Tanabata

july 7 2006.

I start this journal of my travels through Asia in high spirits. It's a lovely warm evening, just after sunset, and I sit in a small cafe on Kofu's main pedestrian street.

Tonight is tanabata, the festival of the stars, and all the beautiful young men and women are out in their summer yukatas arrayed in bright colors; pink flowers, yellow dragonflies, purples, blues and greens of every shade. The little children are dressed up too, holding their mother's hands and clip-clopping along in their wooden-looking plastic shoes.

This area is filled with all the trappings of every festival in Japan- stall after stall of food vendors selling fried noodles, octopus cakes, omelettes and sweets; plastic toys, inflatable dolls shaped like Disney characters, games to win goldfish and tiny rings with red lights inside.
The street is thick with people and above everyone's heads fly long streamers made of metallic foils of every color. They are suspended in circles of paper flowers and make a rustling noise in the breeze.

On this day, the seventh day of the seventh month, two stars are said to meet in the Milky Way. These stars were lovers once, children of gods, who were condemned to separate when the girl's father found she loved her husband too much to keep producing the beautiful silk robes that clothed all the heavenly beings. Her father, the main god of heaven, cursed them to live on opposite sides of the starry river, and said only this one night each year could they come together again.

Children and young lovers write their wishes on little strips of paper and tie them to the branches of freash cut bamboo. These wishes are supposed to be carried away by cranes, who live 1,000 years and are the only creatures on earth that can fly all the way to the root of Heaven, which they do tonight, taking the wishes with them.

It was on this special night towards the end of World War II, after the children had tied their wishes to the bamboo and everyone got ready in their most lovely summer kimonos and went out to the festival, when American soldiers set up floodlights in the circle of verdant hills surrounding this city and opened a firestorm on the people below, raining down phosphorous bombs from the air and shooting the people as they ran from the flames. In just over 2 hours, the small provincial capital was utterly obliterated. All the buildings were burned to ashes, and out of 300,000 people living here, 100,000 died in the attack.

Those who went in the next day to clean up the devastation said bodies were everywhere; that many people had been burned alive while running, and were found in the same position.
All this happened just two generations ago, when my grandmother was just a bit younger than I am now. And it was not unusual, what happened to Kofu, but was so commonplace that it barely merits a mention in the collective memory of that war.

My grandmother jumped over the burning bodies in the streets of Tokyo. Other people's grandmothers did so in Osaka, Nagoya, Sendai, Kobe, Hamamatsu, Kofu; places so small no one in America knows their names.

I read somewhere that 85% of Japanese cities were razed to the ground in this manner, with primitive napalm dropped so diligently and in such quantities that hardly a house or a human was left.

In the faces I see in the streets of Kofu as it stands today, rebuilt as a monotonous string of concrete and artless steel crisscrossed with telephone wires, there is reflected the whole diversity of Japanese people, like the diversity of all people.

There are utterly small women with angelic faces, school girls flaunting their long straight legs in their miniskirt uniforms, school boys with their shirttails pulled out and baggy slacks hung as low as they can, swaggering around in packs. There are young families with moon faced toddlers orbiting around their parents, pulling them this way and that as best they can with little pudgy fingers pointed at whatever moving, sparkly trinket catches their childs eye.
There are hard faces, happy faces, laughing, bored, distracted faces. Faces of shy, ashamed people. Haughty, worried, giddy people. Hopeful, irritated, drug-glazed people. People with secret dreams. People with secret lusts. Old, stooped over, seen-everything people. Tiny, amazed, staring-eyed people. There are tall muscular men with spiked blond hair and deep tans. There are women as thin as the pen I'm writing with. There are business men, tired, always tired, smoking cigarettes, dishevelled in their proper looking suits.

These are mainly peasant people; rice farmers, construction workers, truck drivers, mechanics. It's always been this way in Yamanashi. Here people have always eaten horse meat without cooking it; grilled bee larvae, boiled bear and boar stew.

What happens when 100,000 peasants get burned alive in one night?

Not much. They grieve and they suffer in their towns. They collect the bodies, they perform the burial rites, they move the debris. They collect themselves, they hunker down, they do what they can. The men push with their shoulders and the women with their hands. They throw themselves into the business before them and not much is said, not much is written.

Sixty-two years later their grandchildren walk on new streets, live in their hasty houses made of grey blocks, and come out at night on the anniversary of the Great Murder, dressed in their cotton kimonos covered with cartoon elephants and with plastic flowers in their hair. And they are happy, and they write their little children wishes to the cranes in the belief and the hope they will go up to the sky and sprout there, among the stars.

And the old lady with the bent back pushes her cart slowly down the street between the yakisoba stands and the groups of teenagers laughing sitting in the parking lots, and the young woman takes the white haired womans hand, and they are both in kimono and wooden shoes, and she smiles at her and leads her across the street in front of cars.

After the peasants die, they go on, and their lives go on, and their children and their children's children after them. I was thinking of this amazing simple strength in this reborn city, and I wondered at the beauty of the children who know nothing of what was here so long before they were born, how pure they are and how that's how they should be, and I was thinking of all the people who died in agony years ago tonight on this same soil, when a woman stepped in front of me with her hair piled high and cut off shorts and high sparkly heels, and her black shirt said in silver sparkles

"sadness and gladness succeed each other"

and she swayed as she walked, and her little daughter pulled at her hand for a bite of sweet bread.