Have Been New and Angular

Up on the Air China screen in the bulkhead are kids doing snowboarding jumps and twirls off some mountain back home.  Their getting crazy air and though I’m not much of a boarder I’d look forward to a bit of skiing this year.  My older one seems to have put her foot down.  “No skiing.  I don’t like the cold.”  I have two feet too which I can put down, but I am reluctant to force showdown.  I have taken them to some mountain or another for most of the last ten years trying to instill in them a love for the sport, a love for heading to the mountains in the winter. I tell myself if I just insisted on one more place that was fabled and beautiful and sunny . . . I’d change her mind.  Ahh, but the cold, will still be the cold.  Winter is like that if you head in to it.  We parents do what we can and then we don’t anymore.

Charlie Byrd is up in the ears soloing over samba drum brush strokes and that isn’t cold.  Another morning, I confess, where I did not want to rise at 5:30AM to get a cab to the airport. Must have caught a cold over in Taiwan this weekend.  There is always that first ten minutes or so when you wake up with a cold when you’re weak and you feel like it’s all gotten much worse over night.  But then the shower warms you up, you expectorate, you feel the heat on your shoulders.  I passed on the Air China sprayed eggs or flavorless porridge breakfast choice.  The tea will do. 

Off to Tokyo this evening.  I knew I’d be back and so I bought a book about Japan the last time I left Narita, as I often do, so that I might read it on the next visit.  Last night I left Moses Herzog in home in the Berkshires, his fever seemingly passed. His brother dutifully impressed with Ramona, and the realization that he has no more letters to write.  Off the shelf came Lafcadio Hearn’s essays on Japan.  Living in a small coastal town in Japan, at the end of the nineteenth century, we get nineteenth century village Japan with comparisons to the West Indies, where he'd also spent some time beforehand.   But in Japan his mission was to "think with their thoughts."

What I hadn’t realized until I looked inside this morning was that he never really learned to speak, nor read, nor write Japanese which seemed to suggest to me a rather compromised acculturation.  This period of the Meiji Restoration right before the first modern war with China and then with Russia nine years later, still has a somewhat essential quality in Japanese history.  The drama of the culture becoming “western” so that they “did” industrialism and imperialism better than the west itself would have been new and angular at that time.  Out perform or be subjugated.  What a completely different time for Japan.

We’ll spend some time then with Luccaido and see what we can discern from his process of learning about civilizational otherness one hundred and thirty years ago.  He spends forty pages or more talking about each of the creatures of the garden; each of four types of frogs, the common snake and lizard one sees, the dragon flies and spiders and for each there is a corresponding Japanese anthropomorphic story to go with it.  As imagined we slowly begin to appreciate both what has been lost to modernity but also what I have never bothered to ask about.

Monday, 11/27/17