Waking Up in Sendai

The day starts very early, here in Sendai, because there is something distinctly off-kilter about our time-zone, here. The sky begins to get light at about 4:45 AM and the local temple on the bluff above our apartment rings its big bell at 5:00 AM. Having become used to the good, hard tatami-style mattress of our bed (and being wise to the good, hard pillows, I brought my own squishy old feather pillow from home), and the comforters that don’t tuck in and are a bit short for large gaijin like us, so that we wear good, warm socks, I am sleeping better, but still, when the temple bell goes, it is pretty much time to get up. Or one can at least start pondering life in general, doze a bit, and then get up at 6:00ish. The other thing that keeps one from sleeping well here is all the interesting new things one learns – this was a much worse problem, the last time we were here…

After maybe going for a run along the river, after first saluting Jizu in his little shrine at the trail head (patron Buddhist saint of children; the shrine is well-lit, locally famous, and visited night and day), having some cereal or toast (of the large, square, white variety) and beautiful local eggs (very orange yolks!) or maybe a fishcake or two (or cream cheese from Walmart, which owns the local Seiyu Grocery chain) and some good Maxim coffee, and juice from the 7-11 (combini – convenience stores – are a real necessity to life here, serving as latterie to buy milk and food and underwear and manga and also where you pay your power bills, get cash…), we carefully manage not to take showers while the other person is either shaving or doing dishes (no dishwashing machine), so that the water is super-hot.

Once all ablutions, beautifications, and dressings are completed, we pack up our computers in our packs/shoulder bags, try to decide which coat to wear and whether or not we should be wearing long-johns today or take our clear-plastic umbrellas or what, shoehorn ourselves into our shoes by the front door (leaving behind our slippers, facing inward for our return later), lock up and descend the 4 floors to the ground. There, we can turn either right or left, and will wend our way along the narrow, tidy, sober, well-paved streets of Kome-ga-fukuro (our neighborhood) to get east and north to the main road, across which extends the university, a matter of 15 minute walk or so away. We might pass the little mom-and-pop store which mostly sells sake and gardening supplies, or the gorgeous traditional house with its generous garden, or the amazingly attractive corner café with its tiny garden of trees and flowers, or the gardens with the various camellias, always in bloom: huge and pink, with long yellow centers, small and red, with bright yellow centers, pink and many-petalled, like roses, white and poetically fading to brown, all with their perfect, glossy, dark leaves. The star magnolias are ready to burst into incredible bloom, like huge white roses, and without any leaves, as yet: Robin has coined the word magnolificent to describe them, the plums are fading, and the pink sakura are about to amaze the world, along the river, in gardens, everywhere.

Enough for now! Tomorrow: the rest of the day!

Back to Japan

Where to start? The last month’s writing energies have been siphoned off to other efforts: trying to say something inspirational to a school-full of folks looking for good news, as I get ready to take over the Headship at Saint Michael’s; trying to revise novel number one so that someone will take a second look at it, a third look and then, God willing, launch the thing; trying to write little notes to accompany the photographs, coming from Sendai, where I’ve been since the 29th of March.

Sendai, Japan, that is, Miyagi Prefecture, in the region known as Tohoku, “East-North” in the cool latitudes of upper-middle Honshu. Robin and I lived here for six months, back in the the spring of 2006, and so the place feels like home, but it is mighty exotic, if we sit back and consider, and if this had been our first visit, culture shock would likely be extreme, although back in the States sushi and sashimi are not the unusual things they were in the ‘70s. He and I met through the Berkeley-Sakai Sister-City Student Exchange program: I was in the 1973 batch going to Japan and he went in 1975; we met at a party for the incoming Japanese students in 1974. He was seventeen, I was eighteen, and thereby hangs a tale. How long have we been married, now? Thirty-one years? The good news is that being in the same office all day and a small apartment all night doesn’t seem to be a bad thing…

When we were here in 2006, it had been 33 years since I had last been in Japan, and picturesque Godai-do shrine in Matsushima Bay (go online and admire it: it is adorable!) was open that spring, as it is, once every 33 years… some kind of significance there, I expect. But I was first in Japan as a little girl of 8, on our way to India, where we would be for nearly four years, with trips home every year, after the first summer, and those taken slowly through intervening opportunities of the Levant, Europe, and Asia. I recall staying at the Ginza Tokyu Hotel, and learning from a tall, slender waiter to ask properly for water: o-mizu, kudasai! and also remember standing on the cold shinkansen platform, waiting and waiting for a bullet train that would never come: the only time the bullet train was stopped on account of snow in its entire history, and that was its first year of operation. Instead, we had to take a plane to Kyoto, a low-flying commuter plane, probably a DC-3, and when Fuji-san was announced as being outside the right side of the plane, you can bet that it was justoutside the right side of the plane, gleaming gorgeous with a mantle of snow. And much else… that’s another book lying written and unread, which needs sprucing up and sending out again!

But what of Sendai, city on the beautiful Hirose-gawa, winding like three rivers through the heart of town, past the wooded hill where its founder, Date Masamune, lies entombed in a splendid reproduction of the Momoyama style tomb that burned to the ground in the blitz? Sendai, with its backdrop of mountains, looking out to the sea like a small San Francisco? It is called “the city of trees,” since after the war it was rebuilt in the image of a new, more beautiful, culturally-rich, forward-looking place, a place with broad boulevards lined with zelkova and cherry trees, with a symphony orchestra, a chamber music group, several choirs (including the wonderful Sendai Baroque Ensemble, which we heard sing Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Christi at the local Baptist church, the night before Easter), and a classical music competition (everybody you talk to seems to have a daughter who studies clarinet or piano). It is a place where if you drop a glove or a necklace or a set of keys, it is put on the nearest high surface, awaiting your return, a place where, as you take your morning run beside the river, you see eagles, swooping to clear the high school campus of mice or try to snag your sandwich, pheasants peering bashfully at you through the willows, ducks both plain and extremely fancy, poking along the shore, brilliant, black-and-white wagtails skimming the surface of the water, and loons, fishing in mid-stream. The tips of the tree branches are blushing pale green or pale pink, and the sakura are daily expected: the venerable weeping cherry in the courtyard of the Institute has dark-red buds ready to open on the next sunny day.

And the people! The people greet you as you run with a courtly nod and an ohio-gozaimasu! as you pass them with their beagles, or as they pass you with their far-superior running skills. And when you compliment the hearty old ladies, doing their exercises with a cheerful genki desu! (roughly “you are very healthy!” or “you’re terrific!”), they smile delightedly back. People at a concert of baroque music will sit on folding chairs or will stand, rapt, for two hours of serious, heart-felt attention. When you eat at that Italian restaurant in the basement of the mall, and you forgetfully leave una buona mancia (“a good little something for the hand” – in Italy or France, about $1.00), the waiter chases you with it, up the stairs. Children gape at you – not that many like you, hereabouts – and when you look in the mirror, you think gosh, you really are pretty odd-looking! Oh, there’s just too much. It is a great place to write, that’s for sure.

If you’d like to read what I wrote about visiting Shiogama, just to the north of Sendai, after our last visit here, go to the 2009 edition of youarehere, the journal of creative geography, at www.u.arizona.edu/~urhere/, and look for “On the Shores of Sendai-Wan.”

ja, mata!