The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (31 page)

For me, Hiroshima was a stunning place. Throughout Japan, the old buildings, the bamboo groves, the Buddhist temples, all familiar from imitations and representations in the West, were startling at first hand. I had first seen Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb Dome in my teens in the film
Hiroshima mon amour
; as an antinuclear activist in the 1980s and 1990s I saw photographs of it all the time. It was the icon of the destroyed city, the symbol of why we were against these weapons. A long train ride from Tokyo and a taxi ride to my high-rise Hiroshima hotel, and I was looking out of a nineteenth-floor window in the cold drizzly dusk at the skeletal steel frame of what, before the bomb fell, was the dome of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. As one of the few surviving structures near the hypocenter of the explosion, it became a symbol of the bombing—and perhaps of the survival of some bit of the city even in the face of the most powerful weapon ever made. Walking there the next day I saw, directly in front of the dome, a sort of shrine with water
bottles on it, as though the thirst of the survivors—or their ghosts—was still in need of slaking.

The word
shima
means “island”: Fukushima, meaning “fortunate island,” is now an ironic name. Hiroshima means “big island,” perhaps because it is situated in the delta of a river whose several tributaries divide the city into several long narrow islands that stretch to the coast. In the basement of the Peace Memorial Museum, where I met the
hibakusha
, there was a map of the impact of the American bomb, with the hypocenter colored red, making the city resemble an unfamiliar internal organ with veins flowing through it. The old men pointed at it as they described walking home through the burning, blackened, deadly urban heart on the morning of August 6, 1945, and spoke of how the dying walked with their hands outstretched, the skin hanging off them. One of them rolled up his sleeve to expose the burn scars from the fallout that descended on him and described a lifetime of wearing long-sleeved shirts even on hot days when everyone else was in short sleeves. The other talked about the varieties of cancer he’d developed. Children in utero in the summer of 1945 who were born with severe birth defects are now sixty-seven, and the caregivers they’ve lived with all their lives are dying off.

The northern tip of the central island in Hiroshima is a memorial space. On both banks of the rivers are shrines and sculptures; the Peace Memorial Museum includes dioramas, photographs, and relics of the first nuclear bomb dropped on human beings. The walls near the diorama showing the city before and after the blast are papered with letters that the mayors of Hiroshima began writing in the 1960s, objecting to all nuclear testing, whether Soviet, American, British, or French. Hiroshima has recovered in part by redefining its identity. Once a military garrison town, it considers itself a “city of peace.” And prosperity: it has elegant cafés, a vast mall where expensive European designer products are on sale along with more quotidian furnishings, clothes, and snacks. Hiroshima has a major Mazda auto plant. What it means to be a city of peace is defined fairly narrowly, as being against nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

Japan is in crisis about nuclear power. While I was there, the mayor of Kyoto told Kepko, the regional electrical power company, to close down its
nuclear power plant and seek renewable alternatives. Fifty-two of Japan’s fifty-four nuclear power plants have been shut down, and local governors are refusing contractors permission to continue with the building of new plants. On the face of it, the country is fine without them, but the long-term problems are serious. If Japan doesn’t return to nuclear power, the world’s third largest economy will have to step up its scramble for fossil fuels to keep its manufacturing and its cities running. It would have to backtrack on its carbon-emissions commitments, which would throw the delicate process of global carbon reductions even further off track. Japan can continue with nuclear power, which has proven so dangerous and mismanaged; it can abandon nuclear power and increase its reliance on oil and coal; or it can opt for decline. Add an aging population and a low birth rate, and the tsunami begins to seem like the least of Japan’s problems. It’s possible to imagine a fourth option in which Japan embraces renewable energy and takes pride in building a new green identity, as Hiroshima built a new identity on its charred remains. But nothing suggests that this future is likely to be realized.

Disasters are often like revolutions, moments when people and government move far apart; and if government doesn’t seem criminal at such times, it may seem superfluous, out of touch, or incompetent. In Mexico City in 1985, an earthquake with casualties comparable to those of the tsunami in Japan changed the face of grassroots and national electoral politics. The authorities have reason to fear the aftermath of disaster. Mikhail Gorbachev regards the mishandling of the Chernobyl meltdown as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Perhaps Japan’s disaster will come to seem like an integral part of an extraordinary year of upheaval—from Tunisia, Egypt, and the Arab Spring to Chile, Spain, and Greece, as well as everywhere that Occupy has reached. As in these other places, the relationship between people and government in Japan has been ruptured, but in Japan there is no insurrection as yet.

I met antinuclear activists who were proud of a demonstration in Tokyo, in which 10,000 people had participated, raucously: impressive for Japan, but in a city of 35 million, not so huge. Demonstrations and protests do not yet seem to be a force that catalyzes change in civil society, though the
shift away from nuclear power may be happening anyway (and the impact of Fukushima Daiichi on the global future of nuclear power should not be underestimated). The alienation and distrust that is everywhere has yet to find an adequate outlet. Perhaps change here will be subtle and slow. But it’s clear that Japan will never be the same.

2012

ARRIVAL GATES

The Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan

After the long flight across the Pacific, after the night in the tiny hotel room selected so that I could walk to the world’s busiest train station in the morning, after the train north to the area most impacted by the tsunami in the Great Tōhoku earthquake of March 11, 2011, after the meetings among the wreckage with people who had seen their villages and neighbors washed away, after seeing the foundations of what had once been a neighborhood so flattened it looked like a chessboard full of shards, after hearing from so many people with grief and rage in their voices talking about walls of water and drownings and displacement and refuge but also about betrayal by the government in myriad ways, after the Christian minister pontificated forever while the Buddhist priests held their peace in the meeting my hosts secretly scheduled at the end of the twelve-hour workday, after I told people I was getting sick but the meeting went on, after I left the meeting in the hopes of getting to the hotel and stood outside in the cold northern night for a long time as a few snowflakes fell—or was it raindrops? I forget—after the sickness turned into a cough so fierce I thought I might choke or come up with blood or run out of air, after the tour continued regardless, after the speaking tour at the universities, after the conferences where I talked about disaster and utopia, after the trip to the conference in Hiroshima where I walked and saw with my own eyes the bombed places I had seen in pictures so often and met with the octogenarians who told me, with the freshness of people who had only recently begun to tell, the story of what they had seen and been and done and suffered and lost on August 6, 1945, after the sight of the keloid scars from the fallout that had drifted onto the arm of a schoolboy sixty-seven years before, so that he grew into a man who always wore long sleeves even in summer, after the long walks
along the beautiful river distributaries of Hiroshima and among its willows and monuments to the vaporized and poisoned dead, draped in garlands of paper cranes amid plum trees in bloom but not yet cherries, after the one glorious day in Kyoto when I was neither at work nor overwhelmed and alone but accompanied by a pair of kind graduate students, after a day of wandering through old Buddhist temples with them and seeing the dim hall of the thousand golden Buddhas lined up in long rows, I arrived at the orange gates.

You get off the local train from the city of Kyoto and walk through a little tourist town of shops with doorways like wide-open mouths disgorging low tables of food and crafts and souvenirs and then walk uphill, then up stairs, under a great Torii gate, one of those structures with a wide horizontal beam extending beyond the pillars that hold it up, like the Greek letter π, and then a plaza of temples and buildings and vendors, and then you keep going up. There are multiple routes up the mountain, and the routes take you through thousands of further Torii gates, each with a black base and a black roof-like structure atop the crosspiece, each lacquered pure, intense orange on the cylindrical pillars and crosspiece. The new ones are gleaming and glossy. Some of the old ones are dull, their lacquer cracked, or even rotting away so that the wood is visible underneath.

The orange is so vivid it is as though you have at last gone beyond things that are colored orange to the color itself, particularly in the passages where the Torii gates are just a few feet apart—or, in one extraordinary sequence, many paces long of gates only inches apart—a tunnel of total immersion in orange. (Vermilion, say some of the accounts, but I saw pure intense orange.) Nearly every gate bears black inscriptions on one side, and if I could read Japanese I might’ve read individual businesspeople and corporations expressing their gratitude, because rice and prosperity and business are all tied up together in the realm of the god Inari, but I couldn’t. The place was something else to me.

I later read that the Fushimi Inari-taisha is the head shrine of 30,000 or so Shinto shrines in Japan devoted to Inari. It is said to have been founded in 711 and burned down in 1468, during a civil war, but much of it seems to have been replaced in overlapping waves, so that the whole is ancient and
the age of the parts varied, some of them very new. The gates seem designed to pass through, and the altars—platforms and enclosures of stone slabs and obelisks and stone foxes—for stillness, so that the landscape is a sort of musical score of moving and pausing. The altars looked funereal to a Western eye, with the stone slabs like tombstones, but they were something altogether different.

The foxes were everywhere, particularly at these altar zones. Moss and lichen grow on their stone or cement backs, so some are more green than gray and others are spotted with lighter gray. They often have red cloth tied around their necks, the fabric faded to dusty pink, and there at the altar sites are rope garlands and stones with inscriptions carved into them. The foxes, hundreds of them, a few at a time, sit up, often in pairs, sometimes with smaller Torii gates that were offerings arrayed around them, and then sometimes even smaller foxes with the gates, as though this might continue on beyond the visible into tinier and tinier foxes and gates. You could buy the small gates and foxes at the entrance and some places on the mountainside.

Foxes, I knew, are
kitsune
in Japan, the magical shapeshifters in folk-tales and woodblock prints—and manga and anime now—who pass as human for months or for years, becoming beautiful brides who run away or courtiers who serve aristocrats but serve another, unknown purpose as well. The foxes at the Inari shrine are the god’s messengers, a website later told me, more beneficent than some of the foxes in the stories. Elusive, beautiful, unpredictable,
kitsune
in this cosmology represent the unexpected and mysterious and wild aspects of nature. Rain during sunshine is called a fox’s wedding in Japanese.

Gates, foxes, foxes, gates. The gates lead you to gates and to foxes, the trails wind all over the slope of the steep, forested hill. Most of the literature speaks as though there is a trail you take, but there are many. If you keep going you might come to a dense bamboo forest with trunks as thick as the poles of streetlights, and a pond beyond that, or you might just keep mounting forest paths that wind and tangle, with every now and again a little pavilion selling soft drinks and snacks, notably tofu pockets—
inarizushi
—said to be the foxes’ favorite food. And more gates, unpainted stone as well as lacquered wood.

Arrival implies a journey, and almost all the visitors that day arrived out of a lifetime in Japan, seeing a different place than I did, traveling mostly in small groups, seeming to know why they were there and what to expect. I came directly from the grueling tour of disaster, but with a long-time interest in how moving through space takes on meaning and how meaning can be made spatially, with church and temple designs, landscape architecture and paths, roads, stairs, ladders, bridges, labyrinths, thresholds, triumphal arches, all the grammar that inflects the meanings of our movement.

I had been invited to Japan for the one-year anniversary of the triple disaster, reporting on the aftermath and talking about my book
A Paradise Built in Hell
, which had been translated into Japanese and published just before one of the five largest recorded earthquakes hit the country, and the ocean rose up to, in places, 140 feet and scoured the shore, and the six Fukushima nuclear reactors fell apart and began to spread radiation by air and by sea. But that’s another story. The Inari shrine was not part of it. My encounter there wasn’t the culmination of that journey but perhaps a reprieve from it, and an extension of other journeys and questions I have carried for a long time.

Arrival is the culmination of the sequence of events, the last in the list, the terminal station, the end of the line. And the idea of arrival begets questions about the journey and how long it took. Did it take the dancer two hours to dance the ballet, or two hours plus six months of rehearsals, or two hours plus six months plus a life given over to becoming the instrument that could, over and over, draw lines and circles in the air with precision and grace? Sumi-e painters painted with famous speed, but it took decades to become someone who could manage a brush that way, who had that feel for turning leaves or water into a monochromatic image. You fall in love with someone and the story might be of how you met, courted, consummated, but it might also be of how before all that, time and trouble shaped you both over the years, sanded your rough spots and wore away your vices until your scars and needs and hopes came together like halves of a broken whole.