white with foam

We’re back in Japantown the next morning for our guided walking tour. Its residential streets, where Karyn’s mom lived through the early eighties, are lined with unremarkable houses that people in Seattle would give their eyeteeth for: solid one- or two-story numbers in the airport’s shadow and new condos overlooking a nice park, backed up against the railroad tracks. It’s as if Georgetown had been colonized sixty years ago.

We started the tour on Jimi Standard Time, walking peripatetically in the hot sun for a grand total of maybe three blocks. Jimi’s story was a blend of antebellum childhood memories and the greater contours of the times. He pointed at the stairwell wall-dog up to the second floor above the now-abandoned pharmacy, and told us about how he’d go up there to retrieve his father from the 24-hour card game. He also spoke about the economic windfall that came from locking up the local Japanese-Americans: being as a two-percent minority owned more than half of the vegetable farming and distribution interests in the area, suddenly a wide-open market was there for the taking — a good old-fashioned Harrison’s Hoss Race.

Lunchtime came and went, and Chauncey was listless and panting when we finally made it to the museum and handed off the trunk. We barely had time for a little siesta before the festivities. San Jose’s Obon is too big for a lumbering white guy to really stand out; I’m sure my nephew Logan, who goes most years but wasn’t there this time, is grateful for this anonymity. Like Christmas or an American Wake, there’s a carnival vibe permeating what should be a solemn occasion. I’m not sure where that vibe was coming from. Maybe it was the street food. Or the dancing. Or the cheap beer, the bingo tent, or the ring toss. Alls I know is, try as I might to take a moment to honor my dad, whose wedding ring Mom had given me in Portland two days prior, it was extraordinarily difficult to hold any sadness for long.

This feeling nearly approached the level of cosmic joke the next morning at Oak Hill Cemetery, where Karyn’s okasan and obachan remain in an open-air columbarium. We’re there placing flowers, and the vase itself looks like it’s crying, when we notice the sound of a mariachi band approaching. We look out and see the procession, which has to number in the hundreds, and watch it flow slowly behind the hearse, around our car and up the hill. It was a Mexican version of the classic New Orleans funeral: huge, participatory, and only a little bit somber. Karyn may well have felt a little intruded upon, but still recognized what a beautiful moment that was. On the other paw, Chauncey didn’t bother to uncurl herself from the croissant position to appreciate the river of mourning around her, but the moment we got back she was up in her mama’s lap in an uncharacteristic show of sympathy.

Next we spent some time in cool, shady Kelley Park, in the manicured Japanese Friendship Garden (formerly Meiji Treeline of Advantage) where K. has an iconic family photo from 1965 or so. Then back for a second night of line dancing and an all-too-brief visit with my brother and some of his kids, who were headed home from a weekend at Pismo Beach. Despite the scrapping K. and I endured over their visit, and despite the sweat-and-kelp funk emanating from their truck, it was still nice to see ‘em, however briefly.

Pictures are still here.

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