Gregblog

About Safety, Life, and Danger

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:08:23 +0900

On March 11, 2011, I had just returned to Tokyo from two weeks of research and filmmaking in Palau, and I was riding the Hibiya Subway Line to Ginza. It was an ordinary day, albeit cloudy and somehow sinister. I felt tired, a bit stressed, and so I figured that before getting into the rhythm of preparing my lessons for the new semester, I would go and do some yoga.

As I rode the subway, I was tapping away busily on my iPhone, trying to sort out my thoughts—things I had to do, things that worried me, things that really Seemed To Matter. How would I transport my books from my office at the University of Tokyo to my new office at Hitotsubashi University? Where would I buy my new shoes? Would anything unexpected come up on the results of the physical exam I had done for my new job? I realized I was filled with fear-- silly fears, but fears nonetheless.

At exactly 2:47 PM, moments out of Tsukiji Station, my little “Note to Self” had turned into a self-soothing journal entry, and I was literally writing the words, “But those are just fears and none are based in reality,” when the subway ground to violent halt and I was almost knocked off my feet where I was standing. My immediate thought was, “Damn, I’m going to be late for yoga again!!!”

And then silence. People read their newspapers, played with their cell phones. The conductor came on, his voice oddly strained as he told us that there had been a serious earthquake and that we needed to stop for safety reasons. Silence again.

And then we actually felt what he was referring to as the train lurched back and forth uneasily in the dark tunnel, rocked by the massive tremors that were rippling down Honshu from the epicenter off Japan’s northeast coast. They came again and again. Some people looked alarmed. Others continued to read the paper, as if nothing were going on. But clearly it was an abnormal earthquake, and nothing like I had ever experienced in my life.

Of course I forgot about my silly journal entry, about my little fears. Strangely what I felt was not fear. I felt instead an overpowering wave of what felt like sadness. And shock, I suppose. Shock is different from fear, because while fear is thinking about unwanted events, shock can be the actual experience of the unexpected. Sadness and shock. The incredibly certain feeling that something very, very awful had happened.

Then came the realization that perhaps I would spend my final moments trapped in a subway in a dark tunnel underground. Later I would edit this fear to include dreadful thoughts about being stuck in a tunnel underground as seawater filled the station from a massive tsunami hitting the harborside area of Tokyo where we were (after all, Tsukiji is the site of the famous fish markets!)

Instead, the train backed up to Tsukiji station, and we were all let off out the back of the subway onto the edge of the platform. Everyone was outstandingly calm, quiet, orderly. I was overwhelmed by curiosity about what was going on above.

Back up in the bright March sunshine, however, it looked strangely like an ordinary day. Crowds of people still walked the streets shopping in Ginza, though all the trains had stopped, buses were frozen in the middle of the road, and most cars weren’t moving. Most pedestrians seemed as if they hadn’t even realized what was going on. The police were amazingly mobilized, though-- already stretched out along the sides of the road leading to the Imperial Palace, with helicopters already in the air blaring crowd control messages, imploring everyone to stay calm and stay away from the buildings.

I looked up and experienced my first aftershock-- the traffic lights vigorously swaying, the trees, and then the skyscrapers above them, swaying just as turbulently. It was as surreal as everyone who has blogged about these first moments has described it all. And what was even more surreal was how calm everything was.

I would soon join in the slow-moving parade of displaced commuters who chose to walk the long way home. The weather was fine, I knew the way, and I figured I’d get my exercise walking instead of with yoga. Yet, as I walked and the crowds grew and grew, news began to pour in, via my weak internet connection to Facebook and Twitter, and via the radios and televisions in shop windows, and the gravity of the situation began to sink in.

By “gravity,” I mean that yes, I saw those horrifying images of the tsunami on television too, the grisly scenes of destruction and unbelievable catastrophe. But what was also going through my mind at that moment was how the very ground upon which I stood in Tokyo also suddenly felt so uncertain, so fragile, and so trivial. There was on one hand a huge wave of shock and grief about what had happened to those tens of thousands of people up north, followed by a guilty sense of relief that Tokyo had been spared, followed by another horrible wave of anxiety characterized by the thought, “but HAVE we really been spared, or are we NEXT?”

As I walked through the cold evening streets of Shinjuku that night, I felt a heartwarming sense of solidarity with everyone in this great metropolis, which eased my worry. I thought about all the dear, dear people I love in Japan. My partner, my surrogate families and dearest close friends. Unable to contact them as the cell phone lines were jammed, I felt so isolated and estranged; yet so connected to the other people on the street, complete strangers.

Since March 11, much has been said about how the international media sensationalized the unprecedented, or at least millenial, earthquake and tsunami--and later the nuclear reactor meltdown--that Japan has been facing. I have felt personally disgusted by the outright racism and patronization with which foreign media, or even carpetbagging Japan Studies scholars, have treated this “scoop” and tried to link it up with Japanese animation stories or various pop fantasy apocalypse scenarios, without grasping the reality and the tangible emotional humanity of this experience. Without a trace of respect for the enormous loss of life and transformation of lives that has taken place.

But little has been said about Tokyo’s own self-centered worry about its own fate. Granted, the Fukushima Daiichi Reactor has caused all sorts of hype and speculation about the possible (but we now know unlikely) danger of being in Tokyo. And there have been reports of the “exodus” of so many foreigners (or “flyjin” as they tend to be called), and just as many Japanese who fled the capital in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. In fact, I too, was so upset by the constant barrage of aftershocks that I hastened a planned departure to Shimonoseki to spend a few blissful weeks on solid ground in Western Japan until things calmed down.

In the end, this story isn’t really about us here in Tokyo, though. It was about countless numbers of victims in Tohoku and other places in Eastern Japan who were either killed or seriously displaced by the earthquakes and tsunamis, or evacuated indefinitely due to radiation dangers. For those people who continue to huddle in evacuation shelters, while bearing aftershocks much larger than we’ve ever felt here in Tokyo, I feel much compassion and heartache.

But back here in Tokyo, I have begun to wonder more and more about what it really means to be “safe.” As I took that subway ride on March 11, my notion of safety had more to do with comfort: nice shoes, a decent salary, excellent health, and so forth. It then shifted to something very visceral and urgent: Is my apartment building strong enough to withstand these sudden tremors? When is the next one coming? Is The Big One coming? Will I be irradiated? My earlier “what-ifs” obsolete, I was now seized with a certainty in my worry that all was not quite okay anymore.

I hate pundits and speculative scientists these days. My worry leads me down the internet rabbit hole and before I know it I’ve found some outspoken scientist, like the guy at UC Davis, who insists that Tokyo is doomed and a huge earthquake is coming because of seismic pressure displacement on the already unstable fault convergences near here. Or the guy in Christchurch who happily suggests that Tokyo has been “spared” and will continue to be safe as the surrounding fault lines slowly kick off their pent-up stress.

Then there are people like my meteorologist friend in Miyazaki, who, in no unspecific terms, said, “the next Great Kanto Earthquake is coming pretty soon, so be prepared, and I pray for your sake that you’re in an unpopulated area when it hits.” What, I actually argued with him, is the point of that kind of warning? I couldn’t help thinking that he was deriving some sadistic pleasure in foretelling the apocalypse. When I followed up with, “And couldn’t it just as well be true that this huge earthquake has alleviated that cycle and reduced that likelihood?” He seemed almost defeated when I said this, as I stole the lead in his drama of dangerous and unpredictable calamity: “Maa, sono kanosei mo arun dakedo ne” (That possibility exists too, I guess), he answered.

As the weeks pass, however, my perspective is changing. Forgive the cliché, but maybe living in Eastern Japan now has assumed the excitement of downhill skiing, another “risky” activity. Not even that risky. Not even as risky, really, as riding a motorcycle without a helmet. We engage in adventurous behavior--like riding roller coasters-- because we are willing to stretch our comfort zones in exchange for fun. We fly in planes and ride cars that could very easily explode or collide in mid-journey; yet we accept the “risk.”

I’m not saying that everyone has a choice about whether or not to keep living in this part of Japan, or even to imply that Japan is in any way “unsafe.” It’s the categorization of safety versus danger, and how we internalize that ideology, that fascinates me nowadays. Japan is one of the most seismically active places in the world; yet I never felt slightly endangered until March 11, 2011.

I am inspired by my fellow Tokyoites, and even more inspired by the folks up north. Lately when the aftershocks come, they’re fairly big, and things really shake. But people always seem to look so calm, complacent, even while my own heart races. But even for me, the feeling passes and soon the calm returns. It’s a bit like living life on the edge in some ways, but at the same time feeling more and more like the level of ease with which we accept typhoons and thunderstorms.

I am grateful for this experience, despite my increasing loathing for aftershocks and all seismic activity. It does make me stronger for sure, and at the very least it’s making me more and more aware of the goodness of uncertainty in life. At the same time, it’s making me realize that I can be the source of my own safety-- that safety is really more a state of mind sometimes than an actual, external thing. This isn’t to say that it’s safe to be in the vicinity of the Fukushima reactor, or safe to lie down in the path of a speeding locomotive. But our natural impulse as humans is to survive, and I know that we all will ride these changing waves consciously and vigilantly. The choice of weather to feel hope or dread is another matter. On my good days, the prospects of a newly emerging consciousness here in Japan--one in which it’s okay to prioritize one’s own dreams over various social rules and constructs-- or family and relationships over work and corporate culture--is thrilling. On my non-so-good days, I am haunted by the spectres of destruction etched in my memory.

But life requires un-knowing and un-certainty. It requires the embrace of each moment with a readiness to dive into the danger of adventure and the will to keep on living. And more than ever, life requires love. To love and be grateful for all that we are, all that we have been blessed with, and all that surrounds us-- and to be filled up with that love so much that you have little choice but to feel joy. I recommit to this kind of big love for life, for the people in my life, and most certainly for Japan, this archipelago that has given so much love to me all these years. I am glad to stay and take this journey, however bumpy, to the new discoveries that await.

TREK

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:36:00 +0900

When my mom sold the house in Medford, New Jersey, I was living in Hawaii and doing my master’s degree. It didn’t bother me that much by that point. She had already shocked my brother and me about only three years after my Dad died from skin cancer and she began insisting on selling the big contemporary wooden house she and my Dad built together—their dream house that they both planned and let me even design my own room in, the cozy wooden house that probably still bears my deepest secrets etched into the foil of the insulation fiberglass boards up in the attic; the house that smelled of love and sleep and garlic from the kitchen.

So I flew back to Medford for one last time, in a bit of a hurry, in the dead of winter, wearing my University of Hawaii sweatshirt and ready to clean my old room just a few weeks before the house fell into the hands of some dry conservative Jewish couple and their fat pimply daughter Maureen who would live in my room with her braces and diaries and boring clothes and all the stuff that adolescent conservative Jewish girls like.

My mom booked me a flight with her miles on ATA airlines, which is like the generic brand of airline. I was routed through places I’d heard of but never been—Austin, Nashville, and then eventually Chicago O’Hare, which was so snowed out that my connecting flight was cancelled and ATA had to send me across the city to the other airport so I could catch a flight on American.

The rest of the trip is a blur, except there were lots of people speaking in New Jersey accents and I felt glad that I lived in Hawai’i and had a tan and that I didn’t live in New Jersey anymore. And my mom plied me with various soups. And we fought a few times for no apparent reason.

A couple months later, back in Honolulu, I took receipt of my Dad’s old bike, a Trek touring bike-- a 12-speed slim bike that these days looks like some sort of retro collector’s item even though it was new when he bought it in 1986 or whenever that was. I inherited this bike. We had always ridden through the countryside around our house in New Jersey summer, the cornfields whirring with the sounds of crickets, dripping with the sweet dew of dusk, a Friday afternoon before a weekend at the seashore in Barnegat Light, the blueberry fields, the shrubby pine barren forests, the barking dogs of Vincentown, the old red barns and silos of the rural landscapes that spread out in yet undeveloped farmlands of the south of our state where we lived.

I had thought of myself, when I lived in New Jersey, as an Island boy. I had grown up in the Marshall Islands. I didn’t know from farmlands or corn on the cob or horses or Philadelphia. Yet living as I did from eighteen in Japan and back in Hawaii and the Pacific, and after my Dad had died, New Jersey had its own different nostalgia and homeyness that I missed surprisingly much.

I started riding my Dad’s Trek when he was still very alive. I had been riding a Peugeot bike my parents bought for me for my 15th birthday present for a few years when my parents suddenly decided they wanted a tandem bicycle. My Mom and Dad would both dress up in these ridiculous biking uniforms--my father in a tight spandex yellow stretch shirt and black lycra shorts, my mom in a black and turquoise stretch suit. In their matching helmets they looked like two insects—my bumblebee of a father and my beetle of a mother. I always felt like a bit of a guest riding my Dad’s bicycle—he guarded it preciously with a cold and authoritative gaze, even as he rode in the front seat of his tandem. He had spent a lot on it, on its computers, its tires, its various accessories and racks and lights. He didn’t like that I preferred riding it instead of the Peugeot—it was his baby, not mine, but he let me ride it anyway—with serious reservations.

So four years after my Dad died, when the Trek showed up in its cardboard bike box at Hale Manoa, the dormitory of the East-West Center where I was living with Tatsuya at the University of Hawai’i, a powerful moment of awkward nostalgia washed over me. I didn’t feel deserving of this bike. I felt afraid it would get stolen by someone down in Waikiki who had no idea about the bike’s history. It was not a junky enough bike to just ride to the supermarket on, or a bike to bum down to the beach on.

But I needed a bicycle pretty seriously, so soon I was using it as my main means of transportation and riding from Manoa all the way out to Hawai’i Kai, to Hanauma Bay, to Sandy Beach, even all the way to Lanikai. Most days I took it shopping with me down to Moilili or down to Waikiki and over to Ala Moana. Each night I’d take it up with me in the elevator the 6th floor of Hale Manoa where I would park it near the communal kitchens and lock it up.

Despite my earlier tendency to worry about the bike, in time I began to take it for granted, to ride it on sidewalks and let it get bashed up, to let the tires wear down and to speed it through Honolulu traffic. In time I learned where to get the bike serviced and how to change the tubes myself.

When I moved to Australia for my doctorate degree I presumed I would need to sell the bike until my friends in Canberra urged me to bring the bike along, that I would need it. I was amazed when Qantas didn’t even charge me extra baggage for the bike, which was again in its box.

And so it came to pass that even though Tatsuya broke up with me and didn’t follow me to Australia, the Trek—and the spirit of my Dad—came along for the ride. Together we sped through the savage and sad dry winter of the Australian Capital Territory, along Lake Burley Griffin, to Parliament House, to the National Gallery. And in time my Dad’s bike took me out to the farmer’s markets in Fyshwick and to friendlier places like Hackett where my dear friends Simon and Marg lived. And soon the bike was a total part of my Canberra lifestyle. I would take it to the mall to do grocery shopping, on spins around the lake on the biking path—an almost magical bikeride through forests populated by kangaroos and cockatoos.

And finally I got my PhD and left Australia to return to friendly old Japan where I have lived for the longest in this life of mine. Moving to Tokyo, to Hatagaya, near Shinjuku, it was a no-brainer that I should take the Trek with me here as well. And so Allied Pickfords delivered the bike again, in its trusty cardboard box, to the apartment where I am living again with Tatsuya here in the middle of this metropolis.

That was last year. Now I have fixed up my Dad’s old bike with new flashing lights and lots of gear, gotten it serviced and cleaned up. I use it to speed to the gay part of Shinjuku now, where I spend late nights making up for a week of sitting in front of my computer. I leave on Fridays at maybe midnight and race through the streets, down the busy highways of Koshu Kaido and Yamate Dori until I reach the neon lights of Shinjuku and speed off to Ni-Chome, Boys Town. I speed the same bike that once rode through cornfields in South Jersey and Waikiki beachfront and kangaroo country through crowds of Japanese friends drinking in the streets, waving at me as I ride by.

I gotta go home, it’s late.

How are you going, taxi?

No, I have a bike.

Maji de? Are you for real?

Yeah, on this bike it’s only 10 minutes away

Ii naa... I’m jealous, they say, waiting until 6AM for the train to take them home after a debaucherous night of too much booze and not enough boys.

And I speed off on my Dad’s bike, smelling of clubby smoke and vodka tonics, breezing through the streets, past ramen shops and late-night convenience stores, past the streets of taxis, under the skyscrapers of West Shinjuku, and back to my home, my ever-changing home that seems so permanent and yet is always in flux.

The Chronicles of Hernia

Fri, 2 Jan 2009 09:37:50 +0900

It is a new year, a time when I tend to try to commit and recommit to new ways of being in the world, to correct some of my old ways of doing things, and to set things straight, but actually I devoted almost ALL of 2008 to doing that. In 2008, after an almost total meltdown upon finishing my PhD dissertation, I committed to reclaiming my good health, getting back into financial integrity, and to really having fun in my life again--- all very wholesome intentions that were easier to say than realize. But somehow I managed to really get my life moved on to a new chapter, and by the end of 2008, I felt totally new and improved.

One of the finishing touches I made on my 2008 renewal was getting a long-awaited hernia operation in Tokyo. Amidst my various medical exams for the burnout I experienced at the end of 2007, I discovered I had an inguinal hernia (the polite way of saying that I had a hernia in my groin). Having had two hernias when I was a baby, I had known that I was genetically predisposed to getting hernias, and so it didn’t surprise me all that much, but my doctors in Australia and the US warned that I should probably get it fixed within a year, lest it get any worse.

Since I was on such a health kick, I was actually excited by the prospects of some mechanical repair on my body. The only problem was that because this was elective surgery, there was no chance to get it done within a few months. That made it impossible to get it done while I was still living in Australia or briefly in the US in the spring. Also, without comprehensive health insurance in anywhere but Japan, it made the most sense to wait until I settled in Tokyo.

This turned out to be a wise decision. I went to Tokyo University Hospital back in June and met a very friendly surgeon named Nishida-sensei, who was actually a year younger than me, spoke excellent English (although we spoke Japanese mostly), and who was fascinated in my research; so we immediately became friends and agreed to even go out drinking sometime-- all before we even set the date for my surgery.

Fade out, fade in.

I had expected to get the operation done in the summer, but Tokyo University Hospital being as huge and busy hospital as it is, it wasn’t until the beginning of December that I finally got invited for my procedure. Unlike in the States, where a simple hernia operation is an outpatient deal, in Japan, where healthcare is plentiful and well-funded by the national health insurance scheme, a good hospital like Tokyo University Hospital actually encourages patients to stay in the hospital as long as possible to promote healing. I had to be admitted for three days, including a whole day before the surgery.

I had always feared Japanese hospitals somewhat, mainly because of some horrific negative experiences out in the countryside at private clinics run by corrupt old men. But if the backwater rural clinics of Kyushu are like rustic Mom and Pop shops, Tokyo University Hospital is like a high-tech futuristic mega mall, completely controlled with electronic medical records and very automated systems throughout. It is clean, streamlined, efficient, and--oddly--kind of fun.

After admitting myself to the hospital, I found my way to the 9th floor surgery ward, a very modern wing decorated in mild pinks and mauves. I was met immediately by a spunky, boyish nurse in her early twenties named Sayuri. She was so cheerful and “kawaii” that I felt like I had signed up for a three-day Disney vacation rather than a patch-up operation that would leave me with a painful groin.

Sayuri was slightly awkward but giddy with me, apparently not used to dealing with so young a patient. With Japan’s rapidly aging population, big hospitals tend to serve the elderly, almost as if they were intensive-care nursing homes. Indeed, my hospital mates were all cute elderly Japanese folk, many of whom spoke in heavily-inflected regional dialects, revealing how they had taken treks to the capital for one surgical procedure or another. In fact I was also alone in the relative triviality of my hernia operation compared to the various other gastrointestinal woes that faced my comrades.

After orienting me to my new surroundings, Sayuri instructs me to don a pair of hospital-issued green striped pajamas, and to walk in this getup throughout the hospital in slippers to attend to a number of medical tests like x-rays and blood tests. She also cheerfully provides me with a small shopping list and asks me to buy a diaper and a loincloth from the convenience store in the lobby.

Hm???!!! Yes, a diaper and a loincloth, in Japanese, “omutsu” and “T-jitai,” meaning the kind of tie-on loincloth like soldiers wore in the Pacific war under their uniforms--a piece of cotton that looks like a T on the front and the back when tied-- a broad square of cloth on both sides. These would be necessary, Sayuri explains, because when it’s time for surgery the doctors would need to quickly strip me down, and later I would be unable to get out of bed for 24 hours. Okaaaay....

Sayuri dispenses this advice with the same snappy, happy, cute expression that she has used since the moment we met. To add to the surrealism of the moment, she proceeds to tell me that she needs to shave me “down there,” and that I should hit my call button when I’m ready for this. Yippee!!

In the end none of this is that bad, nor that humiliating-- all thanks to the overall “Hello Kitty” vibe that this hospital ward has to it. Come six o’clock, we patients all merrily saunter with our intravenous tubes on happy rolling poles, to eat happily-prepared, tasty, healthy Japanese food on cute plastic dishes in our happy cafeteria on the ninth floor. At the entrance, we scan our barcode hospital bands and a grandmotherly woman in an apron passes us our personalized meals. We then sit and socialize by the windows overlooking Ueno and Central Tokyo.

My team of doctors are all young, having all graduated from the Medical School. They explain the ins and outs of my procedure, and my anesthesiologists separately explain what they will be doing. They tell me they will use a synthetic mesh and plugs that look like little badminton birdies to patch the herniated areas of my abdominal lining. The margin for error is minimal, but it probably will be a few months before I can lift anything heavy. It all sounds easy and friendly, and the way my doctors explain it it’s as if we’re all working together to bake a cake or something.

In the evening I talk to Tatsuya on the phone. He doesn’t seem to grasp the full drama of my hospitalized situation, or what’s funny about having a team of cute happy nurses and doctors doting on you 24 hours a day.

At around 9PM my nurses give me some medication and knock me out for the night. I am awoken at the crack of dawn by my doctor, Nishida-sensei, who tells me he needs to mark the “area.” He pulls down my pants and makes a big X between my thigh and my pelvis with a black magic marker. Then another one of my doctors comes in and inserts an IV needle into my arm. She screws up the first time in her attempts to make a “route” for the IV tube, leaving me in excruciating pain in the forearm. As I wince, she asks, “hari ga nigate desu ka?” (do you dislike needles?). I answer, “who LIKES them?” She doesn’t grasp the humor.

I spend the morning imbibing saline solution and sugar water through my wrist, chatting with my nurses and visiting with friends on my cell phone. In the midst of a long-distance call with my brother Tim in LA, Sayuri comes in around noon and tells me that “The time has come.”

But this, too, proceeds with the same merry, Hello-Kittyesque feel of my hospital stay so far. Getting off the phone with Tim, I stand up and undress, and Sayuri ties on my brand new loincloth. I feel a brief moment of strange identification with Japanese sailors back in the war, after which Sayuri puts on my yukata robe and escorts me out into the hall, as I wheel my IV bottle beside me. She carries a blue canvas shoulder bag packed with my diaper, my glasses, and a few other personal effects--as if she is my babysitter taking me off to daycare. As we pass the nurses’ station, all ten nurses there stand up and happily wave us off with a bow and a smile.

“Itte-rasshai!!!” they all shout, “Have a nice trip!”

As I walk with Sayuri, I explain to her how this would never happen in an American hospital, with health care stretched to its limits and an insurance crisis that keeps people from getting the kind of pleasant and meaningful care they deserve. I also explain how unlikely it would be to be waved off cheerily by all of your nurses before walking yourself to surgery! She tells me she can’t imagine how it could be any different than it is in Japan.

Arriving at the surgery floor, the environment changes. The pace is quickened and tense, and it feels more “ER”-ish. But still, the same friendliness is maintained. Entering the surgery center, Sayuri and I are seated on a couch in the entrance, where we wait for the surgical team to arrive. She giggles and asks if I’m nervous. “No, actually I’m really curious,” I respond. In fact I wasn’t nervous at all.

Well, that sort of changed when I noticed the stretcher in front of me, where a team of doctors was frantically trying to stop the bleeding on some sort of emergency case. I could have sworn I saw parts of a human face dangling off. Not exactly the sight one desires for reassurance of a calm and tranquil surgical experience.

But soon my doctors come, and they are quite calm and optimistic. It is a team of at least eight people--three surgeons, two anesthesiologists, and three other nurses. They ask me about my allergies, put one of those surgical shower caps on my head and then chat with me as they lead me by foot through the surgical center in my slippers, loincloth, and yukata, dragging my IV thing beside me. We pass one operation after another unfolding in a vast maze of myriad interconnected operating rooms enclosed in glass. The scene is so futuristic that it fascinates me more than it frightens me. In fact it looks rather like the infirmary bay on the Starship Enterprise.

Finally we reach my operating theater, at the very back of the center. At the center of the room is a puffy white operating table, surrounded by tables of tools and various gadgets, lights, robotic arms, mounted cameras, and a number of other mysterious devices. The walls are an unusual dark seafoam color, and new-age healing music is playing softly through a high-tech surround-sound stereo system. There is something Kubrickian about all of this—the whites, the greens, the sterility and futurama of it all. It is like a scene out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

They lay me on the table and ask if I have any musical requests. They laugh and smile. One nurse seems to be there for the sole purpose of holding my hand and reassuring me—which I realize is quite nice, now that I realize that I am about to be sliced open by my friend Nishida-sensei, who comes in and winks at me, giving me the peace sign as he starts poking at my groin with his gloved fingers. The doctors roll me on my side and gently proceed to insert a spinal anesthesia catheter into my back, to numb my lower body. They test the effectiveness of this anesthesia by touching a chunk of ice to my chest and asking if it feels cold, then by touching it to parts of my lower body to see if I have any feeling down there. As one would expect, I become totally numb.

What surprises me, however, is the way in which they manage to paralyze my whole left leg as well. Not only do I lose all sensation, but I am completely unable to move or feel my leg moving at all. It is as if my leg has been amputated. When the team rolls me back so that I am facing up, I ask them why they kept my left leg bent. They ask me to look down at my leg, and I discover to my horror that in fact it is no longer bent, but outstretched, but the “phantom limb” in my mind feels totally bent, if not cramped.

In my enthusiasm, I continue to blab on to my doctors as they start the procedure, and a curtain is drawn in front of my face to hide me from the gore that is unfolding down below. The anesthesiologists, noting my loquaciousness, decide to knock me out with a mild sedative-- which was probably a good idea, because I had a wonderful sleep with many happy dreams, only awaking after they had patched me up and stuck a happy little bandage over the incision. It was, of course, decorated with Japanese cartoon characters.

As my doctors rolled me back to my hospital room, I was filled with joy and a strange sense of delight as I looked at all of them, their young and friendly faces looking down at me. I found myself talking to them in casual Japanese— “Minna honto ni wakai yo ne-- datte tame ka sore yori wakakunai?” I asked, “ You guys are all so young-- I mean, you’re about my age or younger, aren’t you?” Indeed, it turned out that most of them were in their mid-twenties, and the oldest was only 38. Then again, I’m already 35, which I guess is a pretty average age to be a doctor anyway.

Nishida-sensei apologized to various other patients in the elevators who saw how talkative I was, “He’s just a little high on anesthesia-- no need to worry...”

But in fact I felt great not because of any medication but because of the tremendous relief one feels from knowing they are in good hands, that human beings can and do take care of one another, and that I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

That evening Tatsuya comes to see me, in fact only an hour after my surgery is done. It is at this point that I realize what I must look like, wearing an oxygen mask, needles taped into my arm and my spine, a blood oxygen and blood pressure monitor constantly running, the beeping of a heart monitor, my legs wrapped tightly to prevent clotting, and-- much to my horror--a catheter in my bladder to catch my pee! If one were not adequately informed, they think I was the victim of a horrendous car accident in intensive care. The whole thing is rather overkill, and it shocks Tatsuya a bit. He begs me to get out of the hospital as soon as possible, that I don’t belong there. But in fact I’m enjoying the whole thing.

It’s also nice when one of the nurses gives me a whole body massage. Where am I, in a health retreat?

By the next day, however, I am up and walking again, and all my tubes are removed. One more day and I am all ready to go. My buddy Dr. Nishida provides me with a hospital release form to set me free. He signs it with a big happy face and writes in English, “Congratulations!”

My nurses, and especially Sayuri, look quite sad to see me go, and I feel pretty sad myself. But alas, everything must come to an end. I pack my things and head downstairs, a slight ache in my groin. At the front desk, I am presented with a bill for 75,000 yen (about $800 at today’s rate). This is the cost without insurance--quite affordable for three nights in a luxurious hospital with outstanding medical care, medicine, cutting-edge anesthesia, and friendly staff. But once I present my medical insurance card from the Japanese government, the attending nurse smiles sweetly and says, “Oh, okay, then it’s all paid for then, so you’re free to go!”

Like everyone else in the hospital, she looks me in the eyes and says a very sincere, “O-daiji ni,” Take care of yourself-- happy healing!

And I go on my way, feeling fixed-up, back on track, and ready to tackle a new year.

So as I start out 2009, my hernia mostly healed up and my health back in balance, I feel excited and ready to embark on new adventures and make new commitments to live healthily, abundantly, strongly, bravely-- and most of all, happily-- in the world.

May you all have happiness and health too this year in everything you do.

Yokohama Triennale

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:49:21 +0900

Yesterday Tatsuya and I pushed ourselves to go to the Yokohama Triennale, a “festival” of modern art that I had been invited to visit by the Japan Foundation.

http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/event/2008/B852

Yokohama, being once such a bustling port city, has always had the potential to be a Sydney of sorts, but its proximity to Tokyo causes it to perpetually lag behind in development and interest. It’s sort of like Tokyo’s little cousin, a modest harbor city eclipsed by a teeming metropolis of unimaginable proportions.

Art and other “cultural” activities seem to be the way Yokohama is trying to establish its character in comparison to Tokyo. BankART, a revived warehouse that is home to a collective of interesting young artists, serves as the epicenter of the exhibition, which traverses at least five warehouse spaces throughout the port and intends—it would seem—to be gutsy, artsy, provocative....

NOT!

Hmm, unfortunately, not. There would seem to be so much potential for a really fascinating art scene to vividly explode in Yokohama, and yet this particular exhibition, dominated mainly by young Japanese artists, was embarrassingly insubstantial and mediocre. Does “modern art” these days just mean making video installations, taping some cardboard boxes up and stringing up a room with rope or bungee cords?

I am not a novice when it comes to modern art--in fact I love the edginess, provocation, political messages, and inspiration that one feels in the presence of powerful and charismatic modern work. I don’t care if the piece is a big hunk of chocolate in the middle of the room, so long as it truly sends a message and has some sort of meaningful, interactive sort of impact.

Triennale, however, was, for the most part, a lot of juvenile junk strewn up in room after room of the spacious warehouses of Yokohama Harbor. Most of it looked like a high school cultural festival at best, or like the half-baked lazy work of a bunch of teenagers trying to make a “haunted house” for Halloween with plywood, sheets, and trash--only without the mystique of smoke, mirrors, and darkness. In short, it was 90% crap.

And, as usual with many of the recent bland “art” exhibitions I have seen in Tokyo—from the Mori Bijutsukan and the National Art Center to some of the older museums like the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art, the crowning exhibit of all was the exhibit shop, where a wide range of colorful goodies were awaiting the bored and disappointed gallery viewers at their most vulnerable moment. T-shirts, mugs, pens, mouse pads, eco-bags-- you know. Lots of them! And lots of people, of course, lined up, the cash registers ka-chinging, as if the main idea of the whole exhibition was to get you to buy the commemorative goods to assuage your overall impression that the show was really AWFUL, overly priced, and a huge waste of your time!

Now I could go off on a cultural studies rant about what this means in terms of consuming culture and the hypercapitalism of Tokyo in general, but of course the “museum shop” has taken off in recent years worldwide, to the extent that I had to do a double take a few months ago when I actually saw the Metropolitan Museum of Art had established a retail shop in Sydney Airport—or when last month I stopped into the MoMA shop in Omotesando here in Tokyo. Buying art, in the form of quirky and novel design and color, has become more important than appreciating it for what it is—or more importantly, than actually making it.

What did offer at least some stimulation out of the whole Triennale disappointment was an exhibition by Austrian artist Herman Nitsch—a thoroughly disturbing display of naked human beings trying to fit themselves into the carcasses of butchered cattle, blood pouring everywhere, walls and white sheets stained with blood. Yes, it was disgusting, and I felt moved. Not quite my style at all, but still provocative, engaging, pushing the limits.

Another bizarre video installation that filled a room 360 degrees around was one that entailed surreal images of pirates with bulbous noses and half-naked women smearing “brown stuff” (hmmm...) all over themselves and each other. Yuck.

Sadly, the Japanese artists in general failed to impress me with their sound installations or stuffed animals or string. Even Yoko Ono was featured in the show, but her main featured work was basically a sad little video of her sitting there, in black and white, being dressed by some man in a suit. Huh?

Oh, and the one other piece of interest, I guess, was the sculpture of a nine-year-old Japanese boy standing on the edge of a diving board, high over a pool of water (which, by the way, would in real life be so shallow that this kid would most definitely break his neck...ouch!) Unlike the rest of the art, this was displayed prominently in Landmark Plaza, a shopping mall, around which sat the usual green-clad Yokohama Triennale people, acting like serious docents. This is art. We don’t smile.

And sure enough, nearby there was lots of shopping going on.

Yawn.

Allen Ginsberg's Kitchen

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:20:18 +0900

It was October of 1992, a full sixteen years ago, when I met Allen Ginsberg, father of the Beat Generation, great American poet, Buddhist, guru, scholar, musician, hippie, and activist.

I was nineteen, a freshman at Rutgers University, having just returned from one of the most transformative years of my life on exchange as a high school student in rural Japan, where I learned to speak Japanese and thought I never wanted to go back to the States. In fact I thought I was destined to become Japanese one day.

“Jay,” my best friend from my advanced Japanese class, would hang out with me after our lessons and we’d practice our kanji in a rundown air-raid shelter of a building on campus called the Roost. We would be joined inevitably (and against our will) by a needy classmate named “Maureen,” a big girl with very tight frizzy long hair and freckles, who seemed extraordinarily vexed by Japanese, as if it were calculus. Strangely, despite the fact that she was already in advanced Japanese 301, Maureen could not pronounce a word of Japanese correctly; in fact she spoke it as if she were reciting from the back of a Lonely Planet guide, reading excitedly like an anxious tourist en route to her first arrival in Tokyo. Jay and I would cringe as soon as Maureen walked into the Roost. Since the two of us had both been Rotary high school exchange students in Japan, Maureen preyed upon us, slaking her thirst for good grades in Japanese by clinging relentlessly to us like a parasite, hoping our skills would somehow magically rub off.

To give Maureen the benefit of the doubt, our class was in fact run as if it were a calculus or pre-med class—sternly conducted by a plump old Japanese woman with orthopedic black shoes named “Iwabuchi-sensei.” She would tap one tight-fitting shoe on the tiled floor impatiently as one student after another failed to answer her “challenging” questions and ultimately failed. For Jay and me this was at the worst simply comical—we understood everything perfectly and were a thorn in Iwabuchi-sensei’s side because she didn’t like that we were ten times ahead of everyone else in the class. I was particularly nerdy at the time. For example, I insisted upon being called by “my Japanese name,” which I asserted was Iwasaki Yohei, a last and first name I had bestowed upon myself, and Iwabuchi-sensei seemed to relish calling me as patronizingly as possible by that name, as if to drill into me the arrogance and ignorance of my youthful idealization of the Japan that Iwabuchi-sensei had long left behind.

It was in October of that first year of college that Jay mentioned to me as he was dropping me off in front of my residence hall that he’d been invited to go to a poetry reading up in New York by “some famous poet.”

“Do you know a poet named Allen Ginsberg?” he asked.

Of course I knew Ginsberg. Well, not really that well; it’s not as if I read his poems all that much, but I’d even learned about him in history class. At home on the bookshelf in the sun room my parents had crusty, yellowed paperback volumes of his poems--Howl, Reality Sandwiches, Kaddish...

Jay seemed surprised that I knew of him.

“Actually,” he explained, “it’s weird. See, the guy who invited me to this poetry reading is actually Allen Ginsberg’s lover. But Allen Ginsberg is, like, 76, and “Derrick” is just 20. Isn’t that gross?’

This was before Jay and I had come out to each other, and so Jay’s question carried with it a subtle test to see which part would gross me out—the age difference between Allen and Derrick or the fact that they were both men. After a pregnant pause we both made the requisite, “eeeeew” as we pondered an elderly, bearded, fat Jewish man in bed with a 20 year-old. Jay seemed relieved. I felt relieved too that my cover had not been blown; for I was just as worried of what Jay would think of me if he knew I was gay.

And so it happened that one October evening in 1992 Jay and I climbed into a car with Derrick and a beatnik-obsessed lesbian with raspberry-colored hair and a pierced tongue and headed for Hoboken, where we’d take the PATH up to Manhattan.

Derrick was brilliant but terrifying to me. He had piercing eyes and he spoke about sex—and particularly taboo sex, like pedophilia, necrophilia, and orgies—with such candor, desire, and rawness that it was difficult to pretend not to be shocked and intimidated by his words. He smelled like pot and incense and denim that hadn’t been washed for years.

The event had already started when we arrived at the Great Hall of the Cooper Union. The room was packed but there were seats set aside for us in the front row of the VIP section.

Allen Ginsberg was already onstage, wearing a baggy off-white suit, a beige tie. He stood at the podium, a small Leica camera around his neck. His voice—sharp, New Yorky and Jewish, rang out loudly through the auditorium and bounced off the walls. His words were sarcastic, passionate, critical, wise, but just as shocking as Derrick’s had been in the car from New Jersey.

“...I can still see Neal's 23-year-old corpse when I come in my hand.
I can still see Neal's.....23-year-old corpse....when I come in my hand.
I can still see Neal's 23-year-old..... corpse when I come.... in my hand.”

These were among the last words Allen read on stage that day, and I was blown away—disturbed, mystified, disgusted, and awestruck all at once.
He was creepy but paternal and sweet, grandfatherly, spiritual all at once. He could have been a Tibetan lama at the same time.
In fact at his age and with his background, he could have easily been a contemporary of my own grandfather, who had worked in the Naval Shipyards of Philadelphia during the Great Depression—the smell of creosote, WD-40, chicken soup, perspiration and aftershave wafting around him.

“Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry” was the title of the reading. Though Gregory Corso, Allen’s long-time companion from the sixties, was not there, Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder, and others were also reading.

When Allen sat down he immediately began snapping one photo after another with his Leica. I could have sworn he was photographing me.

This became more apparent after the reading during the wine and cheese reception for invited guests, when I finally met Allen Ginsberg, and he proceeded to take at least ten snapshots of me from different angles, with Jay, with Derrick, with Gary Snyder. With some random boys who seemed to float around like a derelict gang of Ginsbergites.

I felt star-struck as Allen doted on me. Here was a living legend, a man who was on display at the Smithsonian Museum—whose name appeared in the American English Dictionary—whose escapades with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs were seen as a major turning point in the history of civil rights, free expression, youth culture. He was inspiration to the Beatles, to generations of artists and politicians. He was a threat to the establishment, an instigator of change.

But that October night, Allen Ginsberg was just an old friendly man suffering from cancer, out for a jaunt with a bunch of young men. He led us—there must have been ten of us—out into the cool night air and through the streets of the Village toward his apartment, stopping to chat along the way with mostly every homeless person he saw. They all knew him. He gave them money and joked at length with them.

We bought groceries in a small corner shop and headed up several flights of stairs in an old brick building to Allen’s apartment. No sooner had we entered than most of the boys headed straight to the kitchen to fix dinner. Clearly this was a regular routine. Most of the boys in the kitchen were about my age. Two or three of them were hustlers whom Allen had rescued from the streets. One sat at the kitchen table plucking an electric guitar left by one of the band members of Sonic Youth—”this thing is out of tune, Allen.”

“Oh shut the fuck up and cut your toenails—they’re so long and filthy,” another hustler bitched.

At this point Allen returned to the kitchen in his pajamas. They were ancient pajamas—pale yellow with stripes, and on his upper body he wore a faded, slightly ripped T-shirt on which was emblazoned his mantra, AH.

As I stared at this famous poet in his pajamas, he snapped back and woke me from my reverie. —“Well don’t just fuckin’ stand there, Greg, make yourself useful! Cut some tomatoes!”

“Oh, shit, Matthew, you know I can’t eat that fatty crap. Throw it out! ... I don’t care if it goes to waste—throw it out! I won’t eat that!” Allen bossed around one of the hustlers as he rolled a joint, pulling some weed out of one of the kitchen drawers as nonchalantly as he was pulling out his stash of bulghur and dried basil from another drawer just a moment before.

On the refrigerator, written neatly in magic marker on the back of a supermarket advertisement, was a note that read “Allen Ginsberg’s healthy diet.” He consulted with it as he ordered us around, scratching his head and passing the joint around. I didn’t smoke any of it. I’d never smoked a joint and had been traumatized by one 1980s-era public service announcement and anti-drug-abuse school assembly after another. I thought that my brain on drugs would be fried permanently like an egg. I thought that Nancy Reagan or Barbara Bush themselves would personally come and chide me for my unforgivable indulgence, lest I dare even so much as touch an illicit drug. So I passed.

We ate dinner rather quietly, except for the lesbian, the only woman among us. I forget her name, but she was clearly a major Ginsberg fan. Sadly, he wasn’t in the least bit impressed by her and didn’t give her a drop of attention. She persisted in asking him a slew of questions about his career, his rhythm, his line structure and poetic code. He ignored her. And so on.

But Allen kept staring at me. “Do you want some more brussels sprouts, Greg? Come on, eat up, you’re a growing boy still!”

As we cleaned the dishes, Jay and I stood off to the side, wondering when the night would end. It was already 1AM.

Allen looked over his shoulder from the sink and grinned at both of us, his hands submerged in soap suds.

“So, are you two faggots?’ he asked, abruptly.

This took me off guard. Not only had I barely come out to anyone, but to hear the f— word bandied about in such cavalier fashion was a first for me. And for it to be such a friendly word in this context surprised me.

Yet somehow the way Allen said it, it made perfect sense.
And in that moment, I realized that Jay was in fact just as gay as I was.
Jay and I looked at each other nervously and then both nodded yes.
Jay giggled as he sucked in on the joint.

“...Well then, good for you!” said Allen.

This was perhaps the most anticlimactic but empowering appraisal of my sexuality I had ever heard. I felt deeply and unequivocally normal—boring, even—in this context of rent boys and poets, beatniks and Buddhists.

We drank tea in the living room, surrounded by walls and mountains of books and projects that Allen had worked on—collaborations with Paul McCartney, Sakamoto Ryuichi-- all sorts of people. Allen showed us a catalog of the Matisse exhibit that was going on at MoMA that season. We sat around this sixties legend, leaning on his rocking chair as he pointed out in his typical dry, horny, dirty voice details like, “see, this painting is really abstract but if you look closely enough, you can see that guy’s cock!”

Then it was time to meditate. We sat on big cushions on the floor in Allen’s bedroom. He lit incense and a candle in front of a small Tibetan Buddhist altar on his windowsill and told us all to stare into the light without closing our eyes. We sat and meditated for half an hour, during which time I couldn’t help looking at the clock and noticing it was nearly 3:30AM and I had a psychology exam the next day.

Back in Allen Ginsberg’s kitchen, Jay and I announced we were going back home. Allen looked disappointed, but then he asked me to take out my program from the poetry reading so that he could sign it.

He took it aside and pulled a fountain pen from his pajama pants. He began drawing squiggly lines and little dots and marks, a bolt of lightning. It was a vicious, contorted sort of face with wild hair, fangs, and big eyes. Above the face—which was apparently a sort of Buddhist mask—Allen etched the letters T-Y-G-E-R. And off to the left he signed AH, the mantra he always invoked, in the middle of a primitive sun illustration.

“For Greg Dvorak... Allen Ginsberg, 10/29/92,” and after this he added one extra “AH,” in a circle.

He handed the program back to me after shaking it off to dry. The lesbian with raspberry hair asked for her program to be signed too and he reluctantly drew a trivial little doodle for her in a matter of seconds and signed it. He did the same for Jay, although somewhat more elaborately.

As we went to leave, Allen leaned forward and gave me a large smooch on the lips. His scraggly silver beard scratched my chin, and his crooked eyes stared into mine like a madman. It scared the hell out of me, and yet I was amazed—Allen Ginsberg kissed me?

We walked through the streets of SoHo as the street cleaning and garbage collection trucks groaned past. Derrick was walking quickly and angrily up in front of everyone.

“What’s gotten into you?” asked Raspberry girl.

“Oh, wasn’t it obvious? I mean Allen was being such a total bitch tonight to me. Maybe it was because he was so obsessed with the new boy.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You mean you don’t know?” he retorted, laughing incredulously.

“Give me that!” he demanded, grabbing my autographed program booklet. “Oh Jesus! It’s worse than I thought! TYGER? You’re his TYGER???!”

He threw the program down toward the street and I caught it just before it went into a mud puddle. I looked closely at the autograph and remembered poet William Blake’s “Tyger, tyger burning bright...” from 11th grade English class. Later I would learn that Allen Ginsberg regularly recited these lines in the form of a song, like an Indian guru, sung along with a harmonium in the background, as if it were a passage from the Vedas.

Derrick was distraught. Several months after I found out that “tyger” was one of Allen’s code words for his favorite, but at the moment I had already figured out what was going on, and I felt flattered and threatened all at once. What if he chased after me? What if I had to... I couldn’t even let myself imagine it. Jay and I glanced at each other as Derrick ranted on, and we laughed under our breath.

In my silly nineteen-year-old naïveté, I was too scared ever to meet Allen again—as if I wouldn’t have been able to resist. But Jay went to New York half a year later, and apparently Allen asked him for my number.

A few years later, Allen passed away. I read about it in the Japan Times when I was living in Miyazaki. I felt genuinely sad, as if a relative of mine had died. Perhaps it was because in a brief and fleeting moment, Allen Ginsberg had seen me exactly as I was, without any judgment or any condemnation. He had invited me into his world, to talk, eat, and meditate with him. And so I felt blessed, in a strange way—anointed, perhaps. I felt okay to be myself and be fully myself ever since I met him, and for that I felt extremely thankful. I still feel thankful.

So of course I got goosebumps over my entire body when I was digging through some boxes in my mother’s basement in New Jersey earlier this year, at the age of 35, and happened to stumble upon an envelope that contained the program for “Beneath a Single Moon.”

It was exactly as I remembered it—Tyger and all. I’ve framed it and placed it on my wall here in my new apartment in Tokyo. It reminds me to think youthfully, to continue to wonder and wander like a tiger—to laugh and cry and never take myself too seriously. And most importantly, it reminds me it’s okay to be myself wherever I go.

Guestbook

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 14:30:46 +0900

Please sign my guestbook! No need to write any comments if you don’t feel like it, but I’d love to know you stopped by. Please don’t be afraid to “add a comment” and even just write your name and where you’re accessing this site from. You can also leave a message if you like.

是非ゲストブックにサインを残してください。コメントなどまでお書きにならなくても、どちらさまがこちらのサイトに寄ってきたか、知っているだけで嬉しいです。よかったら、”add a comment” のところにクリックして、お名前、場所や感想などを残してください。

Morning Comes so Soon

Wed, 8 Oct 2008 14:29:40 +0900

Wow, it’s already October...

OK, once again, I have to remind anyone who’s reading this that I feel incredibly nerdy blogging away like this. It’s not quite my style. I prefer to write long emails to one person or another, not to project my idle thoughts out into cyberspace with no idea whom I’m speaking to.

Between updating my website, designing a magazine for the Australian Association for the Association of Pacific Studies (AAAPS), and starting up my new fellowship, the past week has been rather uneventful. I caught a cold from Tatsuya, who brought it back as a souvenir from Paris—which would mean that it’s a French cold-- which is kind of sexy, I guess. I went out with a friend of mine to my neighborhood Italian restaurant on Monday night and ate, among other things, a pizza covered with wild boar pesto, potatoes, and curry. I am eating it as a cold leftover right now, and actually it’s not as disgusting as you might imagine. In Japan you get used to such peculiar treats, especially in Tokyo. It’s okay to have corn on pizza in Japan as well, for instance--even lettuce. Actually lettuce is where I tend to draw the line. I don’t get that!

Anyway, I’ve been asked to review for The Contemporary Pacific journal about the very first feature film from the Marshall Islands, entitled Morning Comes so Soon. I was really impressed by it-- the acting, completely by local Marshallese and Taiwanese actors, is excellent and done in those languages, and the cinematography, though a bit MTV-ish and clichéd, is really close to pro-level. I say “close” because I was a little irritated by the way every amateur DVD these days has to have one of those “making of” extra bonuses in it where the viewer is invited to watch all the cast and crew messing around in their spare time, trying to act like mega-celebrities, playing really poppy music, and waxing philosophically even though they have little to say. I would have rather heard much more Marshallese commentary and insight instead of hearing the non-Marshallese directors describe how they set up every shot. But all in all, the whole project was extremely worthy.

Set in Majuro, the capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the film portrays a Romeo and Juliet-like star-crossed romance between Leban, a Marshallese boy (James Bing III), and Mei-Lin (Ting Yu Lin), a Taiwanese girl. Though the political context in which mainland Chinese and Taiwanese have migrated in large numbers to the Marshalls is never discussed, the film targets the increasing problem of anti-Chinese racism in the Marshalls. Mei-Lin and Leban both attend high school in Majuro, and they fall in love despite the warnings that Leban receives from his prejudiced friends, who warn him that Chinese girls are all “dirty prostitutes” who work on the tuna junks out in the lagoon. As can easily be anticipated, both Mei-Lin and Leban suffer the consequences of their peers’ racism and eventually this leads to a tragic ending--though the finale is filled with hope and some inspiration.

The film also deals, to a lesser extent, with the major social problem of suicide throughout the island nation, as both protagonists try to kill themselves and one succeeds. I felt that this was quite realistically and tenderly portrayed. The public service messages about suicide were the main intention of Youth to Youth in Health in Majuro, the group that initiated the making of the film. However, unfortunately the film didn’t quite deal as solidly and contemplatively as it could have with this issue.

Not to weigh racism against suicide, but in fact the Marshalls has a long history of tolerance, acceptance, and openness toward people from all over the world, and in my opinion the anti-Chinese sentiment is a Pacific-wide phenomenon that needs attention, but it is not as pronounced as the issue of suicide as a national epidemic throughout the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Especially in Kwajalein Atoll’s overcrowded ghettos of Ebeye Islet, where at times it is not uncommon for two or three young men to kill themselves in a given month, suicide is a severe issue that stems from severe depression, lack of interest in life, and intense social pressures and stress.

Morning Comes so Soon raises suicide as an issue, but then seems to take it for granted. When Leban hangs himself from an oceanside tree on Majuro, he does it to send a message to his family and friends--as a form of communication. This is in line with the way many Marshallese youth commit suicide, but the film doesn’t provide us with an adequate solution. It simply points out that this happens and draws attention to the young man’s thought process--- which, I suppose, is better than raising no awareness at all.

I went away from the film feeling very impressed and moved by the project itself and its likely impact on the RMI, albeit a bit ambivalent about whether or not the film had achieved its original intention. Still, with its very rich portrayal of life in the Marshallese capital, its excellent soundtrack, and its passionate and creative approach, this film really stands out as the first major work of popular cultural art emerging from the Marshall Islands. Up until now, the only Marshallese “art” that was known outside the islands was basketweaving or other handicrafts—or perhaps singing and dancing. Not to discredit these forms of creativity by any means, but such an emphasis on so-called “traditional” forms has made observers oblivious to the fact that there are many gifted Marshallese storytellers, actors, writers, poets--and now potentially filmmakers as well.

I feel excited by this, since I am also making a documentary about the Marshalls and collaborating on a feature film set at Kwajalein Atoll. The more momentum these projects gain, the more likely I see there being a major change of course in the way small islands like the Marshall Islands are seen and understood by the rest of the world. My hope is that finally they will be taken more seriously!

Kurage

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:27:45 +0900

Check out these cute jellyfish!

Submersible

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:26:34 +0900

OK, time to come up for air. I spent yet another WHOLE day building this website obsessively. I woke up at 8 am, actually. Had a smoothie and some coffee, burnt some incense, put on my jogging outfit. The plan was that I’d sit down and fix up the website for an hour or so, sort out my finances for September, etc., and then go out for a jog with my new yellow jogging shoes to Shinjuku. It was a gorgeous day, but Tatsuya and I live in this wonderful but very dark apartment in Hatagaya, where the light of day barely breaks through the cool mossy green walls that surround our building. So I didn’t feel much incentive to get outside, and I still kept imagining that it was about 1PM. It’s always 1PM in my head when I’m getting engrossed in creative stuff in the middle of the day. Just like it’s always 10PM when I’m working at night and I lose track of the time, even though it’s already 4AM in actuality.

So now it’s 10 to 9PM and I’ve barely eaten much all day, just sat here all day perfecting little bits and pieces of this website. It’s a worthy task, but it reminds me of how obsessed I got with my PhD dissertation and makes me wonder if I’ll ever learn to bite off smaller pieces of work bit by bit so I can spend the rest of my day doing something else!!!

Well, in my typical fashion I think what I’ll probably do now is try to make up for lost time... take a quick jog at least out in the evening, come back, have a quick bite to eat, and then maybe go out for an evening soak in a hot spring. This is what’s great about Tokyo--you can DO that. The night is always young--shops are still open, options are still available.

Anyway, to prompt myself into more activity—and to keep myself from getting one of those thirtysomething guts (now that I’m genuinely noticing myself getting one at the age of 35)—I’ve decided I’ll post my jogging info from Nike+ on this website (check it out here). Maybe by making this a bit more public I’ll snap into action!

Return to Oz

Tue, 2 Sep 2008 14:22:43 +0900

It’s been over a month since I returned to Australia. I went with the rather obvious objective to go back and retrieve my hard-earned Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) degree from the Australian National University, for which I nearly destroyed myself trying to complete my dissertation last December. Yet, aside from the graduation, my return was a profound and delightful opportunity to make a more spiritual peace with the land that had called to me and encouraged me to chase my dreams.

Canberra is a weird place. In fact it’s vacuous and barren. It felt dead to me for the first long while that I was there until historian Bill Gammage walked me through the manicured bush outside Old Canberra House on the Australian National University Campus and showed me how the eucalypt trees had carefully been nurtured and planted throughout the area that was now Lake Burley Griffin, revealing how indigenous people had loved and cared for the land before. These people, the Ngunnawal people or their ancestors, were conspicuously absent from today’s landscapes. Their absence actually frightened me. I wondered whether by my own presence I was somehow further erasing their histories, and in my research about Other places—the Marshall Islands, for example—I was disrespecting their past and present.

But the Canberra in which I was living was the one created by white settlers, and its shallowness was painful. It was concrete, cold, and almost deliberately inhuman. It was trying to emulate some other place, like Washington DC or Paris. And yet the land itself was screaming through angrily and wanting to be heard. The magpies that swooped in breeding season, the cockatoos that shrieked awkwardly like adolescent boys trying to sing opera, the frigid winds, the occasional possum that would stare at me as if to tell me to go home and leave it alone, and the packs of kangaroos that would freeze in place and look at me as if I were some very unwelcome intruder.... These were all signs to me that the land was really not at peace somehow.

Yet I felt like I had been brought there by some strange force. Margaret Jolly, my supervisor, would often refer to “the Goddess” as being behind the magic that brought me—a Philadelphia-born American from Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, living in Japan and then Hawai’i—all the way down to the Southern Hemisphere.

Whether it was she or whether it was something else, there was a power in Canberra that I still do not quite understand. I felt like I was connected with ancestors—not only my own, and not only the spirit of my late father but also the spirits of the Marshall Islanders, Japanese, and Americans about whom I studied—but eventually, I realized, the spirits of the very land upon which I was based throughout my doctorate work.

It was that power that, I feel, in some way enabled the passion with which I drove forth with my project despite the limitations of my own body and mind. After 20 December, the day I submitted my dissertation in 2007, I nearly collapsed and experienced what most people might refer to as a nervous breakdown.

In Japanese, this would be called something more akin to “autonomic nervous system disorder syndrome,” or jiritsushinkei shichoushou. This is a bit more accurate, for indeed I was suffering classic symptoms. My blood pressure was abnormally high, and instead of rising as it should when I stood up from a lying position, it would drop. Also, I would regularly suffer bizarre “hormonal” symptoms, like hot flushes and dizziness, heavy perspiration, and other degrees of strange imbalance throughout my body. I felt constantly panicky, and my chest hurt. These were classic panic disorder symptoms, too, but they only got worse and advanced to a point where my panic attacks made it impossible to even get any sleep at night. I went through batteries of tests at hospital after hospital, trying to eliminate the most horrid possibilities.

I would go on with this dramatic saga if I were really interested in it, but I’m no longer that taken with it and get bored easily in the retelling. Instead I’ll point out that, after leaving Australia and resting for a good several months, and with excellent treatment from my doctor in the States, I got back to excellent health and learned that there truly was nothing seriously wrong with my body other than outrageous stress.

And so, many months later, after relocating to Tokyo for my postdoctoral work and feeling settled, happy, and content there, I returned to the mid-winter chill of Canberra to revisit those demons, make peace with them, and more importantly get my diploma. Well, I also went especially because I wanted to see all my friends there and celebrate with them, something else I had been unable to do when I was sick, despite having finished such a major accomplishment.

Although my trip to Canberra was mainly to attend the graduation ceremony, receive my PhD, and visit with my friends (as well as my mother, who flew in from the US), I discovered that there was something else going on. It seemed to be more of a reckoning with the land itself. What I planned very casually--a sidetrip alone to Uluru, at the Red Center of the country--became a bit of a spiritual epiphany. For once I finally “got” Australia. You could easily argue that this was just my orientalist desire for Australia to be “authentic,” for it to look like the dusty red postcards and National Geographic photo spreads I had seen throughout my life. Perhaps, but what I actually felt about the place, and the smell of the earth, the sense of tremendous catharsis and connection, was different. There was aboriginal hip hop on the radio, there were indigenous people hanging out in town. And Uluru belonged to the people, it was not just some tourist attraction. It felt real, unlike Canberra had for so long. And so it was with this sense of clarity that suddenly my whole PhD made sense in a bigger context.

I realized that my work had not just been about Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. It had been about listening to spirits. Listening to the land. Listening to the past that exists in the present. And this kind of awareness came as second nature to the Anangu people I met and those who were studying alongside them out there in the desert. I had come into an awareness that was similar to theirs through my early childhood in Kwajalein Atoll and my recent study there, but I had also importantly made some very meaningful connections with my own sense of humanity, mortality, and ongoingness.

Hmm. Well, normally if this were some kind of really profound essay, I would busy myself with trying to wrap it up with a nice conclusion. But as my mentor Greg Dening instilled in me, I guess it’s really fruitless to aim for a sense of “closure.” How do we close things anyway? Isn’t that impossible? What an arrogant task to take on as a mere mortal.

So I reflect, a month after my trip to Australia, on the larger meaning of my whole PhD in Australia as I sit here in yet another fascinating place that I call home—Tokyo—and I just want to end on a note of awe and humility for the bigness of it all, the wonder of it all, the allness of it all. Let me continue to see beyond the concrete to the reef. Let me continue to see beyond the buildings to the bush.