þÿ__<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8 "> <meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive 5"> <title>Amar Amami by Karen Tei Yamashita</title> </head> <body bgcolor="#000000"> <div align="center"> <table cool width="944" height="6098" usegridx usegridy showgridx showgridy gridx="16" gridy="16" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr height="32"> <td width="943" height="32" colspan="4"></td> <td width="1" height="32"><spacer type="block" width="1" height="32"></td> </tr> <tr height="224"> <td width="113" height="224" colspan="2"></td> <td width="723" height="224" valign="top" align="left" xpos="113"><img src="amaramamititle.jpg" width="717" height="192" border="0"></td> <td width="107" height="6065" rowspan="2"></td> <td width="1" height="224"><spacer type="block" width="1" height="224"></td> </tr> <tr height="5841"> <td width="110" height="5841"></td> <td width="726" height="5841" colspan="2" align="left" xpos="110" content valign="top" csheight="5803"> <div align="left"> <font color="#ff9252"><b><i>Mederu</i></b></font><font color="#ffd1ba"><b><i><br> </i></b><br> There are few routes to the Amami isles, the northern islands of the Ryukyu archipelago: by air or by sea. It is true that I have sunk my feet into the coral sands of Amami's beaches, observing the sweep of bird flights and the relentless crawl of waves. Birds may drop seeds; the ocean deposits its debris. So like seed and debris, many find their way to Amami, but the route that some make is a route of memory and imagination. And that route is a journey that may begin somewhere in another time.<br> <br> As I said, there are other possible routes to Amami, but here is the one I know. A man falls in love with a woman. Or, rather, a woman falls in love with a man. Or it is none of this at all, but that bodies combine for short moments and become attached by experience and necessity. War is the catalyst, creating a sense of impermanence and immediacy, a momentary life together without the hopeful stretch of the future.<br> <br> This is the story told by Shimao Toshio who wrote and lived in Amami, stationed there during the war as a young lieutenant charged with the defense of the islands, ultimately by hiding boats in the island inlets readying for suicide missions against the invading enemy. Thus the war brought a young man to a distant island and ensconced him for short moments in the arms of an island woman, and that is the story that lives beyond what was thought to be the inevitability of suicide, beyond the war.<br> <br> A second story emerges from the same time period, but it is the story of an island man, Kano Toshio, who left behind his young wife and two babies in Amami to work in Tokyo and later to study maritime law in Sendai. In Tokyo, he met another young woman, an American nisei, one of many caught in Japan during the war, who found herself on the same train headed for Sendai with Toshio. For the young and lonely lovers, the war is a futile backdrop, night skies lit in air raids, a city terrorized by firebombing, war pressing its stupid and destructive urgency, creating a context for the secret insularity of desire.<br> <br> But then the terror of war ends, and the occupation begins.</font> <p><font color="#ffd1ba">So there you have it, the story of two Toshios.<br> <br> One day, my friend Ryuta wrote to me and said, <i>Come to Amami</i>. Actually maybe he said, <i>I think you should come to Amami; what do you think?</i> At the time I didn't think anything, so the operative word here was <i>should</i>. I didn't question Ryuta because, as his friends and students know, he's a mentoring force that requires trust, not in Ryuta, but in oneself. And besides, Ryuta said, <i>Amami makes a</i> </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1"><i>cachaça</i></font><font color="#ffd1ba"> <i>to rival any in Brazil</i>. This claim of course sealed my resolve.<br> <br> After I arrived, I learned over time that it is the first Toshio -- Shimao's story -- that was the route taken by Ryuta to Amami. But first, the Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov must first arrive to make a film about the Shimaos in which Miho, Toshio's widow, plays herself, reproducing in film the stories that cross between the boundaries of fiction and fact. Ryuta came to Amami to screen this film and to participate in its commentary. It is at this time that he also met the photographer Hamada Kousaku. And from that moment, a nagging headache drew him back again and again so that for the last five years, he and Hamada and others have organized what they call a free university -- a kind of traveling 3-day island journey of dance, investigation, conversation, food, music, community, spiritual engagement, contemplation, poetry.<br> <br> But it is the second Toshio -- Kano's story -- that was my route to Amami. But first, I must spend hours interviewing Betty Nobue Kano in Berkeley about her activist participation in the Third World strike at UC, and the name Amami is a blip in the interview and on my conscience, certainly inconsequential I think to my subject: the Asian American movement. I arrived on the island looking forward to said </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1"><i>cachaça</i></font><font color="#ffd1ba"> and a vacation from my writing only to discover that Betty's father is the second Toshio, and everything begins here. So like Ryuta, I was caught, caught following Kano's story, following every lead that connected Betty to Amami, and pretty soon I wrote to Betty and said, <i>I think you should come to Amami; what do you think? </i>And the operative word here was should. I couldn't entice Betty with </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1"><i>cachaça</i></font><font color="#ffd1ba">, but Amami sugar and salt was my gift to her.<br> <br> It has been 50 years since Betty's father Kano Toshio died at the age of 42, diving for abalone off Point Reyes on the California coast. So perhaps it was fitting that Betty, her daughter Nina, and her step-brother Shigeki, all returned together this year to Amami as a way of pilgrimage. Shigeki is the baby boy born on Amami and left behind by Toshio; Betty is the daughter born in Sendai during the war. Shigeki had not been back to Amami in many decades and surprised Betty in agreeing to join her. He told me at dinner, <i>I cannot eat miso</i>. Perhaps this was because during the war, there was nothing to eat. Each time he put his hand out to beg his mother for food, she spread a bit of miso in his small palm. The same palm waved in wonder at the bombers thudding across the skies with their terrible payload, perhaps the very bombs that destroyed much of Sendai.<br> <br> Years ago, when Betty was organizing the strike for a Third World college at UC, Shigeki was fighting the police behind barricades at Keio University. And now Nina is about to begin her studies in sustainable public policy in Yokohama. Today Betty is behind the national campaign to support Lieutenant Ehren Watada in his refusal to participate in the war in Iraq. The thread of activism runs through this family. I want to suggest that perhaps there is some sort of activist DNA that can be traced back to Amami, perhaps a consciousness of history, a sense of resistance cultivated over time, or just the courage required to stay, to survive, to leave, and, eventually, to return.<br> <br> The photographer Hamada taught me a word for all these connections that, while not necessarily personal or tied by blood, bind us together: mederu. I take it to mean a love that cares for and cultivates. So our route to Amami is a kind of love story, but it is a love story over time -- a long sacrifice, great patience, stubborn belief. A hundred years must pass in order to know its meaning.<br> <br> <br> </font><font color="#ff9252"><b><i>One Hundred Years</i></b></font><font color="#ffd1ba"><br> <br> Ultimately I imagine the route to Amami may be through death. This is its keen message, holding the ghost of life in tombstone caves of granite, calcite, and coral, in the wrung convolution of the banyan's twisting grip. The islands are dotted with ancient and hidden locations of ritual and buried shamans. Iyaiya is such a location. I believe its name means <i>your house</i>, which prompts me to think <i>mi casa, su casa</i>. In this location in other times, the bones of the dead were laid to dry and to be bleached by the elements. Even today, the remnants of human bones, perhaps the radius of an arm, a vertebra or two, wait in the sifted sand of <i>Iyaiya</i>'s exposed cavern. During the daylight,<i> Iyaiya</i> is a cool damp space of dotted light encased by dark sub-tropic vegetation, hanging leaves and vines of the banyan, and the unforgettable roar of cicada. A large phallic tongue of stalactite hangs over the jagged rock tomb of its shaman. A light rain falls, and we huddle with the bones under the overhang of the cavern and wait for nightfall. Like the rising brilliance of a sunset, the orchestra of cicada crescendos, then rests into dark silence.<br> <br> A few days ago I visited the exhibition of photographs of the Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno who, by the end of this week, will be 100 years old. One photograph in particular intrigued me; Ohno's painted face seems to emerge from the gnarled branches and trunk of a desiccated tree as if his body is that very tree. Similarly, Ohno's student, Nakamura, perhaps a young incarnation of the dancer himself, emerged naked out of Iyaiya's twisted vines and rockery. He was at once a snake, a scorpion, an exposed root, the living flesh of those abandoned bones, a human pilgrim to Iyaiya's ghosted space. One imagined that as Nakamura's youthful image disappeared with the last sawing cicada, Ohno's ancient visage became superimposed on that gnarled landscape.<br> <br> I read today in <i>Tudo Bem</i>, a Brazilian newspaper published in Japan, that Tomi Nakagawa, the last surviving immigrant of the Kasato-Maru, that first ship to carry Japanese laborers to Brazil in 1908, died at 100 years of age in </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1">Londrina, Paraná.</font><font color="#ffd1ba"> This means she came to Brazil as a two-year old child. Over a hundred years, she bore 8 children, and lived to see 30 grandchildren, 35 great grandchildren, and 3 great-great grandchildren.<br> <br> Speaking of large families and the passage of time over an entire century, this year, on the first year anniversary of my uncle Yozo Sakai's death, the remaining four siblings, including my mother Asako, and our extended Sakai family reunited in San Francisco. We all sat together in the graceful beauty of Nihonmachi's newest restaurant, Bushi-Tei, so named because the owner once had a restaurant a few blocks up on Bush Street. Although of course an incorrect translation, Tei, as far as I'm concerned, is my and my Tei obaachan's name. This idea is further sealed in my mind because the dark polished wood structures that form the tables and paneling were all removed from an old house in Matsumoto, the city in Nagano where Tei obaachan was born. Furthermore, the restaurant is next door to the Uoki Sakai grocery store, this year 100 years old, founded by my grandfather Kitaichi in 1906.<br> <br> Asked to commemorate our reunion with a few words, I became befuddled at what to say. Much of what might be said necessarily remains unsaid in a family in which anything said can be the cause of dislodging hidden hysteria. But whose family isn't a bundle of misunderstandings? The challenge I think is that such families, of nine siblings in this case, no longer exist. By the time my mother, the fifth child came along, she had to be raised by her older sisters, and in turn she must have raised her younger siblings. Tei and Kitaichi were matriarch and patriarch no doubt, but who rises to the occasion to do the routine chores of mothering and fathering? If your aunts and uncles are in part your mother's parents, family becomes a rather sticky pot. So rather than to delve into the nature of our relationships, I chose an alternative route: our physical DNA, that is: the Sakai facial phenotype. Who could deny what we look like, like it or not?<br> <br> So in this case, we should begin with a photograph of Tei and Kitaichi -- both from Matsumoto and both so strikingly alike that they could themselves be brother and sister, and the discerning features that mark us as Sakai. To wit: thick bushy eyebrows, high sloping Caucasian-like nose, thick lips, and finally malocclusion of the jaw accompanied by a prominent protruding chin. I know; it sounds ghastly, but a few of us Sakai, depending on our various genetic encounters, are actually rather handsome. Then again, if you imagine a ghastly beauty like that of Kazuo Ohno, then you read my mind. To my eye, the Sakai clan is a recognizable tribe, but I assume that the separate features - eyebrows, noses, lips and chins - come from somewhere, from here and there, from some unknown locations in Japan, from Achi and Kochi in Asia, throwing in the Pacific for good measure. Being in Japan allows me the opportunity to search out the Sakai phenotype, which I do these days on trains and in crowded public places and gatherings, snatching glances and taking mental notes. I suspect that NHK has already done the definitive documentary on this subject, identifying Japanese phenotypes by prefecture; having read this, someone will send me the DVD with the accompanying booklet and a polite note, no doubt.<br> <br> So one balmy afternoon in Amami, we turned the corner and walked down the narrow pathway into a simple seaside neighborhood to be greeted with an outdoor banquet prepared by the local women, by the daughters of the sanshin master Sato Eikichi. I cannot express how moved I was by this gracious gesture; somehow I knew this place and this food. It was both a home I know in California and a home I have known in Brazil. This was Sato's home, but he was now there only in spirit, having died this past year. His daughter said, <i>We thought that he would live be one hundred, and he almost made it</i>. Animated by Sato's memory, the cheer of good food, beer and island </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1"><i>cachaça</i></font><font color="#ffd1ba">, and finally accompanied by sanshin, drumming and singing, people rose to dance. Watching their turning and singing bodies, I fell into my pastime, scrutinizing their faces for phenotypes. Ueno, the scholar critic who sat across the table, may have thought me drunk when I exclaimed, <i>All Asians don't look alike!</i> What obvious nonsense. Ueno must have rolled his eyes if he heard my pidgin, something like:<i> Japanese come in ironna shurui ne</i>. There was not a common phenotype I could name, not in the eyes or foreheads, cheeks or skin tone. If these were Japanese, it was one mixed up bunch of human beings, and I was the only Sakai there.<br> <br> The previous day, we had stood on a stretch of beach while Betty's daughter Nina suggested that if each person in our group had a large plastic garbage bag, we could pick up and remove the trash littering these beaches in a good hour. That's what we Americans call initiative. She was disgusted by the plastic bottles, cans, glass, rubber stuff, and broken junk left by humans and strewn by the uneven gestures of the wind and tide. Five of Ryuta's students, who'd been named collectively the Beka, scavenged the beach for appropriate trash out of which to form a scarecrow and to fashion musical noisemakers. Ryuta picked up a plastic buoy used by fishermen and said that the Chinese characters written on it meant that it had floated to Amami from China. All right. One point for trash. I don't know that I feel ambivalent about cleaning up the litter, but if I had any idea that islands keep people in and isolated, it also occurs to me that a lot of stuff washes in, and one would think that includes people.<br> <br> I don't know if this was a conversation I had on Amami or in Taiwan or in Korea, but it must have been one of those islands. It was the subject of the Imperial Japanese prince recently born and heir to the throne. No problem now. The girls can take a backseat. I asked what his name is, and someone said, <i>Oh nani nani hito</i>. I asked, <i>Like hito, the kanji for man, for hu-man?</i> The reply: <i>That's right, only royalty name their children hito; it's very pretentious.</i> Hito? But if you really look at the royal hito, it's the kanji for Confucian filial piety, jin not nin. Okay, what was I thinking? Not human of course, but maybe Chinese. Now there's a genealogy, and it goes back hundreds of years, back to Confucius, from this boy to this boy, from hito to hito. I guess once you start a thing like that, you just can't let it die.<br> <br> The idea of a genealogy, perhaps especially for the Nikkei emigrant, might be that kind of tie that won't let you die. The Nikkei returns to Japan to find his or her lineage, just like the imperials from hito to hito. But my friend, the translator and writer Asano Takao, no emigrant and a real Japanese, said to me in so many words,<i> I must leave Japan to find my hybrid self</i>. Similarly, my friend Ryuta scours the Amami islands for evidence of his name separated into four families: Ima and Fuku and Ryu and Ta(=in this particular case, pronounced &quot;Futori&quot;). At first I thought, no one is satisfied. One wants purity; another hybridity. But on Amami, as I watched those dancing bodies, representing an indescribable variety of phenotypes located in the thin and fat, tall and short, dark and light, youthful and aging, that grotesque and gnarled and, indeed, joyful hybrid beauty of human forms was my momentary <i>Iyaiya</i>. <i>Mi casa, su casa</i>.<br> <br> <br> </font><font color="#ff9252"><b><i>Benshi</i></b></font><font color="#ffd1ba"><br> <br> Although I did not attend these events, a Japanese benshi came to San Francisco and demonstrated just how it works. The traditional benshi is a kind of voiceover employed to enact a live dubbed performance of a silent or foreign film. I imagine this was a carry-over from Bunraku, puppet theatre. Dubbing and subtitles have made the benshi obsolete. Lately a group of San Francisco poets and writers inspired by these demonstrations have taken up their own form of benshi. Take a popular cult film like <i>Rebel Without a Cause</i>, mute it, and impose your own dialogue, soundtrack, and interpretations. A colleague of mine at UCSC, Roxanne Hamilton, enacted such a performance, creating simultaneously a new aesthetic, a critique, and new interpretation of the same film.<br> <br> We're speeding by train through the Korean countryside from Seoul to Pusan and staring at the muted monitors - continuous news and banal entertainment interrupted by pertinent train-related announcements. The monitors are mute, mind you, and no one comes through the car to offer headphones. My guide interpreter is scholar Earl Jackson who apologizes and informs me that the train workers went on strike some time ago and just never returned. We stare up at the monitors and snack on a box of Hakka cakes I've brought from Taipei, and Earl reads all the Korean titling and goes on to explain the mute commercials, and all the other mute shows -- cooking, talent, comedic gaffs, soap opera shorts, even the mute talking heads news show.<br> <br> Earl's interpretations are interspersed with historic fact, star gossip, anecdotes, absurdity and outright lies. Earl points, <i>That actor was a student at my university, but they kicked him out, and he became the richest young man in Korea</i>. <i>Or Those people are experimenting with an electrocution gadget in order to stage a group suicide</i>. Maybe this is a test. Earl quizzes me, <i>What do you think they're selling?</i> I offer a safe answer, <i>Beds</i>. He says, <i>No, air conditioning!</i> A woman closes and reopens her eyes to see the spray of a fountain and, behind that rainbow of water, a man and two children.<i> How about that?</i> I think, <i>Family planning</i>, but ask, <i>Insurance?</i> I can't remember what Earl says, but he might have said that Koreans have fountains that tell your future.<br> <br> Meanwhile he tells me about his friend who is going to classes to get certified to teach high school biology in America. This place will guarantee his friend a job. For some reason, they've named their operation Global Peon. Earl says, <i>Really it's true, and Global Peon is next to this restaurant named Born Chicken.</i> I don't question any of this because when we arrive in Pusan, we get coffee in a shop called Identity Memory. I get </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1"><i>café au lait</i></font><font color="#ffd1ba">. Earl asks for a daboru espresso that somehow translates to the counter girl as two espressos. Earl downs one small cup, then another. He points to the Joy Mart across the street and says, <i>Oh that's a massage parlor.</i> For all I know, Kim Il Jong died last year.<br> <br> Earl wants me to love Korea like he loves Korea, but he only has five days to accomplish this, and part of the plan must be that I don't miss any pertinent or nuanced detail. It's not just mute monitors and eventually films at the Pusan International Film Festival but all posted signs, written and culturally observed, and conversations, both directed to me and overheard. And it's not straight translation, mind you; it's Earl's marvelously rich and often hilarious form of benshi. It is thus that in five days I am incapable of asking the basic <i>how much?</i> or <i>where?</i> but know the words<i> namnam</i> for beautiful Southern men and <i>kyung wu itta</i>, the generous nature of Pusan people. Actually it probably has nothing to do with me; it's just Earl's obsessive way of imbibing his surroundings, a process of continuous self-education, reading every sign, literally and, well, theoretically. He says to me, <i>You can tell me to stop; I can stop</i>. Then he laughs and recounts an incident in which some Korean asked his friend, <i>Does Earl have a mute button?</i><br> <br> The problem, however, isn't if there is a button but if you can read it. Similarly technology is mute, or at least this year it is. Okay, it might ding and beep, and say something like, <i>Please take your ticket.</i> My son is on the phone calling from L.A. saying, <i>Just break down and buy a digital camera. I can't believe you're still using film. Japan's got the latest technology.</i> He's right I think. One of the scholars on Amami tells me he's working on a project of memory, and he's got this digital camera in which he's recording everything. I check up with him at the end of the day and ask, <i>How many memories today?</i> He answers, <i>400</i>. At the </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1">cliché </font><font color="#ffd1ba">of a 1000 words, that's 400,000 words, two novels no less. I'm lucky if I did the full roll of 24 snapshots. Does this mean I only have 24 memories? Not even an essay. It's like Identity Memory coffee; I need a digital camera in order to remember. <i>Yeah</i>, I say to my son, <i>but I can't read the herupu.</i><br> <br> Settling in Tokyo for a month, I drag in the Meiji guesthouse caretaker and follow her around the apartment. First we look in the bathroom. She points at the buttons for the bathtub. <i>Press this button to heat bath water. This button raises the temperature. This button lowers.</i> Then, the toilet. Hey, it's a Toto Washlet, and I think arrogantly that at least I've mastered this one. In any case: <i>Press this button for bidet. This for oshiri. This for raising water temperature. This button, the water comes zuutto. This one for pulse. This off. Then we go to the washer-dryer. Press this button on. Then for water level, high, middle, low. Then for course, you can do regular, blankets, very dirty, shirts, gentle, handwash. You can put on timer, soak and wash after nine hours. Then dry normal, cool, soft, gentle, very very hot.</i> Then there's the kitchen. <i>Press this button for hot water in sink. </i>Then we go to the microwave oven. <i>This button reheats. This one for toaster. This one for meat. This one for pizza. This one for fried food. This one for rice. This for gratin. This for chawanmushi. And please, if you want to defrost, press this one twice.</i> And we've still got to decipher the rice cooker, the water thermos, the television, the VCR, and the air conditioner.<br> <br> Yesterday, the caretaker left me a room heater with the cryptic instructions to <i>save the power before using the heater.</i> She marked the buttons on the machine with stickies that point to buttons: <i>power saving button and heater on.</i> There are about eight more buttons on the thing, one of which reads in katakana, chairudo roku, which I take to mean child lock. That's me. But this is just inside the house. What about the buttons to get train tickets, food tickets, make telephone calls, or work the ATM? I've been gone these nine years of new button development. I need a button benshi.<br> <br> But what I've come to realize about many of these buttons is that they seem to accomplish tasks for you without even asking. For example, the microwave buttons never ask you how many minutes to zap your coffee. You simply put the food in there, and it seems to know if it's a cup of coffee or a frozen gob of rice and heats the thing accordingly. The dryer doesn't ask you how long to dry your wet clothing; it just does it. How does it know? Someone told me the new Toto toilets open and close their covers as you enter the toilet. I visit the Suga household, and at 9:30 pm, I can hear their bathtub announce that the tub is ready. I try to turn the light off in their bathroom, and Suga Keijiro says, <i>Don't worry. It turns itself off.</i> He adds with some resignation, <i>The whole place is computerized.</i> I heard that in Bill Gates's house, the rooms change temperature and ambiance depending on the person who enters the room. Well, that's Bill Gates, but with a button benshi, I know I'm just buttons away from my digital skin.<br> <br> Lately, Gayle Sato, my friend and host, reminds me of another word for love: amaeru. And I take this to mean a love that anticipates your needs. All right, we won't go there, but sitting on the heated throne of Toto, well just maybe. Okay, maybe it's not exactly love.<br> <br> In Taipei, Nathan Chang, my son's friend and culinary arts colleague, escorts me up the Taipei 101, currently the tallest building in the world. After it's pointed out to you, you realize it dominates the city landscape, like a huge bamboo scepter rising out of the earth. The elevator climbs 87 floors in 37 seconds. That's 2.35 floors per second. They tell you they are the fastest elevators in the world at 1,010 meters per minute, meaning if you go one minute, you've overshot the top by 502 meters. If you do the calculations, it's about 38 miles per hour, and you figure that's rush hour in L.A. You watch the Milky Way light up with tinkling dream music on the elevator ceiling, grip yourself for g-forces, and think who's in a hurry?<br> <br> At the top, Nathan gets me outfitted with a portable audio device and earphones. Tuning in at station #2, a woman's voice gives you the building's vital statistics: highest structure at 508 meters, world's biggest passive damper with a diameter of 5.5 meters and 660 metric tons at a cost of 132 million new Taiwan dollars. This damper is a round ball at the center of the building that keeps it from swaying around in the wind. I didn't understand if it prevents 40% movement or 40 degrees of movement, but 40 of anything sounds terrifying especially when you look obliquely out the glass at the symbolic cloud and dragon reliefs hanging like gargoyles and get vertigo from the sway. You are further informed that the double-glazing glass curtain walls can sustain an impact of 8 tons (a Boeing 767?), and the structure has been designed to withstand the biggest earthquakes in a 2,500-year cycle. The 2,500-year cycle thing should give you confidence, given the long recorded dynastic history of China. If anyone should know earthquake cycles, it's the Chinese.<br> <br> The audio tour invites you to stations #3 through #13, but I keep playing #2 for the statistics and to hear the following: <i>TAIPEI is the acronym for Technology, Arts, Innovation, People, Environment, and Identity. One-O-One represents the full height in floors of TAIPEI 101, but it also represents the numerals one-zero-one used in digital technology.</i> Nathan has the English version of the audio tour too, so we don't know what the Chinese benshi says. Does she recite acronyms or Chinese characters? TAIPEI 101 is the tower of the future, and I am in the mandate of the heavens. From our perch in the heavens, Nathan can flip open his cell phone, take my picture, and dial my son in L.A. <i>Hey, Jon, he says, aren't you going to wish me a happy birthday? Oh by the way, your mom's here.</i><br> <br> Eighty-seven floors below, on this very day, October 10, 2006, thousands of people are on the streets celebrating the 95th year of the Chinese Republic, so declared by Sun Yat-sen back in 1911. I quibble with Andy Chih-ming Wang, professor at Tsing Hua University, about the dates, citing October 1, 1949, our location on the island of Taiwan, and the large elephant to the west with all those People, and of course this is the contradiction at the heart of the island. But at something like 4,000 years from Xia to Qing dynasties, what's 95 years no matter where your portion of the diaspora happens to end up?<br> <br> Actually thousands of people wearing red t-shirts are in the streets and protesting the current government, calling for the resignation of the president. I vaguely understand the protestors to be of the old nationalists going back to Chiang Kai-chek. The current government is that of the new nationalists, but who are they? We eat traditional food in an old Hakka village. The owner-cook speaks to me in Japanese, and walking around that village, our host Professor Kuan-Hsing Chen points out the vestiges of Japanese colonial architecture. In the museums, don't forget the Han, the Dutch, the Malay-Polynesians aboriginals, not to mention pirates. The final defining word for TAIPEI, Identity, has eluded me, but gradually it becomes the most important. It's part of Ryuta's debris washed up on the island shore hybridity theory. Who is Chinese? Who Taiwanese?<br> <br> This is where I put in a word for the betel nut. Kuan-Hsing exclaims,<i> Betel Beauties! I did an article on them for Inter-Asia.</i> Professor Andy tools down the truck routes pointing out the betel nut stores laced in neon and featuring scantily clad women retailers -- betel beauties, preparing the nuts for sale. Andy stops the car like maybe he's done this before, and I jump out to buy a bag. Betel nuts look like small green coconuts the size of olives wrapped in carefully folded leaves. The folded leaves contain a paste of white lime.<br> <br> Mind you, the car is filled with professor-types, and this I imagine is a cultural studies event. At night, the neon lights go on, and my intellectual hosts all turn into betel benshis. I'm told that truck drivers chew this stimulant that produces blood-red saliva that gets spit out the driving trucks. One professor says, <i>Disgusting. Some of my informants were addicted to it, so when they talked, the juice spattered all over my notes.</i> She points at the splatter of dried red paint on all the crosswalks. <i>Are you going to try it?</i> I think about blood saliva and wonder. Identity Memory coffee is about my speed. Then the Roger and Hammerstein's <i>South Pacific</i> song comes back to me: <i>Bloody Mary's chewing betel nuts. Now ain't that too damn bad.</i> She's the tomato drink spiked with Russian vodka and Louisiana Tabasco. Then there's ketchup with its origins in what might be Chinese-Malay-Indonesian fish sauce and Japanese supageti whose main ingredient is ketchup. And tomatoes are native to the Americas. Then there's James Michener who wrote <i>South Pacific</i> and married a nisei, and the actress who plays Bloody Mary is Filipino. It all makes total sense. Betel nuts are the pumping heart of this blood discourse.<br> <br> The next day I slip the betel nuts in with the Hakka cakes and smuggle them into Korea, my gift to Earl.<br> <br> If you get 30 people together for an Amami free university event, you have to rent about five cars to caravan them around the island. All the rental cars have GPS navigation systems. Right, more buttons. I watch our position on the island on the LCD screen. That we're circling the island is obvious enough, but in order to keep the island in the screen, the system has the island turning underneath our position. Thus it seems as if the island is moving beneath our car, and we are merely holding our position on the road. My driver is Ueno Toshiya who I discover coined the phrase <i>techno-orientalism</i>. So heck, I'm in the right car.<br> <br> Besides, Ueno sports the best t-shirts. The first day he's got a very cool one of Che Guevara; the next day he's wearing Frantz Fanon. On the third day, it's Hakim Bey. It's like cool, cooler, coolest. It could be a philosophical fashion statement, but Ueno's a scholar of all these guys. Who knows what other shirts he's got. So we're caravanning in five identical cars, following the spectacular coast or charging up narrow mountain roads, and Ueno is his own navigation system. He's negotiating Fanon, takes a curve around psychoanalysis, shifts into Bataille, makes a New Left but leaves it behind, passes Dubord, checks out Said in his rearview mirror, and then swings into the Imafuku-turn on Amami. And the island slips mutely beneath us like a dream.<br> <br> That night, we view Hamada's edited film, in part a lyrical eulogy for Sato Eikichi. Later, Ryuta and Hamada discuss their ideas for other films, but films they decide that cannot be complete without additional elements: live musicians or dancers or, yes, maybe even benshi.<br> <br> One by one, we slip off to slumber. I return to my room, drawn first to my laptop to refine a sentence or two in a chapter before succumbing to sleep. I can hear the rhythmic pounding of the waves outside my window, but louder yet, human sounds prevail. I slide open the glass door and lean out the balcony. I can see a small group of figures huddled on the beach, and I know Ryuta and the Okinawan Kana poets are deep into their cups of Amami </font><font color="#ffd1ba" face="Times New Roman,Georgia,Times" size="+1"><i>cachaça</i></font><font color="#ffd1ba">. The twanging of the sanshin and the distinct wail of a man's voice cries into the moon's bounding reflection. And it is a deft interpretation of the moon's silent passage over the ocean, a voiceover and dubbed version I will never hear or know again.<br> <br> </font><font color="#ff9252">Tokyo, October 2006</font><font color="#ffd1ba"><br> <br> </font></p> <font color="#ffd1ba"> <hr> <br> (c) Karen Tei Yamashita, 2006<br> <i>@CafeCreole</i></font></div> </td> <td width="1" height="5841"><spacer type="block" width="1" height="5841"></td> </tr> <tr height="1" cntrlrow> <td width="110" height="1"><spacer type="block" width="110" height="1"></td> <td width="3" height="1"><spacer type="block" width="3" height="1"></td> <td width="723" height="1"><spacer type="block" width="723" height="1"></td> <td width="107" height="1"><spacer type="block" width="107" height="1"></td> <td width="1" height="1"></td> </tr> </table> </div> <p></p> </body> </html>