Yesterday was awkward and “chotto crazy.”
I left the comfort of Yamanouchi Uncle (Ozeki-san) and family and headed for Ni'igata Prefecture.
Initially, I booked this leg of my trip to seek inspiration for my writing about Sister Agnes Sasagawa. But in the back of my mind, I knew that because events surrounding Agnes occurred in and around Ni’igata Prefecture — where my family is from — I’d have to make that pilgrimage as well.
I have no contacts and no expectations of actually meeting any family. I only hoped to see the landscapes from which we came. And perhaps to see or imagine what drove them to a new life as sugar cane field laborers in the Hawaiian Islands.
Thank you to my friend Quarry who suggested hitting up ancestry.com for some basic deets. After entering a few bits of info, they let me preview a few key public documents to give me a landing place in Ni’igata.
This is my maternal grandfather’s WWI draft registration card.
It says he was born in Shibata, Ni’igata, so that’s where I went.
I arrived in Shibata and was greeted by the smell of chemicals in the air. It smelled like Eau de Monsanto…
I had no idea where to go and just wandered a bit. I decided to go hang out in a cemetery because that’s just what you do on vacation when you’re a goth at heart. I held some hope that I’d find something because very old graves were intermingled with brand new ones. But the old ones were so old that you could barely read the engravings on them. Not that I could readily read them anyway!
As I walked up and down aisles of temple graves, I remembered a murky, yet key detail about my mother’s family.
Her grandfather, Senmatsu Sakai, who brought his wife and two sons (one of whom was my mother’s father) to Hawaii, was an ORPHAN. And so was his wife. They grew up in a Catholic orphanage in Ni’igata and eventually married. And he became a Catholic.
So all of this pointed to the fact that my hanging out in a Buddhist cemetery was unlikely to bring me any closer to my roots.
However, it did give me the solitude to trigger this memory.
It made me think about where one’s history and identity come from when you are raised in an orphanage and leave as an adult. It is difficult enough to work these things out when you DO know much more about where you came from.
Perhaps this fact made it easier for them to leave.
I walked around Shibata for a few more minutes and just felt like leaving. My legs could not carry me any further in Shibata!
I headed to Ni’igata City, where my hotel was. When I arrived, I felt thoroughly aimless and awkward, and red and puffy all over from all of the heat and humidity and carb consumption. (Still, she’s going on about the carbs…)
I just needed a minute to regroup and chill. I saw a Key Coffee sign and ducked inside.
And that’s when I thought I had been transported to another dimension.
There was no coffee to be seen. Rather, the room was dominated by a table full of vibrant, raucous women of all ages, and yards and yards and yards of fabric and thread.
The leader, in Dickies overalls, yelled out something in Japanese to me and they all started laughing and one of them grabbed me and sat me down at the table.
Was this a quilting group? A coven? Yakuza onna-oyabuns?
“Momoko!” the leader yelled, never stopping the stitching she was doing at lap-level.
Momoko came out and smiled and said in stilted yet ebullient English, “Welcome! Where are you from?” And then the story was allowed to unfold.
I had landed in the studio of Akiko Ike. Akiko calls her art form “Chiku Chiku,” which is her modern take on an old form of stitching called sashiko. Sashiko is a means of strengthening and increasing the lifespan of cloth, often used on work clothes, by reinforcing it with stitching.
Akiko’s work is less about strengthening clothing for utilitarian purposes, but more about her passion for recycling and keeping old cloth alive and vibrant.
She sees Chiku Chiku as a meditation and the stitching is not about keeping lines straight, but more about randomness and the resulting beauty of the puckers and folds that arise.
She unfurled the long piece of cloth she was stitching and I was very surprised to see what it was!
“The cloth is over 100 years old,” Momoko explained.
I asked where it came from and Momoko said, “When she goes looking, it just comes.”
She’s stitching the carp flag for an exhibit and workshop in Australia in October.
Momoko said, “Come here. You are going.” She took me to a car that Akiko’s daughter was driving.
“You are going to Hakusan.”
I got in.
In just a few blocks, we arrived at Hakusan, a Shinto shrine down the street. Yesterday was the last day in a two-day observance of something that I had to Google later: Torigoe Chinowa-kuguri.
And we went through a kind of obstacle course of praying:
3. Bow twice, clap twice, bow once, and then shake this rope to make the metal container clang a few times.
4. Pray to the white serpent. Pray to the yellow serpent.
5. Get a fortune. Mine said that things were going to be “Pretty Okay.” 🤔
Hello Kitty can help make your wishes come true!
Then we got back into the car and went back to the studio.
I sat with the coven a little bit longer and just had to say: “Yayoi Kusama?”
I knew it would draw some sort of response that I wouldn’t need Google to translate. The place lit up with snickers.
I thought, “Is this like Iceland, where the general public thinks Bjork is a crazy, talentless hack?”
Akiko looked at me with a sparkle in her eye and said, “Chotto (a little) crazy.”
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