Yesterday, I was walking along the ridge of Yakushi-dake (Mt. Yakushi). After an hour’s climb the path had leveled out. The sunlight was flickering here and there among the cedar trunks–and all of a sudden I was  wondering if the good feeling (dare we say exhiliration???) was all that different from what Mr. Thoreau felt all those years ago tramping about the woods surrounding Walden Pond. I’m guessing it was pretty much the same.

Today I was reading an article from the The New York Times, “The Great War’s Ominous Echoes,” which discussed how we had best keep attuned to the lessons of history. No joke. “History, in the saying attributed to Mark Twain,” the article declares, “never repeats itself but it rhymes.” Yeah, I thought I’d heard something like that before.

History at least rhymes. But of course. Beause we retain individual desire, group desire, but simultaneously, the ability to listen to the “better” angels. Am I allowed, in the 21st century, to talk about better angels? Regardless, I will!

But back to Thoreau. What a time that was, the twenty or thirty years leading up to the American Civil War! There were those trying to escape the burden of trying religious doctrine (those angry with Puritan hypocrisy and/or angry with the angry Calvinistic God). There were those trying to save a society–one which defined itself as a model of liberty and justice (a self-proclaimed beacon to the world, “a city on a hill”)–from its promulgation of a system (slavery) that blatantly mocked all that society supposedly stood for. There were those amidst all the self-interest (yes, yes, nothing new, nothing old, not always bad) . . . amidst all the self-interest and crisis in belief, who still believed in the possibility of belief, who sensed there might just be worse guides than intuition and individual conscience, and who could thus believe that there might be something to be gained from taking a walk in the woods and at least contemplating the possibility that one could establish and “enjoy an original relation to the universe.”

And what an extraordinary five years in (American) literature we saw: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby-Dick (1851), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Walden (1854). Throw in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853 . . . yes, yes, British), and you could have a lot worse liberal-arts-college, introduction-to-the-human-experience introductory course.

Sometimes you see Fuji, sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes, you park your car under a ginko tree, ablaze in sunlight, a brilliant, warming yellow gleam in the eye of the mountain. Sometimes, your timing’s off. You find the limbs bare, the leaves in the road, wet, fading fast.

Of course, you can imagine any fallen ginko leaf at its brightest–and whether you do or you don’t, the sun will remain “a morning star.”

Just another Wednesday morning ride in to work on the bicycle. One nice big thing to see.

And lots of nice not so big things.

Citrus fruit turning orange. Blue skies. Snow on Fuji. December in Shizuoka City.

Lovely, lovely.

Today was my first time up Mt. Ryuso in a month or so.

As always, though, a great walk. For me, when I go by myself, like today, both settling and inspiring. Beauty and daydreaming galore. But I hope next time, someone will go with me. Because it’s a great walk for a talk, too! The beauty’s better that way, too!

Just get in the blue hybrid and head for Senna. From the bypass, go ten, fifteen minutes up the only road that’ll get you to the parking lot beside the torii gate–where your walk will start. Notice the bear signs. Never saw a bear on Ryuso myself, but did see someone scared to death at bottom of the mountain, just as I’d gotten down. He said he’d seen one–which meant I must have walked by one, too. I’d only been a hundred meters or so behind that guy. Some people have bells. But I think it’s like getting hit by lightning.

Depending on your pace, it’s an hour or so up to Hozumi Shrine. If you’re lucky, someone’ll be there with a hot cup of tea for you. Take a picture with the two giant cedars (see “Three Cedars” from September). Take a rest room break, if you like. Then up, up up the trail.

How big the cedars!

Even those who rose early

Not so far ahead!

Just before you get to the top of Mt. Yakushi, an hour or so beyond Hozumi Shrine, you come to an opening where you get a gorgeous view of Mt. Fuji. Only today . . . Internet: sunny skies. Reality: lots of clouds.

Still, you know Mt. Fuji’s there. (Actually, if you look close, you can see the lower slope of Fuji poking out from the cloud cover.)

What to do atop Mt. Yakushi? Check out the temperature. The Internet said it was 9 degrees Celsius down in Shizuoka City at 10:41 A.M, and as you can see, it was 2 degrees below zero atop Yakushi. (I trust the metal thermometer nailed to the tree more than I do the Internet.)

If your tired, you’re in for a disappointment, because you’re one peak away from your final destination. And Mt. Monju is virtually the same height as Mt. Yakushi, so you’ve got to go back down–so you can go back up. But the dip, then the dash up to the top of Monju is only twenty minutes or so, and then, all of a sudden you’ve got lovely views of the Southern Alps on one side of the ridge, and on the other, a panoramic view that sweeps from Mt. Fuji, to  Shimuzu Port, to downtown Shizuoka City, to the mountains beyond. It’s beautiful when the skies are blue and a snow-topped Mt. Fuji throws a gleam into your eye, but even like it was today, a faint sunlight can do some pretty cool things with the sea and the clouds.

Have a picnic. Talk to some folks. Someone is sure to give you a mikan. Or something. Well, probably someone will. Smile. No pouty aloofness allowed.

Then you gotta go back down. Get out of the woods before four or four thirty. Yes, yes, it gets dark quickly. I usually take the “old” trail going up, but the “new” one going down. The new trail’s slightly longer, less steep. If you have a gimpy knee, it will appreciate you taking the new road.  And the different way gives you a chance to see new stuff the whole livelong day.

If I could have captured

The sun torching the maple leaves–

You too would have a seen

A flock of giddy yellow birds take wing

And dance with cedars.

A couple of weeks can make all the difference. December. The tsubaki (camellia) were lovely–and back down near the bottom, I noticed for the first time ever, the persimmons growing along the bank of the river.

Yes, eventually you will get back down. And you will have to get back in the blue hybrid and drive back to the city. Sorry. . . .

But the mountain’s aura will be with you to the very end, and it’ll be there when you come back, whenever that is. Did you see the size of those cedars? You think they’re going somewhere?

Some people write silly love songs. I bake cookies.

To the dearest one, with love . . .

If nothing else,

Take the cookie cutters,

The Christmas tree, the dove.

We put cheeks to ground

To enjoy the bell flowers

On Ryuso Mountain.

No need to shade eyes.

Red cheeks aglow, we are sure

The sun is in us.

Wear your Easter dress,

The brittle red lily gasped,

The chick-yellow one.

What a beautiful place! On October 12th, I went to visit the Kinezuka family farm in Fujieda (maybe 45 minutes from my apartment by car) to participate in the rice harvest.

They use no agricultural chemicals, so I had imagined it would be a pretty “open-hearted” rice paddy, that there might be all sorts of surprises down among the rice stalks . . . but little did I expect that by late afternoon Mr. Kinezuka would be holding a  mamushi just behind its jaw, peeling off its skin (even as it side-winded in midair) and gutting it, so that a young lady could take it back to Tokyo to dry, grind up, and sprinkle on her bowl of rice . . . or whatever she liked to sprinkle mamushi powder on. Neither did I expect that once the poisonous snake was skinned and “racked up” up on a stick and the initial excitement was over, that the guys would gather in a circle, divvy up the snake’s liver, and eat it as lustily as they would a slice of sashimi.

There were 12,637 frogs in this open-hearted rice paddy. I counted every one of them. Well, counted enough of them to make a “strong” estimate. But I’ll stand by my twelve-thousand figure . . . give or take a frog or two.

I’m no biologist and of course could see no micro-organisms, but it seemed pretty obvious: Keep the paddy chemical-free and the insects do pretty well. And that makes the frogs happy. And then you’ve got the snakes.

An open-hearted paddy also attracts a lot of interesting people. With your short-handled sickle, you whack your way down a row of rice stalks, in any direction, and before you know it you’re chatting with (or just working alongside) a filmmaker,  a company man turned produce grower, a woman involved with an NPO that helps out tsunami victims in Tohoku, a young guy with a PhD in Physics, a woman who chainsaws tree stumps into attractive kitchenware.

We tied the bundles of rice stalks together with year-old rice stalks that we twisted into twine. My first fifteen or twenty bundles, I was pretty bad at twisting up a usable “rope” and tying it off. After that, I got a little better. But I don’t think any of my bundles fell apart.

We raised lines of bamboo poles to hang the rice stalks on. I’d seen–on other days, in other places–that lots of farmers used machines that cut the stalks and separated the rice from the stalks all in one go, and wondered why some folks took the time to hang out the rice to bask in the sun for a week or so–and some didn’t.

Hang the bundles with the grains of rice down, I was told, and the nutrition remaining in the stalks flows down into the grains. I tried to ask, in a mathematical sort of way, what the additional nutrition added up to, but soon was to understand it wasn’t the right question. It tastes better, I was told.

Open the heart. See what comes. In the end, you may or may not care to eat the mamushi, but you’ll have the choice. Finally, once you’ve got something–don’t rush it into the barn. Make sure it fills with all the nutrition it can.

I can imagine a writing teacher saying something like that.

Under a strong sun,

We rip sickles through rice stalks.

A thousand frogs flee.

Even when nobody involved has bad intentions, learning about foreign cultures from a distance can be problematic.  For example, if you want to know about the land of Boogleboopy–and you can’t go and emerge yourself in the Boogleboopite culture–you’ll have to rely on reports from others. In fact, most of the world’s people don’t go abroad, so their knowlege of other cultures has to come from what is reported to them.

What can go wrong? A lot. The informant may think he’s gotten a bead on the foreign culture when really he hasn’t.  When he’s in Booglyboopy, he’s served popiba berries with every meal. He goes back to his homeland and tells his buddy, “Boogleboopites eat popiba berries with every meal.” Actually Boogleboopites only eat popiba berries on special occasions (weddings, the birth of a child . . . and when a visitor arrives from abroad). Or he might say something that is absolutely true, but say it in a way that makes his buddy back home misconstrue the information. “I was invited over for dinner by seven different Boogleboopite families–and every time they had an enormous bowl of popiba berries on the table. Man, do they love their popiba berries!” The informant doesn’t say popiba berries are a daily staple, but his homeland buddy may mistakingly infer that they are.

The informant, of course, cannot paint one hundred percent of the picture, no matter how accurately he tries to report, so much of what Boogleboopites are really like will have to be left up to his buddy’s imagination–and with no experience of any foreign culture, that is, with his own culture having to serve as the default when information about the remote place is lacking, he might come to some mistaken conclusions.

At least he might every now and then. . . . And it’s possible he might a great deal of the time.

One of the best illustrations (literally, illustrations) of this principle is a children’s picture book, written and illustrated by Leo Lionni, Fish is Fish (1970)–a wonderful book.

In a pond, a fish and tadpole become friends. But then the tadpole becomes a frog. He leaves the pond. He goes “about the world–hopping here and there”–and sees “extraordinary things.” He comes back to the pond. He tells the fish of all he’s seen. Birds, cows, people.

“Cows,” said the frog. “Cows! They have four legs, horns, eat grass, and carry pink bags of milk.”

What the frog says is one hundred percent correct, but the fish is  incapable of imagining anything he’s not explicitly told. The frog has assumed, wrongly, that his buddy will be able to infer all the physical attributes of a cow from a description of only three.  And so the fish imagines a creature just like himself, a FISH (that is, a long, svelte creature with fins) . . . only his long, skinny, finned fish has four legs, horns, and pink bags of milk, and it eats grass.

To the fish’s miraculous credit,  he does not, when told that cows “carry pink bags of milk,” imagine his cow carrying them with her hooves! I surely would have. If I could have imagined her hooves!

I wonder if the fish assumed that girl cows and boy cows both carry milk. I wonder if he thought that strapping pink bags to your belly and stuffing them with milk was a bit daft. Wouldn’t he have thought you should keep stuff like that in a cooler place, like, say, the bottom of a pond?

I love this book–and highly recommend it to all the children and adults out there, and especially for all the cross-cultural-understanding educators and students out there.

When you read, of course, its very important to realize that neither the frog nor the fish has bad intentions. And it’s also important to realize that neither the frog (the informant) nor the fish (the stay-at-home buddy) is aware that the frog’s images of birds and cows and people are at all off the mark.  The fish thinks he’s got it. The frog thinks he’s given it to him.

Near the end of the story, the fish decides to see the amazing world for himself. Alas, a mere few seconds of flopping about on the grass at the edge of his pond convince him that he was not meant to be a world traveler. He’s left to conclude that his world–the pond–is “surely the most beautiful of all worlds.”

Of course he does! And no doubt, for him, it is the most beautiful.

Spider lilies know–

Spindly legs, sparkling faces–

The rice is ready.

The spider lily

Creeps up to the rice field’s edge

To share the sunshine.

The answer to that question about when all the cannonballs are going to quit flying still seems to be blowing in the wind.  If we believe the article, “What Our Primate Relatives Say About War,” by Dominic Johnson and Bradley A. Thayer, published in January on The National Interest homepage, the answer is that the cannonballs will never quit flying, but a reply on the part of David P. Barash, “Are We Hard-Wired for War?”–published  online by the New York Times this month, September–suggests that they could, at least for a while, if we just thought about it hard enough.

Johnson and Thayer argue,  “The true source of the tragedy of the human condition is that we evolved in conditions of intense resource competition.” As we evolved, they say, our most uniquely human development may have been “collective action in large groups of non-kin, and defense and offense against rival groups.”  In a nutshell: We like our guys, so we’ve got to be ready to beat up theirs.

Barash admits that we’ve done an awful lot of fighting over the last zillion years, but wonders if saying, Well, that’s just what we human beings do, is really a good idea: “The problem with envisioning Homo sapiens as inherently and irrevocably warlike isn’t simply that it is wrong, but also that it threatens to constrain our sense of whether peacemaking is possible and, accordingly, worth trying.”

And Barash tells a story, which I will quote in full. I like stories.

There is a story, believed to be of Cherokee origin, in which a girl is troubled by a recurring dream in which two wolves fight viciously. Seeking an explanation, she goes to her grandfather, highly regarded for his wisdom, who explains that there are two forces within each of us, struggling for supremacy, one embodying peace and the other, war. At this, the girl is even more distressed, and asks her grandfather who wins. His answer: ‘The one you feed.’

I know we love fighting, but still I like this Cherokee story a lot.

But you can sort out these two different viewpoints–1) we’re killers, 2) we could, maybe, just possibly, if we gave it a shot, find a way to divvy up the resources without killing each other–for yourself.  What I’d like to ponder is what these two different ways of thinking  suggest for those of us who make a living teaching foreign language and cross-cultural understanding.

Whether you’re camping in Comfy Spot 1 (we’re killers) or Comfy Spot 2 (we don’t have to be), it seems it would behoove you to understand as best you could all those  on the other side of the river, the mountain, the ocean, the wall, the whatever. Whether you were trying to get the “resources” before they did, or you were trying to figure out the best way to share the “resources” with them  fair and square, that would seem to be so.  Only if you were in Comfy Spot 1 and you were  to try to understand them too completely (that  is, get to know them up close, really close up, for an extended period of time), you might be taking a risk. Because you might begin to feel empathy for them. You might even begin to like them, for goodness’ sake.  This might work to your disadvantage as you try to secure as many “resources” as possible for your and yours.

To avoid getting caught up in such anti-productive, empathetic feelings, you might settle on a policy of trying to “study” those across the river, the mountain, the ocean, the wall IN DETAIL . . . BUT AT A DISTANCE.

I like Melville’s take on this type of “distance learning” in Moby-Dick. His narrator, Ishmael, is telling us that of all the pictures of whales he’s come across in museums and books, none of them portray the whale as he really is.  In regard to a narwhale depicted in an 1807 London edition of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, he moans that “one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.” The reason it’s so hard for anyone to depict the whale accurately, Ishmael argues, is that no one has spent enough time in his neck of the woods–that is, in the depths of the sea:

Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the stranded fish [. . . .] Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight, like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. [. . .] So there is no earthly way of fiinding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.

Yes, study a culture from a far and safe distance, and you might just distort it. But wade out into it, splash around it it, body-surf it, and ultimately row your boat deep into its heart, and you might just find yourself “eternally stove and sunk” by it.  That is, changed–perhaps changed for all time.

Understanding, empathy, change. Depending on the camp you’re in, they may or may not be things you’re after.