Japan State of Mind

There are a lot of things to remind me of Japan these past few days.  Last's night's Beethoven 9 of course reminded me of the 10,000 voice performance HPAC did of it every year.  Simply running my fingers through it with a new conductor and in a new space was as novel as it was familiar.

And then this afternoon I joined a friend for a Japanese film.  She is slightly older and grew up in Japan as the child of missionaries there.  She has helped me find things Japanese in New York, not least of all the Japan Society and it's annual film festival which is happening right now.  As we sat in the audience before the show, she shared that she had loved the festival last year because it's like being back in Japan.  Before the movie began, the film's composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (who is apparently the John Williams of Japanese film) gave a short introduction from the stage.  Watching  him bow to the other hostess was wonderful enough, but as the film began I understood what my friend had been saying.  Even though this film was set in post-WWII, it still took me back to Japan.  The way people moved, the way they use their space, the language and timing, even the slightly overly dramatized style of the movie was very Japanese.  And the story–about a mother who is visited by the ghost of her son who was killed in the Nagasaki bombing–depicted an aspect of Japan's personal history in a way that would have been hard for an American director to emulate.  As an American in Japan, I did not have an intuition about the war and post war years.  I have an idea of the fronts that the American's fought during that war, and the horrors they encountered (albeit even this is marginal), but Japan's perspective and idiosyncratic suffering is not something I could have grasped.

But in another sense I am returned to Japan in the solitude that I now find myself.  Alone for this month of July I have a space that is familiar from the time I lived in Japan.  I went to the park this morning, at mid-day to do a Tae Kwon Do workout, and halfway through a man rode his bike onto the grassy spot where I was, put out a towel and started sunbathing.   He watched me for a bit, and then started interjecting questions, and then suggestions, and I suddenly found myself getting a lesson in boxing.  I was reminded of my Karate lesson by the river in Japan, another time when I had time and space to allow myself to listen to an unbidden teacher.

Yesterday I went down to some of the art galleries in Chelsea and checked out the pier.  And today, after seeing the film, I decided to walk the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset.  It felt like impromptu trips to Kyoto and Osaka.  On the train at one point one group of people was speaking Italian, another sign language.  Like Japan, it seems it might even be possible to go through a day with speaking no English!  And now, I'm sitting and writing in the silent space around me.

It is precious to be alone, and it precious to be with another.  And I think it is a challenge to do either well.  Solitude can become loneliness, companionship can become distraction.  And after a year of companionship I am returning to this familiar space again, but also, again, in a new way.

some of the apartments in Chelsea (wearing my tourist eyes)

Chelsea Pier