Akashi, Miyajima, Hiroshima

Tamba Pottery

The cloud comes sniffing

down the mountainside

and kiln smoke rises cautiously

to meet it

In the long house

pots stand, brown glazed

under our reverent gaze

______________________________

Outside the Imperial Palace, Tokyo

The pine trees are sculpted like poodles

each clump and pom pom

studiously thinned and shaped

by men in hard hats

No off-shoots, stray wisps

or ambitious twigs

mar the perfect asymmetry

Each specimen conforms to the model

painted a thousand thousand times

for a thousand years

______________________________

Akashi

In the local library, just round the corner from where I am staying, we asked if there was any dance activity for older people. Yes, there was a ballroom class going on right now. We peeped in and were immediately invited to come in and watch. The Mini Mini Dance Circle comp[rised about 16 men and 24 women, plus teacher, assistant teacher and manager. They are aged between 60 and 80, meet weekly and perform around 3 times a year. The group had beautiful co-ordination and style. The teaching was meticulously precise. Apparently, some of the group had been attending for years and some for only a few months, but the difference was not really visible. Each person pays 1,000Yen per month (maybe £8) and although the hall is given free by the town, the group is entirely self-supporting.

It seems that there are another 3 older people's ballroom clubs in this small city, all well attended. I surmise that in fact ballroom dancing is the most widespread dance activity practised by older people in Japan (as it probably is in the UK). There is also in Akashi a blind person's club and a wheelchair dancing club.

Miyajima Island

We come to this little island, just off the coast from Hiroshima, to attend the Toukasai (peach blossom) Festival. Here, every April, Noh players come here from all over Japan to dedicate themselves to their art and perform for two full days in the beautiful little Noh theatre within the Buddhist temple of ... It is also the site of an extraordinary ritual dedicated to two forest deities at the Shinto shrine of Daisho-do. As we come off the ferry, we are amazed to see little Shika deer wandering about the streets, happy among the throng of visitors, tolerant of being stroked and eating one's tourist map. After checking in to our beautiful traditional-style riyokan, which has been an inn run by the same family for 300 years, we walk to the Shinto shrine. A crowd of several hundred is gathered around an oblong enclosure with an altar at one end, with what seem to be customary offerings of apples and oranges and blossom. Along with most of those present, we write our wishes on small pieces of wood (which we pay for - there is always much good fortune on offer at Japanese temples and shrines, but it always costs) and give them back to a monk who stacks these prayers into wooden boxes. A group of yellow-clad monks arrive and station themselves around the edge of the space, at one end sits what look like senior monks in blue. The ceremony seems to be all wood and fire related. Ritual actions are repeated in each corner of the space - we are sprayed with water from a tree branch, arrows are shot from bows, wind is wafted over us. All the while a continuous and vigorous chanting is kept up - I ask a Japanese friend if she knows what the chant is saying, but it is not in Japanese - possibly Sanskrit? In the centre of the space is a large cubic shape which is covered in cypress branches. Finally, one of the monks sets fire to it. It burns fiercely and as the flames destroy the outer covering, we can see that there is a solid wood frame holding it together. The monks offer the wooden prayer sticks we have all inscribed to the head monk, who blesses them. The monks then throw them in bundles onto the fire. This takes a long time as there are hundreds of these prayers to be blessed and burnt. After the fire has consumed all our wishes and sent them heavenwards on the sweetly coniferous smoke, the monks expertly rake out the embers into a lane of smouldering ashes. They line up in their bare feet and march in file with high-kneed stamping along the burning pathway. After, many people, and in particular older people, walk along the embers. No-one appears to be hurt. I am too chicken to try (and, I rationalise, I do not want to take my touristic prurience into a scene which obviously means a great deal to many there. The whole ritual is very clear and performed with great aplomb and good humour by the monks who seem quite unsanctimonious yet generally respectful nthroughout.

Noh Plays

We had already seen a Noh play in Osaka, soon after leaving Tokyo. Later I bought a book of some of Arthur Whaley's translations of Noh plays and began to get a sense of the form. Somewhere I read that W.B.Yeats had writtren some 'Noh plays' and I began to realise why when I saw the mixture of deep sympathy with the natural world, love of words and music and intense melancholy that characterises these slow moving and ritualised events and which has so many echoes in Irish literature and art. In Miyajima, as part of the complex which forms the Buddhist Temple, there are two stages: a Noh theatre, where the plays are performed by different companies for two whole days and another, smaller and ancient stage where Bugaku dances dating from the 8th century are also performed during this festival. The entire monastery is built into the sea, on stilts, so at high tide one sits and watches the plays just a couple of feet above the water, with shoals of little spotted fish swimming below. As the tide receded on our second morning, a deer wandered across the sand between stage and shrine, while overhead a wide-winged kite circled and one was reminded of the closeness of nature, spirituality and art in Japanese culture.

Hiroshima

A pilgrimage to Hiroshima was always on the itinerary, with the main event a visit to the Peace Museum. This is magnificent: beautifully constructed, hugely informational, harrowing and crystal clear in both its condemnation of Japanese militarism and the absolute evil of nuclear weapons. I was sharply reminded how marginal this issue has become in British politics - almost forgotten as a cause for real debate - and ashamed at how flabby I had become about it. Hiroshima is the one placwe that can speak with absolute authority about nuclear weapons and their use and it has one message above all others that is written on the cenotaph of all those who died on and after August 6th 1945:

Let all the souls here rest in peace

For we shall not repeat the evil

Waiting for my friends outside the Peace Museum, a young Japanese woman and an older woman, who might have been her mother, approached me. They said hello and asked me where I was from aqnd why I had come to Hiroshima. I answered as best I could, unsure where this was leading. Finally the younger woman said to me 'I am studying the bible. Have you read this?' and she pulled out of her bag - what else? - The Watchtower.

Shortly after, an older Japanese man and a younger woman came up to me. 'May we talk to you?' he said. 'I am a guide and my friend is a volunteer guide who would like to practice her English'. 'Go ahead', I said. The younger woman, reading from her book, explained the meaning and symbolism of the monument behind us which commemorated those who died as a result of the atom bomb. I congratulated her. The older man explained that he was 81 and was a child in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded. His family all died, but he survived. Where was I from, he asked and when I told him, responded 'Ah, I think England is a place which values what is important and will support the road to world peace'. I said I hoped so. 'Our mayor has written a peace declaration. Perhaps you will make sure people in England know about it'. I said I had a copy of the declaration and I would do as he asked and I would also tell people I had met him and how important that was to me. He thanked me and they both left.