T is for Taro, and for tsunami

The year was 1996. Four friends on the equivalent of an American post-college road trip — except this trip was in Japan. I had been traveling alone, by train, northward from Kyoto to Tokyo, where I met my college roommate, Hiroko. Two years before, we had graduated from a small liberal arts college in Indiana, where I had majored in Japanese.

We stayed with Hiroko’s family for a few days in Tokyo before meeting Mariko, a Japanese woman who’d been an exchange student at our alma mater some years before and remained a friend. The three of us got on the Tohoku Shinkansen and headed north to meet by another good college friend, an American named Pete. Pete was teaching English in Morioka for a few years, and he had a car and an apartment there in Iwate Prefecture.

The four of us piled into Pete’s car and drove into the mountains. Northeastern Japan is rugged and cool, with fall colors to rival New England’s. It was late summer, nearly September, and the smell of fall was creeping into the air. We visited small, out of the way tourist stops: A dairy farm, a cave, a hot springs resort nestled in the woods. We snapped pictures of ourselves at the tops of mountains, with the dark green hills in the distance. We took winding hillside roads down to the coast, where fishing villages were trapped between the mountains and the sea.

Pete drove us to  Taro-chi, a small town clustered around a protected cove. A narrow inlet offered a view of the open ocean. The sun dropped and softened rocks along the shore. We took pictures. We read a plaque on a memorial at the docks.

Taro was destroyed by tsunamis in 1611, 1896 and 1933. In 1933, the village lost nearly half of its total population and most of its buildings. The town decided to build a protective tsunami wall, 26 feet in height. It became the largest such seawall in the world. The problem, aside from the earthquake-prone geology of Japan, was that narrow inlet, which protected the boats in storms but channeled powerful tsunami waves inland.

We were respectful, reading that plaque in Taro on a late August afternoon, but the thing about being in your early 20s is that the world seems full of unlimited, shining possibilities. The kind of destruction that comes from stories-high walls of water is unbelievable, an impossibility. A seawall seems like it could be enough. The bravery of those people who lived in Taro, some of whom remembered the 1933 waves, surely could not be tested again.

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Taro was destroyed by tsunamis in 1611, 1896, 1933 and on March 11, 2011.

Links:

The Wall That Taro-cho Built. An article about Taro’s residents who remember the 1933 tsunami and about the building of their seawall.

A photo of Taro’s sea wall, before.

Video (in German) of Taro before, during and after the March 2011 tsunami.

The Red Cross is helping victims of this disaster in Japan. Please donate if you can.

H is for Hokkaido

I lived on the island of Hokkaido for six months. “It’s the northernmost island in Japan,” I used to tell people who looked blank when I told them where I was going. For some people, my explanation did not explain anything. They asked why I’d want to go there. They told me, as if I’d asked, or cared, that they’d never buy a Japanese car.

When I arrived in Sapporo, in March, bulldozers were pushing mountains of snow into the river because there was no where else to put it all.

On Hokkaido, I rode to the top of an Olympic ski jump. I climbed volcanoes, and smelled sulfur that came from deep within the earth. I traveled to the farthest point north on the island, and also to the most southern. I thought I could see Russia.

On Hokkaido, I traveled alone for the first time; I was nineteen. I took a train that snaked along impossible cliffs between the mountains and the sea, and spent nights in cheap inns with bathrooms down the halls. The other guests stared at my white skin.

On Hokkaido, I felt my first earthquake.

On Hokkaido, I got the worst sunburn I’ve ever had — my shins reddened and blistered and later, my blood pooled in a puffy layer around my ankles. On Hokkaido I ate raw scallops the size of half-dollars, right from their shells. I ate raw oysters and raw shrimp and raw clams and raw eggs. I ate crab meat from impossibly hairy, giant crab legs. I gained 20 pounds.

While on Hokkaido I studied and spoke Japanese so constantly that I began to dream in Japanese. I forgot English. In phone calls home, my speech was peppered with Japanese words that seemed to convey more meaning than their English counterparts. I learned ikebana, and tea ceremony, and calligraphy. An old woman played the koto for me. I gave speeches. I danced in a parade.

On Hokkaido, I lost sight of who I was and where I came from. I got drunk four nights a week. I dreamed of going home; I dreaded leaving.

On Hokkaido one evening I soaked in an outdoor hot spring on the shores of an alpine lake. Snow fell into the black of the water and disappeared.

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Joining Charlotte’s Web, Jade Park and The Contact Zone in working through the alphabet with short, memoir-like pieces. It’s called Alphabet: A History.

Previous posts:

A is for Aaron

B is for Biddeford Pool

C is for crème brûlée

D is for dog bite

E is for everything, everything, everything

F is for Fort Wayne

G is for geology

dreaming of Japanese

One of my favorite things about living in Japan was that I began to dream in Japanese.

I had studied Japanese for about six months before I left to live in Japan for part of my sophomore year in college. Once there, I threw myself into an intensive language program: With five other American students, I sat in Japanese classes for four hours a day. We had hours of homework and memorization to do every night. The families we lived with were instructed to speak to us in Japanese only.

Of course our little group of American college students cheated, and we spoke English when we were away from our teachers and our families. But Japanese surrounded us. Every night I went to bed mentally exhausted, worn out from listening hard, from learning new words, from memorizing more kanji. After a month or so I began to dream in Japanese, which our sensei seemed to believe was a sign of crossing a certain line in the learning of a language. It was progress; if you could dream in Japanese, your consciousness was accepting the language, you were thinking in Japanese, rather than thinking about Japanese. Thinking in Japanese was a mantra of sorts, a shining, elusive goal repeated by every teacher of the language I ever had. “If you can think in Japanese,” they said, “soon you will be fluent.” Fluent was a magic word among us. We longed for fluency, but none of us knew how to get there. How can you force yourself to think in Japanese?

I loved dreaming in Japanese, in part for the satisfaction that I might be making the progress my sensei described, but also because when I spoke Japanese in my dreams, my command of the language was much, much better than it was in my waking life. I did not hesitate, I did not fumble for words, or ask for prompts from those I spoke to. I didn’t act out words I didn’t know, and I didn’t flip hurriedly through one of the many dictionaries I carried with me to Japan. In my dreams Japanese soared out of me. I spoke fluently, understood by all. Thought and speech merged, and my sentences contained words I hadn’t studied the meaning or usage of, words that I’d heard on TV or in someone else’s speech. My brain, my dreams revealed, was studying all the time. I was unconsciously storing vocabulary, grammatical structures, speech patterns — fluency — and my dreams let me know that it was all there.

When I woke up I returned to myself — a student struggling to learn a difficult language. Sometimes I said the wrong words, and I needed dictionaries and prompts. It was some time after I’d arrived in Japan that I understood that you can’t force yourself to think in a language you did not grow up speaking. But through some secret combination of study, time, immersion, and desire, it happens. There was no one point at which I noticed it. Gradually it just got easier, I learned more, or perhaps my sleeping brain shared a little of its knowledge with my waking brain. I began to need my reference books less, and I found myself having conversations with people in which I didn’t scramble for words or grammar, and I could make myself understood. My speech became smoother, the Japanese language became more … available. Like in my dreams.

Last night, for the first time in a long time, probably years, I dreamed in Japanese again. Only this time my dream language skills mirrored the state of my waking Japanese. I was rusty, and fumbling for words that I’ve long since let slip away. I switched back and forth between Japanese (when I knew how to express what I wanted to say) and English (when the conversation moved beyond my current grasp of Japanese). The couple I was speaking to in my dream were people I knew in Japan, people who, just like my language skills, I’ve lost to time. I’m no longer in contact with them in my waking life, but their presence in the dream was unremarkable, unsurprising compared to our use of Japanese. I kept repeating, “I’ve forgotten how to speak Japanese, I’m sorry.” After I’d said it for the third or fourth time it occurred to me that I was speaking Japanese even as I said it, that I could say that much without hesitation, and that I understood their polite denials of this fact when they responded.

I woke up feeling as though I had seen an old friend. Despite our awkwardness together, I was pleased that my friend had returned, but I missed the way things used to be.

The Hello Kitty Undead

This is completely random, but I had to share. I found this video by way of the always-something-fun-for-everyone Watashi to Tokyo blog… It’s cute, and yet it’s dark.

Like the Hello Kitty Undead or something.

“Escape from Japan”

An interesting article about Japanese women “escaping” from Japan in the NY Times.

Korean-Japanese cultural exchange

Here’s an interesting look at the proliferation of Korean-Japanese cultural exchange that has been happening despite tensions between the two countries, from the English-language Korea Herald. I didn’t realize that the importation of Japanese cultural products was banned when I was living in Korea…

Korean Cultural News Extravaganza!

Some interesting articles about Korea’s rapid development (and coping with changes wrought by it) made their way into my inbox this week.

• First, a continuation of the article series I posted about a week or so ago, about “international wives” in Korea. This particular article in the series leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable. The wives in this article are unable to visit their families and unable to speak fluently in their husbands’ language. Some of them feel they have to “run away,” which gives me the impression that they are not in Korea by choice. I can’t help but feel that the Korea Herald is trying to put a positive spin on a negative situation, though I give them credit for producing this series of articles.

• Here’s the final article in that series, which is more about policy, but mentions that foreign wives of Korean men will now be entitled to health care and “basic living expenses,” which begs the question, what were they entitled to before?

• This story, about the difficulties of adjusting to the five-day work week, was brought to my attention last week by Steve, who spends his worklife trawling the Internet for just such interesting news. As it originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, I couldn’t post it — the WSJ Online is for subscribers only, boo. But the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has kindly republished it in a more public manner.

• In related news, the ‘Happy Korea Project‘ starts next year.

• Finally, this article is unrelated to the others above, but I find it fascinating. It’s a book review of sorts —a tell-all by the Japanese personal chef to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. I wish I could read this book, but alas, it is only available in Korean and Japanese. (And it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to read Japanese well enough to consider trying to conquer a book, and even then… not so much.) Toward the end of this piece, the reviewer puts forth an odd perspective, which is basically that criticizing a dictator who “indulges himself in luxury while people starve to death” is “excessively moralistic.” Then he cites Stalin as a counter example. Um, yeah. In any case, this is interesting stuff.

East Sea or Sea of Japan?

This to-the-point editorial on the East Sea/Sea of Japan naming issue is one of the better pieces of opinion writing I’ve seen about it. If you aren’t familiar with this issue, about.com offers an interesting view of the controversy, as does this article.

This dispute has been going on for years. Some of the students I taught in Korea corrected me on the name of the body of water between Japan and Korea with no small amount of exasperation. Never mind that outside of Korea, (and in the English language, as the above editorial notes) “Sea of Japan” was the commonly accepted name of the sea.

Part of the problem for Korean speakers of English, though, is that in Korean (somebody please correct me if I am wrong), the name of the sea is “Dong Hae,” which directly translates into English as “East Sea.”

But that was not why my students refused to use “Sea of Japan.” They perceived a slight in the name: Why should the sea be named for Japan when it just as obviously bordered Korea?

In Japanese the sea is called Nihon Kai (日本海); which directly translates into English as “Japan Sea.” It’s not clear to me whether the name is a legacy of Japanese imperialism or a vestige of the era when European and American ships explored these waters. What was clear to me is that the name stuck and Koreans weren’t happy about it. The East Sea was another notch in a long collection of offenses by Japan. The name of a body of water, no matter how entrenched in international cartography, shipping, and even political communications, could be a slight to be recorded, talked about, and stewed over for years.

As it is still.

Little earthquakes

I have decided that I don’t like earthquakes. The first one I ever felt was in Japan. It was early morning, I was happily sleeping in the 2nd floor bedroom of my host family’s house, and then, suddenly, I wasn’t sleeping and the house was swaying and creaking. I gripped my bed until it was over. Then I waited. I waited for the family to get up, to compare notes, to sigh with relief that it had ended, that it wasn’t stronger. But the house was quiet. I looked out the window. The neighborhood was empty of activity.

When I later saw my host family at breakfast I asked about the earthquake. “Did you feel it?”
They looked at me blankly. “There was no earthquake,” they said. I argued. They insisted I had been dreaming.

Later, in the newspaper, I found a tiny block of text buried on some back page. It listed the size of the earthquake I had felt at 3.3. Tiny, by earthquake standards. Not even noticed by most people, the blurb said.

Which is when I began to consider this: Are people who grow up in earthquake-prone areas born with some kind of alternate equilibrium that allows them not to notice when the earth shakes and their homes sway unnaturally back and forth, causing objects to rattle and fall of shelves? Because I sure am not able to ignore it.

Last night Billy and I were sitting on the couch when our building began to shake, then sway. The movement was visible — outside everything seemed to hold constant. We were the ones moving. An illusion, I know. The swaying and shaking continued for what seemed like a long time. Long enough for us to have a conversation about it; long enough for me to envision our new house jumping off its foundation before we have a chance to move in.

It was strong enough for Billy to get up and walk over to the TV (which is new and sleek and top heavy) and hold it against the motion; it had been rocking back and forth precariously, as if it would topple onto the floor. One of our picture frames tumbled from the mantle. Frames on the walls were suddenly askew.

And then it stopped. I have lived in California long enough now to know that it wasn’t a big earthquake. When I looked it up a few minutes later I discovered it was only a 4.4 centered some 45 miles away in northern Sonoma County. The problem is that they all seem like big earthquakes to me.

Out of curiousity, Billy called some friends of ours who live in Marin, closer to the center of the quake. J., who grew up in LA, said with the nonchalance I have grown used to in long-time residents of California, “Oh, was there an earthquake?”

I theorized that because our friends’ home is newer construction than our circa 1911 duplex, they might have felt less of the shaking. But I don’t really believe it. Am I more sensitive to the earth’s violence? Probably not. I just haven’t gotten used to it, I guess.

But I don’t know that I ever will.

Murakami, some washoku, and a bath

Since I seem to be on a book theme this weekend, I thought I’d pass along three Japan-related book reviews I found myself reading this weekend for one reason or another:

• The Japan Times has a quirky little review of a nonfiction work focused solely on Japanese baths, or onsen.

• Berkeley’s Ten Speed Press (which by the way has a fancy new web site) came out last year with Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, but it’s taken a year for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to review it.
Though this seems like an obvious spot for it, I’ll refrain from adding a Milwaukee put down.

• Finally, most Haruki Murakami fans are probably aware that he has a new collection of stories coming out, but I’m a little slow with these things. Thankfully, there’s Bookslut, and now I’m all caught up, with this review.

Revisiting Japan through books

We have started packing up our apartment already. We aren’t actually moving for nearly a month, but we are eager to get on with it, and we don’t want to leave all of the packing til the end.
Aside from this meaning that our apartment is in a complete, utter state of disarray, strewn with boxes (both full and empty), packing means that I have been revisiting some beloved possessions.

It’s strange how you can live with the same books, pictures and other knickknacks on the shelf in your living room for five years, but still forget about them. This is particularly true of books. I have so many, and there are quite a few that I insist on lugging from one apartment to the next simply because I can’t bear to give them up.
Some of my favorites are my travel books, Lonely Planets and the like, which remind me of places I have been. But equally treasured are my language books, particularly my Japanese texts.
I guess I have quite a collection of books about Japan, which I am quite proud of. All those kanji dictionaries remind me of how hard I worked to learn Japanese, how many hours I spent flipping through pages, counting strokes, squinting at radicals and trying desperately to figure out the correct reading of a combination of characters.

(Of course, now learning Japanese –or probably any other language for that matter– is sooo much simpler. Not to be all “I walked barefoot in the snow uphill 10 miles to school” or anything, but seriously, I am amazed at the tools now out there to study Japanese. I stumbled upon Rikai not long ago, and wow, so cool. No more flipping through kanji dictionaries for hours to read just a few sentences. You just run your cursor over the characters you don’t know. This dictionary is pretty unbelievable too. Just click the boxes on the radicals you recognize that make up the character in question, and it pulls up possible matches. So, so cool. But I digress.)

All those fancy tools don’t make me want to give up my many dictionaries and other language textbooks. If anything, I want to hold on to them more. OK, so I don’t look at them much anymore (my Japanese is horribly rusty, something I hope to do something about once I finish my @#%!! thesis), but it’s nice to know they are there for when I am ready to pick up my studies again.

And it’s nice to be able to remember how far along I was in Japanese. Occasionally, I pick up one of my old textbooks and see my scribbles and notes in the margins of page-long Japanese texts, and I wonder who the heck it was who could understand Japanese so well. Because now, not so much. I blink at the characters and know that I once understood what they meant. Which I guess is a little depressing.

One last thing…One of my other favorite Japan-related books is my Bilingual Atlas of Japan. It’s a fun book to flip through, to examine the geography of the country, to remember where I’ve been. But as I’ve said, I love maps.

OK, two last things. This  is my 200th posting. Yay! Thank you, readerly people, for being readerly.

Ramen night

Or ramyun night, in this case. Korean instant noodles.

When Billy is out of town I tend to look for easy meals…I just don’t feel like cooking anything too complex when it’s just me. Sometimes, I cook things that I know he doesn’t like— dishes that have a lot of onions in them, for example. But last night I just made my favorite Korean instant noodles.

They are by no means healthy, filled with salt and MSG I am sure, but I love them all the same. I got into the habit of eating them when I lived in Korea; it was an easy meal after a long night of teaching English. The family I lived with always had a rice cooker full of hot rice ready in the kitchen, and so I often had a bowl of rice with my spicy noodles (no fear of carbs here!) and would dip a spoonful of the rice into the fiery broth. Yum.

My friend J. says Shin Ramyun are the “best ramen ever.” I don’t disagree; they are definitely my go-to noodles. There are occasions when I am not in the mood for spicy, and then I’ll choose one of Shin Ramyun’s more mild-mannered Japanese shelfmates. I prefer miso-based ramen (my favorite is actually a Chinese style ramen) to shoyu (soy sauce based), but there is even a shoyu brand or two that I buy every so often. My most frequent instant noodle purchase by far, however, is Shin Ramyun.

Of course, instant noodles have nothing on their fresh noodle cousins, and packaged fresh noodles have nothing on those made fresh by hand. Having lived in Sapporo, Japan, which many people say is the ramen capital of the country, I like to think I’ve eaten some the better ramen out there. But the best ramen I ever had in Japan was actually in Morioka, in Northern Honshu. (Sorry Sapporoites!)

Morioka is a quiet mountain city, prone to heavy snows. I visited in August, and I imagine the ramen would be doubly good when the temperatures were cold. The ramen that holds my best-ever title had a country-style flavor to it; made-that-day noodles sat in a hearty miso broth. The ramen was topped with assorted fresh veggies — the one that most sticks in my mind, perhaps because it was seemed an unusual topping for ramen, was fresh buttery corn shaved right off the cob. The dish was served in a heavy ironware pot —ironware being a craft Morioka is known for. Eating those plump kernels of corn in the salty-sweet miso….so delicious. I remember my friend Hiroko and I being so overcome by how good the ramen was that we had to keep putting our chopsticks down. We both ate past full, because the noodles were so good.

Despite the fact that my favorite instant noodles come from Korea, I actually don’t remember eating ramyun in Korea so often. When
it came to noodles, naeng myun (cold noodles), often made from wheat or rice, usually won out. But I did make ramyun with some of the elementary school students I taught. We added red pepper paste and tteokboki to make a kind of spicy stew.

When I lived in Sapporo, I was often told that ramen came about because when Ghengis Khan and his men roamed about Asia, they needed something convenient to eat. So they cooked noodles and ate them out of their helmets. I have not idea whether this is true or not, but it’s a fun image to consider.