#haikyo

Yamagata.

Anyway, I've been enjoying Tokyo Lens by Norm Nakamura. There are a lot of tiny communities in Japan that have been abandoned completely within the past few decades. I was particularly struck by "Exploring Japan's Most Amazing Ghost Town," in which Mr. Nakamura, who declines to identify the area in order to discourage vandals, first traverses a spooky tunnel in the style of Spirited Away, then emerges at a T-intersection overlooking a gorge that has been overtaken by a massive navigable reservoir, then chooses the right-hand turn which is clearly not maintained anymore, then walks along this steadily narrowing road for several minutes before showing us a decades-abandoned car that is still perched on the world's tiniest parking deck because there is no other way to get off said road, then keeps walking across a creek that goes across the road, then goes up and around a curve, hopping over rocks that are now scattered across the road-turned-paved-trail, then climbs stairs for ten minutes, and then reaches the first house in the village--which goes on up at least as far as he already came, paths and stairs branching off further than the eye can see through the trees, little houses and sheds of all sizes speckled seemingly randomly on the brow of the hill.

And part of me marveled and sorrowed at this ancient village, first known from the 16th century, where some three or four score people built and rebuilt their humble homes among bamboo and persimmon and pine, sharing the land with black bears and wild boars and Japanese macaques. I saw and honored the remains of the pulley system that they had used to bring heavy things up the difficult trail and the bright red post boxes that someone had climbed to every day once upon a time. I saw how they had improved their lives, with metal roofing, with power tools, with glass windows, with concrete steps and landings that had half replaced older steps made of stones set into the earth. I saw how electricity running from the poles along the road had allowed them to pump water from the creek through long flexible pipes instead of clambering downhill for it. I saw and marveled at their tiny electric monorail system, with two seats fore and aft and a cargo basket, that had replaced the pulley (which had been kept as a backup). I saw the last inhabited house in the village, its sunken hearth converted into a common room and an electric kitchen built on, its floors covered in tatami and its exterior covered with cheerful yellow vinyl siding, like a visitor from another time among the tottering ancient wooden walls. And I saw how the roof of that kitchen addition had collapsed since the owner left forever in 2015.

I thought of the determination required to keep going for so long as perhaps the last fragment of a network of tiny villages that had been swallowed up by the lake below after the construction of the dam. I thought about a long history gone down to silence. I thought about the graceful torii gate above the village--surely a feat to construct even with electrified help--and the shrine above that, which looked as if someone had swept it and hung fresh shide only the day before, and the much older shrines beside and behind that one. I thought about devotion, and graceful surrender to entropy, and the recognition that there is not really an end.