Sunday, 4/7/02
Hi everyone! I'm writing to all of you -- family and friends -- to let you know how things are going with my visit to Japan. Thank you in advance for not minding being part of a group message! If you don't want to receive these, please just reply to me (instead of to the group) to let me know, and I'll take you off my list. I arrived here after an uneventful but rather long plane flight and was met at the airport. It took about two hours to get here from Osaka, but it didn't seem like that long at all. With the weather, plants, hills, birds, and general feel being just like the Bay Area, I feel very comfortable and am reminded very much of my first home. I met the office staff right away (all very nice people) and had a lively trip to the local co-op, which is rather like a dazzling multi-story Walmart that happens to have some organic food and loud, repetitive music. The next day I went to Kyoto with my colleague Yoko (my teaching partner with Ryo Imamura and the exchange faculty from Kobe this year) who was all decked out in jeans, black cowboy hat and western-style duster. She was stunning! It was wonderful (see below: images). She and I also spent Saturday at Himeji castle (see also below). What a joy it is to be here!

I am finally having a chance to sit down with my office computer (a Dell, totally unfamiliar to me because it's a PC and I'm a Mac person -- plus, the last person to use it was Chinese, so EVERYTHING is in Chinese). It's Sunday evening here, and I'm sneaking into the office to get some work done. I'm guessing that tomorrow will be filled with meetings and lots of bowing. I'm meeting the university president tomorrow and giving him a hand-carved box from the NW that is just right, according to Yoko. Yoko tells me that I made a very good impression on the office people by bowing so appropriately (note to self: ALWAYS bow appropriately!!)... I do think she's being rather generous with her praise. I met my interpreter, Kayo-san. She is about 20, enthusiastic, and needs me to speak verrrry slowly and clearly. I now speak in short sentences. My class ("American Music History") will actually begin with West African and early African-American styles, which may come as a surprise. My name, apparently, is Shiyon-sensei ("teacher Sean").

I actually have a phone in my apartment, a hilarious and heavy 1940s style black rotary dial fellow. Everyone who comes over bursts out laughing when they see it. The phone number is (8178) 795-7712, including Japan's country code. I'm 16 hours ahead as of Sunday. The apartment doesn't seem nearly so cramped now that I've moved the furniture around. The couch now blocks the TV (no English-language anything and only a few stations) and I have the chance to notice the nice hardwood floors, the tatami floor and shoji screen where I sleep on a futon, and the birds singing outside in the mornings. Of course the place is gigantic by Japanese standards, and it feels funny to rattle around in it without anyone else here for the time being. I spent all of yesterday evening scrubbing all the dishes and silverware and glasses and cupboards, getting loads of accumulated grease off of everything. I also put away the ugly dishes and utensils, so now what I have is clean and looks nice. I spent about $200 getting things for the place (cloth-covered cardboard drawers to store clothes, for example -- there's only one small two-drawer dresser). The food here is terrific and it's very easy to get a wide variety of things to eat.

So here are some images I will never forget:

1. Sitting under the cherry blossoms with square lacquer boxes of sake (which had been served to us with bamboo ladles), piping hot takoyaki (octopus in feather-light batter and grilled), yakitori, and a savory pancake sort of thing, followed by sakuramochi, rice-with-sweet-red-bean-treat-wrapped-in-salty-cherry-blossom-leaf. The location: Himeji castle (I bet there's a photo of it on the internet somewhere), where virtually every Kurosawa film was ever made. The music: one hundred koto players, all women, all dressed in different beautiful kimono, playing perfectly in tune and perfectly on beat. Later the music switched to heart-pounding taiko drummers just as the rain started sprinkling lightly. The music didn't stop, and the people didn't leave. The finale was a huge taiko drum (maybe six feet in diameter) played on both sides by a man and a woman, and it was so loud that I could feel it in my chest. It was one of the most powerful musical moments in my life.

2. Standing on the worn steps of Himeji castle where countless samurai, nobles and common people have stood for centuries. I could almost feel the spirits of long-departed people all around me, just like on Ellis Island. The beams used to support the structure were ancient and enormous (a meter thick) and very dark. We all walked around inside in our stocking feet, and climbed all the way to the very top where we could look out. It was awe-inspiring, moving, and unforgettable. If you look up Himeji castle on the internet, you can imagine me peering out and waving to you from the very highest window.

3. Walking through the cherry tree "forest" at Kyoto's Ryoanji Temple (it's the site of the very, very famous rock garden that's in every photo essay of Japan -- the one with the raked gravel) and having a light breeze blow thousands of petals all over us. It was like snow, and there were pristine petals all over the ground. I cupped my hand around a cluster of blossoms that were still on a tree, and closed my eyes, and it felt like cool, gentle, fragrant feathers. As I ran my hand down along a weeping cherry branch, I had a sudden powerful (overwhelming) memory of my own tiny five-year-old hand doing precisely the same thing -- perhaps at the Japanese tea garden in San Francisco, or even at a nursery somewhere.

4. Standing in front of a giant work of calligraphy at Ryoanji Temple (characters: "the power of ki"). The brush used for it was at least six inches wide and the artist's body had to have moved and bent with the energy of creating the work. My body wanted to move and bend too, with the music and movement of the characters. My heart wanted to burst from my chest.

5. Watching a turtle paddle around amidst a group of enormous, ancient carp at the Heianjingu shrine in Kyoto. Yoko speculated that the carp must be more than a hundred years old. More drifting cherry blossoms, smiling people, brilliant blue sunshine, and laughter everywhere as people happily joined in the annual "hanami" (cherry-blossom-watching) ritual.

6. Eating the very finest tempura of my life, seated on a cushion on the tatami floor of an artist's home in Kyoto where sliding windows open directly into a lovely garden. Frank Lloyd Wright would love it. My first bite of the shrimp made me close my eyes and say, paradoxically, "Oh, I see." Eating the tenderest lightly pickled bamboo shoots with their own unique and stunning flavor, (understandably) nothing like the canned ones. Layer after layer of flavor. Light sunshine filtering through the trees, magenta azalea blossoms and small carved Buddhas in various lively and imaginative poses perched among huge bamboo trees. A perfect flower arrangement at our table.

I would love to hear your news! I'll write again once I've begun teaching. Next weekend there are loads of things going on: an overnight visit with faculty and new students to Kurashiki, and a noh (14th-century theater) festival, for which Yoko has found excellent seats! I'm also giving a presentation on Sunday to a group of Irish music-and-language enthusiasts about the relationship between language and music in Gaelic song. Considering the extent of my Japanese (I am currently able to request a battery for a wall clock and to discern that such things are sold on the second floor), it should be entertaining for all.

Love and cheers, Sean