Tag: shosho

Heat Ceases
Approximately August 23rd – September 7th

By:
72 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)
The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate 
Heat Ceases (Shosho 処暑)
Cotton bolls open (Menpu hiraku 綿柎開)
Heaven and Earth become solemn (Tenchi hajimete shukusu 天地始粛）
Rice Ripens (Ka minoru 禾乃登)
Calligraphy by Chieko

Heaven and Earth Become Solemn

At the corner of the west entrance to our danchi apartment complex, there was a mini-police station called koban in Japanese. The koban was next to the terminal where the local bus shuttled residents to and from the nearest train station. There were three to four policemen assigned at this police station-cum-information center in rotation to protect our community of around 2000 families.

We didn’t know the names of these policemen because we simply called them ‘omawari-san,’ which means, ‘the person that goes around.’ True to the name, they frequently patrolled the complex on their sturdy-looking white bicycles. They chatted with the residents, listened to their concerns, and arrived quickly when there was a disturbance in our community, no matter how minor it was. We all respected and depended on the omawari-san and felt safe because they were always around.

One September day after the summer holidays, my older sister talked about an exciting project at her primary school over dinner. Her class was going to bury a time capsule that would be opened many years later, and the students discussed what should go inside. She said that someone suggested that the music album ‘Swim! Taiyaki (oyoge taiyakikun)’—a song about a fish-shaped cake filled with red bean paste that escaped the pastry shop— should go inside the time capsule. The song, which sold over 4.5 million copies, was so popular that almost every child in Japan could sing it. She said that the class agreed that it was the perfect item to put into the capsule.

As a pre-schooler, I listened intently to my older sister’s stories because I was very eager to attend primary school. I also wanted to imitate everything my older sister did, which, unfortunately, extremely annoyed her. When I heard this story, I immediately decided that I should make my own time capsule with my friends.

I acquired a small biscuit tin from my grandfather and started gathering precious items with two other friends. One of them brought his supercar Lamborghini-shaped eraser (a rare transparent one in green), and the other brought her orange yo-yo that she valued greatly. I decided to put my little glass jar of ‘star sands’ that my aunt gave me as a souvenir from Okinawa. It is funny because I was fascinated by these tiny star-shaped sands, but didn’t know where Okinawa was. I vaguely imagined that it was a tropical island with coconut trees in a foreign country.

After filling the tin with these ‘treasures of our times’, the three of us went to a field in the southern part of the danchi, next to the rice paddy fields. As we looked for an ideal burial spot, one of my friends found a 100-yen coin. We stared at the coin for a while wondering what to do, then decided that it was best to take it to the omawari-san.

“Where did you find it?” the omawari-san asked when we arrived at the koban with the coin. The fan was blowing furiously at the station, but it was still stifling inside. We nervously explained to him that we found the coin in the field next to the rice paddy fields. To avoid any suspicion, I quickly added that we were in the field to look for a spot to bury our time capsule.

“A time capsule?” he said, and curiously eyed the tin that I was holding. “You’re going to bury that?” We quietly nodded in unison, and braced for further interrogation about its content.

But no more questions came, which was a relief to all of us. We were worried if he thought that the time capsule was a bad idea. The omawari-san picked up the coin, put it in the desk drawer, turned to us and said, “well, thank you for bringing lost items to the koban, we appreciate your cooperation,” in a very formal tone.  He then smiled and pulled out a 100-yen coin from his shirt pocket, passed it to us and said, “here, this is for you, buy some ice-cream at the bread shop.”

We ran with joy to the bread shop feeling proud that the omawari-san praised us for our actions. We bought three “Home-run Bars” with the 100-yen he gave us. Home-run Bars were the cheapest ice-cream available at 30 yen each. And while we ate the ice-cream on a bench, my friend discovered that her stick had “home-run” written on it. This meant that we could get another ice-cream for free, and we were all surprised because this rarely happened.

I can’t remember how our discussion progressed after that stroke of luck, but the three of us concluded that the home-run stick and the leftover 10-yen should all go into our time capsule. We put them in the tin, went back to the field, and buried our time capsule. We then said goodbye and went home for dinner.

Three years after I buried the time capsule with my friends, our family moved to Singapore. When I returned to see my grandparents several years later, I heard whispers of several suicides that happened in the danchi after we had left. I was much older then and tried to imagine what could make people end their own lives. I also thought about the gentle omawari-san who bought us ice-cream and wondered how he was, because he would have investigated these incidents. He was no longer working at our koban, but I imagined that he must have been heartbroken that these tragedies happened in the community that he looked after.

I also never got to dig up my time capsule. While I was away, the field was paved and turned into acrylic tennis courts. When people talk about Japan’s feverish bubble-period that soon followed, I think about those tennis courts that appeared in the field where we used to play. They were jarringly out of place in the middle of the beautiful paddy fields.

Lesser Heat
Approximately July 7th – July 22nd

By:
72 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)
The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate 
Lesser Heat (Shosho 小暑)
Warm winds arrive ( Onpu itaru温風至）July 7-11
Lotus blossoms (Hasuhajimete hiraku蓮始開) July 12-16
Falcons learn to fly  (Taka wazaonarau鷹乃学習) July 17-22
Calligraphy by Chieko

Falcons learn to fly

Before our family moved to Singapore in the spring of 1980, we lived in a cluster of apartment buildings called danchi, in suburban Chiba. The complex, which was completed in 1972, housed approximately 2000 families, and although this sounds like one of those terrible soulless mass housing projects of the 20th century (they were almost identical to the Soviet style Khurushchyovka), it was actually wonderful to live there as a young child because there were so many other children to play with.  Each building housed 20 families on 5 stories with 4 apartments on each floor, and there were no elevators.

Our family lived on the second floor of a danchi, right above my grandparents who lived on the ground level apartment with a small garden. They were my father’s parents, and would have been around 80 years old when we lived together. Their front door was usually unlocked so, often after school, my sisters and I would simply barge into their apartment like it was our right. They were always happy to see us though, so we spent many hours sitting together sipping tea, watching sumo, and eating rice crackers.

My grandmother was an introvert who mostly stayed home, cooked, did some needlework, and watched TV. She occasionally practiced shamisen that she wasn’t particularly good at and made delicious home-made pickles that she shared with my family. She was also a constant guardian to my younger sister, who spent a lot of time at home because she was often sick.

My grandfather was a very tall man for someone born in the Meiji period, and he was active in the community as the president of the senior citizens club of our danchi. I often spotted him cycling around the neighborhood and chatting with people in the community park. He also had a myriad of hobbies that he practiced seriously, including oil painting, poetry writing, singing, and gardening, all of which he picked up after retiring from running a soba restaurant across the street from Komazawa park in Tokyo.

“Grandpa used to be very strict, but he is so gentle with you grandkids,” my father once said, “my friends never wanted to come to my house because they thought grandpa was too scary.” I remember feeling thankful that my grandfather had mellowed before I arrived in this world because it was terrifying to imagine someone who could intimidate my father, who frightened us with his thunderous temper from time to time.

My grandfather sometimes allowed me to sit and watch him paint in the dark tatami room that smelled of turpentine, mixed with the smell of incense from the modest wooden buddhist alter he had in the same room. Many of the paintings that he made were of some distant mountains or fields. He said they were paintings of Nagano, where he grew up before moving to Tokyo.

Once, when my grandfather was painting, I told him that I wanted to learn to draw, and this made him very happy. He immediately flipped a piece of advertisement paper and used its blank back to show me how to draw a mug that was sitting on the table. “Cups are three-dimensional,” he said, as he started to pencil the outline of the mug. “And to depict that, you draw shadows.” I was about 6 years old and couldn’t even write Japanese alphabets properly, so ‘three-dimensional’ and ‘depict’ were big words for me. I remember I paid as much attention as I could because I understood that he was sharing his passion with me wholeheartedly.

My grandfather was never cynical about my ability, and I loved that about him. If I live to be 80 years old, I hope that I’d still be the person that can share my own passion with anyone without contempt, just like my grandfather.

My grandfather died in the spring of 1990 when I was a senior in high school. I was studying abroad and only found out about his death after I returned that summer. My parents said that they didn’t call me back because he wouldn’t have wished to interrupt my study.

In the corner of my messy workroom in San Diego, I still have the square paper board with a tanka poem that my grandfather wrote for me before I went abroad. It reads: –

Granddaughter,
Off to a school in distant Canada
The old hide their tears, and send her away

Many years have passed since he left us, but I think of my grandfather often. There are many things I would have liked to tell him and many questions that I wish I had asked. I never wrote to him when he was alive, but I want to write a letter to him now. There is no question that he would send me a reply, if only he could.