Hippier Than Thou

The sun rose late over the last morning of the festival (or at least, we rose late).  By the time we rolled out of our tent, all our friends, all the organic coffee vendors and homeless musicians and naked children and drunken surfers were busily packing all their homes back into their cars.  There was a three-week festival coming up in Shiga prefecture, everyone said, and when we tearfully bid farewell to some of our new best friends, we tempered our loneliness by half-promising to see each other at the next festival.  We knew we wouldn’t, though.  In our hearts, we're bike hippies, not music festival hippies.

The Austrian, despite his earlier decision to stay another week to help clean up, hustled out of there with the first drunken surfer who’d give him a ride to Shiga.  The other WWOOFer had gone, too, and with such a show of affection from the Pasar crowd that I have never seen before.  Shaking, she read a statement that someone had written in phonetic Japanese, then switched to more heartfelt (if no less shaky) English.  She received a fond round of applause and many, many hugs as she went on her way.

For some reason Jenn and I were the only ones to honor the "make a weird face" edict.  Funny how that keeps happening.

By one o’clock, almost everyone was gone.  Ours was the last lonely tent still standing in the campground, the field around us stamped with squares and rectangles all different shades of yellow and brown.  It was time to get back into the Pasar groove: help out a little, play some music, maybe cook something, and just generally take in the sea air.

Though it is hard to really relax when your butt scrapes on the ground.

"Tomorrow, we'll need to you help out again," Natsu told us after Aki had retreated to wherever it is he goes.  "We have a very important seminar, and we need to get the place all cleaned up before the teachers get here."

"Of course!" we agreed, happy to have some work to do (though maybe not that happy).   "What's the seminar about?"

"Whaling."

We threw ourselves into taking down the bamboo bar, clearing bottles, sweeping dirt and dumping it into larger piles of dirt.  We were told that it was important that we stay quiet during the seminar, as the proceedings were top secret unless we paid the fifty bucks each to join in.  Also, there would be food, which we would be allowed to eat if there was any extra.

When the teachers arrived, we helped them carry large styrofoam boxes into the Dragon Room.  "What's in these, anyway?" I asked Natsu.

"Whale!  Now go light the oven, please."

I think we're gonna need a bigger oven.

It was then that it dawned on us that this was a pro-whaling seminar happening at Pasar.  Naturally, as children of the '90s in the US, Jenn and I have been thoroughly educated in the "Save the Whales" dialogue.  Specifically, we've been taught that whaling is bad and that whalers are evil, heartless monsters whose boats are fueled by the tears of crippled puppies.  Being a hippie establishment, we assumed that Pasar would naturally be on the side of some of the more prominent American hippie establishments like Greenpeace (and Captain Kirk).

Once again, we were provided with an opportunity to confront some unexamined biases we've held.  It's not that hard for an American to get behind "Save the Whales," if only because giving up eating whale isn't much of a challenge for the average American.  It's not hard to give something up if you'd never encounter it in the first place.  Though, as we discovered at a museum in Hagi, this hasn't always been the case for Americans: indeed, the US's hunger for whale oil was so insatiable a mere century and a half ago that America was fully willing to invade Japan in order to get to the whales in its waters.  But even back then, when American sailors were bringing in whales by the thousands, they still weren't really a hot commodity on the dinner table.

Japan, meanwhile, has chowed down on whale throughout its history.  Now I'm not one to accept "tradition" as a reason for basically anything, and "tradition" is used as a justification for a bunch of nasty stuff worldwide (especially in Japan), but I tried to keep an open mind as Natsu educated us. Did you know that there's actually a population boom of whales in recent years?  Or that whales are a much more sustainable food source than most livestock?  Neither did I, and I'm not terribly sure I believe either of those things now, either, but Natsu sure stated her case admirably.

Sure, whales may be intelligent and make noises that sound beautiful to human ears, but heck, pigs are at least as cute and intelligent as dogs and that hasn't really sparked a popular "Save the Pigs" campaign.  Though we were not sure about the prospect of eating such an intelligent animal, one that we'd been long taught to regard as gentle and soulful, when the pizzas topped with whale bacon came out of the brick oven, our adventurousness won out and we had a slice or three.  They were tasty as heck, though really, I'd probably eat my own head if it was served on a brick-oven pizza.

The whaling seminar wasn't the only such affair held at Pasar during our short stay there.  During the festival, there was also a lecture given on the dangers of vaccination.

"It's unhealthy to put chemicals into your body," said Natsu between puffs on her American Spirit.  Aki and Shio nodded along and lit their own cigarettes.

This is an interesting point that we keep running into: the farther to the left you go, the more you find people who share opinions with folks on the far, far right.  Pasar is as big a hippie enclave as we've ever found ourselves, a hotbed of permaculture, veganism, pacifism, organic farming...and they're also anti-vax, pro-whaling.  While I understand (and share!) a healthy skepticism when it comes to the medical industry, the controversy about vaccinations seems to be coming from a place of gratuitous anti-intellectualism.  I hadn't expected people as smart as Aki and Natsu to fall for the Naturalistic Fallacy, but there it is.  We did the hippie thing and kept our peace, sealing our lips as they told us about the evils of vaccination.

Another brief illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy at work: one afternoon, Shio went walking down by the ocean with a fishing spear, and in the evening he came back with a delicious-looking octopus.  Natsu butchered it beautifully and we ate it sashimi-style, raw with soy sauce.  Now, I'm all for foraging and fishing (as long as other people do it), but there was an implicit assumption at play here that an octopus swimming around the ocean, by virtue of it being "natural," would be healthful for human beings to eat.  Moreover, that it would be better for the people who ate it than farmed octopi that would probably be full of chemicals of an indeterminate nature.

Don't get me wrong.  The octopus was damned delicious, and I'd eat another one right this minute.  But I also don't know where this particular octopus had been or what it had been eating.  It could have been chock full of octopus flu, for all Shio had known.  I mean, it's an established fact that the ocean is 90% fish poo.  But the prevailing attitude at Pasar is that, because this octopus is natural, it is also better than anything touched by human hands.

Another illustration of the Naturalistic Fallacy: because this giant, face-sized, poison-slavering spider is natural, it must be a good thing!  You know, despite all the very obvious evidence to the contrary!

Really, we shouldn't have been surprised; this wasn't our first run-in with Pasar's anti-science stance.  When I came down with a cold after a few days of sleeping in a damp, rained-on tent, I decided to pop a couple of milligrams of Japanese cold medicine.  Over-the-counter medicine in Japan is exceedingly wimpy, but as it's what's available, we have a whole pharmacy stashed in one of our bags.  My one error was to take these pills while sitting in the living room.

"Hey, what is that?" Aki asked me in English as the pill was inches from my open mouth.

"Uh...cold medicine?  I have a cold."

"Don't take that, that's no good."  He shook his head.  I was about to agree, saying that it might not be very potent, but it's all you can buy in this country, but before I could, he told me, "Go ask Natsu for homeopathy."  I tried to keep my eyebrows unraised.

Within minutes, Natsu had retrieved a clear plastic medicine chest filled with pill bottles.  She looked through the dazzling array of colored circles.  "Headache?" she asked, and I nodded.  "Phlegm?"  At last, she presented me with a small pink pill, which she instructed me to hold under my tongue until it dissolved.

"What's...uh, what's in this?"

"Sugar," she said, chipper.  Sure enough, it left a sweet taste in my mouth as it quickly melted into nothing.  I had my doubts; after all, I already take plenty of sugar, mostly administered orally, with chocolate chips.  Yet oddly enough, I did start to feel better before long, and that replaced my cold with crippling existential doubt.  The placebo effect works only if you believe in whatever you're taking, right?  And I have no faith at all in the power of sugar pills, and that very doubt should kill their efficacy, right?

As I've said, I consider myself a bit of a hippie.  I quit my job to bike around the world, I care about the environment, I've belonged to the ACLU and Amnesty International, I believe in art and love and peace, I've experimented with vegetarianism (and absolutely nothing else, Mom).  I don't have a TV.  But holy cow, I am not nearly as big a hippie as I thought I was.  Vaccinated?  Anti-whaling?  Over-the-counter drugs?  If full-time permaculture meditating organic farm hippies look down on those things, then what kinda tourist does that make me?

On our last day before hitting the road, another young, awkward WWOOFer asked Natsu what exactly "hippie" meant.  "Long hair, hemp pants, tie-die, right?"  I rolled my eyes.

"Yes, that's 'hippie style.'  It's all tied up in the '60s, there really aren't any hippies any more," she said, and my eyes stopped rolling and started bugging out.  Surely not!  How could anyone doubt that hippies are alive and well after hosting a week-long music festival on her organic farm?

"Natsu, I always thought that you and Aki were hippies," I protested.

She shook her head.  "We're alternative.  All the hippies are gone."

I kept quiet and reflected on this for the rest of the evening.  I've known many people who've self-identified as hippies, but mostly it's a term that I hear coming out of my own mouth.  Hippiedom in the US is a fairly competitive thing: vegans look down on vegetarians, bike hippies look down on hippies with cars.  I'm sure I brought this competitive spirit with me to Pasar, and whether it's a difference of culture or language, the same definition of "hippie" just doesn't seem to exist in Japan.  I don't feel like I particularly want or need to fit into a subculture that may or may not exist any more, but for some time now I've called myself a hippie with some pride.  Maybe that's just another gift from my Boomer parents.  Even if I'm not a hippie by Japanese standards, even if I'm not enough of a hippie by hippie standards, it's still a label that simplifies my multifarious life into an easy-to-understand cultural archetype.

Regardless of the nomenclature, I know that I've seen some common spirit shared by the hippies/alternatives/whatever whom I've known.  If dancing under the full moon at Pasar isn't hippie, then I still want to be whatever it is.  Whatever our ideological or lifestyle differences with Aki and Natsu and all the others in the Pasar family, we share so, so much.  That will always connect us, and that will bring us back again.