Adrift

Rereading Donald Richie's 1970 classic "The Inland Sea." I read it shortly after coming to Japan and then, as now, I was mesmerized. Yet this time I read the book with eyes that have seen much of the country and have pored over thousands of words in the local vernacular. It is not that I now understand the country as much as I have come to some sort of understanding. Throughout the book Richie bemoans the encroaching change, bringing as it does the imminent death of tradition. Yet 25 years after he took the voyage which gave birth to the book, I sat reading it on the edge of the Nog's own inland sea, the Nakaumi, marvelling at how much of what he wrote was still familiar in 1995. To me, there seem to have been far more changes in this decade between readings. And as these changes occur, the book moves further and further into the realm of fiction.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Perry's Black Ships may have opened Japan to the world, but it wasn't until the dawn of the twenty-first century that the black 0's and 1's of the internet opened the world to Japan.



On the turntable: Ali Farka Toure, "Niafunke"
On the nighttable: Stephen Turnbull, "Japanese Fortified Temples and Monestaries AD 710-1602"