RSSAmplifier

I Love Wasting Ink · Oct 11, 2023

Strange peaks, black cliffs and volcanic cones

Read inOriginalenesdefrptjaitzh
0
Sign in to vote or save

ilovewasting.ink

Subscribe via RSS feed or email

A good day to you all from aboard the Blue Luminous, floating somewhere on the black waters of the Straits of Tsugaru (home to bluefin tuna, American nuclear submarines, and deranged long-distance swimmers), about to head into the bay and towards Aomori City. My walk around Hokkaido is over. Six years and some weeks after landing at its southern tip in 2017, at the youngish and foolish age of 36, I made it back to the same spot, a journey of 77 continuous calendar days spread over three years — the high summer of 2017, the late summer of 2022, and now the early autumn of 2023 — and somewhere between two to three thousand kilometers. From now it’s straight south for some weeks, into the mountains of northern Honshu.

Walking in Hokkaido is harsh, a land with capricious weather and some of the most unappealing architecture I’ve ever come across, a quasi-colony built out on an industrial scale and largely uninhabited, a place that’s Japanese but isn’t Japan. For most of my time around it I longed for human-scale old Japan but then something strange happened as I was nearing Sapporo: I began to feel an overwhelming joy at being here, on this wild island in the north-west Pacific that shrugs off most attempts at domestication, where a pre-human world is never more than an arm’s reach away, where to exist will always be akin to skating on thin ice.

In Sapporo, I met the English scholar and writer Willie Jones, now in the ninety third year of his very long life, the author of a short book of interviews with Hokkaido artists and craftsmen titled Out of Our Hands, published last year by one of his former students, the writer and anthropologist John Ryle.

I now think that Willie’s interview subjects also draw from what I increasingly felt as I neared the end of my walk around Hokkaido: a sense of exhiliration borne from learning to first exist then to thrive on this savage island.

Said thriving, I must add, was helped greatly by the incredibly generous people I met on my way, and also by the bowls upon bowls of some of the best seafood I’ve had in my life.

Some housekeeping

Over my days of walking south, I realized that two field diaries is one field diary too many to keep on a walk. I will be shutting down the one I intermittently kept on Mastodon and keeping only the — very visual — one on Glass. I post quite often these days, 2–3 times a day, mostly photos with very little text. It’s that kind of journey now. The words will come later. Update: No longer online.

Some photos

Chopper, sea, volcano

A helmeted rider sits astride a parked custom cruiser motorcycle at the roadside, head bowed and looking at something held in both hands. The motorcycle has a dark green tank with flame detailing, chrome forks, and a low-slung profile. Behind the rider, a wide coastal flat of low scrub and vegetation opens to a calm sea, with a solitary conical peak rising from the water on the horizon under a pale, hazy sky. Low-angle light rakes across the grass and catches the chrome, casting long shadows that suggest late afternoon.

Sky, lone pine, grass

A single conifer stands at the horizon line, shot from ground level so that blurred grass blades fill the lower third of the frame and the tree rises against a deep blue sky scattered with white cumulus clouds. The camera’s low angle makes the tree appear to tower over the viewer, its dark, dense canopy asymmetrical and wind-shaped, with branches sweeping more heavily to the right. The trunk is narrow at the base and moss-covered, the foliage nearly silhouetted against the bright sky. No other trees or structures interrupt the flat grassland around it.

Bear, totem pole

A totem pole shot from directly below, the camera looking straight up along its length so the stacked carved figures recede toward a sheltering roof structure of steel beams and translucent panels. The nearest figure dominates the lower frame — a broad, flat-snouted face with small inset eyes and a cylindrical open mouth pointing directly at the viewer, its surface textured with the rough adze marks of the carver. The weathered grey wood is deeply grained and cracked with age, contrasting with the angular modern metal canopy above that radiates outward like spokes around the pole’s apex.

Birch, birch, birch

A man in a denim shirt raises a small black compact camera to his eye, both hands gripping it steadily at frame center, a watch on his left wrist and a green cord bracelet on his right. To his right stands a large white sculptural form with a triangular ridge, its flat mirror-polished surface reflecting a smaller, slightly blurred image of the same man photographing. Behind him, a flat overcast sky filters soft, directionless light over a lawn, cobbled path, and a stand of slender pale-trunked trees with grey-green foliage.

Hungry, bored workman; hungry, bored workman; hungry, bored workman

Three middle-aged to older men in matching light grey work uniforms sit cross-legged on floor cushions at low wooden tables in a traditional Japanese tatami-floored eatery or rest area. The man at center rests his chin on his fist and gazes forward; the man at right holds a smartphone and looks down at its screen; the man at left faces away from camera with his head bowed. Flat, diffuse daylight enters through large windows on the left, brightening the lacquered table surfaces in the foreground while the back wall is dense with Japanese posters, notices, condiment bottles, and shelved books. The low camera angle places an empty foreground table large in frame, pushing the three figures into the middle distance and widening the sense of unhurried, mid-break stillness.

Bliss

Two figures rest on worn couches beneath the open-sided overhang of a low building, one seated and hunched forward, the other partially visible at the frame’s edge. A wide brick-paved forecourt stretches to the left, where a frost-covered grass field dissolves into thick ground mist that rises to meet forested hills under a bright, hazy sky. The side-angle light is strong and low, casting a long diagonal shadow across the brickwork and bleaching the mist to near-white while leaving the covered area in deep shadow. White curtains hang tied back at the building’s open bay between the two sheltered spaces.

Some invisible lines made visible

Here is the map with my latest location.

And now I am off

To Tsugaru, home of the eponymous shamisen and the writer Dazai Osamu, the subject of the first chapter of Alan Booth’s Looking for the Lost. Also: apples, apples, apples, apples, and more apples. My friend Tanaka Nobukazu, a trucker from Aomori, messaged me that I should eat apples. I hope he is also eating apples when he isn’t—

I’m carrying snow tires a lot now. After unloading, I will head to Hanamaki city Iwate prefecture.

—trucking.

The very best to you all.

This post is an email from In Between, a newsletter I wrote between 2022–2025.

Posted on: October 12, 2023

Read the original on ilovewasting.ink ↗

Comments

Nothing yet. Say the first thing.

    Sign in to join the conversation.