Matt Clough

Whoops, supposed to published to my Japan blog, http://ohayohokuto.tumblr.com

I’m here.  Where exactly is here?  Here is a tiny town on the border between an endless expanse of farmland, or at least as far as I’ve explored it seems endless, and a train station which leads to places with more retail stores and supermarkets. Here is Nagasaka-kamijo.  Here is also a place where, for these first few days, living on such a threshold has got me mentally wound up.  I miss the amenities of my normal everyday life, but as soon as I go to a more commercial area, it’s disquieting and I want to be back in my verdant vista with old ladies shuffling down the narrow, winding streets among the brilliant rice paddies and cloistered farm houses.

This place is certainly very traditional.  A short walk down the street into the paddies brings me to a shinto shrine complete with torii gates draped with shimenawa (rice straw rope), an arching bridge over a large koi pond embellished with lotus flowers, a purification fountain for washing one’s hands and mouth before coming in the presence of the enshrined spirit, an enormous and beautifully gnarled tree supported by crutches, inhabited by kami spirits as evidenced by the shimenawa wrapped around its trunk, and of course a large wooden building in which the main kami lives.  It’s really not unlike a church, the difference being that theoretically, every shrine could be the home of a completely different spirit, whether it be the local river or the spirit of health or something like that.  The idea here is that you stand outside the shrine, throw an offering in the box at the foot of the steps, give a good shake of the rope to wring the doorbell - which just sounds kind of like beans rattling in a tin can - to get the kami off his ass and outside.  Then you bow deeply twice to apologize for interrupting his sumo match, clap your hands loudly twice, summoning the spirit into the material realm, breaking the silence with two sharp resonating claps.  Then you make your wish; a specific wish, not “world peace” or “support the troops”, something more like “Help me win at poker.”  Natural spirits are, well, natural.  They’re not going to care if you’re asking to win at gambling or if you’re asking for world peace.  They’re neither benevolent nor malevolent.  So after you clap, you bow deeply again in thanks.

If you walk for just five more minutes down the street, there’s another building which someone told me was a shrine, but it looks much more like a buddhist temple.  Like I said, this is the countryside, and this is folk Japan.

I’ve heard that standard chinese characters were intentionally designed to be complicated to keep literacy to only those wealthy enough to afford the education.  I don’t know if that’s true or not, especially since I think the characters were originally based on pictograms, designed to be easily readable, but a lot of signage in the farm village that would otherwise include kanji (chinese characters) is written in hiragana.  Hiragana is the Japanese syllabary.  It includes symbols that stand for all the basic sounds of the Japanese language, kind of like our alphabet, so that if you can’t read the kanji, you can probably at least read the hiragana.

So for those of you who want to know where I am, I hope that’ a thorough enough answer.  Otherwise, I’m not really sure where I am.  Another ALT sent me a message and asked how Hokuto was, and I didn’t really know what to say, because I have nothing to compare it to.  I guess I could say, “I can walk straight out of the San Francisco suburbs straight into Sonoma” but it really doesn’t compare to any place I’ve ever been in the US.  It’s very Japanese, and rightly so, but it’s more than the architecture and the signs and people.  You could show me nothing but a road and a ditch from this place and I could tell it was from here.  The air smells different, the climate is different, and when the 6:00 town bell rings, with a sound like a Game Boy attached to a megaphone, there’s no question as to where I am.