Only a Blockhead

Up in the woods; down in the paddies

A selection of past posts to celebrate 10 years of Only a Blockhead. The rainy season was declared over a week ago. School is out. It is officially summer.

It is hot and humid. Sweat beads on the skin with the slightest exertion. The first cicadas are hissing in the heat of the day. Plants, weeds and creepers are in a flush of summer growth.

     a child's baseball floats

     forgotten in the

     furiously growing rice

(2008)

The flooded paddies bring pairs of brown ducks to the valley to feast on weed and insects. Sated, they preen or rest on the low banks that have been mown of their weeds. Swallows wheel over the young rice, catching insects on the wing.

The half moon hung in a clear sky after sunset. To look up at it was to see the wheeling bats high above the paddy fields, feasting in the insect-rich air. Late last night cycling home, I was--surely there's no other explanation--hit with a light, glancing blow in the shoulder by a bat not paying attention

We met a father and his two young sons coming out of the woods, towels tied around their heads, on their way back from an expedition to find large shiny black newly-hatched kabuto mushi helmet beetles to be kept as pets in plastic cages where they gorge on watermelon rind and are in turn fodder for entries in summer homework diaries

(2007)

     By day, cicadas

     By night, frogs in the paddies

     The sounds of summer

(2009)

--Julian

Festival

Revisiting past posts to celebrate ten years of Only A Blockhead. “Hamaorisai” (meaning “down to the beach”) is Chigasaki’s biggest annual festival, and it was this week. This post combined material from 2011, 2014 and 2017.

As everywhere in Japan, Shinto shrines protect our local countryside. “Mikoshi” portable shrines from about 40 of the currently most prosperous are carried by local residents to the sea once a year. This is the Hamaorisai festival on the July holiday called Marine Day.

For the last week, certain city streets and roads across the countryside have sported ropes decorated with white sacred papers to mark the routes, and the muffled sound of drums and flutes echoed late into the evening to advertise and build anticipation for the event.

The portable shrines are readied, and from around midnight, they are carried through the designated streets. As we sleep, their chants and drums echo into our dreams. Dozens of individuals dress up and combine their sweat and strength--in rotation, falling out to be immediately replaced--to port one of these enormously heavy mikoshi. It is both an example of and a metaphor for the neighborhood cooperation woven into the fabric of society.

The shrines converge at the beach at first light, arriving one after the other in raucous fashion. Many hundreds of people gather on the sand to witness this climax. Dozens of stalls sell food and drink. The shrines are paraded through the crowds in elated festival spirits, snaking and dipping to the rhythm of beating metal and the shouted chants of the bearers, before lining up to be blessed by the senior Shinto priest. 

After the blessing, the mikoshi are taken into the sea in a purification ritual, with the teams of men and women porters daring each other deeper.

After this, the tension is released. In a more relaxed fashion, but with no less effort, the mikoshi are borne away, with frequent stops for rest and refreshments set up in the road outside the houses of prominent citizens, paid for by everyone living nearby. At these stops, the portable shrines are set on trestles, while the porters drink beer or sake before girding themselves with megaphone chants to carry their burden another few hundred yards to the next stop.

Young children join the procession, sitting in large carts playing drums, with older children playing flutes. Police stop traffic as the shrine lurches across an intersection, seemingly with an inebriated life of its own. Knots of costumed and exhausted carriers gather on the curbs. And so the mikoshi make their slow and noisy way back to their home shrines in the heat of the day.  

--Julian

Downpour

Here are some past posts to mark Only a Blockhead’s 10th anniversary: A storm this afternoon sent me back to this account from eight years ago.

(Sudden Shower at Shono by Hiroshige; Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons)

Occasionally on a sunny day during the rainy season, there is a crash of thunder and, suddenly and spectacularly, it begins to rain. The force of the downpour builds until it's a thrilling vertical battery of water that drums on the patio and sets the leaves and even the blades of grass on the lawn quivering. The violence of the water's impact brings the smell of earth and warm stone through the open windows.

And just as suddenly, it is over. Everything drips. Leaves glisten. Puddles evaporate. The temperature has cooled a degree or two.

These are the last respites before the onslaught of summer.

(2009) 

The rush and rustle of leaves in the lush orchard;

A sudden shower!

(2013)

--Julian

Commute

 

--David

Summer is here

It’s July, and I cycle to the beach each morning for a swim before breakfast. On a weekday, I’m almost the only person there. There may be a jogger, a dog walker, or a lifeguard somehow managing with effortless skill to stand on his board ahead of the smallest wave on an almost calm sea. The beach houses—temporary huts erected on the sand for just two months of the year—are still shuttered. I pretty much have the water to myself, to bob and float, looking at the Eboshi rock, Enoshima Island, and the silhouettes of fishing boats on the horizon.

At weekends, there’s more traffic, even this early. The beach houses are already putting out their shingles, together with rental deckchairs, parasols and swim rings. Down the coast at Enoshima, the beach houses are elaborate affairs standing shoulder to shoulder, with cool names, intricate carpentry and paintwork, and sophisticated food and drink to appeal to the crowds coming down the Odakyu Line from Shinjuku, Tokyo. Further away here in Chigasaki, the clientele is mostly local, and the same huts are rebuilt each year, with their hot showers, lockers, simple menus, and unsophisticated expanses of tatami matting.

I walk up from the water. A radio in the lifeguard’s office blares the morning traffic report, with its kilometers of tailbacks caused by accidents in the region, and I’m glad I’m not driving anywhere this glorious Saturday morning. After a cold-water shower provided by the city outside the spacious, clean restrooms recently constructed—many, many thanks!—, I head for home. The sun is getting hotter, and the high hiss of insects is just becoming apparent. There may still be more rain in the days ahead, but without a doubt,

Summer is here.

--Julian

Wishing on the stars (2007)

A selection of past posts to celebrate 10 years of Only a Blockhead

Today is the Tanabata star festival. It is traditionally on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, but July 7 is the date used here in Kanto. Businesses and public buildings already sport large decorated bamboo boughs on which people hang their wishes written on strips of colored paper.

(photo by Laika ac via Wikimedia Commons)

As every year, I cut a bamboo from the grove behind the house and carried it to the university where I work. Writing wishes is a fun activity for English class. Most of the students haven't done it since elementary school, and never in English. Their wishes are those of young people entering life, and range from, "I hope I can find a girlfriend this summer" "I hope I can pass a lot of classes" "I hope I can lose 10 kilograms" "I hope I am going to get my driver's license" to "I hope the world is going to be peaceful."

And as every year, there are a few wishes that stand out for their generosity, poignancy, and the untold stories that lie behind them: "I hope I can make my girlfriend happy," "I hope I can stop wasting money," "Before I die I want to meet my family."

The day after Tanabata, the bamboo, decorations and wishes are fed to a small fire. The smoke rises into the air, carrying the expressions of yearning, hope and optimism to the realm of legend and the gods.

What's your Tanabata wish for this year? As for me, I'd settle for world peace and losing 5 kilograms.

--Julian