Why I Write About Japan, with links, Part I

When Asked Why I Write Poems About Japanese Mythology
— A letter from the suburbs of Seattle to the suburbs of Tokyo

I will send my voices out over the water
where the same cedars that litter my coast
used to tower over yours. Once green,
your cities have nibbled forests into bonsai.
Our hinoki trees are shipped across the ocean
for your sacred temples now.
Postcards of volcanoes rise from a blue sky
in the background of our homes, we share
zones of tsunami, seasons of weeping cherry.

I read about women’s spirits
haunting peony lanterns in the forest.
Men follow them, fall in love
with women long dead. In shallow graves
rotted with tree roots, they still sing.
And here in pages hammered
from your language into mine,
sometimes with clumsy fists,
I have listened to the bush-warbler
mourn her children, the fox-wife’s eyes
in the darkness have warned me
of the growling of dogs and fire.
And when they disappear in silence,
it is not really silence. Their echoes
burn themselves into stone,
into the living screens of my childhood,
fill my mouth with ghosts.

Ghosts sit in my mouth and sing.
Our grandfathers were at war.
I grew up in the birthplace
of bombs that poisoned children,
burned holes into your sacred earth.
Their poison is part of me.

In the shelter of a shrine, a small girl
holds an umbrella. She becomes a white bird.
She whispers and a thousand cranes,
a thousand burning flowers
pile up inside me, spill out onto these pages.
Forgive me, ghosts, for my hard,
unbeautiful hands, for my tripping tongue,
as you demand a healed future, some untorn prayer.

This poem was written some years ago in response to a question from Marvin Bell about why I decided to write the book, She Returns to the Floating World. It was published in Redactions and will appear in the upcoming book.
The Japanese disaster has weighed on me heavily for the past week or so, and I thought I would write here a little bit about how my life has been tied to Japanese culture since my early childhood. Then I’ll post some links from other sources more useful and possibly more coherent and lovely than my own, including meditations on the quake by Mari L’Esperance and Marie Mutsuki Mockett.
Part I
My father was a robotics expert, and so, as a child living in California and Tennessee in the seventies, we had frequent visitors from Japan, mostly other robotics experts, and family trips to Japan happened on a regular basis – once I had measles so I couldn’t go, another time I had scarlet fever…etc…so although every other member of my family has been to Japan, I never got a chance to go. (This is still true!) My father and brothers would come back with stories, dolls, paintings, new words. I had a collection of Japanese picture books and folk tales, and occasionally, the wives of my father’s business associates would teach me how to make a dessert (I remember something with rice and red bean paste) or teach me how to say a few words in Japanese, or how to sing a Japanese song.
I watched my first Miyazaki movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, when I was ten years old, on an ancient primordial version of the Disney Channel. My brother and I sat transfixed, and watched the movie over and over again, its figure of a girl riding on top of giant caterpillars, a boy and girl trapped underneath a poisonous forest in a crystal cavern, frightening war figures and women warriors with metal limbs. This was my first introduction to Japanese pop culture, before we watched Transformers and Voltron and the other imports that would become popular in the eighties. At this same time, I read a terrifying book about the bombing of Hiroshima told from the perspective of a young girl (don’t remember the name of this novel, it was in our school library so I never owned it.)
I started to make the connection between the work done by my father at the neighboring Oak Ridge National Labs as a consultant for nuclear waste disposal methods and the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. (In case you’re wondering why I’m anti-nuclear bomb, anti-nuclear power, this set of incidents – watching Nausicaa, the book on Hiroshima, and early fourth-grade era research on nuclear pollution impacts – are probably key. And that grad-level class on Ecotoxicology I took during my Pre-Med days. Plus growing up with a Geiger counter in my basement and helping Dad edit papers on nuclear waste cleanup in high school, pretty bleak stuff in case you’re wondering.)
Part II to come.

Some links:
Marie L’Esperance’s meditation on the quake
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s meditation on Japan from the NY Times
The Future on Nuclear Energy Around the World
My second book’s publisher, Kitsune Books, is donating a portion of their sales to the Japanese Red Cross