First Autumn in Echizen-shi, Japan – 6th December, 2010.

School Camp

Before asking you, I found two videos online for the cultural camp. One I converted to a mp3 file, put on a loop and used for the Barbados Landship workshop’s maypole section. The Japanese I’ve met aren’t very good at improvisation—anything outside their learnt response causes them to look at each other and bleat “Eeeh?!”, but, seeing I wasn’t punished for my peculiar behaviour, I eventually coaxed my students into imitating it.

This required I be clown-level genki (extroverted) on the day, which earned me some side looks from the Japanese teachers even although they’d said, “Have fun!” They say it but can’t begin to imagine what that looks like to a Barbadian.

This tree is ridiculous

Autumn

The cold has been creeping in. Mornings are consistently about 10 °C/ 50°F in my apartment! This results from poorly insulated houses and perhaps a word as popular as gambatte! (do your best!) but seven times as dangerous, gaman! (endure the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity!). I have been ‘gamanning’ since my skin stopped being an organ used for feeling, crusted over and fell off. So I’ve held out on heating the air (the AC when used in this way can be very expensive, and I haven’t bought the other heater’s kerosine yet, for it to fill the apartment with fumes).

Television-autumn had created a different expectation of real-life-autumn, which has not lived up to it. Look at the dying mountains. The odd-coloured patches are a mistake made to a woman’s hair in a salon, or, something harmful to inhale has started with the trees.

Autumn on television is like models on a catwalk who can wear anything and still look good. The trees have also been edited to represent their most brilliant colour concentration. Before they fall off, some leaves are unnatural yellows and reds from a makeup palette named Autumn You, but many are the leaf hue of a tamarind tree stood too close to a fire. And then…the leaves drop dead, turning the trees into sticks in a wasteland across which you survive to save the world.

The trees couldn’t possibly be resting since Barbadian flora does not rest – it is busy being bright or it is dead. How absurd, a plant having the good sense to die for four months to avoid the cold and then reanimate, when humans don’t…although…it is a plant that fills a husk with thirst-quenching flesh to lure the human animal, and a gazillion seeds to ensure their dispersal. I still do not know how to see them as dormant, only deceased, and hope Springtime in Japan will change this.

Unimpressed by all of it, maybe I have reached the age at which little inspires quick movements, indicating excitement. This has stirred in me an interest in retrieving this part, as, not only is it the thing to do—get back what was taken for granted—but it may be this part which makes putting up with everything else worth it.

Past excitements have metamorphosed into prodding fears. I imagine myself performing a delicate surgery to remove the unhealthy excessive and aggressive bits. I imagine this surgery might kill me because, as their substrate, I belong to their cycle—they are often in bloom, multicoloured heads towering above me, filling the stratosphere with spores.

What could replace them? How am I the destroyer and the destroyed? I find myself in both roles, determination on my face, certain about having another cigarette, another drink…but even as questioning my habits leads me into this maze of my own construction, I stand still. I am rarely inspired to get out, to save myself. Why should this time be different?

A sight woed to see, Within the cage of his heart… A dead Bonsai tree! ME

#AutumninJapan