うみねこ連載随筆

Summer 1972.
A middle school student (let’s call him S) left the sticky summer heat of his home town in Kofu Basin to attend summer camp at the foot of the Southern Japan Alps. At summer camp, sixty students from all over the country gathered together to be divided into groups of 6-8. In their groups, they lived in tents and cooked their own meals, the idea being that they would develop various skills, make new discoveries and find solutions to whatever problems they might face. The students received name lists of their respective groups and gathered under the lead of an instructor on arrival.
The group S joined consisted of two students from Kanagawa Prefecture, one from Yamaguchi Prefecture, two from Tokyo, one from Shizuoka and one from Aomori. While everyone was introducing themselves at the initial meeting, S began to feel self-conscious about his closely cropped hair cut. It was something so trivial that there was no reason why the people around him would even notice. Yet for S, it was tough. The two students from Kanagawa were both attractive girls who looked like they’d come right off the television, and their sparkling presence just caused to further his discomfort. His accent, which he had never previously given much thought to, was pointed out to him for the first time. Children can be cruel. The instructor explained about the differences in dialects between areas, but his explanation was with an adult logic that meant nothing to the children. S had looked forward to summer camp, his heart full of anticipation, but the experience awaiting him on arrival was tough, and he learnt for the first time the unexpected limits of his knowledge and the sheer size of the world outside. S took to wearing his straw hat right down over his eyes.
S, who mistakenly thought that it would be embarrassing to reveal his true self in such a place, destroyed that hat one day. He had felt that by silently destroying his own hat, his own personality would not be uncovered. This is what happened. Summer camp, which ought to have been great fun, was gradually getting harder and harder until one day, one of the girls from Yokohama, a girl of his own age, whose smile was really too dazzling, asked him:
“Why do you always wear that hat?”
“Shall we call you “The Man with the Hat” from now on?”
Even after hearing such well-intentioned words, S was still immature and reacted badly. He protested, but she said:
“You know, you really should try taking the hat off sometimes. You look like a fun person without it. You look cool”.
It was intense. These were the words of an adult, a school teacher. All the immature S could do was blush. Then, as if to hide his blushes, he ripped up his hat and squatted on the ground. Yet this mysterious talk, talk which S had never experienced before in his life, continued further:
I made rice-balls for everyone the other day, do you remember? But I can’t cook - my mom never lets me help with the cooking at home. The rice-balls were really messy, weren’t they? Did you eat them anyway? I’m so embarrassed...

Perhaps this friendly, smiling, down-to-earth girl was just too dazzling for S. As he got up slowly, making wry comments to hide his embarrassment, she looked at him with sad eyes.

S, his hat still ripped, has had to grow up over the years, but the girl, who could be anywhere in the world right now, is still a girl, some thirty years later, smiling and saying:
“you should take your hat off sometimes”
It makes my heart ache a little.

My mother in law’s home is in a place called Hikari-cho in Sorasa-gun, looking out over Kujukuri in Chiba Prefecture. It’s situated on a small hill, with flat fields stretched out in front - at a glance, it’s the sort of typical farming landscape you can see anywhere in Japan. Nearby, there is a sparsely populated village with the unusual name of Musho, famous for its amateur dramatics known as Kiraigo (Welcoming the Devil). In 1976, Kiraigo, a performance which has been passed down by villagers for over 800 years, received the all important designation as an Intangible Cultural Property. This rare Buddhist play, which preaches the laws of retributive justice by recreating hell, is not at all difficult to follow, and in fact any one at all can be drawn into this unique world. The stage inside the temple is hand-made. There are no special seats for the audience _ everyone sits haphazardly on the floor, without mats. Being a small temple, it’s physically impossible to fit a hundred people inside, yet whether aware of this fact or not, both villagers and spectators from far away come in groups to watch the performance. The somewhat-overgrown car park is in fact one of the wider ridges between the rice paddies, yet nobody complains, despite the fact that cars can only exit one at a time, in the order in which they came in. There’s a general feeling that at last, the once-yearly excitement has finally returned to this sleepy village.
Kiraigo (also known as the Devil’s Dance), is performed by the villagers and children of Musho, so I worry whether it mightn’t be hard to keep the tradition going in that little village for another few hundred years. Maybe there’s a special group in charge of its preservation. Recently, though, I’ve heard that the lack of children has naturally cast a large shadow over this small village. The actors wear engraved masks “The Judgment King”, “The Keeper of the Judgment Book”, “The Devil”, “The Black Devil”, “The Red Devil” etc. and these characters all appear noisily on stage to a crash of the nyohachi (a type of cymbal used in Buddhist performances) and an unusual shout of hohoho. Such appearances remind one of the ostentation of kabuki, and in fact kiraigo is not just a Buddhist play but encompasses a liberal amount of entertainment factors too. The story is about the tortures of hell, Sai no Kawara, boiling cauldrons, Hari no Yama and also the Kannon Bodhisattva’s compassion and numen (spiritual force). The story is a bit too obvious to form the object of one’s life faith, but it’s one I hadn’t heard for a while, and it still feels fresh even now.

There is also a tradition that if the actor playing the “Devil” holds your infant in his arms during the play then he/she will grow up healthy, and so many parents bring their babies from far and wide just for this purpose. If the baby being held is too young, then they might not cry, as they don’t understand what’s going on, but some of the reactions of the older babies are very funny, especially such as when they burst into howls. If the child doesn’t cry, then the “Devil” will try and make them. This interaction and crying is a big hit with the spectators.

In the past, I took my children with me to watch Kiraigo. I thought that it was the sort of opportunity they wouldn’t get too often, and besides that, I was interested in seeing it for myself. Firstly, I explained the outline of the story to them. Yet, the moment it started, my eldest son (aged 8) ran out, saying “I don’t want to watch”. Obviously, hearing that if he did something bad, he’d go to hell, be judged, and (depending on how this went) be tortured gave him a somewhat guilty conscience. My second son (aged 4) watched meekly for a while, but then he too ran out suddenly, saying “that’s enough”. For him, it wasn’t so much the story, but the carved wooden masks that frightened him. After making sure that the boys were all right, playing in the park next to the temple, I returned to watch the show. I actually felt that they’d done me a favor. While watching, I could relax, and memories of my own childhood came flooding back to me. One memory in particular - when I was a child, my grandmother took me to pray at the family grave during the Obon festival and I saw many graphic pictures of hell inside the temple. “This is what happens to bad people” _ what a terrible threat to a child. After seeing those pictures I couldn’t sleep from fear for two or three nights. It’s unfair to drill such ideas of religious morals and ethics into kids at a young age. Because of that, my imagination of Akutagawa’s “The Spider’s Thread” and “Toshishun” etc was exactly the same as those bad dreams from my childhood. Putting myself in my sons’ place, I realized that watching a performance of Kiraigo is much more vivid and realistic than those pictures could ever have been. I expect that when children who grew up watching Kiraigo every year are introduced to Akutagawa’s works, their image is one of Kiraigo.

When the play ended and I went to look for the boys, they were still playing in the park and they didn’t hear when I told them it was time to leave. They were running around, so I had to run to catch them and I ended up getting angry. As we were walking back to my mother-in-law’s for dinner, my elder son sat down, complaining “I don’t feel well”. Nobody asked him, “are you ok?”. Various people said “Look, he’s been punished”. “That’s why you have to listen to what you’re told”. He felt bad because he’d run round in circles too much. Everyone was scolding him, smirking: “the Kiraigo Judgment King must have seen you”, so even my naughty elder son admitted defeat. But then he asked weakly, “Why is Ryu (his brother) ok then?”
“Ooh, I don’t know. Shall we ask the Judgment King?” I replied mischievously.
“No more…” my son pleaded!

In the car on the way home, whilst stealing a last glance at the village of Musho in the rearview mirror, I remembered the Black Dragon’s final words.
“When some die, they become Buddhas, leaving nothing behind but their name on their gravestone. But when some die, they are beaten by angry devils….
I don’t want to be beaten by an angry devil brandishing my gravestone.

Apparently camping outdoors has become quite a phenomenon in recent years _ in any case, our family, being no exception to the rule, has been camping quite a few times over the last two summers. Of course, we always take all the necessities with us. It’s really expensive. Obviously, I can’t take time off during the children’s summer holidays, so we go Sunday-Monday, and I go straight from the campsite to the clinic on the Monday morning. As a family, we peer over the camping guides, and spend much time each week debating where we are going to go next.

Of course I, being a genuine camper (albeit self-professed!) like to camp in the middle of the mountains where there’s no trace of civilization, and we have been to those sorts of places in the past, but my wife and children don’t like it. They always complain about little things like there’s no play area, there’s no shower, there’s no toilet…The concept of going camping yet maintaining a lifestyle as close as possible to one’s everyday life is probably a characteristic of those self-professed outdoor freaks, (whose numbers seem to have increased suddenly). Obviously, if you transport every aspect of your current lifestyle as it is into the mountains (I always go camping in the mountains _ for some reason going to the seaside seems like a cop-out, although I don’t know why) then it goes without saying its going to be comfortable. However, when I had a quick look at the next-door tent, (doesn’t the very fact that there was a tent next door to us show that this sort of camping isn’t the real thing?) I thought that, comparatively, we have brought nothing at all. Inside, they had their own electricity generator spinning, they were fully equipped with electric goods, they’d even brought their satellite TV antenna and while they were watching WOWOW I heard the “ping” of their microwave. Am I the only one who complains about this kind of thing?

Recently browsing through a book store I discovered an old book called “Initiation to the Art of Camping”. It was totally fascinating, full of tips on things from how to start a fire (when you don’t even have a match), to how to purify water, which mountain grasses safe to eat, how to set traps for hunting animals and how to prepare and cook what you catch, how to eat insects, etc etc _ a real ‘survival’ guide.

“This is what real camping is like’

When I showed this to my wife, she laughed at me.

“In this day and age?” That’s all she said.

At the end of this book was written the following: the aim of camping is that every single person works together to achieve a common goal. There’s the firewood-gatherer, the cook, the camp-builder, and various others. It ought to be a great educational experience for the kids. But, actually, the children aren’t a help (especially in our family, with my sons aged 8 and 4) when you bring them. At the very most, they will run round about chasing insects and such like. When it comes down to it, its Dad who gets all hot and sweaty, putting up the tent, Mom and Dad who prepare dinner, then go looking for the kids who have run off to tell them dinner is ready, then comfort the younger son when he starts crying that he wants to go home and put him to bed. Finally, it’s time to relax. Then, of course, the next day we have to tidy everything away again. When all’s said and done, exactly what is it that’s fun about camping?
I feel almost obliged to take the kids into the mountains to show off my camping skills, but when it comes down to it, I’m not too sure what these skills actually are. Probably this is the biggest problem with taking your kids camping.

At the height of summer, we set off as always en famille to Mt Hakkoda Tashiradaira. We passed the afternoon sitting under a cool tree, in terror of the falling caterpillars, with a group of youngsters camping close by who were eating and drinking noisily. At first I shrugged it off, thinking no doubt when I was younger I was just the same, but their noisiness just got worse and worse. Lacking the courage to yell a loud “Shut up”, we put up with the noise until they left. Yet the trash they left behind was so bad couldn’t believe it. Fragments of broken beer bottles littered the ground, and there I was garbage everywhere. What on earth had they been thinking of?

Afterwards, while picking up their rubbish with my kids, I said,
“Don’t you ever grow up like that”.
“No way. It’s disgusting” my kids replied.
Hearing this, I felt truly moved.

Whilst gazing at the star-filled sky, I wanted to talk about the transience of human life to them, but I figured that they were way too young for such talk. Yet my elder son exclaimed, “Wow! It’s so beautiful! The Milky Way!”
“Look, there’s a shooting star! There. Whoosh! It’s so quiet” observed my younger son.

Just by hearing these words from my children, it felt like all my hard work was worthwhile.
It’s fun taking your kids on camp.