Tohoku Festivals - Warriors & Dragons!

I’ve spent this week in the northern most part of Honshu, known as the Tohoku region.  It’s high summer here, so like many places in the US, it’s festival time.

Akita (yes, home of the dog) has a lantern festival each year.   No, it’s not a parade of people carrying fancy lanterns.  It’s a parade of teams of people who alternate holding up a “tree” of 42 paper lanterns each lit by a candle. Topped by the Japanese flag, the tree extends 20-30 feet into the air on a series of bamboo poles.  It sways gently in the wind, sometimes carried but more often balanced on someone’s hand, shoulder, or head.  (You may be able to see this in the picture on the right). 

I got to watch a preview one afternoon at a weekend festival, and then again at night.  The town was celebrating the opening of a new community plaza, formed at the junction of its new Akita Art Museum by Tadao Ando, community center, and shopping building.  There were drummers and dancers, food and music, including a young Japanese woman belting out “Rolling Down the River” in a great American accent.  It was much fun, particularly watching the men balancing their lantern trees on their heads, and hearing the roar of the crowd as the trees swayed precipitously and sometimes fell.

Hirosaki has a lantern festival, too, called the Neputa Festival, but it is a procession of large paper fan-like lanterns, complete with warlike figures on one side and lovely ladies on the other. (I didn’t understand the Japanese explanation.)  From the brochure of the museum I visited, it’s a stately somber parade. 

 
Aomori’s Nebuta Festival, held at the same time as Hirosaki’s, is fun and grand.  There are dancers in front and drummers and fifers in back of each huge three-dimensional float of paper tigers, dragons, and warriors.  The festival has been around in various forms for decades and now is the largest one in Japan.  The festival is next week, when I’ll be in Sapporo, but I got to see some of the floats under construction, a museum that houses last year’s floats and showed how they were made, and another museum that has some of the older floats.

A hand under construction

See how big the float is!

It was really interesting to see how the floats are made.  Each starts with a drawing of fantastical figures.  There is a basic wooden skeleton, then thin wire that gives dimension to the shapes. Paper is glued on top, and an individual artist paints the figures (apparently the artists compete with each other for best design).  Light bulbs have replaced the candles that were used to illuminate the paper forms.  The entire float sits on a solid wooden frame that also holds a generator to power the bulbs, and this all sits on a couple of tires.  The whole float is pulled – and turned around – by a lot of people. 

The floats are amazing.  There are fierce tigers and dragons and lovely little birds and butterflies.  Most of them are in a traditional warrior style, though I did see a small float of Sponge Bob in this year's array.  It looks like this year’s parade will be like many others – lots of fun, lots of noise and music, and lots of people around this parade of gorgeous lantern-floats.

16 Months After the Tsunami

I went to three towns along the coast where the tsunami hit last year:  Sendai, Kesennuma, and Kamaishi.  It was important for me to get some sense, in person, of what the area was like and to pay my respects to the strength of the storm and the people who lived through it.  I only saw a little bit, what I could see by foot after getting off the train.  After Sendai, I had to base myself inland, as there was no way to go up the coast by public transportation.  So my impressions are quite incomplete.  To augment it, I strongly recommend you go to YouTube and type in any of the towns’ names and the word “tsunami”.  You will see some very powerful footage.

Sendai.  Like all the towns I visited, Sendai sits up on a hill, descending down to its port.  Aside from the port, Sendai is little changed.  It looks and behaves like any other Japanese city to my innocent eye.  I didn’t figure out how to get down to the port, though I a woman I met who works down there said it’s in pretty bad shape. 

I saw a little bit when I went to Matsushima, the bay north of Sendai that is one of the three most beautiful scenic areas in Japan.  It is indeed lovely, with dozens of tiny rocky outcroppings of islands, all dusted with pine trees on the top.  I came by ferry from a nearby town, Shiogama, which had a pile of debris on the shore still to be carted away and was rebuilding its port.  As I walked along the main street, there were still a few buildings being repaired and one of the bridges to a nearby island had not yet been rebuilt.  But Matsushima is a big tourist area, so repairs were made quickly where the tourists would be.  At least for Sendai and Matsushima, whatever damage that still existed was not where a traveler like me would go.

Kesennuma.  Kesennuma is about 60 miles north of Sendai.  I was several blocks down the hill from the train station before I saw individual empty lots with only a building’s foundation.  Then I noticed that, while there were shops in the first floor of some buildings, they seemed new, spare.  In one there were a group of men and women at tables, making baskets for sale.  As I got closer to the port, I saw more vacant lots, more empty damaged buildings, and then buildings being torn down by giant cranes.  It was interesting to watch:  scaffolding and tarp protected the street sides of the buildings, and behind a crane with Pac-man-like jaws would pull the walls down, pick up pieces, or snap through an I-beam. 

The port and the immediate area around it had been destroyed. There were still some piers angled into the water, and the boats tied up sideways to the quay.  Some buildings remained standing, but they were empty, debris inside, gaping holes in their facades. Pictured here are two that struck me most:  an old copper-clad building in the billboard style I’d seen at an open-air museum, propped up because its first floor had been destroyed by the tsunami wave, and another stone building that had lost its first floor or two entirely and was sitting tilted on the ground.

There was new construction.  There was a new road down to and around the port, a bit higher than the old, so you slid down gravel to the old sidewalk. The only new building I saw down by the port was a three-story parking garage. You could see some temporary housing that looked like container boxes, one housing the police station.  Up the hill, there were some new buildings, or perhaps more accurately newly sided buildings.  In one, I saw men putting in an entire new floor at street level, working around the old woodwork and stairs that led up to the second floor.

I didn’t get a sense of how the townspeople were doing.  They seemed to be going about their business and stores were open.  I saw a number of Japanese walking around, taking pictures as I was.  But generally you heard the noise of the cranes taking down buildings, one by one.

Kamaishi.   A little more than 35 miles further up the coast lies Kamaishi, where I saw much greater devastation than I had seen in Kesennuma.  That may be because the town, which gradually slopes up the hill, lies at the end of a bay with a narrow opening to the sea, which may have added to the tsunami’s force. 

The devastation was extensive, complete, and immeasurable. I'd watched a YouTube video of the tsunami there, even took a picture of what I think was the promontory where it was shot (see right).  Everything was torn up, pushed off its foundation, or gushed through. Even if a building was left standing, its first floor was destroyed, and that meant the supporting pillars might have been weakened and it would have to be taken down.

Vinyl floor of a building

The downtown area and the port were virtually empty, though cars and trucks were traveling through.  The only people walking around besides me were construction workers or engineers.  Amongst the vacant blocks, I saw one or two new buildings and a number standing silently empty, some marked with an X for demolition.  Some structures were being demolished; a concrete foundation was being broken up to be taken away; and in one lot an earth mover was tamping down fresh earth in preparation for laying a new foundation.  In a couple of buildings I saw repairs going on.  But it will take years before there is a downtown again.

The enormity of reconstruction hit me here. There were tons of debris from the tsunami that had to be carted away, and then more debris as the damaged buildings and foundations were cleared.  Much of the town’s infrastructure had to be replaced:  telephone poles and electricity, roads, perhaps the sewer system and gas lines, places for the police, fire, and other government agencies to operate, bus stops and traffic lights.  Meanwhile, the townspeople needed places to live, work, sell their wares, and some reason to feel there was a future worth living.

But renewal had begun.  There was a new main road into town that extended from the railroad station down the hill. The sidewalks looked new or reused. There were new telephone polls and a few old light posts, bent askew. There were new bus stops and even little gardens set into the sidewalks, planted with colorful summer flowers. 

 

In what I thought was a brilliant move, the town had built a three-story box of a building next to the train station.  There, townspeople set up their shops so they could continue their businesses. There were markets, a bookstore, the obligatory omiyage (tourist gift) shop, and upstairs a small Uniglo clothing store.  And there were places where people could gather, sit and talk.  There were three little cafes, all with people in them eating lunch and talking.  There was another gathering place in the middle of the building with long benches, TV screens and a little dais where there could be performances or community meetings.  There was a place upstairs with people to help answer questions related to the tsunami and reconstruction.  For the time being, this was the Kamaishi’s “downtown”.

I don’t think we’ve ever experienced anything as powerful, as vast, quick and destructive as the tsunami was in Japan.  The destruction in Kamaishi seemed so overwhelmingly complete that I am amazed the town could pick itself up at all afterwards.   And yet they and the people in other towns along the coast are doing just that, methodically cleaning up and starting again.   Yes, one could say the Japanese are stoic as they go about the rebuilding, for they have certainly been trained not to bother others or confront.  But I also think their behavior stems from long experience with the natural disasters that occur on this string of volcanic islands sitting on a fault line.   They know such disasters will occur and that you live with them and move on as best as you can. 

Showa Mura and Population Decline

I took a day trip to Showa Mura, nestled in a valley amongst the mountains north of Tokyo, to visit a crafts complex at the suggestion of my weaving friend, Shigeko.  But first, because I didn’t really know where I was going, the bus driver helped by finding the only English-speaking person he knew in the village, began instead at a nonprofit doing community development work here.

The English-speaker, Yoshi Ozaki, is the head of a small nonprofit that was started in 2007 at the village's request.  Showa Mura’s citizens asked a Tokyo-based organization, called NICE, to help them sustain and revitalize this primarily rice-farming community.  The village had declined from a peak of about 5,500 sixty years ago to its present population of just over 1,000, and people were worried the town would die.  NICE sent a small team and now there are six people working in an empty government building that looks somewhat like a school.

Showa Mura ricefileds

I had read an article recently about a young mayor who was working on the same issue of a shrinking population in his town. Yoshi said many villages are facing this challenge, though each one’s situation is somewhat different.  In Showa Mura, demographics and economics were the major reasons for its decline.  Due to the low birth rate, there aren't enough children to replace its aging population.  Many of the children have left because they can't make a living at rice farming.  The government pays rice farmers substantial subsidies, but to the large farmers.  Showa Mura, nestled in a mountain valley, only has small farms. Yoshi said that roughly 70 per cent of the young people said they would prefer to stay if they could make a living here.

To make matters worse, Japan's population -- and hence it's need for rice -- is falling. Showa Mura's citizens believe they will be the last to farm their land and that it will be abandoned after they die.  Many other villages will die, too, and with that, Yoshi thinks, a way of life and value system that is core to Japan.

A Showa Mura community

Yoshi has faced many challenges.   First, while he and his colleagues care deeply for their work and the village, they all came from outside Showa Mura (Yoshi last worked in Tokyo). Even though his board members are all from the village, it has taken time to build trust. The village is comprised of ten different communities, each with the same issue but each with different needs.  And there are no easy solutions. At least Yoshi and his staff can build upon Showa Mura’s traditional spirit of community cooperation and caring for each other.  Still, the work is difficult, solutions murky, and progress slow.

As Yoshi and I talked, I remembered an exhibit I had seen of work by Japanese potters in the 1920's and '30's. They were trying to find an alternative to modernizing Japan by Westernization, and looked Eastward for a new way that was more closely aligned with Japan's traditional values.  I've seen that same conflict between east and west in other areas:  as obi weavers, calligraphers and other artisans modify what they make for a more "modern" market, and even in the sharp contrasts that run through Tokyo.  Japan has managed to live in the middle between old and new, East and West for 150 years and keep its values of deep respect for all living things and caring for each other.  It will be interesting to see how Japan grapples with this new challenge of a declining population. 

Nikko: Lush, Historic Tourist Town

What struck me most about Nikko initially was its size:  at 90,000 it is one-tenth that of Tokyo, so it immediately felt like a small town.  I stayed in a rustic inn on the banks of the river, listening to the sound of rushing water as I went to sleep.  My visit essentially kept me on the main street, so Nikko also felt like a one-street town, even though it clearly isn’t.

And is Nikko lush!  I literally drank in the greenery of forested hills, the stands of towering cedars at the World Heritage site, ferns and moss growing everywhere.  It’s the rainy season, too, so there is mist or rain to add to the river, waterfalls, and little channels carrying water downhill.  My favorite sites were the stone lanterns guarding the temples and shrines, festooned with hats of moss and fern.  I had the feeling that, if the wooden temple buildings were not replaced every twenty years as is the custom, the walkways not weeded frequently, or the grounds maintained, the place would be overgrown in a century.

Nikko is famous because it houses the shrines and mausoleums of Tokugawa Ieyasu and his grandson, Tokugawa Iemitsu, and is the home of a Buddhist sect.  Tokugawa Ieyasu is the warlord who united Japan and established the shogunate that ruled Japan for 250 years until the Meiji restoration in 1868.  Tokugawa Iemitsu centralized the country’s administration and closed Japan to the West.  The complex of shrine and temple buildings forms a World Heritage Site that attracts thousands of tourists each year.

 

Toshu-gu, the shrine for Tokugawa Ieyasu, was originally built in the 1630’s by  Tokugawa Iemitsu.  It is awesome, like many buildings constructed to show off the owner's power and wealth. The shrine’s buildings are richly painted and decorated with woodcarvings of trees, animals, birds, and flowers.  A storehouse has carvings of monkeys portraying “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”.  The walls surrounding the main building have panels, each different, of birds and trees and the ceilings are richly painted.  One has a dragon covering the entire ceiling.  When you clap two pieces of wood together, the sound reverberates in what might be construed as a dragon’s (soft) roar.

There are a number of gates before you can enter the main building, starting with a simple wood torii and becoming more elaborate until the last, ornately carved white-painted gate.  The latter gates have scenes of people and priests, full of life and humor.  For the last gate, it is said that the workmen turned one of the pillars upside down, fearing that the gods would become angry at such a lavish gate. 

Tokugawa Ieyasu’s tomb, however, is quite simple.  You go through a low gate, up a path of stairs to a small, walled in area with his tomb, a large stone cylinder, simply carved, with a roof.  A crane and a turtle, symbols of good fortune and longevity, guard the tomb.  It was quite moving.

Women weeding the rocks

I also visited Tokugawa Iemitsu’s shrine – less elaborate but still quite wonderful – and the other buildings and temples, walking on stone paths up the hills to those less frequently visited by tourists and groups of school children.  It was here that I realized what a job it was to keep the forest and the rain from reclaiming these buildings; you could almost watch the moss and seedlings creeping towards them.

Part of Nikko's main street

As I walked down the main street to dinner, I saw a number of tourist shops, mostly selling “omiyage”, tourist gifts the Japanese take back to their friends.  Many stores seemed empty, closed, or vacant.  When I asked my innkeeper, he said that this is the rainy season, so of course there are few tourists.  The really busy time for Nikko is in the fall, when the maples are turning and the air is crisply clear.

Women on the train to Mashiko

Shoji Hamada pottery

I took a day trip to Mashiko, a nearby pottery town.  There’s a couple of nice pottery museums showcasing the work by Shoji Hamada, a Mingei folk-art potter and a living national treasure who put Mashiko on the map.  Mashiko certainly is a pottery town:  there are 380 different potters, who make everything from heavy, earthen and ash-fired work to everyday dishes to lighter and more refined work.  

Nuclear Power and Little Adventures

Nuclear Power.  Many of you have seen articles reporting an independent commission’s conclusion that the Fukushima accident was man-made, due in part to a close relationship between TEPCO (the electric power company operating the reactor), the nuclear regulatory commission, and the government.  The news came a few days after Japan restarted its nuclear reactor in Oi, the first since all were shut down after the disaster.  You also may have read of protests about the restarting and the roughly 50,000 people marching in front of the prime minister’s residence.  For the non-confrontational, quiet Japanese, this was a significant number.

I’ve talked with some of the people I’ve met in Tokyo about the restart.  What has impressed me most is that the Japanese seem very aware of the clear trade-offs – no nuclear reactors means a 15-20% drop in electrical power, which will affect virtually every individual, business and the economy – and they are willing to make that choice.  They did it last year because they had to; now they are willing to do so permanently.  A recent survey showed that 70% of the people oppose restarting the reactors and are willing to limit their electrical consumption, including having less air conditioning as the hot and steamy summer approaches.  Some I talked with echoed this sentiment, while others were conflicted, feeling there needed to be at least some nuclear power but uncomfortable about the safety issues.  There seems to be a deep mistrust of the government’s willingness or ability to ensure its reactors’ and hence its people’s safety.  That, Tokyo’s apprehension that the next big earthquake will happen near here, and ongoing concerns about the economy and Japan’s declining population, make for an undercurrent of malaise here.

In listening to the talk about the reactors, my thoughts turned to how this might apply in America.  I leave it to you to think about cozy business/governmental relationships and choices we may be asked to make in the future.

Little Adventures.  Any trip is a montage of adventures.  As I get ready to leave Tokyo and head north to the Tohoku region, I thought I’d report on some I’ve had these last few weeks.

Hakone.  This week, Yuko and I went to Hakone, southwest of Tokyo in the Mt. Fuji region.  The last leg of the trip was on a train that zigzagged back and forth up a mountain, stopping at a station then reversing itself along the way.  We first went to the out-door sculpture garden, a nice-sized park of contemporary sculpture, mostly by Japanese but also by Europeans and a few Americans.   There was also a museum of Picasso drawings and ceramics, where the building shook as a small (4.0) earthquake hit somewhere in the region.  The garden was smaller than Storm King, north of New York, and didn’t allow you to walk on the lawn around the sculptures.  But they were interesting pieces, particularly because they were by people I didn’t know.  We especially liked the sculptures made for children to explore.

By a Costa Rican sculptor

Yes, that's a child climbing inside!

In the afternoon we went up the ropeway (i.e. gondola) to the top of the mountain.  By now it was misty, so there are no pictures of us going through the fog, with a descending car emerging out of the white.  As we neared the top, we could look down to see a huge sulfur quarry, used to supply the hot springs below.  By this time it was raining and I decided I really didn’t want to trek around in my sandals over slippery rocks to peer over the edge of the quarry.  We headed back down the mountain, took a train to Tokyo, and stopped at a transfer point to have a great sashimi dinner at a local restaurant. We had a great day, even in the mist and rain.

Sachiko Kashima

The “crazy curator”.  This is a picture of a woman named Sachiko Kashima.  She told me "Sachiko" means “happy” and indeed she is.  I met her a few weeks ago at a gallery in the Ginza section of Tokyo.   Somehow a conversation started, one thing led to another, and she took me to her apartment along with the woman friend she was with.  There I learned she had been a curator at a private museum in Kyoto, where she had put together an exhibition on Noh theatre during the Edo period.  While she specialized in textiles (I think), her training required that she learn about all the arts, so she was expert in pottery, calligraphy, etc.  In between three sets of afternoon tea, each with a different tea and sweet, she showed me a very old, beautiful green Noh costume, scrolls, and lacquer boxes she had collected.  As I left, she handed me a used shibori kimono to use in my quilting and said, “call me and we’ll do something next week.”

I’ve seen her twice since, which is no mean feat since she doesn’t use a computer, is often out when I call her, and we can barely understand each other. The second time she had inadvertently “overbooked” so we first went to a nearby hospital clinic where she had a doctor’s appointment.  Through her and another person I’d met, I learned that everyone in Japan has health insurance and that a hospital/clinic must see everyone that comes in.   You can also choose your doctor, making an appointment at the clinic where he/she works.  The wait may be a bit long, the appointment itself a bit short, but everyone gets treated. 

Next we went to the Mori Museum in a skyscraper to see an exhibit of contemporary Arab art.  I don’t know that she liked it much, and not all of it was good, but it certainly was expressive of a deep anger at a modern soul-less world and the unending, senseless violence between Palestine and Israel, despite religious and political leaders’ statements advocating peace and tolerance.  Afterwards, we went to the observation floor and looked out at Tokyo on a beautiful sunny day.  We finished by having a sashimi dinner nearby and talked about meeting later in the summer in northern Japan. 

It has been an amazing experience with Kashima-sensei and I have no idea why she befriended me.  She is lively, bright, and has a wonderful style about her. She’s also quite strong willed and something of an imp, laughing and making me laugh at what we do together.  I don’t know if we will manage to see each other again, but I will certainly try.

Shoes.  As I rode around Tokyo on the commuter trains, I started noticing the variety of footwear that people wore.  True, there were a lot of black shoes worn by the salary men and women on their way to work.  But there was a lot of style, too, not just worn by women but also men.  There is also a wide variety of socks and stockings that are part of “the outfit”.  One store had a huge display of five-toed socks (popular here), lacy crews, and little “sockettes” with a pretty band across the foot to hold it in place, all in a range of pastels.  So, for the fun of it, here are some of the feet I saw.