Fukushima
The train ride to Fukushima was pretty long from what I can remember. Stops at non-descript stations for no one in particular. Idle waits at the bigger station buildings where trains either roared past or rolled by. As a kid I would never settle for any seat that was not by the window, man was stubborn like that.
The most vivid memory from that yearly journey is tied to one specific stop. The station was a mere hunk of concrete cut into a hill’s base where it met the shore, with the track running parallel to the Pacific coastline. A group of older girls in school uniform were fawning over me thru the window for the brief moment we stood there and my mom waved back at them, happy for me. This is my earliest memory from that route, and I doubt I have ever passed that station again. The train would lurch down a different track every year. And then came the Shinkansen. The shortest path between two points in space. A Euclidian marvel. It was as if someone had threaded a needle through all those little stations and pulled on the string till they converged into each other, tucked away into irrelevance under the warp of city life and its encroaching fabric.
This is in no way a polemic on urbanization. Cities are amazing feats of architecture and social planning. But I am nostalgic about my village in Japan. Which was swept away so many years ago. My brother and I would dart after frogs in the rice paddies while avoiding snakes that shared our motive, and box crabs in our hands till our fingers welted from their pincers. Everyday, we’d make our way to the village’s sole vending machine at sundown, and from that dusty hunk of aging metal our cans would emerge. Glazed with frost that bit at our well-sunned hands. No city vending machine could ever spit out a can so cold, it was as if a regulation capping vending-machine temps never made its way to our end and so the vending machine went about its day holding it down for us. Blissfully ignorant of its crime. Sequences like these glint like silver in the haze of my head, and its striking how pivotal our experiences with family are. I don’t know where I was going with this, maybe to make recall tangible in this time of turmoil.