Japan travelogue II

[maru]

I'm in Japan again. I have been leaving my girlfriend daily voicemails this time, so I feel less compelled to journal the play-by-play as consistently as I did in the first thread. I think this time around I'd like to write infrequent, thinky sorts of posts.

So, that said, it's already happening! We're on the train to Nagasaki right now (well, the second of four). We've spent about two days in Tokyo. "We" ... right, well, it's the same this time, me and Rebecca. I guess I'll get to that first...

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Is it so strange to feel like you've associated someone specific with a place? My first time to Japan was a bit of a terrifying birth ritual; a lot was going on that was very new (etiquette, mannerisms, dress, social expectations, communication, trying to improvise language ...), previously only experienced from afar -- and now it was all enforced backward onto me, too. I watched my behaviour, my dress and my habits so as to not stick out, but I always, ineffably, stuck out, and so I watched it harder and harder, getting neurotic and paranoid. Insofar as I did all this with her, it felt like this ritual had happened "together," and so had marked us in the same way. We shared a month here, and we both now seemed to feel a lot more comfortable in the uncanniness. I can't speak for someone else, but...

I had thought about people I could go with -- as I was definitely not going alone; travel alone can easily feel nihilistic, in the same way binging TV alone can feel nihilistic. Mushishi's solo wanderer has a different affect than, say, the traveling party of your average shonen. Partaking in a world together feels like an adventure, but alone it leads one to introspect or consume, and I feel like I do that too much! -- but it would mean taking the lead, 'guiding' someone in a world I felt I still barely knew at all. I just wanted a season 2 of the same show. Not Osaka, but something new, something old, same cast. So overall, it felt "right" to do it like this, to go again like this.

The impetus for me traveling this time was more prompting a reset in my head to match the reset going on in my life. I've left work, and it's been a long winter. Insofar as we sit at home in Montreal, we seemingly just work ourselves up, unable to do anything more than dress up in the life of the mind, consumption or communication. I couldn't get myself to focus on work and escape this feeling of despair; I just felt depressed, inescapably so, and I knew I needed a change in my life. To walk around, go somewhere a little warmer, do something different. I sort of hated myself for thinking about it like that, for feeling like I "needed" travel to clear my head -- but I also know so many people in Montreal do the same, at least for a few weeks around January or February. The winters just do insane psychic damage here. Maybe it's okay to dodge those external factors?

The flight itself was longer than last time; initially rated at 14 hours, it was pushed down to 13h after being delayed to the end of the day. Half the plane was people from three days ago, still trying to get to Tokyo as the snowstorms in Montreal kept them on the track, then back indoors, then back onto the plane, over and over. I felt bad for them -- even after one day I felt sort of like ... hmm. How strong is my resolve to do all this? Haha. On the plane itself, I just listened to the Lyndon B. Johnson biography I've been listening to for over a month. I just wanted to finish the damn thing, so I squinted at Tetris and at 1.7x speed worked my way through another dozen hours or so of it as I drifted in and out of naps.

Arriving at the last possible time before curfew hit at Narita we were given a shuttle into Tokyo by the airline since there were no more trains. Completely unlike last time, there were no lines, no congested customs or trains, just this liminal nighttime Tokyo highway. And just like last time, regardless, we slept at the hotel for only a few hours before heading out way early the next morning.

We talked about whether or not one can 'need' travel, whether it's as easy as "we like Japan" or if there was a fundamental human thing about the weather, the walking -- as we were walking 15km even just that first day. And in turn we were both really happy suddenly! Like life had suddenly resumed. The air is brisk, it's just a touch too cold for fall attire, but the sun is warm and the plum trees are blossoming.

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Is it just feet on the ground, eyes on the world? Is it seeing so many humans going about their day with common care and reverence? After all, I walked around in Montreal in an effort to kick myself into gear, but it was cold, cold, cold, feeling so endlessly sapped every time I got home, so worn down by trying to get myself moving, that I couldn't really improve my mood that way. So if it's just the weather, if it's just the presence, the Being in the moment, then it's welcome so far. Maybe I'll just have to remember that.

After grabbing some warmer clothes we went through some stops from last time (a shrine, some restaurants, some parks) we meant to see before heading back to our initial hotel early and ... conking out around 6pm. It's definitely an adjustment for now, walking this much again, 14 hours ahead.

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But now we start the first proper leg of the trip. I feel like my writing is a bit distracted, but I'm sure it'll start to smooth out with the rhythm...

[maru]

The train was taking us back in time.

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I think that's how I can describe Kyushu, the further I go into it: it's getting older and older, a bit more rusty, lived in and hetereogenous. The houses are thinner, less densely packed; literally nobody speaks English anymore, obviously. Nothing is so nearly well lit as by occasional lanterns and starlight -- even in a city this size? Taxi cab companies go from the singular S.Ride to a variety of cab companies like "Happy Group" or "Blue Cab" with boxy, 80s designs and polite men in suits. The cabs can only take you so far, though: Nagasaki is designed in a way that doesn't really work for cars. The trams can get you along the longitude of the city, but you'll inadvertently need to start scaling the mountains. Stairs scar along the routes of dense and narrow laneways.

It's really easily charming.

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The house we're staying in is, like last time, an older Japanese house, and it felt amazing until the sun set, and we realised they weren't kidding: there is zero insulation. While there are heaters (and a kotatsu), by and large it's as cold inside as it is outside. The heaters drop pebbles into a lake of cold air. The kotatsu can at least contain a small area for itself; you're just left with your body heat once the sun's gone. It's got this insane ambiance, but we're still figuring out how to make use of it in a way that is wholly relaxing.

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Likewise the city dropped into a much colder feel after dark: the wind is gentle but consistent, cutting through anything exposed. So while I dressed for fall, I'm still just layering up the thickest of my clothes and adjusting. We ate some Italian food, came home and tried to decompress but ended up passing out instead.

Today we wandered through shopping malls, Chinatown and an old church. The mixture of influences on the city are apparent and I guess contribute to its "lived-in" feel. We were talking a bit about how hard it is to be the 'bigger person' to others -- I thought about 'resembling the divinity' and its impossibility -- and a bit about guilt. I feel like there's a line between humility and extravagance, selfishness and selflessness, and I've never walked that line well. I tend to fall into excess either way, though I guess I have a preoccupied feeling of 'injustice' about my life, like none of my accompishments make sense on their own merits, and if I'm not grateful and prudent enough my life will collapse.

That's an ongoing neurosis, I guess -- just like how last time I seemed to slowly realise I didn't feel anything at all, this time knowing exactly what I feel, I don't know what to do with what those feelings tell me.

As we scaled our way back home we ran into a whole mess of cats just hanging out as the sun set again. We sat on the hill with them and looked out. All that mattered was how nice it was to be doing this right now, to make the time to sit with this moment. Then we went on. Maybe I'll read a book.

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[maru]

An old boss from a previous job the other week was saying that doing startups was 'playing the lottery,' it was essentially gambling, and gambling is an act of desperation. It is what you do when no other option makes sense (and it is what you do when you have an addiction...); it is itself an indictment of the social contract.

I've been thinking about that lately -- I feel like I've never really believed in the gamble available in startups, enough to go all in and assume I was going to become a billionaire; I just treated my equity as a hedge, tried not to get too much because I wanted to optimise for salary and any winning outcome would win more than enough.

The average salary in Japan looks similar to Canada (~CAD$40k avg person, $86k for, eg. software dev at Sony) but a 1 bedroom ranges anywhere from $400-700 and apparently even a 2 bedroom isn't that much higher. You can kind of feel the lower pressure involved in living in some cities -- yeah, not in Tokyo, but if you go further out, it slows down a lot.

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So I take a tally: what did places feel like in the past? Toronto feels quite pressured because the salary hasn't caught up to the cost of living. Montreal is much more relaxed (but sadly heating up). Vancouver is ironically quite relaxed; I don't think anyone lives there looking to make a huge salary when Seattle is so close? It was hard to meet people who were in work, compared to students and retirees. If you're "financially independent," Vancouver is great.

I know that the work culture in Japan sucks -- it isn't that different from startup culture in a lot of respects. You get overworked, you don't get a personal life, you try to keep up with demands. That and a rigid culture built on conformity and deference. But I have to believe that, in turn, developing a more artisanal relationship to work, to abide by the social contract where I can improve my skills for a precise and delicate thing and trust in the social capacity to continue doing it -- to not have to wear all the hats all the time thinking I will up-end the industry or bust -- would be a healthy change.

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But anyway, I'm talking out of my ass a little.

Kumamoto was a really relaxed city. Focusing on Kyushu has resulted in a much slower and pensive trip, even as I add some hectic work to it by trying to fill a goshuincho in the remaining time I'm here.

If last time we were saying "why don't we have this or that," this time we're thinking about practical matters. What is different about Canadian municipal zoning laws where you can't just have a cafe on a 3rd floor of an apartment building? Is it illegal to have promotional credit cards and crossovers or do we just not do it? What is cultural and what is the artifact of legal choices made decades ago? What is the impact of our geography on the feasibility of, say, shopping arcades? Why open air, vs. enclosed? Is it impractical for our climate?

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You can see the positive impact of those choices here, and yet, I think in turn people here yearn for the infinite space available in my own home. It can feel romantic, infinitely possible, to have acres upon acres of land to work with. And it can then become extremely frustrating as building on that land becomes rapidly expensive and prohibitive given the legal roadbumps. In communicating with my girlfriend about what I get up to, she wants to in turn capture 'adventure' in Montreal. I've tried this before! It sorta works, sorta doesn't. You hit a wall: you will be alone with the road for much of that time. We are untamed and new; we are a developing place, for some reason perpetually stagnant.

But we can make our own fun, I guess. We can design adventures ourselves for others...

Perhaps that's what I want to take home: a relationship to the world where anything is special and a place as such is worth visiting.

---

I feel like I can't finish without some words about the Peace Park. I think I had this idea that Nagasaki was inhospitable for a very long time; that it was just levelled, then got cordoned off like Chernobyl, becoming a Zone where nothing happened but death and corrosion. But Nagasaki rebuilt quickly. A man was shoved into a fridge behind a pillar and survived at 14, living to 92. Vegetation didn't wait 75 years to return: Nagasaki is a green place.

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The park itself is wide open. There are not that many visitors, plausibly tourists -- do kids tell each other to meet up by the hypocentre or the fountain, for example? -- and the signs denote gifts from Soviet bloc countries renewing their respective dedications to peace. I just kept looking up at the sky. It would be the last thing 70,000 people saw. It is easy to treat such an event as a curse, and the place itself as a cursed place. It is easy to take such an event as a lifelong quest for revenge. But it feels harder to transform an injury into love.

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Thinking about America makes me sad here. They of course did this, then occupied the country, enforced the ideals of peace in the education system, and then ... forgot themselves. What is 9/11 if not the polar opposite response to an event less than one tenth the impact on lives and loved ones, no less the start of decades of meaningless revenge? Japan aesthetically idealises the west; America is one flavour of those ideals. It is, for them, constantly 1960 back on the continent where I live, and the romanticism of these ideals they have learned stand as an aspirational Other. I just don't know if that same people exists in terms of what they value and what they pursue. Likewise -- maybe I have a set of aspirational associations with a people I can't entirely communicate with here, and the aspects of Western "civilisation" (what existed before the war, and what existed after? Suit jackets, modest dress, tablecloths, handkerchiefs, day bags...) still here are an echo of the 20c firing off across the world until what comes next arrives with an equivalent finality.

[maru]

My friend pointed out that I shouldn't get too introspective and instead just have a good time. So I think I'll write a bit on what I've enjoyed so far, now that we've migrated over to Hiroshima.

Bars

We went to two different ones in Nagasaki: one was a jass kissa and the other was a general 'music bar'.

The first's master was an older man who was just sort of quietly spinning vinyl to himself, happy to talk or to not; he focused more on the 50s Blue Note stuff and when I asked about an 80s ECM jazz guitarist, hoping to pick something like, deep enough to be demonstrate you are 'cool' but not so deep that you sound like a weirdo asking the question, he said he didn't listen to new stuff. So I think he likes Chet Baker and Miles Davis. Who are cool and I love listening to that, sure. It was the two of us and him alone on a rainy night, 3F above a huge intersection. The lighting was beautiful and difficult to describe, a lonely-lit bar with the deep blue outside. Honestly, I don't know. Would I stop noticing "the vibe" if I came here often enough?

The second was underground, B1F. Dim and red with some flourescent cyan tubes around the mixing equipment. Tons of band posters on the walls. We came right at opening, so the master seemed like oh! Hi. And we were quiet at first, awkwardly ordering a drink. What's playing? He gets the CD. It's John Cale. I didn't know he sounded like this.

He asks for a request. What do you wanna listen to? Well, Cale is on that Drake record on the keys. I was like, uhh, Bryter Layter? Nick Drake? And he was like ah! Let me look and put it on. And we listened to it in full. A drink or two later and a girl comes in. It seems like he's asking her for a request but she's fine with whatever. Then she gets behind the bar. Oh, she's working, okay.

Then a younger guy who sits beside us. Master makes fun of him because he likes Bruno Mars. I was like ... why him specifically? Seems like someone you pick just because you gotta pick something and it's on the radio. But maybe it's not like that over here and you specifically pick Bruno Mars?

Master is trying to think of Canadian bands. Sloan? Nope, no recognition. Tragically Hip? Knows them. Joni Mitchell is Canadian, yeah. I wasn't going to go for Leonard Cohen because between him and Drake I would seem pretty sombre. (Don't mention the other Drake.)

He throws up a CD that matches the Drake pick perfectly. Wait, what? And then starts queuing up more records to show us. Check out this one. That one. We'll listen to it later.

The conversation as more regulars come in (older men, a local TV news anchor) is more, I don't know. The younger ones can speak really basic English, I ask weird questions, we do cultural exchange. Everyone seems really happy to talk about that stuff, really basic things like what do you do over there? What's your drunk food? We try to figure out if people know any indie JP music here that people seem to know back home (if you are a weeaboo). Swing and a hit! Shin Rizumu! A friend linked her to this song (very cute video) years ago but he's like ... not that well known at all. Oh. Well, okay.

She's just playing Monster Hunter and I think made her recently deceased cat a companion in the game? I ask how to abbreviate my name. She is also a maru. She thinks machi makes sense. It means 'town' so it works that way too. Like machi-chan? She laughs and says like aww, machi-chan...

What do people do? She does this 2 days a week, the boy is an investment banker or some sort of thing? Everyone seems to know each other better like they're here all the time. Shawshank with JP subs are idly playing on small TVs. I keep drinking way too much then needing literally half a dozen glasses of water back to back to catch up afterward.

At the end of the night -- spinning Pizzicato Five, Fishmans, etc. in the process -- Master gives us a hug and everyone says they hope we have fun and it's very sweet. I miss them.

---

We've been to one in Hiroshima so far. It's 2F, the reviews on Google are like, a 4.8 with 32 reviews (usually more indicative of a tourist-centric space if it's only ENG reviews, but it's mostly JP and some ENG), but it's because of the conversation. Yep. It's a single, small room, come up to the counter, and you have no choice but to talk to the regulars who are just, down to talk about whatever. Everyone's English is not as good, we try a bit more. They're surprised we know any Japanese at all? How do we learn? We say, uhh, well actually from manga and anime a lot of the time.

Which ones? My friend says Lucky Star and our company laughs, wait really? And Master doesn't know it, so he puts the OP on TV. It queues up like four other versions of the OP afterward, then the Dokuro-chan OP (who gets a dame! dame! from our friend to the right).

A girl's friend appears, calling herself an otaku -- dressed kinda gothic, full black, vest and button-up blouse and a crucifix? -- and recommends us Drifters. The guy on our left is a salesman to like oil manufacturing? Seems to be not very into his job. He idly says like, tsuki ga kirei desu ne means, I love you. I say I know, but I am not sure why it is mentioned.

After drinking two cocktails I feel like I could use another and just order whiskey on the rocks and I swear he pours me half a glass. I say, that's a lot ... and he just says 'service' in response. I start to not remember what the conversation is about. I think we ended up getting McDonalds or something?

---

I kind of wonder what Tokyo bars are like -- presumably more of an English speaker presence, but it's fun to go really, really far out. Nagasaki just straight up did not have non-SE Asian tourists and so it makes sense people are like, you must like Japan! Spending 3-4 weeks at a time going to different corners of it. Hiroshima has way more, kinda Aussies a lot of the time.

But anyway, Lent just started so now I can't drink. My girlfriend wants me to drink less often anyhow.

---

I also like the culture of really old cafes serving basic toast+egg sets with drip coffee for like $5. It becomes the highlight of my day just ... doing that, right at the start, which is maybe sad. I like taking trains everywhere, I feel like I do not do that enough. I feel surrounded by good graphic design. Today we went to 'otaku heaven' in Kitakyushu and I got a variety of ... year ~2005-2006ish goods.

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