2 days ago
Edging Toward Japan 62: In Search of a Japan of cool summers and light nights
There is a curious historical footnote that tends to be forgotten about the Japanese imperial expansion of the late 19th and early 20th century -- largely remembered today as a remorseless expansion westwards and southwards over the Asian continent.
It's easy to overlook the fact that there was also a small northern component of this expansion resulting in Japan wresting control for quite a long historical period of part of the island of Sakhalin, in modern day Russia. From 1905 until 1945, the Japanese administered the southern part -- and from 1918 to 1925 the entirety -- of this often overlooked island, meaning that you could travel all the way up the archipelago from the southern tip of Taiwan to the northern tip of Sakhalin without ever leaving Japanese jurisdiction.
The Japanese colony on Sakhalin was called "Karafuto" and its third Director General was a man called Hiraoka Sadataro, who also happened to be the novelist Yukio Mishima's paternal grandfather.
"Karafuto" is now a land pretty much lost to history, a piece of modern-day Russia that was once Japanese, but sounds like some fantasy landscape such as the imaginary country of Ihatov dreamt up in the 1920s by the Tohoku writer Kenji Miyazawa. The real Karafuto however was not a dreamscape, but a place sometimes bitterly fought over for its raw materials (timber, petroleum and fishing) with native peoples and bonded labourers moved around like chess pieces to make way for imperial ambitions.
Karafuto popped up in my mind the other day when I was idly dreaming of a Japan that did not suffer from ever more brutally oppressive summers. Imagine a Japan, I was thinking, which you could visit in summer and where the days were long and the weather tolerably cool, how magical that would be. And then I realised that the fantasy cool-and-summery Japan must only be located in the lost geographical landscape of Karafuto.
People often ask me about visiting Japan in the summer and I am often stuck for an answer. I realize that many people enjoy the rituals of a Japanese summer -- the clatter of yukata and geta, the hiss of the cicada, the fireworks, the festivals, the kawadoko (riverside) dining by the Kamo river in Kyoto. Many people visit Japan in summer and have a wonderful time.
But as someone constitutionally incapable of handling the heat and humidity, Japan in summer is not for me. If I spent my summers in Japan, I would spend my entire time indoors, huddled up close to an air conditioner. I've been religiously avoiding Japanese summers since that of 1990, when I nearly dissolved in a sweaty puddle into the sheets in my unairconditioned 6-tatami-mat room in a boarding house in the Uzumasa area of Kyoto. Since then, I have rarely made an appearance in Japan in July or August. In fact, as the years have rolled on, and Japan's summers have got ever hotter, I have now also marked the months of June and September on my "Avoid" list.
This is all decidedly inconvenient. Because it just happens that the months of June to September are also the time of year when I have the greatest opportunity to visit Japan with my school age children. I have often thought how we might square this circle. I've investigated temperatures in the traditional places of retreat from the summer heat like Karuizawa and Hakone, but they are still too hot for me. Hokkaido is more distant, but even if I trekked that far north, it still wouldn't be cool enough and would leave me dreaming of spending August like the British Royal Family in the Highlands of Scotland.
It's a dilemma not being able to visit the country you most want to go at the time of year when you have the most time. So after looking up temperatures on the far periphery of Hokkaido, my eye looked out even further north on the map and I began to wonder if the Japanese gained possession (currently disputed) from the Russians of the Kuril Islands in the far north whether I might then have a suitably cool Japanese destination to visit in summer. Or I found myself dreaming of Sakhalin and half-regretting that the Japanese ever lost their colony there, which would have been quite perfect for my constitution.
The controversial journalist Graham Hancock has been promoting for many decades the idea that at the end of the last Ice Age an advanced civilization, having found their native land unliveable due to radical climate change and rapidly increasing sea levels, took to their boats and headed off to new lands.
I'm wondering if one day the Japanese will, by common consensus, proclaim their traditional homeland simply too hot to live in anymore and take to their boats and start again somewhere a lot cooler. They might do a deal on some uninhabited chunk of northern landmass and restart their civilization there, a remaking of "Karafuto" for those who simply can't hack the heat and humidity any more.
@DamianFlanagan
(This is Part 61 of a series)
In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain.
Profile:
Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).
