Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (15 page)

M
Y MOTHER SAYS
that as a child growing up in Japan, she always knew that winter had arrived because one day the kitchen door would begin to rattle. The winds had changed and now blew down from the north. She was born in 1943, about fifty miles southwest from the city of Nagoya, and was delivered by a midwife; all doctors were at the warfront. Though my mother was very young when the war ended, she still remembers the terror of running from American aircraft and hiding out in bomb shelters. A talented musician, she went to high school in Nagoya and college at Geidai, Japan’s Julliard. Further studies took her to Vienna, where she met my American father in the standing-room section at the opera. They ultimately settled in California.

In spite of winter’s cruelty, my mother remembers the start of winter with fondness. She liked raking the brightly colored leaves into piles. She and her brothers would set the piles on fire, then toss sweet potatoes into the flames. This was just after the war ended, when millions of Japanese starved to death. My mother and her family did not starve, but they worried about food. The sweet potatoes were a rare sweet treat. If they had enough sweet potatoes, they could take them to an
ameyasan
, a candy maker, and trade the potatoes for sugar and candy. But this didn’t happen often. They had to ration their food carefully.

All winter my grandmother fretted about frostbite. My mother
remembers losing feeling in her fingertips and color in her hands, which often turned white. My grandmother rubbed her children’s fingers and toes to keep the circulation going. When my mother’s fingers became itchy, usually in March, she knew then that winter was ending, and she would soon be warm again.

The crops were a more urgent matter than the cold. Winter would determine how my mother and her family would eat come spring, and they would wait out the dark time of the year and trust their future to the earth. In February, if the field of wheat they had planted had begun to sprout, they knew there would be food. All spring, they would watch the wheat grow. In the summer, they would harvest the crop by hand and then take the grain to a mill, which would turn the wheat to flour, for a fee. They then took the flour to an
udon-ya
, a noodle maker, who would turn the flour into noodles. But before all this happened, they needed to ensure that there would be as much flour as possible. And so the children stepped on all the seedlings in February to force the little green shoots to grow back stronger and with more heads. A little hardship—but only a little—makes wheat more productive. This is why stepping on seedlings was a child’s job. Adults were too heavy and would kill the plants with their weight.

Because my mother and her family grew their own food—and foraged and bartered when necessary—they were able to survive the lean years after the war. My grandfather, a teacher, had not grown up knowing how to farm. My grandmother, born into an aristocratic family, had not known either. But they learned from other people, and so they were able to raise their three children to adulthood. Others did not fare so well. My mother remembers one family of five in particular: the father, a colleague of my grandfather’s, felt that digging around in the dirt was beneath him. The entire family perished one winter.

There was not too much snow in my mother’s hometown, located
on Japan’s Pacific side. My grandmother was from Nagasaki, very far to the southwest, where it rarely snowed. But in T
hoku at the temple Empukuji, where my grandfather grew up, it was very cold. Temples in general are notoriously cold places because they tend to be old, and even today they rarely have central heating. People in T
hoku often use something called a
kotatsu
, a thick blanket or futon fitted over a low table, with a heat source underneath. You sit on the floor with your legs under the blanket and sip tea. This is how you stay warm.

I got a sense of the hardship of winter in old Japan when I visited our family temple one February when I was around thirty years old. Throughout my stay, I wore a hat, heavy sweater, wool socks, and two pairs of pants, and still I shivered under the
kotatsu
. It is customary in Japan to bathe before going to bed, but I was so cold, the thought of going out into the unheated hallway and disrobing before I finally sat in warm water was too painful to bear. I said good night and ran from the
kotatsu
to my futon, and bathed in the morning.

It doesn’t snow much at the temple. Most of the snow in T
hoku accumulates in the mountains and on the Japan Sea side, which the Japanese call
yukiguni
, or snow country. When the wind blows the snow, the precipitation sticks to the trees, and the mummified conifers take on the look of monsters. Perhaps this is why Japanese folktales set in T
hoku are full of stories of snow monsters and demons.

T
HE ANCIENT
J
APANESE
came up with numerous rites and rituals to appease the monsters of winter, in some cases trying to prove to themselves that what is harsh can also be entertaining. I think of this as the gift of stoicism. Likewise, my mother remembers the winters of her childhood fondly, even though it must have been a terrifying time for her entire family.

In February of 2003, my mother and I traveled to the Oga Peninsula,
a tiny piece of land on the west side of Honsh
, about 220 miles northwest of T
ky
. The year we went, there was so much snow, the bullet trains had stopped running completely. Such a thing had never happened before. We had to take a bus from Morioka to Akita. It was pitch black outside, and the bus grunted up and down the mountain roads, with snow pummeling the windshield. All the passengers were silent. It was as though we were trying to help the driver concentrate. When we finally arrived safely to the town of
magari, where the bullet train was again running, the snow was waist high in places that had not been shoveled. Here and there people had given up keeping the entrances to their homes clear, and they now exited or entered via a ladder propped up to the second floor.

The hotel we stayed in had a hot-spring bath. Japan’s location right on the Pacific fault makes it prone to earthquakes, but this seismic activity also means that the country is awash with hot springs, which the Japanese call
onsen
. These hot springs are said to have great healing powers. In Japan, whole hospitals are set up alongside
onsen
, so patients can bathe daily as part of their therapy. A Japanese bath expert may even mix the waters of different hot springs so the bath contains a precise balance of minerals. The Japanese consider themselves
onsen
connoisseurs, and whole conversations can revolve around the very best bath one has ever experienced.