A site with Americans apologizing for their election result, and a real time waster at work. Quite touching at times, for me anyways.
Unfortunately, as long as “Driving While Brown” is grounds for suspicion, I won’t be burning any American gas anytime soon. I did send them my own pic though..
It was my birthday when I would arrive in the city of Kanonji. Kanonji is the kind of city the Japanese would call inaka; or a hick-town (with all of the negative connotation intact). To arrive in Kanonji (written “Kan-On-Ji” in Japanese, or 観音寺 if your browser can show the shift-JIS encoding scheme), I took the Hikari (Lightning) Shinkansen from Himeji to Okayama, and then the Shiokaze (Sea Breeze) number 11 from Okayama to Shikoku Island.
A sign outside Himeji Station. It indicates the distance by Bullet Train to major destinatiosn, such as Okayama (20 minutes), Shin Osaka (29 minutes), Nagoya (1 hour 23 minutes), and Tokyo (3 hours and 2 minutes)
The train tracks. At times, some trains would just blow through the station on their way to the destination. In this picture, you can see a series 400 train is pulling into the station.
The pass to Kanonji indicating the date and time I was to leave, and the seat which was reserved for me
The actual train trip takes you on a bridge between the Japanese mainland to Shikoku Island, and is extremely beautiful. Sadly, none of my pictures survived the trip, mainly because I hadn’t wound my film properly – the dangers of using a manual camera, I suppose.
Arriving in Kanonji, my first objective was to find my hotel room; the Kanonji Grand Hotel (I have a link to their website below). Anyone attempting to retrace me journey should be warned that no one in Shikoku speaks English, even in the hotel! This caused untold grief to my mother, who told me all the girl would say is “Hai Hai”. However, my brother who tried to call me did say the people were helpful in trying to get a hold of me (I was out of the room and wasn’t able to call him myself unfortunately; my telephone card didn’t work for Pakistan. I later found out that it was because of fraudulant activities by people from “the Subcontinent” that led to the phone company banning international phone calls from phone booths to India, Pakistan, Iran and a few other countries). This linguistic divide keeps most foreigners out of this country but it drew me like a moth to a flame.
Kanonji is mainly a farming village
In my first day, I did what I did in Tokyo; just go out and walk wherever my feet would take me. It is an experience which I have never had in my life; being so close to the mountains, surrounded by greenery, and so far from civilization. As you walk, you see signs of small town life all around. The small town old man hawking Taiyaki made by the “King of Bean Jam”, the little mall, the flower shop, the school from where kids were streaming out (on their bicycles) as I walked by. I think some of them were a bit weirded out by the strange smirk on my face as I walked by. It was just so reminiscent of the “small town innocence” I read about. That, and the leaving of a beer can as an offering to a departed soul.
When I showed this picture to my teacher, she said it was probably because the guy in question had a great love of beer. Who am I to argue with that?
Kanonji is named after the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kwannon. There is a set of 72 temples that religious Buddhists in Japan follow on foot, retracing the steps of a priest in the last year of his life. Several of them are in Kanonji. Being a Muslim, I have conflicting feelings about visiting people’s places of worship. On one hand, I can respect the artistry that people put into their reverence of God. On the other hand, I think it is disrespectful to enter someone’s worship place without having the proper respect. If you don’t have the same faith, or even similar beliefs, how can one properly show respect? At best, it would be merely polite curiousity bringing you; at worst, it could be a sort of twisted superiority complex, with one wanting to see “what God the primitives pray to”. I choose to avoid the conundrum entirely. If you think I think too much about it, hey, we are talking about my eternal soul. If you don’t think it exists, you can’t place any importance on it. If you do think it exists, you should understand.
Kanonji is a town split by water, and bordered by mountains. One side is vastly less developed than the other, as it holds Kotohiki Park and the highway out of town. The other side has most of the buildings, hotels, and restaurants. The train tracks controlled by the J.R. are a more logical splitting point; they split the town between the more commercial side and the more agricultural side. If you continue to walk a great distance, you can reach the Industrial area, which is basically, across a small “bridge” from the agricultural area. A dangerous design, one that I recall to this day.
Building archetecture has hints of old-school Japan. You won’t find the soulless concrete blocks as often as you do in Tokyo and Osaka, but the designs don’t differ that much from designs from my own native suburb of Montreal. To be honest, the only think that stood out
to me were the roofs and the powerlines which were in-your-face no matter where you would walk. (Compare this to small-town Canada where they usually hide the powerlines in the back of houses). You will find the same idiotic Pachinko parlours and the occassional bit of Americana in the city. Not to mention.. the vending machines.
The new “real face” of Japan.
Vending machines liter the city like you couldn’t believe; literally everywhere I went, I would see a vending machine. I don’t mean that in a good way; they were an eyesore and are a constant reminder of Japan’s position in world politics – beneath America.
My first day had me walk so much that I would exit the city limits and end up in a farmer’s field. As I started into the rapidly darkening sky, and strained to find a source of light, I could only ask myself how I ended up in the middle of a Japanese vegetable farm during my trip to Japan. God only knows. All I remember was hopping a fence, winding up on a street (of sorts) and sort-of walking towards any light that I could see.
I would pass by another Pachinko parlour, and car dealerships selling crappy Honda Life low-emission vehicles, 7-11s and restaurants; but in the end, I saw the train tracks and could follow them all the way back to my hotel, where my severely aching feet would get some much-needed rest. (Did I mention there are no benches to sit down?)
Frankly, Kanonji is polite, quiet, and boring. Of course, this is what I expected; it isn’t much different than my home city. I was still nervous about Japanese food so I went to McDonald’s most of the time, my great secret shame. I could not live in Kanonji though; no internet cafe, no foreigners, no English, no nothing. However, what was there was enough to justify my trip; polite locals, a taste of small town Japan; and more than that, a glimpse into an old dream of my father’s agricultural dreams. Dreams of farm life in a small town; perhaps a “what-if?” for my own life.
Of course, if I had come for that alone I would be a moron. I am most certainly not that; no, I came for Kotohiki Park, which I would get to know.. the next day.
Looks like people aren’t very, erm, happy about Bush winning.
Not my opinion but it does sum up the opinions of some people I know:
Bush has won.
I don’t resent Americans for voting him because I understand why they did it. A combination of fears, fear of terror, of strangers and strange beliefs. Even ardent Muslim Fundamentalists cannot entirely be dismayed at Bush’s election; after all, he would block gay marrage, something so abhorent in the Muslim tradition that it wiped out the people of Lut, right?
Yet… In that fear, the fear that Americans expressed, I inevitably find myself drawn to the evening of February 9th, 2004. I was on a train headed for the furthest destination I could find; a complicated story wherein I was unable to get a hotel room and decided to sleep on the night train. Sadly the night train was more than 300$ and I couldn’t afford wasting that much money. I took the bullet train to my destination and tried to grab as much sleep as possible within the stifling confines of the train’s sole free east in the smoking car. Within the cancer causing soot, and within visual range of a pervert reading hentai manga on the train, I prayed. I prayed that God would find me a place to stay, and that it would be cheap. I promised not to miss any of my prayers if he did so.
As the train pulled into Himeji station, a Japanese man started talking to me. He told me we had arrived and we started talking. A middle aged man, with a tough streak in him that I could see. He spoke English and the kanzai dialect of Japanese. I told him I was Canadian and the fact that I had no place to stay eventually came out. We talked and he told me that I could wait on the train tracks if I wanted, the agents don’t mind. The weather was chilly so I nixed that idea. As we walked down the stairs, with me lugging my giant bag, he left to get some smokes and asked me to wait. When he got back, we talked to the people who worked with the railway people. They said there was a cheap hotel close by, and he thanked them.
On the way out of the station, Mr. Nagai and I chatted. Among other things, I told him that I was a Muslim. When he heard that, he looked at me and said “La illah ha illallah” (There is no God but Allah, the fundamental prayer and statement which must be made by every Muslim when embracing Islam). When I looked at him, my eyes were wide open in surprise. Islam is not widely known in Japan; very few Muslims reside there. As well, I’ve never heard a Canadian (where Islam is the second biggest religion) know what it is. I was not dealing with a normal person.
He asked me if I knew about a place called “The Marriot”. There is a Marriot hotel right where I used to get off the bus in Montreal so I responded in the affirmative. He pointed at a hotel and said “This is the Marriot of Japan” and took me there. As we arrived, he told me to make reservations. I went to the clerk and started talking to him. He told me a single room would be 9000 yen (About 90 American dollars). I was going to agree to this when Mr. Nagai came up and suddenly started negotiating with the clerk. I was shocked at how he managed to get the clerk to drop the price to 8000 yen and give me a bigger room to boot! This room would have cost a heck of a lot more ordinarily.
It didn’t end there as Mr. Nagai took me to eat. The restaurants were all closed but he knocked on the door and when they saw who it was, they opened up and let him in. I never found out why. Was Mr. Nagai a famous person? I don’t recall him missing his pinky finger, so I guess he wasn’t a Yakuza. He told me they were like “Family”; but not of his blood. He fed me and paid the bill, which shames me on this day.
As we left, he told me that he saw me as someone who would succeed in this world. I was pretty depressed to see him go, and told him that. He yelled, “Bakayarou! Ganbatte!” (You stupid moron, cheer up). I cracked up and answered in the affirmative. As he vanished into the night I knew I would never see him again. Life is filled with people we meet for an instant but will only vanish shortly thereafter.
What is the connection between this and the Bush story?
Americans voted out of fear. They are scared of what will happen if terrorists strike again. There is also a healthy dose of arrogance and disregard for the rest of the world. If I had been arrogant I would have never accepted help from a foreigner. If I had shown fear, I would have never gone with Nagai-san. Yes I could have gotten a hotel room, yes I could have probably found something to eat. However, my hotel room would be less comfortable, more expensive and any food I would find would be out of a machine. There would be no memories of this day except for the fact that I was stupid enough to sit in the smoking section of the train.
But I chose to show faith in God’s plan and threw away my fear. And eventhough Nagai-san drank alcohol and talked about picking up his girlfriend, I still consider him closer to God than myself. In the end, was it not God’s friend Abraham who rejected fear and helped the travellers who came to his door? Was it not the act of the one man who God himself respected? How can I aspire to be a good man, and a good Muslim, if I wallow in fear?
Dear Nagai-san, you will never see this page, but you thaught me the consequence of fear. Let those who didn’t learn the lesson see their reward down south where fear has won the day. And dear God, please help me eschew fear and follow the path you have laid out for me.
Amen.