Thursday, April 02, 2015

past-present paradox

I was at the airport, a sunny day in Seattle. I was about ready to go to Japan for the very first time, I was going to spend a summer there that would quite literally change my life. I hadn't seen my own father for a long time, but for some reason that I can't remember now, he met me at the airport. Maybe he sensed this was the start of a lifelong journey, I'm not sure. He gave me a small pack of single use film cameras as a parting gift. This was before digital cameras were main stream, before most people carried around cellphones with cameras and video built in. This was the ancient almost pre-digital past. Shortly after arriving in Japan, I broke my glasses. Film cameras could only snap a few quick random shots, but they are my eyes from that time. The sharp reality of light captured in a small plastic lens. Someday I'll find time to write more about that first time in Japan, but this is not that time. Recently I found the old random snap shots I took of the neighborhood I was staying in. In 2014 (yes, I've been very slow to use this blog) I went back and tried to recreate the shots I had taken well over a decade before.

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Welcome to Takatsu Station in rural Kanagawa prefecture. This is where I spent the summer of 2000. This was my first overseas journey, and I hadn't saved a lot of money. In fact, I had a total budget of about 500 yen a day. (That's about USD$5.) So I mostly walked around the neighborhood and enjoyed summer life. The hotel behind the station is exactly the same, but the station building itself was completely rebuilt.

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Exiting the station, and walking to the left I looked for the fire-station. It was completely changed. It was a weird feeling, kind of what I suppose it feels like to step into an alternate reality. I had walked this street countless times, the old fire-station tower was burned in my mind. But it was nowhere to be found. The white pole and manhole were still there though.

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I turned around and went to the right of the station, I think hoping to somehow find something that I could recognize. This street was made from recycled tires (thats what those flecks are) and I remember being fascinated by it. Without glasses and quite illiterate, traveling around my neighborhood had been quite an adventure. The first time I found this old street I had felt like I had discovered a new area in my domain. Almost nothing was left. The sign board on the right and the green overhang on the building remain though, existing in both of these realities.

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Finally! About 10 minutes from the station, there is a pedestrian bridge that offers a good view of the area. I would sometimes go up there and watch time evaporate in the summer heat (there used to always be a young homeless man sleeping on a cardboard mat there too). This view was almost the same. Proof that I was in the same universe, I suppose.

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I had never seen a Japanese summer festival. I thought then, and still think now, the portable-shrines look a lot like the arc of the covenant. Looking at my past picture now, I was startled to think about the age of the young boy in the red hat now. It's quite believable that he has settled down now and started a family. Dear red hat boy, I hope you had a good childhood.

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I'm not quite sure why I took this picture. I suppose it was the sudden down pour of rain on a hot humid summer day. I still enjoy the smell of the rainy season in Japan. Big fat drops of water smashing into hot asphalt. The thundering sound of a million little cloud-droplets, thundering with a warm intensity. I still enjoy walking around in the summer rains. This building still remained how it was, but you'll see that now someone has tried to take off the gold lettering. If you look closely you'll see that the shapes of the letters, resembling what they looked like in 2000, still remains. I guess that's a bit like how our memories work. Time takes most of it away, hides the past in a layer of misremembered slosh, but somehow the imprint of past events lingers on in us. Our past marks us and shapes who we become. I suppose now I have to go back again around 2025 and see if anything remains. Maybe, if I look hard enough, I can find the boy in the red hat next time.
 
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