The Berkeley playground website tries to prepare parents for the hurdles they will face when they bring their children to the park; its guidelines remind parents to keep their cell phones in their pockets and use good judgment. “If what they are doing is destructive and dangerous,” the website advises, “please stop them and cleanup.”
In contrast, Hanegi Playpark’s advice consists mainly of a sign posted near one playground entrance that reads PLAY FREELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.
It is worth noting that the first line of Solomon’s book is “Existing American playgrounds are a disaster.” There seem to be indications, however, that play and play spaces are becoming the subject of renewed public interest in the United States. In New York City—where it is against park rules to climb a tree in Central Park—a new type of playground designed by the famed architectural firm Rockwell Associates recently opened near the South Street Seaport. The playground is a hopeful sign: it features loose parts—Rockwell-team-designed foam blocks—as well as sand and water. The playground also employs a play associate who, despite some initial misgivings, has been embraced by the playground’s visitors, adult and child alike.
The adventure-playground community is small, and news of this play area, called Imagination Playground, had reached Hanegi Playpark when I was there as Noriko’s guest. At one point, the aforementioned Shimamura, who is also a friend of Noriko’s, sat beside me and weighed in.
“It seems that Americans have always had problems with risk,” he said.
I nodded.
“Even the name of the place . . .” He trailed off, and then, looking at me slyly, pointed to his baseball hat.
“Imagination stays safely in the head,” he said.
| 4 |
On my next-to-last night at Hanegi Playpark, Yelena stopped by to visit me. It was such a huge relief to see her: someone from my hood.
Noriko had arranged a sort of party for me in the playpark. She is a musician—she almost always carries a tin whistle in her backpack—and she sings and plays guitar, tin whistle, and accordion with several friends in a band devoted to Irish music called Bailey’s Milk.
She gathered the members of Bailey’s Milk in the playpark that evening at dusk, and I had the slightly surreal experience of sitting on a log in front of a fire with Yelena as Noriko sang “Down by the Salley Gardens” to us in Japanese-accented English.
It had been a hard workweek for me in the playpark and I was drained by the demands of being a good guest. I sat with Yelena and spoke English and did not pretend to be feeling anything I wasn’t as Noriko sang.
Yelena and I did not know it then, but our families were both about to expand: Yelena, who was in the process of divorcing R, would have another baby, a boy she would name Aevi. Frank and I would also have a third baby, a girl we named Katie.
For her part, Noriko, who had just gone through a difficult breakup and was gloomy about her prospects for ever becoming a mother, would marry at six months pregnant in a wildly joyful, crowded ceremony in Hanegi Playpark. She would end up saying her vows with a man named Haruki, a fellow play worker from Nagano, a few feet from where she was at that instant standing and singing her Irish-ish heart out.
Yelena and I did not know any of this. We sat there, in the smoke, and talked to each other out of the sides of our mouths like gangsters.
As we sat there in this landscape we could never have imagined ourselves in, with everything not yet happened to us, I felt some sense of completion. It was like we were finally at the show we had been waiting to see for so long.
| 5 |
Of all the people I met in the playpark, one of my favorites was Ossan. He was in his sixties and had been coming to the park on and off since it opened in the 1970s.
He came twice the week I was there with Noriko. He walked in quietly in the morning, without fanfare, and set up shop for himself at one of the picnic tables. He stood there with a knife, carving taketumbo—dragonfly—toys out of soft bamboo.
Taketumbo are essentially little helicopter propellers; you clasp the stem between your palms, then slide one palm against the other quickly and release the stem: the taketumbo flies up.
Ossan’s being there in the park reminded me in some ways of Yelena on the floor of the Muji store making her book. Ossan just showed up, in his fishing vest and hat, and stood there with his knife, not really talking to anyone but not avoiding anyone either, just working/playing to suit himself.
In this way he made a space for himself in the playpark that was like a space I had seen before in private, in my home, growing up with my dad. My dad had made that masculine, making-things space for himself in a room off the garage. He had it all in there—the tools, the wood, the oils, the gasoline, the light but considered touch—and the objects, new or repaired, emerged miraculously after a long weekend afternoon.
Ossan made what I thought of as a private, male making-things space in a public place. He had his suburban garage in the Tokyo playpark, at the picnic table. One day he was joined by three little girls who were making a potion out of crushed berries.
I smiled every time I looked at Ossan that day he was joined by the girls, thinking how impossible that tableau would be in New York City, imagining how the first-time parents at the Bleecker Street Playground in New York City would respond if a sixty-year-old guy in a fishing vest wandered through the playground gates with a knife and some wood. The parent phones wouldn’t be able to dial 911 fast enough.
Ossan gave me two taketumbo he made. One is painted brown with orange stripes. The other is plain wood—I watched him make it—and on the propellers is written in ballpoint pen, Amy / By Ossan.
They are fragile. I was scared that they would break before I got them home. And though they did survive the journey, which they spent wrapped in my socks, the painted one is cracked from Mick and King playing with it.
I told the boys: These toys are not for playing with anymore. They sit on my bookshelf now and are almost never touched.
| 6 |
When someone is a chef and wields his knife with such sensitivity that the knife is a part of him, we call that mastery. The chef has completely mastered—dominated—the knife; the knife is like an extension of himself. It has become a part of his body.
This has been our understanding of our human relationship with objects for thousands of years. Objects are inanimate until we animate them. We touch them, we hold them in our hands, we use them, we strive for dominance over them. We believe we have achieved this dominance when we have complete control of them, when we can wield the objects with as much sensitivity as if they were a part of us.
This particular idea of dominance, or mastery, over things is interesting because it tends to obscure the fact that the objects we dominate have a corresponding effect on us. When you wield the knife, you become knife-ish: you cut, you slice, you have edges. You yourself are transformed by this relationship with the knife into knife-ishness. The degree to which one is successful in becoming knife-ish stands as a measure of mastery: if one wields a knife with ax-ishness, one has not yet mastered the knife.
We tend to overlook this reciprocal relationship between the object and the self, however. We tend to miss the notion that a master sushi chef who has become thoroughly and sublimely knife-ish may be viewed by the knife as the object that has been dominated.
The reason we don’t think of this reciprocal relationship, of course, is that we don’t believe that objects have views, per se. We believe that objects are inanimate. They sit there lifeless until we pick them up, and then they are useful or not and we can master them or not according to our desires. All objects are puppets to us in this way.
What a human can do with a puppet is amazing. It was only a mere stick, it bears repeating, that PP held in his hands and used to defy death in his dance a quarter of a mile over Manhattan that August morning. It was a stick that he held to his gut, that he mastered until his sensitivity to it was so great that the stick was a part of him, until his
holding the stick to his gut and his becoming the stick were the same, until, in holding the stick to his gut, he became, in fact, very wide in his midsection, with two tiny feet and a tiny head, like a giant bird with his giant wings spread. He became, then, not just stickish but, in an extremely creative use of his stickish-ness, birdish.
This is not to say that every kid playing with a stick will walk between skyscrapers (or even that he or she should want to). But in toying with a stick, a kid is toying with the world in which he and the stick are a part, a world which is itself a combination of forces at play in a way that is so sophisticated that we have barely even begun to explain it.
As game designer Chris Crawford wrote succinctly in his book The Art of Computer Game Design way back in 1984:
The most fascinating thing about reality is how it changes, the intricate webwork of cause and effect by which all things are tied together. The best way to represent this webwork is to allow the audience to explore it fully—to let the audience generate causes and observe effects. [Computer] games provide this interactive experience, and it is a crucial factor of their appeal.
Yet most of us are hardly cognizant of this webwork in real space.
| 7 |
There was no more Irish music in Hanegi Playpark. It was my last day in Tokyo and Noriko was taking me to another park, to a workshop she was running there. She was going to lead a group of volunteers in making a pop-up adventure playground.
I thought it was odd that we weren’t taking any tools or other materials with us, but Noriko told me there would be things to work with at the park. She shouldered her cloth backpack and off we went.
The park we arrived at was a somewhat depressing grassy acre in what was essentially a traffic rotary in the shadow of a giant apartment building. On one side, it was bordered by a highway, and on the other side, by a street that served as an artery between the highway and the building.
The only pieces of play equipment there were a metal swing set with one broken swing and a concrete ramp, about six feet high, that seemed meant to be a slide, although I couldn’t imagine it being welcoming to anyone’s bottom.
In one corner of the park there was a storage shed similar to what one sees in the yards of suburban homes in America. What we were going to use to make the playground was in the storage shed, Noriko told me.
It took a while to figure out how to get in. When Noriko finally located the key and opened the shed, I was surprised: I had expected tools, but there were only a couple of tires, a dolly, some mats, rope, and a few logs that had been sliced in half.
There were about half a dozen volunteers already gathered when we arrived at the park. The number had grown to about a dozen by the time we got the shed open. My understanding was that we had about an hour and a half before crowds of people would begin arriving to play. I did not see how we were going to be able to construct anything meaningful with what we had in ninety minutes. Noriko began by having all of us walk around the park and pick up any sharp or dangerous objects, and while doing so, we were to take note of the landscape, of any interesting features, and of any opportunities for play, given the aforementioned materials we were going to be working with. We did this for about twenty minutes and then regrouped to compare notes.
It was decided pretty quickly that we would build two structures out of rope: a swing, which would be suspended between two trees, and a monkey bridge, or climbing structure, made of two parallel lines of rope placed horizontally, like railroad tracks, between two other trees.
The tires would be offered to children to roll down the concrete ramp, and the mats would be placed to the side of the ramp so that children could climb up the ramp and jump off it. We would leave the dolly out and see if children wanted to push one another around on it.
By the time people arrived to play, not much was done beyond half of the rope swing hanging limply on one tree. This sad start had taken almost a full hour of effort and finally necessitated a rope-tethered rock being thrown precisely between two high branches, a feat that took many, many tries.
The lack of play apparatus did not seem to matter to those who had come to the event. Mothers appeared with children, blankets, and lunches; they made fires. Tires were rolled down the ramp as anticipated; leaps were made onto mats. Children sat on the dolly and were pushed pell-mell, screaming, by other children. Babies slept.
Eventually, the skeleton of the rope swing emerged, looking like a giant pi sign hanging between two trees. All that was needed was a seat for the swing. Noriko suggested one of the half logs; perfect.
The rope swing being tested at the pop-up playground
I felt like it was only good manners to let the many children who had come to play for the day sit on the swing before I went. And indeed, the line for the swing formed almost immediately and didn’t abate until late afternoon.
But at last, not long before we took it down, I had my turn on the swing. The log seat was low to accommodate the small children who were there, and it was even lower with my weight, but still, it held me, and I backed up until I was on my tiptoes, as tall as I could possibly make myself, like a ballerina en pointe, and then I picked up my feet and let go.
I flew between the trees. I flew gently, easily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to fly, as if flying were easy, as if the trees themselves—the generous, benevolent trees—wanted nothing more than to encourage me in this act.
And I was there, flying while sitting on the seat, which was also the tree, knowing that the swing was going to be disassembled momentarily, knowing that the whole thing was going to be over in a minute, as the sun was going down, as the sun was going to be gone, as it was going to get so dark it would be as if the sun had never been there in the first place, and all this knowing-swinging combined to make me feel like I was bobbing around in a tree womb, where what a tree was, and is, is constantly transforming, a type of supernatural plastic, and I, too, could be like this, could be anything and go anywhere from here.
The swing went up and the monkey bridge went up, and, eventually, at the end of the day, everything came down, and everything was returned, Cat in the Hat–like, to the shed, and the park returned to its emptiness, and Noriko pulled her tin whistle out of her backpack, and I and a dozen other new friends followed her, as if she were the Pied Piper, down the road to the restaurant for dinner, singing along as she played the theme song from the movie My Neighbor Totoro.
This was the dinner at which several young people slept over their cocktails. I was sober and awake, however, and I heard it clearly when one of the more quiet and serious of my new companions challenged me to eat the two glassy eyes out of the giant raw fish he had ordered for the group.
Monkey bridge, pop-up playground
I thought briefly of the Japanese girls with the headsets at the Shinagawa Aquarium, holding up bits of fish.
I chomped the eyeballs, smiling.
The table burst into applause.
| 8 |
Each night, just as I thought we were about to leave the playpark and go home so I could finally rest, Noriko would remember: notes. She had to write her notes.
In theory, this was a beautiful thing. Noriko and at least one if not both of her assistants, two young men in their twenties named Taka and Huta, would meet at the playpark hut—the most craptastically decorated space I have ever seen, with the most fabulous sedimentary layers of interesting junk on junk imaginable—and sit at the low table, the young men smoking cigarettes, as they all diligently wrote their notes about the day in longhand. It usually took about an hour. I felt in these quiet moments, sitting with them, that I was in some sort of Paradise Lost study hall.
I had asked Noriko what exactly she wrote in these notes and what the purpose of them was, and I learned that the notes were gathered and brought to the bimonthly meetings at the playpark where the day-to-day operations of the park were discussed and that after that, the notes were stored and referred to as needed.
Sti
ll, I couldn’t really imagine what she was writing. Ossan stopped by? We made ramen for lunch?
No, she said, it was not just what happened that she wrote about, but the struggles of the day. And to further illustrate, she translated her writing from that day, an entry in which she was detailing that she had decided that it might be nice to let the children paint the big slide and so she had brought the paint out from the supply hut. But she was torn, she had written. She wanted the slide to be painted brightly so the paint would show clearly and people would be attracted to the playpark, but the children liked to mix all the paint together, so the many bright colors became one color, a brown, and that brown, which they began painting with, didn’t really show up on the slide at all.
And as she was struggling, she wrote, with whether to tell the children to stop following their impulses to mix the paint and with her own desire to use bright colors, and with her knowledge that she should not interfere unless it was really necessary, she was simultaneously worrying that her own conflicting feelings about the situation were creating a bad “atmosphere.” That was her word. So she backed off and said nothing and let the children paint the slide as they saw fit, meaning brown, and pretty much invisibly, and she painted the picnic tables in bright colors herself, with assistance from me.
Savage Park : A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die (9780544303294) Page 6
