.... in, no doubt, a never ending series.
Some new things I shall be trying as I branch out and away from academic writing, there will be much rejection I expect. Here is the first, on the theme of 'home'.
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A grain of sand will lead me home
The alarm at 2:35am awoke me at the point at which I was about to eat fish and chips at a Kyoto restaurant (for which I paid ¥2100, a curious detail), after walking with a friend through an underground passage in Hiroshima, bearing the scars of the bomb some 79 years ago...
The alarm was set for a weekly reading group I participate in in New York, from my ‘home’ in Brisbane. I rarely remember dreams, much less seek to interpret them, and yet—having recently returned to Brisbane after a prolonged sojourn in Japan (my third extended residency), and being inspired to think about what ‘home’ might mean, somehow my subconscious had settled on this complex, and complicated, offering.
There was a moment on a return trip from Tokyo this year that it struck me, it was just over 40 years since I first flew this route, Brisbane to Tokyo, Tokyo to Brisbane. How many times? Well, I’ve lost count of that. There were many familiar faces among the flight attendants and whereas the flights used to have a few spare seats, in more recent times that has not been the case. Japan is once again a most-favoured travel destination, and suddenly ‘everyone is visiting Japan’. Curiously, I find myself being a little protective about what some of those visitors get up to in what I consider my ‘other’ home.
A mildly peripatetic life does encourage you to think about what home might mean, when it becomes necessary to do so. In social settings in Japan, there is a set piece introductory round where we all introduce ourselves, usually by way of where we were born, where we grew up, where we live now and how we got to be here in the company of esteemed friends and colleagues. There is an expression to facilitate this exchange, ~umare, ~sodachi, (I was) born in ~ and raised in ~. For some, it is a simple Tokyo-umare, Tokyo-sodachi, I was born and raised in Tokyo; others might be born in say, Hokkaido, raised in Osaka, but now call Tokyo home. These opening statements often lubricate subsequent conversations as we dig down into specifics, ‘oh, where in Tokyo’, or ‘I’ve been to Hokkaido too’, it is rather convenient form of social discourse.
For me, it is always a little more complex. I have to start by saying, well, ‘I’m from Brisbane but I was born in Sydney and grew up on the Gold Coast before heading to Brisbane to study at university—from whence I left to study in Tokyo...’ But not only did I go to study in Tokyo, but each time have I have returned to live there, I keep returning to the same local municipality, Itabashi-ku, the local government district that is ‘home’, that has an enduring familiarity. It is where I return to register my residency status, as required.
In all that time, I have lived within walking distance of the same train line; I surprise the locals when I say I used to go to the Ohgon sento, the classically-rendered public bath before it burnt down and was refashioned as a smaller public bath with apartments built above it; I recall when the AEON shopping centre (now ubiquitous around Japan), was Saty, and before that an expanse of mixed-use land; remember Kuma Kitchen on the high street? I used to eat lunch there; and that Mister Donut shop on the corner, I may have ducked in once or twice a week back in the mid-1980s, on the way home from work...
The conversations happen as a matter of course, quite naturally. I am not trying to make any particular point but it does give a sense of belonging, and at times, longing. Is ‘home’ where you have ‘history’?
For me, this is not such a departure from my Brisbane life, if I think about it. In all the years since moving here to study, initially residing in the student village, I really have not moved far from that student accommodation precinct. I tend to shop, even now, at that big shopping centre in Mt Gravatt, and remember when it was half its present size.
‘Are you north or south of the river?’
‘South, always south’.
I travel a fair bit, but I don’t think I would qualify as a traveller. There is nearly always a work commitment at the end of a plane trip, and besides Tokyo, return trips have included Chicago and Helsinki. Even these cities of temporary transit have their places where I seek the refuge of familiarity. In Chicago it is the bookshops and the music, in Helsinki, the cafes, the coffee and korvapuusti, the famous cinnamon buns. It really had not occurred to me that I had these habits, until someone asked how many places had I been. Plenty of frequent flyer points but not many places really.
Similarly, in Japan, where people like to tally their visits to all 47 prefectures like a competition, I look back on my regular visits to the same places, time and again, gaining insight, understanding, experience, of a different kind. It might be Ishinomaki, a coastal town in the Tohoku region, devastated by the tsunami in 2011; it might be Chigasaki, on the Shonan coast, just around the corner from the more famous Kamakura, and a lot less self-conscious; at other times, I might return to Hiroshima and surrounds, to remind me why I do what I do. I have not been everywhere, but I am everywhere I have been.
I carry mementoes from many visits around Japan’s regions. Some I bought, some I received. One of particular significance is small, handmade, precious in its simplicity. Given to me by a person displaced by the tsunami in 2011, they had just recently been rehoused in new apartments built over land cleared of tsunami detritus, seven years on. In the interim, they lived in ‘temporary’ housing, small demountables in rows, a bureaucratic and perfunctory response to ‘community-building’. Some added pot-plants at the door, others a wind chime, or garden ornaments, all trying to find a way to express this was ‘home’ in a temporary facility, for how long? Unknown.
The community, smashed by the tsunami, came together in ‘housing’, the barest minimum, for seven years. And then, separated again, they were randomly shuffled into the new accommodation, their new ‘homes’. Some adapted, others just exhausted of the various iterations of ‘home’ they had to contend with over several years.
That memento holds her story. ‘At 83 now, I can’t make a new home, yet again. I am tired. I can’t make friends again.’ Her neighbour, I had also just spoken too, was on her way to her weekly karaoke session. She apologised and gave me some canned coffee. She was 89.
I listened transfixed, honouring this woman’s story. ‘I go down to the sand each morning and collect the asari shells and clean them. Then I wrap these kimono remnants around them and stitch them up.’
The stitching actually is a beautiful delicate embroidery.
‘I then attach this little strap, and a bell, for the ancestors. Here, take them, it is all I have now, this is all I can do. I can’t make friends, again’, she repeated, the exhaustion of transitory housing so clear in her voice. Her home was demolished by a freak act of nature, her temporary home, she tried to make, now dismantled across a disused lot several kilometres away. And here, in new, modern sturdy apartments, the will to be homely, yet again, gone. It will simply be a shelter until... she can no longer wander the sand, collecting shells and repurposing them, perhaps with the remnants of what was once her home. A salutary lesson in home and shelter.
After a couple of visits, I ended up with four or five of these precious mementoes, now attached variously to bags or keyrings, even my music stand. Part of what is my home, my memory. I see them, I hear the little bell, I am immediately transported back to Ishinomaki, and wonder how those women are faring, all these years later.
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By virtue of my birth and upbringing, the beach, the waves, the ocean, form an integral part of my home imaginary. When in Japan, that place is Chigasaki, south of Tokyo, shadowed by the magnificent Fuji-san. Drawn to its understated body-board culture (the surfboarders congregate a little further along), it is a fishing port mostly, with small huts attached to the boats that ply the waters offshore, returning with their catch of the day, offering surplus to the beachgoers, along with drinks, and surfboards to rent. Coffee culture is encroaching on the fishing village, Tokyo day-trippers encounter an unvarnished juxtaposition of their daily lives, and a desire that things could perhaps be otherwise.
I sit on the steps to the beach, happy to observe, happy to take in the magnificence of the mountain, watching the wind shape the water into crescents and hopeful riders. Later, I will walk across the coarse black sand, a contrast to the finer white sand of southeast Queensland, camera in hand, beachcomber of the digital age, photographing the shells and driftwood in another time, another place, I might have collected and placed on a shelf, at ‘home’.
By happenstance, I was delighted to uncover during research for another project, the subject of that work, the essayist and novelist Kunikida Doppo (1871-1908) chose Chigasaki as his place of convalescence from serious illness. I have regaled the story of finding the monument to his life and work, tucked away near a car park behind the Chigasaki baseball stadium, to the disbelief of Tokyo friends, incredulous that these are the details I have come to know. (Ishinomaki also has a park dedicated to literary greats, including the poet Basho, whose ‘Narrow Road to a Far Country’ is renowned. I ponder that this literary linking in the ‘home’ of my mind, is less than coincidental.)
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Back in Tokyo, back home, for now. The pandemic forced an unexpected rethink of the idea of home, as an Australian living overseas. One imagines that the passport, tucked away in a safe place, would mean that one always has a ‘home’ to go home to—until it is not. The Morrison government’s edict that no-one shall enter Australia, including citizens, was a reality check for many of us resident in Japan (and other countries of course). The circumstances under which one might return were onerous, airfares inflated to mortgage repayment levels—if you could even get a seat. The internet rage that coalesced around the social media memes of #strandedAustralians sparked some unexpected anger from some ‘fellow citizens’ who were less than sympathetic to the circumstances of those living and working overseas; the ‘fair go’ and laidback reputation of Australians is diminished by the petulance of rage-bait. Where, then, was one to call home?
During this time, ‘home’ was a small apartment in Tokyo, on a work visa though not permanent. The simple arbitrariness with which one could have notions of ‘home’ denied, amplified. While not in the quite in the same circumstances of many who made up the cohort of ‘stranded Australians’ at the time, a failure to extend or renew my visa might have seen me thus. Suddenly, ‘home’ was not the imaginary of literary figures and sea breezes, but a stark and forced choice of understanding one’s place. I recognise my good fortune that in the event of Brisbane no longer counting as ‘home to return to’, I had a place to be. A home.
My most recent Tokyo residency was something of a curtain call on a long teaching career that has included teaching courses in International Relations, traversing all manner of subjects that ultimately lead to defining ‘home’—borders and boundaries, citizenship and asylum, wars, devastation, reconstruction. Military actions that deny ‘home’ to some in order to protect the ‘home’ of others. Humanity’s insecurities wrought on others, there to talk about with some scholarly distance, until it is not; to engage with students assured of their ‘home’, along with those whose visa status might also carry with it the underlying ambiguity of belonging.
A lesson in the classroom but also its significance, salutary, beyond the campus. I was lucky, my university supportive, my neighbours welcoming, my extension granted. That arbitrariness of status worked in my favour, this time.
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Part of being ‘home’ for me, involves community. In Brisbane, that has long meant community music groups. In Tokyo, part of making ‘home’, was joining community groups—music groups, peace groups, volunteering. Whether in concerts or organised gatherings, a common refrain was to sing, or play (in the case of my clarinet ensemble) the song ‘Furusato’ (1914, Okano & Takano), defined as hometown, but also a place of belonging. It took on a renewed meaning following the Tohoku 3-11 triple disaster of 2011. Playing or singing it, everyone knew the words, the hum of the vocals over the instruments, blurred by emotion.
‘Where is your furusato?’ I would be asked at the end of the concert.
‘Right here, of course’, the only possible answer at that time.
And so it is.
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Furusato 1
I finish this essay on my back deck, kookaburras laughing in the distance (as well they might), koalas taking up their daytime perching spot in the gum tree down the back (their night-time growls signalling their presence), the butcher birds lyrically coaxing me to the last words. Yes, this is a home, an environment enriched by the furusato imaginary, and reality.
Furusato 2
As I finish this essay on the back deck, a knock at the front door delivers a small parcel from Tokyo, coincidentally. Coincidentally? Immediately I am back in my little apartment in the northwestern suburbs of Tokyo. Imagining. I am here, I could be there.
It seems some fish and chips are in order.
