Orbit Two: Home, away, and back again.
Hello from Yokohama, Japan. It is I, Steve Frost, Koganecho Artist In Residence, and frequent perambulator.
Orbit one, that I wrote about last time, is the big orbit away from home, Vancouver, Canada, and my new, temporary, humble little home here in Yokohama. Orbit two, that I'm writing about this time, has my new little home at the centre.
I spent the first few days here going for long circuitous walks, getting my feet under me, literally. The walks felt like a guilty pleasure, and then I remind myself my job, while I’m here, is to be an artist. A big part of being an artist is paying attention. As per Mary Oliver:
Instructions For Living A Life
Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it
I was listening to the city. For fun, I ran "listening to the city" through a translation AI, in case I needed to tell someone what I was doing. It came up with 街の声を聞くwhich, for a translation AI, is pretty poetic. It literally means "listening to the voice of the city," which I quite like. Trains, cars, boats, scooters, children playing, mothers pleading, couples laughing, gaggles of teen agers egging each other on, old men busking, drinking parties alighting from a pub. Yokohama's voice is distinct from, say, Tokyo's voice. I'm not yet sure how. Research continues. I'm still getting the vibe of the place.
The above screen shot shows a few of the walks I did my first week here. I didn't always remember to hit record, also using Google maps to find food while simultaneously running GaiaGPS to record walks meant a quickly depleted phone battery, so yeah, I actually walked quite a bit more. I've been averaging between 12,000 and 15,000 steps a day since being here.
After being out and about, listening, photographing, writing, I’d orbit back home and regroup. Then it was time for dinner. a.k.a an orbit away from my familiar little apartment and out to the unfamiliar edges where I must navigate a second language. As a Japanese language learner, I’m solidly into an intermediate phase. I’ve lost the naiveté of just beginning, where you don’t know what you don’t know. I now have just enough knowledge to be painfully aware of what I don’t know. Me, silently to myself: “There’s a correct way to say this, and this isn’t it, but I can’t remember the correct way, and if I don’t at least try I’m not going to get any food, so even though this is going to be wincingly mangled, here goes...” Me, out loud: “Me have these thing please?” Service person wearing the most patient and kind smile possible: “Yes, of course.”
The alternative to navigating restaurants and spoken language is to navigate a grocery store, and written language. This presents a whole different set of linguistic challenges. Entering a store like the nationally ubiquetousドン・キホーテ (i.e. Don Quixote; known colloquially as ドンキ/Donki) where one might purchase afore mentioned groceries, requires a girding of one’s loins in preparation for the all out sensory onslaught one is about to encounter. Honestly, it's beyond describing. You have to image the bewildering (and I think intentional) maze-like jumble of Everything Under The Sun All In One Building, along with incomprehensibly chipper/assertive audio-loop spot-ads acoustically carpet bombing the store. In this context, there seems to be some neurobiological safety switch that shuts off linguistic processing. The meanings of the few written words one does comprehend, simply disappears. The Don Quixote effect, as I’ve come to call it, doesn’t happen when, say, I’m walking outside encountering signage in which words and characters are delivered at a digestible rate. In that instance my brain actually engages, asking, what of what we see do we understand? Don Quixote alone seems to induce some kind of sensory-linguistic overwhelm at which the brain, quite reasonably, just says no, and switches off any attempt at understanding what the eyes are seeing. There you are, standing amongst a vast variety, excluded from said bounty on the basis of simple incomprehension. Buying is often a best guess scenario.
Having encountering it several times now, the ドンキ experience is exceptional enough for me to dedicate an entire paragraph in an attempt to convey the strangeness of it. In the end, my description, pictures and even video just don’t do it justice. ドンキ must be experienced to be fully appreciated.
I am happy to report, a month in, after practice and some confidence and just having to do it, ordering food is a relatively smooth affair. In the course of a simple transaction, say buying coffee, there are still unexpected responses, followed by my deer-caught-in-headlights non-response, followed by my best attempt at an apology for not understanding, followed by a muddled and slightly awkward carrying on with affairs. But for the most part, I'm managing simple transactions which, it must be said, comes with an inordinate amount of satisfaction.
Of my many wanderings into the unfamiliar, I’ve settled on a couple of familiar routes. A familiar way to be away from my now familiar little home. One of the first places I walked to, and have returned to many times, is Negishi Forest Park (根岸森林公園 if you want to search on Google maps) about 2.5km away. On my first visit the trees were bare and the grass brown. I thought, I’m going to be here long enough to see all this change. The grass will turn green, the cherry blossoms will come and go and the trees will become green. It was a curiously delightful and comforting thought.
The last time I visited, the cherry blossoms had arrived. The whole park was alive with children laughing and playing, families visiting, dogs being walked, friends hanging out. In Japan they call it hanami (花見), literally flower viewing, which involves essentially a picnic under cherry blossom trees. I’ve had the great good fortune to experience cherry blossom hanami season several times and it remains one of the most charming and heart warming things I’ve ever experienced. As warmer weather moves from the souther tip of Japan northward, the cherry blossoms begin to bloom. From mid-March onward, every night all over the country the TV news will report on the Sakura Front Line (桜前線). Both the estimated date when the blossoms will bloom, and where they are currently in full bloom. Absolutely everyone is caught up in it. Young, old, everyone in between, even otherwise sullen and disaffected teenagers. Hanami season defies description, albeit in a completely different way than ドンキ, photos and videos don't do justice, but I'll try.
We have one more piece to the introductory travelog section of this series, and then on to the residency itself. As a teaser, I've been taking nighttime city tree portraits.
