2020 Olympic Torch Relay: Japan Brings Multiple Torches, Forgets to Bring the Olympic Spirit

 

I’m the kind of dad who will take the family on a month-long road trip and then ruin it with a bunch of rules like “No screaming back there!” (because I don’t want to crash); “The driver picks the music!” (because I don’t want to go insane); and “Hey, no junk food before lunch!” (unless you give half to the driver).

But even up in Akita, in Japan’s pretty-far north, the summer days can be blistering hot by 11am. And after a couple hours cramped in the back seat with no escape from dad’s previous-century music, my kids were likely to start screaming at each other.

I pulled into a convenience store parking lot and said “Nobody wants ice-cream, right?” or something equally corny. The kids exploded out of the car and ran for the air conditioning and the ice-cream coolers. My wife almost beat them there. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her run so fast.

I stayed outside, absorbed in the poster in the window.

Who's Your Daddy: Japan's Seiwa-Genji Bloodline

I have something like thirty-four cousins. (Don’t ask me to name them all.) My memories of them are varied and numerous: the loud, swirling Christmas parties at my Uncle Vinny’s; road trips to visit far-flung family in Chicago, Texas and Colorado; and one massive family reunion that probably took more planning than a space shuttle launch.

Growing up I thought an extended family could hardly be any larger. My own kids have eleven cousins. Not a bad tally these days.

We have nothing on the old Japanese emperors.

A Goddess, Two Cows, and a Chinese Man on a Mission: Matsumoto's Gofuku-ji Temple

 

How I Got  Here

Years ago I landed a writing gig with the Japan Tourism Agency. This was right up my alley as it involved a paid weekend of travel. But there was a catch. JTA wasn't going to let me bullshit the 20 million foreign visitors they were expecting to soon attract annually. I had to write stuff that was factually accurate and free of sarcasm.

There's a first time for everything I guess.

Matsumoto’s Kōbō-yama

The Life & Times of a Non-Descript Mountain

Kōbō-yama does not draw much attention from the tourist and backpacker crowd. Visitors to Matsumoto, once they turn their eyes from the castle and the easy bustle of downtown, are drawn to the serrated alpine skyline across the valley to the west. Even to the natives Kōbō-yama goes largely unnoticed. And this is not surprising. Standing barely 50 meters above the traffic rolling up and down nearby Route 19, Mt. Kōbō can hardly be called a mountain at all.

Yet there is something very interesting about this very non-descript place. Two very interesting things, actually. One floats overhead and all around, as fantastic as it is fleeting. The other lies underfoot, old and unmoving and fantastically understated. One requires perfect timing. The other is constant as time itself.

Come in mid-April if you want to see both.

Read more at Taiken Japan...

Japanofiles Interview with Dave Carlson

In January I had the pleasure of sitting down with media master and long-time Matsumoto resident Dave Carlson. Dave, among his various involvements in the academic and social community, is also the producer of Japanofiles, a series of podcast interviews with local expats who share their broad range of experiences working and living in Japan.

Since I was living in Fukushima City at the time of the Great Tohoku Earthquake of March 2011 I expected Dave to spend a lot of our time talking on that. But that was just one aspect of our chat, which took several turns I didn't expect but thoroughly enjoyed.

At the time of this writing Dave is working on his 70th podcast. You can find them all at his site, The Japanofiles Broadcast. Our talk checks in at Number 69, which went live just a few days before the fourth anniversary of the quake.

And for those who do want to know more about what it was like to be there, on the ground, among the beautiful, resilient people of Japan during one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded, please check out my short memoir For Now: After the Quake - A Father's Journey.

NOTE: This past Saturday a Magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal, triggering avalanches in the Himalayas that have taken over 2,000 lives according to early counts. This New York Times article from a woman who has lived in Kathmandu for two years and was with her son in their car when the quake hit offers a heart-wrenching yet hope-inspiring account of what it has been like to be in the capital of Nepal during this tragedy. Please read. Please take a moment to ponder the images. And please, count your blessings.

Bringing Home the Melon

The Life of a $14 Piece of Fruit



￥1500 = $13.97 (on 9/14/14)

Today we are here at the farmer's market adjacent to the famed (well it should be) Yamabe Winery in Matsumoto, Japan. The weather has been gracious here in the mouth of the Susukigawa River Valley, and someone is ready to start spewing his garbled genius out a mouth full of the best apples and grapes this side of Mt. Olympus.

No chopsticks needed here, just bring your appetite for fresh, healthy eating and a wheelbarrow full of napkins. Make no mistake, this is fruit at its finest, available for exhorbitant prices in a setting where your urge to haggle is politely smothered under a blanket of glib Japanese niceties from elderly men and women who would also bow if they weren't permanently bent over at the waist from a lifetime of tilling the soil with hand tools.

But breathe easy, suspicious traveler. This is one place you never have to worry about being short-changed (largely because you probably won't be getting any change).

At 1,500 Japanese Yen this beautiful watermelon ('西瓜' – which of course is pronounced 'soo-ee-kah') may seem to the uninitiated to be a bit pricey. But notice, inexperienced consumer of Japanese fruit! This suika comes with its own harness, a wonderful little safety net strong enough to hold up ten watermelons yet is soft enough on your fingers to make carrying this overgrown gourd nothing more than a mildly excruciating labor of love for the sake of your sugared-up kids.

That’s right, no fumbling the old melon here! No letting that baby slip out from under your arm, watching it split open, spilling its red guts all over the parking lot and your shoes while you are trying to remotely unlock your car (suspicious travler that you are). Yes, when you purchase one of these string-secured specimens you’re not just getting a watermelon, you’re getting peace of mind thanks to that ingenius red and white support system not to mention the comfort that can only come from knowing that your big watery baby will make it home undamaged. That your children will be happy and hyper, juice running down their chins as they spit their seeds at you and each other and in every conceivable direction, wiping their sticky hands on their clothes and their chairs, on the table and the walls and each other which is fun if you can forget for half a second that you are going to have to clean all of it up later, right along with their hair probably, but not before you finish eating all the half-eaten slices the little rascals are leaving on their plates or more likely right on your easy-stain table, big chunks of abandoned redness you feel compelled to bite and suck and gnaw and consume after spending 1,500 yen to get that bonus net of knotted string so your 西瓜 wouldn’t end up splattered all over the pavement and your pumps but you can’t eat just now your mouth is already full of yelling at the kids to stop picking those seeds off the floor and spitting them at you and each other and in every direction again but not at your husband because he passed on the melon, grabbed a beer and headed straight for the couch and the game, removing himself from this juicy, seed-ridden, wet sticky mess before it even started, annoyingly prescient to this downward spiral that has come of the $14 melon with the safety net you now wish did not come standard with each and every flippin suika, that what a wonderful place this Japan would be if they could just give you the option of a non-insured melon so you could not only save the extra expense but you could feed the kids a line about how bad you feel because yes, you did buy them watermelon but when you went to remotely unlock the car the sweet unfettered fruit went tumbling out of your cradled arm, its sweet succulence splattering all over the parking lot and your shoes (which you since wiped perfectly clean) and there was just no way to save him, so young and tender and juicy and smashable a melon that he was, but you promise to try again tomorrow kids or hey I know how about sharing a $2 peach?

Deciding What Matters

Making It Home

My recent decision to move my family back to Japanhas been met with tons of positive support and good wishes. For this, my wife and I are extremely grateful. The decision at the time was not an easy one.

There have also been those who, albeit with the best of intentions, have questioned the wisdom of our return, particularly with three young children. I don’t resent the questions; I’m not offended by the concerns, necessarily based on information that is debatable. We don’t know ourselves just what the present situation is, what needs to be done or what the future holds. No one does. Even the so-called experts disagree.

We saw in Fukushima the radiation meters – microsieverts per hour, displayed digitally on machines posted in parks, on school grounds and throughout the center of town. We read updates in the newspaper, day after day. We stared at the spectrum of opinion offered up in cyberspace, mostly from people thousands of miles removed from the reality those they are supposedly educating are living with every day.

Amid all this, we saw the people of Fukushima going about the business of living.

This is, simply, what my wife and I have decided to do.

For the first time in our married life (not counting our 6-month European dream in 2007) we have decided, with no external demands, where to be. For her job as a teacher with the Fukushima Board of Education, through the uncertainty following the quake, for an opportunity that didn’t quite play out as we’d hoped, we’ve always deferred to circumstance in the esoteric yet very real matter of choosing who or what would steer our ship as we sailed an ocean with countless ports we might like to see.

We got knocked around a bit.

Now there is no one on deck but us.

It would be wrong to claim nothing influenced our decision to move here. But the determinants, the deciding factors, came from within. First and foremost, we wanted our kids to spend a few formative years in Japan. The practical path from a financial point of view would have been to go back to Fukushima where, after seven years of continuous maternity leave, my wife could go right back to work. We both have friends who never left town, certain (perhaps with a dash of hope mixed in) that there was never any measurable threat to their families’ well-being. According to some sources they are correct. Still, in our hearts my wife and I didn’t feel moving back to Fukushima Citywas the right decision for us.

So we find ourselves among the mountains of Nagano Prefecture– in the ‘belly button of Japan’ as some like to say. I lived here in Matsumoto once before, during a three-month teaching assignment with my first Japanese employer. I always told myself I wanted to return.

With a little bit of digging we found a house, on the eastern fringes of town, among picture-perfect rice fields, welcoming neighbors and the gently permeating aroma of the surrounding vineyards. I catch up with old friends, still around from eleven years ago, and see in them a sign that this is indeed a good place. My wife has made many new friends already. Some have themselves come from Fukushima.

I think of all the things I’d like to accomplish in the four years we plan to live here. Some are grounded in practical reality; others are entirely self-indulgent. Between these two extremes await the children we are here for, and the things that would mean most to them.

Within the constraints of time must we make our decisions.

In these times, ours is exactly what they will be.