The Japanese summer is the sound of 1000 cicadas in unison, so loud it cannot possibly be just some insects; it’s vast numbers of dragon flies, sortying across the sky in twos and threes and fours. It’s the sweet, sick smell of the drains; it’s scurrying across from one patch of shade to another; the icy thrill of stepping into an air conditioned room, and the wave of sweat that catches up with you when you finally stop moving. It’s being able to walk the streets at last as night falls, and it’s stepping out of a bar at 2am, and it still being hot. It’s watching baseball, eating edamame and drinking beer. It’s girls in yukata, off to watch fireworks, and a businessman in a suit, wiping his neck with a cloth. It’s taking a bottle of water from the vending machine, and holding it cold against your forehead. It’s temple music wafting across the evening air as you run across town.
Yesterday I was over at Kyoto University for a seminar, and as I was leaving I saw a huge, packed lecture hall, standing room only for a meeting to protest the government’s efforts to reinterpret the constitution on military matters. The doors were open and I could see the audience sat, fans going in the heat, but sticking it out into the early evening. It felt like a vision of another generation – student radicals ready to take on the government.
It’s the heat, and importantly the humidity, which is the most notable factor of the Japanese summer. It’s this that shapes when and where and how and what I get up to, day to day. But removed from the direct experience, the heat abstracts away until a memory remains that it was hot, but little memory of what it was like to be in that heat. The other things – the insect life, walking the streets in the evenings – these are what I think of when I think about the Japanese summer, at home in the winter in the UK.
I’ve been reading a little about scholarship on the senses. Last year in my course on travel and contact with Japan I ran a brief session where we tried to explore the non-visual experiences that travelers recorded. It was a bit experimental, but it has been on my radar to flesh it out and try to make a bit more of it for the year to come. Arriving in Japan has reinforced that impulse – it’s a reminder that arriving in a foreign place stimulates all the senses anew – strange smells wafting out of temples and homes as you pass, the sounds of the cicadas & who knows what else lurking in the bushes (monkeys!), and, as a result of the heightened awareness that comes with the sense of dislocation, even the strange feelings of one’s own body, aches that I wasn’t aware of.
Some of the literature stresses that, whilst we might perhaps be able to recreate the exact noise, or the food, or the dung heap of times gone by, we can’t ever recreate what those sounds, tastes, smells felt like and meant in relation to the broader context of that historic moment. It’s a good and important point. However, I do think that remembering & re-experiencing being a traveler oneself opens the door to a better understanding of the experiences of travelers of the past: perhaps we can’t grasp simply what they felt on encountering new places, but we can remain alert to the ways in which a new place awakens the senses anew. And that’s what I’m trying to explore with my students. Whilst an older model of scholarship, one perhaps aiming for objectivity, might shy away from bringing personal experience into one’s work so overtly, in the twenty-first century I think that we are more at home with the idea that the I is inextricably tied into whatever work that we do, for good or for ill.
Fireflies 