Missing Yesterday

You’d hate for anybody to think you’re a complete pussy. But you’re a complete pussy. You can’t drink for shit. You’re still hung-over from your night in Sendai. It was two nights ago, and you still haven’t recovered. And last night in Tono didn’t help, in spite of all your well-intended restraint. You’re tired. You’re soft and weak. Your belly has started to bulge out of your shirt again. This morning at the festival in Tono, in fact, somebody offered to take a photo of you standing shoulder to shoulder with four gorgeous girls in their bright red, green, and yellow festival attire. Since Kumamoto Castle, where the Korean girl offered to take a photo of you with her friends and immediately dropped your camera in the dirt, you’ve been reluctant to let anybody else use your camera, but this morning they were all persistent and you relented. And now there you are, recorded forever in digital imagery, standing in the midst of these lovely ladies, two under each arm, all of them beautiful with gorgeous smiles and white lines of paint down the bridges of their noses signifying something, though nobody you asked about it seemed to know just what, and none of them stands even as high as your armpits. So you aren’t shoulder to shoulder after all. You’re shoulder to navel. You’ve got on the Sgt. Pepper shirt and your camera bag still strapped around your waist. The bottom button on the Sgt. Pepper shirt is open and your belly is bursting out hairy and pale like the bulk of an abalone baked in its shell. You’re a mess. You’re tired, fat, ugly, old, grey, and very, very blue. This trip has finally caught up to you. With one-hundred-and-three pagodas down and five to go, it feels like you’ve been traveling forever.
You’ve got those endlessly, friendlessly, railroadin’ blues.
Maybe you’ll write another silly song, it occurs to you now, as a little melody starts to form in your mind. Maybe you’ll write one when you get some energy together, you mean. Not now. Now all you have is that silly little line rolling endlessly, friendlessly through your flabby mind over and over and over again like the wheels of the train roll over the joints in the tracks beneath you.
You’re ridiculous in your utter and mindless simplicity.
You loved Tono, and it was hard to leave there this afternoon. It was peaceful, calm, gentle and loving like a large and unruly family. But on the train out of town you fell almost immediately asleep, and waking up now you’re just pulling into Kamaishi, on the Pacific coast. You’re the only one in your RR car except for two young girls who are oddly standing across from you—in an otherwise empty car—and staring at you. Also, your feet stink again, and you can’t help but suppose there’s a direct cause and effect relationship between these two phenomena. Also, you can’t help but speculate on what those girls must be thinking.
That simple refrain is still on your mind. You’ve got those endlessly, friendlessly, long distance blues. Fussing and busing and railroading through. You’ve revised it in your sleep, somehow, for better or for worse. Well, probably for worse. But that’s the way these things go. In fact, that’s the way it seems most things go.
The area around Kamaishi is dark and strangled by hills crammed up against the wet sky. Here you don’t find that wide-open feeling you loved so much in Tono. Rather, it’s narrow, confining and closed, and you genuinely don’t like it here. This is the first such bad feeling you’ve had about any place you’ve visited all summer.
This town, Kamaishi, is known nationwide as Rugby City. That’s because the local Nippon Steel Kamaishi Works rugby team won seven consecutive national championships, and eight out of nine during the years from 1976 to 1984. They also won it in 1970 and almost won it in 1989. This has made them something like the Boston Celtics of Japanese rugby, not that anybody in Japan really gives a damn about rugby. Or the Boston Celtics, either.
Kamaishi also has the distinction of being the first city on Japan’s four major islands to be shelled by allied ships during World War Two. That happened on July 14, 1945. Lying so far north, Kamaishi was out of range of land based B-29s that were devastating the rest of the nation so the US Navy turned a task force loose on it. The first bombardment lasted almost two hours and was discovered after the war to have been a complete success, except for the death of five allied POWs being employed illegally as slave labor in the steel mill there. Another source says it was 42 POW slaves who died that day. What a discrepancy. It’s hard to know what to believe.
Naval intelligence wasn’t convinced of that first bombardment’s overwhelming success, however, because the mill’s buildings didn’t suffer the same amount of damage as the works within them, so on August 9, 1945, the same day Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, they had another go at it. This time the US Navy was assisted by ships from the Royal Navy and the bombardment lasted more than two hours. It completely destroyed one of the two POW camps here and killed an additional 27 POWs, not to mention several Japanese. In fact, the sounds of this bombardment were broadcast live on radio in the U.S. via a radio relay onboard one of the ships. This must have provided enthralling entertainment for the American listening audience—the cacophony of big guns going off over and over again, like so many volcanoes erupting—and this second bombardment would make Kamaishi also the last Japanese city to be bombarded by Allied ships, though looking around now it’s hard to imagine why those ships even bothered. There’s nothing here to bombard but ugly grey buildings and narrow grey roads.
But now is now and then was then. And then Kamaishi was one of Japan’s largest steel producing towns. One of Japan’s largest plants here, and that was the target of the bombardments.
Japan’s entire steel industry had its start in 1857 when Japan’s first blast furnace was installed near the iron mines here, in fact. This would make it one of Japan’s few pre-Meiji attempts at industrialization and modernization.
And what did they produce here? Cannons.
The plant would be nationalized in 1873 with the establishment of the Meiji government. It went through several ownership changes, and eventually became part of Japan Steel Corporation in 1970. Japan Steel Corporation would go on to become the world’s largest steel manufacturer, and during its heyday, which peaked in the 1960s, the Kamaishi plant would provide the livelihood for 8,372 workers and their families. Steel workers at the Kamaishi plant constituted 36% of the city’s work force, and Kamaishi was the classic example of a company town. There were even disparities between company employees and other people in terms of standards of living and lifestyle, to the extent that people called it “segregation.”
Not so now.
It’s been downhill for the steel industry in Kamaishi ever since. The last blast furnace was shut down in 1989, shortly after the Nippon Steel Kamaishi Rugby club lost the national championship game to a team from Toyota Motor Company, and now there remains only a wire production facility that currently employs 223 workers. This is up from a low of 147 in 2005. Nippon Steel corporation employs a mere 0.8% of the city’s work force now, and the entire steel industry in Kamaishi employs only 4%. Steel ranks fifth among industries here today. This is no longer a company town by any means. It isn’t even a steel town anymore.
The population too has been in constant decline. From a peak of 92,123 in 1964 it’s down to under 40,000 now. And, like everywhere, the population is aging. In fact, Kamaishi can possibly be viewed as a microcosm of Japan itself, except that the decline of Kamaishi began a decade or two before that of Japan Inc.
Some professors at Tokyo University have done a study on Kamaishi in which they use it to introduce an entire new field of study in the social sciences which they call kibogaku, and which social scientists in the West have translated as “hopology.” It’s the study of hope. And the name of their publication is Is There Any Hope for “Kamaishi”? : The Regeneration of a Former Company Town. Their conclusion is a cautious maybe. Your own guess is no.
Never mind that Kamaishi has been producing steel for over 120 years. And never mind that the city still produces a full 80% of those little steel balls used in Japan’s thousands of loud, smoky and smelly pachinko parlors—those ubiquitous gathering places for the astoundingly stupid. And never mind those seven consecutive national rugby championships. Though they still loom large in the collective memory here, the truth is they occurred a long time ago, and though the team still resides here, it’s no longer winning championships, and it’s no longer a Nippon Steel company team, but a club team going by the name of the Kamaishi Seawaves.
The Kamaishi Seawaves! That’s an interesting name considering that the city was completely destroyed by a tsunami—a sea wave—at 7:32 pm on June 15, 1896. The tsunami was caused by a 8.5 magnitude earthquake off the Iwate coast. It created a wave that reached a height of 24 meters in some places. Now, in 2008, that wave stands as the highest tsunami ever recorded in Japan. Though here again, there is some disagreement, as other sources say the 1896 tsunami reached as high as 38.2 meters in places, which, if true, is the record now and will continue to be even after the upcoming tsunami of 2011.
And speaking of records, the port of Kamaishi has been working for 30 years on a federally funded breakwater that will be 1,950 meters long and 63 meters deep—the deepest breakwater in the world according to the Guiness Book of World Records, and also the world’s most expensive one—when it is completed in March of 2009. The main purpose of the breakwater, of course, is to provide employment, money, livelihood and fiscal health to the city of Kamaishi. But it has another purpose, as well, which is to hold out the waters of the next big tsunami.
It will fail on both counts.
You have no intention of spending the night here, but this is the end of the line in more than just a figurative sense. You’ve been traveling on the JR Kamaishi Line since yesterday, and it doesn’t proceed beyond here. You have an hour to wait for a train on the Sanriku Tetsudo Minami Riasu Line to Ofunato, so you exit the station and walk towards the ocean. It’s always the same in these seaside towns. The railroad lines hug the base of the mountains and it’s a short downhill walk to the sea.
There was a festival here earlier. Maybe yesterday, maybe today. But there is nobody around now. You see very few cars on the streets, and only one person out on the sidewalk. He’s a man about sixty years old with small eyes and a grey twisted face. He’s stocky and strong, and in his blue cotton trousers and shirt, he works fast. He’s walking south to north along the main street between the station and the port. In his arms he has a bundle of Japanese flags—those blood red drops of the sun on pure white fields of virginal snow. They have been lined up along the edge of the road and he is systematically pulling them up from their perches with one hand and tucking them deliberately under his other arm as he goes. He hasn’t rolled the flags up, and the whole arm full of them is flapping in front of him like he’s a crew-cut marine leading a drum and bugle corps, but in exaggerated parody. He has five or six flags under his arm and when you see him coming, as nonchalantly as possible, you pull your camera out of your bag and adjust it quickly for the awful lack of light. Everything in sight is grey and ugly, including the man, and only the armful of flags in his arms provide color or texture or hue.
Okay, you’re saying you do this nonchalantly, but be real. Be honest. Face the sad fact of your existence here. It’s simply not possible for a huge white guy with hair half way down to his ass and a filthy Sgt. Pepper shirt on, not to mention shoes that smell worse than road-kill, to be anything even remotely similar to nonchalant on a deserted street in back-country Japan, and you aren’t fooling anybody. The man has your number from fifty meters away and he glares at you the whole way as he walks. You try to smile. It doesn’t translate. He squints at you and juts his jaw forward. Fuck it. You don’t normally photograph people who clearly don’t want you to, but this is too good to pass up. You put the camera to your eye and take his photo. But you only take one before you run out of memory on your chip, so you’ll just have to hope for the best. In English you say “thank you,” trying to sound stupid enough to put him at ease, like you’re just too dumb to know anything about manners anyway. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. If looks could kill, you’d be dead. You’d be lying stiff on the sidewalk here in Kamaishi, soon to start smelling as bad as your shoes. But as it turns out, though not quite in perfect focus, this will become another of your favorite photos from the trip. You’ll go on to display it in at least three photo shows, and eventually it will end up hanging on the wall in your office. You may end up looking at it everyday for the rest of your life. Or at least until you retire.
It’s raining again as you leave Kamaishi. It’s dark. It’s ugly. It’s ominous. A mere ten minutes out of the city you’re once again the only one in your RR car. You feel alone, forsaken and doomed.
You have two eight-gigabyte memory chips for your camera and they’re both full now. You spend the first half hour on the slow, rackety train between Kamaishi and Sakari deleting ridiculous photos you never should have taken in the first place. Most of them show beautiful faces that had carried soft, thoughtful, sublime expressions or laughter and vivid smiles when you began to point your camera but are now grinning in the photographs like goats behind the goddamn two finger peace sign. You hate that goddamn peace sign. You want to kill the bloody bastard.
Japanese people are trained from birth to pull that motherfucker out of their pockets at the merest hint of a camera pointed their way. You’re not joking. You’ve seen mothers teaching their two-year old children to do it. Camera? What? Wham! The goddamn peace sign. It’s been going on at least as long as you’ve been here, and even Pavlov with his dogs would be shocked to see this phenomenon with such absolute consistency, you figure. You wonder what conclusions he may have come to had he lived half his life in Japan. Because, indeed, conditioned response seems as inherently Japanese as sushi and shitty English.
Fads will come and fads, thank goodness, will go, but this one has shown staying power that seems impossible to fathom, and though it drives you crazy, with all your experience here in Japan, you actually do understand it. So you’ll explain it.
Though American wars have continued through the latter half of the American century like fires ravaging a forest, the peace sign itself more or less died out in America when her futile and indefensible involvement in Vietnam did. And American President Richard Nixon, whose administration was largely responsible for that American involvement in Vietnam, lent the peace sign itself an utterly ridiculous air when he flashed it before the world, with both hands, from the steps of an airplane upon departing in criminal disgrace from the highest elective office in the world. In short, nothing in America is more blasé, if not more downright embarrassing in liberal and moderate society, than the two finger peace sign. Not so in Japan. Here it carries connotations of neither Haight-Ashbury acid trips nor Watergate and Tricky Dick. In Japan, in fact, it doesn’t connote anything, not even peace, which, after all, is not a Japanese word anyway. The most common Japanese word for “peace” is “heiwa,” and the two finger peace sign has nothing to do with that.
So what does it have to do with? It has to do with cheese. That’s right. As in “Everybody say cheese.” Snap. There’s another photo for the family album. These days you rarely hear it, but twenty years ago, when posing for a photo, Japanese people didn’t simply throw the two finger peace sign with reckless abandon into every photograph anybody ever took of them, they actually said the word as well. “Peeeeeeeace.” This was exactly equivalent to Americans saying “Cheeeeeeeese,” when they’re being photographed, and that silly practice, of course, is one that everybody in America takes for granted. It’s neither good nor bad nor strange nor sexy nor cool. Rather it’s an innocuous part of American culture that’s been around since . . . well since you don’t know when, but at least since you were about two years old and your mother patiently taught you how to say it whenever the camera comes out.
And though you hate the peace sign at least as much as you love peace, you see its ubiquitous usage here as the perfect example of how the Japanese, renowned for their ability to adopt and adapt, can take even the simplest of notions from a foreign culture, improve on it a little bit, and make it entirely their own. And who, after all, can possibly say that peace is not a distinct improvement on cheese, not only in this situation, but in any situation one can think of that doesn’t involve people starving to death? It’s just that that damn peace sign, which first merely accompanied the word but has since come to almost replace it completely, has ruined so many of your photographs. You sit quietly on the train, rolling through the damp and the dank and the dark out of Kamaishi, patiently erasing photo after ridiculous photo from both memory chips till you figure you’ve got enough space to get you at least to Morioka where you can buy eight more gigabytes of memory if you need to. Then, by the time you get to Sakari, where you need to change trains again for the five-minute stretch to Ofunato on the JR Kesenuma Line, you’re prone again on the bench and you’ve fallen asleep with your camera in your hand.
Many small rural towns throughout Japan still maintain the tradition of ringing a bell at 5:00 in the afternoon, except that these days it’s no longer a bell, but chimes blaring a song over a system of loud speakers. In the mountain village of Yoshino, the careful reader may recall, it was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that came rushing out of the loud speaker at precisely the same moment you began the five o’clock chant with the monks at Kinpusen-ji. In the small fishing village of Ofunato, you happen to know, the five o’clock song is Lennon and McCartney’s Yesterday, and you had wanted to get there in time to hear it.
You fail.
It’s around 7:00 when you arrive at Ofunato, and you’ve missed Yesterday altogether. This sounds like the story of your life—missing yesterday. And though you know Yesterday will play again tomorrow, you don’t believe you’ll be here to hear it.
In fact, you don’t like it here.
The 4,000 yen hotel room you find smells like an ashtray, but otherwise it’s clean and neat, and the one woman working here is helpful and kind. The corridors are lined with pictures painted by the hotel owner. They’re huge—at least two meters by a meter and a half—and they all depict the local scenery, which is to say ships, docks, fishing, lumber, mountains and fog. There is one in your room, as well. The owner has certainly kept himself busy with his paintbrush. And his work isn’t bad either. Though it may not end up in a museum anytime soon, you wouldn’t mind having a piece to hang on your bedroom wall. The paintings of the town are in fact a lot prettier than the town itself is.
You take absolutely no photos in Ofunato. Part of this is because you know you don’t have much memory. Part is because you’re just tired. But part is because you simply don’t see anything to photograph.
You don’t see much in the way of places to eat either. The town is quiet, heavy, stumbling, like a fighter on his last leg. The town is punch drunk. You walk along the river towards the harbor. Then you turn back north. Then you turn west again. All is off white and grey and nothing is inviting. You decide on a place called Sandwich Bar Sanen because they have pumpkin salad advertised on their little signboard. You love pumpkin salad, something you’d never even heard of before you came to Japan.
Inside, there is a counter enclosing the kitchen on three sides, two young men sitting on stools at the side farthest from the door, smoking, reading comic books and ignoring each other, and a thin woman in front of them, busily preparing something. She’s in her early to mid thirties, maybe. It’s hard to tell. What isn’t hard to tell is that she’s very pretty. This doesn’t necessarily surprise you. Japan is full of pretty women. You run into them everywhere you go here, no matter how remote, and it never surprises you anymore. It does, however, catch your attention.
“Hello,” she says. “Where are you from?” Her accent is not bad and her English is fine. At least she gets this much of the conversation correct, which is more than a lot of people here do. But fuck a duck. Another goddamn English lesson. You’re way too worn out for this, but you don’t want to be rude, and you’re just about to say something in reply when the two guys put down their comic books and start giggling as if they’re third graders and you’ve just walked into class wearing a Humpty Dumpty suit.
Fuck that.
You can be Humpty Dumpty when you have to, but right now you’re not in the mood. And there’s no way you could possibly realize that you’re making a decision you’re likely to regret for the rest of your life. In fact, you’re going to start regretting it tomorrow. But now is now, and you’re tired and blue. You ignore them all and walk to a little table in the farthest away corner, strutting aggressively like you own the place. The décor is quite Western, and so is the menu. You remember when it was almost impossible to find a good sandwich in Japan, but now even here in Ofunato, on the coastal fringes of back-country nowhere, there’s an avocado, bean sprout and tomato sandwich on the menu. After all the beer you’ve poured into your system you feel starved for vegetables, so you order that and the pumpkin salad. The woman, who has come from behind the counter to take your order, addresses you in English. You reply in Japanese. It doesn’t matter. The Japanese words for these things are the same as the English words, or so the average Japanese person thinks, and the woman seems to have no idea you aren’t speaking English to her. She does, however, seem to have lost interest in where you’re from. And as you order you can’t help wondering exactly how many white people have come in this little place alone without the least ability to communicate in Japanese. In fact, you wonder how many white people have come into this little place at all. Ever.
Where are you from, my ass! Who cares where you’re from. And what difference does it make. You’re from Nagoya. You’re a long distance traveler. You’ve got those endlessly, friendlessly, long distance blues. You’re fussing and busing and just passing through.
There are some strange books on your table. One is called Suicidal Bunny or some damn thing. But that’s not the one you pick up. Instead, you grab one called simply Sad Book. Nothing, you figure, could cap your evening off better. It’s a Japanese translation of a book originally written in English by Michael Rosen. It’s about a man whose 18 year old son has died. In fact, that man is Michael Rosen himself. The book is nonfiction. And get this: It’s a children’s book. You read it while waiting for your meal. You can’t help but notice that the son’s name is Eddie. So was yours when you were young.
In Sad Book he writes, “Sometimes I’m sad and I don’t know why. It’s just a cloud that comes by and covers me up.”
This evening is really depressing you.
The young men at the bar apparently tire of smoking, reading comics and giggling at you, and before your meal comes they get up to leave. Sayonara. So long. See you later. Goodbye. Good night and good luck. When your meal finally comes it’s delicious. You eat it quietly as you finish reading Sad Book. You drink a cup of coffee. It doesn’t help to perk you up. Nothing could.
In your hotel room your nose is running and you’re coughing. You sit on the edge of the bed and try to write your notes for the day. Your mind doesn’t focus, and your notes show it. They jump all over the last couple of days. Tono, Sendai, Tono, Yamagata, Sendai, Kamaishi, Ofunato, Sendai. French speakers, Italian speakers, Japanese speakers, English speakers. Dancers and dances and singers and songs. Suicides, salads and sad books. Memories are slow to emerge. They keep popping up like ghosts wandering through a fog. And they’re intimately engaged with the ghosts of last night in Tono. You grab all the ghosts and insert them into the middle of your tiring day. You only hope you’ll be able to sort them out later.
You write “Note how messy your room was waking up in Tono this morning—a life out of control.”
You note that the bicycle you rented this morning was taller than normal. Actually, what you write is “Note: Tall bicycle today.”
You write “Note: Got angry at the information girl at Sendai—the usual thing—that indefatigable Japanese tendency to assume that you must be mentally retarded. Need to call them.” Of course, you know you’ll never call anybody.
And never mind that you spell indefatigable wrong.
You get into bed at nine o’clock. Your nose is still running, and there’s nothing to wipe it with but the towel from the toilet.
The last thing you write before you fall asleep is “This is a sad town.”