Stop & Go (part V): a 3-day journey to Japan’s Northeast

Links to previous chapters: Part I / Part II / Part III / Part IV

Tuesday, Aug. 18, dusk — I emerged from my epic nap, mind half strung to a hyper-dense dream, a confused blend of deep archetypes and frivolous details from the previous 24 hours of my life. The kind of full-feature fantasy likely to unfold over the last few minutes of sleep, instantly forgotten the moment you wake up, but leaving an imprint similar to the shapes that linger when you shut your eyes after staring at a bright object. 

Whatever I was dreaming of was swiftly overwritten: the sky was on fire.

I stood up, found enough bearings to take a few steps, and clumsily dragged myself towards the edge of the wooden deck. Realizing I was still half naked—not the proper attire to engage in conversation with a stranger, especially in Japan—I returned to the bench to grab my t-shirt.

The breathtaking view called for silence. 

The elderly photographer was quietly releasing the shutter of his camera. Yoko, a few feet to his right, forearms on the parapet, gazed at the horizon.

“Oh, there you are,” she whispered softly. “You missed the best part”. I silently begged to disagree.

We stayed for another 30 minutes. Yoko exchanged a few more words with the photographer. The mild-mannered man was a retiree from Tsugaru who regularly drove here to catch the sunset.

The sky was dark enough to discern the hue of the Milky Way. Time to head back to the camping site and start working on our dinner of steaks, mushrooms and European cheese.

Flop of the pop, saved by the Devil

The only rustic aspect of our cottage, besides the location, was the prevalence of wooden materials and the layout of the main living area: two pairs of bunk beds on either side of the room, and a loft accessible through a vertical ladder.

The “unit bathroom” (a one-size-fits-all cube of molded plastic featuring a toilet, sink and bathtub) and kitchen space were the same as in any of Japan’s “weekly mansion” furnished apartments: the low-cost, highly functional result of decades of standardization in a country where indoor space is a big luxury.

Yoko, who professes eating only once a day, was all business: she proceeded to wash and chop the mushrooms. In the meantime, I unpacked the Italian coppa and Parma ham, cut slabs of mimolette just thick enough to enjoy their rich consistency, and arranged them on a plate.

Everything seemed all too perfect, when we realized we had forgotten to bring cooking oil. I suggested chopping the fat off the steaks and using it to sear the mushrooms, and pray there would be enough grease left in the pan to take care of the meat.

The plan worked out, and the cottage was soon embalmed with the aroma of a proper meal.

“Remember my surprise?” Yoko pulled from behind her a bottle with an all too familiar orange label: Veuve Clicquot. “Please take care of opening it”, she said, adding she found the whole procedure rather scary.

“Don’t you worry,” I said confidently, “I got plenty of practice where I came from.” In my family, uncorking a bottle and pouring the wine is exclusively a man’s business—and that includes serving the champagne that accompanies the little rituals of New Year’s Eve, Easter, Orthodox Easter (following the Julian calendar), and any proper birthday celebration. As a teenager, I particularly enjoyed the winter festivities at our chalet, because you never knew where the cork, duly aimed at the low timber ceiling, would bounce.

Given Yoko’s fear of that moment, I opted for a firm twist of the wrist under a cupped hand, for a more elegant, fully controlled pop. I proceeded, waiting to feel the pressure of the cork against my grip. I twisted, and twisted, but the widow remained unresponsive.

“You like taking your time” mused Yoko. —“Should come any second now.” Nothing. A few long seconds later, the cork laid flat as a dead fish in my palm, the stem a telltale darkish brown.

“Yoko, when exactly did you buy this bottle?” I inquired. “Well, it’s been sitting at home for a while.” — “By ‘a while’, would you mean several years?” “Perhaps.”

Mystery solved. I immediately proceeded to unscrew—much less ceremoniously—the half-bottle of Casillero del Diablo I had grabbed that morning at the supermarket.

The steaks once out of the way, helped down with a few gulps of Chilean Cabernet, Yoko phoned a friend who works at the camp site in the summer and invited her to share a few drinks and our platter of salty goodies from Europe.

I did not anticipate the depth of the encounter that followed.

Adrift under the stars

Aisa walked in with a couple of cans of beer—she’d been informed of our little mishap and had pilfered the office’s fridge—and a guitar. 

Her face seemed a bit exotic for a Japanese. Not the Okinawan kind, which bears the traces of centuries of trade with seafarers from the Chinese mainland and Southeast Asia via Formosa. More Native American or Inuit, I thought, an impression reinforced by her slightly hippyish attire.

It all made sense when she explained that her grandfather was Ainu, an aboriginal people now mostly confined to the island of Hokkaido, who suffered an all-too common fate of land dispossession, ostracism and forced assimilation—if not outright ethnic cleansing—at the hands of a “modern” centralized state.

There was something else in her features: a blend of gentleness, sadness and resolve. Over the next half hour, I would realize that a more appropriate word would be resilience.

Aisa hailed from Namie, a coastal municipality in Fukushima Prefecture, where she used to run a bar. Few people outside Japan would have heard of it, were it not for the tragedy that unfolded there from March 11, 2011.

Between sips of stale Veuve Clicquot, which she insisted on sampling (“we all need a bit of poison“ was her line), she recalled the terrible days that followed the hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant: the chaos and confusion amid the lack of information; the first evacuation, her two young children in tow, to an area that turned out to be exposed to radiation. Then another a hurried trek further north, away from the fallout that would produce some 150,000 refugees.

In UN parlance, they would be called IDPs, for “internally displaced people”. The Japanese media, to this day, use the much more euphemistic term “evacuees” (避難者, hinansha), the same as for people who have been asked to move temporarily to a community shelter ahead of a powerful storm. If you’re from Namie, well, there’s nothing temporary about your status as an “evacuee”. And no politician has ever dared publicly admit to people from the most highly contaminated municipalities that most of them will never be able to return home.

Adrift for months, and forcibly separated from her husband, Aisa eventually made landfall in Towada. Her family didn’t survive the storm, one of her sons opting to go and live with his estranged father. Now she runs a bar in Towada in winter, and makes some extra money helping at the camp site during the warm season.

Invicta could have been her name, perhaps not so Master of her Fate, as the last verses of Nelson Mandela’s favorite prison poem go, but definitely Captain of her Soul.

As the conversation moved on to lighter small talk, I decided to lie down on the lower bunk I had chosen for the night. Aisa pulled out her guitar and graced us with a song she’d been working on.

Fingers delicately picking the strings, her vocal chords kicked in, soft yet powerful:

星 — Stars

太陽 — Sun

地球 — Earth

全てはこよい(今夜) — Everything tonight

言霊に乗り — Carried by the spirit of these words

夜の粒子に溶けてゆく — Blends into the particles of the night

まわれまわれまわれまわれ — Round and round and round it goes 

命まわれ — Round goes life

めぐれめぐりめぐる — Spin, spin, spinning away

身土不二 — Body and Earth as One.

I would learn from Aisa the following day that Ainu songs aren’t meant to be sung for others as much as to oneself. Feeling blessed by this encounter, I soon drifted—for the third and last time of the day—into sleep, heart and soul among the stars.

[Jump to Part VI]