11:28am. There are so many places to wake up. In a bed; under a cotton sheet and above that a thicker sheet filled with feathers. Or on an empty train. Or on an aeroplane over the pacific ocean; I watched islands out the window. But to wake under cotton in a firm bed; this is a good and simple place to wake up in. Light is important too because waking up in the dark is a vile and subhuman thing to be subjected to.

Open a window after waking. If I reach out now I can slide the reinforced glass aside and see the sunlight reflecting off the apartment blocks next to us. If I dont push the window aside I can see the light coming through a paper screen; it is soft and blurred. There will be shadows from the light but they will be weak. Unfortunately the air is much stronger than the light these days. There are small amounts of radiation in the air making it more potent. Walking home from Shinjuku station in the rain and wondering about this semi-potent air. Id rather be subjected to mildly radioactive rain than descend five stories underground to catch an underground train.

It’s easy to be conscious of safe routes now. This way; no old buildings. That way; all aboveground trains. But people doing this kind of thinking become tired and need to sleep long hours; 10, 12, 14 hours a night. When you wake after sleeping such an honest nights sleep the sheets will be messy. A body is underneath all that munted cotton. During the night that body has moved into a variety of configurations and violently changed the geography of the fabric above; many bumps, mounds, a cotton hill, a white cliff, terraces, stalagmites, prairies, dried up river beds, craters, canyons, caldera. The sheets are not ruined but deformed and this is natural.

Photo of our sheets this morning and “Tectonic Series Backarc #1″ by Gary Stevens (HERE)

There are helicopters in the air. In the past there were not as many airborne as there are now. Helicopters blades make a sound like “whfoof-whfoof.” But in Japanese that sound is expressed as “pata-pata-pata” or even “buuuuuuuuuun.” Minutes after the Tohoku earthquake, helicopters were filming an encroaching tsunami. The pilots voices were panicked and broken as they counted the waves heading towards the coast; one, two, three, four. Their HD camera’s sent information to news HQs. Watching televisions we saw an endless stream of aerial images. Potent, violent images of the tsunami stretching inland, carrying flaming houses and ships and bits of peoples lives across farms; these images were all broadcast from a helicopter, probably a Kawasaki OH-6D, one of the 387 Hughes designed helicopter used in Japan and owned by Japan’s coast guard. Or perhaps these images were shot form an AW139 Medium Twin Helicopter (Eurocopter) owned by NHK, the main news service in Japan. The images coming from helicopters during this disaster were just as shocking as those seen in the 2004 Tsunami. BUt “helicopter journalism” created a unreal response in people watching. Looking at the television; “it’s not real.” I don’t think the human brain is really evolved to deal with these kinds of scenarios. Helicopters can not deliver any kind of truth which helps make this real.

I’ve never thought much about helicopters, now they seem very important. In Japan there are three helicopter manufacturers: Fuji Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Only the heaviest of industries can manufacture rotorcraft. There are few clients; helicopters are supplied to the Self Defence Force (SDF) or the coast guard. The news services seem to get their helicopters from overseas (the “Eurocopter”).

On the day of the earthquake we sat in a small park near our house. It is opposite the National Defence Headquarters and helicopters were constantly arriving and leaving. I went to get some food for us to eat. After leaving through the automatic doors of the convenience store I heard a chopping sound and stood outside with some other small children. There were five of us. We watched a big Chinook CH-47JA take off from the defence headquarters. It went north. I don’t know what it saw up there, and even if I did I don’t think I could process that information properly. Helicopters; here are some which are being used in the aftermath of the Tohoku Earthquake:





Boeing Chinook CH-47JA Built by Kawasaki Aerospace Company. Photo by Bruce Martin. Four of these helicopters were used to drop water over the stricken nuclear reactors in Fukushima.





UH-60J search and rescue (SAR) helicopters produced under license from Sikorsky by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. These will become more prevalent over the next 20 years.





Mitsubishi MH 2000 (discontinued in 2004). The first helicopter designed and manufactured in Japan, an “indigenous helicopter.”





Mitsubishi HSS-2B. There were 23 of these helicopters built. This is my favourite helicopter because the angles feel slightly wrong.





Mitsubishi H-60 is a series of Helicopters based on the Sikorsky S-70 helicopter family. This is the 60K the newest version.




Fuji-Bell 204B-2: Military utility transport helicopter. Photo taken from THIS BLOG HERE. That blog has the best collection of Japanese helicopter photos i’ve seen.





Photo by Menno Teunisse. The MH-53E. Eleven MH-53E’s replaces nine KV-107′s which were originally built from kits sent by Boeing. A long-range version KV-107IIA-17 (CT58-140-1) was built for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, only one was built. But SDF KV-107s are now out of service.





AW139 Medium Twin Helicopter (Eurocopter) distributed by Mitsui Bussan Aerospace and bought by All Nippon Helicopter (ANH) who are contracted exclusively to Nippon Housou Kyokai (NHK) and conducts news gathering missions for them. I guess a lot of the aerial footage we have been seeing on television recently was shot from one of the two AW139 owned by ANH. I feel sorry for the men flying those helicopters.

6:28pm. I’m sitting beside a window looking out to a storeyed view — apartments with 3, 6, 12, 28 floors. After the earthquake I am afraid to live here. It’s true. I wonder, when will all those storey’s be reduced significantly? Jacques Brel enters and takes me aside at this time, he is sweaty and talks too closely. His hand is heavy, disproportionate, and he pulls me close. “A man who has no fear it not a man.” I tell him that if i’m afraid I can’t do anything, I can’t stop thinking about what might happen, it’s debilitating. “You should throw-up,” he says, “it always makes me feel better. I do it before flying or sailing.” I try, but it’s quite hard to do; unresponsive epiglottis. “The security you knew before was not real. This is real,” he says. I wish he’d go away, he’s too sincere, I can’t make eye contact with him. And I begin sobbing saying “what can I do?” Marlon Brando enters. He has been raised from the dead, reconstituted from ashes scattered in Tahiti and Death Valley. I think he is trying to tell me to act like a man, but I can’t make it out, whoever did the reconstitution on his face did a terrible job. Once they’d both gone I went back to looking out the window.

This song is about a woman. She seduces and destroys but is desired greatly (in this case) by Jacques Brel, who sings about her as he sweats and shakes and finally, surrenders. At 2:29 he gives himself up to her completely. His face transforms; he looks as though he is about to die. “My heart stop pumping so, remember that she tore you apart…my hands, don’t shake anymore, remember when I cried on you.” He gives himself up to be destroyed by a woman named Matilda, his desire is so great. He is on the verge of emotional collapse, enraptured and hysterical and the way he rolls his “r” sounds brings to mind the angry old Yakuza who yelled at you once. When I watched this video I thought about living in Tokyo after the recent earthquake.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that everything I perceive at the moment is seen within the context of the Tohoku Earthquake. For people outside Japan this crisis is over — the waters from the tsunami have been absorbed into the earth or travelled back out to sea, the damaged nuclear plant is being managed closely, and the aftershocks are decreasing (and Libya is a good distraction) — but in Tokyo things are not back to normal, and we still don’t have any real closure. The threat of something else looming over the city is real and hard to shake off. The nuclear reactors have not been calmed (nuclear boy still threatens to defecate! HERE) and we still have not had “the big one” yet. Maybe it’s simply paranoia, or just the natural way that we’re supposed deal with this kind of thing. I think it’s justifiable fear. The tectonic plates underneath Tokyo are under significantly increased stress, why shouldn’t I be too?

Watching the video above I don’t hear Jacques Brel talking about a woman named Matilda. Not at all. He wrote this song about Tokyo, about choosing whether to stay or to leave knowing that you might be hurt worse in the future. The face he makes at 2:29 makes me uncomfortable. I’m trying hard to understand the atmosphere in Tokyo at the moment, but not too hard, i’ve still got to work (I noticed a person found this website yesterday by asking google the following question: “are people in Tokyo still working?”).

4:15pm. “We were so worried about earthquakes in Shizuoka when I was young. My father once bought two namazu (catfish) and put them into the pond outside because namazu are supposed to feel earthquakes before they arrive, they can sense changes in the earth. He would check their behavior everyday but we never really knew what signs to look for. I don’t know what happened to those fish, I think they got old and died.” Back in Tokyo people are still cursed to talk constantly about earthquakes. Outside, the streets are busy but slightly quieter. Things seem very normal. The only indications that anything has gone wrong are the dimmed electronics; darkened advertising lightboxes, unlit vending machines, subway TV monitors gone black and our of service escalators (see photo). Once they were the trademarks of Japans progress. Stranger still is the lack of foriegners, they’ve all gone back to where they came from. Both tourists and English teachers are notably absent while I’m wandering around Shinjuku station.

3:19pm. We’ve just finished our reportage in Bizen. I have waved goodbye to Lucas and Kaori – editors of Papersky Magazine (HERE) – and I’m riding a local train to Osaka where I’ll meet Hannah and catch the night bus back home to Tokyo. Of all the Japanese traditions we have covered in Papersky (public baths, mountain monks, handmade paper, and fishing) Bizen style pottery is the most political. It seems caught in a struggle between elitism and authenticity as a folk tradition. Although it was originally intended for everyday use, the cost of materials and the prestige associated with it from it’s explosion in the eighties has made most items too expensive to be used by regular people for things like drinking coffee or eating rice. Only the rich or those who deeply value pottery will invest. Over time all things come to be mediated by that which they are not, and so, simple everyday Bizen-yaki became a thing for the elite, and so, it is now returning to a more simple place again (and so on and so on). “Modern art is popular, which makes me want to make even more traditional work.” That is Eisuke Morimoto’s philosophy; he is a craftsman working outside the official associations and clubs which control Bizen-yaki culture. Taking the idea of Bizen-yaki even further away from the elite is a workshop called Hidasugi. The potters here are all mentally handicapped; they make pottery using molds of dragons, fish, frogs and kitchen goods. Occasionally some of them make original work using the Bizen clay. The photo above is of a dragon made by a handicapped man who looked to be in his thirties.

12:29pm. “During the bubble era in the eighties people made a fortune from Bizen-yaki. Business men quit their jobs and came down here to begin a life as a potter, it was a goldrush. Things are not so great now.” Morimoto-san has been explaining the recent history of Bizen pottery to us this morning. Most of the good clay got used up by fair-weather artisans and what was left was taken up by the main families in Bizen. It seems that during the bubble many of the larger families here began searching out high quality clay and hoarding it. The families who are headed by living national treasures (an honor conferred to notable Japanese craftsmen) have hoarded enough clay to last three generations; a means of securing a future for their family. Good Bizen-yaki requires excruciatingly rare clay but these days most of it is hidden under apartment blocks and train tracks; construction workers try to sniff it out to make extra money on the side. The -yaki master we talked to (who is not part of a main family) got lucky in 1989 and secured over 100 tonnes of prime clay. It fills two garages. He parks his car outside now. At the same time, in Tokyo, peoples living rooms and cupboards and filled with dozens of bottles of spring water as there is a threat of tap water being contaminated by radiation. Perhaps one day clean drinking water will become as rare as Bizen-yaki clay, with wealthy families fighting over ownership. Once in a super moon some lucky fellow might discover a hidden cache of the stuff and he’ll store it all in his double garage.