The Japan Lights
Introduction
It was an epic road trip. I’d been travelling for about ten days, exploring Tōhoku, the northern part of Japan’s main island. The area comprises six prefectures: Aomori, Iwate, Miyagi, Akita, Yamagata and Fukushima. I’d never been that far north and, having some free time on my hands, decided to throw the camping gear in the car and drift wherever my whims took me. Minori, my wife, came with me some of the way, spending a couple of nights in the mountains on the Nagano-Gunma border and a night in Niigata City. She flew home from there andI continued alone.
My Toyota Mark II Blit had 150,000 on the clock but was a dream to drive long distances: comfy, a great sound system, and with the seats down in the back there was more than two metres of space. More than once the thought of setting up the tent was too much and I simply unfolded my sleeping bag in the car. From Niigata I went west to Aizu-Wakamatsu, camping by a lake near the city, and then up the east coast.
I had two main goals for the trip. The first was to see this coast. Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima were where the 2011 tsunami met Japan. Six years on, the area was still ravaged. Once fertile farmland was now barren, flooded and salted. Millions of planters stood on top of the fields, a bizarre sight, a sight of despair.
I was in Japan during that horrible period. I’d watched the tsunami roll across Tōhoku from the safety of my Aichi apartment more than 500 km away. I remember the tremors shaking our apartment that afternoon and watching the aftermath on TV. One broadcast showed the tsunami approaching a group of people fleeing for higher ground. At the back of the pack were an elderly couple, the husband struggling to help his wife. With the wave only a few metres from them he ran, abandoning her for a few steps before they were both engulfed. I don’t think they ever repeated this broadcast. We were watching NHK Japan on TV and NHK World on the internet and listening to two directly contradictory news reports from the same network. In Japanese, everything was fine. In English: panic now.
Afterwards, I donated money. I wrote fiction and non-fiction about it.I thought about volunteering. Many people went to Tōhoku to volunteer, to help clearing, carrying, whatever they could. I didn’t. I regret that. I feel guilty about that. Was it laziness, selfishness, fear of fallout? I still don’t know. I just know I could have done more.
Now I wanted to see for myself. It took six years but I finally made my way to that coast. From Aizu-Wakamatsu I drove east and stopped in Minamisōma to use the laundrette and the public bath. Minamisōma isa nondescript Japanese town. Functional, pragmatic, not at all pretty, just another bog-standard Japanese town that also happens to bea few kilometres from the Fukushima exclusion zone. When I posted on Facebook that I was there, some friends told me I should leave as soon as possible.
The people were friendly, welcoming, but in a distant, reserved way. At the baths, the staff questioned me about tattoos in broken English, but when I replied in Japanese that I have none, they were all smiles. I was only there for a few hours but I felt an atmosphere, like a cloud hung over the place which, in a way, it did. These people would know people. These people would have lost people. For six years these people had been living in fear of symptoms, of sirens. How many sleepless nights? How many bad dreams?
I felt I was intruding. I had nothing to offer but a few yen into the economy. I paid for my bath, did my washing, I bought a few things at the local supermarket. The consumerist age when the act of shopping can be seen as ‘helping’. What have we done to ourselves?
Up the coast. Brand new roads. Signs every few metres: You are two metres above sea level.
Warning. Tsunami zone.
I was using Google Maps on my phone in lieu of satnav and it kept screaming to U-turn, U-turn, U-turn. These roads didn’t exist. It hadn’t updated to take into account the tarmac washed away, the new street plans.
As I drove north, I was struck most by the absence. The land is paper flat, the sea to my right, the mountains far, very, worryingly far to my left. Too far to reach in the event…The ground was flat and empty. Ripped flat, pounded flat, then cleared, scraped flat, scrubbed empty.
I stopped, climbed to the top of a tiny man-made hill. From there I could see a half-collapsed house, as yet not dealt with. Dumper trucks, diggers, yellow work machinery at the sides of roads or trundling across the landscape. Six years and reconstruction was still beginning. It brought to mind something a friend in Christchurch said about the 2011 earthquake there: ‘After four years they’ve finally started putting up more than they’re pulling down.’
I took a few photos but I was beginning to feel like maybe I was a disaster tourist. The people here had no need of me, I was not helping, I was not offering anything. I was just passing though. What would I say if someone spoke to me? How could I justify being there? I got back in the car and kept going, heading for the Miracle Pine in Iwate.
Out of 70,000 pine trees that once stood on this stretch of the Iwate coastline only one remained vertical, and it was dead. Paid for by donations, the tree had been reinforced and ‘repaired’, and now towered over the barren horizon, dwarfing the nearby municipal building bearing the marks of the sea, half caved in, air-conditioner units hanging from the walls, plaster and concrete flaking, stairs collapsed. One day this will be a memorial park, but that day it was just sad.
The next stop was Matsushima. Matsushima is officially one of Japan’s three most beautiful views (the other two being Miyajima and Amanohashidate) and the pine-covered islands dotting the bay are picturesque but I was not in the mood.I was not in the mood for much. I was overwhelmed by emotion, by input. The view was obscured by row upon row of tourist restaurants, fading hotels, souvenir shops. Tourism in Japan doesn’t know when to stop. When Bashō visited Matsushima, it was a stunning wilderness. Today it’s shabby consumerism.
I asked at the tourist centre for a campsite. There were two but they were at least ninety minutes further up the coast. I was exhausted emotionally and physically but had little choice. I picked one and set off. It was dark by the time I arrived, got my tent up, and ate a Cup Ramen for dinner.
When I woke the next morning, I was still exhausted, utterly drained. I’d planned on taking the ferry to Kinkasan,a small island off the coast that is home to a lighthouse built by some Scotsman, but I couldn’t find any information in Japanese or English about the ferry. The island was badly hit by the tsunami and it looked like it was discouraging visitors. I was in no position to argue. I packed up and went north to Hirosaki, where I booked a hotel.
I spent two nights in Hirosaki, only venturing out to find food. My enthusiasm for the trip had taken a battering. I lay in that cheap business hotel thinking about the sea, about death, and people.
My hometown, Aberdeen, was a fishing community before it became an oil town. The sea defines it. In a sense it defines me, though I’d only ever been slightly aware of the fact. I feel more centred, more grounded, when I’m near a body of water. With the sea at my back, I know where I am, where I’m going. Gifu, where I live, is far inland, one of very few landlocked prefectures in Japan. I have a constant low-level sense that something is missing.
I wrote and thought a lot about the sea in my novel, In the Shadow of Piper Alpha. It’s about the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, so the connection is unavoidable, but novels are black holes that suck all information and ideas into them. Disparate thoughts, things you’ve read, overheard, wondered about, all collide and fuse. There’s a scene in the West Wing where CJ is shown a map that reflects the actual size of the continents and it freaks her out. They then flip the map to show that north being at the top is only a cultural convention. Elsewhere, in a book by Jared Diamond I think, I read about how our conception of the coast as a boundary, the edge, the end, is only a modern affectation. Oceans were highways. If you were travelling from Aberdeen to Edinburgh for most of human history you’d go by sea: it was faster, safer, easier. The coastline wasn’t the end, it was the beginning, the kerbstone, your front gate. Trains, cars, planes: we’ve lost this sense. I started imagining the map from this new perspective, maps that begin at the edge of land, from the north-east of Scotland, a road atlas of the deep. From Aberdeen, from this perspective, south becomes less relevant: east is the thing. The North Sea asa highway, a connection. Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. I’d spent my life thinking everything was south of Aberdeen. Flip the map, shift the focus from land to sea, and there’s a brave new world.
A character from In the Shadow of Piper Alpha gets these ideas. A minor character, but it’s part of the tapestry of that novel and as time passes, it’s one of the things that grows larger, keeps coming back to me. In Hirosaki those ideas returned. Unless our lives are directly connected- fishermen, merchant sailors, the Navy - we have turned our backs on the sea and faced inland. But the sea didn’t go anywhere and every once in a while, it taps us on the shoulder, reminds us of our precarious position on the dry twenty-nine percent of the planet.
Writing The Only Gaijin in the Village also churned these ideas as I tried to make sense of how I’d gone from a commuter town outside Aberdeen to a rural community in Japan. That book was an attempt to explain to myself who I was and why I felt more comfortable in Japan than in Scotland. Doing so involved pulling on a lot of these threads, one of which was the great history of migration, of exiles, the differences between expats and immigrants, between those who move because they want to and those who move because they can. As with all the books I have written, it ended up raising more questions than it answered.
While I lay in that Hirosaki hotel room exhausted by my tardy confrontation with mortality, the other thing I did was to read more about this Scotsman who built a lighthouse on Kinkasan.
I’d come across Brunton years before. In 2009, on a visit to Yokohama,I found myself wandering through the Foreign Cemetery. Yokohama was the first full foreign settlement on Japanese soil after 250 years of Sakoku (self-enforced isolation). The island of Dejima at Nagasaki had held a Dutch settlement but that was very deliberately kept separate from the mainland by gates and armed guards. After US gunboat diplomacy (begun in 1853) opened Japan to world trade, Yokohama became the main foreign settlement. Yokohama is central to Brunton’s story, so we’ll return to one of my favourite Japanese towns later. For now, let’s stay in the graveyard.
As an adolescent I had an affinity with graveyards, finding them peaceful, secluded, beautiful. Some of my worst teenage poetry was on this theme, so I was naturally drawn into the gates to stroll amongst the ageing stones and well-tended foliage. On The Bluff, a later addition to the foreign settlement in Yokohama, open to a dramatic view, the cemetery’s first guest was Robert Williams, a member of Perry’s crew (the first US ships to arrive in Japan), though his body was later moved. The prize for longest lying goes to two Russians, Roman Mophet and Ivan Sokoloff, murdered by Nationalists in 1859.
Walking around, four years into my own life in Japan, I was struck by the parallels. I’ve written stories set in the sixteenth century, the eighteenth century, in World War Two, in the future, in multiple countries, on other planets, and one thing I’ve learned from this is that people are people. As humans we haven’t changed all that much. Certainly not over a couple of centuries. The technology has changed. Our ways of talking about ourselves and the world has changed. But what drives us, what moves us, what matters, that hasn’t changed. Take John Diack, another resident of the Foreign Cemetery, a railway engineer. 150 years before I stood beside his grave, he too travelled from Aberdeen to Yokohama and made his home—his eternal home, it turned out—there.
It was comforting, making me feel less alone, less ground-breaking, less like a pioneer. I was just another in a long line of Scotsmen who’d left home seeking… what? A new life, a better life, a life less ordinary, seeking something anyway. One reason I’ve always liked learning about history is that those big sweeps of time make sense, those oceans of generations moving, building, progressing, failing, falling back, trying again. That apocryphal story about Zhou Enlai saying 200 years was too soon to assess the impact of the French Revolution; when I first read that it was one of those epiphany moments, when something you’ve pondered is defined, named, shared. Our lifetimes are short; history is long. On a long enough timeline, anything is possible. We’re part of a chain that will end somewhere and from above, from a distance, life looks good. The macro works for me, gives me perspective. It’s the micro that’s problematic. I can comprehend millennia; the next seven days, that’s unsettling.
Writing is how I process life. Input becomes output. I got an article out of that trip, and it sparked a curiosity that led to more writing. I first met Richard Henry Brunton while looking around for more articles to write. I wrote a piece on Thomas Glover, the ‘Scottish Samurai’ from Fraserburgh who came to Japan in 1859. Glover was, as Alan Spence proved in his novel The Pure Land, a character. He had a finger in every pie, went bankrupt a number of times, helped start Mitsubishi and Kirin Beer, once imported a train to demonstrate the technology, ran guns for the Chōshū rebels, helped smuggle Chōshū and Satsuma men out of Japan, had a hand in building the dry dock at Nagasaki with equipment imported from Aberdeen that is still there today. He is perhaps most bizarrely remembered on labels of Kirin beer, where his moustache adorns the kirin, a mythical Japanese beast.
I wrote another about Rita Cowan from Kirkintilloch, who married Taketsuru Masataka in 1920, and together they brought whisky distilling to Japan. One possible stop on this trip was Yoichi, where they built their distillery. It made me curious to discover other Scots who had made the same journey.
There are plenty. For a small nation we get about. Yokohama’s Foreign General Cemetery is packed with Scots, but the one who grabbed my attention wasn’t in that cemetery, rather he’s buried in West Norwood Cemetery in London: Richard Henry Brunton.
In 1868, Japan underwent a revolution. It was a top-down revolution led by elite members of society who felt themselves excluded from a status quo that had lasted for two-and-a-half centuries, but a revolution nonetheless. Seemingly overnight Japan moved from feudalism to modern industrial capitalism. To facilitate this, the new Japanese government hired o-yatoi-gaikokujin, foreign experts to guide and teach a first generation of Japanese lawyers, bankers, architects, military leaders: pretty much every part of society including, of course, civil engineering. The Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai however flawed (and it is) is based on this process. With increased international trade, Japan’s island-strewn coastal waters had to be made safe for international shipping. Lighthouses were needed, and fast. The French won the contract and began work, but the British government, by no means unbiased in their opinion, argued that the French were taking too long. Sir Harry Parkes - a name that comes up again and again in this period, and one we will be returning to later on- persuaded the Japanese government that the Stevensons were the very men for this job. David and Thomas Stevenson, the third generation of the Lighthouse Stevensons, as Bella Bathurst named them, (Thomas being father of Robert Louis Stevenson) were the pre-eminent engineers of the day. The Stevensons began the search fora chief engineer and hit upon Brunton as the man who would travel to Japan and do for the emergent nation what the Stevensons had done for Scotland: light it up.
Between 1868 and 1876, Brunton built lighthouses, supplemented by buoys, beacons and lightships, constructed the first iron bridge in the country, planned the streets, sewage system and gas lighting of Yokohama, erected their first telegraph system, and helped establish the first railway, all in a country so beset by earthquakes that many of the basic ‘Western’ assumptions about engineering had to be rethought. He also found time to father a second daughter and irritate his Japanese employers so much that in 1876 he found his services were no longer required.
He returned to Britain where he slipped into obscurity, dying in 1901. He wrote up an account of his travels which remained effectively unpublished until 1991, the 150th anniversary of his birth. It’s nota great book. You can see why no one published it for 150 years and why it then slipped back out of print. What Brunton did is fascinating. What he said about what he did, isn’t. Engineers don’t always make good writers. Robert Louis Stevenson famously had to choose, one or the other. You couldn’t be both, not in those days. Brunton was a great engineer but a mediocre writer. But it’s not just how he writes, it’s also what he says. His views haven’t aged well. By the standards of his time his opinions on the ‘other races’ are not that surprising, but Brunton was also haughty, arrogant and stubborn. He doesn’t come across well. No argument can be made for renewed publication of his memoirs or for a rehabilitation of his character, and I attempt neither here. Nevertheless, there is a statue of him in Yokohama Park, and it is right that there should be. He is not raised onto that plinth because he was a likeable man. He’s there because of what he did to transform Yokohama and to make Japanese waters safe. Initially, a few words in the potted biography on Wikipedia stood out, those initial tendrils of a story. Muchalls is only a few miles south of Aberdeen and I know it well. He had links with the Iwakura Mission, one of the events in Japanese history with which I am most fascinated. He left Japan in 1876 after a disagreement with Japanese officials. That last part. The fact of it, the way it’s described. A disagreement. It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, always tempting for a writer. It also hints at a personality. Was he the cause of the disagreement? Was he a troublemaker or did he reach the end of his patience with Japanese bureaucracy? Maybe it was me reading too much into a simple sentence butI felt I could detect a mischievous character behind the words. Whatever, there was a window into a life that intrigued me.
According to Wikipedia, twenty-six of his lighthouses still stand, though four of those have been extinguished. The idea that came to me as I regrouped in Hirosaki was simple: I would travel around Japan, visiting them all, and write about it.
Initially, I wanted to do it in one go. I’m a fan of travel books like Round Ireland with a Fridge and random mission narratives like Are You Dave Gorman? (showing my age here with these pop culture references). Unfortunately, I wasn’t ina position, financially, to take the time off work and spend the money to do it all in one trip. Lighthouses are, necessarily, in out of the way, difficult to reach places. But I could still visit as many as logistically possible and my trip to Tōhoku was my chance to test the idea. I’d travel to Shiriyazaki in Aomori, the same prefecture as Hirosaki, one of the most out of the way lighthouses on the list and then, on the way home, try again for Kinkasan. After driving around aimlessly writing haiku about desolation, I now had a purpose.