Conclusions on Happiness

A drawing from the midst of catastrophic mental breakdown. Tokyo, March 2016

In general, we wish happiness for the people we care about.

Nowadays I find it very difficult to feel this wish. Now it may just be that I am a terrible friend. But maybe there is something else to it, too.

In Japan, a country I am about to leave after five years, I experienced for the second time a long, dark night of the soul. It was most of all in the unspeakable pain of this ordeal that I became conscious of the smiling masks and proclamations of happiness that surrounded me everywhere. Here there is no escape from it. It appears that displaying happiness at all times is seen as an obligation, policed in everyone by everyone; while on the other hand, expressing a hint of dissatisfaction is a considered a sin which merits the punishment of social death.

For long, long months, I would find not a shred of compassion in my surroundings. Even while butchered inside by neverending heartbreak, I was shunned, judged, rumoured about, lectured to on Reality and How Life Works, and told I was faking it for attention. There were even those who condemned me for writing critical stories and sad poetry, and said, as though it were obvious, that I should try writing happy things instead. Tokyo was a perfect zero-empathy environment which I barely survived, has at the end left me shipwrecked, and whose wounds on my soul will burn for years to come.

Perhaps that is why I have come to look upon happiness as a loathsome, horrible thing.

Tokyo, March 2016

Indeed, in a world as oppressive and exploitative as this one, there are few things I find so repugnant as happy and comfortable people. The instinct, when faced by those people, is to rage: how dare you find it in yourself to be satisfied with this world, where your happiness is necessarily enabled by systems whose defining feature is their destruction of the bodies, minds, hearts and souls of every person they were not designed to benefit?

In other words, each of us who is in a position to be happy, is there not because he or she has chosen it – enough of that feeble fakery, those endless platitudes that you make your happiness for yourself. No: if you are capable of choosing to be happy, it is because you are privileged with at least a certain condition of resources, relationships or power over your life to be able to do so. It is because you are not shrieking with the impossible pain of having those conditions robbed by the social and economic structures under which you live when they deem you different or inferior.

And that is why to wish happiness for those I care about would feel like wishing a curse upon them. Wishing upon them a toxic condition: the ability to be alright with a broken reality, to be happy while knowing that it makes them complicit in, say, the established structures of family or affectionate relationships, the employment structures, and the hierarchies of race, sex or class that they happen to be privileged by, and which in the same action exclude and tear down so many others. What astronomical selfishness, what barbarous indifference, is required to feel such happiness! Is that not a dehumanizing condition to live in, in the same way that torture also breaks the torturer?

Perhaps that is why happiness comes across as so hideous to me. Only a heart of the darkest villainy could truly feel happy and satisfied in a world like this. It does not matter if it was not their hands that built their pleasure boats, or shaped and filled the canals of blood and tears through which they ride them. They are wilfully benefiting from that infrastructure, and that makes them complicit in its crimes.

Tokyo, April 2016. The allusion is to the convenience stores and separation of rubbish types in Japan. Above the door: “Society”. On the bins, from left to right: “unhappy people”, “thinking people”, “feeling people”, and “non-burnable rubbish”.

Perhaps deep down, many of them know this. Perhaps all such happiness is a mask, however thick, to conceal a conscience wracked with poison and decay, and which, deep in its inner sanctum, knows its own feebleness, and dreads a day when it will be measured and held to account for what it has done. Perhaps the happy person is really a broken and fearful wretch who deserves to be pitied, rather than despised.

Of course, the same has been said of torturers too.

Or maybe they are just ordinary humans trying not to be driven mad by this world, and it is I who is the villain for attacking them for this abominable crime of being happy. But perhaps who is right and who is wrong no longer matters – who after all can judge?

What it means though is that happy people cannot be my friends. We seek opposite things for the world. They seek the continued existence of the systems that enable their happiness. I seek to cast those systems down in flames and remake this as a world for everyone – myself not included, for I am exhausted of it all and long only for my end, the release from this pain. But if by then I have succeed in upsetting those happy people, in injecting enough doubt and discomfort to make them reconsider whether this world is really as okay as they insist on believing it to be – maybe then, this wretched life will have accomplished something worthwhile.

An Intermission to Beijing - and, with sadness, some reflections on Toyko after five years living in it

There is an irony to coming up for air in a city synonymous with some of the worst air pollution in the world.

These days the sun does not stand at midday so much as stagger and clutch at curtains of smog.

But after five years in Tokyo which have descended into a desolating and futile ordeal, a brief escape to China to visit some old friends provided a valuable dose of perspective.

Tokyo is a bubble: an artificial self-contained world which soaks at your soul, slowly dissolving away any distinguishing features until – if you are not destroyed resisting – you have been absorbed into that city’s socio-economic illusion, by when everything outside that membrane appears universes away. And now, as I contemplate with growing finality whether to bring my time in Japan to an end, just a few days looking in from outside proved invaluable.

I was a Chinese Communist once. During my school days in London, in an environment of arrogantly triumphalist right-wing capitalist menace, it was all I could do to draw upon my interest in East Asian history and half-Chinese ethnic heritage to build up a defiant identity-fortress of revolutionary ideology and red books and banners to counter them.

Nowadays I no longer do -isms, but this was a crucial period in developing values of my own, as opposed to submitting to allow any society to feed me its own. However I was never a friend to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has yet to face up to the many atrocities it has caused and errors it has made, most or all of them needless, and most tragic perhaps in their squandering of the real opportunity and hope that movement represented in creating something better for the world, all the more so today.

 

And yet for better or for worse, China has always been in some way a part of me. Perhaps family connections were also involved, whether in the China of great upheavals from my parents’ own stories, or in those heroes of the 1980s democracy movement I came to know and in some cases meet through my father’s diplomatic work. Although I would never call myself Chinese any more than any other nationality, this is a country which has always held a certain connection to my soul.

Which is strange, considering I had only been there once, in the mid-1990s, long before my own communist period. I was too young then to remember much of that trip now; it lasted only a few days, its outstanding memory my father’s finger-waving altercation with the clerk at the Forbidden City who attempted to charge him a higher price to enter for being foreign.

That at least they no longer seem to do. Much has changed in this country in the last couple of decades, or so it is said.

 

Perhaps on that visit I also entered the hutong (胡同) streets and alleyways to visit my parents’ own old friends, made in the turbulent days of transition from the madness of post-Cultural Revolution xenophobia (I have heard that it was too dangerous for my parents, one Chinese and one British, to walk down the same street together) to the opening and reforms of Deng Xiaoping.

This time at least I was better aware of these alleys’ significance. The hutongs are the traditional heart and soul of Beijing – hence why, in the name of that strange religion we call development, we have seen fit to wipe them from the map to make way for soulless high-rise apartments and skyscrapers.

Nonetheless no small number of hutongs remains, and at first sight, especially if one is used to the relatively immaculate streets of a city like Tokyo, they can project a shabbiness that disconcerts. Walls and vehicles lie in rusting decay; rubbish overflows from bins uncollected, and all around drift the sights and scents of questionable foodstuffs being prepared under still more questionable sanitation. But from beneath those first impressions rise reassuring currents of genuine humanity: the dwellers here know each other, greet each other with warmth or properly shout at each other when angry. There is a real community here, living amidst walls whose purpose seems less to keep people out than to whisper stories of hundreds of years of continuity: any alley may have its own tale to tell of ways of life unchanged down the centuries, illustrious sons and daughters, thriving markets and businesses, abiding temples, or dissidents hiding from palace or party authorities.

Beijing and Tokyo are both cities that have utterly transformed over the last seventy years, and been heavily critiqued for what they have sacrificed to do so. But in the hutongs of Beijing that remain, the livelihoods and community bonds of the laobaixing (老百姓, “old hundred surnames”) – the ordinary people of the city – are in plain view, in a way which to my knowledge has no real equivalent in Tokyo.

5) THE HAKKODA MOUNTAINS 八甲田山系 – The Wind Rages

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 5 of 5

  
There are those who claim that happiness has nothing to do with your circumstances, and everything to do with how you choose to respond to them. Such people seem quite numerous nowadays; whether more so than in the past I cannot say.

They are fools.

One does not simply choose to be happy. External circumstances matter. We have created societies that systematically break people. How callous, or plain ignorant, does a person have to be to expect anyone to accept and adapt to a world like that?

And yet, there are places our madness has not yet reached. Places free of arrogance, cruelty, poverty, gender or greed. Places that were there before us and will be there long after us. Places beautiful before anyone was around to corrupt the concept of beauty – a primordial beauty, one we cannot define but know at once when we see it, as though by an instinct as old as love itself.

It was a pain that should not have existed, brought on by the failure of human society, that drove me to Aomori in the distant north of Japan in search of respite. And on my final day there, I found one of the most formidable such places of beauty that I have ever known. It was unexpected – not part of the original plan. And it was guarded by some of the toughest combinations of weather and terrain I have yet encountered.

A location where big explosions once happened bigly.

But it was necessary. It was right. For the winds, the rocks, the trees, the skies, no matter how fierce, how rugged, how sharp, how cold, are not mad. Never have they hurt out of malice. They exclude and alienate no-one; all are welcome in their realm. Unlike society's, their conditions are fair. I could accept them with no hesitation. And in return for what they take, they give a thousandfold.

They give better external circumstances. Beautiful circumstances. Circumstances, if not for happiness, then at least for something magical and profound; something which speaks to your humanity at a level our shallow materialist individualisms no longer bother with.

The Hakkōda Snow March Disaster

Make no mistake, that does not mean the Hakkoda Mountains will not kill you if you do not approach them with care. The Aomori Fifth Infantry Regiment, a unit of the Eighth Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, learnt this in supremely miserable fashion back in the New Year of 1902.

4) OIRASE GORGE 奥入瀬渓流 and LAKE TOWADA 十和田湖 – Colourfully Lurking

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 4 of 5

The Oirase River.

Lake Towada.

Many of Japan's most popular sites of nautral beauty are also immensely destructive volcanoes. Indeed, that volcanism tends to be precisely what made them so beautiful. This is something the millions of people who flock there to take selfies and soak in hot springs might do well to consider.

Hakone is perhaps the best example, but another may be found in the mountainous heart of Aomori Prefecture. At the centre of its southern border, Lake Towada (十和田湖) is a bright blue lake 11km across and almost perfectly circular. The lake, along with the upper course of the Oirase River (奥入瀬川) that flows from it, is now one of the major natural attractions of the Tohoku region, above all in the autumn when its crystalline blue and white currents are wreathed in flaming yellows and reds.

Aomori Prefecture, with Lake Towada at bottom centre.

In fact Lake Towada is a massive volcanic caldera, formed by six major eruptions over the millennia. It is considered active to this day, and though its eruptions are not frequent, those that have happened have been spectacularly violent. The most recent, in 915 CE (when it was still not really part of Japan), was one of the largest volcanic eruptions in Japan's recorded history and smothered the entire region in ashfalls and pyroclastic flows.

Remarkable rock formations and colours, many more spectacular than this, can be found around the rim of the lake and attest to the dramatic processes that created it.

The photos that follow come from a walk along the upper Oirase River, followed by a boat crossing of Lake Towada to the little town of Yasumiya (休屋), the lake's only settlement. The area can be reached in two to three hours by a regular bus service from Aomori City or Hachinohe, and with good planning can be explored as a day visit. Note again that winter in this region is rough and sees both the bus and ferry service suspended – check before you go.

3) AOMORI CITY 青森市 – Rassera, Rassera: The Story of the North

A voyage to Aomori, Part 3 of 5

From the sanctuary of Osorezan I crossed back to this world of artifice and illusions. A two-hour descent from the Shimokita Peninsula by train brought me to Aomori City (青森市), the capital of Aomori Prefecture and my base for a few more days of northern exploration.

Aomori. It is a name synonymous in the Japanese imagination with scallop-fishing, apple-growing, and above all the Nebuta Festival.

The city perches at the south end of Mutsu Bay, at almost the geographic centre of the prefecture, where it brings together the diverse cultures, histories, trades and forces of nature of a land whose present form is of very recent construction. Most of Aomori City as we know it today was built upon the wreckage of World War II, while the concept of Aomori Prefecture as a coherent unit is scarcely a century old. Let's take a look at the story of the north end of Japan.


The First Peoples and the Japanese Conquest 

If we speak of illusions, we should do away with one of this country's most popular: that is, the myth of the homogenous nation. The closer you actually look at Japan, the less escape there is from the hollowness of those claims that this is a land of one people, one ethnicity and one culture.

Get on a bus at Aomori Station and within twenty minutes you come to one of Japan's most interesting archaeological excavations, right there in the suburbs of Aomori City. The oldest finds at the Sannai-Maruyama site (English website here) date back almost 6,000 years, to the world of the earliest known inhabitants of this region.

2) OSOREZAN 恐山 – Mount Fear

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 2 of 5

Eight mountains surround a lake at the centre of the Shimokita axe-blade. The wind ripples its surface, creating gentle waves which caress its sandy shore. It is a serene and separate space, suspended from the mortal realm. The top of the world. A paradise. A place of peace.

And a place of dread. There are no other sounds, because the lake has a pH of about 3.5, too acidic to support much animal life. Beyond the shore unfolds a charred and rugged hellscape of blasted rock piles, steaming fumaroles and brooks of bubbling yellow water. The earth looks either soon to crumble or freshly made anew, and the scent of sulphur hangs everywhere. Listen close and stranger sounds emerge: from below there wells the gurgle of the underworld, so close to the surface, and the caws of crows pierce the wind. A thousand pinwheels spin, their whirls converging into a singular neverending rattle. It is eerie – like you stand between the realms of the living and the dead but cannot tell which way is which.

This is Osorezan (恐山), an ancient volcanic caldera. Its landscape and soundscape is like no other, and the feelings it evokes defy description. 

Osore (恐れ) in Japanese translates broadly as 'fear', 'dread', 'horror', 'concern', or 'unease'. This gives the place's name various renderings in English, complicated by it being actually more than one mountain. My choice of 'Mount Fear' here reflects my first encounter with it – many ages ago, before I even knew it existed, in the days of the now rather venerable Nintendo 64 games console.

In the video game Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, the heroic party must ascend this Mount Fear late in the story. It is presented as a desolate if tranquil mountain wasteland, buried in snow and haunted by papery ghosts. At the top lives a witch who can summon the spirits of the dead. The party seeks her in order to consult with the spirit of a certain Wise Old Man, whom they believe to have died when his house was blown up by the bad guys, and who, being the Wise Old Man, is the only one who can tell them what to do next.

The witch was an itako – a traditional shaman, usually blind and female, now closely associated with Osorezan and one of the main things for which the place is known. During festivals in July and October people come and pay for the itako to summon the spirits of their deceased relatives or ancestors for conversation. It is a declining practice: today only a few very elderly itako remain, and their work has been called a sham and met with official disapproval. We may note in this connection that in Mystical Ninja, the party later run into the wise old man whose “spirit” they had got the itako to summon; he had not been at home when his house was destroyed and was still in fact quite alive. 

As I was there outside the festival season I did not come across any itako, and so have no more to say on that subject. I sought this place for reasons of my own. Amidst this hub of the heavens and hells stands Bodai-ji temple (菩提寺), one of the three most sacred sites in Japan and a place of respite, reflection and spiritual training for over one thousand years. It is one of the principal seats of the Bodhisattva Jizō (地蔵) whose red-garbed likeness is familiar all over Japan, especially where he watches over travellers on the country's mountain trails.

Bodai-ji (菩提寺).

I am not a religious person. Nonetheless, Osorezan beckoned as a place of natural and spiritual power that deeply precedes, and transcends, the frustrating politics and dogmas of human religion. Nor does the realm of the dead perturb me – I have approached its boundary before, and found nothing to fear in what I saw across it. And so I, too, decided to make the journey to the burning mountain, in hope of surfacing from the nightmare bubble-worlds our societies have become and their soul-devouring broken frameworks of thought and practice. It was my intent to pass a night in the temple, cleanse my spirit in ancient sulphur, and perhaps, just perhaps, like Goemon's party, to find a way to go.

1) THE SHIMOKITA PENINSULA 下北半島 – A Bridge Between Worlds

A Voyage to Aomori, Part 1 of 5

It beckoned. Cold, remote and foreboding at the edge of Japan, an axe-shaped wildnerness unknown in the English-speaking world and far from everything.

The Shimokita Peninsula (下北半島) marks the northernmost frontier of Japan proper. It was one of the final territories to be reached and incorporated into the Japanese nation (apart from Hokkaido in the north and the Ryukyu Islands in the south, which are in essence different countries, though that is another story.) 

Long had I felt the call to explore these reaches. However, four years into my residence in Japan an impossible set of circumstances emerged in the face of which a retreat was the only option. Shimokita become the inevitable destination.

North, just as before – as on that voyage to that other world, Hokkaido, and those explorations of Tohoku around that time or since. But this time was different. This was a necessary flight to the fringes of this land, in search of a crossing to a very different kind of realm. 

Osorezan (恐山). The so-called mountains of fear, a mysterious beacon at the centre of Shimokita. Its name is well-known throughout Japan, for Buddhist mythology has it that it is the entrance to hell, and a place through which everyone must transit after they die. Its landscape is volcanic, sulphurous, bizarre, and charged with a strange spiritual energy: a place of dread to some, of peace to others, for it seems all react to it differently. This was the place I sought, though I cannot entirely say why. 

On the way I found there is more to Shimokita than its image suggests. Like most places considered remote, peripheral and empty, it seems Shimokita has long been exactly the opposite. For it guards the Tsugaru Strait (津軽海峡), a crossroads of history which has brought together people, information, cultures and goods from different lands over hundreds of years. Cold it certainly is, and out of the way to most of us it may be, but Shimokita reaches out for the worlds of the northern seas, on top of connecting those of the living and the dead, and has a beauty of its own that is one of a kind yet varied, subtle yet full of character.

Aomori Prefecture, in red, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Shimokita is its eastern peninsula. Together with the Tsugaru Peninsula (the western one) it encloses Mutsu Bay. To their north the deep Tsugaru Strait separates Japan's main island of Honshu from Hokkaido.

Shimokita.

It is here that we shall open this five-article series. It covers a journey that would continue on to Aomori city (bottom-left on the map above), and from there into the mountains and forests that stretch down this prefecture's centre. But let us start where that journey began: on a train that rocketed out of Tokyo one bleak end-of-summer morning. By the afternoon it had reached Aomori Prefecture, where I changed at Hachinohe then Noheji onto ever smaller trains, which finally trundled, as evening fell, up the windswept axe-handle of the Shimokita Peninsula.

Odawara

 

Odawara is a coastal city of around 200,000 people and the main urban centre in the west of Kanagawa Prefecture, about an hour from Tokyo by train. Like Kawagoe up in Saitama, it is a historic and attractive part of the Kantō Region whose out-of-the-way feel belies its importance in the story of how Japan became what it is today. For people in or near Tokyo it makes an excellent day trip, not least in spring when the grounds of its castle are fantastic for cherry blossoms (sakura).

Odawara's location relative to Tokyo, in the Odakyu Railway Access Map.

Odawara has been settled for thousands of years, but really grew up and flourished in two capacities: as a massively fortified castle town during the ~1467-~1603 Warring States (sengoku) period, and as a post station on the Tōkaidō road during the 1603-1868 Edo period. Both roles reflected its geography, which as in many places has had a major hand in its destiny. Odawara occupies the low ground between the Tanzawa mountains to the north and Sagami Bay to the south, and for anyone travelling west towards the imperial capital Kyoto, it would have been the last place to rest before entering the Hakone caldera, considered the most difficult section of the journey. Odawara's strategic power over the entire Kantō plain was therefore immense.

As these pictures suggest, the castle is a popular site nowadays, not least because of its beautiful sakura and great views of the surrounding mountains, towns and sea from atop the castle keep. Do not think to enjoy these however without some appreciation for Odawara's story, in which many people suffered.

The Ōtama Trail, Oku-Tama, Tokyo: Up the Tama River

The return of spring to Japan brings ideal conditions for exploring the mountains and forests. Being several kinds of tired lately (one reason this blog has been slow of late), I started with a very straightforward back-to-basics route in Oku-Tama (奥多摩).

This is an easy and accessible walk, only three to four hours long, with a few gentle ups and downs but nothing really strenuous. It follows the upstream Tama river (Tamagawa, 多摩川), snaking up the beautiful Hatonosu Valley and Kazuma Gorge over bridges, sleepy village lanes and woodland trails. Refreshing views and the sound of flowing water are a constant for most of the way, and unique highlights include a dam with a special “fish passage”, some charming local cafés, and Oku-Tama's celebrated fresh wasabi.

A few of my previous Oku-Tama mountain walks have featured in this blog, such as Mitake-san/Ōdake-san, Takamizu Sanzan and the more serious Takanosu-yama (two others, Kawanori-yama and Gozen-yama, I am saving for my hiking guidebook). But today's route stays in the valley, paralleling the far end of the Ōme Line across its last four stations. As such, it gives you more exposure to the human side of Oku-Tama, to which it offers an excellent introduction for first-timers in the area.

Oku-Tama (yellow, far left) within Tokyo metropolis. Central Tokyo is the purple area on the right.

It may come as a surprise that Oku-Tama is part of Tokyo at all. Although the metropolis's largest subdivision, only about 6,500 people live in it, mostly concentrated into little villages or towns amidst its expansive mountains and forests. Despite its contrast with the world of concrete further east, the two have been connected for quite some time: typically hikers, fishers, campers and pilgrims have come one way, while timber, limestone, drinking water and hydroelectric power have gone the other.