man is a map

No. 11

2009-09-13T06:37:00.000-07:00

Dragonflies on stained-glass wings skim over a lake. Their reflections flash like finely cut jewels on the surface of the water. Ancient creatures, unchanged for countless millennia, the sound of their flight vibrates in the air with a song much older than man.

An old man walks through a rice paddy. His shoes are worn. The wide brim of a straw hat shades his eyes. He has worked here the entirety of his long life. Stooping to inspect a row of young shoots he recalls clearing these fields with his father. They set fire to uprooted brambles and as the flames danced the both of them stood in mute solemnity and watched a pillar of smoke rise and disappear into the pitch of night.

A monk kneels in the street. His robe is the color of smoke. Head bent in prayer he chants low in an even unceasing cadence like falling rain. Soon this sound blends with the rhythmic tolling of his mokt’ak and pop music blasting from a nearby shopping mall. Occasionally the tinkling sound of change falling into his alms bowl can also be heard.

With the strength of his rough sunburned body the old man has tilled this earth, dug into it, turned it over to reveal the possibilities it guards. He has inhaled the abundant smells of the soil: the smell of life; of fecundity; smells that engender in him feelings of intimacy, of resistance both met and conciliated.

The monk gathers together the day’s meager offering and stands to his feet. His knees are sore; his back aches. He places the mokt’ak under his arm and sets out for his temple beneath the red neon glow of church crosses that all flicker on with the coming of night.

From a distance two solitary figures can be seen in a rice paddy moving slowly towards one another. The old man is heading towards town, home. The monk is hiking up to his temple in the mountains. They meet. The old man bends awkwardly, without pretension. The monk bows in reply. They have met like this for many years. Their next meeting will be when this monk conducts his friend’s funeral ceremony.

The old man’s family down through the generations will visit the rice paddy to propitiate his spirit through old rituals. They will bring the foods he loved while living: grapes and oranges and wild persimmons the color of a harvest moon that fall from their branches after the first frost.

Sometimes the monk, too, will visit.

Dragonflies on vermiculated wings skim over the burial mound. Their jeweled bodies flash in the sun. The sound of their wings – ancient, indifferent – reverberates through the air as it did long before men sought to tame the earth or populate it with gods.

And when eventually the turning of the earth groans to a stop the song of the dragonflies will be just the echo of that thing beyond the knowing of man and that which his understanding could not compass.

No. 10

2009-06-21T01:25:00.000-07:00

The cacophonic free-for-all of a multitude of conversations. The smell of cigarettes and coffee. The students, the artists, the tourists and young couples. Jazz music played too loudly.

Nighttime at a café in Osaka.

An old Japanese man, seventies, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses and grey tweed blazer; one renegade lock of his comb-over has broken free and hovers about his shoulder like a wisp of cloud, a haunting ghost. He is missing a front tooth. Entering the café he is preceded by two young women carrying shopping bags in each arm. The old man takes their orders and heads for the counter. The women sit.

The women are dressed provocatively enough to draw stares: garters and fishnet stockings; very high heels and very short skirts; one girl has a tongue ring, they’re both peroxide blondes.

The old man returns and the women take their drinks. This old man is shabby in every way. He reminds me of a dusty, watermarked book no one has bothered to open in many, many years. He is a profligate, a degenerate. You wonder what he is paying these girls for their company; what they are taking him for.

One girl alternates sips of an iced caramel macchiato and drags from a cigarette as she solves a Sudoku puzzle in the back of a magazine. The other is looking about the smoky room, bored, a quick flash of lime-green panties as she works down the hem of her dangerously negligible skirt.

This old lecher is nearly beside himself. He can’t keep his eyes, or his hands, off either of them. The women play their roles apathetically: now humoring their patron with a smile or an occasional glance; more often ignoring him and texting on their cell phones.

By now you can hear snickers and muffled giggling throughout the café aimed at this pitiful burlesque. The old man doesn’t seem to notice; the young women don’t seem to care.

After a few moments of groping about these two disinterested dolls the old man gets to his feet and shuffles off.

What is longing if not memory made self-aware?

Longing is memory’s awareness of the limits to its mimicry. It is memory’s recognition that it is not a duplicate, not a representative – hardly even an echo – of what it seeks to imitate but rather a sort of vendor that ultimately peddles in deception.

Longing is memory’s attempt to replenish a past that never was through a present that cannot be.

When the old man returns from the restroom the two women and their many shopping bags are gone.

Standing he takes one final drink of his coffee and surveys the crowd. Some are blatantly staring, others secretly dart their eyes at him and then away again; he does not lower his face; he will not be judged in either victory or defeat.

The old man puts his blazer back on and leaves the café, that renegade lock of hair still bobbing defiantly about his shoulders.

China: Day One v.2.0

2009-06-19T23:51:00.000-07:00

I did manage to take the right bus this time (really, after more than a year in Korea this shouldn’t be a problem) and after just two short hours (it takes me longer to get from my house to the airport than it does getting from the airport to China!) I touched down in Hangzhou.

Waiting at the airport for me – snacks and colorful “T. Paul Buzan Welcome to Hangzhou” sign in hand – was my friend C. Unfortunately, C. was also waiting for me at the airport yesterday (I couldn’t get a message off to her until after she’d left her apartment) so I was all kinds of apologetic at first.

I promised to make amends through dinner and/or drinks and the ever amiable C. seemed satisfied.

My little bus hiccup at the start of this journey notwithstanding I’ve gotten to a point where essential day-to-day Korean – getting around by cab, ordering food, telling a girl she looks pretty – isn’t too tall an order. So it is strange to be back in a place where I have all the linguistic aptitude of a babbling infant. Bacon once wrote, “He that travels into a country before he has some entrance into the language goes to school and not to travel”. With my Mandarin limited to just “hello” and “thanks” I reckon I’ll be putting Bacon’s maxim to the test.

C. on the other hand, who is on her fourth year in China, was wheeling and dealing in sounds that only confused me and before you knew it we were being herded (along with more people than I thought reasonably safe) onto a very crowded bus.

My view from the bus gave me my first taste of China: narrow, three and four-storey buildings built along the highway (they reminded me of tenement housing in NYC) with scraggy looking gardens in front of them (popular housing with the nouveu-riche, I learned); an incredible number of people riding about on bicycles; a preponderance of Western establishments like Starbucks and McDonald’s; lots of big, shiny buildings with men in suits milling about them; foreign cars of every make and model – Mercedes’, Fords, Audis – on the road.

I try my best to travel with no expectations or preconceptions about a place. In travel, as in much of life, these tend to lead to disappointment; or, at the very least, they can obscure the true nature of a thing making it hard to appreciate it for what it is. But I couldn’t help finding myself surprised by my first impressions of China: everything was so new, so modern, so moneyed. I don’t know what exactly I may have been expecting, but I guess that wasn’t it.

On our way into Hangzhou proper C. and I made a couple of transfers and each bus (improbably) was more crowded than the last. Despite the crowds I noticed a serious reluctance on the part of the locals to sit next to the two chatty foreigners. That much is similar to Korea. I wouldn’t call it rudeness so much as a certain shyness. And perhaps, at least in my case, it is well-founded: I usually reward the brave or desperate soul who sits next to me with a (no doubt obnoxious) degree of talkative friendliness.

When we arrived at Hangzhou Normal University (where C. lives and teaches) a light rain was falling – more like a mist, actually. We made our way through the drizzle and throngs of students to the dormitory C. shares with her friend J. Although J. has her own (by Korean standards) ridiculously spacious apartment she shares one with C. (they refer to their set-up as a “trial marriage”) and a grumpy, overweight cat named “Xiao Fu”. After introductions (J. offered me the sole use of her apartment during my stay – awesome!) the three of us headed off with another teacher for dinner at a local French restaurant.

The food I ordered – salmon pasta and an incredible tomato basil soup – was excellent. There was also wine. I couldn’t give you the specifics (my tastes are provincial: I eat like a Viking and drink like a peasant) but it was tasty and complimented the meal very well. And it was so good to be eating something that wasn’t rice or fermented cabbage for a change.

Now don’t get me wrong: I love Korean food. I mean I L-O-V-E it. When I finally make my way back to the States it is gonna be hard to go without my daily dose of gimchee. But when you’ve been eating one type of food pretty exclusively for a year-and-a-half a little variety, and especially variety of such a delicious quality, is awfully nice.

A few hours and a full belly later we headed back to the dormitory. Decided to keep things chill the first night: I got a big week coming up.

China: Day One

2009-06-15T05:46:00.000-07:00

NB: In early-February 2009 I took a trip to China. Although I wrote my impressions down as I travelled, I am only now getting around to posting them.

China Day One:

I missed my flight.

In my haste and excitement I took a bus to Incheon City instead of taking one to Incheon Airport. Sadly the two places aren’t as close as their shared name might imply and I arrived at the airport just moments after they shut the gate on China Air Flight C34.

Not exactly an auspicious start to my travels.

Luckily I was able to reschedule my flight for tomorrow (thanks Lottie! You’re a gem!) so it isn’t exactly a disaster. Just an extra four hours on the bus.

But, hey, so long as I take the right bus next time you won’t hear me complaining.

No. 9

2009-06-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

The boy standing in front of my desk at school is in the third grade. Nine years old. Smaller than the other boys his age; his friends call him “anchovy”. He’s a good kid: listens during class and gets a kick out of using English.

Today, like most days, he’s all smiles.

But it isn’t just his good nature that has him grinning. Today he’s showing off. There’s a gap right in the middle of his mouth; a hint of white pushing through the cradle of an old baby tooth.

Only in childhood (and maybe among some professional fighters) is a missing tooth cause for jubilation, a badge of honor. My little friend wears it well. He is all semi-toothy grin and exuberance; obviously elated at this rite of passage and (perhaps?) the prospect of having less territory to cover toothbrush in hand at the start and end of his day.

He couldn’t be excited about a visit from the Tooth Fairy.

Her wings don’t carry her quite so far as Korea. Over here there is a custom in which children take their lost teeth and pitch them with all their might onto the roof of their home or a neighborhood building.

There is something about the idea of these milk teeth in gutters or on rooftops, orphaned, cut-off from the current of other childhood mementos – school pictures, a stuffed animal, a blanket – that makes me sad.

A tangible reminder of innocence and youth surrendered to the unreliable services of memory.

No. 8

2009-06-02T00:46:00.000-07:00

The thing about most figures of speech is that they don’t typically signify anything in a literal sense.

For example, are clams actually happy? If you “sleep like a baby” wouldn’t you in fact be waking up hourly to squall and suckle? And what about the familiar expression “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck”? That old chestnut bantered about during flu season or after a night of heavy drinking. I mean, people obviously aren’t likening a hangover to being smacked by a Mack, right?

Of course not. Well, not most people anyway. But I imagine there are a handful of folks out there who can lend credence to that worn-out platitude through their own personal experience.

As of last Saturday I can count myself among them.

Lucky me.

It was one of those early-summer weekends that are vouchsafed to us as gift, an apology maybe, for the imminent heat and humidity of July through September. The breeze was fresh and cool, the temperature temperate, the sky painted in the blue of childhood summer vacations; the kind of weekend that screamed, “Ride em if ya got em, boys!”

That was all I wanted out of my Saturday: a nice, leisurely ride about town on my bicycle. It had been raining the weekend before and the one before that I’d had friends in town so it was going on the better part of three weeks since I’d last been out. And with the weather about to take a turn towards the hellish I admit to feeling a touch of desperation.

Maybe that was the problem. You want something too badly and it clouds your judgment; impairs your perception and makes you susceptible to being blindsided.

I didn’t see the truck coming. There were two vans parked at the curb and I – incredibly stupidly – took the crosswalk blind. Sure I had the green but this is Korea. The Koreans are a lot of great things, but safe driver’s aint one of them.

When he hit me – flush on my left side – I went airborne. No doubt through years of action movie conditioning it was like I could see my body in third-person spinning, none too gracefully, head-over-heels and spilling, with equal awkwardness, all over the asphalt. I rolled a few times and staggered to my feet. I’d been hit with enough force to have my wallet knocked outta my back pocket; coins were gleaming in the sun. My bike was totaled. I was bleeding hard from my foot.

I was pretty banged up and would need near twenty stitches in my heel but, rather miraculously, no broken bones. In fact, I’ve yet to break a bone, so I’ve still got that going for me. But I think this has effectively put the kibosh on my dreams of becoming a professional foot model.

All in all I count myself lucky. Well, as lucky as you can count yerself when getting hit by a truck is involved. It sure could’ve been a lot worse.

Japan: Postscript

2009-05-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

Japan.

“Japan”. Linger on the word a moment. Let it rise and fall like a wave inside your brain. Feel it. “Japan”.

Japan at last.

The day we left it was raining. Very lightly. Mist, imperceptible, the gray sky bending and blending with the sidewalks and streets and lapping against the old, exhausted bicycles still chained beneath the overpass.

Again a train rumbled above me with a sound like thunder.

Would I want to live here? I’ve been asking myself this question since I arrived (there was no resisting it) and I am surprised by the answer:

I don’t think so.

This trip was incredible, an amazing first experience, but for all that I don’t know if I want what Japan means to me – my private, internal Japan of the last twenty years – challenged by living here. Maybe that isn’t fair. Maybe I owe it to the country and to myself to accept it for what it is and not just to protect what I want it to be.

But then again maybe people need ideals and (let’s be honest) delusions – about themselves, a place, another person – to get by; a release valve for the pressure that can build up over the course of a lifetime.

Maybe a healthy adulthood is measured, in part, by the ability to touch both what is and what is not, to walk in both the world as it actually is and the world as you’d want it to be.

It is a difficult thing learning what dreams to defer, what hopes to bury, but when we do so I think we free ourselves to appreciate what we so often take for granted – the miracle of a blooming flower; that the sun is warm and good; the act of giving love and of receiving it; a great book – as affirmations that, yes, there is something precious about life, a mystery that wears no words, a beauty we cannot communicate, a worth that is beyond any value we can reckon.

Drops of rain streamed along the window as the plane I was on broke through the clouds and into the sunshine.

Two hours later, I was home.

Japan: Day Three

2009-05-24T02:52:00.000-07:00

Nara is about an hour by train from Osaka.

It’s a pleasant trip. You cross rivers and wend your way around and through low laying mountains. If it is spring wildflowers will be in bloom on either side of the tracks. On the day I travelled there alabaster clouds were drifting through an impossibly blue sky.

The city itself is small – a population of just under 375,000 souls in an area of about 260 square miles – but, having been Japan’s first capital, it is steeped in cultural tradition and history: sake is said to have been created in Nara sometime during the early Edo period; Nara Women’s University, one of only two such universities in Japan, is located here; the city is replete with ancient shrines and temples; and it is famous for it’s cuisine including it’s vegetables, Yamato chicken, and even sake flavored ice cream (which I, very regrettably, did not get to try for myself.)

With all these fabulous foodstuffs just begging to be tasted can you guess what your intrepid band of travelers feasted on after arriving in Nara? Was it a light lunch of Nara-zuke pickles? Miwa-somen noodles, perhaps? Or maybe we just wanted a snack and settled on rice cakes with a cup of Yamato-cha to wash it down?

Ladies and gentleman we had coffee and donuts.

Sometimes it’s life’s simple pleasures, y’know?

After gorging ourselves on one of the world’s most perfect food combinations we headed into Nara proper. One of my goals on this trip (right up there with playing “Street Fighter IV” and digging the vintage videogame scene) was to explore a Shinto shrine. Nara would not disappoint me in this regard, but I had to tackle another goal first: tracking down a maneki neko, a “lucky cat”.

If you’ve eaten at a Chinese or Japanese restaurant in the states you’ve seen a “lucky cat”. It is a feline of porcelain or sometimes brass usually propped up next to the cash register waving its paw like it’s high-fiving an invisible friend. I have a pal here in Korea who fancies them and I wanted to get her a souvenir – surely it wouldn’t be difficult tracking one down in Japan, I thought. Surprisingly (and distressingly on this my last full day in the country) I couldn’t find one anywhere.

Luckily the first street we turned down was lined with one gift shop after another. You know the place: tourist traps masquerading as “authentic [enter wherever you’re taking a vacation here] goods” stores, a regular black hole with designs on your pocket book. It took some trying but I finally found a “lucky cat” – literally just after I’d given up and purchased a different souvenir.

Maybe it should be Murphy’s Universal Laws?

Right in the heart of this merchandise maelstrom I saw my first Shinto shrine. Up a flight of stone stairs and between two shops stood a torii – the iconic gateway of Shintoism – and beyond that the shrine itself. The shrine was closed so I couldn’t get a good look inside, but I did spy a number of stone lanterns and red-bibbed statues beyond the locked gates. From within I could hear the methodic tolling of a bell.

Japan has the lowest number of Christians per capita of any country in the world; something like just 1% of the population identify with Christianity. Growing up as I did in Mid-West America, the gleaming buckle of the Bible Belt, I’m not used to this. Even Korea, which has the highest number of professing Christians of any East Asian country, wasn’t too unlike home in that regard. Neon crosses glow in abundance here in the Land of Morning Calm. So it is interesting to witness firsthand a culture shaped by the currents of a different mythology, a different set of conventions.

And for a kid who cut his teeth in the Protestant tradition as it is practiced in America’s Heartland, it doesn’t get much more different than Shinto. The indigenous religion of Japan, Shinto, which means “the way of the gods”, is a blend of ancestor worship and the belief that kami, or gods, preside over the living, dead, and inanimate things of nature. It was the state religion from the 1870’s until Japan’s surrender at the end of WWII and, while few people today are strictly Shintoists, the religion still plays an influential role in Japanese society.

From pop culture (many of the bad guys I conquered in videogames when I was younger were – you guessed it! – kami from the Shinto pantheon) to higher brow film and literature, Shinto still informs a large swath of modern Japan’s culture.

A travel blog – and even one as rambling and digressional as is this one – probably isn’t an appropriate venue for exploring the dialectical relationship between religions and the societies and cultures that form, support, promulgate, and resist them. It is just that Japan offers such a fascinating picture of a culture mediating and coming to grips with an outside influence – in this case the Christian tradition of the West.

Consider the above a disclaimer for the following.

Regardless of your religious affiliation (and clearly this is not a conversation about religion that intends any theological implications), if you have lived for any period of time in the West the cultural legacy of Christianity has left a mark on you: architecture, film, (certain) social mores, traditions, the “culture wars”, literature and poetry and the visual arts, the list reads as long as you’d like it to. In these ways and many others Christianity has been a guiding cultural influence in Western nations. Not so in Japan. In fact, for much of the time since its introduction by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th-century the Japanese – the ruling body especially – were hostile to Christianity. (The book to read is Silence by Shusaku Endo.)

This hostility has generally abated post-WWII but it has been replaced, as evidenced by the very low number of Japanese Christians, with a collective shrug. Christianity as a religion just doesn’t seem to resonate with the Japanese. What does seem to resonate, and in a big way, is Western culture. Of course this is Western culture with a distinctly Japanese twist: Walt Disney’s Pinocchio inspired Dr. Osamu Tezuka’s “Astro Boy” series as did the horrors of atomic warfare; you can enjoy a shrimp burger with a side of squid fries at the McDonald’s in Osaka; the English language has seen a number of mutations in Japan that have yielded words like beeru (“beer”) and serufu esutiimu (“self esteem”). And in much of the Western culture the Japanese absorb, parts of Christianity get absorbed with it. Not so much doctrinal aspects of the religion (I’m not familiar with any anime based on the “Apostle’s Creed”) but more the mythological underpinnings of the faith.

View a film like Kurosawa’s Hakuchi – an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot – and you realize that while Christianity as an act of devotion may not appeal to the typical Japanese there is something about the religion, that same something that has spoken to artists for nearly two millennia, that is a viable source of creative inspiration. The faith itself may have fallen on hard soil, but its cultural influence has taken root.

Having hijacked this entry with an essay let me steer us back to a sunny spring day in Nara, Japan.

Down the street and as the souvenir shops begin to peter out you come to the entrance of the relatively sprawling Nara Park. The Nara National Museum is on the park grounds as are a number of splendid shrines and temples including Todai-ji, the world’s largest wooden building. In addition Kasuga Shrine - a magnificent temple complex originally built in 710 and then subsequently demolished and rebuilt in identical fashion every 20 years according to the strictures of purity and renewal inherent to Shinto - is located here. All well and good but I had myself set on seeing one thing: tiny deer.

The legend has it that the god Takenomikazuchi-no-mikoto (you think his friend’s called him “Tak” for short?) showed up in Nara Park years ago riding a white deer. Since a deity manifesting itself on earth is a pretty big deal people began regarding deer in the area as divine and the messengers of the gods. In fact, killing a deer in Nara was a capital offense until the 17th-century and Nara deer weren’t divested of their divinity until after the fall of Imperial Japan. Divine or not these deer and their descendants got pretty friendly with humans and, while they’re not domesticated, they are certainly tame.

I imagine I looked like a largish man-child in a petting zoo; my fist full of barley cakes with which to make new furry friends, my movements slow and steady but betraying an obvious excitement. Also: jumping and frolicking and gamboling (me, not the deer) and just generally dewing up with joyful tears.

I dunno. I just really like little deer, I guess.

The deer were pretty non-plussed with the food I had to offer (although one sneaky bastard made a meal of my map) but they were kind enough to indulge my petting and picture taking.

I spent the remainder of my last full day in Japan wandering about Nara on foot: discovering neighborhood shrines; chatting with (or attempting to chat with) some kids catching tadpoles in a creek; drinking more coffee and eating more donuts (cut me a break it was vacation); then back to Osaka to pay another visit to “Big Tiger” and gobble up an aquarium worth of sushi.

I’d be packing my bags that night.

Japan: Day Two

2009-05-12T01:49:00.000-07:00

Here in my old age (I’ll turn thirty next month) a good night’s sleep has gone from the occasional recreational activity it was in my teens and early-twenties to an inescapable biological necessity.

I reckoned I would need a minimum of six hours a night to get the most out of this vacation and to that end the capsule bed served me well. It provided, far and away, the best sleep I’ve ever received at a hostel. And, really, that is selling it mighty short: snuggled away in my snug coffin-like cubicle, sealed by a heavy curtain and resting my head on a pillow filled with what I think were dried beans, I sawed logs like a regular Lunestean lumberjack.

After a light breakfast (my stomach was all back flips and butterflies) S., Y. and I set out for Kyoto.

If you’ve only got a couple of days in Japan I think Osaka – situated about two thirds of the way down Honshu, the archipelagos biggest island – is a great base of operations. Not only does it offer a whole smorgasbord of sights, sounds and activities on its own but, thanks to Japan’s incredibly efficient railway system, it’s well connected to some of the country’s best known cities.
An hour after leaving Osaka we arrived in Kyoto.

Our destination was Nijo Castle. This castle (really a complex of palaces, gardens, a koi filled moat and pond, all enclosed by a massive stone wall) was built in the early-seventeenth century by the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Tokugawa Ieyasu. (Although building on the castle wouldn’t be completed until 1626 during the reign of Tokugawa Iemistsu, Ieyasu’s grandson.)

The castle was crawling with people. From that Friday through the following Wednesday (April 29th – May 5th) Japan was celebrating “Golden Week” – a sort of grab bag of different holidays during which most Japanese are off school and work. While many locals leave the country for a trip abroad at this time it seems the ones who stuck around all came to Nijo Castle that afternoon. Absolutely packed. But it wasn’t just Japanese here on this day: I heard Chinese, French, English, Korean and German (or maybe Dutch?) along with a number of tongues I couldn’t identify being spoken.

Kyoto – the imperial capital of Japan for many years and rich with the country’s ancient history – is a city for tourists and Nijo Castle is one of its top attractions. Despite this popularity, though, the castle doesn’t smack of the kitsch and slapdash of similar headlining acts. (Venice disappointed me in this regard.) There is gravity about the place, a seriousness and solemnity, as when you visit certain temples or cathedrals. Which isn’t meant as an endorsement of the culture that built it; any judgment – pro or contra – of a culture, and especially one so far removed from my own experience as is Japan under the Tokugawa, demands more than a course in college and a couple days spent visiting to be a judicious assessment.

I just mean to say that there is something about the place that inspires quietness. And I don’t think I was the only one who felt this way: amidst the scores of people there was no yelling, no running. (Of course they could’ve just been bored but I doubt it. History is cool, man!)

Hiking to the top of a tall stone rampart I was treated to a view of not only Nijo Castle but also greater Kyoto. A few women in traditional kimonos (which Kyoto is famous for) made their way valiantly up these granite steps. No small feat in itself but all the more impressive considering their garments. Their kimonos were fashioned in muted colors (compared with the brightly colored hanbok Korean women sometimes wear) and printed with subtle designs. Tied in the back with an obi sash the long, narrow skirt of these kimonos stretched to the women’s ankles and forced them to move about in dainty, shuffling steps. The zori sandals that completed the outfits sighing along the stones at this complicated footwork.

After Nijo Castle I decided to take a walk on my own. The day was sunny and bright; just right for exploring a new city; and sometimes there’s nothing as pleasant as wandering alone in an unfamiliar city on a sunny day.

North of the castle was a residential area: squat houses with curly-cue tiled roofs standing shoulder-to-shoulder like commuters on a packed train; a couple of parks; little restaurants giving off delicious smells; people out riding bikes and kids playing in the streets. In some places it was still and quiet, very peaceful.

I watched a young father chasing his daughter along a path ablaze with sunlight and flowers of yellow and orange; the little child giggling, the father beaming with as much pride as the sunlight and the flowers. How many times have I watched this scene on the other side of the world? There is more that binds us together than differences that divide us.

About an hour into my walk I noticed my stomach growling. Hungry butterflies? I was hungry but I wasn’t starved – a snack would do.

I eventually settled on a café called “Colorado Coffeeshop”, a quasi-swank eatery decked out in an odd combination of baroque and Americana: high-backed chairs and bar stools and soda fountains; ornate crystal chandeliers hanging from a frescoed ceiling. Like if Maderno had designed diners instead of basilicas.

The problem with this place (I didn’t have a problem with the gaudy décor) was that it was located right next to a big hotel. In my experience restaurants near big hotels usually offer fare that is tasty in inverse proportion to its costliness: you pay a lot for a little. But I was ready to sit down and take a break so “Colorado Coffeeshop” it would be.

I ordered a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The sandwich – a hot ham and cheese on white bread – wasn’t anything special but it did the trick. The coffee on the other hand was excellent. And, while it was pricey, it didn’t break the bank. So that was good. I decided to read a little bit over lunch. (Figured I’d paid for the real estate, right?) I brought Murakami’s “Dance, Dance, Dance” with me. The first Murakami novel I ever read. I’m a sentimental guy.

After lunch I ducked into a 7-11 and grabbed an ice cream for dessert. Munching the ice cream I strolled back through some neighborhoods, wandering, content to be a strange apparition, a momentary anomaly, in the rhythm of another people’s life. Before too long I came to a commercial part of town and happened upon a Starbucks. You can’t have too much coffee on vacation, I say.

I’m not particularly fond of Starbucks (I could take it or leave it and, as a matter of fact, I would’ve preferred something a little more off the beaten path) but they had room on their patio and that sold it for me.

Sitting down was good. With the exception of lunch I’d been walking or standing (the train was crowded) most of the day. Travelling in a foreign land is both exhilarating and exhausting simultaneously – doubly so when you’ve been living overseas for any amount of time. There is a definite thrill that comes with experiencing a new culture – new languages to grapple with; unusual (to you anyway) customs; sights and sounds and foods and people – it’s all very exciting but sometimes you just want to sit down with a Coke and Big Mac or some other “comfort culture” item. For better or worse globalization can usually accommodate this need.

Maybe it wasn’t just the patio but the familiarity of Starbucks that I was looking for.

Sunday afternoon. People watching. Nico’s “These Days” repeating on my iPod. Now this is vacation.

I was to meet the girls back in Osaka around nine. I’d need at least two hours to make it on time so I finished off my iced Americano and trotted off for the train station.

The remains of the day featured conversation with (presumably) yakuza gangsters; the capture of a live mouse in a very crowded mall; sake and takoyaki and cross-dressing geishas.

Japan is quite amenable to adventure.

Japan: Day One

2009-05-11T07:11:00.000-07:00

There had been some confusion; something lost in translation, I suppose.

The three of us (me and the two girls I was travelling with) were supposed to have rooms booked – couch surfing to be exact – prior to arriving in Japan but, for whatever reason, it fell through. Our flight was Saturday morning and Friday afternoon I got a call from S. Every hostel/hotel/hole-in-the-wall she contacted was full. No room in the inn. She was obviously concerned.

But what can you do? We certainly weren’t going to cancel our tickets. Destiny isn’t going to be thwarted by so arbitrary a detail as a place to stay; things usually have a way of working out.

And there’s always park benches.

As it turns out we didn’t need to resort to getting our camp on. At the last moment S. managed to get us two rooms at a “capsule hotel”. The rooms where we stayed (the girls bunked together; I had my own pad) were little more than walk-in closets with capsules to sleep in. These capsules – just big enough to squeeze yourself into – were like hotel rooms in miniature: mattress, pillow, tiny TV, radio, climate control and reading light. (I looked but couldn’t find a Gideon’s Bible.)

Of course we had to find the place first. We took the train from Kansai International Airport to Shin-Imamiya Station near downtown Osaka. Somehow I wound up carrying most of our luggage.

Outside the station it reeked of piss and garbage. Not exactly a sketchy part of town (do those even exist in Japan?) but there weren’t rows of Ritz-Carlton’s or Hiltons lining the streets either. A whole fleet of bicycles locked up beneath the underpass; bodies at rest; chrome flashing and fading into shadow by turns whenever a train rumbled above us. Old men squatting over a game of “Go”; gambling, cursing and yelling. Vendors set up on the sidewalks hustling, hocking all manner of wares: household appliances; art; a prodigious selection of pornography; some vintage videogames.

It was this latter item (the games, not the porn) that caught my eye. I picked up a copy of “Dragon Quest V” for 300 yen (about three bucks.) Widely regarded as the finest 16-bit RPG to never receive an official English translation this title, originally published for the Super Famicom (SNES) in 1992, was only formally localized and released in America earlier this year. Until then getting your hands on a copy was something of a castle in the sky – or at least a very expensive purchase on EBay – for videogame collectors and aficionados. So I was thrilled to be making this (portentous as it would turn out) transaction.

The guy doing the selling – an older gentleman of few teeth and questionable odor – seemed awfully pleased with the sale so I thought I might’ve been had. But still, it would have only amounted to a couple of dollars so I couldn’t have been taken for too bad a ride. And more importantly: “Dragon Quest V”!

While I was all aglow with unabashed geekery the girls were in a Lawson’s trying to get directions to our hotel. A Japanese man very kindly offered to take us there. It was about a half block back up the street. We’d walked past it a couple of times.

After storing our bags the three of us decided to head to Namba, an entertainment district in downtown Osaka, for the night’s festivities. It was getting on towards dusk when we arrived and Namba was already a blazing Shrine to Neon. I thought they liked it lit up here in Korea but this was ridiculous; if I’d been a moth I would have probably just died then and there: sensory overload.

One of the things I was set on doing in Japan was getting in a few rounds of “Street Fighter IV”. I’ve already written at some length about my relationship with this franchise so I won’t rehearse that here but this has been a goal of mine for a while; to test my mettle against competitors who are routinely ranked as the best in the world. It isn’t a major goal, sure, but, like what Dr. Pausch recommended in his “Last Lecture”, it is an attainable one. And those are good to have; grease in the gears of bigger dreams.

The girls were pretty understanding the first couple of times I drug them into an arcade (they even played a sit down racing game) but this understanding was on the wane by arcades three and four. By arcade five I figured I’d be going it alone. But I was not to be daunted in my quest for a “Street Fighter IV” cabinet! Turns out five was my lucky number. The game was displayed on a big HD screen near the center of the arcade and all things considered I didn’t do too badly: I won six out of ten matches. There were slaps on the back; communal “oohhs” and “ahhs”; the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. An international brotherhood of geeks.

We had ramen for dinner: piping hot and incredibly delicious. If noodles have a Platonic ideal this was it.

What happened next was, for me, nothing short of phenomenal. However it involved vintage videogames. And I’m going to write about it now. At length. Certainly at more length than common courtesy would allow. So feel free to skip to the end if this isn’t your cup of tea.

[Begin Paul’s Epic no-wonder-I’m-thirty-and-unmarried Nerdsplosion]

The store was called “Big Tiger”.

Newer games on the first floor: this generation; PS2 and PS1; some GameCube games; a dusty and unloved Xbox in a shroud of bubble wrap stuffed in the corner. It was all interesting enough. But it was upstairs – up the Stairway to Heaven – where the real joys awaited discovery: used and new vintage.

The distinct sounds of popular Famicom (NES) games like “Super Mario Bros.” and “Zelda” played like a chorus of 8-bit angels as you ascended the stairway to the second floor. (If you grew up in the 80’s you’re probably humming these tunes right now. Amazing how Koji Kondo (the composer of many iconic videogame soundtracks, including the two mentioned above) was able to create such memorable music with such limited technology.) The walls were lined with posters of childhood favorites – Little Mac, Bonk, Akira Toriyama’s “Dragon Quest” character designs – that blurred past like you were moving through a time warp.

And the games! It was like discovering a cache of buried treasure that I’ve been studying the map to for twenty years: Super Famicom games (boxed + instructions “Final Fantasy VI”?!); MegaDrive and PC Engine games and systems; every iteration of Gameboy from its monochromatic origins to the Technicolor sunset of its final version; the various armamentarium – plush toys, promotional posters, controllers and chords and carrying cases – of two and a half decades of videogame culture.

I purchased three MegaDrive games: “Phantasy Star II”, “Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium”, and “Shining and the Darkness”. All three were had for just over 500 yen.

The first two were largely the creation of Rieko Kodama. Although not as well known a figure – either in her native Japan or abroad – as, say, Shigeru Miyamoto, or even Hironobu Sakaguchi, her works (mostly videogames) are well-loved by those familiar with them and she has had a big, if largely unheralded, influence on the role-playing (RPG) genre.

The “Phantasy Star” series (specifically the numbered entries; that is, not the on-line iterations) is, for a number of reasons, my all-time favorite videogame series.

Back before Blockbuster gobbled it up there was a little Ma and Pop video store in my old hometown called “Showcase Video”. The guy who ran the place – an obese loudmouth whose fingers and shirt were always stained with popcorn grease – was a real unpleasant dude, but Showcase was they only store in town that rented SMS games so he had me by the short and curlies.

It was $2.99 for the weekend and you had the game till five the following Monday. (And that was five pm on the dot. Even a minute over and you got slammed with an extortionate late fee. I remember my Dad shouting this usurious racket down more than a few times.) I was too young yet to be working (mowing lawns was still a few summers away) and cash on hand was a rarity so I didn’t get to rent a game every weekend, but when it did happen it was a real treat.

And of all the SMS games I rented (and I think I eventually rented them all) “Phantasy Star” was tops.

The game itself was pretty revolutionary. One of the earliest console RPGs it featured a massive quest and pseudo 3-D dungeons that pushed the SMS’s technology to the limit. At barely ten years old, however, I wasn’t aware of the game’s historical or technological significance. All I was aware of was how much ass it kicked.

I’d never played anything like it. This game was wholly unlike the run-jump-rinse-repeat platformers (think “Super Mario Bros”) I was familiar with: there was very little action; I spent a lot of the game walking around talking to townspeople; when I would finally sally forth from the city limits I’d usually end up getting slaughtered in short order by a giant bee or grasshopper or some other angry insect; I was constantly getting lost with no idea how to progress. And it was a totally engrossing experience. It certainly didn’t hurt that Reiko Kodama’s character designs paid more than a little homage to “Star Wars”, a franchise I was – surprise, surprise – pretty into at the time.

Just before Showcase Video was finally vaporized by the Blockbuster Death Star in the late-nineties they had a going out of business sale. It’d been years since I’d been in there; I doubted if they’d even still have SMS games on the shelf. But they did. And in one of the most memorable purchases of my life I asked the owner (no longer the obese and draconic man of my youth but now his equally obese and draconic son) if he’d take a five spot for “Phantasy Star”. “Yea, whatever”, he said. “It’s not like anyone plays that old shit anyway.”

And now I can add the Japanese copies of “Phantasy Star II” and “Phantasy Star IV” to my collection of old shit. Awesome.

What a place was “Big Tiger” and how appropriate that it should be named after an animal that, through the fiction of Jorge Louis Borges, has come to represent the magical and unattainable – childhood in retrospect – to me.

It is a rare thing when the dream isn’t outstripped by reality.

[End Paul’s Geektastic Excersise in New Games Journalism]

I met back up with the girls at close to eleven o’clock. (Clearly they weren’t about to have anything to do with my weepy trip down memory lane.) We decided to finish the night up at “Sex Machine”, a BBQ dive-cum-James Brown shrine. The Godfather of Soul in the form of cut-outs plastered to the walls, a passable likeness in oil paint done by one of the stores proprietors, and a miniature wooden effigy among other relics, was there to preside over the serving of cold beers at a reasonable price.

You can’t make a place like this up.

Outside a trio of call girls were seeing their johns off from the love motel above us; inside the place throbbed to sixties rock and roll, soul, and jazz. James Brown and jazz, hookers, Japan on a Saturday night: I was ready at any minute for one of Murakami’s protagonists to enter the bar looking for a missing cat or girlfriend.

After some brief taxi tribulations (what trip to a foreign land would be complete without it?) the three of us decided to call it a night and headed back to the capsule hotel. It had been a busy day and Kyoto was the plan for tomorrow.

on the eve of a journey

2009-05-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

Japan.

“Japan”. Linger on the word a moment. Roll it about your brain like a hard candy on your tongue. Savor it. “Japan”.

Christmas Day 1988. It was a Sunday. Still my favorite day for Christmas to fall on. We opened our presents on Christmas Eve back then. There wasn’t a lot but my Mom and Dad did their best. And my sister and I were always amazed. That Christmas after we got home from church my folks asked my sister and I to check behind a curtain in the family room, said they thought they saw something back there. We raced. The curtain was yanked away. Sega Master System (SMS). Incredible. And that set the course. That planted the seed.

The games I played on the SMS – “Alex Kidd”, “Alien Syndrome”, “Phantasy Star” – were weird. G.I. Joe this was not. These were games with flying cats, kids that played rock-scissor-paper against creepy demons, space curiosities that were as “cute as they were deadly” (a direct quote from the “Fantasy Zone” game manual). I didn’t know it at the time but these games offered an almost undiluted experience with one element of then contemporary Japanese pop culture.

And I loved it.

Pretty soon after that Christmas in 1988 – if not in actual conjunction with the event – I was introduced to Saban Entertainment published cartoons like “Noozles”, “The Little Bits” and, most importantly, “Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics”. More Trojan horses from the Land of the Rising Sun.

It was in junior high when I began making the connection between these artifacts of my childhood and the country they came from. It wasn’t like it is today in America where otaku culture is, if not mainstream, at the very least a well-represented niche. My love of Japanese pop culture at the time wasn’t so much a product of the social isolation I experienced as a means of reinforcing it. This was long before (culturally speaking) the advent of the internet and message boards offered a place for shy basement dwellers to congregate (sort of) and stroke each other’s vanity while exorcising the aggression that would likely get their asses kicked at school so I had no one with whom to share my interests. And even when there were kids around I could talk to they didn’t know about (and weren’t generally interested in hearing about) the obscure videogames and cartoons that so infatuated me.

The films of Hayao Miyazaki came next. “Princess Mononoke”. October 1999 at the Palace in Kansas City. I remember I was in love with this girl at the time and she sat next to me during the movie. Her hand occasionally brushing against mine, electricity shooting up my arm and through the rest of my body every time she did so. I remember this. I remember how crazyoverwhelmingmaddeningexciting it is to be head-over-heels for someone at that age whenever I watch this movie again. And it’s really nice.

She’s married now with a beautiful baby. A family started.

More Studio Ghibli films followed: “The Cat Returns”; “Nausicaa”; Spirited Away”; "Howl’s Moving Castle”. I introduced these to my younger brother and sister and viewing them together became something of an event for us: what we would end up calling “watching a Miyazaki”.

In October 2001 I was rummaging about in a used bookstore that has long since vanished and thought I’d take a chance on a book by Haruki Murakami. I’d never heard of the author but the cover - a sheep in a suit - caught my eye. The book was “Dance, Dance, Dance”. Continuing a trend: I loved it. More Murakami – notably “Norwegian Wood” and “Sputnik Sweetheart” – followed. As well as Tanizaki, Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and Endo. What started with videogames and comics was now an insatiable appetite for Japanese literature.

My junior year of college (2005, what a year!) I enrolled in a Japanese culture class at UMKC. Dr. Ebersole. No cakewalk. That year (and that semester especially) was an ordeal that was in some ways made easier by this grey-headed academic sadist grinding his boot heel into me: I completely lost myself in my studies. And it was great to be adding more to my understanding of Japan than just what I’d gleaned from pop culture and the reading of a handful of novels.

And then in August 2007 I moved to South Korea. To a city about as far from Japan as is my hometown of Kansas City from Saint Louis. Why Korea and not Japan? It’s a good question. Part of it was pragmatic: student loans to pay off and Korea seemed (and has thus far proven) to be the more remunerative of the two options. But mercenary considerations are only a part of the picture. (And let me add that my time in Korea has been amazing; I’d not trade this experience for anything.)

I think I may not have yet been able to confront Japan. The Japan that exists within me – the private Japan I’ve been piecing together for more than two decades, a place within my imagination so infused with nostalgia – exists within me and nowhere else. Reconciling this fantasy with the reality of a Japan of people and buildings and waiting on trains and paying too much for a bowl of noodles and culture shock is a tall order. Sometimes we stay in bed not to sleep but to keep dreaming.

“Japan”. A journey twenty years – and almost an entire life – in the making.

So am I ready now?

Does it matter? I leave tomorrow.

mea culpa

2009-05-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

three and a half months.

that is an awful long time to leave a blog unattended. all the usual excuses apply: ive been busy; im lazy; my dog ate my computer.

honestly part of it (although it hardly accounts for the entirety of my negligence - three and a half months?!) is that ive done some travelling: China and Japan. in that order. although im going to blog about them in reverse.

so that will get things started once more, a little travel blogging. i know that the four or five of you who happen by here have probably heard most of these stories via email and, to make matters worse, im not going to post any photos (i doubt it, anyway) with these reflections. humor me, i guess.

three and a half months is far too long to leave a little blog on its own.

keep it up and the next thing ya know im gonna get a call telling me "manisamap" was seen drinking behind the bleachers or got caught with a joint in his bookbag. some parent i am, geez...

ERRATUM

2009-01-20T22:27:00.000-08:00

Kingdom: Demonalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Acardia
Order: Demianthropoidea
Family: Adamopolous
Genus: Mierrus Hominidae
Species: Mierrus

Apology:

We have endeavored with the preceding entries in this compendium to treat our subjects with the detached objectivity appropriate to scientific writing. Given the ostensibly preternatural aspects of the subject matter at hand this was a task fraught with challenges. It has been our intention, however, from the very inception of this project to place the maligned recipients of our attentions within a context free of the distortions that inhere in so much of both religious and folk representations.

Despite our efforts there can be little doubt that we will offend the sensibilities of some whilst perchance exciting the lurid curiosities of others. But what may strike the gracious reader of this text as grotesque or pornographic has engendered no such emotions within the authors. Just as our colleagues in the separate but wedded discipline of taxonomical biology assign no moral valuations and thus do not flinch at, say, Megaselia scalarsis and its necrophagous proclivities, we too have refrained from quaint moralizing.

As scientists we are, after all, to operate as the eyes of Nature and not her conscience.

It is with professional apologies, then, that we present this our last entry. Here you will find depicted an organism so vile, so fulsome to even the most depraved mind, that we were regrettably but ineluctably compelled towards invective rather than mere description.

Anatomy:

Mierrus, whilst classified as a single organism, is composed of a myriad of constituent parts that operate under presumed notions of autonomy. (Not autonomy apart from the super organism – the existence of which the individual groups seem largely ignorant of – but autonomy apart from one another.)

The groups are in effect biologically identical with one another but do exhibit some degree of difference (see “Behaviour”) as well as distinctions between male and female genders.

The subject’s size is capable of extreme variation; presumably at will, but it is always humanoid in form; horrifically and awfully humanoid.

Behaviour:

As mentioned above Mierrus is composed of a large number of groups operating under dubious notions of autonomy. These groups are wholly dependent one on another for continued existence but act as if blind to or insensible of this fact. Indeed, interactions between groups were overwhelmingly marked by violence.

The features by which these groups attempt to distinguish themselves are essentially arbitrary: the superficial aspects of some groups – size; coloration; et cetera – show minor variations over another; certain groups excel in tasks at which other groups struggle; their vocalizations display unique semantic markers for nearly identical referents. These distinctions, and others equally arbitrary, are the grounds for justifying – in fact, frequently making virtues of – the most reprehensible atrocities imaginable. (Since the time of this writing the groups have evolved – perhaps “devolved” is more apposite – in such a way that any act of justification has been largely abandoned. Meanwhile the assignation of virtues has increased in inverse proportion.)

Violence is not only exported. Often it was observed within groups, the female and young of the species typically – but not exclusively – being the victims.

In this creature at war with itself rape and murder are endemic; genocide is routine; vengeance is pursued at any cost; creativity brings forth the armaments of destruction; the blood of the innocent (what innocence there is amongst them) cries unanswered in the streets; cruelty and deception of every sort is the common currency.

It would seem that a commitment to self-annihilation is the one thing about which Mierrus agrees amongst itself.

Mierrus has means of communicating (if we may debase the word thusly) through the use of many tongue-like organs that writhe together in a perpetually agape mouth and shriek in what sounds like as many frequencies. (As we have already sullied “communication” we will do no further damage and refrain here from ascribing to these individual rackets the word “language”.) At those rare intervals when two or more contrarian tongues achieve a degree of acoustic consonance such that mutual intelligibility at least seems possible every effort is made by these accidental conspirators to frustrate their own efforts and descend once more into a chaotic, chattering din.

Mierrus is an omnivore with a preference for meat. Unsurprisingly, groups prey without discretion upon one another’s young. This in itself is not uncommon in Nature but we frequently observed behaviour associated with this appetite that was almost unfathomably appalling.

One group would sever the heads of the stolen infants of another group and then, under auspices of empathy, serve to the grieved and apparently ignorant parents the brains and entrails of their slaughtered progeny. The ignorance of the “bereaved”, however, is highly suspect. We noticed that many groups advertised or made available – subtly but irrefutably so – their young to rival groups and while they maintained an attitude of dismayed shock throughout the ordeal the sincerity of their sorrow is little to be believed. It would appear that these atrocities must be classified not as acts of kidnapping and murder but of ritualized infanticide and cannibalization.

It must be noted that this behaviour is some of the only intra-group cooperation demonstrated by Mierrus.

In matters of culture Mierrus displays a considerable propensity for the creation and adoption of religious myths and topoi. Such beliefs were very nearly ubiquitous amongst the groups observed and as they are congenial to the affecting of some of their most remarkable perversion and cruelty this may explain their considerable influence. Violence was especially fervent when sanctioned by a religious authority or the (supposed) divine mandate of a god.

Evidence suggests that Mierrus reckons its deities in its own image; a fact that, if true, only serves to further damn its nature.

Conclusion:

This concludes our entry for the daemon known as Mierrus.

To maintain for the period of time demanded of us the proximity to such a monster necessary for the accumulating of this data was nearly a trial beyond words. For Mierrus is a daemon unlike any other. It lives for death, has made an “art” out of viciousness, and glories in its violence. It is this that makes the fiend so ignoble: that it is conscious of what it does.

A certain pity can be extended to the brutish lot of the beasts of the field; they know not what they do. But what sympathies are on offer for a being that is self-aware? For a being that must surely know better?

Perhaps on second thought Mierrus is, if not worthy of our pity, at least pitiful: no promise of damnation to come could surmount the punishment of daily living with itself. Mierrus’ torture is simply, piteously, horribly, that it can never stop being Mierrus. At least Oroboros (see entry XXVI of this volume) had the consolation – specious, to be true, but no less consoling for that – of a finite length of tail to consume.

Mierrus, in spite of all its trying, can’t get rid of itself.

It is with no small measure of terror that we contemplate such a monster making its way into our midst.

-Excerpted from “Essays in Taxonomical Daemonology” , Hume and A. Toore eds. (unpublished)

russian riffing

2009-01-20T19:55:00.000-08:00

Every happy family is alike insofar as its members are committed to maintaining a set of shared deceptions; it is in the upsetting of these deceptions that a family acquires its unique unhappiness.

No. 7

2009-01-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

At dawn the sky still breaks against the face of the mountains in waves of pale blue mist. The sun emerges as Earth rehearses this arc of its ancient orbit and the waves recede; drawn in to wait again for nightfall. From the vanishing darkness a rooster signals a new day’s momentary triumph.

My punctual alarm clock pierces the sleep that surrounds me and I surface from a dream. Lying in bed I struggle to guard from marauding consciousness the fading apparition of a girl who is at once both as strange and remote to me as a fairy kingdom and the sum of every woman I’ve ever known, loved, cherished, cursed. The ember eyes of this unknown Ur-girl flash finally as the dream is outstripped by reality and I am left alone in the growing glow of morning.

In the kitchen my coffee maker exhales periodic sighs that fill my small apartment with its rich, resuscitating breath. I pour a full cup; I am going to need all the help I can get today. The mountains may be clearing but my mind feels wrapped in a stupefying fog and with half-blind eyes it peeks disconcertingly from its cephalic cave.

Opposite where I live there is a small vegetable garden. Rows of pepper and bean plants, bellflowers with milky lavender blossoms, and a pumpkin patch grow here; all enclosed by a wire fence from which ivy hangs like a shaggy, green beard. Every day with bowed back and dirt covered knees the same old woman tends to this garden. Standing at the window, the cup of coffee cooling in my hands, I observe her.

The old woman lays down her hand spade straightens her back inhales deeply and with knotted gnarled fingers begins turning over a pile of desiccated pepper plants beneath which grow seedlings their stems and leaves as pale with newness as the day seedlings that are being protected and nourished through the decay and death of the plants from which their seeds were harvested seedlings that in a short span of time will lay shriveled on the earth with new life burning under them and the old woman will strip the familiar shroud from their reincarnated selves as she has done since the time before her remembering and give them anew to the creative chaos of the sun.

I finish my coffee. The day is soon ringing with peals of children laughing and singing on their way to school.

- Yeosu, South Korea, September 2007

No. 6

2009-01-08T04:30:00.000-08:00

"The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance."

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest (V.i.27,28)

"In war, the physical or idolatrous substitute for the real dialectic of the spirit, one lives by half-truths."

- Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

No. 5

2008-12-10T05:27:00.000-08:00

These days I’m not in the classroom long before hearing someone – usually a student but occasionally a cheeky co-teacher – calling out “Santa Claus! Santa Claus!” to me in an unmistakably Konglish patois. Christmas is fast approaching and Santa is busy hawking everything from LCD televisions to gimchee refrigerators in Korea this holiday season. His rosy mug gives a wink and smile from just about every store’s window. So I can understand why kids would have Santa on the brain. But that doesn’t necessarily explain this new nickname of mine.

What is it about me that begs the comparison? At first glance not much:

Despite frequent bouts of gastronomical enthusiasm I do not share jolly Saint Nick’s jovial rotundity. My wardrobe consists of not a single red jumpsuit. I couldn’t locate the North Pole on a globe if the place didn’t have directions built into its very name. My working understanding of reindeer is slight, and while my knowledge of elves is (embarrassingly) considerable this is more of the Dungeons and Dragons/Tolkien’s "Lord of the Rings" variety than it is Santa’s little helpers. I’ve never even ridden on a sleigh.

I don’t exactly sound like a guy whose gonna find out if you’ve been naughty or nice, right?

But there’s more to the story.

You see there is something about me – a quality so uncommon, so rare, and so significant in Korea – that it is seemingly capable of changing the fresh face of a boy from the Mid-West into the very visage of Father Christmas.

What is this caterpillian quality? What is the motivation of this transmogrification?

My beard.

Now my beard isn’t especially Clausian: it is of a chestnut hue and, despite three month’s of unmolested growth, doesn’t reach much beyond my chin. Judged against even a garden variety Santa at the mall in any American suburb I wouldn’t measure up. But I’m not in Kansas anymore. And around these parts a little scruff goes a long way.

The beard in Korea is an endangered species. A thick whiskered Korean man is as elusive a creature as the bird watcher’s ivory bill woodpecker: they may be out there but it’s been many a moon since one was spotted in the wild. True, you may from time to time run across a fellow with a little facial fuzz – the pencil stache is currently popular with gangsters and a few pop stars – but this is the kind of well-manicured, finely sculpted “beard” that looks like it took about three times as long to groom as it did to grow.

Gentlemen, if you could successfully audition for a boy band it’s not a beard.

This scarcity of facial hair, this paucity of pileousity if beards happen to make you rhapsodic (ladies you know who you are), is more a genetic matter than it is a cosmetic one: Koreans just aren’t very hairy. Any effort by a typical Korean man to muster more than a downy shadow on his chin is an exercise in follicular futility. Naturally, then, my beard is a bit of a novelty and reactions to it run the spectrum from awe (pre-adolescent boys) to envy (middle-aged men) to courteous disgust (women regardless of age).

I take the good with the bad. Sure my beard is essentially date-repellant, but it also provides me with the most effective means I have of keeping some of my sixth grade boys in line: they see it as a testament to my alpha-male status. (Clearly these aren’t the same students who liken me to Santa Claus). Luckily I’ve not yet had to join these boys on the soccer field where their perceived notions of my presumed manliness will collapse like a house of cards. I’ll milk it for what it’s worth while I can.

In just a couple of weeks 2008 will be winding down. And I imagine once the holidays have passed, after the sales have ended and the Christmas tree has been packed away till next time, I won’t hear so many shouts of “Santa Claus! Santa Claus!” as I walk the halls of my elementary school.

No, I’ll probably go back to hearing the refrain of “Chuck Norris! Chuck Norris!” that greets me for the better part of the year.

That’s right: Santa Claus and Chuck Norris.

I’d like to think I’m doing the beard proud.

No. 4

2008-12-04T05:50:00.001-08:00

The buildings stand packed together in tight rows. Their concrete facades – advertising for restaurants, shops, clubs and bars – are similar enough to be interchangeable; each block replicating itself with only minor variations. The air is rank with exhaust fumes.

Central Seoul.

The streets are busy now with families and couples out on the weekend, but this crowd is nothing compared with what will happen later that night. After dark these streets will overflow with hundreds of young men and women awash in a sea of neon drifting from one bar to the next. People will huddle shoulder to shoulder around street stalls eating a cheap midnight snack of odeng or deokboki. There’s likely to be a fight or two; someone passed out or vomiting on the sidewalk. The crowds won’t let up until the trains start running again at 5 AM.

You’ve spent most of the afternoon walking through this neighborhood without any destination in mind and now you’re thirsty. It doesn’t take long to find a café. Approaching it you can smell freshly ground coffee beans. Korea doesn’t serve the best coffee but it’s not the worst you’ve had either; and you’ve had plenty of opportunities to learn to appreciate it.

Inside there is some confusion about your order which is frustrating because you consider ordering coffee one of the few things you are capable of in the language. Once this gets straightened out you mount the stairs to try and find a seat on the second floor; it is crowded but there’s a table available. You quickly walk over and sit down.

You take a couple of things out of your book bag and have a look around.

A group of four women are sitting at the table in front of you. Three of the women sport nearly identical bobbed hairstyles. There are frequent lulls in their chattering as they scoop spoonfuls from a shared bowl of ice cream and cake into their mouths. To your right, at the tables lined up against a row of floor to ceiling windows, sit three couples. The couple sitting farthest from you – the youngest of the trio – might be on a first date: their interactions conducted with all of the awkwardness and expectation of romance in its infancy. The two other couples – older; perhaps in their thirties – seem comfortable if not a little bored: that initial wild excitement long since subdued through habit.

You take another drink of your iced Americano.

Young girls reading fashion magazines consult with pocket mirrors before reapplying lipstick and foundation according to their own exclusive code of beauty. A man in a tweed jacket gesticulates wildly and knocks his drink over in the process. A mother bounces a baby on her knee while her husband flips mindlessly through the newspaper. Music – mostly American Top 40 from the ‘80’s – plays over the intercom. In the short time you’ve been here nearly every person has had their cell phone out to take a call or send a text message.

This is the same Saturday afternoon that plays out in any number of cafés around the world; the same Saturday afternoon you have participated in for many years. From a café in Kansas City to one in Seoul; it doesn’t matter where you go; how far you may wander from home. You never stop being yourself.

Man is a map.

By the time you step out of the café the sun smolders in a glowing heap on the horizon. The crowd is growing. You zip up your coat. December can be a cruel month here. You could stand to eat something but it is difficult getting a table for one in Korea. There’s always street food but you had that for lunch. All the restaurants you check look full. You decide to try a quieter part of the neighborhood. Following a narrow, twisting back alley you come to a Japanese franchise that specializes in ramen. The place is packed but the cook lets you eat at the counter with a few other people. You order pork ramen and a beer. It isn’t long before a piping bowl of noodles arrives. Alternating bites of hot ramen with sips of cold beer makes for a satisfying meal. You hurry to finish and free up a spot at the counter; there are people waiting.

Returning to the main street the now massive crowd moves like one entity: each person a single cell contributing a tiny part to this organism’s enormity. From any of the surrounding rooftops you imagine it to look like a pulsating, amorphous creature – something out of a B grade horror flick – heaving its way in all directions; a cacophony of white noise rising from it like an alien frequency. Merging with the crowd you move to the pulse of this amalgamated animal, aimlessly, without volition.

The crowd carries you to a place called “The Gamble” which you figure will be as good as any of the other countless bars around here. You spill with a few others into the building’s lobby. The Gamble is on the fourth floor but there is a line for the elevator so you take the stairs. On your way up you are bombarded by images of candy canes, presents, Santa Claus and reindeer. It is like a concerted effort by all that is lurid and crass about the holiday season to make you homesick.

It more or less succeeds.

Unsurprisingly, The Gamble is wall-to-wall crowded with the exception of the bar itself which is completely empty. You order an imported brown ale. It’s more expensive than a domestic but worth it. You’ve only had your beer long enough to take a few swigs before two men walk up to you. They are both pretty big: the kind of crew cut, square-jawed dudes who look like they take their steaks raw. American G.I.’s, probably. They are saying something to you in English. One cracks a lewd joke; you don’t laugh; they get the picture.

You finish your beer alone.

That first beer hits the spot so you order another. The bartender – a no longer young but still attractive woman calling herself “Phantasia” – brings it over. You’ve both made some marginal attempts at small talk, but these are just ramshackle bridges that can only begin to span a linguistic divide. She pantomimes a rock, scissors, and paper with her hand. “Play”, she says. Your first game ends in a draw: paper. You beat her on the second try. Reaching into her jacket pocket she pulls out a wooden bracelet of Buddhist prayer beads. The charm is slipped over your wrist. “Here”, she says. “For good luck.”

For good luck, you think. It couldn’t hurt.

The elevator’s slow descent is interrupted at each floor to pick up new passengers. Two drunken girls stumble on. They try to practice their English with you. The ride down seems to take forever. Finally the doors open with a sound like a gasp, a rush of breath, and cool air hits your face. Your ears are burning. The buildings outside are lit up in the garish greens and reds of Christmas back home. It is as bright as midday. A business card for a strip joint is placed in your hand. Over the thumping bass of a generic hip hop track laughter mixes with a language you can barely comprehend. You feel like a sleepwalker in someone else’s dream.

Fingering the bracelet you struggle against the crowd towards the subway entrance. You need to hurry.

The last train leaves in fifteen minutes.

No. 3

2008-11-28T00:21:00.000-08:00

Hatred never ends through hatred.
By non-hate alone does it end.
This is an ancient truth.

-the Dhammapada

No. 2

2008-11-26T05:30:00.000-08:00

It was the summer of 1992. I turned thirteen that June.

That summer I kissed a girl for the first time: a shameless and slobbery affair on an amusement park ride. I did a lot of fishing and hiking with my dog in the woods behind the house in which I grew up; woods they bulldozed that fall to put in a new subdivision. I learned a few chords on the guitar, slept in nearly every morning, and just generally gorged myself on the carefree indolence of youth. But of all the events that still signify that summer to me, probably the most memorable took place at a neighborhood convenience store.

I was over at my friend Daniel Martin’s house. Daniel was two years younger than me – a significant amount at that age – but I liked him. And he was one of the few kids I hung out with. Our mom’s had introduced us at church. There was a 7-11 about a mile from where he lived and we’d usually ride our bikes down there when we had a little money between us. Although cash in hand was certainly not a prerequisite: a lot of times we’d just stand around inside, broke, enjoying the A/C our parents were two poor to use, thumbing through comics and magazines until one of the cashiers would ask us to buy something or leave.

In the early-Nineties arcades were still big business in America and just about every pizza parlor, movie theatre and convenience store had a cabinet or two set up to coax you (or, more often, a beleaguered parent) into parting with any loose quarters that might be jingling around in your pocket: classics like Galaga and Pac-Man; newer titles like N.A.R.C., Toki, and Klax; and, for the first time ever that glorious summer, Street Fighter II: The World Warriors.

The specifics are hazy. I don’t remember when exactly the local 7-11 got its Street Fighter II cabinet. I was plenty into videogames as a kid but I can’t remember any games that preceded this one set up next to the Slurpee machine. It might be that, as an extra quarter was a rarity in those days, I had no reason to notice the previous games on offer. Maybe Street Fighter II stood unnoticed by me for weeks or, for all I can remember, it might have been installed earlier that same day. The particulars leading up to the event may be lost, but I’ll never forget that summer afternoon in 1992 when I was in possession of that rare quarter and played my first game of Street Fighter II.

It was one of those childhood experiences that stay with you.

I chose Blanka as my avatar. Blanka, for the (lamentably!) uninitiated, is a mutant from Brazil who employs a Capoiera fighting style (naturally) and battles to reunite with his mother. A gripping narrative was clearly not the game’s selling point. I picked this particular character because his green skin reminded me of the Incredible Hulk (another childhood fixation that has weathered the journey into adulthood). Who knows how far into the game I got on that portentous quarter? I didn’t get knocked out in the first round but I doubt I got much beyond that. What is certain is that I got at least far enough for this game with its eight suitably outlandish yet iconic playable characters – the “World Warriors” of the game’s sub-title – to seize hold of my imagination in a serious way.

Very nearly the first game of its kind and without question the most accomplished to that point, Street Fighter II introduced a generation of boys (and occasionally their fathers and uncles) to the wonders of the one-on-one fighter. Elegantly simple in its design – a joystick and three buttons each for punches and kicks – the level of depth afforded by the game’s play mechanics were unprecedented. Matches, either against the computer or more preferably a human controlled opponent, were best of three affairs that combined the strategy of chess with the breakneck pace and pyrotechnics of an action packed Saturday morning cartoon: every bout was the apotheosis of hand-eye coordination in sixty second bursts. Even at the time of this writing, more than sixteen years after its U.S. debut, the game and its subsequent iterations still routinely host competitive tournaments.

I was hooked.

Before long it got to the point where I’d reckon the meager pittance I received in allowance not as any monetary unit but in the number of plays at Street Fighter II it afforded me. Learning that each character was capable of powerful special moves and nearly unstoppable combos was to be initiated into a secret and arcane knowledge; the joystick and button combinations for these devastating arts becoming mantras that were repeated throughout the day. I scoured gaming magazines for whatever fresh insights I could glean from them about my passion. I filled notebooks with drawings of the game’s roster engaged in combat or striking various heroic poses; as well as a number of tawdry and anatomically ludicrous depictions of Chun-li, the game’s lone female protagonist.

In other words, I treated Street Fighter II like most thirteen year olds treat an interest: I absolutely freaking obsessed over it.

This monomaniacal devotion to perfecting my Street Fighter II game had a significant impact on my available income: I was soon able to conquer the game’s final boss – the despotic M. Bison – on a single try and the other kids who frequented that 7-11 learned not to waste their money on a match against me. So not only could I get in a game or two of Street Fighter II but I often had enough change left over for a candy or soda.

It’s good to be king.

As the summer wore on I, like any fighting champ, sought out challengers worthy of my skill and for the first time in my young life a trip with my mom to the mall was not the equivalent of death by boredom and/or embarrassment.

One of the privileges accorded me by parents that summer was a greater degree of autonomy. A privilege I wasted no time in abusing by sucking face with whatever girl was willing and available (a combination that was, admittedly, pretty rare.) Beyond these poorly judged PDA episodes, however, I exercised my freedom by heading straight for the arcade in the mall – a smoky and rather seedy place called Aladdin’s Castle – while my mom did her shopping.

It was like moving from Triple A to the Majors; I got whipped pretty good on my first couple of attempts. Part of it was stage fright: a lot of the kids there were older than me and, as shy as I often was then, just working my way up to a cabinet very nearly exhausted my available resources. I was also terrified that my mom was going to come back to get me at the exact moment one of these guys dropped an F-bomb, thus making it very difficult to focus. After a while, though, I got comfortable in this environment and I started tallying up wins. It wasn’t long before I’d created a name for myself at the arcade amongst the older boys.

Playing Street Fighter II at Aladdin’s Castle – and playing it well, it must be remembered – allowed me to connect with my peers in a way that, up to that point, I’d never had access. I was never any good at sports (the word “abysmal” fits) and to make matters worse, at least from a social standpoint, I was homeschooled. So not only did I lack a common school – and thus social – experience with the kids in my neighborhood but I also could not compete with them in the ritual of kicking a ball or running fast and far. (Unless, of course, I was running fast and far to escape getting my ass kicked; I was a pro at that.)

These factors combined with my love of reading and drawing made me an easy target for bullies growing up. But thanks largely to the well-meaning vigilance, and downright scariness, of my mom I went from being picked on to being ignored. By thirteen I’d gone from punching bag to pariah.

I don’t know which was worse.

Being one of the better Street Fighter II players around (I’d given up Blanka and was playing a mean Ken by summer’s end; the character I nearly became invincible with) gave me a chance to know what it felt like to belong to the tribe; it gave me a shot at solidarity. Some boys have their jump shot or a mean fastball to earn the respect of their peers; I had a flying uppercut and a whirlwind kick. It’s geeky, sure, but what can you do? In childhood we are not in a position to question or repeal the circumstances that write themselves upon us; the circumstances that define us. Growing up is the awkward and frequently painful struggle of trying to rid ourselves of this mark or finding some way to live with it.

Did I want to be identified as a kid who was good at a videogame? That’s the wrong question to ask. I was just glad to have any kind of identity at all.

Given this history you can probably imagine how I reacted when in early-2008 Capcom – the Japanese developer of the Street Fighter franchise – announced they would release Street Fighter IV, the first numbered entry in the series in more than a decade, that fall. Excitement doesn’t quite do it justice: I watched the teaser trailer online many, many times. I emailed it to friends. I searched the internet for previews, write-ups, and a release date. I started plotting what steps I would need to take in order to play this game as soon as possible (how much would a ticket to Japan cost?) It was like I’d hit a time warp that sent me back fifteen years into the past. But the thing is I’m not thirteen years old anymore and my life has far more responsibilities now than I could ever have imagined back then. This reignited obsession blazed white hot for a moment and then burned itself out.

That is until last week.

Last week through a random browsing of a message board I learned that Street Fighter IV was available in Korea.

At an arcade in Seoul one hour from where I live.

The weekend couldn’t arrive fast enough.

* * *

Has this extended rumination on Street Fighter II been just a trip down memory lane? A sepia tinted look back at the halcyon past? Is this game only a totem, a sort of fetish, of my childhood? To some extent the answer to these questions must be “yes”, but this is a qualified assent. Yes, Street Fighter II is emblematic of a special childhood experience but it isn’t so much the memory of an experience, per se, that still carries value for me.

Nostalgia has become an enormously marketable commodity for many of us. If you grew up in the West or Japan chances are you passed much of your childhood and adolescence in relative comfort playing the days away with toys and games that have long since gone the way of the garage sale. Sure, in today’s Age of EBay nothing ever truly disappears into the ether. And even easier than this route – and generally less expensive – you can now recover all those lost after-school afternoons spent with Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, Transformers, et al through a quick trip down to Wal-Mart; or a ticket to the next summer blockbuster. Or that is what multi-million dollar marketing campaigns would have us believe, anyway.

How many of you from my generation – now parents yourselves – haven’t given to your child a modernized version of your own favorite plaything in the hopes of recapturing even a spark of that first flame?

Only the fire remains out.

Or who among you has not found himself seated in a theatre at the midnight opening of the film debut of a cherished childhood property? The special effects blow away anything the original could have produced; the story is competent; the characters are treated with respect; there is plenty of fan-service.

Yet your thirteen year-old self remains as distant as an echo.

I’ve certainly experienced my fair share of these and similar disappointments.

Can we really not go home again?

Maybe not. But if it is possible the road there will not lead through a mausoleum of once loved experiences; it will not be found by propitiating old ghosts. It will have to be a much harder pass than this because what we yearn for is not the experience itself but what motivated the experience. All the toys and games were incidental; they were a mere catalyst for the joy of discovery, of faith, of – Chun-li nudie pics and all – innocence.

We want to be surprised again, in the best possible way, with what life has to offer.

We want to shed the cynicism that so often attends adulthood.

* * *

The arcade was packed – teens and younger kids, mostly; a few businessmen at the crane games and slot machines – and I had to endure a molasses-slow line before getting my turn to play. When I finally stepped up the cabinet I looked over at the kid who was to be my opponent. He couldn’t have been a whole lot older than I was the first time I played. He was fidgeting with the joystick while I put the required change into the machine. I wondered what kind of map his life would be and where it would lead him. I wondered if he would someday find himself in a faraway land remembering his own childhood in South Korea.

“How’s it going?”

“Umm, hello”, he replied in English.

He seemed awfully nervous.

I moved my cursor over to Ken and was about to hit the “Start” button when I glanced at him once more. He was focused on the screen now, still visibly nervous but with a set, determined look on his face. He was obviously going to play to win.

Who knows? Maybe this kid reckoned his allowance the way I once had and had to make every coin count. Maybe this game was a lot more to him than just a way to kill time on a Saturday afternoon.

My cursor lingered on Ken for a moment more before I moved it.

Just for old time’s sake, I thought.

I chose Blanka.

No. 1

2008-11-25T02:35:00.000-08:00

I moved to South Korea on 26th August, 2007.

My life before that in Kansas City wasn’t a bad one by any means – I had a wonderful family and group of friends to spend time with; a career that had its ups and downs but was largely fulfilling; plenty of good books to read; a cat – but after nearly a quarter century in the same community I’d begun to feel like a lot of my possibilities at home had been exhausted. I felt stuck: stuck in a routine; stuck in one place; stuck in my own skin. I experienced shades of “Groundhog Day” every morning.

So I decided to shake things up.

In a pretty big way.

The week before Thanksgiving 2006 had been a particularly hard one at work. I was at the office late (a not uncommon occurrence at the time) finishing up a few emails when I decided to take a quick look at any job openings in my area. It wasn’t that I hated my job; I was just so restless; so bored with myself. I loaded up craigslist and the first listing I clicked on was a “Teach in Korea” link. It was just a generic add for an English institution outside of Seoul – the kind of add that clutters these types of sites – but it set me on a scavenger hunt for information (not on company time, of course) that would eventually lead me to accept a teaching position at an elementary school in Yeosu, South Korea. I’d been involved in education for a couple of years already and it had long been a desire of mine to see Asia.

This opportunity seemed like a perfect fit.

When my plane touched down at Incheon International Airport after twenty-six sleepless hours of travel I was running on pure adrenaline. Through some time spent playing guitar in a rock band before college I’d been fortunate enough to travel around much of the United States but this was only my second time overseas; the first being a brief two weeks in the United Kingdom and Italy over the 2003/04 Christmas holiday. Nothing in my life’s experience had prepared me for this journey and, now on my second year, I can safely say nothing outside of time spent in Korea would have.

It is a weird and wonderful place.

This blog will consist primarily of impressions of and reflections upon my time spent living, working, and travelling through South Korea, although I should forewarn you that given the nature both of this medium and the author a certain number of self-indulgent detours into fiction seem regrettably inevitable. I’ll try to keep those at a minimum. For the most part I will stick to recounting many of the everyday experiences that never cease to fascinate and bemuse me: walking through open-air fish markets; hiking with Buddhist monks; eating and drinking with Koreans; and all the countless opportunities for comedy that avail themselves to you when you’re a stranger in a strange land, to list but a few.

Above all this blog will be a way for me to preserve the memory of what has become one of the most unique and remarkable seasons of my life. It is my hope that you would find some of these entries of interest.

I suppose that about does it by way of a preface.

Thanks for checking out my little love letter to the Land of Morning Calm.