Riding the Trains In Japan
RIDING THE
TRAINS IN JAPAN
TRAVELS IN THE SACRED AND
SUPERMODERN EAST
Also by Patrick Holland
The Long Road of the Junkmailer (UQP)
The Mary Smokes Boys (Transit Lounge)
The Source of the Sound (Hunter)
The Darkest Little Room (Transit Lounge)
RIDING THE TRAINS IN JAPAN
TRAVELS IN THE SACRED AND SUPERMODERN EAST
PATRICK HOLLAND
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
www.transitlounge.com.au
Copyright ©Patrick Holland 2012
First published 2011
This e-book edition 2012
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission for excerpts reproduced in this publication. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.
Cover photograph: Ito Koichi (Zeissism)
Cover and book design: Peter Lo
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
This project has been assisted by the Australian government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
A cataloguing-entry is available from the National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
978-1-921924-37-8(e-book edition)
CONTENTS
Riding the Trains in Japan
A Suburban Chinese Ghost Story
Among the Montagnards
In Transit: Benoist, Designer of the Summer Palace
The Art of Memory: Oku-no-in
Saigon: River of Lost Time
The Race for the Kingdom of Women
In Transit: The Eastern Paradise
Cuong
In Transit: Ithaca & Troy
Lost Cities
In Transit: Meditations on Flight
The Art of Simplicity
Coda
RIDING THE TRAINS IN JAPAN
Kyoto to Tokyo to Kyoto to nowhere …
I arrived in Kyoto in the middle of the national holiday called Ō-Bon, the Japanese All Souls, when Buddhists believe departed spirits may return to earth and when ancestors and the elderly are honoured. I had travelled widely in the East, lived, worked and studied in Vietnam and China, and I had never once made a hotel reservation. ‘Something will turn up,’ you say to yourself everywhere from freezing Gobi Desert outposts to Saigon in a tropical storm after midnight, and it always does. But not in Japan. Not in Kyoto at holiday time.
From Kyoto Station I took a bus northeast to Higashiyama District, where I had read there were cheap traditional guesthouses. I walked with a twenty-kilogram backpack, shoulder bag and briefcase. With the help of a phrase book and a Japanese man returning home from the pub I found a half-dozen places. All were fully booked. It was half-past ten at night. I walked down the hill to a public telephone and rang two dozen places, from backpacker hostels to four-star hotels that I could not afford. There was nothing. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not the day after.
I ate a meal of udon noodles at a little restaurant on Horikawa Road with my bags between my knees under the bar. Then I lugged my gear onto a bus back to Kyoto station.
My initial plan was to put the bags in a locker and sleep on a bench. At every other transit centre I had visited in the world there were ample benches and people lolling about and sleeping – waiting for a bus or train or the dawn. I thought I would not look out of place waiting among this tribe in Kyoto. But in Kyoto there was no such tribe. Buses and trains came far too regularly for lolling, and people were moved on and off them with such efficiency via the computerised ticketing system that to have sat down for even a moment would have made me conspicuous – if, that is, there had been a bench to sit down on.
The lack of public seating is meant to discourage loitering; and certainly there is no loitering. But I could not help feeling sorry for the elderly; the mothers of cranky children; husbands of women shopping for shoes (there were many and various shops in the station complex); and, of course, the homeless – whose number I was briefly, illegitimately and comically to join. I say ‘comically’ now, though it did not feel comical that hot night under the weight of my bags in a foreign city.
I found a locker to accommodate those bags. I paid ¥500 for the key and felt like a free man, having lost the weight that I had shouldered for more than twelve hours since Tokyo. I was almost happy, almost as excited as I usually am in transit centres, where so many individual itineraries converge and the atmosphere is pregnant with the possibility of striking off along any one of a thousand paths.
I bought a canned ice coffee and sat down on the concrete wall of a raised garden bed and watched people go by: business men returning from bars, young people going to and from clubs, and now that I was one of their number I began to look for homeless people. Surely they must be here, I thought. In every city in the world the homeless were to be found at transit centres: even the absence of benches could not stop a man from setting his bags down against a wall and sleeping on a towel or flattened cardboard box. But here in Kyoto it seemed the homeless either did not exist or they had been expertly removed. I did not yet appreciate the art of being homeless in Japan, an art almost as subtle and refined as the ancient art of the geisha. My first lessons came early.
While I sat and drank coffee it was I who was watching the people; but the moment I finished the coffee and lay down on the concrete wall it seemed they were watching me. I rested on my elbow and a middle-aged man walked past then stared back over his shoulder. A young woman did the same. It seemed a thousand pairs of eyes were upon me. I sighed, wondering where I might rest discreetly. The man who had stared at me walked downstairs to the train platforms. Then I knew what I would do. I would ride the trains. There was more than twenty thousand kilometres of train line in Japan. For the next three days until Ō-Bon was over I could travel on the trains and no one would notice me. I could lie back in a soft seat and sleep. I could eat, walk around at the stops and, most importantly, be inconspicuous in my vagrancy.
So began my time riding the trains in Japan.
I bought a ticket on the Shinkansen, the Japanese bullet train. At that time it was the only train I knew how to catch. I took the train to Tokyo. I reckoned this was a long enough journey to sleep on, but not so long that it would be painful to get back to Kyoto if I had to. I do not know why I regarded Kyoto as my base. I had no more ties there than in any other city in the country – not even the promise of a hotel room.
The unreserved Shinkansen ticket cost me ¥13,000, roughly $140. The price seems excessive to me now, but Japanese money still had the ‘toy-money’ feeling a foreign currency has at the beginning of a trip. I justified that this was not much more than I would have paid for a hotel, and anyway, so long as I did not leave the platforms I could go back and forth between Kyoto and Tokyo in comfort all night.
I settled into my seat and sank into a milieu of ever-changing passengers sitting side by side in communal solitude. I watched the outskirts of Kyoto rush by and then open tracts of land fringed by distant flashing lights. The train travelled much too quickly to form any notion of a coherent landscape, much less a meaningful passage through it. And there were not even those typical indicators of passage such as the gradual build-up of outskirts and residences before a station. Stations were suddenly upon the train and then gone. The only constants, the only elements of pattern, were the distant and in
scrutable lights on the horizon – or what seemed the horizon, but may have been near. A station followed a band of darkness. Then came residences. Then came industrial sprawl. Then darkness again. And this order was continually shuffled. I thought of the 17th Century haiku poet Matsuo Basho and his classic Narrow Road to the Deep North. How unlikely the event of such a patient, observant book today; a book that sought to capture the realities of travelling in 21st Century Japan as Basho sought those of his own age.
In Basho’s narrative, details such as an uncommon dragonfly resting upon a rock were enough to cause the poet to break his travels and compose a poem. Such details as the flow rate of streams and the varying sensations that falling leaves produce in an observer are commented upon. Rather than discrete poetical entities such as dragonflies, rocks and water, depthless terrestrial nebulas arranged themselves out my window on the Shinkansen: a post-topographical abstraction. The recorded announcements said here is Shizuoka, here Yokohoma, but in fact nothing could be seen to distinguish one city from another. Through long stretches of the journey I might have been anywhere in the world for all I could gain from the train window.
The would-be Basho of today must contend with the truth that 21st Century travel makes the traditional travel narrative problematic – at best a kind of nostalgic fantasy, at worst a lie; where the writer carefully chooses those colourful and familiar tropes of ‘travel’ and ‘the exotic’, leaving out the passages and portals – airport lounges, meetings with travel agents, residency in more-or-less like urban landscapes – that furnish him with those few saleable encounters that he deems book-worthy. Travel narratives abound in our time, perhaps because we sense that travel may shortly become impossible: everywhere will be ‘here’; and ‘here’ will not be anywhere in particular.
On my first night riding the trains in Japan I felt the logic of journey dissolve; I was travelling nowhere, travelling only in order to be no-place – in an ahistorical, de-territorialised and perpetual non-place (non-places, paradoxically, seek to appear permanent – highways, transit centres and commercial buildings such as shopping centres and fast food restaurants are ever renewing themselves and do not give of age – their tendency to be over-lit denies us even the line between night and day, the passage of hours that does not effect them; and their preference for concrete gives the appearance of solidity, though they are constructed, amended and destroyed at a rate traditional buildings never were). St Augustine compared time to an arrow. But the destruction of discrete place, and so logical journey, (what Marc Augé calls ‘the broken narratives of space) must compromise the linear flow of time for the mind. Ironically, while bulleting through supermodern landscapes on an express train, you cannot help but feel that the arrow has been replaced by a dark and indistinct sea, where historical markers are not so much destroyed as disordered and latent, waiting to be chanced upon, to arise at a whim – as a mock pagoda building might arise amidst a precinct of Euclidian office blocks; and these give way to a genuine Heian Shinto shrine behind a web of powerlines and a hillside of houses crested with aerials.
I made three trips between the ancient and modern capitals that night; shuttled between two great cities, and stood on platforms in transit, never once having felt I had actually left Kyoto, and with no clue as to how long I had been travelling. I was no longer even sure what was meant by the name ‘Kyoto’, though I had travelled the length of it between transit stations earlier in the day.
I thought of a three-hundred-year-old Basho haiku that I had transcribed into a notebook as a teenager and always kept on my shelf.
In Kyo I am
And still I long for Kyo
Oh bird of time
At some point in the night I thought to orient myself by studying the map above the bag rack in the carriage. Like almost every other rail map in the world today, it was a stylised chart based on the classic London Underground design that first circumvented geography in order to placate the mind of the traveller with the most basic mental image of a journey. Nature may famously hate straight lines, but rational man does not.
Traditional topographic maps invite the imagination simply by the spatial relationship of names. I become nostalgic for the southern Chinese city of Kunming when I see it on a map: the closeness of the printed name to the borders of Tibet and Vietnam remind me of encountering different nationalities every half-hour on a trip I once made through that country in a hired taxi with a documentary film-maker from Hong Kong; the distance from Beijing reminds me of Kunming’s eternal spring air that renewed my waning love for China after a term studying in the capital.
But a dislocated, disoriented name has trouble evoking meaning.
Modern rail maps present the traveller with a nexus of points, without geographical orientation, and often with no hierarchy but the varying size of the points. The traveller guesses the larger dots are major stops, perhaps city centres. A compass rose, or some other mark of orientation, would be both inappropriate and useless on such a map. As would a key, for distances are only relative suggestions; else they are done away with altogether.
Railway maps describe systems that require tremendous amounts of energy and even a degree of chance and danger (a train may or may not arrive at any of the points on the map: the attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 is just one reminder of this). Yet a journey rendered in the stylised lines and dots of a modern rail map produces a strangely peaceful feeling in the reader of the map, of being simultaneously secure and utterly lost. There is a sense of inevitability about the journey, and an absolution of responsibility, when all possible disturbances, even bends in the track, are removed from consciousness, and the traveller is even encouraged to put out of mind the distances to be travelled. The pleasure of such maps – of such travel – is akin to the pleasure we get when looking from a high point across the changing faces of a city at evening, the joy of incomprehension, of distance, of infinite possibility and ineffectualness …
I turned from the map above the doors and descended into sleep as the train charged through industrial precincts and over black flags that waved in scraps of shallow light in rice paddies, crossing and obliterating the paths trod by poet monks like Basho.
Kyoto to Uji
In the morning I walked through the ancient Gion district of Kyoto and sat in the grounds of the Jinja temple at the end of Shoji Street. It was a sweltering day and I did not feel well. I sat with a tofu and green tea ice-cream, watching children fishing plastic fish out of a pond with a paper scoop, netting as many as they could before the paper broke. And I was watching for geisha. Most of the young women with painted faces and kimonos were Japanese tourists enjoying dressing up. They posed for photographs as all young Japanese do – leaning against friends’ shoulders and making peace signs against their cheeks.
Yet one young woman, strikingly tall for a Japanese, walked more elegantly in her geta than the others, and a young man in simply cut traditional clothes walked beside her. He carried a bag of the young woman’s personals and a parasol over them both. The temple crowds grew quiet when the woman was near and I thought she must truly be a geisha; though I had heard it was rare to see geisha in the daylight, and this was a very hot Kansai day. Geisha, say the Japanese, belong to the night.
She walked close by where I sat, and I noticed her impeccable make-up. The same comprehensive foundation on other girls I had seen that morning was faintly streaked with sweat. The perfection of the woman’s make-up may have been due to touch-ups courtesy of her attendant and his bag, but later a man who took me into his home in Hirakata told me that geisha learn various mental tricks that prevent sweating, just as Hindu religious know how to generate warmth while sitting naked in snow.
Exempting oneself from the heat was an art I had not mastered, and by lunchtime I was looking for respite. I took my first local train from the underground station at the top of Shoji-dori. I watched people at the ticket-dispensing machines at Chushojima station and figured out how to buy ¥1000 passes for all Kansa
i Prefecture on the local Keihan line.
This station connected Gion with Uji, the ancient town on the outskirts of Kyoto that I had been reading about late the night before in the Edward Seidensticker translation of Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. So I began to-ing and-fro-ing between Kyoto and the town where the last ten chapters of that Heian period (9th to 12th Century) classic were set.
I rode there and back and there again before getting off, enjoying the half-empty air-conditioned carriage that made for a far more relaxing journey than the bullet train – which, in daytime, was apt to get crowded and where I was occasionally forced to stand. Once I felt rested I walked out of the station and checked a couple of hundred yen off my rail pass. I walked into a typical urban Japanese landscape. Concrete buildings clustered in every direction but south. The on-ramp of the Keiji bypass roared behind me. Looking townward, I thought Uji did not have much in common with its Heian period self: the Uji I had read of on the train. But as I walked down to fast-flowing Uji River the place began to change.
I came to the top of Uji Bridge. Built in 646 AD, it is one of the oldest bridges in Japan. The bridge has been destroyed five times by war, flood and earthquake. A plaque at the bridgehead tells the visitor that Emperor Ojin first established a palace in Uji in the 4th Century, and that since then countless battles have been fought on the water and the riverbanks. The great Battles of Uji River were waged in 1180, 1184 and 1221.
Scattered around the town were stone monuments commemorating scenes from The Tale of Genji. One of the most striking was at Asagiri bridgehead: a statue of Ukifune (the name means ‘drifting boat’), the tragic heroine of the last chapters of the novel. The monument remembered the meeting of Ukifune with Prince Niounomiya on a small boat on the river. I sat down on a bench twenty yards up a wooded hill on the east bank and opened The Tale of Genji.