Geisha, Interrupted

?So what are you going to do tomorrow, at 2:46?? My friend asks me soberly, yesterday morning. "I don't know yet," I say. Probably, I think to myself, I am going to watch TV and cry.  That, after all, is what I did last year at this time.  And in order to do so, I will have to go back to my home in Tokyo.  I can't stay in Kesennuma for another day.  I am not running any workshops on March 11 anyway.  And even if I did, nobody would come. I was invited to...

It`s Christmas Eve, and we are on our way to the Watanoha district of Ishinomaki. It is dark and snowing.  I know this route.  You cross over the bridge and suddenly everything is gone.  Well, almost everything.  Torn curtains jut out from crushed and shattered windows, fluttering in the cold wind.  The snow accumulates on the bare foundations of houses that fared even worse.  Watanoha has an undeniably creepy aura to it at night lately. I don`t want to...

Live in Tokyo long enough, and you will start to think that neon is a naturally occurring color of the rainbow.  Or at least you would have, before the power saving campaign that followed the Fukushima meltdown, before setsuden.   In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami, when people started to seriously consider shutting down Japan`s nuclear reactors, I thought all that talk sounded pretty idealistic.  Nuclear power was obviously dangerous, but then again so...

 

Yes, really.  Japanese people have actually taken to the streets en masse to protest something.  (And it isn`t even China!)  In my experience, you have to understand, the Japanese have not always been the rise-up-and-take-to-the-streets type of crowd.  So when a friend invited me to check out the anti-nuclear rally in Tokyo yesterday, I was sure there would be at least 2 or 3 other people there. Lord was I ever wrong.  

So here is a video I took last Sunday during a taiko performance at a festival held on a hill beside the rows of temporary housing in Koizumicho, Kesennuma.  You cannot see it from the position of the camera, but everything on all sides of this hill- basically the entire town, has been obliterated by the tsunami.  Six months on, there is still wreckage in every direction.   Yet this town`s will to survive is unmistakable.   The performers are the children of this village...

For Many years now, the Japanese pro-whaling/dolphin hunting community and the largely foreign groups who staunchly oppose these activities have been engaging each other in a constant, unending, epic battle to discern who can be the most annoying. Take last year, when the conservationist Peter Bethune takes his expensive, high tech protest boat Ady Gil and stations it right in the path of the Shin Maru 2. Annoying. Yet the Shin Maru 2 doesn`t stop or slow down, slicing the Ady Gil in half...

I never would have imagined this site would turn into a sporadically updated volunteer blog, but hey, shit happens.      Last weekend was spent in Kesennuma, the port town that rose to an unfortunate fame after being inundated by the tsunami in under seven minutes, then burning for four days straight afterwards. And yet, over this past weekend there was a summer festival at the volunteer center, where I did my part to run a craft workshop for kids.  I got to see...

I have finally made a happier youtube video about my experiences in Tohoku lately. Now hurry up and watch it before I take it back down!  

It`s not exactly the feel good youtube movie of the year, but this is still what it looks like.  The crazy part was that everyone on the bus kept talking about how much better and cleaner than before it all was.