pumps and ladders

m's back going to her day care center; her thoughts about the accident seem to be fading as quickly as the bruise on her side. M finished meeting with the police yesterday, and they were egging her on to make her complaint as strong as possible so they could throw the book at the driver. We've still got negotiating to do with the driver's insurance company since regular health insurance doesn't cover accidents and we've got a $3000 bill from the hospital. So life's back to normal, except that I keep waking up from nightmares in which I'm unable to do anything to save people from death. Weird situations, too, like chasing Marina on a rickety steel ladder hundreds of feet in the air when a little baby also appears, and I have to make a choice between going after Marina or the baby. And the baby falls. . . . Four nights in a row now.

We've made all our requests to the architect now, and are waiting for his final plans which he'll bring on the 26th. If they're okay, they'll turn them in to get a building permit, and the clock starts. One of the last-minute changes we made was to keep the washing machine near the bath, instead of having it in a nook off the kitchen. It's pretty common in Japan to use the bath water for doing the wash; it's just gray water since no soap is used. A lot of washing machines even come with built-in pumps and hoses.

m is okay and I am so very grateful

Little m is okay. She was hit by a car last night in a horrific scene, with all of us within feet of her, but unable to do anything. Her little 5-year-old body was picked up and thrown 20 feet, and she landed on her side in the middle of the road. By the time I reached her, she was trying to get up and was gasping for air. I lifted her and took her to the side of the road with M and looked back at the driver. He looked at us for a moment, made eye contact and then drove off. I was screaming at him, then took m to a grassy patch on the roadside and laid her down. M was calling an ambulance.

There's plenty of guilt to go around. We were in Warabi, M's family's home, after taking some futons from the beach house to store there while we're building. There's a cheap vegetable store across the road and, as everyone else does, we waited for a break in traffic (it's not a major thoroughfare), and crossed. On the way back, I had already crossed with the bag of shopping and looked back to see little m on her own--she'd slipped her aunt's grip--standing on the yellow line. I screamed at her to stop and wait but she took two steps across the road and thunk.

The van hit her, lifted her up in the air and then both moved out of my line of vision--all in slow motion. And I died inside. That saying about life passing in front of your eyes? It was like watching a future go by, imagining life without her. I dropped all the shopping and ran around the corner, dreading what I was going to see, but she was already moving.

M's sister Y and several other people, including 2 young guys from the vegetable store, took off after the van, but he was moving fast. Little m was in shock, moving her legs and trying to get up, but she was complaining about pain in her chest and hip and I held her down and stroked her head, trying to feel for any head injuries. There were no visible wounds or scratches even, but she kept complaing about her hip. A young guy came back to tell us that he had chased down the driver (he had been in the car right behind, and had the amazing presence of mind to not gawk, but take off when the guy did), and some of the young men from the vegetable store were now holding him for the police. The driver of the taxi just next to where m was hit had stopped to help, and gave us his name as a witness before having to leave.

The paramedics were working on m and the police hadn't arrived yet. She was talking and answering questions and they lifted her on the stretcher and put her in the ambulance. M got in and they told me to wait for the police. I ran down the road for 400 meters to the place where they were holding the driver. I started to go around the van to get to the driver, but the people stopped me and said they had it under control. They said to go back to the scene and tell the police when they arrived where they had stopped them.

The police had arrived by the time I ran back. We went through a short explanation and then they brought the driver back. I kept asking if I could go to the hospital, because I really couldn't stand being around the driver. He was acting completely nonchalant, ignoring me and m's aunt Y, until finally one of the cops started yelling at him to apologize. Which he finally did, begrudgingly. I screamed at him, "Why did you run away? How could you?" and he just kept shrugging. Y was doing most of the talking, and they finally let me go.

By the time I got to the hospital, they had finished with the blood tests and x-rays, and M and m were waiting in one of the emergency rooms. m was still in shock, kind of staring silently at us. I said that she'd never told me she could fly, but I saw her fly through the air. She must have been trying to get out of the way of the car. Did she remember flying? And she nodded and smiled. And slowly started coming back to the real m.

Amazingly, the only visible damage was a bruise that was slowly changing color on her hip. There were no scrapes or scratches or cuts. The doctor returned with the test results and said there were no signs of internal bleeding and no sign of injury to her head, but that some readings are difficult because of the shock factor, so they wanted to keep her overnight for observation. Which got m crying, since she wanted to go home.

M and I spent a lot of time there at the bed, just hugging each other, while waiting for them to make the arrangements. After they got settled in, I had to get back to Tokyo to feed the cat, and spend a lot of time on the phone with the police. Not a lot of sleep last night. The image of that car slamming into her little body and seeing her tossed out of my sight just keeps playing in my mind whether my eyes are closed or open.

Y told me that after I left, she and the cops finally got a reason from the driver for his running. He told them that he was in a hurry because he'd promised to lend the car to his brother.

I don't know what to say about all the incredible people there at the time. It was as if they had all been through accident rehearsals. After Y was unable to chase down the van on foot, people along the route were handing her memos that they had written the licence plate info on. The young guys at the vegetable store had taken it upon themselves to go and hold the driver after he'd been stopped. While I was waiting, people young and old were coming up to ask if I was the father, and then would hand me canned drinks and say kind things. The paramedics, police, everyone was extremely professional and very, very kind.

I just got the call from M that they finished the tests this morning and the doctor was very optimistic. I'm not going to wait for the results; I'm heading out now.

I am so very grateful. I'll put this down as a miracle, regardless of what anyone thinks.

Just Enough: Sales Pitch 1

I’m having a wonderful time these days editing a book by Azby Brown, a good friend and professor at Kanazawa University. And I wouldn’t bring my work into this except that the same grains of thought that resulted in the book idea were very much responsible for this house-building project and leaving Tokyo.

The book is called just enough: lessons in living green from traditional japan. I think it started (and Azby can correct me if he ever stumbles across this blog) at a bar that we got together at on the way to join M and m in some grilled squid and a beer at a local festival. We’d been batting ideas back and forth and I was waxing hops-fed poetic about the Akiya house and the comfort zone of traditional houses because I know Azby is one of the few people I know who knows exactly what I’m talking about. (He’s the author of some amazing books including The Genius of Japanese Carpentry, about a temple carpenter, Small Spaces about how Japanese use space, and The Very Small Home: Japanese Ideas for Living Well in Limited Space.) And Azby took that idea and came back with the idea for this book. It’s about how Edo-period people lived, and lived fairly comfortably with very little impact on the environment.

It was while we were putting together the outline for this book, as Azby took me deeper and deeper into the mindset behind Edo-period life, that I realized how much the Akiya house—though built some sixty years after the period met its demise—reflected those same values. The title, “just enough,” came from the period thought of finding value and method in minimalism; of treating things with long-term caring—mainly because it was drummed into the society for survival’s sake. The beauty of it is that what started as political dogma for survival’s sake became an aesthetic that permeated society. It’s not only the basis of all the industry that developed during this period, but led to the melding of industry and art in the craft of making things of great usefulness. (I think the West also has this ideal, but here it’s as if the Puritans had several centuries of developing without the religious restrictions turning them into sex-starved wackos.)

I haven’t included any footnotes for the above paragraph, and if any academic reads this and grows a six-inch goiter on their neck from irritation with my research methods, they’re welcome to write to the folks at the neojaponisme web site, or the prime minister’s office. It’ll have the same affect.

But the chance to try to experience living with some of those traditional values in a way that just can’t be done in Tokyo—say, building in local woods, making a compost, using a wood stove, or looking for healthy compromises of traditional methods and contemporary conveniences—has me hooked. And I’ve got pages and pages now of Azby’s prose—as well as sketches of everything from toilets (and oddly smirking people squatting on them) to an entire breakdown of rice planting and thatch roof-making to keep me happy.

Got to go. Little m wants a story and is not appreciating my pontificating. But trust me. My bedtime monogatari, or bedtime tales, are not nearly as windy as these blog entries.

The 3300-Year-Old Tape Measure

I love the fact that the measurements used by builders in Japan still are based on the shakkan-ho system that's been around since the 13th century BC. Japan went to the metric system in the 20th century (AD), and the shakkan-ho has been actually banned since 1961, but it's still firmly entrenched in building and real estate You can see the little arrows on my tape measure at 91 centimeters, which is three shaku. One tatami mat, or jo, is three shaku by six shaku (or one ken, or 182cm), and every measurement in our house plan is based around that. For the metrically challenged, one shaku is 11.93 inches, so think of a tatami mat as six by three feet.)

The plans are in centimeters, but every measurement you see is divisible by that 91cm measurement. The halls are 91cm wide (post to post); the kitchen is 2.73 by 3.64m; the dining room 3.64 x 4.55m. If you want to add something or cut something? You have to do it in increments of that scale.

The jo is a very human measurement. It is just the amount of space a person at rest would need, which is why, I suppose, we think of it as the size of graves. Though I suppose for people like my brother-in-law Jim, who at 205cm has grown beyond a size anyone imagined 3300 years ago, it might seem a bit small. One jo will also be the floor space of our toilet, the tokonoma, closets, the wood stove space. Two of them will make up the size of the bath, the stairs, etc., etc. Only the living room will actually have a tatami floor.

When I first arrived in Japan, tatami was everywhere. Many houses, if they had the space would have one Western-style room, with wooden floors, stuffed chairs covered in plastic, ugly throw rugs and a collection of kitsch. It was a formal place for visitors and was always chilly, as if they'd just dragged the entire room out of cold storage. It was where you'd be served coffee in dainty cups along with Western sweets. (If you were entertained more familiarly in the tatami room, it would be green tea and Japanese wagashi.) Now, it's the exact opposite, and in most houses--at least the ones that have them--the tatami room is usually the little-used one, where one drinks tea and sits uncomfortably in the role as "visitor" in a pristine time capsule.


I want our living room to stay the way it is now, a place to kick back on that soft surface, stretch out, roll around if you want. I want to watch people come into the room, sit around the low table, and slowly melt as they relax. M and I laugh about how often people have fallen asleep during afternoons of eating, drinking and talking. I want to keep experiencing those times when the tatami's just been redone, and you can breathe in the smell of the green rush straw as it slowly dissipates over weeks and months. The room is eight jo, plus a four-jo wood-floored engawa, and we're determined to keep the "human-ness" of this room in the new place. So, other than the sliding shoji doors, we refused to do anything--like the popular raised floor--that would set it off from the other rooms.

Damn You, Jun!

Our good friend and photographer, Jun, and his family visited a week ago. And he sent some shots that will help us remember how cool this old place was, as well as make it even more painful to think of tearing it down. This is the north entrance, the genkan.



And the east side (with the amado--the storm shutters--closed):



And the angle from the south:


Some afternoon light on m and Luna:


And some local wildlife:

Drop My Monkey (Part II)

I'm starting to feel sorry for our contractors. They finally got their plans down to our budget area, and come in with complete architectural plans, beautifully rendered on a computer with all the symbols for everything from water/electricity to windows, beams, posts and earthquake reinforcement (detail above). And, of course, just as they sit back feeling pleased with their endeavors, we throw back at them with a completely different second floor, ripping out walls, water systems, windows and flopping stairwells, which has T-san, the architect, scribbling like mad until he comes up with:

Ahh, much better, we say, as T-san holds his heads in his hands. Okay, so the post (or strut) runs up right through the middle of the master bedroom, which we've moved six feet away from the beach-side windows, and the study is now directly overlooking the sea (which means working will be an incredibly strenuous undertaking). But now m has her closet accessible from her room, we've ended up with a large (by Japanese standards) walk-in closet with a loft, and to top it off, I've just found out that T-san didn't know that the term for the sliding wooden locks on traditional storm windows in Japanese is "monkey."

But T is nothing if not forgiving, both me for my arrogance at cockily bandying about an obscure term that he hasn't ever had to know to keep his clients happy (until now), and us for wanting to get the best out of what we're putting into this house. So he grins and promises to have the new plans for us in "two weeks--maybe three." Meanwhile, we commit to the ultrasound check of our soil, and start talking about schedule. As our feet settle in the slowly drying commitment we're making to our lives, M and I turn to each other and shrug. We've got another couple weeks to think of more things to drive T crazy.

10 Months and Counting

The New Year holidays were spent looking at sunsets that seemed, each day, to outdo the one from the previous day. Or it seemed like that in the presence of an evening like the one above. Actually, they were pretty busy: we did the annual cleaning of the Tokyo house, drove up to Nagano for New Year's Eve with M's parents, then down to Akiya for three days. Tokyo was mild, Nagano was cold, but not as bitter as usual, and the days in Akiya were spent once again in shirtsleeves.

I fell out of writing for a while, since there hasn't been any particular movement on the house front, and I wanted to keep this based around that theme. We've got another meet with the contractor set up for next week, and we've sent several revisions based on the scaled-down plans to see what they'll come up with. One of them has the main bedroom moved off of the sea-side, though there will still be windows from the bedroom into the small atrium and beyond, so it will only be eight-feet away. The study would be on the ocean side, which I'm not sure is a good idea if we want to get work done.

Time is starting to become a major factor, which is not what we wanted and why we had started working on this last year with so much to spare. Now we have to finish the architectural plans for approval and start the process of tearing down the two present houses at the same time. We've gone ahead and asked to do the second ground test, this time using ultrasound technology.

The other thing that is starting to dawn on us is that, once the construction starts, it's the end of our weekends at the old house. That is very sad. It means fewer moments for a while of moments with friends like this:









or this:












or this (photo by m):