Mother Nature's Nothing But a Tease

Recently, while loitering in a book store, I picked up a book provocatively titled something like Nihon no Jisonshin, “Japan's Pride”, and read part of the introductory chapter. The author spent some time in England and marveled at how similar it and his home country are, if only on the superficial topic of each having a strong sense of tradition. The intro continued with the lamentable tale of how the author took his new found individuality and confidence to express opinions and criticisms back to Japan only to be (well, duh!) socially and professionally ostracized, but the tradition part got the cogs in my noggin spinning. What traditions do Americans hold in high esteem? That thought was right around the time Puxatawny Phil got bandied about for his annual prediction and I tell you I audibly, unconsciously, groaned. Is this what passes for our tradition?

I never believed the little bastard's prediction—or payed much attention to it, really—preferring to rely on gypsy rumor and the ramblings of old banjo-playing men and what their knee was telling them. Those and whether or not it was freakin' 20-degrees outside in mid- February and the spring bloom was upon us a month early, as were both the cases this past weekend.

Memes infiltrate and travel through Japan at near the speed of light, and you either get aboard and start proselytizing or you pretend to in the name of social acceptance. Asinine comedian one-liners, the ongoing “metabo syndrome” craze, loving the black enka singer, Jero and now blaming anomalous weather on global warming are the prominent ones of the day that I can think of off the top of my head. Whether this odd February weather is a sign of warming or not is entirely unknown, but I will say that it's three days later and the weather has snapped back to winter conditions as it's snowing outside the window while I type this.

Maia and I certainly took advantage of it all and enjoyed most of the sunny Sunday. I say “most” because it didn't start out too well. We'd been invited to the Dazaifu area near Fukuoka by one of Maia's coworkers, Hayashiuchi-sensei, to see a temple off the beaten path, but nearby the huge and perennially popular Tenmangu Shrine. I'd never been there, oddly enough, even though it's one of the Kyushu's main attractions. Wait...that's precisely why I'd never been there. Anyways, Maia and I were going to be maybe five or ten minutes late for our meeting with Hayashiuchi-sensei at Dazaifu Station when we hit The Snarl. I've been to the Kyushu National History Museum located directly behind the Tenmangu Shrine three times with hardly a whiff of what traffic could be like on a day like this. Later we'd learn that the combined good weather, desire to see the first ume blossoms of the year, desire by students to say prayers for success in the upcoming examination season and the opening day of a new exhibit at the history museum all mixed together nice and frothy to overload the pitiful road and parking capacity of the city for a few kilometers around. It took us thirty minutes to get the kilometer from the highway to the shrine turn off. We were forty minutes late and something was wrong with Hayashiuchi-sensei's phone. He wasn't picking up for whatever reason.

At this rate we wouldn't arrive at the shrine for another hour, and a gambit I tried only exacerbated the situation, so we decided to ditch the car in the parking lot of some closed music store/dance studio and walk. We were, on foot, much faster than everybody in a car. The whole experience up to now hit home yet again how unnecessary car ownership is in a dense urban area and (now for a bit of unabashed back-patting) how awesome bikes and motorcycles really are.

An hour late for our meeting, we arrived at Dazaifu Station and didn't find Maia's coworker, no surprise there. The atmosphere was electric at the shrine and our spirits were raised by it. Festival food stalls were set up all over and we each found something to suit our palettes: I with the most tasty butabara skewer I've ever had, Maia a juicy ear of roast corn. And it was while eating that a curious thing happened. A man approached us—both of us—and asked if we could model in front of a particularly in-bloom ume tree. At first the two of us were a tad annoyed to be interrupted while eating, but the man was nice enough. He did his thing and shuffled off, but no more than a minute later another man came up and asked the same thing, which we laughingly obliged. Then a third! The whole thing reminded me of a curious incident fifteen or so years earlier at Nepenthe in Big Sur when a stringy, funny-accented Eastern European man ran up to my sister, my cousin and I, yelled out “I love American kids!” and promptly took a few snapshots. The brain hardly has time to react and it's only in the aftermath one has the leisure to wonder “Just what the hell happened there?”

We got out of there after that, but not before grabbing some of the best soft serve ice cream I've had over here and seeing a cheap concession stand t-shirt with a picture of goya arrayed in the shape of a marijuana leaf over which the phrase "No bitter melon, no life" were emblazoned. The temple Hayashiuchi-sensei intended to take us to was nearby and we stalked around there for a few minutes on our way back to the car and a pleasant remainder of the day in Fukuoka. Pleasant except for the fact that my girlfriend trounces me every time at Puyo Puyo. She's like the Genghis Khan of the arcade, it's kinda creepy.

--Matt