Video: Graham in Japan

I’ve written thousands of pages in my life, but ‘Japan’ was by far the most difficult to write. Normally, my writing process is pretty straightforward – poke interesting/contradictory details and then tease out explanations and hidden truths. However, no matter how much teasing and provocation I applied to the page, no words on Japan would appear.

Words by Graham Ezzy – photos by Ezzy Japan

I guess I felt too close to the trip, and I wanted to write something more poignant than the typical surf film. I wanted to capture the strangeness of it all, to find words and images to make the viewer feel the unhomely homeliness that Japan inspired in us. The first words that came to the page were about the waves and the wind: ‘Windy enough for 4.2, some waves that were overhead, blablabla kill me now’. This concentration of cliché made me nauseous.

I turned to other surf films for some inspiration, but so many of these films start with something like, ‘Yeah, I got a call that the waves were going to be good, so I took the trip. I didn’t expect much but it was really fun. And I got to know so much about the culture.’ To that I must respond: ‘No shit. All that is assumed in taking a trip’. Clearly there was no existing model for me to follow.

I was back to square one. How could I capture the small, business-man hotel in which we stayed? (A small hotel for business men, not a hotel for small men who work in business). Our suite room had a chamber for a bathroom with gaskets on the doors and an electric toilet. Given the indeterminate length of our stay, we had to move to separate single rooms every other couple days and then back to the double suite. One time, they moved us into a double room that was just two beds walled in with no other floor room at all. How could I capture that hobo feeling of always moving rooms and never being in a stable state?

Or the wind! The wind attacked incessantly – pushing the cold through any number of layers of clothing. Going outside would require scarves and gloves, but none of these would help – we were permanently naked to the wind. Even indoors with the windows closed, the wind would howl and claw trying to get at our souls.

One solution to this elemental beast was the communal bathes, or onsen in Japanese. Divided by sex, people would strip and sit in the hot spring waters. The only white men in the bathes, we were definitely a naked target for Japanese eyes. But the hot waters provided a much-needed respite from the winds.

When we found out that our hotel had its own onsen downstairs, we were excited to try it. Brendan and I robed up and slippered through the lobby into the onsen. But walking through the shallow water towards the empty pools, our feet burned. And stepping into the pools felt like stepping into a boiling cauldron for cooking white people. At almost 50 degrees C the water was not good for our skin, but we tried anyway. Only after 10 minutes of burning ourselves a blistery red did we give up and go back to the room.

How could I capture all this in a few words? And more importantly, how could I use words to transport to the viewer my feeling of both alienation and acceptance at the same time? My answer came from another isolated island, Ireland.

The Irish playwright J. M. Synge spent time in the Aran Islands and documented his stay in journals. His travel writings are published in a book simply titled The Aran Islands. His accounts of the islands are mesmerizing and I looked at them for inspiration. Synge was able to see the differences in the Aran view of space-time from the Irish mainland. For example, there were no clocks on the islands so people would tell the time by the placement of the shadows cast through the open doors. But when it was stormy, the doors needed closing to keep out the rain, but this also kept time out too.

So I thought of the ways that space and time were changed for us by Japan. We never knew when we were eating or how long we would be driving in the car because of the language barriers. So we had to prepare for everything and anything. The only time reference point was windsurfing in the sea. And the wind that filled my sails on the water made sure that we almost never left the hotel room without a definite purpose, destination, and many layers of wool. Space for us was either the tiny Japanese room or the entire Pacific Ocean and rarely anything in between.

This was what I set out to capture. The entire sensation could be summed by a thesis that despite being surrounded by a sea of people we were completely isolated, surrounded by nothing but distance.