Mists and Fleas

I have been listening to Unbeaten Tracks of Japan by Isabella Bird, narrated by a woman who anonymously refers to herself as Availle, which she mispronounces as Ava Yee. I listen while I hike around the streets here. It poured last night, despite claims from the weatherman that the rain would pause for days. Not so much. The thing is that a storm won't even turn up on radar until its less than 50 miles off the coast and is here in about 5 hours after that. So you can get a storm hit the radar before you go to bed and hit here before you wake up the next morning. The result is shiny wet streets, dripping trees, the pollen knocked out of the air, and fantastic views of the mist rising out of the Yuba River canyon to my North, mists filling the Sacramento Valley to my West, and the Sutter Buttes sticking out of the top. I had a serious burst of allergies after visiting the Valley yesterday with Dad, signing documents and grocery shopping. I was worried I'd caught a cold, but not after all. It mostly stopped after a few hours and a couple dozen Kleenex.

In the section of the book I've reached, she's gotten away from the well travelled parts of Japan and into country so rural they have never seen a foreigner before. Most of the people are naked, it being hot sweaty summer, and most have ringworm, fleas, and some 30% are heavily scarred by Smallpox, which was gone in the West by this point (1878). Isabella writes that most of the inns she stays at are filled with fleas and biting flies, stink of charcoal smoke since they have no ventilation, and bugs crawl up between the gaps in the floorboards and tatami mats, including centipedes and more fleas. They also stink of sewage since folk seem to use chamber pots without lids, and most won't sleep in a room without a slow burning open oil lamp. Its really not very nice. It makes Appalachian poverty sound quite civilized and modern in comparison. Most of the population being naked is pretty disconcerting, and all the diseases must have been terrible.

Small wonder the modern Japanese are disinterested in stories about the times other than the valiant homosexual swordsmen fighting to keep things the way they used to be, which is the sort of illogical thinking that only a Japanese person can understand. Really, it sounds miserable and you can understand why the Imperial Japan was so popular. They made things better. If they hadn't been so hasty to attack China and Korea, Japan might not have ended up sacrificing most of their men in WW2. Too late now. It is the lack of iron to make steel, and oil to run a civilization on, which squeezed them.

From what I've read and listened to, being a Japanese rice farmer is really miserable. Only an ignorant moron would think that's fun. If we ever get a serious battery for electric combines, Japan will be able to automate the worst bits of rice farming, like we do here, and being a farmer will be a better job. And I hope they work that out, because leaving so many fields fallow is a bad deal for any country with 5 generations of China wanting to smite them the moment the USA shows itself unable to defend that country from invaders.

If Japan gets crushed, who will make my anime? Oh, I guess it will be Korea and Vietnam, and Americans can probably make it now too, and I suppose anime companies might form in Latin America, speaking Spanish or Portuguese instead of Japanese. And that would be okay. Avatar, the real one not the blue one, was originally in English despite being a story about pseudo-Asians. You don't get many stories about fleas.

I'd love to see a proper, serious, film or miniseries of Unbeaten Tracks, with careful filming, though all the nudity would likely confuse things a lot. You can get away with it in Japan, but I'm not so sure with the BBC. And I'm very sure you can't in USA's media. All the bugs would be hard to describe without a scene showing digital fleas hopping around and the constant scratching of the actors to remind you of the bites. The poor Japanese rice farmers, living in these villages and small towns had it very tough in the 19th century. Western medicine hadn't reached there yet, and any surplus was taxed, so why try? People have to be quite poor to be unable to afford clothes or soap, and the Japanese bathed often, but washed with soap hardly ever. Their dirty clothes and skins seemed to be responsible for all the skin diseases. And the poor building standards are responsible for the fleas and bugs in their homes.

I feel relief when I see slice of life anime where the homes have normal beds and normal carpets, normal sized homes instead of crammed squalor which seems to be the joke-version of Japan, all crammed into Tokyo. It seems things are more Western that not, once you get out of old towns. Considering the security irritations and crime of living too close together in Western nations, people who want to live about shops in 400 square foot apartments are welcome to it. Just don't think you can force me. I'm from the suburbs. We have space around our houses. We have decks and barbeque grills and garage doors that shut, locking out the burglars. You can keep your criminals and conveniences. We'll retain windows that shut and our fences, our basic rights we are accustomed to. The kind of thing the Middle Class kill people over.

I feel a certain kinship between Japan and Here. California is like Japan, geographically. There are differences too. California is an oasis with a wet jungle to its north, and a dry desert to its East, with ocean to its West. We get heavy rains in the winter, and a little snow in our mountains, and no rain in the summer. Japan gets rain the summer due to being surrounded by ocean, around the same amount of snow in their mountains, and the summers are wet rather than dry which is the primary difference. We both have volcanoes and serious earthquakes, and outside our big harbor cities with foreign trade, most of our populations are impoverished and working in agriculture but aspire to mechanization and worship technology. We are similar, the Japanese and Californians. Japan's economy is about 20 years ahead of ours down the poverty decline, and California is about 20 years ahead in technology, except for cellphones, due to laws forcing us to keep the legacy stuff going, whereas Japan discards their stuff every 18 months, meaning they're cutting edge 5G or 7G by now and we're still fussing with 4G and barely implemented 3G a few years ago. We have the advantage of needing only English and Spanish here, and they have the disadvantage of speaking Japanese, which nobody else cares about because Japan is insular.

What this means is, if Californians go to Japan like Isabella Bird, without seeing all of California first, they'll be impressed but for the wrong reasons. Other than temples and water, it is a bit too similar. See California in the winter, when it is raining, and you'll see enough similar to be unimpressed at the differences. Furthermore, if you drift up into Oregon and Washington as the Spring turns to Summer, its even more similar to Japan (geographically and climatically), only with meth'ed up rednecks and potheads, something they ALSO have in Japan.

I wonder if Oregonians would ever turn those muddy stream and river valleys into rice paddies? That already happened over in Klamath Lakes and the Modoc Plateau East of Crater Lake, North of Mount Lassen. Drought has largely ended those farms, as I understand it. Now they want to grow pot.

We also seem to have fewer fleas than Japan. I do wonder what Oregon will be like when the oil is sent elsewhere and the ability to get around that state is limited to rich people or bicycles. Will you want to travel any distance by bicycle when its raining every half hour and the roads are all muddy because pavement is for cities with people rich enough to afford it, and black bears can run faster than you can pedal? Black bears are hunters. Will you be dinner? And if you can't leave your little valley any great distance, how inbred will you get? Will young people journey out of the valley to find a spouse, risking bears eating you, so you don't have to marry a half sibling cause Mommy and Daddy were cheaters?

Will you be wearing rags or nothing all summer, working in rice paddies, all rednecked, copying the poverty of Japan because that's what conditions leave you in our post-collapse diaspora? Not terribly romantic times, are they? That's what I think about, listening to the story of rural Japan. Will we fall that far? Its very hard to predict. Without fancy electric batteries for the post-oil solar powered tractor, its all human grunt labor. Without electric power, we'll end up doing things by hand, and living on what we can produce ourselves. And that means going without a great deal, like cloth made by machines. And medical care so we'll have diseases too, including Malaria and Bird Flu, and entire towns will die sometimes of epidemics. We won't always know why either. That's how things are, for the peasantry. Education didn't work. It just increases the overall racism, the hatreds. It doesn't make better people. It makes more snobs, who feel justified to hurt their neighbors for money, for power, because they're better than you. This is why revolutions keep happening. Until the population gets fed up with being tossed in the meat grinder and settles in to make a living instead. Here's hoping we can focus on that part instead of turning ourselves into someone else's sausages.