Knew You Were Coming

“I was raised in the slums,” San Oizumi tells me as we sit in the cozy central room of his large, rambling mud-walled farmhouse. “There in the tenements was a world that I could never have dreamed of before we had to move there … so many people living right on top of each other: sick and broken people, the mentally handicapped, prostitutes. As a fourth-grade boy,” he admits, “it was kind of exciting. I even heard about a neighbor woman who killed her husband, crazy with jealousy. It was quite an education for an elementary school student.” He smiles slightly and raises one eyebrow. “But,” he says, now serious again, “because I grew up as a poor person, surrounded by poor people, I learned a lot about the distortions and sickness that lie at the foundations of our society. I don’t have any illusions about what it’s really all about.”

Such statements are typical of the broad-shouldered potter with the unhurried voice. Although he offers his insights with seeming indifference, when Oizumi looks at me, he’s all serious attention. It’s not a glare but it’s more than a gaze, and it always has a strong element of concern to it. Although Oizumi can at times come off as gruff and brusque—his statements contain none of the polite circumlocutions I am used to hearing when speaking Japanese—I never feel that I am speaking about something trifling with him. This has the effect of making me really consider my words and try to speak from a deeper, more serious place in myself.

I had come to meet him originally because I had heard of his old-style wood-burning pottery kiln of mud and clay, an inclined kiln of traditional Korean design that takes three days to fire, and of his organizing against a high-level nuclear waste dump planned for his rural district. After meeting at tonight’s gathering of citizens’ groups opposed to the dump, we’ve come back to his house. Sitting around the huge wood-slab table he has made, with pieces of his luminous pottery all around us, we drink tea and talk into the night.

Oizumi tells me of his upbringing and of his father’s anarchism and general nonconformism. In Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s the militarists were in control of almost every part of society, and I find it hard to imagine that it would have been possible to be either anarchist or nonconformist. “Dad was a poet and woodblock carver,” Oizumi says in his thick working-class accent. “But you can’t make much money writing poems,” he laughs, “so we were very poor. When I was a very young child, before we moved to the slums, we had a house in a small village. The other villagers were very suspicious of my father because he had a record by Beethoven, and they could see by the letters on the album that it was clearly foreign, so they thought he was collaborating with the enemy Americans.” This suspicion was corroborated for them because Oizumi’s father could speak and understand a lot of English, German, and French, and because he refused to go into the army.

“He didn’t want to have anything to do with people in the business of killing,” says Oizumi in his matter-of-fact way, “and as a result, the village elders shunned him and the other members of our family. But when Japan lost the war and the U.S. occupation forces arrived in the village, there was no one else but my dad to translate. The same village elders who had ostracized him came begging at his door to ask for his help. But he didn’t want to help the Americans either: in his eyes, they were murderers just the same.”

A few years later Oizumi’s father lost his house in a swindle, and the family was forced to move to a tenement building in Sendai, an industrial city in cold northern Japan. The old man died from tuberculosis when Oizumi was only in sixth grade. Like his father, Oizumi, it seems, is willing to make decisions entirely on principle, and he too is perfectly willing to suffer the consequences of his actions.

“Growing up in poverty,” he tells me now in his calm, slow voice, taking a sip of tea, “I learned that even if I have very little money, that’s not the end of my life. I know I can still have an interesting life without it. I don’t want to be someone who is completely reliant on money, someone who is used by money. That’s why I neither borrow nor lend.” The hard-edged world of the slums he grew up in seems such a contrast with the antiqued beauty of this two-hundred-year-old house with its massive hand-hewn timber rafters, mustard-colored walls, and beautiful tansu cabinets, where he lives with his wife and three children today.

I ask him about how he came to be in possession of such a home. “Well, about twenty-five years ago the house I had been living in was slated to be surrounded on three sides by a golf course, and, as you know, to maintain only one kind of grass on large areas, they have to use an incredible amount of herbicides. Also, I hate golf. I was hit in the head with a golf ball when I was a boy. So of course I had to move.

“I got on my motorbike one afternoon and just started driving around looking for a new place. Then I saw an old building far off the road that looked beautiful, and I walked on down to it. Inside there was a very, very old man, and he said to me, ‘Ah, you have come. I have been waiting for you.’ “I was quite confused because I had no intention of coming there. In fact, it was just a whim to even go out that particular day.

‘I knew you were coming,’ said the old man. ‘You have come because you are to live in this house.’ That old man was a real Japanese shaman.”

~ Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan