Kyoto Diaries - 5
On the train returning from the Noto Peninsula. Snow on the mountains beyond – edge of the Japanese Alps. Late Fall, the weather has turned. The Noto Peninsula juts out into the Sea of Japan and on the Northeast side, forms a large bay that is rich in fisheries. Kanazawa, the regional large city on the Western coast, has a renowned fish market, now selling gorgeous snow crabs of different sizes and prices – they can go for considerably more than $100.00 – and are shipped where ever you wish. There were a few pretty big tuna too, over 50 lbs, and lots of fish I did not know. Uni for sale, of course, and a number of very nice produce stores. A thriving and high quality market. I got into trouble there for disposing of my banana peel in an open bucket beneath a fish display that had a branch of fir in it. I did not ask if it was organic trash, and the vendor was quite upset at me. In fact, he ignored me entirely, knowing full well I wanted by buy a skewer of barbequed eel. The stand-off lasted several uncomfortable minutes as he busied himself with other clients. Finally a woman showed up and took care of it. Yikes, what a faux pas. I felt terrible for hours.
Kanazawa is also the home of D.T. Suzuki, the famous Zen Buddhist teacher, and the small museum in his honor is a beautifully executed building, nested against the large central park that surrounds the former Kanazawa castle and was part of the castle grounds. The Kenruokuen Garden is on the castle grounds, and though I visited under driving rain, it was spectacular. It was designed and built starting in 1676 and the fifth lord Maeda Tsunamori planted a number of the pine trees from seed, notably from Lake Biwa (near Kyoto). Needless to say, the pines are stately trees, several draping down over the central pond, and whose branches, shaped over hundreds of years, are propped up by elaborate bamboo scaffolding and ropes to hold them up under the burden of the snow to come. Kanazawa also has several preserved ancient neighborhood enclaves where one can see the traditional land-use patterns, the narrow streets abutted by largely 2 story wooden houses and merchants’ houses. The neighborhoods are under historic preservation and are full of boutiques selling traditional artisan crafts, foods and also housing restaurants. All for the tourist trade. Roofs now are tile, and heavy, though I suspect they were once thatch. The main threat for these neighborhoods was fire, and you can see why. Japanese building, traditionally, used a lot of wood and the country faced timber shortages upon several occasions. Buildings feel low slung and dark, but inside the spaces are pretty open, and, of course, had little to no furniture and no closets. Mostly a few storage boxes and things were piled up. Today, that building style remains, and places are quite cluttered, clothes hang on poles inside, along the walls, across windows. Looks a bit odd from my heritage.
Like most places in Japan, there is a lot of rice paddy agriculture in the Noto Peninsula, including an extraordinary “Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Site” called Shiroyone Senmaida, rice paddies developed over 1,300 years ago on a steep hill cascading down to the Sea of Japan. It is said there are 1,000 paddies, so tiny they look about the size of a king-sized bed! It would be fascinating to watch them get irrigated, and see how the system is organized. Now they are maintained by volunteers. Moving along the coast, whose precipitous accents and rocky shores rival Big Sur, there are salt manufacturers, still using traditional techniques, including boiling sea water to extract the salty brine in enormous vats set over wood ovens. The vaporized brine coming off the vats is hugely irritating to the eyes, but on a cold blustery day – of which there are many in winter, the hot and fiery oven room is a welcome respite. The Noto Peninsula is also known for its sake. Excellent rice, excellent water, those are the 2 basic ingredients.
To drive over to the bay side, you can cruise along the shoreline or cross the mountains, and this time of year there was already a sprinkling of snow on the peaks and by the side of the road at higher ridgelines. On the bay side, viewed from the coast, there was a clearing of the clouds, and the Japanese Alps could be seen miles away, glistening with snow. Pretty dazzling. On that easterly side of the peninsula side, there is a pretty flat shoreline and the road follows the edge of the coast. This time of year was very quiet. Hardly any cars, hardly any tourists. Life on the peninsula can’t be easy though. It’s remote, hard to find cell phone coverage in parts, cold in the winter, and not a lot of economic activity. Though it is densely wooded, like the rest of the mountainous areas in Japan, the economics of timber don’t favor an active timber industry, or even much of a micro industry, though I saw a few scattered saw mills. I was told that because the forest is no longer managed and cleaned, the highly sought after Matsutake mushroom yields are plummeting. Human cultivation can enhance biodiversity and productivity, and has in many places – if not all inhabited locations – across the globe. Similar phenomena are found in places around the Mediterranean where there is no longer much goat and sheep grazing. The vegetation thickens and certain harvestable plants get crowded out. The owner of the ryokan where I stayed, who was a superb cook, said only small children and old people remained on the peninsula. Youth flees to cities, as the resident inhabitants are conservative and intolerant, closed minded and grim. Young people who want to farm, for example, have no market outlets. She also talked about how concerned she was about the future of Japan where 1 out of 3 people have cancer, and the government is continuing on its modernization schemes of roads, bridges, dams and river modifications (good for jobs) and the agricultural heritage is being lost. At the ryokan I ate roots I had not eaten yet, and foods I knew (like mountain yam, burdock and lotus root) prepared in novel ways. So many things one can do with burdock or lotus root, who knew? On her property, which she owns with her husband, there are chestnuts (a common tree in many parts of Japan), which she harvests and processes in to a slightly odd and surprisingly flavorless cube that is vaguely gelatinous, served with wasabi. It had a nice, slight, flavor, but certainly radically different than how the Italians, or even the French, preserve and serve chestnut!
This ryokan is outside of Suzu, a small town on the bay side of the sea. It is set back outside of town in a small valley, at the end of a miniscule road. Built following a traditional Japanese style over 30 years ago, it is well established on the site. The owners planted a maple grove that must be a sight of glory earlier in the autumn, in front of the building, greeting the visitors. In the back, behind the bath, is a glorious stand of giant bamboo, and the baths – separate men and women – were enormously elegant. On the man’s side, the tub was made of lacquered wood, a specialty of the Noto Peninsula. Lacquer is a highly irritating sap that is collected and processed and has been used for centuries in Japan. The woman’s side had a stone tub. I arrived rather frazzled after a day’s travel and driving on the left side, to find out that the reservations I thought I had, did not exist, and that, in fact, the second night I thought I had reserved, the ryokan was closed all together! Anguish, tears quickly mounting. It was dark, rainy and late in the afternoon. The owner, enormously gracious, seemed as troubled as I. She offered a choice of different rooms, a large traditional room in the ryokan, with a wood stove, coal brazier, sliding screens, and very cold, or the guest house, down the path, across the way. After slipping and falling on my back and head on the damp wooden bridge across the small creek, the visit showed a beautiful, modern style building with radiant floor heating. I chose to stay in the big cold room in the ryokan, and the owner shooed me to the bath as she made up the futons and lit fires. I now understand the bath, or at least have a glimmer of understanding of the importance of the bath. I never did like saunas, for example, but getting into a hot, hot bath (mineral water from their spring, heated by a wood fire) after a thorough scrub down and reclining there, absorbing the heat, gazing out into the lit bamboo grove, was one of the most exquisite experiences I have had. Hot to the point of sweating, I slipped on my 2 kimonos and made my way to dinner with the other guests – including Jonathan (!) – they were all from Tokyo. The evening started out a bit slowly, but as the sake was poured and the dishes appeared, each a delectable new set of flavors, people loosened up and chatted, pidgin English, mostly Japanese and with a lot of laughter, started by my getting an extra pillow and gesticulating about my achy behind. The Japanese eat with such gusto, slurping in the food, aerating it with the aspiration to increase the flavor in the mouth, shutting their eyes in delight, savoring each mouthful, expressing appreciation at every dish. That was lovely to partake in. Learning how to slurp, however, takes practice not to swallow wrong, to get the air quantity and sound right. Not something I will practice in public upon my return.
The next day, my hostess, taking pity on my distress about where to stay that night, offered her guest house free, a family dinner and her private small bath. Extraordinary generosity and grace. The guest house over-looks a pond and is where a number of her illustrious friends stay, including Nancy Singleton-Hachisu, a well-known American cook book writer of the Chez Panisse entourage who married a Japanese farmer and has written 2 well received Japanese cook books, one on country cooking, the other on preserving. I hope to go back; it would be an ideal place to sit and write, take a few hikes, explore the fine intricacies of the beaches, mountains and villages. A month should do!
But, on the other hand, villages are pretty dead on Sundays and in the off season. The peninsula seems to run on tourism, as do a number of the more traditional regions of Japan. People are troubled by this, but there seems to be an inexorable trend toward city-living. This means the ancient knowledge is slipping away, the techniques, the facility and machinery, the networks of suppliers and also the markets. At the same time, here in Japan as in other more developed and developed nations, the countryside is the bastion of conservatism (according to our hostess). They voted for Abe, overwhelmingly; similar patterns are found in the US, in France, in Eastern Europe, in the UK, in Germany. It is a challenge that is of long standing – the rural versus the cosmopolitan urban. The cosmopolitan center, place of tolerance of the other (or greater tolerance), of anonymity, of political movements (though not exclusively), of higher learning and libraries, of a concentration of art and culture, and economic prosperity. And of alienation from the kinds of labor that is practiced in the countryside, by and large. And so the city-folks forget about the country-folks and the inextricable interdependencies, embodying Marx’s Metabolic Rift. City and Country cannot do without the other, yet the different needs that exist in rural locations are not addressed and fulfilled as people move away and engage in different lifestyles. At different times in the course of modernization, there has been more working class solidarity across urban and rural, but that has been either abandoned, or forgotten. In fact working class organizing has been largely dormant altogether, part of the changing and atomized workforce. Moreover, in the Anglo-American context it has been undermined by the idea that we can all be entrepreneurs and take care of ourselves. Want to be a driver, sign up to be an independent contractor with Uber. You are your own boss. We should all want to be so (our own bosses and entrepreneurs) according to neoliberal ideology. But this goes against the grain of what it is to be human – social beings who exist by virtue of cooperation and being part of organizations, whose very identity is constituted through social relations. The more we atomize into being single individuals out there for ourselves, the more the social fabric frays and we forget how much the other is like us. Living in cities, far from the daily lives of the farmers and fisher-people who feed us, distances us from understanding the quality of their existence, their struggles and difficulties, their humanness. This is problematic given the economization of all aspects of our lives, valuing cheap prices above all. Japan has developed extraordinary price supports, like for rice, but this will not ensure rice growing into the future if there is not other change – just like in the U.S. In the U.S. the price of land, at least in California, is a prohibitive barrier to entry. But the whole systems of farm lending, market distribution, is stacked against the small grower. I don’t know what it is like in Japan, but I have an inkling that there are also systemic obstacles to ensuring a new generation of small farmers who carry on the Japanese heritage. In the US, of course, we don’t have 1,500 years of history to jettison to embrace agro-industrial agriculture, but we are fighting to find new, more wholesome ways of producing a healthy food supply to the public, and providing decent livelihoods for farmers. Farmers who would then feel connected to their brethren in cities, who in turn, might be interested and concerned about the quality of life of people on the land.
But for now, I worry that Trump and his generals will blow us all up and contaminate the planet for centuries to come, let alone how to create the necessary solidarity with the folks that have been left behind, though that is an important piece of ensuring a future for all.
