Saturday, December 27, 2008

Just Another Thinkhole


Ah'm whupped, as we used to say in Tennessee. Spent four and a half hours with the contractor yesterday evening/night. The first bad news was that the soil tests turned out just on the wrong side of the limit, which means they (the soil borers) made a finding that although the soil is hard at between two and three meters in the five places they bored, there was clay in a shallower level. They are suggesting we sink piles, more than fifty of them, in the area of the foundation, which will cost around one million yen. There are other methods of strengthening the land, including mixing concrete in the soil, putting gravel "pillars" in the ground, or some other wild ideas, like putting styrofoam under the foundation, but it's all costly.

But we have a choice. Unlike the Swedish method that these testers used, there is another one using ultrasound equipment. According to the contractor the ultrasound generally is not as tough as the former one. (I also have the sneaking suspicion that since the Swedish one relies on human judgement, and since the company that does the test also does the pile driving, that one might think the humans might slant the test to give themselves business, but then I'm a suspicious bastard.) So we toss more money into the testing hoping that 1) forty thousand yen will save us a mill, 2) we can build the house without pilings, and 3) that it won't sink, one-sided, into the earth, at least until the poles melt and the seas drown us all. The contractor said they will still insure the house, as long as it passes the second test.

After we got past that bit of disappointment, we found out that the costs had ballooned a good ten percent over our budget. After a few hours of trying to find out where--20,000 yen here and 10,000 there--I just decided that we had to make some drastic changes if we were to bring it down. So in spite of the fact that most of the plans were drawn up, we cut chunks of excess in the form of several square meters from the layout. Even though it was painful, and a pain in the ass, it was kind of fun to try to think creatively again. In fact, I'm kind of happier now, not just because we made more of less, but because the atrium is now against the sea side instead of in the middle, and we got rid of the second floor tiny terrace, which had seemed to me to be a bit much considering we can always go downstairs. The wood stove is also in a more efficient place, and we were able to keep the tatami room intact. So what if the toilet is under the stairs? It's a toilet.

So now we get to wait and see how much we were able to lop off of the price. We're getting closer fast to the day we're going to have to start some destruction if we're going to be all moved in by the end of the year.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Day the Earth Got Drilled

One of the men from the contractor showed up at nine on Monday morning with a team to do jiban chosa, or soil boring tests. Like I said, if the land isn't up to snuff, then we'll have to spend a lot of money to drive in supports, and that will definitely hurt the budget. So they did the boring in five different places, as close as possible to where the corners of the new place will be.

It's a simple system, which they called "Swedish Weight Sounding Test." They take the sharpened boring rod and push it into the ground, then start loading weights on it--up to 100kg--until even when they're screwing the drill the ground is hard enough to stop progress. For the first meter or two, the rod slid down just with the weights. Then they'd both have to start drilling to get it to go further, meanwhile taking notes at every 50cm or so.

The bore got down to 2.5 meters on the back side of the house, 3.5 on the front side. One of the problems could be unevenness, but they said this was probably not enough to matter. However, they did find a lot of clay layers, which meant that it had probably been hauled in 100 years or so ago, before the present building. They had to take the core samples and the figures from boring back to their company to crunch before we get the results either late this week or early next.

I asked the contractor what his feeling was, and he just said, "I think it will barely be okay." Which would be plenty okay for us.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Dead Cormorant and Boiled Sardines


Okay, I'm doing this a little bit at at time, teasing with the Standing Rock photo. At least here, it's clear--there's even the pine tree on the other rocks in the background. Next time I may throw Mt. Fuji in at the horizon, where it would be on a clear day. Sunday was an incredibly warm and windy day, and m and I spent a lot of it climbing around those rocks and trying to keep from slipping and getting soaked. There was a dead cormorant washed up on the beach. I've never seen one of those up close, and the neck was incredibly long. Some tourist kept picking it up by the head, swinging it like a lasso and flinging it into the surf but it kept washing back up at his feet. He did that four or five times before getting bored.

Our friend Mark came over later in the day, and we ended up going to one of the local restaurants that I've stayed away from because it looks too touristy. But it was surprising: local ingredients and healthy portions. The big treat was shirasu, the tiny baby sardines that are about half an inch long and as big around as a toothpick. If they're not fresh, you need a mouthful to get any taste at all, but these were local--they dry them on big screens in the sun--and flavorful, both as the topping on a bruschetta and on top of a green salad. They're transparent when raw, but these were boiled, so they had turned white.

You can tell there was some wind on Sunday from the picture above, and it got worse during the night, rattling the windows and doors even after I'd closed the storm doors. m slept throughout it all (M stayed in Tokyo for school), but I'd wake up and try to think of ways to lessen the noise--such as jamming boards against the door frames. Nothing worked. It's nights like these when I realize that however nice these old doors are, the way the winter winds blow, not to mention the typhoons of late summer, we're going to need double pane aluminum doors if we're going to live (and get some sleep) right on the sea. It's dramatic and exciting, and I don't mind feeling the earth shake when a particularly large wave crashes, but when a strong gust hits just right, it sounds like someone is hitting the doors with a baseball bat. It gets so bad sometimes that you can see sand blowing in through the cracks in the old flooring.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

On a Rock or a Soft Place



This is not easy, trying to hurry up and slow down at the same time. I want to move forward on so many things, but every time a problem arises, I want the time to think it through.

This is the sea side view of the proposed house with late afternoon winter lighting, and we're no closer to getting this realized than we were a month ago. We just had another meeting with the contractors, and it was as if we were moving sideways, even backwards. Costs went up, ideas went down, new problems sprang up and my enthusiasm took a bungee jump off a bridge.

The immediate decision was that we're going to have to drill for the jiban chosa, a test of the earth to see if it will hold the proposed structure. I'm not sure why we have to go through this with two structures already on the property. But they say if we don't do it now, we'll have to do it after they've been taken down, and if we find they have to reinforce the earth then it will add more than a million unexpected yen to our budget. So I guess I'd rather know that now.

The contractor said he doesn't expect any problems, but when I brought up the fact that the obaasan, who was the former owner, said that the firm rock underneath was the reason the old house had made it through so many earthquakes and typhoons, he suddenly looked worried. It turns out he's concerned that the rock may be under only a part of the lot, and if the earth foundation is hard in one part and soft in another, the prefecture may demand that we strengthen the soft part by pounding supports into the soil.

So I'll stay down in Akiya over the weekend, and take a day off on Monday as they're coming to do the test at 9am. M's got a massage school end-of-year party on Sunday night, so it will just be m and I. Then Tuesday's a national holiday, so we'll end up with a looooong weekend. I suppose I can use it to start hauling stuff to the local dump. It's much cheaper if you do it yourself than if you hire someone, and I'm sure little m will get a thrill. It doesn't matter if it's a trip to Disneyland or a dump; she thrives on new experiences.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Tidal Tale (1)

Kiku took two short hops down the branch. He wanted to be in the sunlight—his head was still damp and matted from the afternoon thundershower—but he also wanted to be able to keep an eye on the girl in the lime-green bikini top standing not far from the garbage bin. More precisely, he wanted to keep an eye on the grilled squid on a stick that she’d been playing with, more than eating, for a very, very long time.

This branch, this tree, was his favorite spot overlooking the beach. He had several other good locations--a crumbling wall, the tile rooftop of an old temple--and he’d go there if there was a lucrative looking picnic taking place nearby, but this old pine branch felt good under his feet and he appreciated the way the twisted branches kept him less exposed. Besides, it was right next to the Fujimi beach house, which rented out parasols, boogie boards, and served a fairly extensive menu from ramen to barbecue. There were two garbage bins, and they could be gold mines.

He was in the middle of scratching the tough feathers around his lower beak with the top edge of his wing when he felt, rather than saw, a shadow sweep across the sand, and he looked up at the hawk that had just started another circle high above. He stopped what he was doing, hunched his wings to make himself look larger, and flapped them noisily. “Craaaahk!” He paused just long enough to know that he now had the hawk’s attention. “Craaaaahk!” It wasn’t a full-throated call, but it was loud enough for the hawk to get the point: that squid belonged to Kiku.

The girl in the green bikini top was now chewing on the end of the stick. The squid was only half gone, and her progress was so slow Kiku found himself hopping up and down, now on this foot, now on the other. He knew that she was going to leave some of it. Girls like her always left something, mostly the dried out tail, but if he was lucky, he’d get more, maybe even some of the charred body. He also knew what he was going to do with it when she was finished, if she finished.

Kiku had seventeen caches spread from the northern to the southern ends of the beach, the farthest of them several hundred meters inland, the highest an abandoned nest. When he was younger he'd had many more, but his memory wasn’t as reliable as it used to be, so he’d learned to be smarter about his placement. The squid was going to go high up on the side of the tunnel entrance in a lip that had formed out of eroding concrete. It was the second best location he'd ever found. The best was a real cave, a shallow spot just above the high tide line. When the concrete tetrapods were hauled in a few years ago to form a breakwater, the wave action changed completely, and when Kiku had returned one day to dine on his stash of day-old fried noodles, complete with crispy pork and vegetables, he found the cave full of water, his meal plundered by crabs.

The girl in the green bikini top still stood below him next to the bin. With one hand, she was crumpling the wrapping that had come with the squid, rolling it in her palm with her thumb as she stared with seeming disinterest at the beach house, where a good-looking young man in cut-off jeans and a jinbei top was serving bowls of shaved ice to some little kids. With the other hand, she was mindlessly spinning the stick of squid down by her leg, not realizing it was throwing specks of sauce on the towel wrapped around her waist. Kiku was sure she'd have to make a move soon. Toss it, he thought. Or eat it. "Caaaaaaahw!" he cried in frustration, and she looked up for a moment and then went back to her spinning.

I'm going to fly down there and take it right out of her hands, Kiku thought. It was at times like this that he wished he were one of those dumb hawks. He'd seen them take things from people’s hands hundreds, no, thousands of times, without giving it a second thought. You’d never catch a crow getting that dangerously close to anything. Kiku knew the extended reach of all kinds of animals, from man, dogs, and cats, to badgers, raccoon dogs and wild boars. He had never even been touched by anything other than another crow, and it was never going to happen. He once had done all his foraging with other crows, but over the years he found it more effective to be alone. The number of visitors to the beach had decreased, and the pickings were too slim to share.

“Caw. Ca-a-haaaw.” He hoped the girl would hear his hunger in the low-throated call, but she didn’t move. He thought about giving up. There was a dead cat in several parts in the middle of the road just up from the convenience store, but he was hoping to get to that later, after the afternoon traffic had thinned. And he was sure that, the minute he flew off, the squid would end up in the bin and soon after that in the beak of that circling hawk.

Toss it. Toss it. Toss It. Kiku started a mantra, hoping the girl in the green bikini top would get the message. Toss It. Toss it. Toss it. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to concentrate. Toss it. The pain came like a spear in his side, and his eyes opened in shock. He was looking up at the sky, but he wasn’t flying. He was falling backwards. He didn’t remember letting go of the branch and there wasn’t time for another thought before he hit the gravel at the foot of the pine tree, raising a small cloud of dust. He struggled to his feet, and didn’t bother to try to raise his right wing. It hurt like crazy and he wondered if it was broken. He knew he had to get away from whatever had hurt him, so he hopped as fast as he could down the gravel path towards the river.

“Fuckin’ freak,” the young man said, dropping the second of the large stones he’d picked up.

“Who is that?” said the girl in the green bikini top.

“Nobody,” said the young man. “He’s a nobody that’s been around for years. He went to school with my father, and they used to beat him up because he was too smart for his own good. He was supposed to go off to Tokyo University or something, the first ever from this village.”

“But how did he get like now? With all the long, matted hair, and and beard, and filth?”

“Don’t really know,” the young man said. “Don’t care. My dad says the pressure got to him. His family had a pet crow, but the day before he was supposed to go off to college he strangled the bird and took off into the hills. He came back later, but he’s been like that ever since. He doesn’t really bother anybody, but he scares people. Like you.”

“He is so creepy,” the girl in the green bikini top said. “Sitting up there in the tree like that. He just kept staring at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. It was like he wanted to take a bite out of me or something.”

Hidden by the bank, where he crouched on the rocks that bordered the river, Kiku watched as she let the squid stick fall to the sand and followed the young man back to where the kids were tilting their bowls of shaved ice up to their mouths to get the last drops of the sweet syrup.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Screw the Azaleas


When I first started visiting Akiya, there was a mountain village nearby that could only be accessed by one road that lead from the beach. The mountain was forested—real forest, not cultivated—and the houses were old, a few still with thatched roofs. They built a road over the mountain a decade ago, and pretty much shaved the entire top of the mountain bald as a goat. Then they put in a development of houses based on American suburbia, absent any yard space, and called it an International Village. Most of the open space was then planted in azaleas, acres and acres and acres of azaleas. Azaleas as far as you could see. Someone really liked azaleas.
Or hated the International Villagers.

They forgot that, with all the trees gone, the offshore wind would have nothing to slow it down, so now it screams up the valley and howls over that mountain top like a banshee, frequently so strong that it’s difficult for the residents to go outdoors. Not that they would want to, since there's only a bus stop, a supermarket that has an entire aisle of chips but, strangely, no vegetables, a “resort” restaurant, a Family Mart convenience store and a few hi-tech looking research facilities.

The irony is that one of the research institutes is focused on reforestation. When a colleague of mine mentioned last May that she was a volunteer with the institute and that they were having a tree-planting event there on the mountain, we signed up. The head of the NPO is a man named Miyawaki, who has developed a way to reforest very quickly, with a high success rate. There are some photos here that show how quickly he’s developed forest areas in a number of countries—China, Malaysia, etc.—as well as Japan. Some of the photos I’ve seen in brochures, where an entire forest appears from an empty space in ten years, are hard to believe.

The event was held in an open space next to the institute’s parking lot. The plan was to have the volunteers that showed up plant 3000 trees. It was surprising to see how little land would be covered by that many trees—surely not more than an acre, maybe closer to half. The Miyawaki method, as I understand it, is simple in concept, but it does take a lot of preparation. His people had already spent several days at the site, removing all the rocks, plowing the ground, putting stakes in, and hauling in the 3000 seedlings. There was an instructional lecture describing the different trees we’d be planting because one of the main tenets is how important it is to use local trees. Another directive was to mix them up, and make sure there was no pattern, although we were to plant them relatively close together. He believes that competition between the trees helps them grow much faster and taller.

So many people showed up—over 500—that everyone, including M and m and I, who planted perhaps two dozen trees, finished in 45 minutes. After spreading mulch, and roping it down with stakes, there were a few cheers, and we were done. They had even supplied the gloves and shovels.

It’s not a lot of land compared to that given over the azaleas, but it felt good to do something proactive after shooting my mouth off for many years about how they destroyed the old forest. And it was great to see all those people come together—way many more than they’d expected. My friend said this happens with every event they do, regardless of the country: the word spreads and people come out of nowhere. I just read on their blog that some of the members of the institute had been up at the International Village site weeding and checking. I’m going to have to contact them and tell them that we’d like to be involved if possible in keeping an eye out on the plot. We’ve got some investment there.

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Torn Pages


We stayed in Tokyo this weekend for various reasons, and I consoled myself by spending an hour or so poring over old copies of Chiruchin Bito, a magazine that focuses on “homes, ways of living and world lifestyles.” It’s an inspiration because, although it’s a little bit unfocused, it features a lot of wood houses, new and old, with upkeep issues, traditional methods of building, airflow, etc. I guess you’d call it a slow life magazine. I’m constantly amazed at finding such beautiful old houses in it—and I don’t mean an Architectural Digest kind of beauty. A lot of the places are beat up and cluttered, and most of them look very lived in.

M’s mom gave us about ten years worth of the magazines (thank god it’s not a weekly). She used them when planning their house, so they’re missing a lot of places where she cut out pictures to show her contractor. We found ourselves doing the same thing—so now there are many pages that fall apart in your hands. But I’m still finding inspirational images.

I’m also wondering where all these great homes are. M’s parents live in an forested area of artists, galleries, retirees, that's visited by lots of tourists bicycling around the valley. Incredibly enough, though, their house is the only one in a pretty large development that has any connection to the traditional styles or the natural setting. All the other houses, weekend places or otherwise, are pretty much irritating, if not horrendous.

I was talking about zoning with a photographer on our way to Niigata to look at old minka houses. I mentioned that famous development in northern California (I can’t recall the name right now), that has all kinds of rules, from what materials you use, to where you can put the hot tub. He said it’s not a bad idea, but there are too many rules. When he was shooting houses in the English countryside, he was told that they have a much simpler way of doing things. You can basically build anything you want in any way. As long as you have the approval of the neighbors.

The newest issue of Chiruchin Bito, which I haven't bought yet, is all about heating, mostly about wood stoves.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Tokyo Blues (the chorus)


My love affair with Tokyo is over.

We're still friends. And I hope we stay that way.

But, as BB says, the thrill is gone. The excitement that has been with me from my birth as a gaijin in Tokyo, awakening from the womb of a Shinjuku Park bench after my first bitter cold December night in the city, through my time learning how to read the streets from the driver's seat of a meat delivery truck, over the years as editor of a city magazine with the city's events and happenings unfolding in my hands each month as we went to press, has gone.

It happened as it can happen with any relationship. With my eyes on Akiya the last year or so, I haven’t been paying attention. So what probably was a slow fade to disinterest now seems like a sudden thing. It hit me hard the last month as I was cruising the back streets on my Super Cub or sitting in the back of a cab gazing out the window: I once had a job in that building. Got in a fight with a yakuza on that corner. Broke up with a girl in that restaurant. Got high and puked my guts out in that park. Sold instant ramen packs to housewives in that supermarket. Wrote songs that were recorded in that studio. Was dumped by a girl in that coffee shop. Ate three times a week for six months at the little izakaya that stood where a coin-operated parking lot is now likely earning more cash than Osamu the cook ever did.

All my connections with the city of any strength worth mentioning are memories; I have no commitment to the present, or to this city’s lifestyle.

When I was the editor of the magazine, I used to tell interviewers that I was born to chronicle life in Tokyo at the turn of the century. I even had a prepared answer when people would ask me how I liked living in Japan. "Japan?" I'd say, eyes widening in surprise, "I have no idea what living in Japan is like. I live in Tokyo." It sounded good but was, of course, absolute nonsense.

I’ve loved this city, deeply and passionately. I got chills at a new silhouette on the skyline, or a new discovery of a cool, yet hidden bar. I could talk about how finding the beauty of the city entailed a different approach than, say, Rome or New York. "It's a matter of distance," I'd say, and then proceed with a theory that is sound but far too belabored to reconstruct (it ended with a bonsai in a laundromat alley). I’d take great pride in knowing that I retained several layers of history on my mental maps of, say, Shinjuku's red light district of Kabukicho or the refined fashion avenues of Daikanyama.

Now, instead, I've got this uncomfortable ache that comes just after a relationship has faded, when the object of your former affection is always around yet feels so oddly distant, even alien. And combined with the other constant ache to be living in Akiya—right now, at this very moment—it leaves me in a pretty painful situation.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

May I Interest You in a Delightful Cliché?


I was flipping through the photo file, and realized I really haven't ever taken a picture focused on Tateishi, the "Standing Rock" of this blog. The only one where it even features in the frame is this one, and it's completely black. There's a parking lot right next to it, from which you can--if you're so inclined--shoot it with Mt. Fuji and those pine trees that appear in the background, which is probably an activity as close to orgasm as some photographers can get. So, as the sunset makes its way across the horizon each year to backlight Fuji. there are certain days when the tripods sans cameras will be sitting there like squatting insects from early morning, as the shooters stake out their ground to capture a shot that would make the cut for any ultimate collection of postcards from Japan. At sunset, Britney would be pleased at the number of shutters going completely mad. And all I've got is this sad example. Sorry.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Apocalypse Never


One of the great things about our village of Akiya is that one minute you can be scuffing your way down the beach, stumbling over sea shells and starfish, dodging shore fishermen while looking down for pottery fragments that have washed up . . . and the next you can make a hard left turn and head up the river like Captain Willard. Well, they call it a river, but it’s more like a stream that makes it’s way down from Mt. Ogusu. Which they call a mountain but is more like a large hill. The open space at the top, though, is the highest point on the Miura Peninsula, and from it you can see Yokohama, Mt. Fuji, and the sprawling spread of the much larger peninsulas that put Miura to shame: Izu to the west and Chiba to the east. Miura and Chiba are like crab claws closing around Tokyo Bay: Chiba’s the big fat one with lots of meat; Miura is the little thumb-like appendage.

M and I used to make the trip up the hill often, but since little m’s been around, we have gotten lazy. It’s only a four-kilometer-or-so hike, but it’s mostly carved out steps too high for little legs and numbingly painful for larger legs carrying little legs. But the prefectural government has done something very nice. For about a mile upstream from the sea, they’ve laid a series of (very natural) stepping stones that make a slightly uphill and very secluded walk through the forest and along the stream that little m can handle. On the round trip, we may pass one or two hikers, but that’s it. The stream passes through bamboo groves, over several waterfalls, through a fairly deep gorge, and there are places where we can stop to picnic or, like this last weekend, stop to eat a sweet potato that has been baked over hot stones. To get to the hiking path, we have to pass several stalls that sell freshly harvested vegetables. The last one sells the baked yaki imo potatoes when the weather gets cold, and the skins are crisp and crunchy and the inside is soft and sweet. Next time we’ll remember to bring salt.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Lift (or Drop) Your Monkey


This bolt is called a saru, or monkey, supposedly because a monkey won’t let go once it has its paws on something. It’s a good name. They’re found on the amado, or rain shutters, on all old Japanese houses, and they’re the only thing between the outside and inside other than some pretty flimsy locks. I once came down to spend the weekend without the front door keys and spent a long couple of hours believing I could get past them. But the monkeys held their ground.

The vertical piece slides up into the jamb, and the horizontal one slides across to hold it there, like those wooden Chinese puzzles. This is an agezaru, or “lifting monkey,” whereas the one that go down into the floor are “drop monkeys,” otoshizaru.

The aloe that fronts the house has bloomed so it must really be winter. Their blossoms rise out of the plants on long stalks, and they're not the most attractive flower . . . oh hell, they're ugly as sin, and those stalks are like the weird appendages on the aliens in War of the Worlds. If I didn't cut these plants back every year, we'd be fighting our way through an aloe forest everytime we left the house.



The Revenge of the Cultivated Beauty


Here are some flooring samples. The sugi is on the right, matsu (pine) on the left. (You can see scratches where I was testing the softness of the wood.) Sugi, which we chose for its softness and color, is also called Japanese cedar, though it has no relationship to the cedars. It’s actually part of the cypress family, and has the Giant Sequoias as distant relations. So I’ll call it by its real name, Cryptomeria.

The good-looking tree, which grows straight and tall (over 200 feet), has been used for centuries in Japan, both ornamentally and for construction. After WWII, the government offered big subsidies to replenish the forests, and the easiest solution was with sugi and hinoki, another beautiful wood that also has strong historial ties. But the cultivation came at the expense of natural forest. Now, most of the Japanese forest you see in those hauntingly poetic pictures of nicely patterned Cryptomeria in a mountain mist is completely unnatural. Below that canopy, there is little undergrowth and few broadleaf trees, and the result has been a plague on the whole country. The pollen from these trees comes out of the forests in great swirling clouds and makes for the cities, where all the concrete leaves it with nowhere to settle. The only people who've profited from this are the medical mask makers, who sells millions of masks each year to growing ranks of hay fever sufferers. M gets it bad. The last few years I’ve started feeling it a bit--itchy eyes and runny nose. Since hay fever is something even politicians suffer from, they've pushed the Forestry Agency into culling the sugi forests and replacing them with broadleaf. But since 18% of Japan's land mass is covered in the trees, they've got a major job ahead of them. And lots of sneezes.

And we have a more than sustainable wood that is beautiful, hardy, lightweight and waterproof. We want to have the color of the wood match the colors of the old house, especially since we’re going to use some of the old doors, etc., but also because we like the darker color of wood to offset the white of the walls. Since the sugi takes a while to darken, we want to stain the wood with kakishibu, made from fermented unripe persimmons. We’re going to get more samples so we can test strength and coatings to get the right match.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Real Thing


Our original plan was to to keep as much of the old house as possible. The main tatami room--eight mats plus a four-mat sized engawa--has everything that makes the perfect Japanese room. All the colors are variations on earth tones, from the tatami to the wood to the paper shoji doors that absorb the light and pass it on, slightly softened, to the opposite side (which side depends upon the time of day and where the light is coming from). All the walls are shoji or the wooden fusuma, so the room changes its configuration as people open doors or close them. We sleep in the far room on futon and feel spacious in the summer with all the doors open, or cozy in the winter wrapped in a closed door cocoon.

Unfortunately, three different contractors and carpenters told us that the foundation was too weak to build on. We could raise the whole house and put in a new foundation, but the wood columns and walls weren't strong enough to hold a second floor, and reinforcing them would cost a small fortune. We're trying to stay small, under 1500 square feet, and without adding a second floor we'd have to use all the garden space, and having a garden was one reason for moving in the first place. So, after much soul searching, we decided to build new, with the one absolute being that the main tatami room would be copied so carefully that we'd feel just as if nothing had changed. All the architectural plans began around that.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Death of the Emperor


We were going through the obaachan's prefab place last weekend, seeing if there was anything to keep. You can see how small it is in the photo--basically two stacked six-mat rooms with a kitchen and bath. It will be the first place we have to tear down. There's really nothing to it, but it has steel beams, so they'll have to get that small back hoe in and just pull it over.

Just out the upstairs window was this scene of neighboring ruins. When we were getting the land registrations for the bordering properties in order to figure out our boundaries, we found out that this once belonged to Charles E. Tuttle, of Tuttle Publishing. Not much is left holding up the tile roof, though the garden, which is twice the size of our whole property, is in amazing shape. The local contractor told me that old man Tuttle left it to his maid and his gardener or driver (I can't remember which), but they don't like each other and can't agree on what to do with it. So they've built two tiny pre-fab houses in the most distant corners of the lot and let the sprawling old place disintegrate. It looks very much like it was built around the same time as my old place. You can tell by the stove pipe coming out of the roof that this was once the bath house.

We couldn't find anything of use in the obaachan's place other than the washing machine, which we can salvage with some cleanser and a new drain tube. In the bedroom upstairs there was a yellowed newspaper announcing the death of the Showa emperor wrapped in plastic, lying on the floor under this light.

Monday, November 24, 2008

How Do You Like Them Apples?


The highlight of a fine weekend spent half at the beach and half in the mountains was harvesting the apple tree that M’s parents “rented,” from an orchard not far from their house. The orchard, like their house, is located at the foot of the Northern Japan Alps, and we could see snow clouds in the upper peaks above us. But it was a very warm day, and we ended up in our shirt sleeves. The orchard people said it was good that M’s folks had rented one of the trees close to the farm house: the ones further up the slope are often targeted by hungry monkeys and bears. This tree had been targeted by hungry birds—but only a few by the look of it. I don’t think there were more than twenty or so damaged apples.

Some of the apples were as big as little m’s head, and she had a hard time getting her mouth open far enough to bite into one. With the four of us taking our time picking (twist, twist again, pull up), we had the tree bare in thirty or forty minutes, and while we didn’t count them, I’m guessing there were at least 350 apples from that one unassuming tree. Another family, who was picking further down the slope, said they got over 700 from their tree, a large, very old one with stanchions holding up branches that spread ten meters and more from the trunk.

I drove the car up a deep rutted track to the tree so we could load the boxes. I had no idea that apples could weigh so much. The car sank so low on the axles that I had to drive back down to the road with the left tires way up on the inclined side of the road. All the pickers stopped what they were doing to watch, wondering if we were going to topple over, but little m, riding shotgun, thought it was awesome. She wanted me to keep doing it, even after we got down to the paved road.

I don’t know what M’s parents are going to do with all those apples, though they make great gifts. They’re organic Fuji apples, which must be the best apples in the world, and when you snap your fingernails against them they give off a great “thock” sound, like you're hitting a bongo. They gave us one whole box, so you won’t see any doctors around our house for a while.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Fold in Your Mirrors and Pray


A three-day weekend, which we'll be spending partly down at Akiya, partly up in Hodaka, at the foot of the Northern Alps, where M's parents have retired after building their own place. We've got to go to Akiya and start going through things that can be saved and stuff that will have to go. By February or March they'll start tearing down the pre-fab structure where the obaasan, our landlady, lived next door. It's part of the property, an unremarkable place, and pretty ugly, but it will be even hard to see that go.

Three years ago, when Akakura-san was 94, she finally allowed her sons to talk her out of living alone and moving into a home. When we heard that, our first thought was, "Why?" She was still getting around, even putting make-up on every day to go down to the bus stop and take an hour roundtrip ride to do some grocery shopping. Our second thought was, "Well, that's the end of our weekends at the beach." We were sure that her sons, who she told us were not at all interested in the property, would want to sell it, and we knew that market prices were way beyond our reach.

But thanks to her, they were pretty much told to try to sell it to us at what we could afford, and we ended up doing the buy directly, even dodging the need for a real estate agent.

The prefab house is basically two rooms and a kitchen and bath. But it's got steel beams in its structure that will have to be struggled with. The one drawback of the property is a very narrow driveway. I mean, "fold in your mirrors and pray" narrow, so it's going to be hard to get much bigger equipment than the smallest back hoe into the space. That means destruction by hand, and loading and unloading trucks parked in the street, and that's also added cost to the whole operation.

We'll drive up to Hotaka tonight, after the Akiya chores. It's going to be cold, I'm sure, but the wood stove keeps the big house comfortable, and I'm going to try to get M's dad to give me tips on how to keep a wood stove operation affordable, since we're going that route in Akiya as well. He gets a lot of his wood from the apple orchards that surround his place, and the winters there are so cold that the wood stacks run almost all the way around the house. But it's a beautiful place, built in a kind of Nagano style, with 10-meter ceilings and dark beams everywhere. Hearing about their experience building it did get us thinking of doing something similar.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Swim, Shower, Shit and Shove Off

I don't have any photos of when I first started sharing this house--with a German-Swiss windsurfer and his Austrian friend, but it didn't look like this. It had been in the hands of Western weekenders for many years (I heard the German ambassador for a while), and the house was obviously just a place to swim, shower, shit and shove off. There was carpet tacked into the straw of the tatami--red, I gathered, from the few threads that weren't completely worn down to the backing. Four huge heifer-hued faux leather chairs obviously pilfered from someone's boss's office sat around the living room like a posse of 19th-century robber barons. The wooden floors of the hallways were black from water stains and shoe soles. On one whole side of the house, the wooden storm panels had been nailed shut over old windows. None of the sliding shoji or wooden doors slid. Someone had nailed plastic boards over places in the wall where the original earth-and-bamboo wattling had eroded.

For the first year or two, I used the place like everyone else. I'd drive down on Saturday morning, hungover as hell, and undergo the ocean cure of swimming, barbecuing and lying passed out under a beach umbrella. Often, also like everyone else, I wouldn't even bother opening up the house, which does entail a rather complex series of sliding recalcitrant storm doors into their respective boxes.


One day, bored from a
Robert Parker novel that I was sure I'd read five or six times before, I found an old handleless claw hammer poking out of the rubble under the veranda, and started pulling the nails out of the storm doors that covered the southeast side of the house. I slid them into their boxes, and went inside for a drink. Just then, the mid-afternoon sun hit the window glass--and suddenly I could see the texture of the water surfaces on which they had been made. I rubbed the glass and scratched enough grime off the wood lattices to see the signs of a beautiful piece of craftwork. The liberated windows not only brought a whole new time of day into the room, they showed me that there was more to this place than a beach shack for sweating out the excesses of the week.

I bought a sander, a real hammer, a Japanese saw and garbage bags, big ones.

Standing Rock


"Standing Rock" is the literal translation of Tateishi, the name of a fifteen-meter tall rock formation leaping out of the sea just a hundred meters or so north of the house site. (You can see just the edge of it on the far right of the photo at the top of the page.) It's been there long enough for Hiroshige, the famous Edo-period woodblock artist to do a print of it (no doubt with Mt. Fuji in the background). I say no doubt, because although every mention of the rock includes that fact, I haven't been able to find a copy of the print anywhere. Not even on the internet, so I'm beginning to doubt it exists.

The name of the village where the house is located is Akiya, or more poetically in English--"Autumn Valley"--which is not an image that immediately comes to mind when one thinks of beachfront. Phonetically, it can also mean deserted house, which does come to the mind of many people when we tell them we have an old place in a former fishing village or show them this picture.

The front windows face southwest. A little to the right, over the water looms Mt. Fuji, which can be disconcerting, since all our senses tell us we should be looking toward Hawaii when we're actually gazing in the direction of Shanghai. Across the bay lies the long arm of the Izu Peninsula, where I first fell in love with beach life back in 1972, while working as a day laborer on a construction team digging huge holes in the jungle floor for resort hotel hot spring tanks. (¥3000 per 10-hour day with all you could drink--and a bath. Not a hot spring bath either, but a cold hose and a barrel half.)

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Walls of Seaweed or Hemp?


We've decided on the komuten,the "carpenter/contractor," signed the architect's contract, and the basic plan is pretty far along. This idea of building a new house in the spot where our Taisho-era beach house has been standing for 80 years has taken on its own life, and I have no choice but to follow it.

Today was spent going over the plans at the komuten's office, but first visiting several of the houses they've built in the last few years to get a feel for various materials, mostly wood (cedar or pine?) for the flooring, and wall material (
shikkui or keisodo). We went with the cedar for the softness and warmth under your feet, and the keisodo, which is supposed to absorb humidity. Shikkui is made of lime, hemp, and seaweed. Keisodo is made of seaweed, and earth. Both are biodegradable, and have their nuances but the keisodo's rougher texture seems better suited for the beachside.

Ike-chan, the just-out-of-architecture-school-but-hasn't-passed-his-architecture-exam assistant, had just finished the model of the house, and presented it to us with so much care and deference that, when he lifted the roof to show the inside and it fell to the floor and broke in half, we all stood and stared down at it, hands clasped before us, as if before an open coffin.

He did the ceiling of the tatami room and the beams in a wood-pattern, just like it will be. It shows clearly in this photo, but the model is so small you can just barely see the ceiling from the outside. It reminds me of Japanese chefs spending enormous time and energy cutting vegetables with great care and precision, knowing they're going to be dumped into a larger dish where no one will notice. I tell myself that I will peek into the tiny windows and look at this from time to time in appreciation.