October on Yuigahama

The beach at Yuigahama is dark grey, almost like wet coal. I don’t know why this bothers me – maybe it’s habit. In my head a beach looks different: bright, straw-coloured, sometimes nearly yellow. The kind I knew at Skanda lake near Olsztyn, where I played as a child in summer. A giant mountain of sand we tumbled down all the way to the bottom, where the water waited. In truth it was a small patch of sand, but in a child’s memory it grew into the eighth wonder of the world. Here, though, above Sagami Bay, the sand is dark from iron and from history. It surprises me, though it shouldn’t, how quickly an October afternoon comes to its end. The sun hangs low above the headland of Inamuragasaki and looks like a bowl of tea that has begun to cool.

I’m sitting on a low wall that separates the promenade from the sand, backpack under my elbow, thermos in hand. The beach season ended two months ago, and the place where the umi-no-ie (海の家 – lit. “sea house”) once stood – wooden stalls with rāmen and beer – looks like an old, abandoned theatre stage. The wind from the ocean is salty and heavy. A few kites hang above the waves – at first I don’t see the children holding the strings, only after a moment do I make out their silhouettes by the pier, and beside them the more static figures of fathers. The kites don’t seem to be steered by anyone – they jerk and sway as if they had their own minds and their own vision of where they want to fly. From far off, through the noise of the waves, every now and then comes an enthusiastic, childish “agare!” or “takaku, takaku!”.

I had wanted to see the Great Buddha today, half a kilometre from here, on a hill, in the temple of Kōtoku-in. I know I’ll get there, but not yet. First I need this. An imperfect beach. Not crowded, but not deserted, not colourful and hot, but autumnal and grey.

On the right, twenty metres or so from me, a man in a neoprene wetsuit keeps emerging from the wave with a board under his arm. He does this without hurry. I count distractedly how many times he’s fallen, the way someone counts grains of rice in a bowl, more from boredom than from interest. I give up. I try to listen to what is actually being said here.

The Surfer

He’s stubborn. I begin to count more carefully. He gets up for the eleventh time. The wave pushes him down the way it did the first time, the second, the eighth. He returns, swimming on his belly, twenty or thirty metres. He paddles with his hands, sets the board, asks the wave a twelfth time.

I expected that at some point he would shout. I expected an angry gesture of fist striking water, a silent hissed “f—”. Nothing of the kind. The surfer rolls onto his back, lays his head on the board, closes his eyes. He stays like that for several breaths. Then he paddles back to shore, walks out of the water, lays the board on the sand, sits down beside it.

He doesn’t look like someone who lost. Or won. He looks like someone who understood something. The wave is bigger than him. That’s how it is, end of matter.

He sat about a dozen metres from me, and on his face I saw a calm for which I had no good name in Polish. The word “resignation” fits this state like a suit two sizes too loose. “Reconciling oneself” sounds greasy, artificial. “He accepted it” – sounds like a contract, like a signed document. None of it fits. He lost, he gave up, sure – yet I have the impression he’s grateful for it.

I stare at this longer than is decent. The surfer takes a tangerine out of his small backpack, peels it slowly, like someone returning from a match whose result didn’t matter, because the playing was for the playing’s sake.

The Fisherman

On the left, on a concrete pier, stands a man who could be my father, if my father had been born in Japan, not in Działdowo. He wears a thin nylon jacket and his hands – strong, dry, with knotted fingers like roots sticking out of an embankment.

I look at him on and off for perhaps an hour. The sun in that time has clearly slid towards the horizon. He hasn’t moved once, except for raising his hand twice to adjust the line. He hasn’t caught anything. Nothing has pulled. His attentiveness contains nothing of tension – it is the attentiveness of a man who isn’t hurrying, but isn’t putting anything off either.

Eventually, when the sun grazes the horizon line, the fisherman packs up his gear. He does this still without hurry. He puts the rod into a canvas case. He carefully shuts the bucket with its lid, though there’s probably nothing in it but air. He takes the case under his arm, the bucket in his other hand. He stops on the pier – six, seven seconds. He looks at the sea. He gives a delicate bow of the head, almost imperceptible, and walks off.

I don’t understand at first to whom that bow was for. Only now, when I read this notebook years later and try to pour its incoherent thoughts onto the “paper” of Ukiyo-Japan, does it occur to me that he bowed to what he didn’t catch. Or to the sea – today nothing wanted to give, but at least it kept him company. Or to the hour of his own life, which he had used as well as he knew how. Or to all three at once.

The Word

They have a word for it. Anyone who has lived in Japan for a while will sooner or later hear it. The first time perhaps in a bank, when you’re trying to open an account, the clerk in his white shirt shuffles your papers twice, touches them with his finger in a few places, and finally says with a slight bow “mōshiwake gozaimasen, kondo wa akiramete kudasai” – I’m terribly sorry, please give it up this time – because the residence card has a date shorter than six months. The second time in your own head, when you’re standing with a bicycle in a narrow alley in Setagaya, behind you a car driven by a woman returning from the shops glides patiently, on both sides a concrete wall and there is absolutely no way to let her past – and inside you something that just a moment ago was screaming “I have to do something about this!” suddenly fades and says calmly: akirameru, let it be, ride on at your own pace, she’s in no hurry either. The third time in front of the television, when a Japanese swimming coach at the Olympics is screaming at his seventeen-year-old swimmer making it to the last wall three lengths behind the rival: “akiramerunaaa!” – don’t give up! – and you can see in his face that this is no empty shout, only the one word that makes any sense in this twentieth second.

諦め (akirame). Resignation. Reconciliation. Consolation. But these are only three outer skins. Underneath sits something far older.

The character 諦 itself consists of two elements. On the left stands 言 – “speech”, “word”. On the right 帝 – “emperor”, “highest authority”. Together they give the image of speech uttered as if by a sovereign: finally, without appeal, in a tone that nothing will alter. “To speak as an emperor.” To pronounce a thing with complete clarity, without negotiation, without evasion.

In the Chinese Buddhist tradition the same character was used to write the Sanskrit satya – truth, that-which-is, reality seen as it really is. The Four Noble Truths of the Buddha are written 四諦 (shitai) – four truths, four clear pronouncements of reality which cannot be evaded. The first runs: existence is suffering. The second: suffering has its source in craving. The third: this source can be extinguished (and with it, suffering). The fourth: there is a path, leading towards that extinction.

Because akirame has a brother. A brother almost invisible, yet for the whole meaning crucial. With the same sound – akirameru – the Japanese also write a different verb: 明らめる, where instead of 諦 stands 明, the character of light and clarity. This second verb existed first. It meant exactly this: “to brighten”, “to make clear”, “to see through”. Only over the centuries, through the Buddhist association with the truth of impermanence, did the clarity of this seeing begin to shift towards reconciliation, and reconciliation towards letting go, and letting go – towards the present, shallowed-down understanding of the word as resignation. Today’s dictionary says “give up”. The old Japanese dictionary says: “make clear”.

Both meanings live inside one word to this day. When you say akirameru, you can let go with a hung head, or you can see the thing as it is and live on with that seeing. The first is failure. The second is maturity. The language plaits both at once and refuses to choose. The surfer let the wave go today. The fisherman let the fish go today. Both saw a certain truth about themselves.

The Coach Shouts

That this word lives two lives at once is nowhere as clearly visible as in Japanese sport.

A kendō coach screams at a nineteen-year-old buckling under the pressure of an older opponent: “akirameru na!” – don’t give up! A maths teacher in junior high bends over a girl putting her pen down on an unsolved problem and says quietly: “akirameru na yo” – just don’t give up. A TV commentator sighs as a swimmer covers the last fifty metres slower than the start of the lane: “akirame ga hayai” – she’s giving up too quickly. It’s a reproach. It’s a flagging of weakness.

The other side of the same coin is “akirame ga warui” – “stubborn, can’t let go”. Here the register suddenly reverses. Because now what is being flagged is the absence of akirame. A competitor who can’t say to himself “it’s over” looks grotesque. Holding on to a result that can no longer be changed is like quarrelling with an echo. The same word, in mirror image. Here a reproach for weakness, there a reproach for stubbornness.

Most deeply this is visible in sumo. A bout lasts a few seconds, sometimes a few more. In that time neither of the two great men has the right to let go even for a fraction of a breath. But at the moment the foot of the first touches the sand outside the line, the bout ends. The loser steps back to his corner. He bows to his opponent. He walks down from the dohyō, on which a second ago he was fighting for his place in the hierarchy – in complete silence and apparent indifference.

He doesn’t spit, doesn’t shout, doesn’t wave his arms. He says to himself: mō akiramemasu. I let go now.

From our European perspective this may look like some cold ritual stripped of emotion. But this isn’t stiffness. This is precision. This is one of the most mature acts a human being can perform publicly: to see a thing as it has happened, and to honour that seen thing. I lost. The opponent was better.

An old, today rarely heard saying (諺 – kotowaza – a proverb) goes:

何事も諦めが肝心

“nanigoto mo akirame ga kanjin”

“In all things, the ability to let go is the most essential.”

The first lesson of life. The word kanjin contains the character 肝 – liver, the most important organ, the axis of a living being. In English one could translate it: “akirame is the heart of the matter”. This lesson isn’t a lesson of weakness. It’s a lesson of knowing when to fight, and when to bow.

The coach shouts “akirameru na!” only in one specific context – during the run, during the match, during the exam. After the run he no longer shouts. After the run he sits down beside the loser and says quietly: “mō akirameyou”. Let’s let go now. That was a good fight. There will be others.

Hōjōki

Sometimes I return to a small, old little book. In English it appeared as “An Account of My Hut”, in the Japanese original “Hōjōki” – literally “Record of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut”. It was written by Kamo no Chōmei in 1212, in seclusion, in the forests below Kyoto, when earthquakes, fires, famine and war had finally beaten out of his head any wish to remain in the capital (more about this here: Japanese children know "Hōjōki" by heart – but what can we learn from a monk of the 13th century?).

It opens like this: a river flows ceaselessly, but the water is never the same. The foam disappears, then forms again, never lasts long. So it is with people, and their houses, and their cities.

A Japanese pupil at twelve knows this sentence by heart. A grown Japanese returns to it sometimes, when something has been taken from him again. Japan herself returns to it every dozen years or so, when something has perished again – a tsunami, an earthquake, a market crash. Because “Hōjōki” is not a complaint. Nor is it a hymn to suffering. It is a lesson: “how to look?”

Chōmei writes about people stripped of their homes by fire or flood, but he doesn’t write about them with pathos. He writes the way one draws water – looking at it, adding nothing to it. After a hundred and fifty pages of such looking he comes to a conclusion which is the core of Buddhist and Japanese maturity: to wrestle with what passes is to give it a second power over you. Maybe I’ve put this too much in European terms. But I am a European, and I take Japanese teachings my own way. I too must let this go. Akirame.

The first power impermanence has at once, of itself. The second you give it yourself, when you try to stop it. The first you have to bear. The second you can refuse to give. The whole difference between an unhappy man and a man at peace lies right here.

Chōmei built himself a hut ten feet across, because he knew that a larger one he would have to leave with greater regret. The small hut isn’t an act of asceticism, nor a manifestation of virtue. It’s a sober reckoning with reality – with what can really be held.

Hase-dera

I get up from the wall and walk uphill. There, where the Hase shopping street ends, the gates of Hase-dera temple open. I pass a row of small restaurants with white shirasu fish in the display, and quietly walk through the wooden gate.

Hase-dera is old, thirteen centuries, and beautiful with that particular kind of beauty a place has when it has been through much. In the main pavilion stands the eleven-headed Kannon, nine metres tall, of gilded camphor wood, the tallest wooden statue in Japan. But it isn’t for her that I came today.

On the left, between the path leading to the main hall and a small stream, stretches an area usually passed by visitors with a light step, with no awareness of what they are actually looking at. Hundreds, thousands of small stone figures. Statuettes the size of a fist. Each one has a round face with half-closed eyes. Each wears a red bib, sometimes a small child’s cap, sometimes a scarf. Some have plastic windmills at their feet, spinning when the wind from the sea sweeps into the courtyard. Some hold a plush toy. Some have a can of sweet drink set beside them, sometimes a juice in a small carton.

These are jizō. More precisely mizuko jizō – mizuko means “water children”. Each of these figures was placed by a parent – father, mother, both – in memory of a child they couldn’t take into their arms. Miscarriages. Stillbirths. When a child dies before it begins to breathe, Japanese tradition says: its soul did not have time to harden into this world. It is like dew on the grass. Jizō – in Sanskrit Kshitigarbha, “womb of the earth” – is the protector of such souls. The red bib parents put on the figure is meant to keep the child warm on the other side (more on these figures here: A stone Jizō figure in a red bib — when there are no words left).

At Hase-dera, since the Second World War, about fifty thousand of them have appeared. They are replaced when the stone crumbles from moisture. They stand densely, in several rows, by a wall overgrown with wet moss and ferns.

I crouch in front of one of the figures. A cap knitted on needles – someone placed it not long ago, it isn’t soaked yet. On the ground beside it stands a cup of apple juice. I chose this statuette by chance, because it was at the end of the row, but in the crouch there is no chance any more. I stay with it and don’t know what to do with myself.

Though I have had the luck never to experience this, I imagine this is the hardest akirame that exists in human experience. Not the letting go of a match, not the letting go of a fish, not the letting go of a job in a corporation. It is the seeing that the child you waited for will not come – and the not closing of one’s heart to the world after that.

Because in this lies the whole difficulty of the thing: you can break down and wait it out. You can stiffen and forget. Each of these solutions is a failure of akirame. Akirame wants something almost impossible: that you see clearly that the child is gone, and that you remain still “naively” open to the world.

The red bib tied by the mother on the stone is a gesture at the edge of what language can say. “I know you’re not here. But you’re cold. And I have to help you.” This is a love that knows its limits, and within those limits, in spite of them, does what love has always done – dresses, warms, passes apple juice, not minding that this is irrational.

I get up when I hear someone walking the path behind me. An older woman, near sixty, with a paper bag and a small bouquet of wildflowers. She passes me without a glance, crouches by a figure three rows from me. She takes a new red cap out of the bag and gently slips off the old one. The old one was wrinkled by rain. She folds it carefully, as if it were a living child’s clothing, and puts it into the paper bag. The new cap she ties under the chin of the statuette. She stays in the crouch. I don’t know whether she is praying or talking. I go quietly down to the stream, so as not to take this from her.

Beneath the Sand

I come back to the beach by another route. It’s almost evening. The surfer is gone. The kites have disappeared. On the pier where the fisherman stood, some boy is throwing a stick to a golden retriever. The dog races over the wet sand and comes back with the stick, lays it at the boy’s feet, panting. Someone might say it’s a quite un-Japanese sight, but Kamakura is a dog-friendly city, and outside the season you can take them onto the beach.

I sit by the very line of the waves, near the place where the sea licks the sand every dozen seconds. And suddenly I remember what I read on the train in a junior-high history textbook, when I was coming here from Tokyo. The fourth of July, 1333. The forces of Nitta Yoshisada beneath the western wall of Kamakura. The Hōjō clan, regents of the shogunate, the family ruling the country for a hundred years, is losing its last battle. General Nitta took advantage of the low tide, went around the headland of Inamuragasaki – the same headland above which the sun now hangs – and entered the city from the side of the beach. In one day it was over.

In the family temple of Tōshō-ji nearly nine hundred Hōjō samurai, including the last three regents, committed seppuku together. Not out of shame. Not out of panic. Out of pure, dry recognition: we have lost, and a man who has lost no longer seeks any further day for himself. Ordinary townspeople followed. In total that day over six thousand people connected with the Hōjō parted with their lives – many by their own hand, others in fires and final clashes. Six thousand in one day, in a city the size of Płock.

In 1953, during work near the first torii gate leading to the shrine of Tsurugaoka Hachimangū, near the place where this retriever now runs, five hundred and fifty-six skeletons were found. All from that period. All with marks of violent death. Subsequent excavations in the nineteen-nineties uncovered another four thousand. The rest – buried, burnt, scattered in the sand which I have under my feet.

I look at it – it’s exceptionally dark, and now suddenly it seemed to me almost black. I cannot easily reconcile what happened here with what is here today. What I’m trying to say sounds angular in my head: the Japanese tradition of akirame has within it a noble core, and at the same time has within it that extreme gesture in which the clarity of seeing reality is taken all the way to a complete resignation from existence. This stands before my eyes and I do not approve of it, but I also cannot say I am repelled by it. The Hōjō saw how things stood, and from that seeing drew the final conclusion. They didn’t panic. They didn’t try to escape to Kyoto disguised as monks. They stood in the truth as long as the truth allowed them – and then they were no more. I don’t like it. I don’t have to like it.

Akirame has its dark underground. It mustn’t be cut from the story about it, because without it the whole concept becomes sweet – like an American mindfulness handbook in an airport bookshop. This isn’t a sweet concept. It is serious. It contains within itself the readiness to go into the truth all the way to the end, and it is precisely in this readiness that its weight lies.

The golden comes back with the stick. The boy throws it again. The dog barks. In the calm air of the October evening this bark sounds like a call to a life going on regardless of what shadows lie beneath the sand.

Stoics by Another Sea

Something similar occurred also to people who had never heard the word akirame and didn’t know any sutras.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor, my first philosopher beside Nietzsche – read in the difficult years of being a teenager, when about Japan I still knew nothing – was sitting on a similar evening above the Danube, in a military camp on the border of the empire with Germanic tribes. He was writing then a notebook – shown to no one in his life, found long after his death. Short notes set down in Greek. One sentence returns in them again and again: “To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.”

Or this: “Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you.”

The emperor wrote this not out of naïveté or lack of life experience. Most of his children died before him. The empire was falling apart. The plague which would later be given his name was wiping out legions. Marcus Aurelius is not writing himself a handbook of good mood. He is writing an instruction on how not to give in inwardly – not through stubborn negation of what is, but through accepting it.

His spiritual master, Epictetus, a slave from Phrygia, opens his Encheiridion with one distinction. Some things depend on you – your judgements, your desires, your aversions, your actions. Others – do not. Your body does not. Your property, your reputation, most of the events around you – also do not. The whole of wisdom, says Epictetus, consists in not confusing these two orders. The unhappy person tries to grasp what does not depend on him, and ignores what he can shape.

This sounds like an instruction on akirame, written in Greek. See what depends on you. Hold to that. The rest don’t pull at. Let go – in the original sense of the word, in the sense of making clear, in the sense of 明らめる.

Nietzsche, nineteen centuries later, lays out the same thing from another side. His amor fati – love of fate – is no longer only consent. It is an active attachment to what happens anyway. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, but love it.”

I don’t want to make cheap contrasts here. The Stoics did not invent akirame, the Japanese did not invent Stoicism. A human being, wherever he sits down and thinks calmly about his own fate, sooner or later comes to similar thresholds. Life isn’t yours. Events are bigger than your plans. Trying to bend them to your will is a recipe for suffering. To see them as they are, and not to retreat from that seeing into bitterness – is maturity.

Different cultures approach this threshold from different sides. The Japanese from the Buddhist sobriety that everything is like dew. The Stoics from the Greek discipline that some things are in our power and others are not. Nietzsche from the German hardness that the choice must be active, passionate, total. But across the threshold one always passes with the same body, with the same eyes. With the same question that the fisherman on the pier did not ask in words, but in a bow.

Sarinagara

The sun is already beneath the headland. The sky still holds a little light, but the water is already dark, and the sand almost black. The dog has run after the boy. It really starts to feel empty.

I sit and remember a poem I once read, in Sapporo, in the reading room of the university library, frozen after a cold ride on a bicycle. It was written by Kobayashi Issa, a country poet, a lay follower of the Pure Land school, two hundred years ago. In the year 1819 his daughter Sato died, she was barely over a year old, smallpox killed her. Issa knew everything that Buddhism knew about impermanence, about dew, about the illusion of holding.

He was a poet. He was a believer. And after his daughter’s death he wrote one of the most well-known haiku in Japanese literature.

露の世は

露の世ながら

さりながら

(tsuyu no yo wa / tsuyu no yo nagara / sari nagara)

This world of dew

is a world of dew

and yet, and yet…

— Kobayashi Issa (小林一茶),

from the journal Oraga haru (“My Spring”), 1819

The first two lines are doctrine. The world is like dew: short, fleeting, scattering at the first hour of sunlight. The second line repeats the first, as if Issa wanted to convince himself of it. “Tsuyu no yo nagara”: although I know that this is a world of dew. The third word – “sarinagara” – is so sad. It means “and yet”.

This is the fullest definition of akirame I have found. Akirame is not the killing of the heart, not the suppression of weeping under doctrine. Akirame is the seeing of dew as dew. And the further loving of the one whom the dew took away. The first and second lines are clear seeing. The third is a courageous heart, which doesn’t retreat from that clarity into cynicism or into lying consolations.

This is the Japanese maturity that the West sometimes doesn’t understand, because it is used to thinking in either-or categories: you believe or you don’t, you accept or you fight, you hold or you let go. Sarinagara says: you can see and hold on still. You can let go and not stop loving. To know that there is no longer anyone for whom, and to make for him a red bib of knitted wool.

I get up slowly. The backpack is heavier than it was in the morning, though I haven’t put anything into it. I walk along the line of the waves, towards Hase station. The Enoden train will arrive in twenty minutes. I turn back at the very end of the beach, to look once more at the headland of Inamuragasaki. The sun I will no longer see – the water has taken it for itself. Maybe in the morning it will give it back.

>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:

Evening Reflections in a Bar. Yotsuya, Tokyo.

Reflections from the Edge of the World — A Day at a Provincial Railway Station on Hokkaido

Hunting Time. Autumn Momijigari Walks as a Lesson in Japanese Mindfulness

Autumn Walk with the Masters of Haiku – Feeling “Japanese” among Polish Birches

The Moyai Point at Shibuya Crossing: Tokyo’s Furious Momentum and the Fishing Communities of Okinawa

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

of the page

    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

___________________

inari.smart

Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!