I spent with him, I found his level of interest alternately appealing and mystefying. After all, who could imagine a similar cult of carrots or cabbage? Yet like so many people I met during my research for this book, Komatsu seemed to have found a secret door to layers of meaning in the plant world that elude most of us, and he was eager to open that door for all who would follow him through. This was fortunate, since as soon as I discovered that his restaurant existed, I desperately wanted to eat there. When I called asking not only for a reservation several months down the line but also to spend a day in his kitchen bothering his chefs and getting in the way of his waitresses, he did not object. To the contrary, he seemed thrilled. Takenoko occupies a special place in my forager’s heart because it was the first food I picked from the wild after moving to Japan fifteen years ago, and I have enjoyed it many times since. Eleven courses of it in the name of research
sounded like a dream come true. But was it truly a wild food? At least 1,400 species of bamboo grow around the world, from the frigid Kuril Islands to the southern Andes. Of these, over one hundred are native to Japan, and seven or eight are eaten there with some regularity. Several are harvested only in the wild, most notably a bushy, snow-hardy variety called chishimazasa (Sasa kurilensis). But at Uoka I would probably be eating the shoots of mosodake (moso bamboo, Phyllostachys edulis; also called mosochiku), which is by far the most commonly consumed species in Japan. Mosodake, with its beautiful arching stalks and plumes of delicate leaves, was introduced from China in the eighteenth century and has been cultivated as an agricultural product ever since. In Japan at least, it is no more a wild food than apples or oranges. Under certain circumstances, however, apples and bamboo alike can go feral. In Japan this is happening because bamboo baskets, rice spoons, fishing poles, and all the other products once made with this terrifically sustainable resource are being rapidly and heartbreakingly replaced by plastic. This, together with a rise in cheap imported takenoko from China and the aging of Japan’s farmer population overall has led farmers to stop caring for a great many mosodake groves. In Kyoto Prefecture, nearly all groves north of the city of Kyoto had been abandoned by the early 2000s, and satellite data suggests that at least two-thirds of groves nationwide are similarly untended.
All photos by the author
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WRITERS IN KYOTO 4TH ANNUAL ANTHOLOGY Poetry and Prose, Fiction and Memoir, Academic and Evocative With all the irregularities that have happened this year, you will be glad to know that the Anthology of Writers in Kyoto, now in its 4th year, is coming along and is expected to be available early next year (from Amazon). The theme is “Structures of Kyoto” and we have a very good mix of writing, about physical structures (such as Sanjusangen-do) and mental and psychological structures (such as Zen). In the meantime, here are some things to look forward to: Illustrations by Stuart Ayre and a hand-drawn map of Kyoto, showing the location of most of the contributions. Many contributors will be familiar to readers of Kyoto Journal and the Kyoto literary scene in general, as well as winners of the 2019 and 2020 WiK writing competitions, and even some new faces. —Rebecca Otowa and Karen Lee Tawarayama Co-Editors, Writers in Kyoto 4th Anthology
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Photo: Minechika Endo
INSIGHTS FROM ASIA
A non-profit, volunteer-produced quarterly since 1987
PUBLISHER John Einarsen
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Storm Approaching Nachi, Photograph by Mark Thomas