Sunday Papers: Robert Twigger

 

"The wrong map in the right hands is better than the right map in the wrong hands."

 

On the turntable:  Paul Chambers, "Whims of Chambers"

KJ at 100

 

 

I began my relationship with Kyoto Journal back in 2003 with Streets, issue 55, though I'd been reading them long before that.  The magazine has recently released its 100th issue, bound by the writing and photography of many colleagues and friends.   I am proud to stand among them.  

On the turntable: Peter Murphy, "Dust"

Sunday Papers: Martha Gellhorn

 

"Amateur travel always used to be a pastime for the privileged; now it is a pastime for everyone.  Perhaps the greatest social change since the Second World War is the way citizens of the free nations travel as never before in history.   We have become a vast floating population and an industry; we are essential to many national economies not that we are therefore treated with loving gratitude, more as if we were gold-bearing locusts."

 

On the turntable:  Johnny Cash, "American Recordings"

Sunday Papers: Jeff Fuchs

 

"Morning is the time when all is possible again, and when the mind is pliant and vulnerable and has a touch of amnesia of all that came before."

On the turntable:  Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt & Lyle Lovett, "2005-11-18"

 

Sunday Papers: William Goldman

 

"Shooting is just the factory putting together the car."  

--On film production

On the turntable:  Emmylou Harris, "Songbird"

Structures of Kyoto

 

  

Quite happy to have been a part of this project, amongst a bevy of very talented people.

Details here:
https://www.writersinkyoto.com/.../structures-of-kyoto.../

 

On the turntable:  Flatt & Scruggs, "The Foggy Mountain Boys, 1959-1963"  

Sunday Papers: Peter DeVries

 

"If we can think of this great country of ours as polarized between two sets of James Brothers, Frank and Jesse at one end and Henry and William at the other, why, we begin to get some sense of the enormous spectrum in between."

 

On the turntable: Norah Jones, "The Fall"

Sunday Papers: Hunter S. Thompson

 

“The Edge...There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others-the living-are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there.” 

 

On the turntable: Nick Cave, "B-Sides & Rarities"

 

Exploring Osaka’s Museums

  

Last autumn, I was given a private tour of Osaka's five major museums, in order to write up a guidebook of sorts, as part of the preparations for 2025's World Expo. View it here: 

 

https://www.osaka-art-museum.jp/zh-tw/wp-content/themes/museum-v2016/build/pdf/page/toppage/exploring-osakas-museums.pdf

 

On the turntable:  Of Monsters and Men, "My Head is an Animal"

 

Sunday Papers: Tony Vagneur

 

"The grief of a mother who loses a child is never gone, its dilution measured in minuscule drops."

 

On the turntable:  New Model Army,  "Live@Maxwells" 

 

Sunday Papers: Rory MacLean

 

"In this serene space, unspoiled by the modern age, I consider the legacy of the 1960s travellers. Only a generation ago, English girls hitch-hiked alone across Iran. Free-spirited teenagers from Berlin and Boston were welcomed as honoured guests in Baghdad. The hundreds of thousands of footloose westerners, in flares and open-toe sandals, may have been the first movement of people in history who travelled to be colonised rather than to colonise. But their values and comparative wealth did change the places they visited. The host societies, especially those of rural Iran and Afghanistan, were for the most part defiantly conservative. I begin to wonder if the casual morality and humanism of those first independent travellers could have further polarised these countries, encouraging urban liberal minorities while insulting - even enraging - traditionalists and zealots. Might this not even have helped to stir the stern Islamic reawakening?"

 

On the turntable:  Chick Corea, "Now He Sings, Now He Sobs"

 

Sunday Papers: Tony Russo

 

"A secret is a fact that's held prisoner."

 

On the turntable:  The Monkees, "The Birds, the Bees, and the Monkees"

 

Sunday Papers: Ernest Hemingway

 

"The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function."

  

On the turntable:  Herbie Mann & Chick Corea, "The Complete Latin Band Sessions"

 

(untitled)

 

Wind on my cheeks,

Filling in spaces

On maps I once thought done.

 

 

On the turntable: Nick Drake, "Five Leaves Left"

 

Sunday Papers: Charlie Chaplin

 

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot."

 

On the turntable: Chick Corea/Bela Fleck, "Two"

Thoughts on Earth Day

 

 

On the turntable:  Don Ellis, "Connections"

 

Sunday Papers: W. Somerset Maugham

“Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter. How much more elegant is it to slay your foe with the roses of irony than to massacre him with the axes of sarcasm or to belabour him with the bludgeons of invective.  And the adept in irony enjoys its use when he alone is aware of his meaning, and he sniggers up his sleeve to see all and sundry, chained to their obtuseness, take him seriously.  In a strenuous world it is the only safeguard of the flippant."


On the turntable:  Madness, "Nutty Sounds"

(untitled)

Nothing growing  
In winter paddies 
But the shadows of running boys

  

On the turntable:  Nick Cave & Warren Ellis,  "White Lunar" 

Sunday papers: Jim Whittaker

 

"If you're not living on the edge when you're young, you're taking up too much space."

 

On the turntable: Squeeze, "Cool for Cats"

Mitsuhide's Road to Infamy, Part IV

 

  

They reached the temple at dawn.  The clamor would have awakened Nobunaga, followed by the scent of the wood ablaze, then the inevitable knife thrust to the belly.  Mitsuhide continued to move, first to kill Nobunaga's son at Nijō, then further east to Azuchi castle, where he tried to vain to recruit other warlords to his cause.  Upon hearing that Hideyoshi's forces were bearing down on him, he decided to cut him off at his stronghold of Shōryūji Castle, and once again marched west.

I do the same, but begin my own march again at the marker for Honno-ji, on a cold but sunny February morning.  I can imagine the victorious troops marching proudly down the broad Horikawa, though not as broad as the road would eventually become during Hideyoshi's redevelopment of the city in the subsequent decade.  I too stick to the big road awhile, trying to stay in the warm sunshine.  But it proves quicker to zig-zag down the smaller lanes, which I do despite the chill.  

I settle once again on sunnier Omiya.  Two police cars have pulled over an Uber delivery driver.  I'm not sure if it is a moving violation or an accident, but the bike faces the wrong direction.  Still, the panda atop the delivery box keeps its smile.  This section of the city isn't terribly attractive, the bright sky being the only color.  Near Ryokoku University, a woman runs for a bus.  It doesn't look like she's going to make it.  I don't have the best opinion of bus drivers in this city, but this one proves to be nice and comes to a halt again, allowing her to board.  I return a smile to a nearby toothpaste vending machine.

I pass three more dentists before cutting through Umekōji Park, most certainly not here in Mitsuhide's time.  Bundled up young mothers push their prams around in the sun, and a small queue is beginning to form at the railway museum.  I'm led down a diagonal path through the Kyoto Freight Station, as every few minutes a large truck rolls past, bringing cold wind in its wake.  The opposite side is lined with a long row of flats that look like the flank of a luxury liner.  At street level are the twin rows of cherry trees, a month shy of their full glory, a glory that lasts about as long as Mitsuhide's thirteen days.

 

 

I'd led beneath the rail lines through a tunnel whose water-damaged walls resemble graffiti.  The hanging vines sprout leaves that I first take to be Christmas lights.  Coming out the other side, I note that the contours of the city probably haven't changed very much, as tendrils of nagaya extend off in both directions.  The row houses here are probably of a size and alignment as they always have been.  An old man sprays chemicals from a cylindrical backpack, over an empty plot of land.  There is little wind but I stutter-step for a moment, before passing by.    

There's an immense construction project going on, taking up an entire city block.  The fence has a gap, the machines still and quiet, so I duck inside, craning my head every few seconds in anticipation of being hollered at.  I spy some historical memorials with feet bound in concrete.  They've been dug up and moved here from where they had long stood.  One marker tells me that this had been the site of the Kyoto Municipal Rakuyo Technical High School, Japan's first, which stood here from 1886 until graduating its final class in 2018.  Beside this is a time capsule, the sight of which suddenly saddens me, thinking how it had been left here accompanied by the hopes and anticipations of students looking a century into the future.  I notice that the steel compartment on the back is no longer held fast by its padlock, which lies dark and rusting to one side.  I slide back the bolt and peer inside.  Nothing remains, except perhaps the dreams of those long-dead students.      

I am funneled down a narrow lane running diagonally off the busier Kujō.  It suddenly dawns on me that I've done this walk before, years ago with Joel, as we followed the Sangoku Kaidō out to its terminus in Yamazaki.  This discovery helps me determine the remainder of my route.  Overhead a helicopter buzzes and buzzes.  I will later hear the whir of its rotors in the background about a dozen of the voice memos that I use for my notes. 

At the Katsura River, uniformed boys play baseball on purpose-built fields.  Old-timers play gateball on an adjacent field. Tennis courts stand netless and empty.   Kindergardeners chase their teacher around, and at the water's edge, Himukai Jizo faces east.  Near the bridge, a long white guardrail sways like a drunk, the soil beneath repeatedly besotted by the now annual floods of increasingly stronger storms.  

I'm angling to get to Muko's Spice Arcade by lunch.  As I'm a little bit early, I decide to sit awhile beside the river, reading from a book of short essays by Hemingway.  A cormorant pops up close to my feet, and startled, takes wing far away.  It's a reminder to move.  I climb the embankment, beside a man with a trowel, who works a plot no bigger than 2 1/2 tatami.  

My lunch stop rests my legs for the slight and steady climb toward Nagaoka.  There are quite a number of Jizo clusters, for this road had once been the main pilgrimage path toward Atago.  This final hour is a treat, along a nicely preserved fuedal road, with ample informative signs and lined with numerous old buildings and temples. A Showa period candy shop remains, quiet for the moment but sure to fill once the locals school lets out.  

I come to the edge of the arcade, beneath an wrought iron arch emblazoned with the calligraphy Kotari, a now common Japanese name which once had the esoteric meaning of unimpeded function of the body.  This holds true in the case of my feet, feeling no fatigue despite the thirteen kilometers trod.  A few blocks to the left is Shōryūji Castle.  Only five months since my previous visit, there is no need to visit again.  The Saikoku Kaido leads off diagonally to my right, but I've walked this already, at least as far as Yamazaki.  Part of me is tempted to carry on from there, all the way to Osaka, where it meets the Sanyō-dō. But another part of me thinks it a bad idea, with the potential for unnecessary hardship.  Though not as bad an idea as assassinating my boss...

To follow Mitsuhide as he flees Hideyoshi's troops, click here. 

To follow me as I continue westward toward Kobe, click here.

 

On the turntable: Neu, "Neu!"