The first day of National Novel Writing Month is over, and my word count stands at 1198 words, the first of which is ‘The’, and the last of which is ‘restaurant’, followed by a full-stop. I’m 468 words short of my quota, but the 1198 words that I did manage were reasonably enjoyable to write.
29 days and 48,802 words left to go, if all goes according to plan.
Now, though, I am very definitely going to bed.
Taking a short-cut through one of Naha’s labyrinthine covered markets, I passed a small shop that had been set up temporarily as a cinema. It was surrounded by a couple of dozen hand-painted billboards for old Japanese films, including one of my favourites, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (用心棒, above — whose plot, incidentally, was the basis for the (also very good) Sergio Leone / Clint Eastwood western A Fistful of Dollars).
The billboards were in such immaculate condition that it was hard to believe they were decades old – and in fact, it turns out they weren’t. I asked the man running the place where he got them, and it turns out that a friend of his painted seventy or so over the last year! It’s really nice to know that the art of movie-poster–painting is still alive and well.
Walking past an art college yesterday, I noticed that a rock that was sitting on the grass in front had a strange twisted mouth on it. When I looked closer I realised that it wasn’t a rock after all, but a weird, warped shisa dog.
Some things:
So… is anyone else up for writing a novel?
Incidentally, part of the reason I want to do this is because I’ve been wanting to make some music under a tight time-constraint for a long time, and I think this could be a nice (though in almost every way scarier) dry run (the music thing will wait until I get back to the UK). This idea was partly inspired by reading the Crap Art Manifesto of a certain Mr. Tom 7 (who makes both free fonts and free music software that I sometimes use, and which I was shocked one day to discover were the work of the same person). Tom 7’s idea of an ‘Album-A-Day‘ is possibly taking things a bit too far in terms of quantity over quality (although it’s something I’d like to try one day too), but I think an Album-in-a-Month (NaNoWriMo style) would be a pretty exciting thing to try…
I have two pieces of news:
(1) We didn’t win the taiko contest. But I’ve come away feeling more excited not just about taiko but about Japan generally, for reasons that I will explain later because, more pressingly:
(2) I have a new job in Naha, and so I’ll now be staying on in Okinawa until March. Just as I was thinking that crossing Mongolia / Siberia in November might not be as good an idea as it seemed in the sweaty heat of Okinawa’s summer, and feeling that actually a few more months in Okinawa would be quite nice, a job turned up. I started on Thursday, at a junior high school in the city. It’s about eight times the size of the island school I taught at before, but the teachers seem like a nice enough bunch and my work hours are shorter than before, so I’m hoping it should be a reasonably pleasant way to spend the winter before heading back across a Mongolia that is thawing rather than freezing.
…I want to say more about the taiko contest, but Tokyo followed by job-and-flat-acquisition and all the moving that goes with that mean that if I don’t go to sleep now I will probably die.
I’m writing this on a coin-operated internet computer in the lobby of a vast, glossy, cultureless international hotel skyscraper in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It’s twenty to one in the morning and in exactly eleven hours’ time I will step onto the stage at the Tokyo International Japanese Taiko Contest. Which is crazy. All things considered, I should probably be a lot more terrified than I am. I’m looking forward to it, but there is also a small prayer that I don’t screw up in some gut-wrenchingly audible or visible fashion fluttering about inside my mind.
I have no idea what our chances are, because I have no idea what the other bands will be like, and I’m not inclined to make predictions about this kind of thing anyway. All I will say is that if this was a movie then we’d surely have to win: last week, in our hour of need, the drummer from a big 70’s Japanese rock band turned up on our island like a large, black-clad, poodle-haircutted angel and dispensed rhythm-wisdoms and encouragement. Along with the ridiculous chain of coincidence that took me from seeing the band by chance in a London street four years ago to finding myself living next door to Mr. K, the head of the group, in Okinawa two years later, it would just make such a good story if we won…
I must now go to sleep, but please consider touching some wooden objects, stroking your lucky rabbit paw, shouting some sort of an oath, or any other such thing that might in some way help. Thank you.
With only a few days left in Naha, most of my time lately has been taken up with (1) failing to pack, and (2) taiko practice. The reason for (2) is the still-hard-to-believe fact that I will now be playing in the Tokyo International Taiko Contest in ten days’ time. On Saturday I will be going back to my island for one final week of solid taiko practice, and thence to Tokyo, and thence… I don’t know — my plans have been going wonky lately. Probably China, if plan A still be the plan.
Last night I went up the hill to Shuri Castle — once the seat of the Ryukyu kings, before Okinawa was finally swallowed completely by Japan. Almost entirely destroyed in World War II, but painstakingly reconstructed, the castle is beautifully lit at night and sits on a hill with a great view across Naha to the Kerama islands. It also looks very like a scaled-down version of Beijing’s Forbidden City — an indication I guess of how much closer old Okinawan culture was to China than Japan. (Incidentally, the picture above is one of the gatehouses — not the castle itself. I just liked the way the light came out in this one).
I’ve been to the castle several times before, but never at night. Night is a good time for castles.
Okinawan buildings traditionally have sculptures of shisa — fierce lion-dog creatures — on their roof or gateposts in order to scare away evil spirits. When they’re found either side of a gate or door, one always has its mouth open while the other’s is always shut. Traditional shisa are sculpted in an old-fashioned Chinese-looking style, but on Ishigaki there’s a pottery that’s become quite famous for its crazy, bright-coloured 21st century shisa and shisa-inspired creatures. They’re very photogenic, but oddly, they seem to look a lot better in photos than real life. Or rather, they look the same, but in real life it’s easier to notice that they’re a bit too gaudy and crazy to sit comfortably against a background of less crazy objects… I think they’re still quite groovy though.
Well, I failed to dive the Yonaguni ruins, but after getting back to Ishigaki-jima I managed to dive to see manta rays. When we got back to Ishigaki from Yonaguni, k had to go back to Osaka, but I decided to stay on for a few days and dive with photographer and ex-JET Chris, who was down in the southern islands for photo-taking purposes.
We caught a boat out with a nice bunch of people from an Ishigaki dive-shop, who took us to an underwater rock a few hundred meters out to sea which the mantas seem to use as a meeting place. We dropped from the boat to the living coral 14m or so below, and began to look for mantas. Just as I was beginning to wonder if the search might end up being in vain, a large silhouette condensed out of the haze and we hunched down to watch it glide past. Soon, five or so others appeared. The largest we saw had a wingspan of probably about three metres. They were as strange, beautiful and graceful as mantas should be: about as strange, beautiful and graceful as anything.
Incidentally, Chris’s website has several galleries of lush photographs of Okinawa and Japan. And I designed it, oh yes.
On Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island, I failed to dive to the kaitei iseki – the mysterious underwater structures that some people like to claim are the 10,000 year old relics of a vanished civilisation – and I also failed to see a living Yonagunisan, or Atlas moth, which (in Japan) are only found on Yonaguni. I also failed to see Taiwan, which is just over 100km away, although that’s not such a great failing, because apparently it is only visible on about ten days every year.
However, I did see Japan’s westernmost sunset, Yonaguni’s famous little horses, a rock that looked like a face (and which is, almost certainly for precisely that reason, called ‘human face rock’), and a huge bat, which was grumpily trying to find somewhere to sleep where the man who for unknown reasons was pestering it would not be able to get to it. It flew away downriver and successfully disappeared into the trees.
I couldn’t dive at the kaitei iseki because the sea was too rough, so I took a trip on a glass-bottomed boat instead – the only real alternative. Unfortunately because the sea was too rough to dive, it was also too rough to keep the boat still, so I had the frustrating experience of seeing only a few parts of the structure through a small, constantly-moving window. Diving would have been incredible, though… However, I left the island less persuaded than ever that these structures are man-made: an interesting fact about Yonaguni, which I have not seen mentioned in any discussion of the structures, is that a lot of the geology around the side of the island where the ‘ruins’ are is also very regular. Lots of natural flat rock surfaces at right-angles to each other, not unlike the ruins themselves.