The summer was, as I have said before, very hot (it remains very hot and humid today, in mid-September) and Seiji and I took the opportunity on Monday, August 13, during my summer holidays, to go out to the beach at Kitaura again. To escape the heat, we went early, at 9am. The drive was beautiful, as we passed fields of ripening rice, thick stands of forest, and many old, traditional-style houses on the winding roads leading to the beach. On our right, at points, we could see Lake Nakaumi and beyond it Mount Daisen, with its two uneven peaks wreathed in clouds.

 

As we parked by the cement boardwalk, I said, “Isn’t that Stephen?” Sure enough, Stephen was perched on the boardwalk, smoking a cigarette and gazing at the water, looking a lot like a basking lizard with his thin frame and weathered skin. He often comes out very early to the water to swim before he teaches. Seiji, in previous years, used to come out to the beach after working at Kaya and sleep on the sand. We sat with Stephen a while, listening to the whining of the cicadas in the trees and watching the hawks. Even at this hour, there were others on the beach, including several bunches of children closely watched by their mothers or fathers. The beach hut was pounding out dance music. Some groups had erected elaborate tents and beach furniture; Stephen told us, laughing, that the two young men down the beach a ways had spent close to an hour trying to erect a tent before finally giving up. We watched the couple next to us unfold a picnic table from a small plastic briefcase. I briefly wished for a simple beach umbrella; even in the morning, the sun was searing. Stephen left and Seiji and I went for a swim, ooching and ouching our way over the burning sand. Seiji told me that when he was a boy, his grandmother wouldn’t let him or his brother or sister swim during the Obon holidays, because it was a widely accepted superstition that spirits of the dead would pull people under and drown them. It was hard to imagine such ghostly things on a fine day. The water was clear and beautiful; I stood waist-deep watching the leaping prisms of light dance over the rippled sand at my feet. After swimming for a long time, we got out of the water and ran for our towels. I surreptitiously watched the man next to us. He had been fishing and returned with a cluster of spiny, black sea anemones. Now he was tapping them open with a chisel or such, and carefully extracting a little gobbet of meat from each. He offered a bit to his girlfriend – raw - and she tried it and seemed to enjoy it. It seemed like a lot of work for such a small amount of meat.

 

After a second dip and doze (and lots of sunscreen for me!), Seiji suggested going for a drive along the coast and we headed out on the scenic route into the north mountains, looking down into long valleys with broken-down old shacks and rice fields. We passed other beaches as well, with little houses overlooking the beach. I was very aware, as we drove, of the two competing Japanese concepts at work regarding nature. One is the concept of wabi-sabi: the idea that beautiful things are always “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”. Wabi-sabi is a nostalgic feeling, like when a person can look at a weathered old shack in the woods and feel a stirring in the soul, and say, “That is beautiful”. It is why Japanese potters often make simple cups and bowls that at first glance are asymmetrical and unrefined, and yet astoundingly expensive. Aki, a friend of Seiji’s, is a potter; his family creates vessels with a trademark cracked blue glaze that is very beautiful. Much of the Japanese coutryside, especially the old homes, temples and shrines, is wabi-sabi. This concept is in direct conflict with the very modern idea that nature is dangerous and dirty, and a perfect, modern world is smoothly encased in concrete (no messy dead leaves, no noisy peeping frogs, lovely plastic bowls instead of ‘dirty’ pottery). I’ve been reading a book called “Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan”, and its main thrust so far is that Japan’s juggernaut bureaucracy is addicted to construction, so that lakes are filled in, rivers are channelled into concrete chutes and dams for no valid reason, roads are built that lead nowhere, tiny paths in the woods are paved, every hill is encased in concrete to prevent rockfalls, and over 60% of Japan’s coastline has been “protected” with walls and piles of concrete to prevent erosion, when in fact they apparently contribute to it. Although the drive through the country was beautiful, both concepts were very much I evidence. Every beach has a long wall of giant concrete ‘caltrops’ (for lack of a better description). Every slight slope is bound with concrete, as well. But the old-fashioned, wild charm of the Shimane countryside and the small towns mitigates this somewhat; I was particularly delighted by the little town that had a small, flower-bedecked graveyard with a spectacular view of the beach. We drove up into the mountains, finally reaching Okidomari (“the place where waves stay”) on the other side. Okidomari is a small, old fishing village flanked by steep hills of bubbled and cracked volcanic rock. Seiji and Aki used to come out here to swim together, before the days of steady girlfriends. After exploring close to the water – stunningly blue, with lots of plants and fish – we climbed up high above the town. Here the graveyard is at the pinnacle of the town, and looks down over orange tiled roofs to the harbour. It looks a lot like I imagine a fishing village in Italy or Spain might look like, except for the distinctly Shinto shrine on the far hill. We climbed up further, to the top of the highest hill (Seiji told me to watch out for snakes in the long grass) to look out, beyond the craggy cape, at the blue, blue sea.