A Few Grey Leaves Left

Walking along the river at Nakameguro.  It’s lovely even when the cherry blossoms are not blooming.  There are only a few grey leaves left on all the cherry trees.  The water is shallow and seems almost clear enough to drink.  And over dinner my friend mentioned that he’d met someone who grew up here in the 1970s when it was an open sewer.  Of course it was.  It would have had to have been, when Japan was building itself up as an industrial power, twenty five short years after the war’s devastation.

The air is so clear and the horticulture is lovely.  My Yamanote line JR train stops for a moment at Harajuku Station and there is a wall of green ivy and otherwise manicured vines and branches that have been shaped into a wall that forms the boundary of the park that holds the Meiji Shrine.  The train drops me off in Shinjuku, which I don’t normally visit and I note the way the word sounds on when repeated by the automated voice at the train stop.  I compare it in my mind to what the Chinese characters would sound like in Mandarin. 

There’s a walk now.  My friend wisely told me to follow the west exit.  Shinjuku is enormous but I submit to this idea of heading westward until I come upon signs in English that point me toward the hotel I need. I’d been warned but it was a good walk over.  “Ten minutes” isn’t much of a walk when you’re setting out to walk.  But when you’re late . . . every step is a waste. 

Strolling along I noticed two big signs announcing Tokyo as the Olympic city.  The city will opt for a blue geometric circle on a white background.  I note this with only a glance but consider them tasteful in a manner Japanese.  I’m across the street from my destination but I have just missed the traffic light.  Instinctively I take a few photos of the tall buildings around me, and the crosswalk itself, as I wait for the light to change.

Scary Uniforms

Landing in Haneda.  It wasn’t my choice to be over here in Japan just now, so soon after having been in Singapore and Indonesia. But Japan is generally rejuvenating.  This one is firmly anchored as the pride-of-place peripheral in my US-China mindscape.  No other place demands reckoning quite like this.  No other place complements reckoning in the same way either.

We’ve landed.  We’ve landed one hour later than it is back home but thirty-seven minutes earlier than when we were supposed to have landed, local time.  How a group of people butcher your language is a remarkable filter into how we view them, isn’t it?  Think of Chico Marx fresh-off-the-boat Italian English. It’s ridiculous but oozes a certain truth.  The stewardess is saying "truly" in a manner like Elmer Fudd.  

Japan does scary uniforms better than China.  Better than Indonesia too, with their two-tone combat boots.  I’m on a train I’d just rushed out and on to at Haneda station.  There’s a guard who has the purple armband safety pinned on to his shoulder in a way that isn't dissimilar to the Chinese version.  What is it then?  There are the white gloves, but the Taiwan taxi drivers also have white antiseptic gloves.  He’s tall which is important. But it may be the vaguely fascistic epaulette, white ribbon he has draped across his shoulder.  The epaulette and the uniform blackness of his attire.  The overall effect is martial, even though we all know isn’t.  It was.  It ain’t now unless this archipelago is provoked in the extreme. 

No one on the train except me cares about the guy.  Before me suddenly are a circle of salary man who've sprung up like a redwood standing circle.  They’ve been drinking.  They seem loose, or at least a few of them are.  Two or three of them are pensive.  I’d probably be amongst the loose buffoons were I to be one of their tree-pack. 

It’s a fine thing to be in a city that works well.  This is noted.  Beijing requires so much lubricant to make the gristly gears pull smoothly.  Some of that lubricant is the “wow it’s all changing so fast.”  I don't know if it’s enough grease to get us through the winter.  This place has already had most of its change, it’s well oiled and easy to navigate, easy consider even if it is impossible to be absorbed within it. 

It Must Be Somewhere

“Dad, wake me up at eight.  I have this volunteer thing at school tomorrow.” I dutifully climbed the stairs and delivered the awful news: “time to get up.” She came down later and said it was already too late. ”Too late?”  “Yeah I think they left already.”  “You think?”  Don’t give up.  You need the fighting spirit that doesn’t give up,” I suggested, as if I were George C. Scott.  I gave her a look of notable disbelief.

Much relieved to receive the news a few moments later:  “They haven’t left yet.”  “Ahh. Ok.  Shall we go catch them then?”  We did.  An hour later the younger one rang the bell.  She’d returned from a sleep over somewhere else in the compound.  She’d begun texting me at 5:00AM: “Hi.”  Apparently she had spent the slumber party sleeping on the floor.  She had a bit to eat and promptly went back to sleep. 

I worked.  I worked a long time on one document.  And then the document I was working on crashed.  Happens.  I reopened but it hadn’t auto saved.  Hours of work was now gone.  My own fault.  An older version of powerpoint, an older operating system, I knew why this disaster that used to happen all the time in the early days of computing but hasn’t been a major issue for years, befell me.  I kept looking in vain for the “recovered” file.  It must be somewhere. It wasn’t.

Who is the British historian who finished a history of something only to have his house burn down so that he lost the work that had taken him a decade and he promptly decided to sit down and write it again and . . . he claimed the rewritten version was better? He’d have had to have.  (Thomas Carlyle, “The French Revolution, A History”  J.S. Mill’s maid burned it by mistake.)  How many times was he tortured, unable to recall that perfect turn of phrase, unable to release the nagging suspicion that his original juxtaposition he’d managed, was the better one?

I did mine again and considered the places where I could nudge and improvise and approximate.  I don’t know if the redux was any better, but it wasn’t high art and eventually it was done.  Looking back I can remember the moment right before complete acceptance that it was lost.  I was trying fury on for size.  I had enough distance to see that I was preparing to explode.  Not exploding uncontrollably, but rather readying myself for loud release.  I tried on a mini explosion as a way of compromise.  It worked.  I got a bit angry.  I swore a bit.  And moved on to do what clearly had to be done.  Perhaps I know the material a bit better now.  Perhaps. 

Singularly Worth Trying

I have taken my kids to Europe a few times.  I always try to explain the middle ages.  The Roman Empire is easier to explain.  The Industrial Revolution is easier to explain.  You can stand in the Uffizi Gallery and illustrate the Renaissance:  “Here is a Giotto.  See how the halos are flat?  See how the people are stacked on top of each other?”  And turn and walk into the next room and say” OK.  Look at this Leonardo, “The Assumption.”  The painting has depth.  The Medieval painters couldn’t do this.  Suddenly they’d deciphered this and with a flourish, consumed and constructed with the learnings of Rome, the learnings of the Arab world.  

The Middle Ages are more opaque but singularly worth trying to understand.  They are centuries of soil turning that allow Europe to oddly unite civizationally under Roman Christianity, while remaining fractured and politically competitive. This, the fulcrum perhaps, of its incandescent, cancerous momentum, to ‘save’ consume and organize all. 

Is there a better film about the Middle Ages than “The Seventh Seal?”  I walled off work on Saturday.  “and, stay out!”  And tried to play ‘Settlers of Catan’ with the younger one and watch a movie with the older one.  We’d been on a black and white movies kick and I tossed out a few for her to consider but my artifice was transparent.  I really only wanted to watch one of them.  And after dinner, (which is risky for me, but I managed.) we set out to see Sweden in 1348 or so.

 

Quickly, my daughter recognized the Monty Python and Woody Allen as films she’d seen that had borrowed from the Bergman classic: the burning of the witch, the personification of the Grim Reaper.  The characters are not so far from ourselves.  The comedic troupe leader and his visions, the naivety of the cuckolded blacksmith.  Max von Sydow’s remarkable struggle with meaning and his Odyssey-like quest to return to Penelope before he dies. 

If death were one out of three people.  If death were plague-like and inexplicable and cruel.  If disease were able to take out every third person you knew:  Those who remained would most certainly have a different relationship with death.  Death personified?  Indeed.  You can find him in the eye if you look close enough.  The Moyen Age only had so much to lose with the onslaught of disease.  And productivity returned after a revolutionary epoch in to two generations.  But would that be true today?  If there were a plague like that; the political institutions we know, the nation states we know would be unlikely to survive as currently understood.  Expedient, demagogic, solutions that promise stability after so much misery would be all but necessary.  The assumptions have so much to do with who controls innovation and technical capacity to spring back. And the step back in time might be hundreds of crucial years, or perhaps much longer.  How long would it take to restore the arc of science to what we’ve currently accumulated, codified?  Something raw and crass would no doubt fill the time we lived without, beneath the shadow of the past. 

A Notable Force Suprssed

In 1994 I visited Sumatra with my stepfather.  We wanted to see birds and we wanted to see orangutans.  But I never went to Java.  And all these years on I’ve developed opinions about what Indonesia is like well knowing I’d never seen the nation’s cultural core.  It’s interesting being in a city that brags about its traffic, when you come from a place with notoriously bad traffic.  I’ll acknowledge, your traffic is very bad. But it’s for the same reason that Beijing or Shanghai’s have been worse at times, when the subway was being built. 

I was in Indonesia on business and I met lots of business people.  I naively told the immigration official as much, immediately regretted it. I would probably have to go get in line somewhere and buy a visa or explain why I didn’t have a business invitation letter, but then remembered what my friend who’d just entered had said and texted to remind me of brevity:  “I’m only here for one day.  Then I’m out.  One day.  Yeah.  Right.  One day.  One day, then I go.”  The official beside mine spoke to him in Bahasa.  I know no Bahasa.  But translation wasn’t needed: “Just give him the transit visa.  It’s not worth it.”  Right.  Well noted.

Indonesia has a troubled relationship with its Chinese minority.  Not unlike many other countries in the region, the Chinese minority controls the business interests.  I am here on business and had lunches and dinners and coffees with various people.  A remarkable number of people I met were ethnically Chinese.  And it was explained to me, more than once:  “we are the lost generation.  We needed to sublimate our Chinese identity, because it was dangerous to identify with the PRC.”

Zhou En Lai, if memory serves, had overtly referred to the Chinese in Indonesia as a “Fifth Column” and once Sukarno was overthrown any such nonaligned niceties were done away with, Suharto pivoted to the U.S. and Chinese were suspect as a national insurgent movement.  Chinese were, once again, the victims of their own success.

Later I had a room to present to.  It became clear that most of the room was ethnically Chinese.  I was introduced as someone living in Beijing.  They were intrigued that I could speak Chinese.  And, as I tried to engage the room, using Mandarin, it was clear, that no one there spoke a bit of Chinese. 

It struck me as a notable force suppressed.  So many people had Chinese cultural affinity and understood a mature network of business relations.  But any overt embrace of Chinese civilization was still held in check.  I inquired and many people were now encouraging their kids to learn Mandarin.  Will this then wax uninterrupted: “I’m Chinese and I’m proud”?

It strikes me with some distance that it’s unfortunate that I didn’t have more time to speak with more ethically Javanese people.  Presumably their take is rather different.  Chinese have this ineffable connectivity, this social genius that promotes its own and filters out unwittingly.  What to make of this undeniably capable diaspora?  Will they build or disrupt?  Nationalism and ethnocentricity can be body politic in Indonesia.