Japan
Dispatches, 2004
Peter and Judy returned to Japan on the Autumnal
Equinox 2004. Soon after, we started receiving dispatches from this journey.
Index of Fall 2004
Dispatches
[Most recent dispatches at top of list]
Dispatch #1,
A Prescription for Japan's Cities,
Sept. 26, 2004
Dispatch #2,
Finding the Path Off the Road,
Oct. 7, 2004
Dispatch #3,
Tokyo Typhoon: Vestiges of a People and a River,
Oct. 15, 2004
Dispatch #4,
Restoring Ecology From the Inside Out,
Oct. 18, 2004
<<<===>>>
Dispatch #1, September 26,
2004
Northwest Pacific Main Islands
By Peter Berg
Starting out from Tokyo on a trip to other parts of Japan is like using
a highway transport truck to drive to a garden for a walk. A tandem truck
with separate warehouse size containers each packed to the roof above a
single narrow zigzagging aisle. One container holds a jumble of
erratically steered cars, motorcycles and bicycles, another bulges with
streaming phalanxes of preoccupied humans, a third is crammed with shops
from only two people wide up to mammoth department store edifices dozens
of stories high splattered over nearly every inch with signs matching
their size. These are the first super-arenas encountered by anyone and
there is a feeling that an unlimited number of others will follow. (They
do and without pause.) Unabashedly hard-core consumerism tolerates
high-end European fashion advertisements on the front page of even a
popular English-language daily newspaper. Ads in general are so thick that
truly important traffic signs and pedestrian lights, street names and
direction arrows, and flashing emergency lights can be impossible to
detect. The dominant atmosphere surrounding this extreme stuff-worship is
a quintessentially Bladerunner world with omnipresent and
incomprehensible juxtapositions of old and new cultures. Worn granite
demons at the foot of a sheer aluminum wall, a twig broom with a bamboo
handle at a precarious angle against a wall beside a tattered handbill for
a computer dating service. There is a definite darkening shadow of
overdoneness, that the city's life can't keep up this heated pace
indefinitely. Up-to-date Tokyo is cooked to the limit and about to
smolder.
Then how to account for personal endurance and even congeniality despite
the pounding noise of construction, cyclonic whooshing of traffic, impatient
bumps of half-running crowds, and visual assault of searing fuchsia,
chartreuse… the whole family of neon tinged colors? Put it this way, what
would make a Tokyo native homesick? Japanese in general often say that what
they miss when away is their distinct food. To be more precise regarding
Tokyo, tiny noodle shops can be as welcoming as other parts of city life are
insufferable, as reasonably priced as others are outrageously expensive.
They unfailingly produce large satisfying bowls of magical tasting
ingredients that are as unique as their eight seat counter refuges with
owner family members cooking, gossiping, joking, or even doing homework
before your eyes. There are hundreds of diverse neighborhoods with dazzling
special qualities that range from blaringly overt sexuality to subtle
serenity. They are all as close as the nearest entrance to the quickest,
cleanest, safest, and most frequent subways imaginable (with the caveat that
their fares are probably the highest). Good eating, enjoyable playing and
fast mobility make any city amenable regardless of its hassles. And there is
one more point of specifically Tokyo identity that can't be overlooked.
Other capital cities may be the center of their national societies, but this
near-thirty million person layered heap is Japan's central high-revving
engine as well. A friend estimated that the working population is dominated
up to seventy percent by those who chose to stay or came here to pursue life
careers. Being so dedicated they can't help but
imagine themselves to be fundamental and indispensable not only to Tokyo's
existence but to Japan's itself.
As for the walk in a garden, it couldn't be in pursuit of a more
different vision. This was the starting and return
point for a circuit to appropriately declare the need for ecologically
nesting cities sustainably within natural features and systems of different
places throughout Japan. Ecology leader and Planet Drum Foundation Board
Member Kimiharu To acted as networker supreme as well as guide and
interpreter for Judy Goldhaft and me. Matsumoto City in Olympics-pummeled
and economically depressed Nagano Prefecture was the first stop. Councilman
Yagi Satoshi hosted us in City Hall with other council members, Nagano
residents, and some visitors from Tokyo for a talk about transforming
cities. It concluded with a workshop making maps that showed participants'
depictions of their local nearest bodies of water, land forms, soils, native
plants and animals, and both beneficial and destructive aspects of human
life.
When the maps were completed the attendees were divided into groups
representing different geographic areas. At that point formerly quiet
listeners turned ebullient declaimers of their detailed creations. Each took
more time then usual for a workshop I've presented in different countries at
least a hundred times. "In Japan there aren't many opportunities to express
your personal feelings", Kim explained. "People don't attend workshops here
just to learn how to do something but to extend themselves in public. We
have to let them take as much time for this part as they want for their
outward exposure as well as learning from each other." That fits with the
workshop's overall purpose to initiate
reconceptualizing who as well as where you are in nature, so we watched with
no little amazement as voices rose and arms waved.
The two main groups learned radically different things. Tokyo visitors
barely knew the breadth of their urban home much less whatever natural
elements were cemented in, flowed under, or flew over their daily lives. For
them this unawareness and need to know was a valuable lesson. Nagano
residents did much better, recounting the surrounding major natural features
and a few within Matsumoto city limits. They unanimously complained that
damming of local water resources with utility company hydroelectric
generators for distant users had disastrous effects on local aquatic
habitats. The development of more benign forms of this renewable resource
for their own power needs was also a major issue.
Before the workshop someone commented that the biggest political problem
was "the incompetent mayor". Considering the key city administration roles
some of the participants play, future ideas about restoring and maintaining
natural systems and programs for pertinent sustainability issues should now
get a better hearing and higher political profile.
We spent that night in the ski resort town of Hakuba, guests of
techni-organico Green activist Ko Ogawa, his multi-talented wife and
all-play baby girl, in an old farm-style house he was renovating in a way
that blended with the original expansive openness of these buildings
intended for large families. Ko's high energy radiates out into web
designing, childcare, landscape photography, sound recording, mountain
biking, political campaigning for greenish candidates and issues, dauntless
self-reliance, public events ice-breaking, and community volunteerism. A
bona fide player in the sustainable future Renaissance. It was the city's
Environment Week in a national holiday period celebrating the autumn equinox
and Ko adroitly handled all of the technical aspects of the event.
My talk on the next day's program was aimed at the historical state of
environmentalism and the arrival of its Second Phase. The shock and implicit
negativity of the introductory phase reflected in titles like SILENT Spring,
The Population BOMB, Planet in PERIL, and many similar
grab-by-the-shoulders-and-shake outcries had done their job. For better and
worse everyone now knows we share the Earth's same limited skein of life.
Better for developing further ecological consciousness and action based on
this foundation. worse because the scale of destruction brought by
greenhouse gases, species extinction and disappearing habitat, soil loss and
desertification, resources depletion, and other mortal facts of present-day biospheric life seems beyond personal, governmental, or even
intergovernmental control. How does that knowledge fit the young 21st
Century's absorption with economic growth, globalization, terrorism, and
war? What do we do in the Second Phase?
Our identity as a species has actually been changed. Humans have always
coped through developing culture, and at present this means accounting for
the reality of being unified interdependently with all other forms of
planetary life and natural elements. To do this we must recognize the living
continuity of these factors in the widely diverse locales where we live,
bioregions in the biosphere. Working to restore and harmonize with them
sustainably is the wellspring and foothold for the new culture.
Our species is now and will increasingly become based in cities. Homo
sapiens urbanus.
This isn't seen as a hopeful prospect for most people given the
conditions of city life. Urban centers are predominantly dislocated from
living responsibly within their bioregions even though they ultimately
depend upon them. To dim the prospect even more, the illusion of city
separation from nature and consequent disregard for the realities that are
necessary for survival isn't new. Sumerian, Mayan, Cambodian, Hellenic, and
most other ancient cultures' cities were abandoned because they became
over-extended in terms of local food, water, and other essentials. So will
the present-day maximegapolitan sprawls that sometimes Gargantuanly contain
half their national populations. They should and sometimes already do
collapse for the same basic reason. Simply stated, cities die because they
progressively consume greater amounts of resources and produce huger piles
of wastes.
The identity of cities has to change to fit the new identity of our
species. They have to become reciprocal with the life of the bioregions they
occupy, they must become sustainable and city dwellers need to live
sustainably within them. The have to produce resources and eliminate wstes.
There is promise for these changes in the Ecuadorian city of Bahia de
Caraquez which has adopted an Ecological City Plan. Planet Drum Foundation
has worked to promote bioregionally beneficial approaches for food, energy,
water, recycling, human waste, industries, and education since the
Ecological City Declaration there in 1999. An example is a program to turn
household wastes into compost to grow fruit trees for residents of a
disadvantaged barrio eventually that has been expanded to become a
city/county wide recycling effort. This is especially significant since
organic material represents a full half of the waste stream there. There is
also a revegetation project for controlling erosion using only native plants
in a neighborhood ruined by a mudslide resulted by creating a "wild park"
with steps, paths, identification placards, and a self-guided tour map. The
neighborhood community participates in maintaining and leading tours of the
park. Another, more ambitious project seeks to revegetate many hundreds of
hectares of similarly eroded land along a six kilometer stretch entering the
city that fulfills numerous bioregional criteria. It not only grows and
plants thousands of trees but saves soil, produces useful fruits and plant
materials, creates habitat for native animals, reserves rain water by
reducing runoff, prevents mud slide destruction of houses and roads, reduces
siltation in streams and the major river, creates jobs growing seedlings and
planting them on hillsides, provides an educational facility, and offers
development of future benefits including visitor services and
accommodations. An inter-generational, free Bioregional Education Program is
teaching basic reading, writing, mathematics, and other skills through
involvement with restoration and sustainability projects. Industries for
using recycled material include handmade stationery produced from wastepaper
and decorated with native plants by several different small companies. There
is a steadily growing number of three-wheeled bicycle "eco taxi"
organizations, mangrove and other natural features restoration and education
projects, eco-tourism companies of various kinds, ecologically oriented art
works programs, and city-wide celebratory events.
The model that is developing in Bahia de Caraquez isn't necessarily
applicable in all aspects for more developed places such as Japan, but it
addresses bioregional component areas such as watersheds, native species,
and sustainable production that are necessary although different in their
particulars. City residents should begin the transformation of their lives
while pressing for public policies that can reach further than their
personal control.
There has been a circle of eco-networkers in Hakuba ever since the 1998
Winter Olympics brought home the necessity of environmental involvement in
an unmanageably grand way. Residents suffered the onslaught and learned from
it. A native plant nurseryman introduced himself and immediately led a tour
of the exquisite naturally planned growing site he named "Biotope" with a
creek for aquatic plants and rock formations to grow bare-soil tolerant
local mountain varieties. Natural materials handicrafters have become more
numerous, led by renowned native wood furniture artist "nature boy" Bunpei
Maniko.
Most prominent among the bioregional luminaries is Toshio Watanabe who
originally opposed the Winter Olympics even though he operates a ski lodge
that might have benefited from the crowds. When prevention of the
environmentally ruinous Games could no longer be debated he magnanimously
turned over his place to house volunteers and became one himself as a guide
and interpreter for visiting team members. He is permanently devoted to
ecological betterment and oversaw the organization and direction of
Environment Week with its speakers on subjects ranging from mountain
wildlife to sustainable community development, and learning opportunities
including a map-making workshop by Kim and myself followed by Judy
performing her inimitable "Water Web" performance art piece.
Toshio's newest project is restoring an abandoned 115 year old former
farm site as a school for teaching traditional approaches to local living by
carrying out activities linked to farming and nature. Irori Juku (Hearth
School) is on a 200 hectare site that has a main building with five actual
four-person floor hearths and study spaces. Its stout one cubic meter roof
beams are hand-adzed and only wooden pegs were used in the original
construction. Stacked parts of another old house from a different abandoned
location will eventually be reassembled here as well. Toshio has begun
cutting down a dense thirty-year old stand of planted cedar trees that are a monocultural plague on Japan's hillsides. (Planted continuously since the
end of World War Two to create employment and as a
future source of wood, cedars now are a main culprit in loss of native plant
diversity and animal habitat, besides causing allergic responses to pollen
that are common throughout Japan and reportedly affect 40% of Tokyo's
population.) A shoulder-high charcoal oven with two burners was built of
native clay to feed in small-sized logs that are fired for three days and
then allowed to smolder for the rest of a total week. It's an inferior grade
of charcoal for cooking but ideal for the many other uses Toshio described:
water and air filters, sewage filters, and room and other living space
freshening. Traditionally a construction material under buildings for
absorbing both ground and air borne moisture, charcoal is also used
contemporarily as an insulator under floors and in walls to resist
electromagnetic fields. Charcoal-making will be a lesson area when the
school becomes established along with whatever other activities flow forward
in the process of restoring the farm and surrounding mountain forest
landscape. This may represent more than just a personal preoccupation
because Toshio is a candidate for Hakuba's City Council. If he succeeds
Hearth School could have far-reaching implications for the entire community.
<<<===>>>
Dispatch #2, October 7,
2004
Northwest Pacific Main Islands
By Peter Berg
Starting in September the Japan countryside starts
showing a yellowish green tint of planted rice in squares of land as small
as backyards and as large as whole valleys. This alert color brightens even
more toward a bursting mustard yellow as fields ripen for harvest beginning
around the autumn equinox and continuing in higher and cooler mountain
terraces through early October. Stacked in paddies as numerous small
teepees, hung upside down on single, double or even triple tiered racks, or
arranged bunch by bunch like bricks in chest-high chimneys, the cut rice
retains its green stalk/yellow head aspect for a week or so before turning
deeper and deeper shades of gray-brown. Meanwhile new two-spear green shoots
rapidly rise in the previously cut rows of brown bunch-stumps, resurrecting
what had come before. This parade of shapes and colors is happening
everywhere at nearly the same time sounding a symphonic dominating theme
from the landscape that reverberates in consciousness as a naturally
unfolding procession. It doesn't matter if the cultural reciprocity through
rituals that once accompanied it has lapsed through use of machines to
plant, tend and reap. The dance remains in the process itself perpetually
ready to hypnotize with grace.
The southern main island in the Japanese chain of
Kyushu feels more informal and humanly slow-paced immediately upon stopping
at the train station in Hakata to pick up Yoko Nishida who will accompany
Judy and me. She makes us feel at home waiting for the next train by
presenting a page of mounted photos from her visit to our office in San
Francisco and bioregional tour of Glen Park.
We're met in Kagoshima by fresh-eyed,
community-building professional Yuko Oguri and seventeen year Japan resident
writer Jeffrey Irish to enjoy southern laidback style eating and spending
the night at his remarkable rebuilt countryside dwelling. It is a former
lookout for village cows with a single tiny enclosed crows nest above a
one-room concrete house. Jeff smoothed out what was there with new flooring
and plaster, built a perfect cooking hearth to use home-made charcoal, and
added a walled-off elegantly simple squat toilet and wood-fired hot bath.
Although he is around six and a half feet tall, the whole place can't be
longer than thirty-five feet or wider than twenty yet seemed open and oddly
spacious. Nothing seems done except with extreme care and deliberation, so
much so that it represents a thoughtful living exhibition of traditional
Japanese house aspects reiterated in a contemporary context. Except for
electricity for a computer and telephone, lights and a few appliances, it
could have existed at the beginning of the Twentieth Century if not earlier.
The prospect of remodeling the old lookout for a token amount of yearly rent
came through his work and involvement for the past seven years with a
village that faces abandonment. This is part of a massive trend of younger
residents leaving for cities that is similar to Toshio's Hearth School site
outside Hakuba. Jeff has helped the place and its remaining elders survive
and written articles for Japanese newspapers and books extolling the
sustainability of older local practices and customs.
Yuko took over the next morning explaining the
conference session in the fair-sized city of Kagoshima with local group
leaders and members planned for the day. This was to be an active community
organizing event arranged through her adult life-long learning extension
program in coordination with public service groups. She envisioned an
ecological underpinning for future urban community sensibility with
implications for a new national policy to merge local governments. If cities
around Kagoshima merged together, they should do so with consciousness of
sharing the same bioregion. Once again I was humbled by the adaptability of
the bioregional concept to a completely unforeseen situation, and the way it
was taken up during the meeting is worth telling because it was a first in
all of the group sessions any of us had experienced.
Community non-profit group leaders spoke first
explaining the purpose and menu of the gathering, followed by energetic,
inclusivity-driven Satomi Maruno. She magically dispelled the kind of shy
hanging-back that sometimes afflicts audiences here by prompting them all to
write their first thought about what was good in the community. Then they
held up and read what seemed an expectedly wide assortment of favorites: "a
spot on the river", "the respectful way people treat each other", and even
"the neighborhood badminton club". Satomi next requested a quick response
about each person's role in the community and received another diverse
collection (including "I don't have one"). People were now in the mood to
take a ride of imagination together.
Because of the predominantly urban backgrounds of the
attendees, I shortened the usual rap to explaining what ecological factors
and natural features sustained city life.
Next Judy delighted them with "Water Web", but the
program was running shorter by twenty minutes than what was scheduled. The
workshop organizers improvised by staging a mass bioregional map-making
exercise using the blackboard and volunteers to draw in the local river,
mountains, soils, native plants and animals, and best vs. worst human
adaptations to those natural features.
After some anxious minutes of appeals for the first
volunteer, the map got underway with an extremely accurate, curve-by-curve
depiction of the river by someone who guided tours on it. There was an
appreciatively astonished pause as everyone watched the miraculous perfect
line take shape and widen slightly to end at the ocean. When I next asked
for mountains and hills, there was a rush by four young women to the
blackboard that took everyone by surprise. But not for long. Flashbulbs
popped all over the room as other participants realized that an important
moment of group understanding was taking place and they recorded it the way
baseball fans snap a homerun. None of the workshop practitioners had seen
anything like this in any previous context and we stared at each other with
hands outspread, "Wha..huh!"
It wouldn't have been possible to stop volunteer
artists after that. Six, then eight chattering people were sketching in soil
types when a woman ran up to quickly label one of them "pyroclastic flow"
(in English) and then run back to her seat. Plants and animals nearly
overflowed the frame of the blackboard. Noxious superhighways, polluting
factories and obtrusive dams competed with admired recycling spots and
beloved gardens. People were enthusiastic and had become engaged far beyond
expectations. When the organizers solicited the last person's statement
about what had been gained from the meeting, there was unanimous acceptance
of the information and enjoyment of the experience. The most striking
declaration for me was from a woman who worked at a cement company; "I
didn't realize that I know nothing about the natural elements around me. I'm
going to find out now."
A few days later Yuko joined our quest to visit the
saga-laden city of Minamata in nearby Kumamoto Prefecture. Devastated
starting in the fifties beyond anything comparable in the horrible long
history of industrial pollution, the place has given its name to mercury
poisoning, Minamata Disease. Several blocks-sized Chisso Corporation
knowingly poured countless gallons of mercury and other lethal chemicals
into sluices leading to the bay. Borne by air, water and fish into human
nervous systems they caused wasting disorders, crippling and death for as
many as one hundred and seventy thousand people. We wanted to see what
degree of ecological restoration had taken place, and how people viewed
living there today.
Although it was a weekend, resourceful Yuko arranged a
tour of the twenty-two kilometer length of the Minamata River watershed
guided from source springs down to the ocean by organic tea farmer Kazuya
Matsumoto. Amazed on arrival to find him married to one of her university
classmates, Yuko rode with us in a happy cloud of revived friendship to
Samukawa Spring on nearly one thousand meters (3000 feet) high Mt. Ozeki
This peak is significant also as the border between Kumamoto and Kagoshima
Prefecture where we had just been. Spring waters spout from stark rocks
above a rugged flat shelf with statues of water deities and protective
spirits, offerings, and a cup for drinking. "Many people come her to fill
jugs of water, " Kaz said and so did we. An evergreen variety of oak
dominates the dense although inviting wet forest with accompanying camellias
(Japonica). Diminished to the point of endangerment, small numbers of native
matake (bamboo) and sugi (cedar) compete with massively planted exotic
species of these plants in monocultural groves that ominously comprise as
much as half the vegetation in the watershed. The small parrot-green mejiro
bird with white eyes survives as a native.
Only a quarter of a mile from the steep springs,
numerous narrow rock-walled terraces make sensuous curving beds for
household supplies of yellowing rice, flowering buck wheat (it ripens in
winter), and soybeans. Good signs of continuing viability and self-reliance.
Previous cash crops such as tangerines have diminished but more sustainable
tea and onions remain profitable enough to attract young farmers.
Watershed maintenance is limited to building up new
hillside retaining walls and shoring up old ones, even though a national
attention-getting massive avalanche last year that killed more than a dozen
people indicates restoration of indigenous vegetation is an urgently needed
preventative for future erosion. The mountains are steep and boulders up to
five meters (fifteen feet) in diameter came down in the slide.
The city limits are fortuitously the same as the
watershed borders, and coming into the most populated coastal part we are
given a wonderfully detailed watershed map with numerous side panels showing
natural sites, customs, products, and activities. It is only one of many
other outstanding information sources and activities found here now paid for
by public funds. Ecological consciousness in Minamata was harshly spurred
beyond other places by the mercury poisoning tragedy and remains higher than
other Japanese cities, a Hiroshima of environmental destruction. Councilman
Yoshimoto Tetsuro pioneered this level of community environmental education
and practice as the appropriate way to begin a long process of recovery.
Fifty-eight hectares (about one hundred and thirty acres) of soil were
needed to cover over the mercury poisoned bay bottom near the plant, and
another one and a half million cubic meters of sludge were dredged from
farther out. The landfill has been planted with native vegetation from
various parts of the watershed and there is a soulful park with memorial
statues sculpted by living victims. Surf fishermen were standing in front of
the garden on terraced landings leading into the bay. In one place a
memorial billboard reads that this is a " …model of an environmentally
friendly city learning from the lessons incurred by Minamata Disease."
Another part states, "Where you are standing now is the land solemnity. By
visiting this place, we hope all will recognize the importance of
environmental protection." Misspelled English that causes the words to be
read several times only heightens its touching effect. Judy had tears and Kaz reminded us, "Many people suffered but no one knows how many lives of
animals were taken." It is a poignant, historic turn-around city that
deserves re-dedicatory pilgrimages.
Spent the evening back in the mountains at a
comfortably funky, lived-in old farmhouse with agricultural guru Amano-san
and the friendly disciples who arrive unbidden at this door. We feasted on
seasonal delicacies, took a hot bath with a football size bag of home-grown
organic English tea that stained the water orange-brown, and rode in the
back of his pickup truck to view the waning harvest moon.
<<<===>>>
Dispatch #3, October 15, 2004
Northwest Pacific Main Islands
By Peter Berg
The definite origin of the New Stone Age people of the
Japanese Islands is unsure but they may have originated in Siberia and
arrived at least 10,000 years ago. Known now as Jomon, their DNA survives
predominantly in the contemporary population along with that of Yayoi
descendants who migrated from Korea starting from around 2,500 years before
the present. (These are such well established traits that a peculiarly
directed scientific finding reported last month used the two genetic types
to gauge the average national male fertility, establishing among other
things that Jomon descended men had greater sperm counts in spring and Yayoi
in fall.)
Jomon culture was highly advanced if the ornate pottery
vase with gracefully sculpted flames shooting up from rim that is on display
at the Tokyo National Museum is a fair indication. Their relatively dense
village-style society with dozens of thatch-roof circular houses dug into
the ground must have been intensely interactive. The dwellings feature
leg-dangling double circular rows for ten or so people each sitting around a
central fireplace. (There is an echo of this today if you unexpectedly find
a space for knee-high legroom under the table in a home or at a restaurant
when seated on the tatami mat covered floor.) Only thirty or so feet (ten
meters) in diameter, the interiors of these dugout homes feel larger inside
because they are divided into ample separate spaces for sleeping, working,
cooking, and storage similar to the style of a rounded Mongolian ger (yurt).
A significant difference from the nomad structure is the sitting tiers
descending like a miniature stadium into the earth, which along with ceiling
rafters and a walled ground level comprise altogether at least four
small-scale floors. Larger meeting halls and other specialized buildings are
also found with these sociable huts in a defensive enclosure, guarded by
watch towers constructed of tall tree-sized poles. "Ceremonial" centers with
standing stones are sometimes found outside the villages similar to
countryside shrines today.
Extrapolating today's Japanese society from Jomon
stretches credibility but there is an atavistic ring to the high degree of
organization that was involved. The climate was significantly colder then,
the terrain even more uneven and rocky than today (subsequent agriculture
and other forces have smoothed it out somewhat), but Jomon people seem to
have done exceptionally well at survival despite those harsh conditions. Is
this the actual taproot for the outstanding Japanese trait of
cooperativeness even before the orderly necessities of rice farming that
came thousands of years later?
Jomon could also be a great-plus grandparent for the
respectful cultural identification with nature that was so prevalent here
right up to the abrupt era of Emperor Meiji that brought modernization only
a century and a half ago. Chinese and Indian influences for at least two
thousand years before are often cited for obvious contributions to Japanese
nature philosophy, but they are comparatively late to credit for the core
sensibility about natural forms and qualities. It is a uniquely native taste
that guides fundamental elements such as Japanese food, use of stone and
wood materials in natural forms, and unique celebrations of the seasons.
Older residual features persisted even when cultural achievements were
deliberately evolved from Chinese aesthetics such as the beautifully
landscaped Edo Period (17th-19th Century) Koishikawa Korakuen
Gardens in Tokyo's relatively sedate Bunkyo District. A walk through the
garden shows arrangements of indigenous volcanic stones, careful placement
of distinctive native trees, and plain grain-showing wood and stone
structures. Some wild native elements are also part of the experience such
as white egrets navigating through dark trees to perform balletic open-wing
landings on rocks beside a lake. It even retains a precious small length of
the original Kanda River which has elsewhere been replaced by oversize
gutter-like cement sluices that blight almost all of Japan's urban
watercourses. More than just a meditative wonder from the past, this
revelation-filled park is a reservoir for holding and eventually liberating
some of the ecological forces that eventually can transform Tokyo toward a
post-industrial future.
A section of the concrete-shrouded Kanda River is just
across the street from where we are staying at Kimiharu To's apartment and
its condition is easy to guage on daily morning walks. Easy to overlook in
the shadow of an elevated highway, it is a perfectly straight, barely
moving, stagnantly dark green stripe about 25 meters (75 feet) wide that
sulkily fills one-quarter of the trough. Until recently I had only once seen
a solitary bird flying above the surface and a single albino carp swimming
along the edge. Then Japan's twenty-second typhoon this weather-crazed year
struck Tokyo head-on and altered everything.
First there was a surprisingly cold, hard-blowing
all-night rain, then a relatively calm morning of off and on drizzles, and
even a puzzling false period of calm. Next came the true drenching,
near-hurricane force typhoon with body-slamming gusts and occasional
strangely warm tongues of tropical air that lasted through the afternoon and
night. Kim fidgeted while inside during the height of the blow and finally
slipped a rain jacket over T-shirt, shorts and zoris to see what he could
find outside. It was a spectacular discovery that he came back to insist we
share. Kanda River was in full flood, completely filling its suddenly
inadequate cement jail and surging over pedestrian bridges into the street.
Kim was in rescue mode having informed the building manager to call for
water barriers that emergency crews arrived to put in place with amazing
speed. Of all the typhoon phenomenon the river's total reversal of character
was the most profound. It was now brown and running with a current of twenty
to thirty miles an hour; rising, falling and rising again several feet in a
few minutes. The surface flickered under bright lights carrying along pieces
of wood, plastic containers, and other debris so quickly there was barely
time to identify them.
Normally preoccupied with doing business, Tokyo was
pushed to the outer limit of its ability to cope like a mountain climber in
a sudden blizzard. The city's famous perfectly scheduled trains even stopped
running. The next morning there were broken umbrellas in crippled postures
on every block and street corner, testifying to the universal effect of the
typhoon on everyone in the city. Another Jomon village encounter.
The Kanda River slowed to a walk and dropped to its
previous low level but new effects stemming from the storm came into play.
The odor was no longer stagnant but richly organic like a mudflat. Tree
branches broken off by the storm floated along the surface. An egret flew
low under a walking bridge and landed to wade near the edge while some
smaller brown birds playfully climbed up iron ladder rungs set in the cement
above the water. It might only last for another day or two, but the Kanda
had once again become alive.
<<<===>>>
Dispatch #4, October 18, 2004
Northwest Pacific Main Islands
By Peter Berg
There is still a medium level of desire for
ecological accountability in Japan today on individual, community and some
business levels, as well as in planning by local and national agencies. It's
not a rage and could even be waning, but it is greater than in the United
States where post-9/11 consciousness continues to be dominated by terrorism,
war and economic concerns. Neither major presidential candidate campaigned
significantly on environmental issues, for example.
Environmentally beneficial ideas that are
unpublicized or actively blocked in other parts of the world have often been
refreshingly welcomed. Japan is the birthplace of the seven years old Kyoto
Protocols on climate change that stands as the most significant monument so
far for a positive environmental direction in this century (even if its
implementation is still problematic both here and with other nations).
Energy efficiency has always been a concern in this relatively fuel-poor
country and clever solutions retain a high priority. They have even become
a staple export in several areas, witnessed most recently by the quick
popularity in the US of Japanese-made gasoline-electric hybrid cars.
Both in social customs and individual behavior there
are traditional ethics that carry over into environmental areas. Waste is
highly discouraged and re-use is considered prudent. Leaving clutter indoors
and throwing things away outdoors was once unheard of and even in messier
disposability-ridden modern times is significantly less here than in most
developed countries. Consumer consciousness lags noticeably behind in areas
such as redundant paper packaging to decorate and guard purchases and gifts
that is unfortunately considered to be an art form, and thorough-going
recycling is thwarted by burning trash officially categorized as
"combustible". But "green labeling" is a large and steadily growing
phenomenon that is actively encouraged by industries eager to sell products
here as well as in Europe with its comparatively tougher EU standards. (Ads
for ISO 14001 training to become employed helping companies to meet export
standards can be found in taxis.) Surprisingly, some companies have had
long-held policies to introduce notable environmentally sound innovations on
their own that later become accepted industry-wide. One that is familiar to
anyone who has worked in an office is reusable ink bags in copy machines.
On the side of wild nature, an urge to control rivers
with concrete dams and paved streambeds is finally coming into question on
local and national levels with suggestions to tear some down. The post World
War Two mania for over-planting of cedar trees is now held to be a mistake
if only because they are a major source of rampant allergies in the
countryside and urban areas. Restoration ecology for everything from small
aquatic habitats to whole watersheds is receiving some attention. Limits on
fish catches are being considered for a range of species.
Considered "radical" concepts in the United States and
Europe, ideas about natural resources and city management and planning
according to bioregional considerations are becoming popular on local,
prefectural and national government levels here. Only environmental and
student groups were interested in them during the middle nineties when I
first toured Japan, but half of the dozen presentations in September and
October 2004 were sponsored at least in part by mayors, city councils or
agencies scattered across the country.
Kimiharu To of Japan Environmental Education Forum (JEEF),
a fairly large and influential representative of various environmental
interests, feels that official recognition can only be partially effective
in transforming social and cultural consciousness. There has to be a vast
change in public attitudes to create a demand for more thorough-going
eco-centered policies that are needed, so he sought out non-government
community groups and popular audiences. Kim convinced JEEF to throw its
sponsorship behind a weekend afternoon public discussion in downtown Tokyo
featuring Taoist nature poet Nanao Sakaki and myself with social/cultural
author Tsugi (Keibo Oiwa) as moderator. The title roughly translated as
"New/Old Never Run Dry" and admission was free in return for registering to
receive JEEF's future notices. A hard-core environmental activist who helped
publicize the event told her friends, "This will be a chance to reflect on
what we're doing and why we're doing it."
Nanao is a non-pareil literary phenomenon. A sailor in
World War Two he lived through the devastation and reconstruction that
lasted to the Sixties by following a personal path of natural and spiritual
exploration. Myths followed his hippy-clad footsteps. Did he actually climb
all of the highest mountains, and live off the land while hiking through
valleys and along coastlines everywhere in Japan? Was he an activist
planting trees in remote rural corners of the country? Did he establish a
commune on one barely populated volcanic island and spread veneration for
thousand year-old trees on another, originate a struggle to preserve coral
reefs, and lead protest tours up dam-stifled dry riverbeds? Was he broke
most of time, reading poems for nothing in coffee houses and bars, and
making so many friends he can no longer remember most of their names? Almost
all of it is true. And part of the price for living such an unaverage life
is the nationally disgraceful irony that his principal following exists
outside his own country. Even though he is a de facto "living treasure" for
creating contemporary spiritual-philosophical verse in the great tradition
of previous poet-seers, Nanao is barely known in Japan. He has spent much of
the last thirty years living, visiting and inspiring audiences in other
countries where his work has been translated into seventeen languages. He
arrived for the discussion jet-lagged from readings in Prague,
unapologetically sake-stoked to overcome sleeplessness.
Sakaki led off with a short reading that included the
visionary poem "Let's Plant Stars". Tsugi, whose book "Slow is Beautiful" is
extremely popular, served as an insightful moderator and commentator asking
the two of us questions for the next two hours. As the only non-Japanese
speaker thus requiring interpretation for questions and answers that made
every statement three times as long, I needed to talk simply and directly.
"We are wild at heart. An animal species that is related to all of the other
species. This has always been true, is true now, and will continue to be
true. Our brains are capable of entertaining different realities and
illusions. One of these can sometimes be the mistaken belief that we are
detached from nature. It's easy to think this is true sitting in this
auditorium. But all of us and everything in downtown Tokyo came from
nature. We are nature and have a long species heritage of harmonious
interdependence with other life." These may seem obvious truths but in the
surrounding atmosphere of overcrowded subways, sidewalks, pedestrian
signals, sheer stone and metal walls, escalators, sterile hallways, and
countless other solely human artifacts they needed to be firmly reiterated.
Tsugi mentioned a two hundred years old ginko tree on the same block as the
auditorium that we had visited just before the event. It had been preserved
with its own shrine but although over a hundred feet tall it was
pathetically squeezed and starved for light between two new skyscrapers. He
told how I had imagined peeling back what this tree had seen. New office
buildings rising and blocking the sun, American bombers overhead, Japanese
soldiers marching off to fight in Manchuria, the advent of Emperor Meiji …
even as far back as before Tokyo when the city name was still Edo. This
sadly treated tree was not only the sole significant presence of another
species remaining in the area but also the single living witness to all of
that history..
The three of us became a kind of expository team
alternating experiences and visions with problematic realities and examples
of creative solutions. Nanao described planting trees alone in the Kyushu
countryside and being joined by farmers in a cooperative way without using
environmentalist rhetoric. Tsugi pointed out the dual message of a potted
native tree he had placed in front of his garage: honor bioregional
elements, and get rid of cars. I recalled the disappointed reaction of a
student who asked how to begin living sustainably at home when I answered,
"Use the water when you're finished with a hot bath to flush the toilet".
The significance lies with the nightly practice of most Japanese when they
have the opportunity to take a hot soaking bath in a specially designed tub
after showering. The student must have been looking for something more
seemingly dramatic without realizing the enormous volume of water at five
gallons or more per person for each bath. Or the general statement that this
practice of re-use represents in consumer society. "Your whole life-style
can begin to turn on one activity like that," I insisted.
Tsugi wondered why Nanao continues to attract young
people and he replied, "I don't like people my age. They only talk about bad
health and insurance plans. I don't think of myself as old. I'm still
alive!" People in their twenties volunteer for Planet Drum's projects in
Ecuador because we offer an opportunity to fulfill their ideals, I said. "We
haven't made life decisions that force us to comply with the demands of an
ecologically destructive society. Our volunteers don't want to make
decisions like that either, and see us as people who haven't compromised."
Nanao stated that he hadn't gone beyond grade school
and believed that this is what kept him interested and involved in new
information. Tsugi is a college professor but has had Sakaki as a guest
lecturer for classes regardless of his lack of credentials. While listening
to them a whole cluster of thoughts from different incidents during this
visit lined up and they began to come together when I was asked to speak.
There are nearly a quarter million high school students in Japan who don't
show up for classes. This is a startling new development in such an
academically competitive society. Reasons range from brutal bullying among
pupils to difficulty of courses that require whole evenings of homework.
Teenagers also have a clear view of some new realities that aren't
adequately accounted for in classes. Computers and robots are displacing
people from traditional work and conventional jobs that require schooling
are disappearing extremely fast. Globalization is seriously threatening the
roots of cultural identity. Even Earth is different because of environmental
changes. Society isn't controlling the outcomes from these sweeping forces
and doesn't know where they will lead.
A positive twist on this theme came when I visited
Hitoshi Yoshida's recently acquired old farmhouse in Nagano. He and his wife
Seiko are reviving the place as a base for carrying out wide-ranging
activities to raise watershed restoration consciousness locally and
eventually throughout the Shinano River Basin, the largest in Japan. He had
arranged a conference titled "Touch the Forest and Feel the River" at an
agricultural university where I spoke. There were students (some from China
and Bangladesh told me they were taking bioregional ideas they had just
heard back home with them), faculty, local residents, and political figures
from throughout the prefecture. On the farm Hitoshi is aiming toward
self-sufficiency and housing a few student-helpers. A craft-wise handyman
was employed to assist restoring the buildings and fields. He has since been
joined by Yuuto, a high school dropout from the nearby town. The quiet boy
visited once and decided to stay to learn traditional work. He watches
everything the older man does and hands him tools when needed. At the
conference he made tape recordings and photographs under Hitoshi's
direction. "His family didn't want him to leave school and come here at
first but now they seem to have gotten used to the fact that this is what he
actually wants to do," Hitoshi told me. In terms of finding his own path by
learning to work toward ecological sustainability, Yuuto is a success story.
"There's too much meaningless education and not enough ecology," Nanao
declared.
Tsugi asked for more examples of sustainability and
Sakaki handily read a poem with ten or so things anyone could do. I took a
chance on how far audience participation can go at an "intellectual" event
in Tokyo and asked everyone to stand. All two hundred or more immediately
got to their feet. "Flap your wings like a bird." I demonstrated and waited
an anxious moment for a translation. Then they all flapped on cue and some
whistling broke out. "Now growl like a bear." They growled. "Growl louder!"
Fierce bear threats filled the modern style auditorium. "Now howl like a
wolf." There was a pause when I wasn't sure they would follow so I howled
another time before raucous howling broke out and continued through several
peals. "Now sit down and resume being human beings." There is something
universal in this exercise after all, and I thought maybe it could go
further next time. If there was enough time they could have been led in a
circle around the seats writhing like a snake they way some of us had done
with indigenous mountain people during a theater presentation in Cotacachi,
Ecuador.
When it was over we three agreed to be being surprised
by the remarkably close overlap of themes. (Once I argued that the need for
urban sustainability was urgently important because the lethal pollution of
Minamata was an imminent condition in all cities and concluded, "Tokyo is
Minamata." Nanao spontaneously wailed a sharp grief-stricken "NOoooO!" that
startlingly established the point.) If the purpose was to pronounce a
long-term positive vision for ecological change and re-inspire the
hard-fighting activists and supporters who made up a large part of the
audience, there was no question that they had stayed with us. Afterwards
someone said that nothing like this discussion had happened here before.
<<<===>>>
