After so much work and energy put into developing this short film, the documentary of my January trip to Japan is finally finished and online. The story starts here and the film is on this page if you click on the movie icon in the top right corner.
It was an amazing trip full of discovery. When confronted with confusion, there are generally only two human responses: anxiety or curiosity (or a combination). Japan was a little bit of both, but by the end of the trip, I was only curious.
An interesting side note: It was really cold (it was snowing at the beach). But my wetsuit caused my neck to chafe terribly– it was raw and scabbed after the first day. So, I had to ride with the top of my wetsuit undone. This meant that every time I fell, a surge of cold water would invade my suit. And my neck was left unexposed to the crazy cold.
You can read my edited version of the story on WI. Or here is my original story:
Brendan (owner and mastermind behind umi) always wanted to go to Japan. He told me this on our first real trip together (Baja in 2009). I had already been to Japan once before in 2007, so I was able to tell little stories of vending machines in the middle of farmland or chasing down swell in the southern islands of the Japanese archipelago. The stories only inspired Brendan’s hunger to go East and he promised that if ever I could set up a trip to Japan, he would be there.
In January of 2011, I finally had the time to do a trip to the land of the rising sun. The Ezzy distributor in Japan, Shoji Ogura, is a former pro and a good friend of mine. I’ve sailed with him all over the world and he rips— think sick turns and big 360s. He was to be our guide, and he showed us the sailing at Omaezaki, a former pwa location just 3 hours from Tokyo. I’d only sailed in the south of Japan, so I didn’t know what to expect. All I knew was that it would be cold (January is winter after all) and that the wind can get really strong.
Japan is quite singular. Japanese culture is entirely separate from anything Western— it evolved independently. Japan is probably the only nation that has no western influence but is at least the same level developmentally. In fact, it could be that Japan is even more developed than the west. Tokyo is the largest city in the world, but it is also the cleanest. A contradiction! From a western lens, Japan is full of these contradictions.
And yet, despite being so isolated, Japan is actually oddly similar to the west. For example, like the Japanese, Brits take their tea religiously. In the same way that the French pioneered the division of a cow into butcher’s cuts, the Japanese were the first systematize butchering of fish. The similarities extend beyond simple human commonalities.
For me, some of the strangeness in Japan was from how similar it was to Hawaii. The Japanese are the largest ethnic group living in Hawaii, so Hawaiian culture is heavily influence by Japan. For example, Hawaiian children commonly play rock, paper, scissors but with the rhythm of their hands they shout theJapanese words, “jan, ken, po!” The Japanese gummy rice treat Mochi is common in hawaii too. And every gas station has musubi— a Japanese rice ball snack with seaweed.
The similarities between Hawaii and Japan don’t stop with the borrowed culture. Both places are island chains isolated in the Pacific. In fact, the waves that I grew up riding at Hookipa in the winter are from storms that brew and rage in the north of Japan. So really, I’ve ridden Japanese waves my entire life.
The entire trip to Japan was an overload of the oddly foreign and familiar. Modern understanding of English word “uncanny” comes from Freud’s combination of the German: “Unheimliche Heimliche”, which literally means an unhomely home. Japan for me was definitional of the uncanny. And for this reason, every experience had a flavor of discomfort similar to being tricked by an optical illusion. But rather than being unhappy, I loved the surreal experiences I was collecting.
Through Brendan’s lens and my words, I hope to capture some of these uncanny details of my brief walk through the Japanese way of life. Both visual and auditory stories are to be taken in and digested so as to give the viewer a feeling of the trip– strangeness and all!
