| Sunday, July 15, 2007 10:57AM | | | | Japanese Bear Country | Posted By: Tony Dsouza
|
It’s Obon here in Nemuro, the festival to celebrate the ancestors. I don’t know too much about it, other than it’s Buddhist, and a time for families to gather and remember the dead. Everyone has been running around in kimonos the past couple days, and when I went walking in the countryside yesterday, I came upon a party at a farm where they had strung up lanterns and lights and everyone was dancing in a circle to traditional music. Four generations dancing the same formal dance, simple movements that included a leg kick and arm punch at the sky in time with the music that the older people seemed to be taking very seriously, and the younger folks seemed somewhat embarrassed by when I walked past on the highway’s sidewalk. The mothers were chasing the little kids around. There was food set out on a long banquet table. ‘Invite me in, I don’t bite,’ I transmitted to them with my smile and telepathy. Though they smiled back, they didn’t turn out to be telepathic.
My father died ten years ago of a sudden heart attack. He was 54, I was 22, my sister was 17. It was an out of the blue thing, an assertion that life will happen on its terms. Time heals old wounds they say, but it doesn’t. I don’t think about it moment to moment anymore, of course, but it’s always there to get me when I don’t need it to, like now, and now, and now. It makes me want to rush home and be with my loved ones, to not waste a minute away from them. The feeling, like festival, will pass, and the life we must still live will be before me again.
They shot off an hour’s worth of fireworks at the port tonight. It was spectacular to watch, a reminder that gunpowder can be used for beauty if we want it to. The rockets spun high into the night sky with their pigtails of flame, hung at the apex, exploded, and showered us with colored sparks. The reports always remind me of war, but it wasn’t like my first 4th of July after Africa when I cowered at the noise in my bathroom in California with the park right next door, the reports so loud, and me pounding beers just get me through all of that awful noise. What are we trying to say with our fireworks here in Nemuro on the day of the departed? That we miss them? That we’re still here?
I went to the Ainu Pirka Kotan at the Koganeyu Hot Spring recently. It’s an Ainu museum and memorial at the same time; Ainu culture hangs on in Hokkaido much like many native America groups hang on in the States. The Ainu have lost their land, their language, their traditional culture, their way of life. Even their genes. At the same time, reminders that they lived here first are everywhere: towns, mountains, lakes, roads all bear Ainu names the way Americans live in places named Delaware, Tallahassee, Mississippi, Sheboygan. I can’t remember exactly when I first discovered the Ainu, but I know it was when I was young, eight, nine, I was reading a lot of books about Native Americans. “Indian in the Cupboard” was one. There was a series about a young woodland Indian boy who had to accomplish a number of Herculean tasks, like chasing and shooting a flock of mythical night geese, killing a bear. I wanted to live that way, too, and there was a wood near my home in suburban Chicago where I went with my carved spears and homemade bow and arrows (my mother gave me a length of elastic from her sewing kit for a bow string, and I made arrows out of cattail reeds from the high school pond. I never succeeded in shooting anything but the neighborhood bully in the lip after he was threatening me and I fired one off at him in warning. Such was the artistry of my arrow design that it was pushed down by a slight breeze from twelve feet above his head. Sorry again. Or did God grab that arrow and stick it in your face the way it seemed at the time, m----- f-----?). The wood was mostly the place where the high school kids went to smoke pot, and where our parents warned us never to go because homeless people and pedophiles lived in it. But I spent years in that wood and never came across anything but woodchucks and deer.
Anyway, my native American phase led my mother to explain things like the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee to me. Of course I was horrified. Then I somehow read about the Ainu and I think there was some relief in me that we Americans weren’t the only people in the world who had systematically annihilated our indigenous groups. So the Ainu became yet another people in my growing pantheon to feel awful for and worry about. My mother spared telling me about African-Americans and slavery until I was eleven (fifth grade, believe me, I remember exactly when she did).
But my day at the Pirka Kotan let me know that the Ainu don’t need my worries, that though they’ve suffered much, they, like the rest of us, are still here. The Pirka Kotan is new and as quietly beautiful as the DC Holocaust museum, in a setting of deciduous trees on a stream and surrounded by forested mountains. There are two levels to the museum, with a large traditional style hall for performances, and classrooms where students learn the Ainu language, weaving, carving, and cooking. Outside is a recreated Ainu village of reed and grass huts, inside of which Ainu elders readily answer questions about how the Ainu lived and worshiped and told stories. Just as in Africa where I learned that my notions of ‘primitive’ life were wrong, here I saw that the Ainu homes were sturdy and spacious despite the Ainu’s lack of metal or other technologies to make them with. The interiors of the Ainu homes on display were clean and warm and the floors were covered with woven mats that surrounded the central hearth pit. It was such that I could comfortably imagine winter raging outside, even though it wasn’t. One of the most important tasks of the Ainu man was to carve prayer sticks to burn in the hearth to the ancestors. These sticks are roughly three feet long, the thickness of a hiking staff, half covered in bark and the other half covered in some kind of yellow animal hair, like a horse tail. Except that when the elder handed me one, I saw that it wasn’t hair at all, but the stick itself whittled down into hundreds of strands so fine that they resembled hair. How many hours must it take to make one? These sticks, when set in the fire, quickly burn and send up a plume of smoke that carry the Ainu’s prayers.
The Ainu believe that all living and non-living things are Kamuy, God, so that the world and everything in it is God in its particular way. And the Ainu, as with almost every people when you go digging into them, have their life ways which give one pause. The big one about the Ainu is the bear ceremony. Hokkaido is home to brown bears, equivalent to grizzlies, and the Ainu worship them in particular. Part of their worship of the bear is to capture a cub either while it’s in the den, or soon after the bears emerge, raise it for a year or two, then sacrifice it in a ceremony where they shoot it with arrows and then strangle it with a rope. They eat the bear afterward, and to them it’s a way of thanking and releasing God from the world at the same time. In ancient times, lactating Ainu women nursed the young bears taken from the dens until they could eat on their own.
The Ainu were hunter-gathers in their traditional days, dependent on the Hokkaido salmon runs, on deer, waterfowl, and bear meat, and they did practice some agriculture. By the time the Japanese defeated them definitively in battle in the mid 18th century, the Ainu included potatoes in their diet, so they clearly were part of the world economy. The similarities between Ainu life ways and those of Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest are striking, one of the most interesting things at the Pirka Kotan is the huge Ainu whaling boat with all of its anthropomorphic carvings that could easily be at home in Seattle.
With language keeping me an entity unto my own here, I find myself often interacting with animals. A day ride on the train from Kushiro to Nemuro let me see hundreds of deer and a few foxes. The deer laze in the wheat fields like they own the place. There is velvet on the males’ antlers now. I saw a fox run by on the street the other night when I was on the porch having a cigarette (I live downtown). The people who walk in Meiji park at the end of town wear bells on their jackets or shoes to let bears know they are coming. One of my favorite walks here is the 12 kilometer roundtrip to the Hanasaki Port on the other side of the peninsula where the famous Kurumaishi Rock is. It looks like a huge lotus blossom and can be seen from the open ocean; it was formed by an usual lava flow. To walk there I have to pass these two ravens who dive bomb me from their light poles every time I do. One got a clump of my hair last week. What did I do to them, hey?
I’m heading up the coast on my bicycle tomorrow, I hope to make it all the way to the very northern tip of Hokkaido. It’s at least a week away, and I’ll spend at least some of that time in bear country. So I have my bells ready to tie to my shoes. They sell them in all the shops here, if that tells you anything.
There is a raven who hangs out near the driving range a few blocks from here. He snatches golf balls that get through the net, pecks at them all day because he thinks they’re eggs. I felt so bad for him that one day I crossed the street, chased him away from his folly, and put the golf ball in my pocket. I mean, winter is coming, he can’t afford to be wasting time and energy on pecking at a golf ball that will never be an egg. Well that raven of course chased me for blocks, cawing, dive bombing me. What can you do sometimes? I’ve nicknamed him George W. Bush. Sorry bird.
I went up to the Ainu village in Akan town. The performance hall was pretty empty. At the end of the traditional dance show, two long-haired Ainu girls came on stage to play the mukkuri, the mouth harp. It’s the same instrument that I heard the Hmong play when I visited their mountain villages in the Vietnamese highlands. It sounds like someone twanging a long sheet of metal. It’s a different sort of music for sure, the girls pulling the string at the end of the harp to make the bamboo reed vibrate; I don’t know that you’d ever dance to it, but it took me somewhere, those vibrations running through the room, the girls standing stock still, twanging the string, the sound vibrating louder and louder and faster and faster until I had to close my eyes and just let it vibrate through me. It’s a sound that belongs in a cave or a hut, in a darkness lit by a fire, shadows on the wall, the world a little more right than it’s since become, the sound of a time when we were better than we are. | | |
|
4 Comments | Add a Comment |
| |
| 7-16-07 6:03PM: Elliott Avedon said...
Hi Anthony - Your blog brings back a flood of memories. When I was working on a masters at Columbia U in NYC (1956-7?), I did text research on life in Japan. At the time I too "discovered" the Ainu, but not with the feelings you convey!
A decade later and a doctorate, I joined the Columbia faculty and lived down the street from a Buddhist Temple on Riverside Drive. Each summer they held the Obon Festival in Riverside Park. We danced with their members in the park, and later dined in the Temple. I leared that it was a joyous time for the living to share memories with the dead. We became good friends with some of the members as a result.
Your blog generates thoughts of my life in a dfferent world. Well, as someone wrote, "You can't go home again"! Actually, as you know, I'm quite content with my current world. That is a world that among other things includes you. Thanks for the blog and the good feelings it engendered.
-Elliott
|
| 7-16-07 11:45AM: Clair Norman, Petaluma, Ca said...
Tony,
I enjoyed your observations about Japan's treatment of indigenous people as compared with America's history on the subject. We've never met. I'm a friend of your mother and Irene. When I stayed with them last year, I read your book about the Ivory Coast and enjoyed very much. I stayed with them again this past February. It was great because I got to see Alice, Irene, Martha, Nancy, and Tom. We got together for lunch. I also took in three operas, which is a passion of mine.
All the best.
Clair Norman, Petaluma, California
|
| 7-15-07 6:38PM: Irene Mirkovic said...
Hey there, Anthony -
I am really emjoying your blogs. Keep them coming..........
Irene
|
| 7-15-07 11:52AM: Barry said...
Hey, you bring the place to me with these observations. You one clean & clear writer-man, Mr. Tony-san!
|
| |
| Post a Comment: |
| | |
|
