My memories of Kyushu flicker,
somewhat. All memories do of course, still-frame images linked by
erratic motion, frayed by semantic qualifications, by overlays of
sentiment, by conflations, by mis-remembrances, by objects out of
place, post-production edits, and all the other things that separate
memory and event. But what I remember of Kyushu flickers in the way
light does, each image bursting with a flashbulb's glare.
And perhaps this is because the
landscape seethes with fire. It is an island of smoking volcanoes,
subtropical fruit orchards, massive caldera craters filled with
seawater, rich seams of coal.
Whereas
most of the country produces sake, given the warm climate, the
preferred tipple has always been shochu, a distilled drink sometimes
made from barley, sometimes from rice, and most popularly and most
deliciously from local sweet potatoes, I came to adore its warm
flavor, its aroma of candied yams and burning leaves, the combination
of a malty, Scotch-like complexity and a clean vodka finish. And the
way it paired with the local specialties – tonkotsu ramen swimming
with pork marrow, rich Saga ribeye, almost more like foie gras than
beef, the heavy seafood and pork broth of Nagasaki champon noodles,
muscular little Kumamoto oysters, and the spiced, briney strips of
roasted cod roe.
It was here that the newly emboldened
Japanese Empire's sun first rose, with Admiral Togo's defeat of the
Czar's navy, crossing the T of their fleet at the Tsushima Straits,
leading to the seizure of Russian territory throughout Asia.
And it was here that the same imperial
urge ended 40 years later, with the citizens of Kitakyushu at the
northern tip of the island burning coal tar and releasing steam from
power plants through the night to prevent American planes from
repeating their attack on Hiroshima a few days previous, forcing them
to reroute to a misfortunate nearby shipbuilding city, where the B-29
Superfortress Bockscar would
drop the Fat Man bomb, detonating 1500 meters over the roof of
Urakami Cathedral in the northern suburbs of Nagasaki.
In Fukuoka, my first stop, there were
of avenues of Washingtonia palms abutting narrow canals, persimmon
trees heavy with vermilion fruit, brightly lit signs along the river
advertising an “exciting adult club,” a
Germanic beer festival I wandered into, Japanese men in Bavarian
hunting caps and Japanese women in dirndl singing underneath fairy
lights about liebe and
ambrosia and Goethe's
Erlkรถnig.
In
Beppu, the surrounding hills were obscured by the heavy clouds of
sulfurous steam that came out from underground, a product of the
hundreds of hot springs that fill the city, along with the jigoku,
the so-called “hells,” boiling hot azure-blue and burnt-orange
pools guarded by statues of tusked demons and the Chinese goddess of
mercy, one filled with burbling mud, one spraying boiling water a few
meters into the air every half-hour, and one teeming with crocodiles.
In Nagasaki, the
harbor is crowded with cranes and shipyards, and the streets lined
with old Dutch warehouses that were once stocked with the exotic
products of the outside world during the era of the hermit kingdom –
clockworks, gin, cloves, and lenses passing through on their way to
the shoguns' households. I walked up to the epicenter of the nuclear
blast, to the last surviving fragment of the old cathedral, a section
of an archway, a Chinese lion growling at the base and at the top,
European saints with El Greco faces staring into the void.
And I took a boat
across the harbor, guarded by a statue of the Virgin Mary, to
commemorate St. Francis Xavier's death in the city, past little
islands where Catholic fisherman guarded their virgins as Shinto
goddesses, where their crucifixes were hidden within Buddhist
iconography, to the island of Hashima, studded with concrete towers
from the early years of the 20th Century, where countless men
(including Korean slave laborers in the war, didn't mention that in
the audio guide) worked to extract coal from beneath the East China
Sea.
I had
come to Kyushu looking for some insight into destruction. I'd known
about Nagasaki, of course, and also the Tsushima Straits and Hashima,
and the eruptions of Mount Unzen and Sakurajima, and also Kyushu's
reputation as a breeding ground for yakuza. I'd read Shusaku Endo's
Silence, with its
themes of trials of faith and the ways in which we negotiate belief
in the face of an unforgiving reality. But as I crossed the island,
destruction seemed to be a tangential factor.
Of the
classical elements, fire is the only one which cannot be called a
substance as such, but rather a process, which is why Heraclitus –
whose work, what little we have of it, seems to me to be the most
far-reaching of any of the pre-Socratic philosophers – believed it
to be the basis for all other elements.
And in
Kyushu, the fieriness seems to be barely contained. I was at a point
on the surface of the earth where the very soil barely suppressed
magma flows, and where what had once been an isolated,
inward-looking, insular kingdom first faced every process of the
modern world, mercantile trade, missionary religion, imperialist
desire, and ultimately nuclear war.
