Julian Garrison ’19 – Page 3 – Japan and the Environment 2017

First View of Tokyo

The thin red curtains cast a strangely pink glow as the sun’s rays peak over the city skyline and sneak their way into our apartment. It almost simulates a real sunrise, even though surely it’s been hours since the sun rose. It’s about 6:00 or 7:00 am, here in Shinjuku, Tokyo; a surprisingly normal wake up time considering jet lag. We started our day off with a コンビニ (conbini; convenience store) breakfast: I got a strawberry yogurt drink, egg sandwich, and musubi. Surprisingly tasty and filling for the price, time, and long day ahead of us. I don’t think I can even begin to capture all the information and details and everything that Oozaki-san (our tour guide for the day and Aridome-sensei’s good friend) left us with. So I’ll be focusing mainly on highlights and things that stood out to me.

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We met Aridome-sensei’s dear friend (親友; shinyuu), Oozaki-san, at Waseda University. Oozaki-san is a nationally certified tour guide, so we were definitely in for a treat today! After a 上手 (jouzu; skillful) 自己紹介 from Ethan (and shorter ones from the rest of us), we set off for Tsukiji Fish Market. Selinger-sensei and Aridome-sensei both expressed concern that, given my fascination with marine life and vegetarianism, if I would be okay walking through the aisles of Tsukiji, where wholesalers prepare and package the fish they bought earlier (think 5:00 to 7:00 am) at the auction. It’s definitely an interesting question that I’ve been asked before and is perhaps relevant to my own project: If we are to value marine life so highly, especially Japan as an island nation, does that mean we forego consumption of marine life? Or, does consumption of it also convey that reverence? For me, I tend to approach vegetarianism from an environmental perspective; that is, I think the way meat is produced and processed (especially in the United States) is inefficient and leads to a whole host of environmental problems. Also, it’s hard to know exactly where your meat (or any food really) comes from and how it was handled. So processing of fish, like at Tsukiji, doesn’t really bother me. The way I see it, if it’s not the blades of a skilled wholesaler, it could very well be the blade-like teeth of, say, a shark or other predator a trophic level above that fish. More so the case, I was really interested in trying to identify various species as best as I could, to as specific a taxon as I could manage. I was also intrigued by the decisions to either present fish as live fish, whole (dead) fish, or in pieces.

Walking through the aisles of Tsukiji Fish Market.

Sardine-looking fish at Tsukiji. An example of live fish displays.

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We also visited numerous shrines and got a really historical view of Tokyo. Apparently, a large portion of it, which encompasses Tsukiji, is reclaimed land. I was also very impressed with the Tokyo skyline, from two separate buildings (I’m blanking on one of them, apologies; the other was the Tokyo Metropolitan Building). I’m usually not much of a city person (some friends from Boston like to joke that I’m from the “countryside”), so I had some mixed feelings about Tokyo. As I was telling Aridome-sensei, I think Tokyo feels more open and less suffocating than a city like New York, where skyscrapers obscure the view of the sky and everything feels grid-like. Maybe it just had to do with the district, but Shinjuku and Ueno had a different, lighter and more modern feel than New York. I also think Tokyo has more green spaces interspersed and the skywalks and monorails help you get off the ground and add a lot of layered complexity to the city. Speaking of transportation, I was impressed by the efficiency and sleekness of Tokyo’s subway system. Definitely rivals New York’s subways in terms of sprawl and Boston’s T in terms of organization and modernity (namely, the T’s blue line). Tokyo subways are a lot more crowded, though, and it kind of made me realize that, besides the lack of natural spaces and being surrounded by concrete/metal faces (which I already knew), cities bother me because of how congested they are. I like efficiency, so moving at a snail’s pace amidst a crowded street or subway and being pressured from behind to keep moving even though I physically can’t is somewhat frustrating for me, I think.

Namiyoke Inari Shrine. “Namiyoke” apparently means “protection from waves,” which I think is really cool!

A relatively crowded market street. We got daifuku mochi here. おいしかった!

Stunning view of the Tokyo skyline. All of this is reclaimed land, and if you look to the left you can see a bit of Tsukiji.

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I was also struck by how difficult it can be to have dietary restrictions in a foreign country. We ate lunch at this wonderful restaurant on the second or third floor of an outdoor-ish mall. They had an English menu, thankfully, but even then they had relatively few vegetarian options. I ended up getting curry again (granted, it was すごくおいしかった = sugoku oishikatta = extremely tasty), but it came with a bunch of sides like miso soup, salad with a peanut and ginger dressing, etc. Later, when we were getting dinner after a long day (I was dragging at this point) at a デパ地下 (depachika; contraction of デパート and 地下; aka, department store basement), Oozaki-san showed me around to the various vegetarian (肉がない; niku ga nai; meatless) options. 本当に肉がないオプションをみせてくれてありがとうございました (hontou ni, niku ga nai option wo misetekurete arigatougozaimashita). I realized it’s really difficult simply browsing and trying to discern what options don’t have meat; I suppose a more active approach (i.e. asking which options are meatless) is probably more effective.

Lunch consisting of curry rice and vegetables, salad with peanut ginger dressing, and miso soup. すごくおいしかったよ.

Thoughts of a Passerby Overhead

I guess, again, I’ll be doing a two-part post. Mostly, I just wanted to document some thoughts I had on the flight from Portland to Chicago, and then later I’ll write about our first day in Japan. I think I tend to get oddly reflective whenever I’m on a long flight. I wrote these down, mid-flight, honestly just shortly after taking off from Portland, so tense might be a bit strange to read after the fact. ごめん！Gomen! Sorry!

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I think, you never really realize how fragmented and patchy our landscapes are, even in a place like Maine, until you’ve been flying over it in a small, short-distance, domestic airplane. Patches of cleared forest, square and rectangular in shape; highways and winding, crisscrossing roads; towns and cities sprawled out as grey and black tiles against the contrasting hues of green, human settlements arranged in grids or perhaps more haphazardly–that’s the landscape I see below me now. As we depart from major urban and rural hubs of everyday human life, between the sea if slowly-drifting, low-flying clouds I see rolling hills and small mountains interspersed with vales. All are crowned with the dark green of trees and yet, still occasionally I’ll see a break, a line, and though I cannot see below the canopy, from way up high, I know that there’s an asphalt serpent winding its way through those trees, with cars and trucks riding its black scales.

We’re so conditioned, I think, to see the world in contrasts and boundaries. Even within this small airplane, traveling some many thousand feet in the air, we compose a patchwork symphony of different backgrounds, different identities, different personalities. I think it’s a wonderful thing, such diversity, but at the same time our very sensory systems are designed to highlight edges through lateral inhibition, though perhaps those are more graded to an extent. What if our landscapes were not so patchy, but gradually faded and blended with those of our surrounding environments, of nature? What if, for instance, Central Park in New York City or Meiji Shrine in Tokyo were not islands of green, biodiversity in an ocean of metal and concrete, but rather blurred into those urban surroundings? And what if, in turn, those cityscapes melded into their surrounding countrysides? What ecological consequences would arise? What about social or cultural implications? Would this, too, be a gradual change, or would we suddenly be cast into a world where this was so?

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“Riffle through my Mind” (a poem, as we passed over the Great Lakes)

Will you ripple across the surface of a glassy lake,
or will you lose yourself in a swirling riffle?
You might call the forest floor your home,
clinging to soil or burrowing down with the earthworms, the beetles.
Or perhaps you might reside on the waxy green of a leaf,
a traveler ready to depart
and soar amidst the clouds.
At times invisible,
at times clearly seen.
Gentle in the first light of dawn,
sheathing the most peaceful blades you may ever witness.
Or, barreling through channeled walls,
scratching and clawing at the rock like a torrent of rabid mice.
Of many forms and dispositions, this ocean’s daughter,
but all one and the same, this precious water.

~~~

Someone, entirely unknown to us, just came over and asked us if we knew if the people next to us (also total strangers to both parties), sleeping, were supposed to get on the presently boarding flight. Out of total, random concern for people he didn’t know, that they’d miss their flight. It takes guts and an eye open to your surroundings to reach out to two independent groups of strangers like that.

Into the Forest

Today was a bit of a shorter day, but really good discussions nonetheless. It was also a little sparse, since Christmas-sensei, Aridome-sensei, and Anna-san were all out today. We had presentations and discussions led by Karen and Michael. Karen presented first on a reading she did called “Fukushima in Light of Minamata.” This reading made the case that, although Minamata Bay (and Minamata Disease) is seen as a “man-made disaster” and Fukushuma is traditionally seen as a “natural” disaster (though, see our discussion on Satsuki Takahashi’s “Four-fold Disaster”), there are a lot of similarities between them. Karen also brought up the idea of whether “disasters” such as these can ever really be over. Instead, she suggested, disasters can be thought of as a beginning; that is, what’ll become of things in the wake of these disasters?

Following Karen’s presentation, Michael presented on the role of women in Japan’s environmental movements. I thought he did a really good job of setting up our understanding of activism in Japan in general prior to his discussion of mother’s and women’s activism. There was a lot I didn’t know or had been exposed to, so it was definitely a really interesting discussion today!

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We closed the day by watching an NHK documentary on Meiji Shrine, with live “play-by-play” translations courtesy of Michael and Selinger-sensei. I’ll be honest, I was expecting a documentary on the shrine itself, but was pleasantly surprised to find myself watching a documentary on the ecology of the forest surrounding Meiji Shrine. Although supposedly this is an “Eternal Forest,” meant not to be disturbed by humans, apparently it was artificially constructed or planted about 100 years ago. What I find fascinating is that the planners of this forest were able to accurately project how succession might occur in the forest based on planting a certain composition of coniferous, evergreen, and deciduous trees. For the 100th year anniversary, the Meiji Shrine Forest was opened to researchers of various disciplines to document the astonishing biodiversity in the forest. What I’d be really interested to know is, were animal species added at the beginning with the planted trees or did they colonize there on their own?

Enter into an Immersive World

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been going to aquariums. Anytime my family and I would take trips and vacations, we’d HAVE to go to an aquarium. I’m not even sure just how many times I’ve gone to Maritime Aquarium, in Norwalk, alone; they just never get old for me. So I want to start off this blog entry part 2 (the sequel; see here for part 1) by just saying, I’m really excited to be reading about and discussing and visiting aquariums.

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For my pre-trip presentation on aquariums, I read a chapter, “Zoological Gardens of Japan” by Ken Kawata and “Ciliated Sense” by Eva Hayward. I was a little disappointed in how little the former talked about aquariums, but it did provide me (and I think, my peers during my presentation) some history on aquariums in Japan. Pre-WWII, aquariums were pretty uncommon, but then proliferated and became very popular post-war. Kawata partially attributes this to a cultural phenomenon relating to Japan’s status as an island nation. Like Kawata, I also would’ve expected marine life and aquatic environments to have a profound influence on “language, culture, and food habits.” But the question I had, and posed to my peers, was, “Why only after WWII does this cultural phenomenon occur? It’s not like Japan suddenly became an island nation.” Perhaps a post-war liberation from wartime duties and resource devotion to a war effort? Newfound leisure money?

I’ll put it simply: “Ciliated Sense” was absolutely fascinating. To use an analogy, if I was expecting to dive into a relatively shallow pool, say maybe 9 feet in depth, I think what I got was the Marianas Trench. That is, Eva Hayward puts forth a really interesting, deep discussion of immersion and perception as they relate to aquariums, that I won’t really have time or space to go into here. I highly recommend checking it out, though.

“Ciliated Sense” details the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, so I framed my discussion of aquariums from a Western aquariums perspective; I’m looking forward to seeing how Oota-sensei and the Tokyo Sea Life Park might parallel or challenge my ideas of aquariums. Aquariums began as early as the 19th century in Europe, with “aqua vivariums.” These were geared towards the affluent and to sate intellectual curiosity and religious and biological insights. These aquariums coincided with a time when the oceans were considered a dark, cold, alien world and its inhabitants even more so. So these exhibits, then, became a way to dominate, contain, compartmentalize, and study non-human inhabitants and demonstrate biological knowledge and technological achievement. I think these early ideas really highlight and hearken back to our previous discussions on the “West as conquering nature” ideas, sad as that may sound (especially for me as a marine biologist/ecologist at heart).

Hayward argues, using the Drifters exhibit in Monterrey Bay Aquarium, that at some point modern aquariums shifted to a less binary-generating role. Instead, she suggests, using increasingly more advanced technology and optics, aquarium displays can immerse the viewer in the underwater world of the non-human inhabitants. So instead of contrasting “man-made” and “natural” in aquariums, it seems more a blurring and integration of those binaries. Aquariums such as the Monterrey Bay Aquarium as best as they can aim to recreate and simulate natural ecosystems. Hayward has two major conclusions that I think really resonate with how I also view aquariums: “Animal displays are not simply about seeing the human reflected back upon us” and “We are not only immersed in virtuality; we are immersed in deep marine techno-science worlds.”

Along with those conclusions, I’ll leave you, dear reader, with another series of questions I proposed to my peers:

What do you think of when you hear “aquarium”?
What do aquariums mean to you? Perhaps a specific aquarium?
Why do you go to aquariums? What do you get out of them?

Enter into the Home

I’m going to break up today’s blog entry into two discrete posts, since they’ve been getting rather long recently (which definitely speaks to the complexity of the topics and our engagement with them!). This entry is on kanpo, or traditional (a term I use hesitantly) Japanese medicine, and genkan (entryway) etiquette. Part 2 (the sequel?) will be on my presentation on aquariums and immersion. I don’t mean to elevate my own discussion or project as separate from Valeria’s or the general group discussion, but I think kanpo and genkan etiquette actually go hand in hand, as I think you’ll see. And I don’t mean to toot my own horn, so to speak, by even writing about my own presentation, but I want to share the ideas I read about in “Ciliated Sense” because I think they’re absolutely fascinating. Apologies for the long disclosure; now for our feature presentation!

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How ironic and relevant it is, to be discussing “illness” and “disease” and medicine (Kanpo and Western), at the same time I, myself, am fighting a sore throat and cold. When, just the other day, I went into the Bowdoin Health Center for diagnosis and treatment.

Kanpo is a little hard to define without slipping into binary traps or comparing it to Western medicine and practice, since until today that’s all I really knew. From Valeria’s and Professor Selinger’s presentations and discussions today, if I understand this correctly, kanpo and “Japanese Germs” are very much about “purity vs impurity” (note: an entirely different sense from the historical/anthropological “purity” from Day 1) and treating imbalance. It contrasts the clean (pure) inside with the dirty (impure) outside or below. So for instance, and as an incredibly relevant example as you’ll see later in this post, the genkan or entryway of a Japanese home, where you take off your shoes, has a raised step. That is, what’s considered “inside and raised” is meant to be kept clean from the impurities of the “outside and below”–hence why you take off your shoes there.

I thought it was particularly interesting about how these ideas of purity and impurity evidently arose with the Kojiki, a work which contains origin and creation stories of Japan. I’ve always been really intrigued by these kinds of stories, oddly enough, despite my “scientific” disposition. In short, Izanagi’s wife died and went to the underworld. After some time, Izanagi decided to venture into the underworld to see her (I’m unclear whether this is like an Orpheus story where he wanted to return her to the world of the living or if it was just to visit). While there, Izanagi was contaminated, owing to the death, dead bodies, and illnesses of the underworld. Back on the surface, the purifying waters of a river cleansed Izanagi and from cleansing deities were born: Amaterasu, Susano-o, especially, among many others.

We continued our discussion by contrasting kanpo and Western medicine as well as pathology (study of disease-causing agents) and etiology (circumstances that led to contraction of a disease). As an example, my pathology might be whatever virus, bacteria, etc. that infected my throat and upper respiratory tract. My etiology, however, would probably be staying up late after finals were over and some friends were visiting, thereby weakening my immune system and allowing me to contract whatever my friend had. I thought it was also particularly interesting the idea of ひえしょ(hiesho) or “coldness (sensitivity).” It’s an idea common, I think, to both Western and kanpo practices, in that being cold can somehow lead to illness. While I agree that hot things are wonderful when you’re sick (trust me, I’ve been drinking copious amounts of tea and soup), I wonder if in certain sicknesses cold or cool things are also useful. When you have a fever, for instance. Or just the other day, we went to the Gelato Fiasco, and I found the cool, creamy gelato to be really soothing to my sore throat. I digress.

To summarize, we came up with a list of binaries that might accurately contrast kanpo (left) and Western (right) medicine:

illness vs disease
- treating imbalance vs pathogen
  - treating chronic vs acute sickness
    - correlative vs “magic bullet” thinking
      - body as homeostatic system vs as discrete parts
        
        diagnosis vs treatment
        
        healing vs curing
        
        healing goal: restore balance (a fluid, moving, context- and environment-specific target)
        
        curing goal: rid body of specific pathogen

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Respect. Appreciation. I think they’re a bit underrated, perhaps a bit neglected terms. I don’t mean to be cynical here and I’m not trying to say everyone is necessarily disrespectful or unappreciative, but I think it’s definitely something that at the very least takes a subconscious or subtle role in our lives. In contrast, respect and appreciation are huge, I think, in Japanese culture. From my second year (二年生 = ni nensei) language studies, we learned a lot about how much respect and social norms are embedded within the language itself. Take Keigo, which I briefly talked about the other day, in which you humble yourself and honor the socially-distant or socially-superior person. Or, take a typical exchange between a host and a visitor to that home:

Visitor removes coat and rings doorbell, before waiting for host.
Visitor: ごめんください。ボウドイン大学です。

Host opens door and lets visitor into the genkan.
Visitor: 本日はおまねきをいただきまして、ありがとうございます。
Host: ああ、どうぞ、おあがりください。
Visitor: (pause) じゃあ、しつれいします/おじゃまします。

Visitor takes shoes off in genkan, being careful not to touch their socks to the lower, "outside" portion, and neatly sets shoes to the side.
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After being shown to a seat, the visitor offers a gift of appreciation.
Visitor: これ、つまらないものですが。。。
Host: ああ、いいですよ、いいですよ。
Visitor: いえ、ほんの気持ちだけですから。。。

Romaji:

Visitor removes coat and rings doorbell, before waiting for host.
Visitor: Gomenkudasai. Bowdoin daigaku desu.

Host opens door and lets visitor into the genkan.
Visitor: Honjitsu wa omaneki wo itadakimashite, arigatou gozaimasu.
Host: Ah, douzo, o-agarikudasai.
Visitor: (pause) Jaa, shitsureishimasu/ojamashimasu.

Visitor takes shoes off in genkan, being careful not to touch their socks to the lower, "outside" portion, and neatly sets shoes to the side.
~~~
After being shown to a seat, the visitor offers a gift of appreciation.
Visitor: Kore, tsumaranai mono desu ga...
Host: Ah, iidesu yo, iidesu yo.
Visitor: Ie, hon no kimochi dake desu kara...

Basically, this exchange is all about respectfully entering someone else’s home after you’ve been invited in and showing gratitude for that invitation through gift culture. This kind of social exchange is definitely super important. Time to get memorizing of these set phrases (13 hour plane ride, anyone?).