NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – CAPSULE I

Kokura, Japan, September 2024

The Nippon Zen Master (NZM) buys the coffee from abroad. Then roasts it and grinds it. I thought that I was drinking the best in the world. It is soothing and unfair: there is no such thing as best in the world.

The caffeine intake results in an unexpected thesis on the nature of Senseis. I’m about to visit my first dojo in the country when she says: “Senseis are macho-boring and touchy-feely.” She compares them to jazz musicians. “Don’t get me wrong, at least jazz musicians are mostly dentists.”

I have to ask her to finish the line. It is one of the many social rules that made this country the wet dream of humanity’s future. There are so many of them. Not saying is the main one. You don’t finish controversial lines; you just push your interlocutor to pull them up; hence you turn your confidant into your accomplice.

“A lot of jazz players are dentists…so what?” —I forcefully ask.

“They called themselves doctors but they aren’t. But at least they use gloves and technology to dig in your hole.”

I have no alternative.

“So what about Senseis?”

“They are all physiotherapists.”

I don’t ask “seriously?” I just think it might come handy if my fucked up left knee crumbles.

I haven’t trained since the ambush. It was two of them four months ago in Phnom Penh. They came from behind with tiny blades. I turned fast, and knocked the first down before the second crushed my knee with a knuckle-duster. They hit my head and sliced my left ear, and up until today I’m pretty sure they raped me. I woke up with an excruciating pain in my temples and arsehole, blood all over my underwear and outerwear.

She heard the news and invited me over. She knew I had never been in Japan and that it was my dream before the obliteration of my underwear.

Timing was kind of perfect, except for the injuries. My main intention was to visit the country to practise Aikido. She said, “martial arts are the least interesting thing about us.”

It was too irresistible a line. Spot fucking on.

Kokura Reloaded

We are in Kokura. There’s an ancient samurai castle behind an obnoxious mall. It is an impressive piece of architecture built in 1602 that was brought down to ashes during the Summer War of 1866. The reconstruction was finished in 1990 and has the exact same flair as public health offices in Spain. All the walls are foamy and the whole place smells like mothballs, which is in turn how most porn cinemas used to smell in Spain back in the 1990s.

So it is cheap samurai porn, except for the sculpture outside its stunning garden depicting the battle between Miyamoto Mushashi, arguably the finest swordsman that ever lived, and Sasaki Kojiro, the second best. Mushashi claims that Kojiro was the last man he killed. He was 29 years old when he finished him. Then he went on living without killing, and when he turned 59 he wrote “The Book of Five Rings.” (1645). You can only wonder what Kojiro could have written if he had got the chance. “The Book of Five Rings,” remains today as a must read for many martial Senseis.

Outside the castle, down a flight of stairs, there is an old building that according to the Nippon Zen Master and neighbours “is the official HQ of the local Yakuza.” Kokura is still regarded as the main Yakuza city in the south.
I stop at a tiny cafe. The owner has a convoluted tattoo that seems to run his whole anatomy, which according to her and neighbours, makes him one of them.

I ask him where he buys his coffee. He grins like a diamond cat and says “many different places.” I just want to know about the one I’m currently drinking, which is incomparable to hers. He says “Vietnam.” I say that is where I come from and he grins again.

“Does it feel like home?”

“Just in a Robusta kind of sense”.

I sit down, keep rereading Mushashi, and order a second coffee, his finest if possible.

“If you do not pursue a genuine path to its consummation, then a little bit of crookedness in the mind will later turn into a major warp. Reflect on this.”

That is Musashi writing.

I reflect on my cracked arsehole and sliced ear, tiny major warps.

The moral of the story is that when you lose your awareness you either become a murderer or a corpse.

I pay for the second coffee and he asks what happened to my ear. I say it was sliced in a back alley and he gives me nothing but an unforgiving smile. The second coffee is excellent, same for the place and its music. There is a massive BUT though: its location “must remain undisclosed,” he says. I say that is the motto of my travel log: “undisclosed locations only.”

He majestically bows and says that I can try to describe the insides. It is a forty-metre square living room, minimal to the max: just four dark wooden tables, each one with two light wooden chairs, and a mahogany bar. The coffee grinder is Italian, circa 1970’s and the whole room smells like Naples darkest roast. There are four small Marshall speakers and an ancient record player with an outstanding selection of cosmic jazz, from Sun Ra and June Tyson to Thelonius Monk and Billie Holiday. The undisclosed owner has a lovely tendency to interrupt cosmic jazz with Black Sabbath and Kraut Rock. He claims that he lived in Munich and Chicago, where he allegedly joined the envoys of his clan. He has a scar on his cheek that runs until his chin like a crooked question mark. It rings an undisclosed bell.

If you get in and ask the wrong question, or fail to remove your shoes, this might become the last cafe of your life.

Alternatively, you can walk around and look for an old inscription in Hiragana and Kanji that reads: The Five…

Just take a photo and run.