Only a Blockhead

Last customers of the summer

Things are sometimes regimented in Japan, and summer is one of them. It took getting used to (“They’re closing the pool? But it’s still as hot as ever!”) but now I positively enjoy the predictability and the sense that we’re all doing this together. Although the season spreads over July and August, the word for summer—natsu—mostly vibrates with the excitement of the one-month school holidays in August. This is the final weekend in August, so it’s the last weekend of summer.

With the heat and humidity, the Japanese summer is a tough season to get through. But there are so many pleasures to be had, and now they’re over for another year. The fireworks shows that lit up the nights are memories. The rooftop beer gardens are closing. Summer festival drums and flutes are silent. Cicadas blunder about in the final hours of their short lives. The August high school baseball tournament, pitting teams from all over Japan in struggles of high drama and shameless passion, saw its final thrilling game earlier this week.

Southern Beach, Chigasaki (Photo: Goki, Wikimedia Commons)

Down at the beach, the temporary rest houses built on the sands and offering lockers, showers and refreshments shut down for the last time this weekend. In a few days they will be dismantled and gone. We cycled down in late afternoon to see if there was a swim to be had. The lifeguards had just gone off duty for the day and season both, and were racing each other on surfboards. The sea was very warm, and the occasional mild tingling told us that this was the right time to cede it to the jellyfish. The beach houses were putting up shutters and stacking tables, but our favorite agreed to serve us beers and a dish of salty edamame. We were in fact their final customers of the season. As we left, the staff told us that they would have twice as much space next year, and to please visit them.

That's one more thing to look forward to next summer.   

--Julian

When I Die

I had always hoped that when I die my mortal remains could be put out with the oversized garbage (sodai gomi, it's called here in Japan).� I am informed, however, that the law does not allow this.� That being the case, I hope that my survivors will put together something a little like the send-off tuba player Kerwin James's friends and family arranged for him.

Since I won't be around to thank you after the event, allow me to thank you now, in advance.

--David

Late summer Saturday

The sun pools on the tatami mats

It's a late summer Saturday. The mid-morning sun is pooling on the tatami mats under the curtains that sway gently in front of the open window. Sweat beads on the skin. The electric fan slowly turns its face back and forth, bringing momentary relief from the heat.

Outside, someone is cutting grass, and the whine of the motor weaves through the pulsing drone of cicadas.

It's time to get up and start the day.

--Julian

Clogged Conduit

It's not that I've stopped reading.  It's that the conduit which allows VOX users to import information about books, CDs, DVDs, and so on from Amazon into their collections has been, for the last week or so, silted up, making it impossible to add anything new.  If anyone would like to see what I have been reading, they can go here.  (Scroll down to the bottom for the most recently read.)

—David

A weekend in paradise

For residents of Tokyo and vicinity who don't have the time and money to go to Okinawa, there's a closer, cheaper alternative. The Izu island of Niijima is an overnight ferry away, or 2.5 hours on the hydrofoil. The light is bright, the sea is blue and clear, the sand is white and the flat-roofed houses are like a Greek island. The sea is a degree or two colder than here in Shonan, but still invites swimming. The island has an aging and dwindling population, and the mood is slow and down to earth.

Endless white sands: Habushiura Beach

Island shrine (Photo: M)

Close by the port there is a outdoor hot spring bath that overlooks the ocean. A 15-minute walk up from the port is Maehama Beach, protected by tetrapods. What it lacks in aesthetic charm it gains in lagoon-like swimming conditions. Habushiura Beach, a ten-minute rented cycle ride across the island from the port, has surfing waves and endless white sands. During summer vacation, the beaches are watched over by cheerful and disciplined lifeguards. There are a handful of stores and restaurants. A craft factory just up the hill from the hot spring uses local stone to produce olive-green glass.    

Sunset from the hot spring (Photo: M)

Among the memories we took away from a weekend in this paradise were walking and cycling along quiet streets under the baking sun, watching the sunset from the hot spring before a dinner of Izu island sushi (regular sushi lightly brushed with a savory sauce that takes the place of dipping it in soy sauce). And a magical early-morning swim in the deserted lagoon before the lifeguards came on duty.

It isn't Okinawa, but it's close.

--Julian

Getting there: Tokai Kisen (03-5472-9999) overnight ferry from Takeshiba Pier in Tokyo to Niijima, and "jet ferry" back was about 20,000 yen round trip per person;
Accomodation: free campsite with basic amenities; cheap minshuku; or "Grand Hotel" around 16,000 yen per night.
The hot spring is free; a dozen stores rent bicycles for 1,500 yen per day. 

Reading Books: Chaotic Autodidacts

Readers are chaotic. I am, anyway. I read out of order: Franz Kafka before Mark Twain, Mary Shelley before Lady Murasaki. I read To Kill a Mockingbird at 45, Women in Love at 12 (not that I understood much of it, but I tried). A History of Literature based on my reading habits would be haphazard in the extreme. And I imagine that other readers behave much the same, hunting and gathering in libraries and bookstores, reading by whim, slowly accumulating an internal world, book by book.

Audrey Niffenegger writing in The Guardian

and

Probably the most noble thing a publisher can possibly do is provide cheap paperback editions of important texts. All the first editions and Folio press embossed hardbacks in the world are, culturally if not financially, worth less than a single bundle of 1960s Penguin Classics, and the line of low-budget purveyors of enlightenment is a worthy and laudable one. From the Everyman’s Library editions of the 1900s-40s, with their arts & crafts aesthetic, aimed clearly at autodidacts rather than scholars, to the more famous and, recently, highly fetishised Pelicans and Penguins of the 40s-70s, this is a story of profit, no doubt, but also of human emancipation through mass production. You can see this especially in the Pelicans of the late 1960s, where hot-of-the-press accounts of the ‘new French revolution’ would go alongside texts on scientific management, with Herbert Marcuse next to Frantz Fanon next to A.J.P Taylor, and all of this conflicting and intoxicating information in a pocket-sized form, on cheap paper and with impeccably elegant modernist covers. This tradition has started to make something of a minor comeback, perhaps as a result of the obvious intellectual vacuity of a now decrepit Thatcherism, and the most encouraging example of this is Verso’s Radical Thinkers series.

Owen Hatherly writing at 3:AM

—David

Cross Cultures

American Holiday

We're in favour of Americans - we like Americans - but their country baffles us, and more than that, destroys us. Little by little, we're being destroyed. We need to get back! We need to go home!

I wrote about my adventures, as an American, in Scotland and England here.

Here, in mirror image, Lars, an Englishman, writes about his adventures in America.

There are other entries about Lars's travels in America at the always interesting Spurious.

--David

Admiring the Right

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

                                                                                     —Johann Hari, in The Independent

Read the whole thing here.

—David

Cicada vs Satie

min min cicada [aka abura-zemi] (Photo: Kumon; Wikimedia Commons)

On this shining summer morning as I sit studying Japanese, there is a min min cicada in full throttle right outside the open window screen. It's competing with Erik Satie's piano works on the CD player.

Erik Satie self-portrait (Wikimedia Commons)

Cicada wins.

(and it isn't just competing volume, but is actually music vs. music, as David implies here.)

--Julian

Two Quotations Touching on Joy

Is my life better than other peoples lives? Perhaps. I have a roof over my head and many do not. I do not have leprosy, I am not blind, I see the world—what extraordinary happiness! I see this day, and outside it there is nothing. Who could take that away from me? And when this day fades, I will fade along with it—a thought, a certainty, that enraptures me.
                                                 —From The Madness of the Day by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Lydia Davis
                                                    (I found it at the essential wood s lot.)

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

                                                —Douglas Adams
                                                    (This one I lifted from Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion for which Adams's
                                                     line serves as the epigraph.)

—David