EGGED ON THE DAILY

Koyoto University's squatted dorms and Mount Kumara 👺👺👺 !!! PART 3 of my Japan diary !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WE GO OUT TO GET TEA and toast for breakfast, on the way to get the train to Kyoto where M lives usually, and also it turns out where my other friends are living. We are in the part of town with big companies and tall buildings, cement bridges and monolithic roads. M’s friend who is joining us for toast says that the conglomerates have to hide their names on ther shuttle buses, else people egg them on the daily. It gives me a warm feeling to think of people taking the time out to do that. He tells us the rice has gone up in price and no one in Japan knows why. So people eat bread more. The toast is really fat and sweet, its what they think Europe is like, the baking here is the dream of a Europe that doesn’t exist. I can see why people get upset when they come.

M has this book thats new called Social contagion - microbial class war in China. She says some hate and some love it. she says she has no opinion just learning. We talk about how you can’t judge China easily on what people say, because there has been this sudden turn against it, as its the new super power. Must be hard I guess for people who don’t have “natural” predators to see some other country on top. The first time someone came at me with the china story i laughed in the guys face.

Another book that gets brought up a lot is The book, which will be translated into German soon by M and english too. It’s about a woman who lived in the tent village. She wrote about how she needed to express herself. How she hated wage labour and suppressing her likes and dislikes. How she wasn’t understood. She lived her whole life in the tent village and wrote it on her deathbed. It’s about freedom. Koyama was her name it means small mountain. (READ MORE ABOUT THIS IN THE LAST POST!!)

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WE TAKE THE BULLET TRAIN to Kyoto, and the electric train to the house we are staying. It has a room of comics and a hole in the floor where stairs used to be. I make mental note not to go the wrong way in the night, looking for the toilet cause I see bad in the dark. They have bags of rice at the front door to sell to neiboughs that they grew in the commune, which is more to the south.

We visit the ‘squatted’ dormitories of Kyoto University, although technically it’s not the legal arrangement. It’s sort of illegal, but in negotiation with the University which is taking them to court. The university is the most elitist in Japan, and was for the imperial men leaders to learn to practice and enact power dynamics, but things got experimental in the 60s, and it derailed that plan into going left wing and including woman and international people. They wanted the universities to be for all. Not as in, admit everyone or be more democratic in the process of who gets too study there, just open to anyone who wants to come and stay, a public space. So now there’s students and non students living together in the halls. Which have that same dilapidated feeling I got at grow healthorw or the ADM. These long running feud with power and a free shop. Paper flaps all over the walls silently, and the spring breeze comes in through the open sliding doors to the garden in the middle. M says they have a lot of rules that are meant to be about autonomy, but end up silencing people or a few forcing power. Also people must use names, must be open for debate. The Red army communist league came out of the student movements, which became international terrorists working with Palestine groups.

M wants to plant some seedlings in the garden and flirt with someone. I disassociate around growing. And will resist at every turn. I grew up in farm like conditions growing potatoes, apples, pears, plums, goosberries, carrots and the right of passage of training ducks to walk with a stick. But ever sense that dream died I have been somehow unable or unwilling to connect with the land for growing. Usually its grief under a thing like that but im not looking. So she’s digging holes and im doing everything not to listen to the plants. Even when they are in the ground and crying out to be watered. its stupid really the effort it takes to avoid - ive always dated someone with an allotment (it seems to by my type) ive always had friends who have grown. i lived with environmental scientist doing experiments on mud and worms in the garden, comparing editions of foraging guides, and i’ve been to the only biodynamic university in the world which is in Germany. i guess i am that stubborn. i act like i know nothing but its not true. i don’t want to know.

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I WAKE UP AT 4:45 AND LAY IN BED, until the 7 eleven opens to get eggies for breakfast and nab wifi. To tell you the truth by this point I am addicted to the French desserts. I can’t stop eating them. I’ve dreamed about cream cakes but not ate them in at least ten years. My granny was this person who would deal with grief through cake. Buy a whole box when someone dies and sit at the kitchen table and eat them all. She ate a lot before the Good Friday Agreement, so muhc so she popped the pleats on her work pinafore. She never sat at the kitchen table unless someone died. She just fed everyone else. So the whole thing was quite a spectacle. I allowed myself one eclair when I landed and now I can’t stop. Im eating a cream cake with every meal and I’m in full ADHD mode. I am questioning if sugar is poison to me, because I am out of control frankly. The animal rights activists say never trust a vegan that went back. They might be right. I whatsapp my other friends somewhere in Kyoto from the 7 eleven and I manage to arrange that I will go for dinner with them tonight.

After everyone else gets up and after the eggies we take the train through the valleys, to the mountain to see a bunch of shrines and a temple on the top. when we arrive, M tells us how to do blessings with the cups of water and about the dragons who it dribbles from. Me and C copy what she does. It’s always a balance in these situations between being roped into who you doing believe in and make no sense, and being respectful of what’s expected. But it feels quite easy to navigate, something here is quite direct about the exchange.

My fave shrine of the many here on the mountain, which is apparenlty where reiki comes from, is baby Buddhas made of stone wearing real bibs. feels like a aceint or timeless joke or universal. Half way up the mountain we go into a temple and M is creeping along - sneaking almost like a cartoon character. So we are sneaking too, but we don’t know why, just copying. We follow her around the corner and down stairs and she leads us into the basement, and through a door that’s too dark for me to see. She takes our hands in hers, and pulls us quite fast for pitch black. We turn left into a narrow corridor, then right, then right, then left, deeper and deeper and I can’t see fuck all. I always had bad night vision, but after the time was sent out to get a pizza from a delivery man in the pitch black on acid, I was never quite the same. I knew some of the washing lines where not real but not all of them. So I had to crawl along the floor. Now I am just always thinking i’m about to trip over laundry. Im realising, as my eyes finally adjust, we’re in a maze underground. We keep going till we get to a small brightness glowing at the back, with a tiny window to a lantern that is the only light what warms the space, it feels alive somehow. As well, the eqsuisite sound of the water trickling as if its coming out of heaven or the collective consciousness. As if its where it starts from, like the dress of the high priestess, which its said, is where all the water in the raider waite emerges. M tells us that the water is going through the mountain. As my eyes adjust more I see the walls made of beaded metal curtains, between shelves floor to ceiling with urns, walls to ceiling on each shelf. They are apparently filled with hair of people who have dedicated themselves to the path of enlightenment. Now I don’t think enlightenment is the be all and end all that many do, and I don’t think enlightened people are any less prejudice or more moral, but I am still a sucker for the path, or the people on it.

At a little shop I buy a keyring of the guy with the big nose who is the mascot of the mountain. He’s a big deal. He has his own emoji 👺!!!! It has a scroll of paper in with a fortune. M translates the Japanese into English before we go for lunch. Everything it said has since come true.

The shrine is a shinto shrine and its important to say that M resists anything that represents the nation of Japan (or any nation) in anyway (not as much as the comrades born here in Japan, who in many cases would never go to a shrine whatever) she points out how many myths are perpetuated by Japanese nationalism and how oppressive it is. i have to mention this. And obviously shinto is a class of people who was allowed to kill for the emperor, and killed the poor. For many this is irreconcilable. Japanese supremacy is formidable.

On the way down the mountain I get the impression I need to come here once a week for a long time. Though I know it won’t happen. I’ve never seen so many shrines in one place. And all so well taken care of.

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TANKS FOR READING!!!!

PART 1- EVERYTHING YOU GET IS WHAT YOU WANT - talking about the worst place in Tokyo, the homeless movement and the sacred path of hating money!!

PART 2- STAY HOMELESS - talking to an anonymous anarcho feminist superstar and comrade about dignity in homelessness and making solidarity on the basis of no one being excluded. THIS IS REALLY FROM THE HEART OF HEARTS !! I hope you like it as much as i do, its really illustrating something fundamental to me for serval reasons!!!!!!

FUCK THE AUTHORITIES!!! I HOPE THEY DON’T HAVE ONE MOMENTS PEACE UNTIL THIS ALL COMES DOWN!!! ALL POWER TO THE SURVIVORS AND THE UNDERCLASS!!!! NEVER GIVE UP YOUR DREAMS!!!! SLOW DANCE SOMEONE CUTE LATE AT NIGHT!! KISS YOUR BRO’S!!!!

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