The Pilgrimage Road

In a general sense, things weren’t going well. Components were falling off the mainframe more rapidly than before. Shit seemed to be going down, in both personal and global terms, and so I did what I normally do. Before the oil prices got truly atrocious, I booked a round-trip ticket to someplace unfamiliar, and decided to spend two weeks amid smoking craters and fragrant citrus orchards, and tried to find some equanimitous sense of things. 

Of Japan’s five most prominent islands, Shikoku is the forgotten one. Neither connected by Shinkansen to the Japanese heartland like Hokkaido and Kyushu, nor a verdant tropical paradise like Okinawa, it exists off to the left side, without major cities. And despite numerous trips, I’d never gotten there, and so clearly it was time.

What did I know? Well, Kafka on the Shore was set there, and I know that young Kafuka Tamura makes sure to eat the udon for which Shikoku is famous, and I know that I don’t much care for udon. And I knew it as being ringed by a pilgrimage road, a sort of Japanese Santiago de Compostela in which 88 temples of historic note around the island were connected. But that was it. I’d barely even heard of the island’s largest cities (Matsuyama, Takamatsu, Tokushima, Kochi). I knew no national parks, no particular loci of the tourist industry. But I had time, and the weather was getting feverish around the Thai New Year, when I used to joke that I always summered abroad.

After a brief stopover in Kyoto mon amour – cherry blossoms over the canals, a few visits to old haunts, a few hisses towards the more uncouth tourists – and it was time to take the Shinkansen west to Okayama, sunny land of peaches and grapes, and then take a local express southwards, crossing the long causeway over the turquoise waters of the Seto Inland Sea.

 There is a pattern that sets in when one travels in Japan. It’s part of a larger pattern – the novel becoming the staid. Upon arrival in the city of Takamatsu, it’s not that different from anywhere else. Japanese provincial cities are hard to distinguish from one another. Little houses, shopping arcades, blaringly loud pachinko parlors, the inevitable foundations of a long-since destroyed castle, and even the local quirks seem standardized. The localized manhole covers simply seem to all be a variation on the same theme.

Maybe I’d made a mistake. Maybe the innate cynicism of the weary traveler – the place changes, but it seems the same – was setting in. And in the case… what the fuck was I doing here?

I liked the rhythm of things, I really did. I find my preferred hangouts, those little institutions of the sort only found in Japan – little café-bars run by solitary men (and the occasional woman), where they can express their curatorial taste in food, drink, music, cinema, and books. I met elegant lady sommeliers, I met grumpy old men who only looked happy when they were perfecting the grind on their Yirgacheffe coffee beans. There are cozy corners. There is tea.

There are the many varieties of citrus that grow on this coast, familiar and unfamiliar. Sure, this is the land of the tangerine and the blood orange and the yuzu, but I came to also know the kanpei and the iyokan, the amakusa and the hyuganatsu.

And every day, I made my way to temple or shrine, temple or shrine, whatever that might be. I climbed up mountain after mountain. Lacking in context, failing to identify the difference between Mahavairocana and Bhaisajyaguru, I simply gawked. I was unable to read the script, and while Google Lens is very good at getting across the meanings of menus at yakitori joints, it is less good at conveying the subtleties of Medieval Shingon Buddhist religious poetry. Again, what the fuck was I doing here?

Natsume Soseki, the father of realist fiction in Japan, lived here for a time as a teacher. He was abjectly miserable, and the only means of coping he found was to relax at Dogo Onsen, a hot spring resort since at least the 6th Century AD. I went there, and it was pretty nice. I had a good soak. I guess he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing there either.

The sign says “Kokoro,” the same as his famous novel. Turns out it’s a hair salon.

I take the ferry to little Naoshima, the best known of the Inland Sea’s “art islands,” the whole turned into a major art installation, save the belching smokestacks of the Mitsubishi smelter at the north end of the island, thoughtfully tucked away lest the crowd of late middle-aged French aesthetes in stylish round glasses actually have to confront the livelihoods of working people. And yet I can’t hate. Because the installations are some of the smartest, most effective pieces of contemporary art I’ve ever seen, absolute masterworks by Lee Ufan, Tadao Ando, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. They pierced the void. Sure there were plenty of works by masturbators like Yves Klein, Jenny Holzer, and David Hockney, but what do I care? I am being given a little contemporary wagashi and a glass of sencha as I look out over the ships beyond Sugimoto’s pristine landscape architecture. Rocks and trees, sea and ships. Here at least, I am happy. Even if the veil is quickly pierced.

 

 

Throughout, I ran into a dismal number of loudmouthed American tech bros, i.e. the people I literally moved to Asia to get away from. Many of them were fascinated by my culinary journalism gig, but it quickly became apparent that they viewed visiting top-tier restaurants a bit like unlocking video game achievements. Hungry ghosts in the antique sense, beings of pure consumption that can never be satisfied. To be fair, I encountered a greater number of the lovelier of my countrymen, some of whom may be reading this right now, but a single bad vibe could take me out of my element.  I’m sitting here with an antique cocktail and trying to enjoy the cherry blossoms, and this mustache-and-Carhartt Brooklynite hiding his bald spot under a fitted Knicks cap is coked to the gills and telling me about sick business opportunities.

“This was not the Paris that good Americans went to when they died.” – W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

I often describe my nature as “peregrine.” But this isn’t quite accurate. Because the term peregrine refers to a pilgrim, and I’m not a pilgrim, carefully making my way down the ordained path in search of transcendence. I’m a wanderer.

And yet I followed the pilgrimage road, diligently, even if I was sad and sick and fucked up and my life was thrown into upheaval. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I looked all the same.

At the Ishite-ji, Temple 51 on the pilgrim’s path, in the outskirts of Matsuyama, I arrived despondent. Horrible dreams woke me up early, haunted by ghosts of the present. Again, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing there, but it found me.

After wandering the grounds, I see a sign. “Pure Cave.”

The sign warns you. No light. No photos.

The corridor is barely big enough for one person. I barely fit, and someone actually fat, it would have been impossible.

It twists and turns in the dark. Steps you have to feel for, walls to guide you, low overhangs that threaten to hit you in the head. You have no choice. You can only feel around in the dark.

And you almost immediately lose any sense of time, of the larger world. You are here in this dark space, and you are trying to negotiate it. It does not yield to you. The only sounds come from you. You are reduced to what you are, mind harnessed to body, alone, confronting an impassive reality.

Until you see the strobing light at the end, and the little statue of Kannon, boddhisatva of mercy.

Her light is fleeting. You crawl back through the dark into the daylight. I have never been so happy to see sunlight.

And I knew I needed to climb the mountain.

I found my way up through the abandoned cemetery, all that citrus rotting on the ground the whole way up, the perfume of the petitgrain blending with the reek of rotting oranges.

At the top, the little donation box amid the little statues is rusted. Whether the corners are curled up in accordance with the dictums of classical Japanese temple architecture or whether that’s just the metal rusting and curling, I cannot say. But I don’t think it matters, does it?

I throw myself onto the gravel and stare up at the tips of the cedars and cypresses, where the forest ends and the sky begins.

I have been here many times. The mountain itself is almost irrelevant. The point is getting here, to this apogee, because I can.

This is what the fuck I’m doing here.

The Obliterated Island

They ordered the tunnels to be built underneath a hill, towards the south end of the island, across the river from the little city that had once served as the capital a hundred years before, back when this was an independent kingdom. The admiral noted the quality of the sandstone – fine-grained, easy to quarry, but also remarkably resilient. The locals had a special name for it, in their dialect. They hid in caves hollowed out of the same stone.

It wasn’t much, but it would do in a pinch. The navy, once the terror of the sea, had been pushed back, forced into increasingly desperate action in a bid to keep the enemy away from the homeland. An invasion of the island itself seemed imminent, and they needed someplace safe, in the hope against hope that they might make it through. These men had been told they were going to unite a continent. Now they struggled under the tropical sun, quarrying out sandstone.

When the bombing raids began, the admiral and his men were trapped down there. He sat in the heart of his labyrinth, a simple bed, a simple desk, some radio equipment. Not much. He was did his best to try to convince the men that it was going to be alright, that reinforcements were on their way.

And yet the situation grew worse and worse. Thousands were down here, stranded. As the bombing raids increased, they couldn’t go outside. They slept huddled together, standing up, in the little alcoves in the soft sandstone. They shat in the corners where they could, the reek inescapable. And they waited, even as bomber after bomber flew above, shaking little bits of sandstone gravel from the roofs.

Until the admiral realized it wouldn’t happen. The enemy had already taken the northern half of the island, leaving the few infantry remaining stranded on the hills to the south. He had to make his decision. He pulled out his pistol, unable to salute the rising sun from deep within his underground maze.

Some finally sallied forth, a suicidal charge to the bright light outside, carrying out a dictum under two martial codes – one modern, brought back by the intrepid young men of the previous century who had carried the most contemporary ideas and philosophies of France and Germany and England back to their little nation, one far more ancient, derived from a time when a handful of feudal lords fought over what little arable land they had between their rocky, forested mountains and the endless sea.

And other men stayed in the tunnels. Weeping, desperate, they pulled the pins from their grenades, bodies still crammed in, device after device exploding, as young men who just a few years before had been tending to their fields and delivering letters and teaching in rural schools chose death over capture.

The few survivors out of the thousands who were down there came up to an obliterated island, fields destroyed, towns leveled, nearly every tree felled, many of the residents evacuated some months earlier, but a full 25 percent of the island’s civilians dead – either killed by the enemy, or goaded into suicide by commandants who could not bear the thought of their people living without the guidance of the imperial standard.

I stare out of the tunnel, into the light and emerge onto that high hill above the city, a light rain falling, halfway between Tokyo and Manila.

I knew the American military had been there for years, on the island of hacksaws and jawbones, hell, I’d known guys who had been stationed there in the USMC, but I didn’t know that we had administered the island as late as 1972. We left American-style plugs (two blades, unlike the two rounds used elsewhere), an affection for Spam and “taco rice” (made from the taco meat of scrounged MREs, and as disgusting as it sounds), and an inferior public transportation system.

“Keystone of the Pacific” read the old American license plates still hung up in bars and restaurants around the island.

Now blurred by the scratching processes of history. That mediocre Mel Gibson movie where Andrew Garfield played a real simple feller who just wants to love him some Jesus and save some folks. That’s what about the limit of what most Americans know. That and it’s where Mr. Miyagi is from.

And I had remembered, from news stories in my childhood, the 1995 incident in which three American servicemen, having been put off by the high prices of local hookers, had instead gang-raped and murdered a local girl. And indeed, I remember seeing the press conference where the then-head of the Pacific Command, America’s top military officer in the entire Indo-Pacific region, responded as follows:

“I think it was absolutely stupid… for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” – Adm. Richard C. Macke

Then I stand under the two bishop wood trees, Bischofia javanica, that had survived the bombardment of the Shuri Castle, on a hill that had been thick with them.

But all of that history – 1945, 1972, 1995 – was remote from me. I was there, but I was not there. I was on the same hill, but in the here and now, the battlefields now covered in little houses and sun-bleached apartment complexes with rusted fences that would be just as familiar in Honolulu or Los Angeles, palm fronds and guava leaves fluttering in the Pacific breeze.

The tourist gazes on history. He, in turn, takes his photos and is gazed upon. And thus we form our place in the world. 

And then when I came back to my adopted city, and gave out my gifts – sweet potato candy and sea grapes, pickled scallions and preserved pork belly and dried beef tongue and spirits made from jasmine blossoms and the local shikuwasa citrus – that I sat at my local jazz venue and saw a woman in white, her eyes closed and hairline sharp like a Shinto shrine maiden, playing hypnotic, soft guitar, her voice a precise, almost impossibly mellifluous soprano.

She says to me in broken, slow, deliberate English, “I can tell. You were listening to. My music. Seriously.” Aww, that’s probably what you tell all the girls.

She smiles. “Your hometown. Is where you are.” She had said earlier in the evening.

And I look down at the page of my notebook where I had written about the tunnels. I look back at her. “My hometown is Okinawa,” she says.

The Terraforming of Hokkaido

 How many absolutely boring pieces of writing are there about the ineffable Japanese aesthetic? How many treatises on cherry blossoms and kimonos, how much lazy garbage about the effortless blend of the modern and the traditional?

Or as you may have said in a 7^th grade geography report, a laaaaand of contraaaasts.

And I can't say I've ever been particularly taken by the traditional aesthetics more than those of any other country – sure, I appreciate a gorgeous Zen temple, but I can't say I'll be sitting down to a tea ceremony anytime soon – and the standard-issue pop-culture exports have always left me cold, other than a handful of Studio Ghibli offerings and Murakami novels, and a few baked-as-fuck viewings of Dragonball Z in my teens.

But I do love Japan. And thus it was that I found myself in the country yet again, this time in Hokkaido.

What I truly love, the thing that really keeps me coming back for more, is something likewise ineffable, but somehow the inverse of the standard message. It is not some harmonious marriage of the old and the new, the local and the global, but the precise opposite – the way in which the global is completely broken down into constituents, then rebuilt through the lens of the local, with little attention paid to the original design.

Consider the town of Otaru, half an hour north of Sapporo. It's one of the few places where a significant amount of the architecture of the Taisho and early Showa Periods in the early 20^th Century has been preserved, a rarity in a country where everything is either 10 or 1000 years old. Otaru stayed a backwater as more and more governmental and commercial affairs moved to Sapporo, and along its icy coast, bits of the newly industrial Japan have remained unchanged.

This isn't to say it's terribly historic – in this sense, it has no more concentration of historical architecture than the average Midwestern county seat, and in fact probably far less. Rather, what makes it interesting, is the particular architectural vocabulary, rendered in concrete and marble. You see touches of Gotham art deco, echoes of the American civic variation of Beaux-Arts, Doric columns and meander motifs taken from Greek revival, a Bavarian half-timber here and there – even a Soviet mosaic left from attempts to seek diplomacy across the Sea of Okhotsk. I step inside an old civic building to purchase snacks and local wines as gifts, and it is cozy and old-fashioned in the same way a small town American post office with WPA murals is. And yet while the ideas were imported, the construction comes from an entirely different reference point.

Less an imitation than a full-scale terraform. And those local wines? Made from forgotten American grape varieties, Niagara and Delaware and Campbell Early, wines with the musky and foxy flavor of a Ray Bradbury summer day in a hallucination of a Midwestern town on Mars.

It was a pattern I noticed when I set foot in Bar Yamazaki, an institution located on the fourth floor of an anonymous building in Sapporo's Susukino entertainment district. To walk in is to step back in time 40 or 50 years to the peak of Japan's economic boom. Their 100 year old barman recently died, but his vision – an earth-toned wonderland of tartan-vested bartenders, red carpets and high-backed stools in matching red leather, wood paneling and ornate hanging lamps, remains unchanged. Of the drinks that won international competitions in 1976 and 1981, with names like the “Polestar Twinkle,” with unfashionable vodka-amaretto bases and green Maraschino cherries as garnishes (ever even seen one of those before outside a fruitcake?), with black-and-white photos of the awards presented by men in combovers at Geneva lakeside hotels. In what universe is the Balalaika or the Valencia or the Silent Third a “classic cocktail,” as the menu would have it? And the bottles of cordials behind the bar, do they even make these anymore? The labels certainly haven't changed, for Cheritier-Guyot Kummel, Mazarine Creme de Cassis, Vosges Anisette – memories of staring at the bottom shelf at the liquor store as a small-child, the ugly Victorian-font labels on plastic bottles of blackberry brandy and sloe gin seeming to indicate the pathway to an adult world... as would be that promotional clock from the '70s, topped with a brass statuette of a kilted Scottish clan warrior, tucked in neatly beside the SoCo.

In the 1970s, before making his genre-defiling masterpiece Hausu, Nobuhiko Obayashi rose to fame as a director of high-concept advertisements. This bar in Sapporo reminded me of nothing as much as this:

 

 Yes, Charles Bronson tuxedo'd in a lowlit piano bar before cruising home to smoke a pipe shirtless and douse himself in Mandom – incidentally a product I used after a bath in the Noboribetsu Onsen the next day, all the while whistling the theme song, “Otoko No Sekai,” or in its international version “Lovers of the World.” The audio version of a shag-carpeted conversation pit.

But in Hokkaido, everything is even more a terraform than in other parts of Japan.

This is the final surviving push of Japanese imperial might after the Meiji Restoration. When, with guidance from the stern and muttonchopped New England missionaries who built Sapporo's Odori Park and the clock tower with its small-paned Puritan windows, as defenseless against the Arctic winds as in the farmhouses of Massachusetts. Dreaming of imperial glory, the Meiji state pushed into what were deemed virgin lands, beyond the outpost of ethnic Japanese around Hakodate, at the southernmost tip of Hokkaido.

“Boys, be ambitious!” commanded William Smith Clark, founder of the Sapporo Agricultural College, and a well-known figure in Japan to this day.

And that ambition came in the form of the same tactics that were still then being used against the Plains Indians were used against the Ainu in an attempt to push the Japanese nation northward, with land cleared for crops, with methods of hunting salmon and deer restricted or downright made illegal, with an agenda of forced assimilation.

I stare out from my seat on the train at the meadows, the sea, the snow-streaked mountain cols, the smoking volcanoes.

At the end of the day, history is the same series of echoes and reflections – only the walls of the mirror maze differ.

One I find to be a charming piece of kitsch. The other an unspeakable grotesque.

Notes on a Steakhouse From a Murakami Novel

We live in an era in which our restaurants are designed, more than anything else, to be photogenic. Our dining rooms are decorated to catch the camera's eye. Our plates are garnished to act as indicators of lifestyle more than anything else.

Naturally, I fucking despise this. Which is why I'm deeply in love with a quietly and magnificently off-trend restaurant, hidden deep in the labyrinthine recesses of the older and grimier of Bangkok's two Japanese quarters, a dusty street where at night, the ladies of the evening come out in full costume to appeal to the tastes of salarymen, row after row of prim schoolgirls, nurses, prom queens, and kimono'd quasi-geisha on folding chairs.

Walk down past the security gate, past the signs for "erotic lady clubs," past the half-empty '90s shopping arcade with its postmodernist fanlights and glass-brick partitions, to a barely marked door. There is a sign in Japanese, but nothing in English to indicate the name, just the words "Teppanyaki," "Japanese," and "Dining" in tiny Helvetica Narrow tucked beneath the katakana characters, and an equally tiny Thai spelling of the establishment's name.

This is where I will pause to conspicuously not give the name of this fine eatery -- for those of you living outside Thailand, you probably don't care, and for those of you living here, I want to make it a treasure hunt. I'm sure you can follow the clues to get there.

Once you walk in the door, you see a dining room that was once peak trendiness, and its peak trendiness of course coincided with peak Japan in the early '90s, in the kind of shitty "Asian minimalist" décor in dark wood with lots of potted plants under track lighting. The soundtrack, is, naturally, piano jazz (the only other choice for such an institution would be the sort of '60s and '70s easy listening that enjoys an enduring popularity in Japan -- Claudine Longet, Judy Collins, and the like). Take a seat on the low chairs upholstered in walnut-brown vinyl, next to the little caddy of liquor bottles for the most conservative possible choices in digestif spirits -- Glenmorangie, Courvoisier, etc. – and I can't imagine the face they'd make if you asked for a craft cocktail.

Having sat down, a warm towel between your hands, take a look at the menu -- all of the à la carte items are written in Japanese, with no English translation, just a transliteration into Latin script. I've only gone at lunch, and I've focused on the lunch set items, all attractively priced, and in keeping with the teppanyaki tradition, it is a set vaguely modeled on Western dining, of the sort developed in Kobe in the wake of World War II during the MacArthur occupation -- a Japanese interpretation of an American interpretation of classical French service à la russe, brought from Moscow to the salons of Napoleon's France by Prince Alexander Kurakin (shortly before Napoleon returned the favor by marching 700,000 men into Kurakin's homeland).

And so what you get is a teppan-grilled steak or a "hanbagu" (oh how the Japanese can completely warp a borrowed English word) steak served under a fried egg with what the Japanese call demi-glace, and which tastes more like teriyaki sauce than a classical French demi-glace, but is wonderful all the same. It comes with the sort of Japanese salad that is designed more as a garnish than an edible, a natural coming from the country that perfected plastic models of food to place in restaurant windows -- fluffed pieces of cos lettuce, a few strips of Vegetable Incognito, a whole cherry tomato – along with a bowl of rice, a remarkably bright and flavorful miso soup, and three sauces (soy and shaved radish, kind-of-chimichurri, and maybe-mayo?), followed by coffee and a beautifully inscrutable Japanese dessert.

Everything is so aggressively outdated, it almost seems studied in its languor. The weird future-Japan '80s aesthetics haven't been preserved like treasured jewels, but have to a certain degree left to fade. One teppan sits mostly abandoned, and they sit me at one solitary chair at the end where a copper cloche sits on the grill alone, fake flowers dusty, and wrinkled, a decorative plate sitting next to the cardboard box the air conditioning unit came in. Sitting alone at the teppan, a piano soundtrack playing, unsure whether the palms are real or not, you can feel like you've stepped out of our reality and into a Murakami novel.

But it is a reflection of its surroundings. A relic within a relic, on a back street in a neighborhood dedicated to the flesh industry.

I often comment on the ubiquity of vaporwave aesthetics in the wild in Bangkok. With the Thai economy having collapsed in 1997 (immediately following Japan's deflationary period, and exacerbating Japan's problems in the process), and having not really recovered since, it becomes inevitable that the architectural style of early '90s Asia has become the definitive standard of the city, much in the same way New York is defined by the style of the years leading up to 1929, and the way Paris is defined by the style of the years leading up to the collapse of the Second Empire.
We can think about food in the context of history pretty readily. You can imagine the thick steak on the plate of a '50s Madison Avenue accounts man taking a big client out, or the massive joint of poultry being gnawed upon by a Medieval king.

So my curious little restaurant is but one instance -- one that takes the impersonal aesthetics of architecture and design and carries them into the intimate aesthetics of gastronomy. And for that it is a monument worth preserving akin to a row of old commercial buildings, an antique tea set on a dusty shelf.

On Kyushu

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 Erlkönig.

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.