Met my old friend Ono-san in our local ‘shop of ten thousand services’ (yorozuya) the other day. We had stepped into the store from a downpour without seeing each other and met over the tofu tub. “Wet season’s here,” she said, fishing out a brick of bean curd. “Good for the hydrangeas.” “Good for the slugs." “You got ナメクジ problems?" “My bathroom’s a mold palace, the rice paper doors have more ripples than a Seto low tide and my tatami mats are so damp the slugs think they’re water beds.” “You’ve got a way with words.” “If I could sell some I wouldn't have to eat tofu everyday.” The cashier clickety-clacked her abacus beads, devised a sum (how the hell did she do that?) and took my damp yen with a weak smile. Out in the street, rain drops big enough to fill a sake cup smashed on the bald heads of old men too slow or senile to have remembered an umbrella. Wet season, or tsuyu, has arrived. From now until early July it will wrap the Good Hood in a hot, damp blanket. There'll be days of steamy downpours and long, warm drizzle. Moisture and grey sunlight will conspire to turn my old townhouse into a Welcome Inn for terrestrial gastropods. I want to know my enemy, I did some reading: “Like most gastropods, a slug moves by rhythmic waves of muscular contraction on the underside of its foot. It simultaneously secretes a layer of mucus that it travels on, which helps prevent damage to the foot tissues.” (Denny, M. W., Gosline, J. M. (1980). “The physical properties of the pedal mucus of the terrestrial slug, Ariolimax columbianus"). At first, I thought these were instructions on how to Moonwalk. Then I remembered - zoologists don’t dance. Soon Ono-san’s hydrangeas will burst into giant volleyballs of pastel hues and nod their big dripping heads. Neighbors will admire them. My slugs will loll about growing wise and fat on mold and tasty titbits dropped by my kids and my neighbors will laugh. I don’t blame my kids, Hell no, I blame the Shinto gods: the collision of two clumsy giants - one warm and moist, pushing in from the Philippines, the other cold and dry drifting down from Siberia - who gives us what the Japan Meteorological Agency calls with practiced dourness, a “relatively stable bad weather front over Japan which lasts several weeks.” Tsuyu sounds nicer. It means “plum rain,” with no hint of slime, and though I have no idea why the fruity innuendo, I guess it has something to do with the size of the raindrops. In the dead of night a cloudburst can sound like ten million unripe plums being machine-gunned onto the roofs of the Good Hood. On nights of such drama, I curl up beneath my bed sheet, happy to know that between me and nature’s wrath lie roof tiles made by men who knew how to make a roof tile. Alas, 100-year-old houses like mine do not chill well. They were built to ‘breathe’, with clay-mud walls and paper doors that absorbed, filtered and circulated air, light and moisture. Modern household clutter like plasma screen TeeVees and rice cookers nullifies this effect. It turns a large, breezy house into an Amazon riverboat filled with empty wine bottles and a cabin fever that can turn sane men into serial killers. Yet the people of the Good Hood, and of greater Himeji city, endure. They have done for centuries. They sling bamboo shades from their windows, hang wind chimes from their eaves, flap uchiwa and sensu hand fans against their streaming faces and flock to the rooftop beer gardens downtown, hopeful for a salty breeze off the Seto Inland Sea. “There are people who complain about the wet season,” says Ono-san. “But look at the positives. The city is cleansed, cedar pollen and Gobi sand are flushed away AND it’s good for the..." “Hydrangeas.” I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman so adept at turning lead into gold. Days later we are inundated. The Good Hood turns riverine in minutes. My courtyard floods, runoff by-passes the roof guttering causing the storm water drains to overflow. The Semba River becomes a superhighway for lost volleyballs, Coke bottles, milk cartons, baseballs and beer cans, all racing towards the Seto Inland Sea. Next day on the train to Ako, 30 klicks west of Himeji, the land looks like a broken mirror: flooded rice paddies reflect a powder blue sky filled with thunderheads, farm hamlets and green mountains lumpy as a dragon's back. Green. Lumpy. Slugs. Gotta stop by the yorozuya on my way home, pick up a sack of salt for my new house mates.
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Four years ago this June, I was standing in a watermelon patch beside Himeji's Semba River shooting the breeze with my longtime friend and regular contributor of wisdom to this blog, Smokin’ Joe Matsumoto, the kitchen gardener who lives up my street. A crescent moon hung in the eastern sky. Bats skimmed the Semba for midge flies and a Buddhist temple bell bonged somewhere off. “You look stressed,” Smokin’ said. “It’s these new Uniqlo underpants. They’re cooking my eggs,” I said. “No, mentally. I mean you look wrapped too tight.” “Where did you learn that expression?” “From my English teacher.” “I’m an English teacher!” “You’re expensive.” “Life’s expensive. It’s gettin on top of me.” “You should get a grip.” (fishing a cigarette from his pocket) “Get a grip?” “Learn a martial art.” “Like what?” “Like iaido.” “Like what?” “The art of swordsmanship.” “So, next time an *Uomachi goon with “T U F F L O V E” tattooed on his knuckles hauls me out of a club at dawn I can shout, “Unhand me chimp or I’ll dice you like dog meat with the sword I don’t have on me right now.” “Sometimes I have no idea what you’re talking about. (lighting the cigarette) There’s an old samurai saying, “Win the battle without drawing the sword.” (exhaling) Iaido teaches you to be aware of your enemy, to anticipate his next move and to meditate on your own. But most of all it teaches you that to use your sword is the very last option.” The bats flitted overhead. The Semba raced on toward the Inland Sea; everyone and everything in a hurry except old smokestack and his watermelons. I left him to his beans, melons and samurai philosophies and followed the river back to the empty streets and emptier houses of the Good Hood, my home away from Australia for 15 years. Seven days later. Twilight and the city Shinto shrine was closing for business. Two blocks south the dojo of Kanshou-ryu (the Flying Crown sword style) was opening for business. I stepped beneath its flickering entrance light, removed my shoes and entered a small wooden hall. Scuffed and scarred floorboards rubbed against my feet. Odors of oiled steel, old sweat and mosquito coil filled my nostrils; there was tobacco smoke, too. I crossed the floor, passing racks of swords, lances and spears, to where a small woman stood in the corner. A coal black ponytail fountained off her head and her hands rested on her hips. A cigarette smoldered between her lips. She wasn’t waiting, she was expecting. “Enter this dojo with the mind in which you left it,” Souke said. I was about to say I hadn’t had a chance to leave it. Her manicured finger silenced me. It hoisted my gaze to four dark, swirling pictograms on the wall overhead which she read for emphasis, “Sho shin kan tetsu." She took a long draw of the cigarette and exhaled. “Matsumoto-san and I went to the same highschool. He told me you were coming.” Highschool? Souke (the Grandmaster) and Smokin’ Joe? Peas in a pod. Now I understood - the samurai philosophies... She studied my height and walked to a wall rack. She took down something long, cold and heavy. “This is not for beginners," she said, “But it’ll do for you." Compliment or caveat? I couldn’t tell. Nevertheless on that humid June night four years ago, my second life began. Names like Spring Lightning, Moon Sleeve, Wind God, The Secret, Valley Wind, Blizzard, Spinning top, Slicing the Swallow, Ocean Current and Leaping Frog - cutting techniques - became part of my Tuesday and Friday night lexicon. Two nights a week, every week for a year, every year for four years, off came the grimy business collar, on came the dogi and hakama. By night’s end, each held a day’s worth of sweat and 206 weary bones. There are three distinctive sounds in an iadio dojo: the click! (of a sword being freed from its scabbard), the vicious whistle (of a blade carving through air) and the soft whoosh (of blood being ridden from the blade). Not real blood, but something symbolic of blood. Stress. Iaido is the ‘art of drawing the sword.’ It has also been called “Moving Zen” which I guess implies the ability to perform a highly disciplined action with an uncluttered or ‘empty’ mind. In other words the last thing you should be thinking of when handling a ‘live’ sword, or shinken, is how much blood is going to leak from your body if you make a mistake. “Let your sword do the work, let it fly,” Souke told me on my first night. “Let it fly, but remember that control is everything.” Words to live life by. Next week: Moving Zen part II *Uomachi is the name of Himeji's ‘entertainment’ street. It is generally referred to as a precinct and is home to some 3000 bars, clubs and lounges. What do commuters think about on their long rides to and from the mills each day? I bet they don’t think about how lucky they are that the wheel was invented. I was a commuter once - a nameless man in a salt-stained suit and headphones. A Business English instructor, a corporate gun-for-hire with a bandolier of Ballpoints (™), a ronin who could commit hara-kiri with the edge of a Let’sTalk2 cd. But didn’t. Because it was never about the destination - the depressing chemical plants, semiconductor factories and sinister steel mills waiting for me at the end of the line - it was about getting there. The Kakogawa line train is the quintessential ‘paddy lands express.’ Four years of rattle and roll through the greenest rice fields this side of the Japan Alps, from the Seto seabord to the lush hinterlands of Hyogo, a place where frog eats fly and snake eats frog and snake gets beaten to a pulp by village boy. The journey (like the boy) neutralised the destination. The Kakogawa-sen follows a great, slow-moving torrent called the Kako River. If you've ever seen Apocalypse Now or read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for four years that guy in the story (Willard in the movie, Marlow in the book), that was me. I wish I could say I found someone as interesting as Kurtz at the end of the line, but alas, there was no badass. The two-car ‘conductorless' train still departs Kakogawa station at 20 minute intervals, bound for upcountry with students, workers, Guinness Book grandmas and sometimes a foreigner or two. Young women still sleep on the shoulders of strangers and college girls still doze and nod their heads like glam-rock groupies as the train bounces down the rails. Some days the entire car looks like it has been gassed; passengers everywhere, draped on each other, slouching, snoring. I stepped over a fat boy asleep on his back on the aisle floor once. My destination was Yashiro, a place where trains pass hourly and the station attendant is a large, fat ginger cat which eyes passengers suspiciously as they pass through the turnstile. In summer, midge flies, moths and nymphs cloud the platform. Fuzzy caterpillars crawl over the bench seats and spiders abseil from the rafters. In winter they disappear and the soft, silent misery of falling snowflakes fills the hour-long wait for the night train back to modern-day Japan. I don't miss the long commutes. But I do miss the man who was always waiting for me at the end of the line. A taxi driver named Yamamoto. His shiny black Nissan Cedric always got me to the mill on time. Love him or loathe him, I still can't decide; he was both the endearing face of small town Japan and the Mister McGoo of public transportation. He drove at a speed I could have bettered running on my knees. He clocked 39 km/hr once on a paddy by-pass. He would veer and drift all over the road, squinting over the wheel as he squeezed out his best radio-learned English. He once answered the dispatcher in English: “Oooh yes? How are you today? I am very fine, veeeeeery fine thank, and you? Hahaha-ha!" Every conversation with him ended the same way: “Many thankyous Mister Simon, for the free English lesson." “Nothing lasts forever. Not even a rock,” says Kawabata-san, pouring two glasses of beer. He slides one across the table. “To your long life.” Kawabata-san runs the liquor store on the old shopping street near my house. It stands next to the butcher, opposite the yakitori grill, across from the tea ceremony teacher’s house. It has a vending machine outside and the rumble-and-THUNK of bottled beer falling into its hopper is a familiar note in a symphony that fills this street at the end of the day. Coins tumble, bottles rumble, liquor loosens tongues, lubricates conversation, firms up trust and builds friendships - it’s the glue in the social fabric of communities all over Japan and in the Good Hood of Himeji city, too. And so passes an afternoon of drinking and philosophising in the backroom of a liquor store, about the demise of the old neighborhood in which we live, and all the while the outside traffic heads north away from the city, the school kids in new uniforms marching by in scattered ranks, Mitsubishi Electric workers cycling home under greasy collars, ancients walking their dogs to nowhere in particular. The city winds down, the bathhouses fill up and dinners are served, beer bottle caps lopped off and TVs revved up. Another day gone. Kawabata-san burps. “Nothing lasts forever.” For 15 years I’ve borne witness to the slow demise of a traditional neighborhood, the old houses being pulled down to make way for tax-effective car parks and smaller, more compact houses built of shiny, weather-resistant materials that make them look like cheap toys from Guangdong. “Many see old not as ‘classic’ but as unfashionable and inefficient,” Kawabata-san says, refilling our glasses. “The traditional Japanese townhouse is too hot in summer, too cold in winter, too dark, too airy, too noisy in typhoons, too quiet when it snows, too hard to maintain. Me, I love mine!” And me, mine. Yet, as new houses rise around us, I ponder the fate of my 100-year-old mudwall-and-tile abode, built in 1916 by the hands of master craftsmen. From the street it looks haunted. There’s a ‘pissing pole’ for local mutts outside, a crapping gallery for the crows in the power lines overhead, and twice a week, residents deposit their garbage bags (neatly) for collection along my south wall. I can replicate the roar-and-chomp of the midnight garbage truck perfectly. Ask me next time. I have come to favour its weather beaten facade, coarse tatami mats, creaking stairway and winter sunlight which streams through the holes in the paper doors. It's the tilt that worries me. A ping pong ball rolls across the floor from north to south at speeds which grow faster each year. Maybe it's time to join the slow bleed of the Good Hood and leave... I repapered the shoji sliding doors the other day, and the fusuma paper doors, and the amido fly screen netting that flapped against the window all winter. These are jobs designed to give you gorilla knuckles and a Quasimodo stance. I won’t miss them. One day this house will crumble and return to the earth, or to the Matsui Demolition Company which will bring in their ‘Komatsu Claw’ - a tracked house-munching machine that rips and shreds for a living. I will have to search the world wide web for a new dwelling, and a new ‘Good Hood.’ “Nothing lasts forever,” Kawabata-san says, looking at our empty beer bottle. The mountains behind Himeji look promising; cooler in summer with a view of the sweltering sprawl and glowing metallic centipede we call the shinkansen that passes through the city. Wherever I hang my hat in the those mountains, I will take pleasure in rolling the ping pong ball one last time. From the top of my street. Next week: The writer takes Himeji's Train to Nowhere. “What do samurai and cherry blossoms have in common?” asks my old friend Smokin’ Joe Matsumoto, the kitchener gardener who lives at the end of my street. It is not a question. He is offering me the tail end of a thread, inviting me to pull. I give it a yank, “Both live short, beautiful lives.” “Exactly,” he says. “You told me this story last year.” “What?” “I said you told me this last year!” “What’s wrong with your hair?” “Nevermind.” At 78, Smokin’ joe is the sage of the Good Hood, the traditional neighborhood in which I have lived for 15 years. If samurai lived like cherry blossoms, then Smokin’ has lived like a kusunoki (camphor tree), one of those ageless arbors which shade castle forecourts and shrine yards all over Japan, hearing all, seeing all. Kusunoki have medicinal qualities, too, and were once used to treat the septic sword wounds of the samurai. And yet, physically, Smokin Joe is no tall timber. He reminds me of the ronin (masterless samurai) leader in Akira Kurosawa’s seminal film Seven Samurai. He’s short and bandy-legged, has arms like vines and legs like tree stumps that'd probably take root if he spent any more time in his garden. But what he lacks in stature he makes up for in knowledge. This is the man who powers my blog when the Thought River runs dry. He gave last week’s post a boost with his two cents on cedar pollen and the seasonal wind, the Haru-ichiban, which disperses the damn stuff. From hay fever to cherry blossom fever, this week. The Good Hood readies itself for another season of partying in the pink, yeeeEEHAAAAA! Spring signifies new beginnings; school starts, the financial year too, a time for big companies to mince fresh recruit meat for their rank-and-file sausages. It is also when karoshi (death by overwork) reaches its peak as the senior sausages struggle to make deadlines, finalise accounts and receive their lucky dip job transfers to far-flung posts. Getting rip-roaring drunk, thus, is acceptable form of steam-letting. Hanami - cherry blossom viewing - is the perfect excuse. The cherry blossom, or sakura, remains an enduring symbol of Japan. From coins to kimonos, fingernails to footballs (Japan's national rugby team is called the Cherry Blossoms) the sakura motif gets blanket coverage for the next few weeks. Gangsters of Japan’s largest criminal organisation, the Yamaguchi mob (which incidentally originated in Himeji!) favour the sakura blossom tattoo. Or, at least used to. I have the feeling that old school is out and the young yaks are pressing their bosses for something more racy, more y’know, “groovy-daddy,” like a nude tattoo of P!nk. The tradition of Hanami dates back to the seventh century, when the blooming of cherry trees was considered an indicator of the coming rice harvests; full blooms would signify a bountiful crop and that would be cause for celebration. By the end of the 17th century the Hanami party had become popular across all social classes. Now, you’ll find bands of liquored truckies parking their picnic sheets between chain-smoking company bosses and their beery-breathed minions. Hanami is the great equalizer. Newspapers splash their weather maps with tiny pink dots to pinpoint the best hanami spots. Which is helpful to Japan's sakura otaku, “cherry blossoms maniacs," who are generally retired folk with money to burn and like to jet around the country chasing the party blow-by-blow, bloom-by-bloom. Me, I think I’ll bundle up a bento for Smokin’ Joe and myself and throw in a bottle of fancy sake, the stuff with the gold flakes in it, and head us down to the castle. It’s the least I can do for my old mate the kitchen gardener, a man who, even at 78, never seems to stop growing. Last night was a howler. Fujin (“Foo-jeen”), the wind god, arrived in Himeji bearing both fragrance (plum blossom) and foulness (cedar pollen). I could almost hear the pollen drumming against my 100-year-old walls trying to get inside. I tried plugging the gaps in the warped timber, the cracks in the mud walls and the chinks in the tatami mats, but I can tell you I've failed; my wastepaper basket overflows with soggy tissues, my tears sprinkle this keyboard and I need a bottle brush to de-itch my throat. It’s not Fujin’s fault. The big green dude with the crazy hairdo is in town because it's that time of year again. From March to April, he dips in his finger and gives the atmosphere a good stir over Japan. Fujin is one of the senior Yaoyorozu-no-Kami 八百万の神, (8 million gods) which ‘inhabit’ the Shinto world and the ‘spiritual' force behind the Haru-ichiban which heralds the start of spring. Like the ‘Freemantle Doctor’ of Western Australia, the Mistral in France and the Monsoon in south Asia, the Haru-ichiban signifies a turning point in the seasons and is the first strong wind to blow across the archipelago before the typhoons arrive in summer. The boffins tell it like this: low pressure systems pushing in from China create a vacuum into which air from the Pacific is sucked and this generates the big southerlies. They shake down the cedar plantations upcountry, delivering pollen up the nostrils of the good and innocent, knotting my saliva, tickling my throat and causing my eyes to spring leaks. I cycle to work crying. Sidenote: Why so much cedar pollen? My good friend Smokin Joe Matsumoto, the old kitchen gardener who lives up the street, explains: “After the war, Japan rebuilt with timber. Towns and villages went on cedar growing rampages backed by government tax concessions. These plantations have matured. So have their planters. Now, no young people want to manage these forests. They don't like the snakes, boars, hornets and bears (ed: and poor iPhone reception). Cheap imports from China and Siberia have sealed the timber industry’s fate.” Enough of timber. Let's get back to winds, which are not just ‘winds’ in Japan. Each has its own handle, character and purpose. They're named for their strength (typhoon), taste and smell (shiokaze, sea wind), cooling effects (soyokaze, summer breeze), location (yamakaze , mountain wind,) and ‘divine' purposes (kamikaze). My neighborhood is shielded by the mountains in the north and the island of Shikoku in the south. Unlike the rest of urban Japan, the traditional neighborhood in which I have lived for 15 years, is not a sophisticated place. Wind strength is measured by a wetted finger, or a loose sheet of roofing iron on an abandoned house nearby which flutters in the dry Siberian winter winds, clangs in the late summer typhoons and bangs in early spring when the Haru-ichiban arrives. Spring has sprung and I don't need Fujin to tell me. The Semba River which flows through my neighborhood is running fast and clear, the cherry blossom buds overhanging the castle moat are groaning under pressure. Bulbuls wake me up at sunrise with their sing-song calls, raiding the gardens of the abandoned houses for loquat flower nectar, and the sickly sweet fragrance of jin-chou-ge (daphne) is everywhere. The Haru-ichiban is Japan’s proverbial ‘wind of change’. It heralds the start of everything new; kids march back to school in stiff new uniforms, university undergraduates dye their hair brown and gold. Graduates, on the other hand, revert to black before joining the grey workaday battalions. And Ching! go the tills of Himeji’s hairdressers. Which reminds me, my sideburns need pruning. Next week: The Good Hood breaks out bento and sake bottle and heads for hanami (cherry blossom viewing). Rolling thunder? Hunger pains? Another murmur from the Yamasaki fault line? No, that deep rumbling sound which fills the night sky over the Good Hood is the sound of a festival brewing. The beat of the taiko drum heralds the approach of another year’s worth of shoulder pain, chanting, sweating, drinking and more drinking, all crammed into one day in October. There’s not a moment in the Himeji city when I feel closer to the soul of Japan than at matsuri (festival) time. When the smell of burning rice chaff signals the end of the rice harvest and the sickly sweet aroma of the kinmokusei flower fills every street, lane and alley. Matsuri! Matsuri! The sound of drums can be sourced to the backyard of my Jichikai-cho, the neighborhood Boss, and our elaborately decorated centrepiece, the omikoshi, or portable Shinto shrine. Generating the thunder are the small arms of the neighborhood school kids. Two weeks before festival day, they hammer volleys into the night sky, honing their skills, perfecting their rhythm for the big day. One day before the festival, the Boss summons me. An extra pair of hands is needed to assemble the omikoshi; it’s an intricate and fiddly job which entails bolting, knot-tying, binding the shrine and attaching ornaments to its housing. When preparations are complete, six packs are passed. Quiet slurping and furtive glances towards the sky follow. Will Raijin the God of Thunder stay away tomorrow? Across the archipelago, autumn festivals are thrown to honour the Shinto gods and give thanks for the rice harvest. But as my good friend Ono-san laments, it’s a meaning too often drowned in drinking, eating, macho posturing and the excitement of carrying the omikoshi. I reply: “And you think Christmas is just the Big Man’s birthday?” The night before the festival, our illuminated omikoshi ventures into the streets swarming with school kids and pushed and pulled by fathers who have escaped the office early. Lanterns hang from residents’ porches like overweight glow worms. The omikoshi moves slowly, like a dinner cruise boat along darkened laneways. Festival day breaks with a clear crisp dawn. I don my blue festival jacket with its giant red kanji character for “festival” on the back, shake the night’s hangover from my head and secure by self-pity with a red bandanna. The Boss gives a speech. Cups of sake are passed. Died squid jerky, too. A staccato drum beat sends the men to the yokes and together we carry the omikoshi to the local shrine to be blessed by the Shinto priest. Joining us are other neighborhoods, their omikoshi topped with dancing lions and decorated with tigers and bamboo, each supported by an entourage of mothers, wives, kids, babies in prams and the occasional lost tourist. The day wears on, the sun beats down, bento and beer flow, and through the Good Hood the omikoshi rumbles and rattles like an old war horse. The sound of its drum brings residents to their doors bearing envelopes of gift money. For this they receive a boisterous, semi-drunken chant and vigorous shaking of the shrine by its bearers. Rice millers, tatami weavers, barbers, tea shop and restaurant staff come out of their shops to cheer us on. To a destination I’m no longer sure of, or even care. The omikoshi becomes a lifeboat for those who have drunk too much. Stay with us! Don’t let go! The taiko beat feels like a huge rolling rock inside of our heads. By late afternoon the chanting eases, the fall of the drumstick dependent more on gravity than energy, the bearers are tired, the drummers slightly deaf and the mothers’ auxiliary strung out in the streets behind us; only the babies waking from their afternoon sleep are punching the air. On sunset, as the crows fly north overhead, we give thanks for another great day, then set to work dismantling and packing away the omikoshi for another year. Once the roller door is pulled shut, I turn and head for home, bone weary and beat. The Boss summons me. I cringe and turn slowly to face my fate: the other annual tradition in the Good Hood I forgot to tell you about -- the matsuri AFTER PARTY! Sunday morning, what to do, what to do? I could tune in to the gossip from the Wella Ladies Hair Salon up the street --Mr so-and-so got drunk and peed on Mrs so-and-so’s hydrangeas again -- or I could tune out in the Himeji Castle park with some cold beer and dried squid and make animals out of the Autumn clouds. Or, I could go to the horseraces! The Japan Cup it isn’t but the sights, sounds and smells of a day at the Himeji Racecourse have a gritty charm of their own. Call it a polyester parade, a high-tar heaven for the hard-working men of this great city who pay their dues from Monday to Friday in the steel foundries and heavy fabrication plants along the coast. Sunday is their day. That they blow their sake allowance on horses with names like Storm Mouse, Milky Magic, Long Camelot and Special Aroma is beside the point. It’s the thrill they come for. Unlike in the West, horseracing in Japan is the ‘poor man’s pleasure.’ There are no fine dining facilities, no millinery or manners on show. Admission is 100 yen, the concourse is crowded, the green tea dispenser overworked and the betting hall haze heavier than a Jimi Hendrix riff. Despite this, a festive atmosphere prevails. My mate Smokin’ Joe Matsumoto, the kitchen gardener who lives up my street, first visited the race course as a ten-year-old in 1956. “Back then the track was a ribbon of dirt and the starting gate a piece of rope,” he says. “Horses that bolted before the Marshall’s call threw their jockeys over it.” At big city race courses, fortune-tellers, called yosoya-san, sometimes set shop up outside the front gates. For 300 yen (a few bucks) per race, they advise the punter on which horse to back based on his zodiac sign blood type etc. To my knowledge, the only thing predictable about these people is the high speed at which they move on if your horse doesn’t come in. I trust in my own good sense as the contenders for Race Eight enter the paddock. A flighty beast bearing the number “six” enters last and I crack a smile when I see this one answers to the name “Shrink.” The purse for Race Eight is a handsome 900,000 yen and excitement builds to fever pitch on the concourse overlooking the paddock. A tooting trumpet sounds the start of the race. No sooner does the last horse (I might have guessed) -- Shrink -- enter the starting gates then they’re off, bolting through a spray of hot sand. In each punter’s mind only 1400 metres separates him from his winnings. And like them, nothing I feel is coming between me and a fist full of “Souseki’s” (1000-yen bills) that my horse, Buzz My Heart, will bring home today. But something does. Through the dusty haze the pack falls away one by one, two by two, until on the home stretch there is only one horse out front. The winner by five unbelievable lengths. Number Six. Shrink. Next week: The Good Hood goes to the Nada Fighting Festival!
Where can you find a really, really big tree in Himeji city? You can’t. The City would like you to believe that a standing, living tree does not create jobs. But cutting one down does. And for the past few years I have borne sad witness to an industry that has turned tree doctoring into ‘tree butchering.’ Before the relentless summer heat arrives, small trucks of hard-hatted men with chainsaws disperse throughout our city shaving and snipping, chopping and chipping, wiping out the very shade and oxygen-giving botanicals that we need! Yet in this sprawling western Japanese city, unplanned and mismatched in every sense of the architectural word, small green spaces exist. They are pockets of calm, oases, where a forest giant or two rises, birds congregate, highschool kids smooch and elderly toss coins, clap their hands and bow into the warm, fragrant depths of Shinto shrines. That’s right, I’m talking about the abode of the Gods: Shinto shrines. My local shrine sits on a tiny knoll cut off from the world by a rice paddy sluiceway and a luxuriant wall of foliage. Out of this rise two enormous kusunoki (camphor trees) and at the foot of them stands an old weathered Shinto shrine, pelted by bird poop and succumbing to creeping moss. It is the quietest place in the Good Hood, a traditional neighborhood north of Himeji Castle and my home away from Australia for the past 14 years. So there I sat this morning, on a poop-pelted bench, watching feathers and fruit stones fall from the canopy and shafts of morning sunshine illuminate patches of fiery red spider lilies. Beetles whirred and butterflies flitted through the undergrowth. The reason such life exists is because the grounds of a Shinto shrine are sacred turf--off limits to the little men in hardhats with the biting saws and stinging blades. Trees are the realm of Shinto gods. They are untouchable. My troubles dissolved, I left through the torii (Shinto gateway) refreshed, my mind emptied and at ease, ready for the surge of new knowledge, stimulation and stress that each day brings living in Japan--a country which, despite its traditions, prides itself on living at light-speed. Next week: The Good Hood celebrates Autumn with colour, noise and plenty of hops. |
This Blog:What is the essence of a traditional Japanese neighbourhood? Writing from my home in Himeji, a castle town in western Honshu, Seaweed Salad Days distills, ferments, presents! Archives
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