KJ BLOG SELECTION: http://www.wideisland.blogspot.com/
From KJ #62

WIDE ISLAND:
WHERE EAST PASSES WEST ON ITS WAY TO THE FRIDGE
Name: MAETHELWINE
Location: Hagoromo-cho, Hiroshima

Self-description:
I'm a guy who dispensed with Plan A many years ago and is presently working his way through the middle stages of Plan N.

June 17, 2005: Hey Howdy, Li'l Buckaroo!

Welcome to Wide Island.

I understand from several things I've read that I'd be a fool to expect anyone to actually read this for a good year or so. Since there's virtually no chance of it still being around then, I don't guess anyone will mind if I take my shirt off. It's hot here.

The 'here' in question is Hiroshima, Japan. So let me begin by saying that I love this country. Not unconditionally, but as long as certain conditions remain met I am quite content to loiter here on the west bank of the Motoyasugawa and watch my life tick by. And so I promise that this will not turn into a rant site about the Japanese, or a giddy newcomer's reporting of all the funny names for candy bars and soft drinks, or the weird things my neighbors enjoy on their pizza. On the other hand, I will give voice to certain frustrations, probably quite often, but this should taken in the spirit of one friend looking askance at the idiosyncracies of another.

June 22, 2005: Abnormally Gorgeous
I haven't mentioned before now that I have a daughter. I wasn't sure if I wanted to drag my family into this, and even less certain about putting pictures of my little girl on the internet. But I've decided the world, sore and troubled as it is, needs more beauty. Even if the world, in the context of this blog, consists of 2 strangers passing through in under five seconds. The flashing, subliminal glimpse of innocent perfection afforded here will follow them on their way, inevitably touching others indirectly and spreading slowly among the gathered crowds like news of a golden city rising from the waves.

Or perhaps not. You will notice, however, that Ema seems much cuter than other children you know. Let me assure you that this is no trickery, my own skill with the lens not being up to the task. Other children, cute as they may be, lower their heads in abject shame and fall back into the shadows at Ema's approach. This is not her fault. Be kind.

July 10, 2005: Where I'm Writing From, Continued
I live in Hagoromocho, part of the central ward of Hiroshima, lying along the west bank of the Motoyasu river. Years ago, most of the land around our house was occupied by Banshouen, a garden which had been constructed by the Asano family, rulers of Hiroshima under the Tokugawas. The river was lined with pine trees and residents, many of them employed in the garden, would drape their laundry on the branches to dry. Visitors were reminded of the magical shawl hung on pine branches in the old story Tennyo no Hagoromo (the Shawl of the Celestial Maiden), and soon the little neighborhood acquired the name Hagoromo Town.

The pines are all gone now. The riverbank, which was still natural when my wife was a child, isn’t anymore. The last piece of Banshouen survived until just a year and a half ago. One of largest trees I’ve ever seen in a city stood next to a pond. At night, the wind through that one tree sounded like waves on a shore. Herons and other birds nested there. I sometimes heard owls from our balcony. At the base of the trunk was a tiny, old Inari (fox) shrine, and when plans were made to take down the tree some of the old people around here said that terrible misfortune would come to whoever wielded the saws, and that the whole neighborhood might be subject to the baleful presence of an evicted fox spirit. A small petition went around, and phone calls were made to local television stations. But in the end the tree came down and the pond was filled in to make space for an apartment/nursing home complex. I want that tree back.

Hagoromocho was destroyed by the a-bomb. Whatever structures weren’t flattened by the initial blast, burned in the fires that followed. By one o’clock in the afternoon of August 6th, 1945, the entire neighborhood was in flames. Most of the surviving residents fled to Yoshijima, a little farther from the hypocenter of the nuclear detonation. Keiko’s aunt, who lived around the corner until she died last year, escaped the fires by carrying a futon to the river’s edge. She soaked it, wrapping it around her head and shoulders, and waited for someone to come for her as she watched the corpses of thousands wash past to the sea, then back again as the tide turned.

Aug. 1, 2005: Coming Home
When I was a kid in Saudi Arabia, I remember how keenly many of us tried to hold to our identities as American, or British, or Indian, or whatever we thought ourselves. Living at such a remove certain things, real connections to old friends, cousins, mortal enemies of childhood, took on a talismanic weight. A particularly foolish example was Bubble Yum chewing gum. All the American kids somehow came by the impression that back home, other kids our age were gnawing away at the stuff round the clock, punctuating all the little moments of their American days with colorful, fruit-scented bubbles. The result was a brisk and, for some, very rewarding trade in Bubble Yum. Kids going home for repatriation would haul back boxes of the stuff, selling it for as high as ten dollars a pack. We’d steal money from parents just to keep ourselves in gum, forging a simulacrum of imagined American life that often intersected with the reality at precisely no meaningful point whatsoever.
I no longer try, as I did then, to be American. The stamp is unmistakable, and others are happy to remind me where I come from, often several times a day. But it is interesting to come back to America and see how far my countrymen have been swept downstream from the place where I left them.

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