10/26/10 It's shocking to wake up in the morning to find that the room you've been blasting the air conditioner in is far warmer than the other. Of course, without insulation here, it only makes sense that every fierce coldsnap would find its way in through the cracks the spiders haven't yet clogged with their corpses. Through drainpipes and laundry vents, through the dusty threshold of the genkan. The minimal warmth of the faux-bearskin blanket I found at PLANT-2 magnetizes me to the bed for fear of exposing my flabby body to the elements of a cold Japanese morning. It's cold even during the maddening melt of summer; come fall, it's another beast entirely, leaving me in dread of the season that is to come. When I wake up these mornings, knowing all that awaits me outside is a vista of rice paddies draped in muslin sheets of rain, and the supernatural fog that slips down the mountains and covers the elementary school, I long for the simple unpredictability of Kentucky weather. I think of our old saying, which likely isn't ours in origin but was co-opted by Louisville without looking back: "If you don't like the weather today, just stay for tomorrow's."
Here in the inaka there is a sense of finality to this weather, like something that might come in leading the charge of the four horsemen as harbinger to Judgment Day. Once the pelting funnels of freezing rain come whipping in, the whole country seems resigned to more of the same. These are a people who did not fight their environment with the same bullheaded stupidity as my own. There is something very noble about that, but also very weak. I can imagine thousands upon thousands of people up in Seattle, teeth gritted against the cold, all wallowing in the same seasonal misery like their time of the month came in the middle of a downpour. And here we are bowing against the rain, doing our best to feign ignorance and muttering 'sumimasen' when we walk into it. Like a killer bee buzzing around and losing interest once nobody reacts, the storms subside, but they always return, and never apologetically; they trumpet their arrival with staccato taps against the windowpane and puddles that well into tsunamis beneath our tires. The mud of the flooded rice paddies creeps higher and higher until it spreads itself in the road and covers the still-green shoots. Crows the size of seagulls wheel through the air and make kamikaze runs at the remains of deer caught in the crossfire traffic, hit by drivers who are blinded by the rain, then their guilt, pay their respects, and move on.
This is the inaka caught under the torrential wrath of heaven.
Here in the inaka there is a sense of finality to this weather, like something that might come in leading the charge of the four horsemen as harbinger to Judgment Day. Once the pelting funnels of freezing rain come whipping in, the whole country seems resigned to more of the same. These are a people who did not fight their environment with the same bullheaded stupidity as my own. There is something very noble about that, but also very weak. I can imagine thousands upon thousands of people up in Seattle, teeth gritted against the cold, all wallowing in the same seasonal misery like their time of the month came in the middle of a downpour. And here we are bowing against the rain, doing our best to feign ignorance and muttering 'sumimasen' when we walk into it. Like a killer bee buzzing around and losing interest once nobody reacts, the storms subside, but they always return, and never apologetically; they trumpet their arrival with staccato taps against the windowpane and puddles that well into tsunamis beneath our tires. The mud of the flooded rice paddies creeps higher and higher until it spreads itself in the road and covers the still-green shoots. Crows the size of seagulls wheel through the air and make kamikaze runs at the remains of deer caught in the crossfire traffic, hit by drivers who are blinded by the rain, then their guilt, pay their respects, and move on.
This is the inaka caught under the torrential wrath of heaven.
