Attention To Travel

When traveling, Mary and I usually work on different projects. She tends to focus on topics like art, architecture, or nature. I gravitate toward sociological observations or historical references. She works on fall leaves, time with family, and manhole lids. Her blogs about them have appeared on Kakkoii before. They're very nice. Go read some, I'll wait.

I'm currently working on a series of blogs on Japanese authors such as Yasunari Kawabata, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, and Osamu Dazai—writers who helped define the postwar Japanese literary period. I’m hoping to put them all together to make an ebook when I’m finished. My first blog focuses on Osamu Dazai and the similarities he shared with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both were deeply troubled individuals.

I spent several weeks collecting information on Dazai's favorite haunts: his preferred liquor store, his grave, his memorials, and his house. At the same time, Mary was compiling a list of local manhole lids around Mitaka. We gathered our information and overlaid our routes, trying to connect the places we wanted to see and photograph. And then over a series of several days we traveled to collect photographs and to talk to people.

It's all interesting stuff, but what I really want to talk about is a recurring theme—one I seem to forget on many of these journeys: the need to stop looking through my camera lens and start looking through my own eyes. Simply put, I need to remember to stop and smell the roses.

By this point we had traveled to Mitaka several times, this being our third. We had rented an apartment in Sangenjaya to work out of, so it wasn’t a long journey, but we were both feeling a need to wrap up this part of our projects. Mary was looking for a particular manhole cover that seemed to be located behind or on the grounds of a Tea house. I was following directions to the former residence of Osamu Dazai. I had collected my information from a variety of sources that would all turn out to be wrong.

After passing a side street several times, we realized that the cover we were looking for would be along this street. We walked up the street and found the tea house. We pondered it, we walked past it several times looking for a way to get in. We looked at map after map including google earth. After 15 minutes we realized we weren’t going to be able to get onto the property. Feeling dejected, we decided to move on to the next stop; the home of Osamu Dazai. According to an online mapping service the house would be a ten minute walk.

When we went there the address we had been given was a meat market that had been used as a location in several of his novels. And that was cool but not his house. Mary found a nearby museum dedicated to him nearby, so we decided to go there hoping this would be the sight of his house. It was maybe 5 minutes back in the direction we had come from.

At the Museum we met some wonderful people that I can write about later. But, for the purpose of my blog, I want to focus on a map we were given. It was a very detailed map of every sight related to famous Japanese authors of the area. Including the sight of the residence of Osumu Dazai.

It was 10 feet behind us when we were staring at the Tea house. Literally behind us. And we’ve been told it is fairly obvious, not hidden behind bushes, fences or walls.

The problem was; we had become so focused on a goal, we neglected the journey. If we had stopped looking at our phones and maps and looked around we would have found it.

It was getting late and we were running out of time. The lighting gets strange early here in the winter, making it hard to get well lit photographs. Time to grab the train back to Sangenjaya and to remember to look around once and awhile and smell the roses.