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♦ Northern Noto

The Noto Peninsula resembles a dorsal fin sticking out from the middle of the back of the main island of Honshū into the Japan Sea. The peninsula is part of Ishikawa prefecture, and its northern part curves eastward at an almost forty-five degree angle to its southern part. This means that one side of the peninsula faces the Japan Sea, while the other curves in toward the direction of the mainland. Due to this, these two coasts are known as the "outer coast" and the "inner coast," respectively. The outer is wild and rugged, while the inner is mild and sheltering. Hence, these very different environments are sometimes referred to as "Father" and "Mother," and the character of the villages along these coasts is, accordingly, quite different. It is on the "inner coast," in the bay created by the crook of the curve of the peninsula, which contains Noto Island (Notojima), where the village of Sora is situated. This inner coastline looks toward the Tateyama Mountains across the expanse of Nanao Bay, which is formed between the curve in the peninsula and the mainland.

The northern area of Noto is often referred to as "Far Noto," and the nature and energy of the place is best expressed in the words of an old peddler's song: "Noto is a gentle place; even the earth is so."

A slangy term that describes another aspect of the energy on this peninsula is totoraku (literally, "father's ease"), because traditionally the women do most of the work! Not only do they care for home and family but they also farm, and often hold a job either within the village itself or somewhere nearby. Their days begin very early and end long after everyone else has gone to bed. And when the men are socializing at home, the wife is very often excluded from the table, while being expected to cater to every whim of her husband and his guests. This extraordinary feminine energy and forbearance was one of the first things that impressed me when we arrived. It permeates the entire fabric of life in the villages and the surrounding fields.

An epithet often applied to the areas of country facing the Japan Sea is "the back of Japan," while the Pacific side is called the "front," because it faces toward the West. From the end of the Tokugawa period, around 1867, the West was perceived as more advanced than either China or the Korean Peninsula, both of which had previously been the main direction of trade and played, of course, a major seminal role in the development of Japanese culture.

It is because of this area's present remoteness and the fact that it has largely been ignored in the modern era that it has become the repository of a very rich and ancient culture, which has only in recent times begun to be eroded by twentieth-century consumerism—the enemy of all holistic cultures. The fact that Noto is only now becoming of interest to scholars and writers is, unfortunately and depressingly, an indicator of its imminent demise—the "culture vultures" circling over it in its death throes. And here I am, I suppose, sharing these same carrion-scented thermals!

♦ Sora Village

The village of Sora stands within the sheltering crook of the peninsula on a small inlet into which the confluence of the two small rivers that passed our house flows and which opens into the bay where Noto Island is located. The village itself faces south across this sheltered bay and toward the island, Nanao Bay, and the Tateyama Mountains beyond.

There are no services with regard to bus, taxi, or railway station in or near the village, since the railway makes a detour around it. Taxis have to drive in from the town of Anamizu, some sixteen kilometers away, and most of the aged inhabitants either walk or ride bicycles to and from neighboring villages.

The village consists of about eighty houses. On one side it faces the sheltered waters of the bay, which are the fishing grounds of the village's tiny fishing fleet of small boats. And at its back are densely forested hills that rise up like lumpy islands out from the small, flattened valleys formed by the rice fields. On some areas of the higher ground, the trees have been cleared to make way for tobacco fields and the occasional chicken or dairy farm, owned by incomers to the area according to the vagaries of the agricultural policies of successive governments. Here are the remains of several derelict chicken farms, with the haunted ambience of abandoned concentration camps.

At one end of the village is the Shinto shrine, set atop a small wooded hill, standing just back from the village itself. At the other end of the village is an ancient Buddhist temple of the Shingon sect. It stands at the top of a flight of stone steps with its back to the forest, just across the road from the water's edge, commanding a view across the bay to the sacred mountain of Tateyama. Both provide the poles of spiritual focus that form the village's religious life.

♦ The Name "Sora"

When we first moved into Sora, on my inquiry someone told us that Sora was named after one of the pupils of the great haiku poet Matsuo Bashō. Sora had been Bashō's traveling companion on his famous journey, described through linked prose and haiku in his famous Narrow Road to the Deep North. Sora was supposed to have stayed in a house in the area at some time during his life.

Of course, this idea greatly appealed to me, until we discovered that it had no basis in fact and that a study of the characters forming the name suggests "a place in front of a cliff." The most likely possibility offered, however, is that it was named by a local samurai family who, moving to the area from a nearby village called Asora, named the place they resettled "Sora." There does appear to be some historical evidence for this, but it remains speculative. No one we asked really seemed to know.

The reaction of many of the people we met in local towns and other villages, when they inquired as to where we lived, was one of surprise and often shock. "Sora?!" Often adding, "How inconvenient!" They simply could not understand why an educated Tokyo-born woman and a Western man would want to live in such a poor, remote village with no nearby "cultural center." What they expressed was the fact that they failed to recognize the very importance of villages like Sora.

As portrayed in myth, folk, and fairy tales, and well understood in alchemy and psychotherapy, it is often that which is despised, overlooked, and ignored wherein lies the greatest treasure. To me, this is precisely what Sora represents. In spite of all the great storehouses of Japanese culture in the cities of Japan, including those that are synonymous with the culture itself, such as Kyoto and Nara (both ancient capitals), it is in Sora, and in the little places like it elsewhere in Japan, that what I believe to be the last remnants of true living Japanese culture remain. Not as a quaint anachronism in a largely Westernized mainline consumer society, but a place where it is still ordinary everyday life—a way of living, still firmly rooted in the Japanese soil and under the tutelage of its ancient gods, and not a comfortable cul-de-sac of cultural and religious lip-service.

The tragedy is that it is now autumn in these villages, with the penumbra of the shadow of winter already fast descending. And with the demise of the present generation of elders, when that winter's snows have melted so too will have most of the traces of an albeit hard way of life, but with it all the beauty, skills, knowledge, wisdom and faith of a noble people.

This is in no way to romanticize a life of frequent privation—the very conditions of which, in fact, temper it physically and spiritually—but to recognize a life filled with suffering, happiness, humor, and gratitude for that very kind of life, and a meaning that transcends the very concept of the word, wherein the meaning is in the life lived. This is a way of living that we have largely forgotten and the "meaning" of which we desperately need to find ways to reconnect with, in lives which have become, and continue to be, increasingly trivialized and disoriented.

Often, visiting the homes and work places of the old people of the village, I was struck by the difference between aesthetics born out of necessity, practicality, and aging through generations of use—where the objects that make up and define the living / working environment are evidence of a continuity of living, often hard and poor from the perspective of today's standards and values— and those found in the places we now generally inhabit.

♦ The House

Most of the houses in the village, with a few exceptions, are old houses. These are traditionally built of cedar-wood frames between which are lathes of bamboo tied with rice straw. The lathes are plastered with a three-layer mixture of clay and rice straw to form the house walls. This is a more sophisticated version of the familiar European wattle-and-daub technique.

For the first layer, rice straw is chopped into small pieces and then mixed with clay and left for a year to soften the straw. After a year, it is reworked and spread over the lathes and left to dry. The next layer consists of very finely cut straw mixed with clay that has a little sand added to it. Finally, a layer of sandy clay, with local color added and bound with a glue obtained by boiling funori (a type of seaweed), is smoothed over the first two layers. Many houses then have these walls clad with cedar weatherboards.

In the old days, all the houses were thatched. While examples still remain scattered throughout the peninsula, all the houses in Sora are now tiled. Examples of the original old tiles are still borne by many of the roofs in the village, and they have a natural warmth in their color and form, compared to the mass-produced tiles of today.

The houses are mainly two-storied, and the living area is partitioned into separate tatami-floored rooms by the use of paper-covered sliding doors called karakami (or fusuma). This provides a versatile space in which the size and number of rooms can be changed according to the needs of the moment. For example, in the event of gatherings and parties the karakami can be either opened or removed altogether to provide a space almost as large as the ground floor. This does mean, however, that there is little privacy living in a traditional Japanese house.

At least one room in the house will feature a tokonoma, an alcove in which a scroll depicting a religious subject or the appropriate seasonal scene will be hung, with perhaps a work of art or a flower arrangement beneath it.

As each family is affiliated to both the local Shinto shrine as well as a Buddhist temple of one sect or another (not necessarily the local temple), one will find both Shinto household shrines and a Buddhist household altar in the same house.

The Shintō household shrine or kamidana (literally, "god shelf") enshrining the household gods (kami) is traditionally located either in a room near the entranceway (genkan) or the main living room. There will also be a small shrine in the kitchen, for the kitchen gods.

The Buddhist household altars (butsudan) in the countryside are usually very large and elaborate and because of the craftsmanship involved cost many thousands of dollars. Usually a special room is devoted to the butsudan, the design of which, and the image enshrined therein, will vary according to the sect to which the family belongs.

Entering a Japanese house at ground level, there is a small vestibule (genkan) from which one steps up a step and into the house proper. It is here that one removes one's outdoor shoes and, stepping up into the house, dons a pair of slippers, at least as far as the threshold of a tatami room, where even the slippers will be abandoned as they are only worn on the hard floors of the house.

Traditionally, a country house would have had at least one room in which there was an open square-shaped fireplace set into the floor, called an irori, over which cooking would be done, and around which the family and guests would sit. Generally speaking, this room would have no floor above it, and the smoke would exit through a vent in the roof.

Sadly these days, although some still retain a working irori, in one room of most old houses in the village there will be a dip in the tatami, rather like the shallow depression left by a pauper's grave. This is the site of an irori that has been abandoned and covered over with tatami. The main reason for this is that there are now much safer ways of heating and cooking in buildings that are very prone to the risk of fire.

The disappearance of hearths in Japan, however, as in other parts of the world, apart from any environmental considerations or safety precautions, is also, I believe, a symbolic indication of the direction that our sophisticated, so-called civilized cultures are taking us. It has always struck me that the word "hearth" looks as though it is composed of the two words "heart" and "earth," and the world over, the fire used to be the heart of the home and was originally built simply on the earth (Scotland and Ireland often burned earth in the form of peat). These days we are forgetting both heart and earth in our haste toward haste.

♦ The Storehouse (Kura)

Apart from barns and outhouses, it is common for a house to have a special storehouse (kura) close by, or sometimes adjoining it. These buildings have a distinctive design and structure of their own and somewhere on their exterior (a shutter or gable end) bear the family crest. The kura is used for storing furniture and domestic items that are not in use during a particular season. Traditionally, furnishings, such as sitting cushions (zabuton), futons and covers, karakami, pottery, lacquer ware, hanging scrolls, pictures, etc., along with seasonal clothing, will be changed according to the time of year. The furnishings, decorations, and even eating utensils will reflect colors, images, and themes of the seasonal landscape and farming activities outside the house. As in the winter, materials will tend to be heavier and more solid, to create a feeling of warmth within the house, and at the same time often carry images of winter; so in the summer, things will tend to be made of materials light in terms of both weight and color in order to create a general feeling of coolness and airiness during the hot, humid months. At the same time, different utensils and furnishings might be used for special occasions—weddings, funerals, etc.— and need to be stored when not in use. Foodstuffs, such as rice and miso, are also stored in the kura, which is built with thick walls of clay or stone that maintain a stable temperature and humidity throughout the year's seasonal extremes. Of prime importance, of course, is the fact that they are fireproof.

In addition to the kura, in a village like Sora where each household is engaged in either farming or fishing, or often both, there is also at least one barn or outhouse attached or in close proximity to the house. In the case of our own house, there was a barn adjoining the back of the house, with access to it internally from the kitchen, as well as from the outside.

Up until the fifties, each household kept a bullock which was used for a variety of tasks throughout the agricultural calendar. Since then, farmers began to buy gasoline-engined cultivators and, later, small versatile tractors. These tractors consist of an engine on two wheels, with long handlebars for steering and on which the controls are mounted. This two-wheeled tractor is made stable by a variety of combinations—tractor and trailer, tractor and cultivator, and so on.

The bullock and the cadence of its movement—the rhythm of which impressed itself not only physically in the shaping of fields and tracks but also on the temporal frame of work and life—its body temperature, its smell, and voice like the working horse of Britain, has vanished from Noto and the rest of Japan. But now and then, a hint or shadow can be detected in a neglected byre-end of a barn, the grease on the side of a doorway or wall, the warm patina on an old hitching-place, or glimpsed in the minds of the aged in the warmth of his or her voice when reminiscing around the fire or beside the stove on a winter's night.

♦ The Bath (Furo)

Most of our neighbors still heated their baths by burning wood. Some of these tubs were made of cast iron with the fire built directly beneath them. This entailed the installation of a wooden pallet on the bottom of the tub to prevent the bather's lower body from getting burned. But the more traditional types of tub were constructed of cypress wood, with a section built into the bath, incorporating a cast-iron firebox into which the wood was placed for heating the water.

Between 4:30 and 5:00 in the afternoon, depending on the season, when villagers returned from the fields, and before they had their evening meal, the first clouds of blue smoke from their baths would drift between the houses, or lift like a spirit-form of the tree that the wood had once been, into the sky, perfuming the village.

Passing by a house, you would hear the distinctive sounds of water being lifted from the tub and poured over the bather's body with a wooden scoop or plastic bowl, and the "clop" sound as it was replaced on the floor after the ablutions were completed. The bather then stepped into the tub to soak. These sounds would echo and be magnified by the bare walls of the bathroom, as would the voice, often sweetened with saké, of one of our neighbors, the headman on a late summer's night in the bath after a night's drinking.

Regrettably, our own bath had been converted so that the water was heated by a kerosene-fired heater in a system separate from the bathroom and located in the barn, while the kerosene tank was secured to the outside wall just below the window of the bathroom.

In the old days in the village, only certain houses possessed a bathroom, so that those families that had none were invited to bathe in a neighbor's house. In some houses, as many as forty people might have bathed in one tub of an evening.

Generally, the bathroom floor is tiled or is made of concrete with a wooden deck. Sometimes the tub is sealed into the floor which has a drain, and often in older bathrooms there is a pit beneath the tub where a drain is situated. It was in just such a pit beneath the tub in an old house we lived in, in Tokyo, that I discovered a dead rat. The smell had been getting progressively worse each time we entered the house over the period of a week, until the molecules it was borne on began to describe precisely the shape of its origin and its location. One evening I looked beneath the tub with the aid of a torch, and there it was, at the far end. I cut two long, thin pieces of bamboo from our tiny garden and, using them like chopsticks, tried to extricate the corpse, which had by now, in the warmth of spring weather, decomposed and was merely assuming its former shape and offered nothing substantial to take hold of. It simply became rat puree at the ends of the bamboo! I finally had to flush it out by emptying the water from the tub, which filled the entire pit before it reached the drain, where its escape became impeded by fur and small pieces of bone that I had to remove by hand.

The stench had become so powerful during this operation—its last molecular onslaught being augmented by the water—that it became indelibly imprinted on my olfactory processes and associated with the bathroom scent of soap. For weeks afterward, each time I came to bathe it was as though I soaped my body with the corpse of the rat!

♦ The Toilet (Benjo)

The toilet in our house was a traditional Japanese benjo; that is, basically just a hole in the floor that accessed to a large dark cavern beneath the house over which one crouched, not unlike lavatories in many other parts of the world. And since we owned no rice field on which to use the contents as fertilizer, it had to be emptied by a local firm at regular intervals, usually according to the number of people visiting the house. Once it was emptied, the heavy dark smell that emerged from it and permeated the house, and probably our clothes as well, gave way to a strange scent like a bouquet of ozone, and the first turds of the new cycle echoed like hymn books being dropped in a cathedral.

This ecclesiastical image is not entirely out of place, as I remember once, when I was staying in a Zen temple, that it was my duty to clean the benjo. This task entailed scraping the day's feces from a wooden chute just below the hole into the pit. This operation was performed with the help of a large wooden spatula with a prayer written on its handle and was considered an important spiritual practice.

On the occasion of having our benjo emptied for the first time after moving in, added to the expected contents it was discovered to contain six pairs of slippers! This find, from then on, seemed to endow the space below the house with the powers of some lower-world purgatory.

After some months, we learned that the Korean family firm who owned the vacuum truck used in this operation also ran the best restaurant in the local town of Anamizu. Taking care of both ends of the process seemed to make perfect sense. It reminded me of a Vietnamese restaurant that we once discovered in Tokyo called "Mai Dung."

♦ Rice Fields (Tambo)

In early spring as the air gets warmer, the rice fields are flooded in preparation for planting. Suddenly, the landscape becomes filled with light, as if the land was laid out with mirrors reflecting the sky and the forested hills, opening up the earth and doubling the world. At night, the fields become holes in the ground to another sky beyond, which is filled with a chorus of croaking stars. And as early summer draws up the green shoots from the water, so some of those stars, too, rise from that other sky and fly as galaxies of fireflies.

In spring, the airspace above the village becomes filled with the excited cries of swallows flying back and forth over the roofs, as though dowsing, refamiliarizing themselves with its topography and relocating the sites of the previous year's nests. The village streets fill with the noise of tractors and people on foot, coming and going back and forth between their homes and their fields.

These first few weeks are a time when bodies that had been housebound all winter, or at least far less active, suffer from the sudden intense physical activity.

Whereas at one time all the processes involved in the cultivation of rice were done by hand, except for those like ploughing where the bullock was used, today ploughing and planting are most often mechanized. In some of the smaller fields around the village, however, the work is still done by hand.

The bodies of the old people, particularly the women, bear witness to decades of hard work in the fields. It is a very common sight in country areas to see the backs of old women that are so permanently bent from a lifetime of stooping to plant, weed, and harvest that their spines, from the waist up, are horizontal with the ground. They have to support themselves on sticks or on infant's buggies, which they wheel before them, often with their shopping or produce from their fields on board.

I never failed to be moved by the way the women spoke of their love for the land on which they worked and lived in a reciprocal relationship—a relationship that had often given them hardship and pain, and shaped it into their bodies. They did not speak of this love per se, it was simply in the language they used when talking of the earth, the plants, or the seasons, or in the manner in which a woman farmer would unconsciously touch the grass on the bank surrounding a field while she talked, in the way you might stroke the hair of a child or a beloved spouse, or in the glance at a field as she passed. One of the women described to me how, when she was young, she hated and resented having to work in the fields but how now she had learned to love it.

I frequently heard the villagers express grief at the sight of an abandoned rice field, as though their own bodies carried the pain and loneliness of the field's neglect. Rice fields are inherited and worked, very often for centuries by one family, so that the cessation of a field's cultivation means a rupture in a tradition of continuity of work and generation, as though a limb of the cultural body had died. Many of the farmers' graves are located beside or between the fields they cultivated in life—their bones planted with the rice in death.

Slowly, many of the fields around villages like Sora are becoming overgrown with weeds, their drainage ditches clogged, and the banks around the fields all but disappeared. As the fields die, so they become a visual barometer of the demise of the villages and of a way of life—the severing of a living link between the villagers themselves, future generations, their ancestors, and their gods, as they pass by on their way to and from their toil.

The rice grown in Sora was the best I had ever tasted, as was the local saké brewed from that rice. And in the cultivation of their own personal rice fields and vegetable gardens, they never made use of either chemical insecticides or artificial fertilizers. For fertilizer they simply used the contents of their cesspits and the rice husks as a mulch. The only place they used chemical fertilizers and insecticides was on the rice and tobacco grown for the government, in accordance with that government's directives. And even though the harvest of our final summer in Sora was ruined by a disastrous drought, we never needed to buy rice for the whole of the following winter, due to the selfless generosity of our neighbors.

In their gratitude for rice and their close identification with its propagation, the old people, particularly the women, seemed to feel a duty to continue the cultivation of their own family fields, long after the remaining members of the family had died or moved away and there was no longer any practical need. They would be the last in their family line to do so, even though they were so stricken by age and a lifetime's labor that they could only literally crawl around their fields on their hands and knees, going to and from them with the support of their prams. It was this extraordinary spiritual energy that enabled many of the women we knew to transcend serious illness and continue an active life.

The village is divided into groups of five households. These households share the work and responsibility for the upkeep and care of their particular part of the village, as well as sharing work at times of planting and harvesting both rice and tobacco. After the war, however, because of the difficulties in maintaining what had always been a self-sufficient agrarian economy, it was customary for the active members of families to leave the village and work in the cities on building sites and road construction in order to supplement incomes derived from their fields and fishing and support elderly parents or parents-in-law. Fortunately, nowadays several small, light industries have been introduced into the village in order to prevent the necessity for leaving. These vary from hand-weaving silk for kimono, which are made up in Kyoto, to small electric-loom shops, rice-straw rope making, and the machine production of curtains.

The women weavers of kimono material weave when the weather is bad and farm when the weather is fine, their hands moving naturally from the fields to the shuttle and loom and back again. In winter when the fields are at rest, they marry warp and weft as skillfully for a kimono to be worn at a spring tea ceremony as they plant out rice in the spring in patterns across the sky-reflecting fields around the village—rice that will fill bowls in the depths of winter.

I love these old women,

whose skin resembles

the earth they till,

and whose backs are bent

horizontal

from bowing to it

so long.

They laugh so easily,

these earthwomen,

and show the gold

that fills their mouths.