Leaving on a Japan Trip
Now perhaps leaving on a Japan trip is too vague…I actually don’t usually go to Japan so it should be leaving on the Japan trip but I don’t like to say that because to me it sounds scarier.
Sitting on my porch in Fort Collins on Sunday morning, I feel a little like Frodo Baggins, who, if you remember the original Tolkien story, The Hobbit, was perfectly happy to be at home enjoying breakfast and second breakfast in his super comfortable hobbit hole. But somehow Gandalf sucked him into an Adventure.
The person who was the instigator, the person acting in part of Gandalf, is my daughter the Marine. She’s stationed out there, on Okinawa, actually, and said I should come visit her. Back in the dark evenings of winter when trips get planned I thought it sounded like a good idea.
Fujisan Beckons
Even the part about climbing Mount Fuji. I wrote about this Fuji leg of the trip before. Mount Fuji has not been canceled. Despite the fact that to tell you the truth, I have done almost no practice hiking. I have gone over the list of supplies you have to have to start up the mountain, and put them in my large day pack, and put that in my checked-bag suitcase. I have worn my Fitbit and done my 10,000 steps a day. I went on two 7 mile hikes. But…mostly I went horseback riding with my granddaughter Ella. Such are the vagaries of the grandma.
Packing for an International Journey
The packing at large! I have created a Google document listing all the activities we are supposed to think about doing. I looked at the activities and wondered how we would fit them all in, whether they would work out, what would the weather be, and how far apart every activity I listed was in real distance? I noticed I was almost out of face cream. I decided to buy some when I got there. Just another Japan adventure in the making.
I checked the weather report and saw a typhoon approaching Okinawa where we are staying but my daughter says it is going to veer off. “They always do.”
Oh good.
A Family History in Hokkaido
Although I have never been there, I have links with Japan that go way back. My father was stationed in Hokkaido and my older brother was born there. As a small child I was fascinated by my mother’s tale of something called the Japanese baths. Apparently, to this day, communal bathing is still practiced in establishments called “sento.”
My mother had handmade Japanese dolls that she brought home from Hokkaido. Back then was the era of collecting souvenirs. She also had the little sandals called zoris that had emigrated to America and became flip-flops.
And then there was Speed Racer
I have to admit a certain admiration for anime. I love the Studio Ghibli movies, in particular Spirited Away and Totoro. And when I was a little girl, there was a precursor to all this. I loved the TV show Speed Racer. “Speed” was, in case you don’t know, a race car driver whose crew was his family and he drove a white car with an M on the front called The Mach 5. It was the fastest car anywhere on Earth and could jump over huge precipices and drive on two wheels for extended periods; it even had a submarine function. “Speed” always played fair and he always won the race because he was so good, not to mention having the best car. He also vanquished bad guys who talked like they were from Brooklyn. I asked my father about this show and he said “Oh that comes from Japan, that drawing style could only come from Japan.”
“Speed” always played fair and he always won the race because he was so good, not to mention having the best car. He also vanquished bad guys who talked like they were from Brooklyn. I asked my father about this show and he said “Oh that comes from Japan, that drawing style could only come from Japan.”
For sure Speed was no Elmer Fudd. He had long eyelashes and he jumped so gracefully into his car. He wore an ascot. I suppose it’s true, he could only come from Japan.
A Japan Trip Goes to a Magic Country
So all my life I thought of this place with communal baths and the finest cartoon art ever seen, beautiful dolls and clever sandals. It was too far away for any of us to go there. Even those who joined the military, most went to the Middle East or somewhere in the American South or Germany or Italy. The husband of a friend went to Canada for a collaborative project. Japan remained incredibly remote.
And There’s Also a Grandma Angle
The only civilian in my entire family who went by herself to Japan voluntarily was my grandmother. She made the trip by ship, and in fact she traveled from San Francisco to Hokkaido on a cargo boat which was carrying cattle. She joked later that she traveled in steerage – get it, “steer”age?
My mother said that my grandmother came at the time her grandson, my older brother, was born, just to make sure that “he had all his fingers and toes.” This type of humor is the kind we had back in those days. When they still used jokes like “Mom is going to kill you.”
The old days. But I digress.
The Link Between Japan and California
Then there’s this: a children’s book author whose works I’ve been collecting for my classroom. Alan Say is an artist and author who won the Caldecott award for his book Grandfather’s Journey. The loving pictures of a 19th century steam engine, a wheat field, and the Rockies showed how Tay Sr. and Tay Jr. both loved America, and particularly San Francisco, but Grandfather, after going home to Japan, was not able to return as an older man … because of The War.
World War II
When talking about Japan it’s impossible to avoid discussion about World War II, eventually. How did it happen? We remember Pearl Harbor, the battle of Iwo Jima which became a trope for ferocious fighting, perhaps beyond the reasonable, and the Japanese Emperor. My middle son, once in the Navy, has a picture of the Japanese WWII surrender over his refrigerator. A mass of sailors line up on the decks of the battleship Missouri as Hirohito stands at a table facing the American officers.
Looking at that picture one is amazed at how tiny the emperor appears, and wonders about the bravery it must have required to walk onto the ship surrounded by a thousand enemy sailors and lean forward and quietly sign surrender documents, wearing western clothes and a top hat. No one who has seen the newsreel of the event can help but think Hirohito was a nobleman of a type Americans had not seen.
The Idea of the Noble Warrior is Deeply Japanese
Moments like that are what the nobility is for. An average normal man could not have done it. Robert E. Lee almost didn’t make it to Appomattox Courthouse, they say. Only because a third of his army deserted over the weekend was he driven down.
But I digress.
When Travelling, I Go Always to History
Hoping to learn more about all this, and have something to read on the plane, I checked out a book on Japanese history from the library. It is called the Japanese Experience and was written by W. G. Beasley, born in 1919, who went to the U.S. Army Language School to learn Japanese. He fought in World War II and served in Japan at the end of the war.
Later he became a scholar at the University of London and wrote several books about Japan. He was one of the only westerners ever elected to the Japan Academy, an elite club of nationally important scholars.
According to Beasley, Japan, “at least officially, has had only one dynasty since the beginning of time.” This intriguing fact reminds me of what my father told me about the Americans, who have, like it or not, the oldest constitutional government in the world. Both countries have a tendency for (relatively) stable government.
Nothing has changed in this regard since my childhood. As I prepare to set forth travelling west, to arrive in the East, I promise myself that I will keep my eyes open and that I will learn and reflect and experience and record. For Japan, remote as it is, has been in my life since my beginning. And there is an analogy between Tokyo and the California where I began life, the two regions facing each other across the Pacific, at similar latitudes, now for almost 200 years being by turns antagonists and friends.
