Unforgiving Slopes

It's sad to hear that at least four people lost their lives in the mountains this last weekend. Three out of a party  of six that was hit by an avalanche on Nagano's Mt. Shirouma Saturday morning went missing; as of Sunday morning two of them had been found dead. Another man died on Mt. Yatsugatake on the Nagano-Yamanashi border, and yet another man was found dead Sunday morning at the seventh station of Mt. Fuji.

With Golden Week just begun, I'm afraid that there will be more mountain-climbing fatalities. As the weather warms up just in time for the multiple-holiday period, and many flowers start to bloom, a lot of people decide to go trekking and climbing. Unfortunately, the weather also tends to encourage avalanches as well as climbers, so many places can be  more dangerous than they look.

The fellow on Mt. Fuji was climbing pretty early: the official season is generally only the months of July and August. Police have said that he apparently slipped and hit his head. It's not clear whether the fall killed him or whether he died of exposure while unconscious, but this early in the season the paths are treacherous with ice even where there's no snow, and the temperatures that high on the mountain can get very low, indeed. Even in June or September, nighttime temperatures drop well below zero Celsius.  The winds can be strong, too, and change direction suddenly. That combined with tricky footing--it's not uncommon for ice to melt and then refreeze around sunset, leaving a sheet of ice with a thin covering of volcanic gravel atop it--can make it all too easy to lose your balance and slip, tumble, and very likely hit one of the boulders scattered around the slope. This early in the year, the mountain huts are all closed, so there's not much hope of either help or adequate shelter, so off-season climbing is very dangerous, indeed.

It sounds as if the Shirouma climbing party was just unlucky; you can't really prepare for or avoid an avalanche. In hindsight, perhaps they should have been more wary and chosen a different place to climb, but it probably looked safe enough at the time. Yatsugatake is still pretty cold this time of year, and although it's not as tough a climb as many other spots, nor usually considered as risky, I know the area fairly well and it wouldn't be a place I'd go climbing this early in the year, myself. Certainly I wouldn't go alone.

I wrote around this time last year about Golden Week climbing accidents, in summer of 2009 about climbing accidents increasing, and elsewhere about the risks of climbing Mt. Fuji. The high country is beautiful, and trekking or climbing are really fun, but one has to be prepared, and sometimes even then things can go badly awry.

One can't live in fear, and avoiding all risks would make life rather too tame in my opinion, but at least I hope that this year I won't hear about any more mountain climbing deaths due to insufficient preparation or bad judgement.

Farewell to the Black Lion

The Black Lion pub in Meguro has been my "local", my favorite urban refuge from madness in madness, for most of the time since it opened in 1996.  It closed its doors for the last time a week ago, and I'm going to miss it, a lot.

I heard the bad news too late to attend the official  farewell party on the 16th, but I went instead to the last evening, the night of the 23rd, starting outside with canned beer brought by the early arrivals at 16:30, then moving inside at 17:30 when they opened the doors, finally staggering off into the morning sunlight at 06:30 or so.

The place filled up as the sky darkened; as many of the old and new regulars as could make it packed the place, and made a brave effort to drink up whatever stock was left. All of the draft beer was gone before midnight, most of the bottled beer disappeared soon after, and those of us who could not--or would not--rush for the last train and instead elected to stay until the bitter end...well, we managed to do away with most of the spirits. After the last of the scotch and Irish (and JD, too) was gone, as it became fully light outside, I finished up with several pints of "Parachutes", tequila and grapefruit juice, which had been the signature drink of D.B. Cooper's, an Aoyama tequila bar, another much-mourned now-defunct hangout from the late '90s. It seemed fitting, somehow. Besides, there wasn't much else left to drink.

I drank the last one standing at the end of the back bar, where I used to park the bike, among the sawhorses and lumber, back when the Black Lion was still under construction. At the time, since they didn't have their liquor license yet (or a bar or tables, for that matter), we pulled beers from a cooler and left money in a bucket labeled "construction fund donations". Having the last drink where I'd had the first provided a nice symmetry, it seemed to me.

It also seemed fitting, in a call-back to days of yore, that I had to go directly from there to go teach a class (I drank lots of coffee on the two-hour train ride). I was pleased to see that I can still manage that with acceptable aplomb and decorum. I don't think that I could still do it several times a week as used to be the case, back in The Bubble Days and their aftermath, back when the Black Lion was brand-new, back when I was somewhat younger, and only a little more  foolish. Well, I still could, I guess, but not as well or easily, and not always with appropriate decorum. Nor with impunity. It's my birthday today, and not my twentieth nor even my twenty-fifth nor fortieth, more's the pity. But the Black Lion, even after a great run, didn't make it to eighteen.

So what was the last night at the Black Lion like?

The evening was a kind of microcosmic recapitulation of the entire history of the bar, a fast-forward déjà vu multi-memory-mimicking  montage compressed into a little more than a dozen hours: long-suffering stalwart barman Scott presiding over a steadily rising tide of revelry and weirdness...lots of booze flowing...the usual scattering of hopeful predators and more-or-less coy prey, doing the hunter/hunted dance with varying degrees of discretion and of success and some on-the-fly role reversal...lots of laughter...lots of crying...lots of booze flowing...lots of "have you met my best friend in the whole world?"...an utterly senseless fight or two to break up...lots of music including a couple of apparently impromptu live singer/guitarist performances...lots of booze flowing...tales retold of escapades and adventures reflected in the bar mirrors and fueled by the bar stock...hugs and backslaps and handshakes and bites...shouts and whispers...lots of booze flowing...lots of declarations of undying friendship/respect/love...lots of booze flowing...and failed plumbing, mercifully near the end of the evening...er...morning.

And the hard bright low-angle unforgiving dawnlight at the end.

An appropriately epic final farewell friendly frenzy. I'm glad I didn't miss it.

But I'll miss the Black Lion.

Two Years and Counting

There are about 315,000 people living in temporary housing today, two years after the earthquake, tsunami, and multiple nuclear power plant meltdown spread destruction across Tohoku and fear even further. I've seen some of that temporary housing, and it's aptly named. While far better than the school gym or public hall alternatives they replace--and there are still people living in emergency, not temporary, "housing" as far away as Saitama--they're neither fancy nor inexpensive to build, as you can see in Phil Brasor's and Masako Tsubuku's article in their Yen for Living blog. Two years is a long time to live in cramped, mostly pre-fabricated places, thrown into communities very different from those in which you've lived most of your life, with little more charm than the refugee camps they are.

There are also many areas at least partially reliant on volunteer donations of food, water, and labor, such as the Minami-Soma area with which I'm most familiar.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has promised to speed up reconstruction, but he's also pretty clearly aiming at restarting the nuclear power plants around Japan as part of his "Abenomics" policy. My best guess is that the former will be viewed skeptically and the latter disdainfully at best, particularly among the 57,000 people who have not yet returned to Fukushima, as well as among those who live there but cannot return to, or rebuild, or in some cases ever even approach their homes. Abe's Liberal Democratic Party made lots of promises during its decades-long run as the ruling party, and has been an integral part of the "nuclear village" which through arrogance, denial, misinformation, mismanagement, naivete, falsification, cover-ups, and outright lies was largely responsible for the position in which, for example, the one-time residents of Futaba, Fukushima--now living in a defunct high school in Kazo, Saitama, find themselves.

That's the same LDP whose party politics of obstructionism is at least partly to blame for the delay in reconstruction. Yes, I know that they were then the opposition party. I also know that "reaching across the aisle" and "consensus building" and "keeping the greater good of the citizens" only really plays in speeches, not in the real life of Nagatacho. I consider myself a cynical realist, and I suspect there are a lot of people in Tohoku who share my view of politicians and--especially--bureaucrats, but the victims of the disaster deserve considerably more common decency from the government, even though based on experience they have precious little reason to expect it, particularly from the LDP.

The right to live in temporary housing has been extended for another year. Few if any of the residents have much real hope of being able to find better housing anytime soon, even if they can somehow gather the funds with which to do it. There is plenty of determination still, and plenty of tough people committed to somehow getting along, getting better if at all possible. There are not a lot of reasons to harbor hope, and plenty of reasons to despair...which makes their determination in the face of relentless stress all the more admirable.

Much of the debris from the disaster has been hauled away. "Much" is not "all" by any means, however: there are still ships perched atop seawalls, vehicles rusting in the middle of what used to be rice paddies, gutted shells of buildings, vast areas scoured of all but foundations, and fast-filling "temporary" storage spaces for trash, not a little of which is contaminated to various degrees by radiation. An NHK documentary recently showed contaminated topsoil and debris being disposed of by being wrapped in vinyl sheets and "temporarily" buried in private gardens, for lack of space elsewhere.There are insufficient resources of people, equipment, and money for clearance, much less rebuilding. There is also very little progress on finding space for and building facilities--even interim, much less permanent ones--for storage of more seriously radiation-contaminated debris.

Nevertheless, in many of the devastated areas people are working to rebuild their businesses and provide jobs for themselves and their neighbors. The efforts are often hampered by difficulty in attracting labor and investment.They are also hampered, much less forgivably, by red tape of all sorts, often exacerbated by bureaucratic turf wars and/or inertia.

The excellent Shisaku blog has a collection of useful, and at least to me disheartening, statistics. I sincerely hope that both he and I will have much better news to report at this time next year. Meanwhile, I will continue to do what I can to help. I wish that it were more, and I really wish that the government could be relied upon to match their promises with swift and decisive action.

It has been two years, and the Tohoku victims are still counting. It's a pity that they can't count on their government.

Winding Ahead, Not Down

May all of you have a very happy, healthy, and especially prosperous New Year!

This is--or soon will be, if you follow the traditional oriental calendar--the Year of the Snake. Specifically, this will be the year of the Water Snake, when the Snake is said to be influenced by the element of water. I'm not a believer in astrology, whether Eastern or Western, but the association of the Snake with prosperity, and with a resolute cunning geared toward success, is a good match for my hopes for the coming year.

The winding progress of a snake doesn't always make it obvious what direction it's taking, or how soon it will reach its destination. The most direct route isn't always the best one, though, to reach one's goals.

I hope that both your and my relatives, friends, and loved ones find prosperity and happiness in 2013. May it be filled with good fortune and excitement every day.