Still Looking for the Lost

The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan arrived safely on Monday, just seven days after I ordered it from The Book Depository, so that was pretty impressive (international shipping is free, remember, although it should be noted that this doesn't apply to certain out-of-the way countries likes Bhutan).

I haven't started reading it yet as I'm still finishing off Looking for the Lost, which I'm thoroughly enjoying now after initially finding it difficult to get into. Looking for the Lost contains accounts of three different walks the author undertook in three different areas of Japan. In the second of these, Booth heads to the island of Kyushu and follows the route taken by Saigo Takamori (the real "last samurai") in 1877 when, in the dying days of the Satsuma Rebellion, he managed to evade capture by the numerically far superior government forces in Nobeoka and lead a band of several hundred followers cross country to his hometown of Kagoshima some 500km to the south, where he made his last stand on Mount Shiroyama. This part was the only part of this particular walk with which I was familiar, having hiked up Mount Shiroyama during a visit to Kagoshima in 2004.

Although my walking achievements pale into insignificance compared to those of Booth, I do feel a certain affinity with his basic approach. For a start he preferred sticking to roads, eating in restaurants, and sleeping with a roof over his head as opposed to staying away from roads and camping (he never carried a tent). He also maintained a strict rule of not using land transport of any kind during his walks, even on his rest days, a rule he called the "Protestant Walk Ethic."

In other respects our approaches to traveling on foot are very different. For example, while I enjoy having people around me I tend to keep to myself a lot while walking. Booth, on the other hand, was extremely gregarious, reveling in his encounters with all kinds of people, descriptions of which are among the most fascinating aspects of Looking for the Lost. As well, while I try to stay away from alcohol during long walks, Booth needed very little excuse to stop for a beer, often downing several bottles over the course of a day.

Booth has a Wikipedia page, but it's so perfunctory that I went searching for more information and came across this 1993 obituary from The Independent. One fact not included in the obituary but mentioned in the brief biography at the end of The Roads to Sata is that Booth had read most of Shakespeare's works by the age of ten.

Looking for the Lost

By four o'clock a thick mist had hidden the hills. And at four-thirty, in the only grocer's shop I found to rest in that cold August day, I came face to face with one of the unlikeliest creatures you can encounter nowadays in the hinterland of Japan.
She was an unmarried college graduate, twenty-two or three, very bright and very pretty, who, despite studying for two years in Tokyo and working for another year at a day-care center in Miyazaki city, had come back to live with her aging parents on the shore of this lake in the middle of nowhere and help them run their shop. It was a move that almost anyone in her position, with her attractions, would have resisted, even though her mother was ill, she told me, and spent most of her time asleep. But the young woman looked content with her situation; or at least she looked more content than her father, who sat on the raised tatami of his living room, glaring suspiciously at us through his open screens for the entire time that I hung about his shop, which was as long as I could realistically make two large bottles of beer last, all ready to leap out and separate us at the first sign I displayed of committing aggravated rape.
"Aren't you bored here?" I asked the pretty young woman.
"Oh," she said, "I was born here, you see." Then she added, as though it explained the whole of life, "And there are fireworks in the summer."
. . . .

"What do you dislike most about this place?"
"The mosquitoes," she said brightly. "They're so big and black. Don't you think they are so big and black?"
I hadn't noticed any, I confessed, and she giggled. So I took my eyes off her face for a second and glanced around the shop for mosquitoes, and saw three of them, black and silent, feasting serenely between my knuckles.
I had better stay at the Fujiya Business Hotel, the pretty young woman told me. That's where she would stay if she were me. It was about three kilometers further up the road in the village of Murasho. Of course there was an old-fashioned ryokan as well, for men who came to fish in the lake. But a person of my tastes, accustomed to city life like she was, well, I should stay at the Fujiya Business Hotel. What on earth had they built a business hotel for, out here among these dams and mists? Oh, that was simply what they called it. It was more like a pension really, with a coffee shop downstairs and a few small bedrooms with showers. Sometimes she went to the coffee shop. There were no other coffee shops for miles and miles. Yes, sometimes she went to drink milk tea there. She would stay at the Fujiya, without a doubt, if she were me.

From Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan by Alan Booth

Keyword Analysis (The walking fool)

	Num	Perc.	Search Term
	9	12.00%	walking fool
	3	4.00%	The Sea at L'estaque
	3	4.00%	walking the tokaido
	2	2.67%	wanderlust quotes
. . .
	1	1.33%	walkin wardrobes nz
. . .
	1	1.33%	how to beat a creatinine test for kidney stones

Roads to Sata

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit describes Alan Booth's Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan as "delightful" and "a milestone in how far the literature of walking had come".

Originally published in 1985, Roads to Sata is an account of the author's journey on foot from Cape Soya, the northernmost point of Japan on the island of Hokkaido, to Cape Sata, the southernmost point on the island of Kyushu. It was one of the many books I borrowed from the Christchurch Public Library as a keen, relatively young student of things Japanese in the 1980s, long before I took up walking.

Solnit's mention of Roads to Sata made me want to read it again. Unfortunately it appears the library no longer has a copy. But it's still in print (in fact it's considered something of a classic now), so I've ordered it from The Book Depository (who, unlike Amazon, offer free shipping worldwide, as pointed out by a recent commenter). In the meantime I've borrowed the sequel, Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, which was published posthumously in 1995 (Booth died in 1993 at the age of 46).

Writing this has made me think how interesting it would be to walk the length of Japan following the same route Booth took as a kind of experiment to see how much things have changed in the nearly 25 years since Roads to Sata was first published.

American Journeys and American exceptionalism

The young man who sought the meaning of life among the poor and in religion, and the train driver who knew nothing of the world twenty miles either side of the tracks he drove, were both in their different ways expressions of American 'exceptionalism'. [Alexis de] Tocqueville, who coined the term, would have found their like in 1831. That is to say, at some level both shared the assumption of Americans, from the Pilgrim Fathers to George W. Bush, that America is different from all other countries because America is a country - the only country - blessed by God.

The idea is essential to the doctrine behind the War on Terror, to the strength of religion, the weakness of the social security system, the pervasiveness of the flag and other symbols of the nation; to its violence, its self-deceits and hypocrisy, its inability to confront its own contradictions, its childish fears and paranoia, and its mind-numbing provincialism. It is also, very likely, the reason for its power, its creativity, its capacity for self-renewal, its numberless heroic examples and the desire of people everywhere to live in the United States.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Manituana and American exceptionalism

You may recall my expression of puzzlement a while back at Wu Ming 1's statement in an interview that "Manituana is our novel on Iraq and the 'war on terror'". Well, things became a little clearer after I read the following exchange (from an interview on the Social Text website):

Marco Deseriis: Can you talk about Manituana in terms of political allegory relating to the War in Iraq.

Wu Ming 1: Right, because we started from a journalistic metaphor that was used in the weeks prior to the shock and awe bombing that began the 
war in Iraq. This metaphor was 
"the Atlantic Ocean is widening," with reference to the difference of opinion 
between the US and Europe about the necessity of attacking Iraq, about the
 complicity of Saddam Hussein's regime in the attacks of 9/11, and about Saddam
 having hidden weapons of mass destruction. There was complete disagreement at the UN about this. And in Europe, most of the public, even
 the right wing, was against attacking Iraq. For instance, in Italy 50% of the people are explicitly 
fascist, but if I remember the figure correctly 92% of them were against the
 war in Iraq. This marked a big 
difference with what was going on in the US at the time. The same was true throughout 
Europe. And many newspaper 
articles kept talking about the widening gap between the EU and the US, one 
that was never so great as at that moment. So we began to reflect on the history of the relationship 
between the US and Europe. And of 
course the beginning of that relationship was with the American Revolution and
 the birth of the US as a separate country. At the beginning, the project was different. We wanted to write a novel set in 1876,
 exactly one century after the revolution. 
But one set in a parallel reality in which George Washington had been 
defeated. This involved 
reinventing a completely different reality, which was very difficult to handle, to the extent that we weren't able to imagine the changes that would be 
necessary. So we came
 independently to a conclusion: why imagine an alternate reality when the
 American Revolution itself contains so many different realities, depending on 
the different point of view that you choose? If you choose the point of view of Native Americans, the
 American Revolution is something totally different. It's something really far away from what one expects. So we decided to write a novel set in 
1775, at the beginning of the revolution, and lasting the whole course of the 
war, until the Treaty of Paris, when the British Empire acknowledges the existence
 of the US as a separate country.

Ashley Dawson: And so having written the novel, what do you make of the discourse of American exceptionalism?

Wu Ming 1: It's the birth of American exceptionalism; it's reflected in all the discourses and conversations that you find in the novel.

Ashley Dawson: But did your perspective on these questions change in the writing?

Wu Ming 1: I don't know what we thought at the beginning. It's the curse of 
knowledge, that when you know something you don't remember how it was not to
 know it. But it's a book on 
American exceptionalism, seen from Europe. There are some conversations in the London section of the 
novel that are deeply allegorical of American exceptionalism, seen from a
 European perspective. And American 
exceptionalism is still there; Obama is an exceptionalist like Bush. Of course, the politics are different, 
but the exceptionalist assumptions are still there: the key role that America
 has to play on the world stage, etcetera. 
"We are the chosen ones" is the subtext underlying every discourse,
 whether it's Bush or Obama.

Think of the music

No people on earth make music like the Americans - no-one else comes close.... When anti-American feelings sneak up on you, when you think the democracy is a bit of a sham, the people are ruled by ignorance and fear and no good can come of the place - think of the music.

From American Journeys by Don Watson

Beyond bagels

The sorry state of rail travel in the United States (epitomized by the bagel episode I quoted the other day) is just one of the many topics covered in Don Watson's marvelous American Journeys, which I stumbled across by chance in my local library the other day and have been engrossed in ever since.

Most of the problems (slowness, lateness, poor service, aging equipment) stem from a lack of investment, a situation exacerbated by the reluctance of governments to subsidize passenger rail services in the neoliberal age (something all too familiar to us here in New Zealand). Another problem Amtrak, the government corporation responsible for passenger rail travel in the US, faces is that while it owns its own trains, most of the tracks are owned by the rail freight companies, so that passenger trains invariably have to give way to freight trains using the same stretch of track, leading to lengthy delays. It's probably no coincidence that Amtrak's most profitable services are in the so-called Northeast Corridor, one of the few places where the corporation owns its own track.

As Watson notes, however, the reluctance to subsidize rail travel is inconsistent to say the least in light of the huge subsidies enjoyed by road and air travel. Roads are built and maintained using public money, as are airports and the air traffic control infrastructure. As well, aircraft manufacturers in Europe and the US receive massive government assistance in the form of either direct funding or government contracts for military and space research, which subsidize the production of civilian aircraft.

Most of the journeys covered in the book are by rail, but Watson occasionally hits the road to visit places no longer served by rail (including, ironically, Chattanooga, which last saw a train in 1970). In places his writing is so beautiful, and the subject matter so moving, that it brings tears to the eyes. For example, he describes how the American bison, some fifteen million of which once roamed the plains of Wyoming, were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century (five million were killed in 1873 alone). He quotes an old hunter who explained how they took advantage of the animal's better instincts: "When a bison was hit, the others would mill around it, and if there was a hundred or so in the bunch, the hunter could get nearly all of them."

Passing through Oklahoma gives Watson the opportunity to write about one of his many American heroes, Will Rogers. He also visits the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which is dedicated to the victims of the Oklahoma bombing of 1995, which killed 168 people and injured more than 800. He is impressed by the memorial, but unsettled by the adjoining museum.

It is a strange museum: by no means all sentimental, but with a bit of the communal solipsism of daytime television shows. The memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which both express the same instinctive fascination with the moment of annihilation, do it on behalf of a quarter of a million dead civilians, tens of thousands of children. Somehow at the Oklahoma Memorial a sense of scale has been lost. At the same time, in the religious homilies and the unrestrained grief, the altruistic and the narcissistic become inseparable - a paradox that just might have been the root of the evil in Timothy McVeigh.