epithet often applied to the areas of country facing the Japan Sea is "the back of Japan," while the Pacific side is called the "front," because it faces toward the West. From the end of the Tokugawa period, around 1867, the West was perceived as more advanced than either China or the Korean Peninsula, both of which had previously been the main direction of trade and played, of course, a major seminal role in the development of Japanese culture.
It is because of this area's present remoteness and the fact that it has largely been ignored in the modern era that it has become the repository of a very rich and ancient culture, which has only in recent times begun to be eroded by twentieth-century consumerism—the enemy of all holistic cultures. The fact that Noto is only now becoming of interest to scholars and writers is, unfortunately and depressingly, an indicator of its imminent demise—the "culture vultures" circling over it in its death throes. And here I am, I suppose, sharing these same carrion-scented thermals!
♦ Sora Village
The village of Sora stands within the sheltering crook of the peninsula on a small inlet into which the confluence of the two small rivers that passed our house flows and which opens into the bay where Noto Island is located. The village itself faces south across this sheltered bay and toward the island, Nanao Bay, and the Tateyama Mountains beyond.
There are no services with regard to bus, taxi, or railway station in or near the village, since the railway makes a detour around it. Taxis have to drive in from the town of Anamizu, some sixteen kilometers away, and most of the aged inhabitants either walk or ride bicycles to and from neighboring villages.
The village consists of about eighty houses. On one side it faces the sheltered waters of the bay, which are the fishing grounds of the village's tiny fishing fleet of small boats. And at its back are densely forested hills that rise up like lumpy islands out from the small, flattened valleys formed by the rice fields. On some areas of the higher ground, the trees have been cleared to make way for tobacco fields and the occasional chicken or dairy farm, owned by incomers to the area according to the vagaries of the agricultural policies of successive governments. Here are the remains of several derelict chicken farms, with the haunted ambience of abandoned concentration camps.
At one end of the village is the Shinto shrine, set atop a small wooded hill, standing just back from the village itself. At the other end of the village is an ancient Buddhist temple of the Shingon sect. It stands at the top of a flight of stone steps with its back to the forest, just across the road from the water's edge, commanding a view across the bay to the sacred mountain of Tateyama. Both provide the poles of spiritual focus that form the village's religious life.
♦ The Name "Sora"
When we first moved into Sora, on my inquiry someone told us that Sora was named after one of the pupils of the great haiku poet Matsuo Bashō. Sora had been Bashō's traveling companion on his famous journey, described through linked prose and haiku in his famous Narrow Road to the Deep North. Sora was supposed to have stayed in a house in the area at some time during his life.
Of course, this idea greatly appealed to me, until we discovered that it had no basis in fact and that a study of the characters forming the name suggests "a place in front of a cliff." The most likely possibility offered, however, is that it was named by a local samurai family who, moving to the area from a nearby village called Asora, named the place they resettled "Sora." There does appear to be some historical evidence for this, but it remains speculative. No one we asked really seemed to know.
The reaction of many of the people we met in local towns and other villages, when they inquired as to where we lived, was one of surprise and often shock. "Sora?!" Often adding, "How inconvenient!" They simply could not understand why an educated Tokyo-born woman and a Western man would want to live in such a poor, remote village with no nearby "cultural center." What they expressed was the fact that they failed to recognize the very importance of villages like Sora.
As portrayed in myth, folk, and fairy tales, and well understood in alchemy and psychotherapy, it is often that which is despised, overlooked, and ignored wherein lies the greatest treasure. To me, this is precisely what Sora represents. In spite of all the great storehouses of Japanese culture in the cities of Japan, including those that are synonymous with the culture itself, such as Kyoto and Nara (both ancient capitals), it is in Sora, and in the little places like it elsewhere in Japan, that what I believe to be the last remnants of true living Japanese culture remain. Not as a quaint anachronism in a largely Westernized mainline consumer society, but a place where it is still ordinary everyday life—a way of living, still firmly rooted in the Japanese soil and under the tutelage of its ancient gods, and not a comfortable cul-de-sac of cultural and religious lip-service.
The tragedy is that it is now autumn in these villages, with the penumbra of the shadow of winter already fast descending. And with the demise of the present generation of elders, when that winter's snows have melted so too will have most of the traces of an albeit hard way of life, but with it all the beauty, skills, knowledge, wisdom and faith of a noble people.
This is in no way to romanticize a life of frequent privation—the very conditions of which, in fact, temper it physically and spiritually—but to recognize a life filled with suffering, happiness, humor, and gratitude for that very kind of life, and a meaning that transcends the very concept of the word, wherein the meaning is in the life lived. This is a way of living that we have largely forgotten and the "meaning" of which we desperately need to find ways to reconnect with, in lives which have become, and continue to be, increasingly trivialized and disoriented.
Often, visiting the homes and work places of the old people of the village, I was struck by the difference between aesthetics born out of necessity, practicality, and aging through generations of use—where the objects that make up and define the living / working environment are evidence of a continuity of living, often hard and poor from the perspective of today's standards and values— and those found in the places we now generally inhabit.
♦ The House
Most of the houses in the village, with a few exceptions, are old houses. These are traditionally built of cedar-wood frames between which are lathes of bamboo tied with rice straw. The lathes are plastered with a three-layer mixture of clay and rice straw to form the house walls. This is a more sophisticated version of the familiar European wattle-and-daub technique.
For the first layer, rice straw is chopped into small pieces and then mixed with clay and left for a year to soften the straw. After a year, it is reworked and spread over the lathes and left to dry. The next layer consists of very finely cut straw mixed with clay that has a little sand added to it. Finally, a layer of sandy clay, with local color added and bound with a glue obtained by boiling funori (a type of seaweed), is smoothed over the first two layers. Many houses then have these walls clad with cedar weatherboards.
In the old days, all the houses were thatched. While examples still remain scattered throughout the peninsula, all the houses in Sora are now tiled. Examples of the original old tiles are still borne by many of the roofs in the village, and they have a natural warmth in their color and form, compared to the mass-produced tiles of today.
The houses are mainly two-storied, and the living area is partitioned into separate tatami-floored rooms by the use of paper-covered sliding doors called karakami (or fusuma). This provides a versatile space in which the size and number of rooms can be changed according to the needs of the moment. For example, in the event of gatherings and parties the karakami can be either opened or removed altogether to provide a space almost as large as the ground floor. This does mean, however, that there is little privacy living in a traditional Japanese house.
At least one room in the house will feature a tokonoma, an alcove in which a scroll depicting a religious subject or the appropriate seasonal scene will be
