| Tuesday, June 12, 2007 1:55PM | | | | Where I live in Japan | Posted By: Tony Dsouza
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I got the keys to my apartment today, or "manshon", from the English word mansion, though it's not a mansion. It is very big for a single person by Japanese standards, but basically a one bedroom. I have a view of the town and the ocean. On clear days I'll be able to see the volcanoes on the 'northern territories', the islands the Russians took from the Japanese at the end of WWII that are still being disputed. I live in Nemuro, the eastern most town on the northern island of Hokkaido. The signs here are in Japanese and Russian. It's nine hours from Sapporo, which is already a northern outpost to the Japanese. So Nemuro is it, as far away as you can get. But in ultra modern Japan, I have wireless internet even here, a tv mounted in the wall above my bathtub, and a heated toilet seat.
Nemuro is very small, a crab fishing town. For example, two women gave me a yogurt box outside my apartment this afternoon. I have no idea what anyone is saying to me, anyway they gave me a box of yogurt. They wouldn't take any money. It was about something, but like I say I have no idea what. Then I went down into town and ate ramen noodles in a little shop by the water. Those yogurt women came in there not five minutes later. Then they were pointing at me and laughing. I'm pretty sure it was along the lines of, "Hey we just gave you yogurt up the hill."
People do urge me to speak Japanese and I'm getting better. But I won't pretend it was easy to rent an apartment on my own in Nemuro. I haven't felt such cultural dislocation since my first day in my village in Ivory Coast. At least here I can retreat from it in my hotel and now my 'manshon'.
I return my rental car in Sapporo tomorrow and come back by train. Nemuro is the end of the line and the ride is overnight. I'm living here because yes it is an unusual place to live, but also, it is pretty and manageable and I think I'm more likely to get to know it than I would Sapporo, say, which is a huge industrial city. Nemuro has a few parks, one very big one called Meiji Park, a number of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, and it is also home to the Tancho crane, the red capped crane that is the Japanese symbol for lasting happiness as they mate for life. The Tanchos were almost exterminated in the '80's because all their wetland was turned into hay farming for Hokkaido's dairy industry. They only survived out here, and things have turned around for them after a winter feeding program was started, there are now 600. I already saw two pairs, one pair standing together in a marsh at the side of the road, and another coasting together above a rice field. I've seen foxes jogging on the roadside, and deer. I went to a hot springs resort in the mountains nearby, and they have an Ainu community there and I went to a traditional Ainu folk dance, they put it on for Japanese tourists. The Ainu are the indigenous people of Hokkaido, they were hunters and gathers and lived off the salmon that were once numerous in the rivers. The Japanese did to them what Americans did to their native groups, and at around the same time, the 1850's. Now the Ainu are very few, less than a hundred fluent Ainu language speakers, and some say the real number is more like five. They are why I'm here...my project is to record some of their oral stories. Well I heard a few the other night in Ainu and they gave me a recording to listen to in English, an American woman who spoke Japanese translated the stories from Japanese for them. I'll tell you one: there are ravens all over the place here, they are aggresive and loud, I like them, but most people don't like them I think. Anyway, the Ainu story, the very short version is that one day long ago the devil decided to swim out to the edge of the world at night and wait for the sun. When the sun would rise, he would swallow it. But of course the devil had bragged about his plan. Just as he opened his mouth to swallow the rising sun, the ravens of Hokkaido flew into his mouth in a great black cloud and stuffed it, and the sun rose as it always had. So that's why the Ainu don't get upset when the ravens steal fish from time to time. | | | |
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