Rambling holiday nonsense

November, the middle month of autumn. Cool, crisp nights with frost. Brilliant blue skies above what remains of colorful autumn leaves. The smell of woodsmoke in the air as folks light up the woodstoves or fireplaces. Occasionally, even the smell of burning coal as a few still use it for fuel. Hikes into the woods where is is easier to see wildlife as the foliage decreases and some bigger game becomes more active for breeding season. The bugle of a bull elk. The chance of seeing one of the most impressive animals in the woods---a bull moose.

Oh wait. I am having a nostalgic daydream. I am in Tokyo, Japan, which although it is the only country on earth with 4 distinct seasons (make me barf) I occasionally have trouble figuring out which clearly distinct season it is without the help of a calendar. I still very much miss being able to just walk out the backdoor and be in a forest within 5 minutes like I could as a child. I miss the ability to drive to the woods like I could as an adult in Washington state, Washington DC, or that most beautiful state of Montana without a major undertaking like it is in Tokyo.

The more I live here the more I live to get out of town and at least find some fresh air, hills, and forests. A big bonus is to see wildlife, although nothing interests me less than seeing a damned monkey. Perhaps disinterest that may change someday. But the biggest bonus is to be able to get out in the woods and not see nor hear another human for the whole day. I suppose my wife is OK, but as a city girl she has no such interests. Not in Japan anyway, but she did while in Washington and Montana to some degree. (Usually it involved her getting to eat---picking wild blueberries, or me hunting. Occasionally she enjoyed seeing a bear cub, or some other baby animal.)

Since I can't get out of Tokyo as often as I would like---which would ideally be every damned day---I have to make do with what passes for "nature" here. In order to do that, I look for nature on a much, much smaller scale. I have to ignore all the unnatural surroundings, all of the human activity, all of the noise, and all of the obviously man-made (or arranged for man's pleasure) parts of nature. For example, flood lights on at night so that we can "enjoy" cherry blossoms.

I spend a lot of time near the Tamagawa (river) as it is about the closest thing there is to natural in my part of Tokyo. I can spend hours and hours there on top of what I spend riding my rode bike along the river. There is some wildlife, mainly waterfowl which although very, very wary of humans can provide opportunities to watch, learn, and relax. (There are various species of ducks around as well as egrets, herons, cormorants and other large waterfowl.)

Quite often if someone sees me photographing in the area, they'll come up and start talking. This is not something that is all that common in Tokyo, but it seems to happen a lot there. Most of the time people will be speaking in Japanese instead of assuming that I cannot speak a word of the language. Although this can be a bit of a nuisance if I've been trying to get close to a heron to take a photo and Watanabe-san chooses that time to noisily walk up to me and start asking about the lens I am using, generally I find such encounters very enjoyable as folks speak to me as a fellow human being and don't give me the full (baka)gaijin treatment. I have learned a lot of interesting things about the birds there and the river from older guys who get all excited about the chance to tell me what they know. (Did you know that some of the lava flows still visible at times in the river were formed during volcanic activity 300,000 years ago? Me neither, until earlier this year.)

Anyway, I have spent the last 2 weekends trying to find some signs of autumn. They are here, of course, but on a different scale. It's cooler. A few leaves have started to change. I have become so desperate for fall that I have gather some of the fallen sakura leaves and have a pile on my desk. In about another month, most will have finished and be falling. Fall subtly (and officially) began in September. In small ways. I began to notice the difference in the type of winds while riding my bike by late September. Naturally, the length of the day had shortened and light angles---and thus color---had begun to change. These changes are very subtle compared to what I have been used to for most of my life before coming to Tokyo. Thus, I have found myself becoming more sensitive to them by necessity, because the seasons, the weather, and the outdoors (nature, wild areas, mountains, wildlife---not golf or other games) have always been extremely important to me.

But still, I have to get into the mountains occasionally or I will become completely insane. And within this month, I plan on at least two trips to the mountains. I won't wanna come back...

As I await the end of summer, which by temperature standards of my home would be around late October in Kanto, (meaning it is what I would call summer-like in Tokyo until then) I am trying to focus on trips to the mountains that I plan for the fall and winter. I am hoping to be able to go to areas sufficiently remote that I don't have a noisy bunch of grannies and grandpas destroying any sense of nature with transistor radios blaring, talking and giggling in voices loud enough to wake the dead, or even the types I see on TV who as soon as they reach a cleared, leveled, and perhaps even concreted viewing platform of an official scenic view scream "sugoiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!" repeatedly. This rules out much of anything that does not require camping or travel by car.

I have been able to get completely away from humans only once in the last year when I went to the Nikko area and found an obscure trail leading to the top of one of the more popular mountains there. I never made it to the top as I did not have a real map, but a printed puzzle written by a clown with no sense of scale nor idea of how to make a map. (Real maps useful for doing any serious hiking or climbing are hard to find. I understand that they are or were available at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku, but I have not checked yet.)

Decent English books on aspects of nature concerning Japan are tough to find. Decent does not include books with the standard "mystery of the Orient" slant to them. There are magazines in Japanese concerning mountain climbing (actually hiking) that are somewhat useful in getting an idea of where to go. Otherwise, like most other magazines, their main focus is on selling readers stuff they don't need.

One book that I recently bought is The Green Archipelago by Conrad Totman. It concerns forestry in pre-industrial Japan and is one of the very few in English that I have been able to find. In fact, I have not been able to find much in Japanese beyond the simplistic either, at least in any bookstores. Even if I could, it would be a challenge for me to read it and get as much out of it as I could one written in English.

Oh well. Forget that. Manga-Man Aso is seen by some as angling to slither into the prime minister slot. There is the answer to Japan's problems. And don't worry, about some of his and his supporter's statements in the past. After all, nationalism is not an issue in Japan, yet.

More nature than any other country

So I have recently been informed. I like to go out in the woods as often as I can. This ain't often in Tokyo.

About 2 hours from Tokyo is Nikko which is fairly convenient for a one day trip. I last went there in February. As I was hiking up a trail to the top of a 3,000 foot plus hill, enjoying the sugi trees (planted as a crop by the bureaucrats years ago) and hinoki trees and the silence (rarely did I even hear a bird), I suddenly heard a loud, disturbing noise. No, not a sneeze from one of the many who have developed an allergy to the unnaturally over-abundant sugi trees, but a fellow hiker with his transistor radio at full blast. (That's him in the photo.) Apparently, this is a traditional way for a lot of old guys to enjoy nature. Fill the silence with AM radio. Scare away any living thing within hundreds of yards.

I stopped and let grandpa pass and stayed back taking photos and just enjoying the walk for a while. Unfortunately, I could not walk slowly enough and once the trail started up hill, grandpa slowed to a crawl. I wanted to pass him as I sure didn't want to spend the next two hours listening to his radio. He wouldn't move off the trail even slightly to let me pass either---as I had done for him. So I went through the woods and around him an nearly ran up the next two slopes to get away from him and his noise. Later as I had stopped on the other side of the top of the hill to take photos, I heard Rajio-ojiisama again. I put away my camera and took off down the hill. Rajio-ojii actually tried to speed up after me for some reason (wanted to get in front to block the trail again or entertain me with the radio?) Unfortunately for him, he fell flat on his a**, and I kept going.

I just found a new site, One Life Japan, offering very reasonably priced tours in rural Nagano. This somewhat irritates me, as starting this type of business has been a fantasy of mine for years. And now, I have been beaten to it. THis is nothing new, I had an Amazon.com type of idea when I lived in Toyama, but sort got beaten there too. Hopefully, he will be successful with it---I hope to get time to take advantage of pone of his tours soon. It is something like what I have been looking for---there is only so much city life I can endure.

Japan's deep respect for nature

Along with the tooth fairy myth, this has to be one of the more absurd things that people believe. Here is an interview with C.W. Nicol, a now Japanese citizen, but originally from England, naturalist and writer who has lived in Japan for 27 years and is quite knowledgeable of the environmental issues here.

He occasionally writes nature columns for the Japan Times.

When I first came to Japan, and later, when I visited or lived in villages and small towns, folk would welcome the swallows, and put out small trays under their nests if the mess bothered them. Some even hung upside-down umbrellas under the nests for this reason. Swallows not only nested under eaves, but even inside buildings.

It was still like that 25 years ago when I first came to Kurohime, here in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture where I live. At that time, swallows nested inside the station and it was a delight to watch them. Then the station was redecorated, and they were discouraged from nesting inside. Lately though, to discourage these lovely little harbingers of summer, the squeamish locals have been spreading ugly plastic sheets all over the place and hanging fake crows outside as well.

Some years ago, I heard from a friend that the manager of a golf club house in Karuizawa had 30 or so swallow nests, with young inside, destroyed because a lady complained about a speck of bird dropping on her blouse. I've heard similar stories about a supermarket here where I live.

...To me this is all a sign of the increasing selfishness and mean-spiritedness of so many contemporary Japanese who seem to either not know of or not care about the beauty of the birds themselves, or the long journeys they have made from distant Southeast Asian countries or faraway India -- let alone their wonderful soaring flight or all the harmful insects they consume.

Unique love of nature? Like that of most city folks everywhere, only in the abstract. Only as Disney "nature."