Japan, Part 2

The second of a three-part series exploring family, history, and travel in my return to Japan.

Sean Thor Conroe is a Japanese-American writer born in Tokyo in 1991. His debut novel Fuccboi was published by Little, Brown in 2022. He has guest edited New York Tyrant Magazine and hosts the book podcast 1storypod.

MONDAY, MAY 19

It's been two weeks since I've been back stateside. It's Monday. Amelia left for Philly on Saturday to see her mom and shoot a movie. She's been staying at mine since we got back. I've been saying “I can finally work” now that Amelia has gone traveling, jokingly, of course jokingly, but also totally incorrectly so far, since yesterday I was dead all day from turning up too hard with Harold for no good reason on Saturday night, he's younger and stronger and I try to keep up and do for a while till out of nowhere I get blindsided by the projectile vomit I instinctually try to catch in my hands—that I fail to catch in my hands—at which point I have to go, I think I’m done, bro, I’m out.

So yesterday I couldn’t do shit.

I've just gone to the store and gotten new pencils and pens and a notebook. I'm writing in it now. I started with pen, but just now switched to pencil. Amelia forgot her pencil sharpener here, I got it in Japan for her early on in the trip, at the beginning of April, before we knew we were going to meet up out there. It works super well and has a little receptacle that catches the shavings and little puffy, differently-colored animated creatures depicted on the front of it. Writing with pencil is best because, as you're writing, you're constantly reminded that you only have so many words, so much lead.

Which incidentally was exactly how traveling felt: acutely aware of your transience, of time passing. A natural motivation to act and love and move deliberately and intentionally each day. A sense, what with the passing of my baba and the fact of my sister and her babies and my mom and dad being together after all that time, of things that seemed triggering in the past no longer seeming so. There was too little time to spend angry.

This was the energy I was on. And retained, I feel, over the past fortnight back here in New York.

Till yesterday, with Amelia gone, I could feel myself plummeting back into my old orientation towards the world, of how things felt before. Of taking time for granted, of falling into timewasting habits. Writing this to remind myself how things felt in Japan, to remember everything I don't want to forget.

DRINKING IN JAPAN

In truth, it hadn’t all been roses and daisies getting to the point of pulling off the conjugal overseas meetup. We’d gotten into a nasty fight not a fortnight before we met up. It was days after I touched down, just hours postfuneral, a day of ritual and remembrance and quiet grieving, certainly, but also as it so happened a day of steady ceremonial imbibing, since high noon more or less, at the crematorium to start, then on the late-afternoon walk back from baba’s to the family bnb after dropping off the urn I as firstborn grandson was required to carry—I carried it back to baba’s—only I'd accidentally taken the lone key they all needed to get back into the bnb, and so the day drinking was compounded by the 9% strong seltzer “road can” I copped for the walk back, about a mile, at a brisk clip once I learned they were locked out, a pleasant walk past a long park I'd never seen before—

All to say, I was already on a belligerent one in my conversation with Amelia that first night, which destabilized things some.

Then the following day we went back for another meal at my uncle Nobu's, that I matched Nobu’s whiskey and beer intake during, out of respect, and then that night I had a video work meeting that I went into already sparked, it had to be late because of the time difference, and it went well, and I was feeling so exuberant and ALIVE in a way that must be connected to having buried and cremated your baba the day before and then sipped a whole bunch of whiskey the following day—it was that night that we got into our first terrible fight.

OUR FIRST TERRIBLE FIGHT

Amelia FaceTimed me coming back from dinner with some friends out in Bali. She might've had some drinks, too. I was being brash and careless, more just flippant and whiskey-ed and insensitive. She sensed this and said, Are you drunk? And then, when I laughed: I'm going to go now. And then she hung up. She didn’t necessarily hang up on me, in that she said she was gonna before she did. But I felt like she did. I tried calling back and she sent it to voicemail, and I just unloaded with some texts. Right when we'd been going so well, too, that morning we'd been at this mall with the babies and I'd gotten a whole drawing set for her, pencil and sharpener and eraser, and though I hadn't told her, she must have felt this, she was out all day trying on dresses and was sending me cute selfies of herself in new dresses all day. Only now I’d ruined it.

~

The following morning, our final morning at the family bnb, we were set to travel out to Chiba for two nights and stay on the water in a beach town, Torami. The idea initially was that my mom would be slammed logistically with funeral tasks, so it would be good for us to clear out for a couple days and then come back to Kasai when things were more settled. At the last minute, my mom decided she was going to join us.

But so I get up hungover as shit and we’re all scrambling to get packed and cleaned by checkout, I'm in my room trying to take stock of all my stuff while simultaneously uploading the week's podcast since I don't know when I'll have stable Wi-Fi again, but little Selah doesn't realize this and he just wants to play the game where he comes into my room and takes all my stuff and throws it everywhere so that I become “the monster,” he wants to play “the monster game,” only “it's not time for that Selah, we're not playing that game right now,” lifting him up and placing him outside into the hall and closing the door. Only I don’t see Toto right behind him, following his every move, and right as I'm closing the door, something seems off. It's little Toto's finger in the gap on the backside of the hinge, and I do stop closing it at the very last minute, but not before definitely closing it a little onto Toto’s precious little finger, and then it's two hours of kissing Toto's boo-boo, of complete panic, convinced I’ve crushed it, and I feel worse and angrier at myself than I can remember feeling, and I think this HAS to be karma for all the garbage I texted Amelia yesterday—

And so all of that travel day and the first night I’m trying to send Amelia apology texts. Nothing is working...

TORAMI

We take two short trains from Kasai and then at Tsudaname take the long rapid train out to Torami. A couple hours in all. On the outskirts of Chiba, in Ichinomiya Prefecture, facing west onto the Pacific. It quickly becomes countryside, rice fields with intermittent houses with older architecture. We commandeer a full train row and the one across from it. I try to listen to The Tale of Genji on audiobook but quickly pass out. It’s been just four days since flying out here and it’s been a nonstop bender.

It was like this last time, in 2015. I was twenty-four, it was a year after walking across country, I’d worked all that year making coffee at a bakery, and then finished up my degree at UCSC while renting a room out of the house I grew up in, that belonged to Diana, the woman with cerebral palsy my mom worked as a live-in caretaker for. I was deciding whether to move in with a girlfriend or buy a van and live in that. There was this uncertainty of transition I was feeling—of an era ending, not dissimilar to this present trip—not to mention the strange unresolved feeling of being back in this pre-consciously familiar environment I was nonetheless only marginally able to communicate in. Add to that the dread/fear of going to visit my dad for the first time since he’d left the states…

But there isn’t any of that frantic energy this time. There are babies around so no one has the luxury of acting like baby.

The owner of the beach house we’re renting picks us up from the Torami train station. In a camper van with a drop down bed in the back. We squeeze in. There are so many little trinkets and souvenirs on the back of the front seats, I almost don’t notice the small TV screen initially. It’s playing surfing highlights. Toto had been getting squirmy in the backseat after the long journey. I go, “Look,” pointing out the screen when I notice it. She goes immediately quiet and starts watching the surfers, mesmerized.

~

The beach house has a big backyard and a covered porch and then a second covered barbeque area on the side surrounding an astroturfed, fenced-in lawn. The ocean a few blocks away, across a two-lane highway. We sit out in the sun.

There’s even a barrel sauna on offer, but that costs extra.

My dad has been on this, saunas and cold plunges and sun bathing. He’s got a sauna on his land up in Hokkaido and runs a bnb side-business out of it, hosting people to do a sweat literally overlooking the ocean. Every morning, he claims, no matter how cold out it is, he sunbathes nude out back behind his sauna.

The babies nap, and we go about figuring out the coffee situation. There are Nespresso capsules, plus a type of instant that’s a “latte,” coffee with evaporated milk somehow incorporated. There’s too much going on to stay frustrated about upsetting Amelia. Even when the babies are napping—they could wake up at any moment. I announce that I’m going to make a coffee and my mom and sister say they’re going to, too, or that they want one, I say “OK,” or “Nice, I’m gonna make one.” I thought we were doing like a “using the bathroom first” type situation, I don’t know if they mean they want one right this second. Shiina comes out ten minutes later after putting the babies down and goes, Where’s my coffee? My dad and I both have our shirts off and are leaning back in the recliner sun chairs, facing the sun.

“I mean...”

“I thought you were...”

Shiina and my mom stand there like tsk tsk, selfish men as always—returning to our dynamic from growing up, towards my dad for not being there, towards me for being the only boy in a house with sometimes up to five women, including Diana and her other caretakers—before going inside.

Biking to the conbini in Torami

~

A SHIFT

We try talking that night but it doesn’t go well. And then the next afternoon I ignore her call. That’s when all hell breaks loose. We’d spent the day walking to the beach in the morning, and then playing soccer in the backyard. There’s a swing back there, too, only it’s got concrete beneath it and transitions abruptly from concrete to astroturf, there’s a jagged dangerous edge right at the nadir of the swing, not to mention it’s set too close to the house to swing back without hitting the house. I come up with this game where I catch Toto at the highest point, and then push her while still kind of holding her to ensure she doesn’t fall, pausing at the beginning of each swing to make a game of it. She just loves it, she can’t stop laughing. Then Selah comes over and insists I return to soccer. Only for Toto to come up to me in the cutest way, all focused and determined, taking my hand and leading me back to the swing. I didn’t mean to ignore her call—I had my hands full.

And so little time with all of us together. After dinner I drink a bit more, I took the bike to the nearby conbini, biking through rice fields, I got snacks for Shiina so it wasn’t totally selfish, there’s a children’s book in the house that’s like a giraffe and all these different animals, and we sit on the couch and read it through a couple times. Toto keeps turning the pages all fast, she reads in this way where she only looks at each page for a second before laughing and turning it, and tomorrow we’ll head back to Tokyo and my dad and I will catch a flight up to Hokkaido and my sister and the babies will head back to baba’s for a night and then head back to LA. I just can’t be having daily fights rehashing everything that happened in the past, trying to prove we’re right, I say, we can call off the Japan plan, you’re right, I’m wrong, but we can’t do this anymore.

This energy shifts something, snaps us out of some accusatory loop we’d been caught in. After some tears and declarations of commitment, we’re back on a calm, if tentative one.

Walking back from dinner that night, it’s a Tonkatsu shop right on the highway there, the ocean on the other side, quiet and dark and the stars are out, and the moon rising a week from full, and Selah is going is that baba up there? And Shiina says yes that’s baba, she’s up there now, see? And Selah goes how did she get up there? And Shiina says she flew up there. One day we’ll fly up there and join her.

Tonkatsu in Torami

WEDNESDAY, MAY 21

Wednesday now. Amelia went to Maryland for her little sister’s graduation. She’s experiencing a family gathering in the same way I did that week in Torami, she was venting to me and feeling triggered and I told her it’s okay, it’s what everyone experiences with their family, only she wasn’t really hearing me. When you’re in a particular, difficult circumstance it’s not helpful to realize that it’s universal. But that makes it all the more important to share about your difficult particular experiences, courageously and honestly, it helps others find the universal in their own particular experience.

~

Things went way different last I was out here. My dad didn’t have a house yet, he was renting out this spartan apartment, like low income housing, on the edge of town. It was a three-day visit rather than eleven, on the tail end of turning up all week in Tokyo with my sister the week before. We got so drunk off whiskey together, I remember, we got into a huge fight. In my defense, it was a real bomb that he dropped on me that sparked the fight—that my great grandpa, his grandpa, about whom I knew nothing growing up, whom even he barely knew anything about due to how private my grandpa was about his childhood, but just learned, took his own life when my grandpa was 1. And “Conroe,” both our surnames, was the name of my grandpa’s stepdad, who my great grandma married when my grandpa was 8.

The rootlessness of this discovery, which my dad relayed to me unthinkingly, belligerently, that first night, he was feeling stunned by the discovery himself. At the time, I’d get so upset by how absent and groundless he was, never providing a solid foundation, he shouldn’t have shared it so loosely. And this discovery gave his actions a genetic, predetermined quality. This was 2015, so he’d have been moved out there since 2012 after trying and failing to become a priest and finding himself out of money and scrambling to survive, living out of a house in San Francisco his brother, my uncle Mark, owned but hadn’t rented out yet. It wasn’t till my grandma passed in 2017 that my dad inherited the means to buy a house out there in the small fishing village in Hokkaido. And not until a year or so ago that he’s been working out and mostly sober and laying off the cigs.

We get all packed that last day in Torami and take the train back to Tokyo and see my mom and sister and the babies off at the Kasai station, before gearing for the trek up north. It’s around noon. We’ve got almost an hour to kill before the airport bus. We get kebabs from the Kasai station there and wait. It’s April 9.

~

AINU EASTER

The plan is, I’ll stay till April 20, Easter Sunday, and then fly back down to Tokyo to spend 10 days with my mom at my baba’s. Or in an airbnb if Amelia and I can work things out and she decides to come join me. My dad and his wife, Sono, have planned a trip the last weekend to drive all the way across Hokkaido to the eastern coast, they’ve been together since he moved out here, I’ve only met her a couple times. She’s out of town—incidentally down in Tokyo to visit her son, who is grown now—the first few nights I’m up there. “So we’ll be on our own for food the first nights,” my dad tells me like delivering grave news, sparking up his pickup in the long term airport parking lot, a gravel expanse surrounded by trees, after the two-hour flight and a shuttle.

Long-term parking

It’s a Japan-only Toyota with a six-foot bed and a tiny cockpit. It’s faster to take the expressway across the island, along the coast, but we cut through, up and over the mountain, to evade the tolls. It’s noticeably colder up here, the air has a frosty sting, and there’s snow on the switchbacked summit. It’s ainu country, the indigenous natives of Japan, who hailed from up here on this northern island. There are only about 10K recorded ainu left since being assimilated. This is a big part of the trip across Hokkaido we have planned, Sono wants to take us to the ainu museum there on the far coast.

I’ve been on a mythological kick, reading the earliest Greek and Roman and Judeo Christian stories, trying to understand the gospels from an anthropological viewpoint, to understand how the Christ story ties into the earliest seasonal festivals. We’re coming up on Easter, the vernal full moon is this Sunday, and Easter is of course the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. These are all spring festivals to do with death and rebirth, and of course my baba’s birthday was the first day of spring only she died five days before, and yet it feels like everything is being renewed again on this trip, our relation to each other feeling recurrent yet clearly distinct, my dad isn’t just trying to be the “cool dad” doing whatever I’m on, smoking cigs, drinking, like he’d do whenever he’d pop up in the past, but rather has cultivated himself over this time away. He’s adamant about his changes, especially now that we’re going back into his actual life with Sono. “We’ll find you a spot to smoke, but if you could try to keep it down to a minimum,” he says as we pass vast gorges, stretches of road still coated with snow. This almost triggers me but there’s also something sweet about it, he keeps trying to pawn off these OD 20mg cherry cola Zyns on me, and that he bought in bulk online. “I’m all good with my smokes,” I say. “But thank you.”

Around the end of the drive, emerging out of a tunnel onto Lake Toya, I’m hit with the thought that we really are being reborn this Easter week, we’re embodying new roles, I’m “uncle” now, my mom and dad are “gigi and baba,” and my sister is “mom.” To say nothing of whatever rebirth is happening with Amelia. It’s real, this seasonal story of death and renewal.

And yet, all these mythological stories are based off of agricultural practices. Easter is spring because harvests. The ainu, I can’t help but realize, driving past white pines so close together you can’t see how far back they go, never made the jump to growing crops, never razed the land. They stayed hunting and gathering much longer. I can’t imagine how they survived in this terrain.

It’s a different awareness, a nonstop battle with the elements, I’ve gotta learn how they managed to survive.

~

THE ONSEN

It’s a small but beautiful house, corrugated steel and big second-floor windows facing out on the ocean. A small sauna out back, feet from the cliff’s edge. The first two nights, without Sono around, we subsist on our grocery run the first day and 7-Eleven and the restaurant at Shiosai, the onsen (public baths) in town. On Saturday, my dad cranks the sauna and we get in there for some good few rounds and lay out in the sun.

Laying out in the sun

My dad is insistent on going nude, it makes sense since onsens in Japan are all separated by gender and full nude, we were in Shiosai on Thursday, that’s what we did the first afternoon, walked from my dad’s house which sits on the corner of a curve in the road, down the hill along the water to the baths which looks like a big moored ship right on the water, I’d somehow forgotten about this from last time, that all Japanese baths are full nude. You take your shoes off right when you step into the vestibule, and then drop trou in the changing room and then shower, there are a couple standing showers but the traditional way is to sit on a little plastic stool with a hole where your butt is, you lather down in front of a mirror with a removable shower nozzle, it’s true in Japan people don’t play about their bathing, you’ll see dudes taking their sweet time in there, lathering fully, shaving, it’ll all clean as the water is continually flowing into the many drains, and the onsens themselves are located according to the natural springs, like how in primeval times hunter-gatherers who first learned to stay put in one place gathered near the natural springs—

And so you shower and then hit the baths, there are different baths with different temperatures, we hit the one outside with a cover over it and then hit the sauna which has a TV inside playing the news, and then hit the cold bath and sit there naked on a plastic chair for five minutes minimum, letting the hot-cold therapy do its work, this is part of the ritual in Japan, you’ll see old dudes sitting in chairs looking zenned out after each round, and then we rinse and repeat that process a couple times.

And since the onsen is the town center in some ways, and my dad is the only white dude I see all week, and not only that but is the English teacher at the K-12 Waldorf school in town, not to mention has a huge white beard and bald head and is like 6-4, he’s recognizable everywhere, and right when we hit the outside bath the first time, the ocean visible across the way, we run into two young boys barely out of high school, one of them is literally just out of high school and since my dad has been out here for twelve years exactly—since spring of 2013—we put together that my dad taught him since he was a first grader. He speaks in a slow deliberate lilt, practicing his English of course since my dad is the English teacher. They go over his various behavioral phases throughout his years, across the bath from each other—he had a rebellious period around eighth grade but then snapped back into gear in high school.

“Other than that brief time, you were a good student,” my dad says.

“I did all my homeworks!” he says, eyes wide and unassuming and cutely indignant.

You sit in the bath and then it gets too hot and you gotta sit on the edge a sec, both boys sit on the edge of the pool, unashamed, it’s all very Call Me by Your Name–coded (pause).

~

But so my dad wouldn’t dream of wearing shorts in his personal sauna when we spark it up on Saturday, I wear trunks, and he’s got a pullup bar right there by the entrance, so between rounds, repenting for my bender back in Tokyo, I crank a set of pullups followed up by pushups followed by situps, it’s truly a divine progression from hot to the ice cold metal bath he’s got there that he fills up manually, to the exercises, to the sun, with the ocean right there.

And doing so incites some natural animalistic competitive impulse in my dad, he can’t help but put a set in, only he’s nude, so next thing I know I’m finished with my set, muscles taut and un-inflaming by the breath, buzzing euphorically, only to hear my dad grunting and look over from my reclining chair to see him ass naked doing a 40 stack of pushups, his manhood and beard hitting the walnut deck wood each set lmao.

And I think yes—things are very different this time. Lighter, more gratitude about what’s even happening rather than anger about what isn’t, nothing to prove. My dad is just a person, I’ve recurrently realized over the years, but perhaps feel more tangibly than ever in this very moment.

~

Part of the problem, before, was that my initial defense mechanism, of not needing anything, of overachieving at everything I did, being ambitious to a slightly psychotic degree, actually scared him some. It brought up stuff with his dad, of being an easygoing pacifist in a world of toxic ambitious men, to the point that he couldn’t believe that I would ever need any help. So when he was revamping his life with his inheritance, and I was actually going through hell, all fucked up circa 2017-2019, he didn’t even realize this, or want to realize this; the distance with the extreme relocation, with no designs to ever come visit, also didn’t help.

~

Sono comes home that night. On Sunday, Palm Sunday, we play tennis in the dome. It’s that my dad has adopted a physical ritual that has got him literally, physiologically calmer, I don’t think this would be the case without these physiological changes. Now that Sono is back I’m cutting out drinking, in the evenings I speak to Amelia for an hour, earlier than I normally would since the bedroom is right next door to my dad and Sono’s and I don’t want to disturb them. As the possibility of Amelia coming to meet me in Tokyo starts looking more and more likely, I cut way down on smoking, I need to get healthy and jacked for Amelia.

All week it’s very ritualistic. My dad goes to the school in the mornings to teach his classes, sing his songs with the youngins, and Sono works at home mornings so it’s just me and her at the house. We get up and she makes just the most unreal breakfasts and we speak in Japanese, discuss things I might do with Amelia when I return to Tokyo. It’s the first Japanese I’m required to speak for survival since I can remember, since I can always switch back to English with my mom, hide behind my mom when speaking with gigi and baba.

And in the evenings we read from this old book The Three Years by Emil Bock, we read what happens to Christ each day of Holy Week. On Wednesday Amelia books her flight out to Japan, and on Thursday I book the Airbnb we’ll stay in for the week.

~

THE CHICKEN AND THE SNAKE

On our final evening at my dad’s, Maundy Thursday eve, my dad tells me the funniest story. Everything feels so on the nose, the fact of us embarking on our trip tomorrow morning, Good Friday morning, into the land of the dead—of the past, my ancestral past I’ve forgotten, but also the literal past of traveling with my dad, of my childhood. But we’re upstairs in the attached kitchen-living area, sort of reading, sort of looking at our phones, commenting occasionally on something we were reading or looking at, the ocean vast and black out the wall sized windows.

I start asking about how things were on the property before, how undeveloped and wild it was initially, before he went in and razed it, like Hercules did the primeval forest, to get it flat like it is now. In the early days, he reminds me, he had chickens and a rooster. He starts going in, digging up photos. “Man, I loved those guys. They were so damn cute!”

One day, a fox came, yanked them all, left just their feet. “But they were under constant attack.” A weasel came once and jabbed the chicken in her neck and fled. My dad has trauma around this story, he spares me the details. It was just a little hoop house, what they needed was a sturdier structure. A typhoon first got the structure, blew that shit out, exposing his babies, on that final fateful raid. “But man, you gotta see this one,” he says, pulling up a video.

It's my dad with a significantly smaller beard, less jacked than he is now, out back in the no longer existent hoop house. Face to face with a snake.

With a jab, he grabs the snake by the neck, sort of on its head, and lifts it, it's gotta be three feet, and gathers the still-coiled lower part with his off-hand. He's got on big black rubber gloves. He's saying something like, "Gotcha!" He turns to the little black chicken and lifts up the snake to his face, the chicken jolts and turns, my dad laughs maniacally—he thinks it's hysterical. And then he strides towards the ocean. The camera pans, exposing a wild, dense area where the sauna currently sits, and walks out to the water's edge.

“Rewind that. What's that in its mouth?” I say.

There's orange goop in the snake’s mouth that's dangling in a weird way, making it look like it’s grinning.

“That’s yolk,” my dad says. “He was trying to eat the egg whole.”

My dad strides to the water's edge, along a path through the untamed jungle back there, and flings the FUCK out of the snake off the cliff, which is hundreds of feet down to the water below.

We both start dying laughing, playing it over and over.

“Cast that shit down to hell!”

“Begone!”

“Like Satan falling out of the sky like lightning.”

~

We pit stop the first night, Good Friday night, in Obihiro. A medium sized town surrounded by mountains. A spot my dad likes and visits with Sono sometimes, the Hokkaido Hotel Spa and Resort. It’s calling card is the onsen, but the architecture goes crazy too. Very Twin Peaks coded, with wooden bear carvings all over.

We hit the sauna then try to hit a nearby izakaya. Sono is meeting a friend in Obihiro, so we’re on our own. It’s rainy and dark and my dad gets stressed when he can’t read the damn menu.

We abort and walk across the street to McDonald’s. Go in on a Big Mac meal, claiming it’s “research for my essay.” Then head back and call it, we’ve got a long drive to Abashiri, to the ainu museum in the morning.

Japanese breakfast at the Hokkaido Hotel Spa and Resort

~

NORTHERN PEOPLES

It was one of the first things I learned about Amelia upon meeting her a year ago to the week, there were countless connections to make our meeting seem fated, but one was that we were both Swedish, only my Swedish lineage, through my dad’s mom, is mainland Swedish, whereas hers is sami—the indigenous northern peoples of Sweden.

So it comes as a stunning discovery that the museum is not only about the ainu, but about all northern hunter gatherer people, the Inuit, Eskimo, Northwest Coast Indians, Siberians, and also—the sami.

I start texting Amelia everything I’m seeing, incredulous.

This has been a hole in my thinking, focusing so much on the pagan harvest rituals of antiquity; these were for those who developed agriculture. But what if you lived in a climate that didn’t allow you to develop agriculture. Not everyone can get land and crops, sometimes you have to confront what’s around you and make do with ingenuity and skill.

The Northern Peoples can’t be detached from the resources they use to survive. Their clothes are made of seal and reindeer pelt, walrus skin, treebark.

I start texting Amelia, unable to help myself.

“Look—outfit of a Sami man.”

“Sami garment with a hood for the baby.”

“Sami wedding garment.”

Outfit of a sami man

Early Europeans traded with the Northern Peoples. They brought luxury goods: tobacco, coffee, and guns. These items “dramatically altered the lives of Northern Peoples.” There are sami and ainu tobacco pouches, coffee makers.

“Your favorite,” Amelia texts.

She keeps doing this funny-ass bit where she goes, “I remember how cold it was… it was so cold.” Going “Brrr,” with bunches of this emoji: “🥶.”

The progression from hunter-gathering to agriculture isn’t as clear cut as it would seem, turns out. In Hokkaido, many people relied on hunter-gathering well into the agricultural period. They had their own culture going on independently of what was happening on the mainland, up on the Okhotsk coast here and on the Sakhalin islands, in Russia, just across the water.

Their gods were different. They worshipped bears. Praying that the dead would return as bears, bringing meat and fur as gifts.

There are hunting tools: spears and arrows, fishhooks and nets; traps for catching land animals like foxes and martens— “what you needed to protect your chickens!” I tell my dad.

And tools for herding reindeers, what the sami people did. Reindeer provided food but also transportation, the sami literally rode the reindeer.

“I remember...” Amelia texts. “It was so cold.”

~

We drive one town over, to Shari, to check into the hotel. It’s a tiny town. The coast is wild and unforgiving, I can’t imagine spearing a walrus in there. The hotel has a sauna, an outdoor cold plunge. They give us gowns so we can all go in together, the hot is hot and the cold is damn cold. We sit there buzzing looking up at this tree overlooking us.

Final plunge

And after we shower we hit this Italian restaurant in town, we have a few nice dishes and then head back to the hotel and sip a tiny bit and read the final page from Holy Week, it’s Holy Saturday eve, Christ will rise in the morning.

And in the morning we drive all the way back, I’ve got to catch the flight by five, we pit stop at a soba spot for lunch and then keep moving, things are different now but they’re also the same, we’ve resurrected anew but we’re also always trying to resurrect, my dad and I haven’t fought once this week, we barely drank, but he’s also got new vices, his thing is pounding soft serves, it starts when we hit this famous soft serve spot on the way out, but the drive back is long and he’s gotta put in his shifts, do his part, give Sono breaks, every time it’s his turn to drive he keeps pit stopping at 7-Eleven for another soft serve, it’s the funniest shit, he’ll be ranting all geeked up for an hour after each one and then crash like a baby, we’re all dying and being reborn but it’s also perennial winter and we’re just surviving like the ainu, trying to pay respect and properly worship those around us we need in order to keep surviving—

And it’s almost end of day on Friday, May 23, I’ve got to send this piece in, Amelia will be back this evening, she finished her movie, I’ve got to get the spot right for her return—

We have our last meal in the airport, on Easter Sunday evening, my dad has taken me into his shelter all week and there’s some healing that happened there, he keeps emphasizing that this will be the last time this will happen, when else are we gonna get a chance to spend time like this, and it’s like, bro, you can always come visit, you’ve got grandchildren now, I feel slightly triggered by this easy, sentimental fatalism, but we’re here now, we can only confront what we can see before our eyes, once our meal is finished I give both my dad and Sono a big hug and tell them I love them and hop on the plane for Tokyo, excited to meet up with Amelia.