Eerie Japan

Magic exists.  Not necessarily the Harry Potter-esque magic – Expecto Patronum and all that – but there is magic all around us.  It is a slight ripple in the veil between fantasy and reality.  In some places this magic is stronger.  New Orleans is brimming with this magic – the mixture of history, culture, and atmosphere can convince even the stoutest nonbeliever that maybe the handsome young man with hungry blue eyes that just passed wasn’t completely human.  Places with magic inspire us.  They make us dream.  They enchant us into believing that maybe the fantastic is just out of sight – the figure seen out of the corner of your eye, the whispers not quite audible on the other side of the door, the smell that stirs strong memories but vanishes in an instant.  These magical places tell us that all the stories, legends, and beings we have loved and feared our whole lives are waiting just beyond the veil.  And as you walk the streets of these magical places, you realize it is possible to pass through the veil into the world of the fantastic.

Japan is one of these magic places.  Walking down the quiet, nighttime streets you can feel the magic like heat radiating from the buildings...the streets.  Like New Orleans, Japan has the magic of time.  You can almost see the ghosts moving through hundreds of years along the same streets, past the same houses.  In a place that resists change, where even simple residences have stood for hundreds of years, time has cast its spell.  The old man in the kimono walking toward you could be real.  Or he could be a phantom, moving down familiar streets in another time or reality.  But it is more than just time that weaves its spell over this country.  The architecture itself – the meeting of old and new – creates bazaar shadows and throws sounds in ways that make you wonder if you are really alone.  The streets are well lit, but in such narrow alleys and winding pathways, the electric lights can easily play tricks on the eyes and deceive the rational mind.  The people themselves have their own kind of magic. Homogeneous by nature, a crowded street or subway can bewitch a tired mind, allowing feelings of isolation, otherness, and fear to creep in.

As I have wandered the nighttime streets of Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo I could swear I have walked with ghosts, seen the impossible peeking from the shadows, and somehow picked my way through the dangers of the unexplainable to return home safe and inspired.

Outside the cities, in the forests and mountains, there is magic too.  Unlike the cities, where time seems to bleed together, the country is timeless.  Walking down a mountain path, you never know what time you will emerge from – the present, a hundred years in the past, even further back.  Away from the noise of the modern city, time simply ceases to exist.  Coming around a bend in the path could frighteningly, but not impossibly, bring you face to face with a bear, a boar, kitsune, tengu, or even a dinosaur just as easily as a fellow hiker.  Even the many temples and shrines hidden in the mountains, valleys, and forests across Japan exude this feeling of timelessness.  Covered in moss, twisted with roots, and eerily quiet, these places of worship seem to have been grown rather than constructed.  It is as if they have always been – just like the trees in the forests and the rocks in the rivers. 

Japan is full of magic.  It inspires me and fills my soul with stories.  It makes the fantastic come to life and sets my imagination ablaze.  It makes it easy to believe there is something amazing, maybe frightening, but certainly exciting waiting just out of sight.  It is a place of waking dreams, where anything can happen if you only let it.