Monday afternoon here in olde Nagoyaland...sunny and humid, with not a sign of the aforementioned and promised "mother of all typhoons", which is, as we speak, dilly-dallying out in the Pacific, somewhere south east of here. Some kind of massive dousing is on the way....but that was supposedly the case for yesterday...and aside from an hour or so in the afternoon, it was a non-event.
Not quite knowing what to do, we decided to go out to the Nagoya City Museum, which is just a fifteen minute bike ride from where we are. My wife had been talking about seeing the exhibition of wall frescoes from the excavations in and around Pompeii after the Renoir show up at The Nagoya-Boston Museum of Art last weekend, so it seemed like the thing to do on a possibly dodgy Sunday afternoon. Apparently, we're getting our late summer dose of culture in.
It was my first time over there, and the facility is huge. It also seemed like a good chunk of the local population just happened to have the very same idea...so it was all crowding, shuffling and jockeying for position to eye the roughly 80 piece collection of mostly fractured, incomplete wall murals and sections. As I've mentioned before, the concept of deodorant doesn't really seem to have caught on over here, and with each passing year, the distinct need for this situation to be remedied seems to be becoming more apparent. I would have hoped that anyone with a tendency toward emitting a powerful brand of b.o., whilst planning on visiting a crowded museum on a damp, humid Sunday, might also consider applying some kind of masking agent, cologne or perfume before venturing forth...but, no...no,no,no. For some reason, this type of forethought rarely (if ever) occurs among the J-locals. Recently, I hear that this is all actually OUR fault. We 'gaijin', that is. According to more than one of the local 'experts' that I've spoken to, this is, indeed, a more 'recent' phenomenon. Back in the old days, before the advent of rotary fans, and later, air conditioners, when Japan was 'pure', the J-natives all worked and toiled dutifully in the stultifying summer heat and humidity, and everyone smelled like a fresh spring breeze. That's because they all ate a traditional Japanese diet, which is healthy and righteous, and doesn't morph into foul odour producing toxic sludge in your guts. In the last 70 odd years, the 'westernisation' of the Japanese diet has led to all manner of degradation. Diseases, smells, fat distorted bodies...even behaviours that were never, ever witnessed before, are becoming commonplace. The new scourge of Japan...courtesy of the dread, but inescapable 'gaijin menace'.
I suppose I should invest in a gas mask or respirator before our next cultural foray. As for the exhibit, it was well curated, and, if first century Roman wall murals are your thing, a must see. I was amazed at how well some of the more delicate brush work and pigments had stood the test of time...but admittedly, I've always had a bit of a morbid fascination with the demise Pompeii, Herculaneum, et al...so, for me, this was the main attraction. Being an art exhibit, unfortunately there were no petrified Pompeiians with their dogs - frozen in time, recoiling in fear from the descent of scorching, gaseous pyro-clastic flows, or the like. Just the simple idea that this art had survived such a calamity, and stood, relatively intact, for us to peruse some 2000 years on.
The exhibition tickets also got us a free pass to go upstairs and wander the rather extensive museum of local history, which was fortunate, as it had decided to piss down outside, and we had neglected to bring umbrellas. Alas - there were skulls and bones, and archaeological pieces from around olde Nagoyaland dating back tens of thousands of years, straight through the wartime era, and into the mid-twentieth century period of post-war reconstruction.
Some of the small ancient funerary bits and pieces on display had been excavated not far from where we live...an area has been steadily inhabited since the stone age, and which was also the location of a military industrial site up to and through WW2. This whole part of town was bombed heavily through 1945, and reduced to a smoking pile of ashes, along with the surrounding districts. Amazingly, walking around the local area, it's still possible to find traces of that conflict here and there...often accompanied by small plaques explaining what this or that building had been used for, or what this bullet riddled, twisted piece of metal or concrete originally was; how it came to be so mangled, and how that should never be permitted to happen again.
Even after so many years, this stuff trips me out.
Among the WW2-era pieces in the museum were a set of children's drawings from this period that really spoke volumes. One particular young illustrator could give Edvard Munch or Francisco Goya a serious run for their money. The horror and poverty of war, through the eyes of a child. The meticulous detail in the drawings of B-29 bombers dropping their payloads on a burning city, as the distorted faces of the children, in their patched and ragged clothes screamed and wept in the foreground. Impact. It's interesting to see all of this from the other side. Having grown up in Canada, and learned this history from a western perspective, it's easy to form a rather shuttered view of the goings on of the past. In my years over here, I've also had more than one occasion to hear the stories of those children...now seniors in their late 70's, or older.
One of my former students spoke of being 10 years old, and watching a military plane with big white stars on it's wings fly low, right over his house...and the sound of explosions shaking the ground in the distance. This was April,1942...and the first time that Japan had been bombed by the Americans...a swipe at the Japanese home island in response to the Pearl Harbour attack that December. The Doolittle Raid.
Another student spoke of being a young girl, living not far from a P.O.W. internment camp outside of Nagoya City...and how American planes would fly over and airdrop big crates on parachutes for the prisoners...and how, on one particular occasion, a crate missed it's mark, and came down in a field near where they were staying. The local kids all rushed out to see what it was, but were cautioned back by the adults, who broke the container open to find things like coffee, chocolate, cigarettes, tinned meat, and other provisions. Being that the locals were basically starving, they wanted at it, but were shooed off by the military police...the feared Kempeitai (think Gestapo), who forbid anyone to touch it, as they said that it was 'poison'.
The stories of children, through the mouths of the aged. History is an amazing thing.
As we wound our way through the last of the local displays, the showers had subsided, and my wife was eager to get out of there, and hoof it back home on our bikes before the promised main event downpour, and a soaking that we would never forget. Cue forward 24 hours. It still hasn't happened. Oh, well.There's always tomorrow...and the first day of autumn season kindergarten classes. Seems fitting that this promised 'mother of all typhoons' would wait until then. Sigh.
Until next time.
