The Study: Discovery of Man

From the observation deck I watched a family dressed in black huddle around a freshly filled grave. In silence they stood as a monk priest wearing three shades of orange robes waved burning incense over the buried and chanted words that allowed his face to remain expressionless and still. It was picturesque; the way life accented the charcoal grey tombstones in a neighborhood graveyard that held the remnants of its past residents. From up here, the tiny people who could have been dead or alive or bronze added yet another element of depth to the forever sleeping mosaic below. I stood there, focused on the death of a stranger, yet keenly aware of the opposition to the order of life. The cycle had been broken for those in mourning no matter how hard they tried, the distractions of comfort, of selfishness, couldn't be ignored. The sun beat down on their necks, the wind blew pollen into their eyes and before long the living were once again reacting to the living rather than accepting the loss of life. The deceased was buried now, out of sight and had it not been for the brass plate at the head of the grave, the dead would have been out mind as well. From the observation deck I watched as those dressed in black and orange separated themselves from their former neighbor before even leaving, before floating away as the incense smoke and forever removing themselves from the expired. To some it’s sad, this reactionary world in which we live. For those in opposition fall victim to their own inability to cope with unconscious responses to even the most normal and necessary occurrences and instead of welcoming reality, the human runs away. The human has closed their eyes and plugged their ears and turned their backs for so long that the modern man can no longer be blamed for the evolutionary track his cowardly predecessors have put him on. Regardless of the commonality of this behavior across every sector of our kind, for our own good and for the good of future generations we must relearn to react to the invisible. We must internalize and accept the sounds and sights and smells of worlds civilized and not. Collectively, we have already forgotten our past, whether past is in relation to time or distance, and individually we have begun to separate our minds from our bodies creating a race of people who are not only strangers to one another, but strangers to themselves. It is for these reasons that I am compelled to eradicate the contagious, to burn the suppliers and vanquish the propagators of hyper-modernity, whether machine or man.

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I came to Kyoto as a student of international politics, but within the six moths I had spent here, in Japan and with Maki, I found myself digressing from the traditional definition of politics and understood less and less of their connectivity to life. I guess you could say I was at a crossroad, but my confusion didn't stem from the choice of direction to travel, it was more so in why this choice even existed. I had felt so passionately about the inner workings of nation-states and truly believed in the connectivity of man and law, yet, with each bike ride, each day spent with Maki, seeing things through her eyes and then refocusing my own, I found it harder and harder to understand the ways in which man and law related, in which man saw himself in law and vice versa. From my time in Japan I came to understand that our environment dictates our action and inaction and law remains the shallow language of a very acute reactionary (reactionary here meaning opposing) bunch. These thoughts grew inside of me and Maki nurtured them.

The semester had come and gone, but I wasn't ready to leave. I felt like there was more I needed to accomplish here, more I needed to see. I wrote home to my family letting them know about my decision to drop out of college and instead study culture and language on my own account. I began to take tips from the backpackers I'd see around town. I asked them how they got the most out of their day and they’d explain to me that everyday before going to sleep, they'd map out a new direction to walk through town. If the decision was to travel south, they'd walk as far south as they could, seeing everything along the way, and then walk back the same way, reviewing things from a different angle, assuring the remembrance of the little things later in life. The next day they'd walk north, then west and so on. So this is what I planed to do to with the assistance of my bicycle and the guidance of Maki. We loaded up our rickety rides with makeshift saddlebags and panniers. Maki made sure to grab her notebook and I made sure to grab my language guide and we started southbound, destination Kagoshima. Although I was a tourist, I was set on seeing the people and not the sights. I needed to affirm these feelings within me about mans relation, his reactions, to his environment and I needed to see myself within the movement of the world as well. Over the next month we rode from ryokan to ryokan exploring the people and the cities and the relation between the two. By the time we reached Kagoshima our notebooks were full, our heads throbbed from the expansion of concepts kept within and our legs were only beginning to warm up. Maki and I both felt the importance behind this journey, the importance of learning who we were, but more accurately stated, why we were.