Murakami and the Subterranean City

I posted this piece by Sam Anderson about Haruki Murakami on Facebook the other day. This bit hit close to home.

I descended into the subway with total confidence, wearing a freshly ironed shirt — and then immediately became terribly lost and could find no English speakers to help me, and eventually (having missed trains and bought lavishly expensive wrong tickets and gestured furiously at terrified commuters) I ended up surfacing somewhere in the middle of the city, already extremely late for my interview, and then proceeded to wander aimlessly, desperately, in every wrong direction at once (there are few street signs, it turns out, in Tokyo) until finally Murakami’s assistant Yuki had to come and find me, sitting on a bench in front of a honeycombed-glass pyramid that looked, in my time of despair, like the sinister temple of some death-cult of total efficiency.

The picture above is of one of the staircases that descend from the raised highways mentioned in the piece and featured in the first chapter of Murakami's book 1Q84 - got my copy yesterday!

I've been a fan of Haruki Murakami for about 7 or 8 years since my sister, who happened to be reading the Wind Up Bird Chronicle at the time, introduced me to him. Looking back that was a fairly ambitious choice for my sister who was like 15 at the time. Following her recommendation I started with Norwegian Wood, moving on to Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - one of my favorites - and the Wind up Bird Chronicle.

For those un-initiated to Murakami's work, I think a good point of comparison may be the film the Big Labowski. The archetypal Murakami character is a bit like the Dude, a tad disaffected and detached from society, but drawn into some strange events by forces outside of his control. Unlike the Big Labowski though there are a lot of surreal and occultist elements. There's this consistent theme that there are many things we don't understand going on beneath the surface of our daily experience.

These supernatural elements are more along the lines of the King's ghost in Hamlet than flying brooms in Harry Potter. My uniformed reading is that these supernatural elements aren't allegory, but kind of augment the personal, and historical events that shape the personal narrative of the main characters by adding a sense of mystery and enigma to peoples actions. What makes Norwegian Wood a good introduction to his work is that it doesn't have any of these elements but you can kind of see how from the right perspective, given ignorance of someone's past, the way their experiences can come back to haunt that person can seem paranormal to an outsider. So good advice sis!

Anderson's piece correctly identifies this subterranean theme running through Murakami's work.

I reread the Wind Up Bird Chronicle after moving to Tokyo and it's amazing how different the book feels now that I have a better understanding of the geography in which it takes places. The landscape of Tokyo both reinforces the sense of mystery in the book and makes the supernatural elements fit in better with the rest of the story.

My assertion is that the defining aspect of the Tokyo Landscape is how subterranean it feels.

Unlike say New York which seems defined by it's skyline and tall buildings. In Tokyo with it's deep labyrinth subways, underground clubs, stores, restaurants, and walk ways, much of the action always seems to be going on below ground. All of the tall buildings in the Skyscraper district in Shinjuku are interconnected by a vast underground mall that sprawls outward from the station.

Even walking around at street level feels in many ways subterranean. Part of this sensation is a result of almost never having a clear view of the horizon. Most of the time you're walking through a narrow maze of densely packed buildings. When you do emerge onto a main multi-lane road it's often capped by one of the raised highways, making the road appear like some giant tunnel carved through the urban landscape - see the pictures above. This, I imagine, is why the description concrete jungle has stuck to Tokyo.

Tokyo is a city alive with energy, the most densely populated city in the world, but most of the activity is hidden from view at street level, millions of people flowing in and out of stations beneath your feet, gathering in buildings tucked deep into back alleys and in clubs below. It's easy to see how someone with an imagination like Murakami's could envision a supernatural element to all the things unseen.

As a westerner here, the effect is probably magnified, all the signposts and guides are labeled not only in another language but in symbols that are totally different from our Roman characters. That living in Tokyo doesn't resemble some kind of dystopian nightmare is really a credit to the Japanese people and culture. People are friendly, the city is safe and clean, and once you know how to get somewhere it's actually fairly easy to do. Tokyo is one of the only cities in the world where you can really experience all the excitement and mystery created by tens of millions of people packed in a tight space in the relative material comfort and safety of a much smaller city.

I'm looking forward to 1Q84

Dog Friendly Cafe

The caption reads

Please do not go out with having left me in the house. If I am here, can you go out with you? I am unpleasant. I hate it being left.

I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when I saw a guy on the train carrying this bag on my way to work. I actually saw either this guy or another guy holding the same bag again, which is when I snagged this picture.

If I see him again I recommend to him the anea cafe, about a 10min walk from my apt.

Where they have pizza....
Organic beer...
And a dog menu!

After the Wave 5 - Boat, Ditches, Rain

To state the obvious this is not where you would expect to find a large boat.
I stepped off the overnight bus from Shinjuku to Ofunato in a bit of a daze at 6:30am on Friday. Grabbed a cup of coffee, signed up for ditch clearing work and found myself staring at this surreal scene by 8:30. It's difficult to appreciate the awesome destructive power the tsunami wrought. I mean chances are you've scene a Michael Bay movie, but really the idea of staring down a 40ft wall of water coming at you at 500 *50 miles an hour is difficult to wrap your head around. Scenes like this give you some visceral appreciation for how powerful the tsunami was.

Here's the boat from another angle, notice the bridge on the left.

And here is a shot taken from that bridge. I circled the boat in the lower left, which is seriously far away from the ocean.

A couple more from the area.

As I mentioned before I was on the ditch clearing team. Essentially the tsunami filled all of these drainage ditches with debris, which would need to be cleared away in order for water to flow back into the ocean and not flood the area.

The first step was to remove any remaining concrete caps covering the ditch. Some of these caps were washed away, some were smashed and in the ditches, but a few remained which we had to take off to clear the material below. The second step was to dig out the debris with a spade and shovel and cart the stuff away in wheel barrows. The final step was to brush out the remaining bits with a broom. Here's a look at a stretch we finished clearing.

And here's one near the end of step 2 beginning step 3.

The last unfinished bit there was the most challenging as it had been filled with dirt and paved over with asphalt so bulldozers could get in to the block and clear away rubble. We had to dig it out with spades and pick axes, it was a bit tedious.

Friday went well. We had beautiful weather, it was great to be outside, and made good progress.

After work at dinner I had the opportunity to meet the All Hands founder David Campbell and his wife who were up visiting the site, working on site, and meeting local officials.

I actually was sitting next to Mrs. Campbell at dinner, but since I had arrived that morning I had missed their introduction to the group the previous evening. This was pointed out to me when I asked her if she worked for All Hands....

Foot meet mouth, ah I see your already acquainted...

I topped this later when I pointed out it was a bit silly to allow alcohol at one of the two base sites in Ofunato and not the other. Turns out the other facility doubles as an alcoholic treatment center. Oops.

Saturday was round two of ditch clearing and was much less pleasant then Friday due to the persistent poring rain. As these were drainage ditches, and the the ditches weren't clear they quickly filled up with water, mixing with the debris to form a kind of mud and chemical sludge which was just great to work in. It only took a couple hours for all of our clothes to be completely soaked through even under our rain gear and totally covered in mud. Even my knee high water proof boots were quickly filled with muddy water.

Also for some reason on this side of the road the concrete caps covering the ditch were enormous six inch thick blocks that weighed over 100lbs and were a total pain in the ass to move.

In order to effectively clear the ditches we had to get the water level down, which meant clearing away obstructions to the water flow. We eventually traced the blockage to a point of the drainage system that was under metal grates going across the road at a nearby intersection. Unfortunately we didn't have authority to block of traffic and obstruct the intersection so we could clear out that bit of the drainage system.

Of course westerner's that we were we got together thought about it for a bit and decided we weren't going to let something as silly as "the rules" stop us. As we say in the US "It's better to apologize then ask permission," as you might imagine this is not a common saying in Japan.

We got a system going where we would run out into the intersection when the light turned red lift up the grate and dig furiously for like two minutes, clear out when the light was about to change, and bow from the side of the road to any cars we had obstructed.

After about an hour and a half of this we got the water flowing, although not perfectly since bits of the ditch were unacceptable due to grates that were bolted down.

At lunch our site leader was on the phone with one of the Japanese coordinators who asked if we needed anything. We told him extra rain gear, hot raman, messages, and maybe an onsen. He responded that he wasn't sure if he could find all these things. Sarcasm in Japan doesn't go very far.

Despite the rain we actually made fairly good progress, due in part to the extra man power we had that day from 11 US Military personal who were up from a base near Tokyo volunteering for the weekend.

A mixture of Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coastguard all of them were assigned to a joint command responsible for communicating with their counterparts in the Japanese Self Defense Forces. They were all heavily involved coordinating operation Tomodachi ("friend") the American military assistance after 3/11. The US sent about 20 ships, 140 aircraft, and 20,000 rescue personal to the area.

Back at the base at the evening meaning. One of the soldiers who was on ditches spoke to the group, thanking the volunteers and recognizing the difficulty of the job they were doing. She even said that the day in the ditches was about as hard a day of manual labor as they had done in their career. The resident wise ass Chris - formerly in the Navy himself - didn't miss a beat at that comment and called out "Oh you must be an officer!" in front of the whole group.

On Sunday, I was back working in the park, laying bricks which was much less strenuous then clearing the ditches.

Some group of Germans showed up that day with about 300 homemade cakes which they were giving away at the main train station in Ofunato. The cakes were delicious, I never got a chance to get the full story though - like Germans, Cakes, Ofunato, wtf? - as I had to head back to Tokyo for work on Monday.

The military folks very thoughtfully offered to give me a ride back to Tokyo in their convoy of vans. I love the shinkansen but it is expensive, so I took them up on their offer which saved me about 15,000yen (about $200) in bus and train tickets.

Leaving Ofunato we drove down the coast passing town after town that had been hit by tsunami. Many towns had been completely destroyed. While Ofunato suffered catastrophic damage, with about half of the down either destroyed or severely damaged, you can see why All Hands was there. In many places there simply wasn't anything to do except bulldoze away the rubble, there wasn't anyone left to help.

*speed of the tsunami is 500mph in deep water, it compresses becomes more powerful and slows down in shallow water hitting land going about 50mph.

After the Wave - 4 Photo Recovery

See parts 1, 2, 3

The goal of most of the work going on in Ofunato seems to be to help people move on from the tragedy, to create the conditions where some sense of normalcy can return. Clearing debri, gutting houses, fixing up parks, etc.

The photo recovery project stands out in this regard in that it's purpose is to help restore to people some small token of what was lost. Recovery workers found hundreds of thousands of photos that had been washed away by the tsunami. Many of these photos suffered irreparable damage, and all of them will quickly decompose if they aren't cleaned and treated.

The longest running All Hands project is the photo recovery project. The estimate I got when I was up there was that they had cleaned, restored, and returned about 80,000 photos to date. NPR actually did a story on the project which you can find here.

I had the opportunity to help out on this project on my second day. One would think that compared to doing hard physical labor out in the sun this would be a pretty cushy job. In fact it's incredibly tedious and in many way emotionally draining work. Each photograph must be carefully washed in cold water, in order to clear off corrosive bacteria. Once each photo is cleaned they are hung up to air dry.

What makes the job so difficult is that most pictures have parts that are severely damaged. You must handle the photos very delicately or the entire picture will dissolve in your hands, gone forever.

It's impossible not to go through an alblum of pictures and not wonder what happened to those in the photo, whether they survived or not. Most volunteers up in Ofunato prefer the physical labor, when I was there the photo project was the last one to fill up (which is how I ended up on it). However, there is a core group of dedicated volunteers who are committed to photos. Many of them have been working through boxes of photos day in and day out for months.

My short weekend stint in Ofunato left me with a deep respect for the people who have committed so much time, in many cases making severe personal and professional sacrifices, and all that had accomplished. It's easy to feel like a half hearted weekend warrior around people who've committed so much. As the All Hands project in Ofunato will wind down in the next month I felt a bit of regret for not coming sooner, and if I'm being completely honest a bit envious too of their opportunity to be part of something that's so important, has had such an impact, and the deep personal connections they've made with others along the way. I'll be heading back up there next week for at least one more trip before they wrap up.

The All Hands people put together this short video, that shows some of the projects they worked on and how much things have changed in the past six months. Check it out.

Six Months of Project Tohoku from All Hands Volunteers on Vimeo.

After the Wave - 3 Parks and Recreation

One of the aspects about the All Hands organization that I appreciated was their broad focus to just help in any capacity that they could. Unlike other organizations that I've worked with they didn't have a narrow focus say on housing, education, or cleanup.

All of the active projects were shown up on this board. Every evening after dinner all of the volunteers have the opportunity to sign up under different positions. Volunteers who have signed up for chores around the base get the first pick of projects.

In addition to gutting and de-mudding houses and stores hit by the tsunami many of the projects had a community support element to them. One project had volunteers helping to harvest rice fields, because a lot of the laborers they count on are no longer there. Another job had volunteers taking senior citizens to grocery stores or other shopping centers. With most of the public transportation infrastructure damaged, and many stores destroyed or still closed some people have no way of getting to the shopping centers to by daily necessities. Many of them have lost their family members and have no one else to rely upon. The photo reclamation project will be the subject of my 4th post.

Two of the coordinator's primary responsibility was to scout, choose, and plan different projects. It's worth mentioning here, how difficult it is to actually turn the good will and motivation of potential volunteers into actual good works. Just showing up in a disaster zone and trying to help isn't such a good idea. You're going to need accommodation, food, water, sanitation all of which are going to be difficult to get for the people who live in the impacted area and you don't want to be a burden on already strained resources. Then once you've managed to do provide for the basic necessities for volunteers you have to pick and choose a steady stream of projects for them to work on. Then you have to mediate conflicts and issues that arise when you throw all kinds of random people together in a really cramped living situation and working in a very emotionally taxing environment. This includes dealing with the occasional oddball crazy guy who manages to find their way in.

So really what I'm trying to say here is that the logistical work that goes into managing a base that regularly had over 100 volunteers constantly working for months is quite impressive.

On my first day I would be fixing up a park that was submerged by and filled with debris from the tsunami.

Leaving the base I got my first view of Ofunato in daylight. The first reaction I had was surprise at how beautiful the natural scenery is surrounding the town.

Ofunato is a port city located on a bay, but it's surrounded by dramatic green covered mountains. One coordinator I talked to, a former investment banker, said if this town was located an hour from Tokyo it would be the most expensive real estate in Japan.

The park itself was in much better shape then it had been a few months ago. Most of the debris had been cleared away. A bulldozer had spread a new layer of fresh dirt.

Looking around I saw most of the houses were intact, and I initially assumed the tsunami must have not done much damage here. I learned from our site leader that in fact they had just already renovated the surrounding buildings. I would guess that the park itself was a bit over a mile from the ocean, by the time the tsunami reached it it was only several feet high, big and powerful enough to totally destroy the first floors of most buildings but not strong enough to destroy most structures. A few hundred feet towards the ocean and it was a much different story.

Still the rate of recovery for this area was really impressive.

I spent most of the day working with two other volunteers and our sit leader all of whom were Americans. Two of them have lived in Tokyo for many years and happened to be friends with Ricky. Either Tokyo is a smaller community then I thought or he's a really popular guy.

Our major project was building the fence that was going to surround the park. Part of this involved mixing cement by hand in order to set the posts. Turns out leveling and getting a fence to stay straight is way more difficult then you would think.

But I think we did a pretty good job. Although at the end of the day, a crew came by with a flatbed truck with a crane to remove the 1 ton debris bags we had our site. They managed to drop one of the bags on one section of the fence when their crane malfunctioned. Bummer...

We also planted a few new trees. This was actually the scariest job of the day since the large trees were occupied by giant spiders.

We finished our work day around 4:30 and headed back to the base for dinner. Every workday a big meal is prepared for the volunteers by a few Japanese women from the community. It was quite good and it was great to have a nice home cooked meal. Although mayonaise on sweet potatoes, common really.

After dinner, the daily meeting and selecting work assignments for the next day volunteers are pretty much at liberty to do what they want. Which is mostly just shower and hang out, there isn't a whole lot of activity going around the base. The volunteers work 6 days a week including Saturday and Sunday, Tuesday is the only day off making Monday night their weekend.

Still, I was sitting in the main common room with a few of the other volunteers around a Japanese style floor table when a macho Japanese worker strolled in wearing those crazy baggy pants and sat down and joined us. He was one of the neighbors and apparently stopped by regularly. The only english he seemed to know was "You drink Japanese sho-chu" sho-chu is a Japanese liquor made from potatoes. After that he produced a 4L bottle of the stuff and poured us each a tall glass mixed with a little water.

After the Wave - 2 Showing Up

It turns out that Ofunato is actually quite far away from Tokyo. 330 miles (530km) north of Tokyo, it was about as close to the epicenter of the 3/11 earthquake as any land in Japan.

Simply getting there would be a bit of an adventure for me. This would be the farthest outside of Tokyo I'd been, and I would be traveling alone. The first step in my journey was a ride on the world famous Shinkansen, Japan's bullet train system.

Looks pretty cool. This was my first Shinkansen experience and I certainly came away impressed. Tickets aren't cheap but the ride is virtually silent and perfectly comfortable. Delays are virtually non-existent.

After going to work in the morning I went across town to Tokyo station. I arrived at the station at 1pm, bought a ticket for the 1:08pm train to Sendai, promptly boarded the train and took off.

Having skipped my launch I purchased a Bento boxed launch. Several options were available and since I had no idea what was in each of them I just picked one at random.

I was a little surprised when the bento saleswoman asked me if I knew how to eat this.

"Um I open the box and eat what's inside?"

At this she leaned over and found a small yellow string protruding from the box. She pulled the string out of the box, told me to wait five minutes, then left.

I was really surprised when my Bento suddenly became very hot and started steaming. Yes that's right my bento started steaming. It was literally cooking itself in front of me.

After my lunch finished cooking itself, I opened it up to find a plastic bowl of rice and beef located in another bowl which contained some sort of chemical packet.

After I finished eating I sat back to watch the scenery go by. The landscape shaped by volcanic mountains makes for some great window viewing. The mountains punctured every few minutes by some rice fields or city.

The Shinkansen took me as far north as the city Sendai. From there I would need to ride a bus four hours to Ofunato. The tsunami had damaged all of the rail lines leading into the city and they still weren't operational.

Sendai is actually a fairly significant medium sized city with a population of over 1 million. I arrived there by 3:30pm, but the next bus that went to Ofunato didn't leave until 5:40. So I had a couple hours to explore the area around the station.

Most of the foot traffic flowed into these large open air malls, with high glass arcade ceilings. Presumably these are too keep the snow out during the winter.

There seemed to be at least seven or eight city blocks worth of these types of malls.

By the time I boarded the bus at 5:40 it was already dark out. The bus was almost full, and would make about 10 stops on it's way to Ofunato which was the last stop. I got a few looks when I got on as I was the only foreigner.

After driving for about an hour and making the first couple of stops virtually all of the city lights had been left behind. The road the bus was taking was technically a highway, but it wound it's way through hills and mountains.

Slowly with each stop that went by, more and more passengers got off the bus until I was the last one left. As we neared Ofunato I was tracking my progress on my phone. Outside the bus everything was dark, but on the screen of my phone it showed we were moving through populated areas.

At around 10pm we finally reached the end of the line and I got off the now empty bus. Looking around me all the buildings were closed and the streets were deserted. I broke out the access map to the All Hands base that I had printed out. It was a about a five minute walk from where I was.

On the way there I passed the first sign of life which was a fairly lively Japanse style bar.

I managed to find the All Hands base, and met the volunteer coordinator. Who had me fill out a few forms and gave me a quick tour of the facilities. From the communal sleeping area

Bedding not included.

To the bucket showers.

Before bed I had my first chance to talk to some of the volunteers. Most were young, from say early 20s to 30 or so. With maybe a few older. The majority were foreigners from english speaking countries, mostly the US and Brittan.

About 25 or so volunteers had left that evening. Most of those that were still here were long termers. They had been here for a month or longer. Some people had been here since the beginning. I had stumbled into some wild diverse family gathering. Welcome, but an outsider.

After the Wave* - Part 1

Last weekend I had the opportunity to volunteer in the town of Ofunato, which was hit badly by the Tsunami on 3/11. The organization All Hands was founded in the wake of the South East Asian Tsunami in 2005, and has brought volunteers to major humanitarian crisis across the globe since, including New Orleans post Katrina, and in Haiti after the earthquake there last year.

I had received the contract for my transfer to in Japan on 3/10. I had it on my desk waiting for my final signature fully committing myself to moving here for at least the next two years when I found out about the tsunami. Even at that point I felt some connection to Japan, and the disaster unfolding there hit me at a more visceral level then others around the world in recent years.

In a lot of ways the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has overshadowed the far greater human impact of the wave.

Fortunately not everyone lost sight of the major humanitarian disaster. All Hands has been on the ground in Ofunato since March. I was the 1,020 somethingth volunteer to come through the operation. Many of the people I met up there had been up there since the beginning. They've managed to do incredible work, many have made great professional and personal sacrifices to be there. Some had come only for a week or two but found they couldn't leave or left and felt compelled to come back and do more.

Their project will come to an end soon but I'm planning on going up for at least more weekend. A lot has been accomplished, but there's an almost unimaginable amount of work that still needs to be done. I'm grateful to the All Hands organization and staff who gave me the opportunity to participate and see things for myself. I'm going to share a bit about my experience over the next couple posts.

*The title is a riff off of Haruki Murakami's After the Quake Stories, set during the Kobe Earthquake, I'm reading them now, recommended.