Reflecting on Ogimi Village

They always warned me about the mountain boar, telling stories of children who wandered into the forest, never to return. There was a bay right outside the village, and Uncle Masa would catch tako (octopus) by throwing a line over the sidewalk railing and patiently waiting. My grandfather had a farm in walking distance, always seen smoking cigarettes, drinking Orion every night to celebrate a hard day's work, as his dog that exclusively lived in the fields, got her daily head pats. Ogimi village is full of octogenarians, but you'd never know by their activity. My grandmother would pound mochi in the backyard with a wooden stick, wrapping it in a leaf before serving. There was an old woman who operated an ice cream truck for decades, and when she died, so too did her treats (which were often given out for free). Things would simply cease to exist when the person did, because everything was provided by a unique member of an aging society, and unlike cities of the world where there is a cutthroat line forming behind your resignation, the expectation in Ogimi was an elegy, and subsequent absence that imprinted burial into reality.

Decades later and I write this from the bilge of Los Angeles, and when I think of Ogimi village, the first thing that comes to mind is the fresh air, imbued with ocean wet, nature calmed by decades of stillness, how it feels being struck by a salty gust that removes a few layers of stress. There are thousands of poets on a Long Beach city block, legions of gray-haired professors chasing publications like addicts crawling for a drug they took in their twenties and could never find again (or divorcees with callouses so thick nothing can be felt). A revolving door of actors begging to be discovered by an elusive kingmaker who has become blind. Every artist I know jokes about moving to a cabin without an address, even if an appendicitis means death, because the nearest hospital is five hours away. They romanticize a return to nature in their work, bashing modernity like an abusive boss wearing a tailored suit, but none of them have made the big move. At best, they're adjuncts (an additive) who will never know tenure, as they're too opinionated for overpaid administrators unwilling to take chances on wannabe Bukowski's. They're unemployable outside of an education system that barely wants them because the last thing HR desires is to interview a highbrow literary wonk who'll immortalize all their bad experiences in a magazine with high prestige but no readers. Writers don't make money outside of King and Kaur, which means even if their poetry collection sells ten thousand copies (an unheard of success) they’ll still see less than a minimum wage paycheck.

I'd like to live in Okinawa again, but my passport has expired, and American fast food has removal local tastes like an invasive culinary species; high cholesterol, clogged arteries, heart disease. American military bases continue to expand, unleashing young marines who terrorize the local population with time-out impunity. The youth have either moved to Naha, or the tourist filled mainland, and the abandoned elderly have run out of money; forbid they become sick and have no choice but an understaffed, underfunded facility where black mold is just a form of wallpaper. Those employees sacrifice their lives out of honor and obligation, and once bright eyed children return home for similar reasons, discarding their fledging careers, life savings gone after a few years of repairs; this is what happened to my tako reeling uncle, who will now take care of his ailing mother until the likely age of seventy, with no income of his own (because there’s not enough time in the day).

My Japanese mother says nobly, that if she can’t live without assistance, that I should “institutionalize” her without second thought, that my life isn’t worth giving so she can eke out a couple decades where her daily dignity is decided by the temperament of a caregiver who is sometimes so stressed they forget to wash their hands before a standing lunch.

Like bad son who never listens, I could never deal with the guilt, knowing my mother is alone, on the same block as a factory billowing black smoke, wallowing on a dirty medical bed, breathing in chemicals that will accelerate an inevitable cancer. I will never let love be a distant memory she sometimes receives in the form of a phone call cut short by dinner plans. Maybe what I yearn for is a community where individuals cannot be replaced by legions of workers willing to put in double the hours for a quarter of the cash, where technology is not a God we sacrifice happiness on our 21st century pyramids, where billionaires wave the newest iteration of a corrupted invention that adds another decimal.

Maybe I long for Ogimi village because it represents a bygone time, where life was simple, and even though we had less, much, much, less, the little things were actually the big things, and all of us have become junkies, with no idea how big the hit has become for us to feel the pittance we do.

Maybe this modern diet is untenable for human existence,

and our tolerances have become unsustainable.