15 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

Life in a Toronto Basement


Luckily I didn't have to worry about a place to live as my youngersister was living in Toronto. But she had a household of her own and was a full-time housewife. Although we are siblings, I had to exercise some constraint with her better half. I couldn't impose on them too long.

Three weeks after moving into my sister's house, I ran into Anastatia Shkilnyk. Anastatia had lived for two years on the Grassy Narrows reservation researching her doctoral dissertation for MIT. She promptly arranged for me to live in the basement of her mother's home in the downtown area. The basement, warm in winter and cool in summer, was perfect for a single person like me. I brought along my two trunks, pulled out the sleeping bag that had given me so much peace for the past six years and placed it on the comfortably springy sofa. I put my toothbrush, razor and hair brush in the bathroom and the 13 volumes of works by Chinese writer, Lu-Hsun, which I never let out of my sight, on the bedroom bookshelf, and voila!, my new life had begun.


Anastatia Shkilnyk's dissertation later published by Yale University

14 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

It is a wonderful day, isn't it?


I Receive My Set of Needles and Head for Toronto

Jacques later moved to Montreal, where he set up an acupuncture clinic. And so we met again. I studied at his clinic about once a month. Jacques traslated all the reference materials, which were in French, into English for me. After three years, he gave me the handmade needles his teacher in Nice had given to him.

"Hiro, these needles were given to me by my teacher in Nice, and to him by his Chinese teacher in Vietnam. When he gave them to me, he said they are to be used to heal people, not for profit. Unlike Western medical doctors, Oriental medical practitioners should not take money for curing a disease. If you want to make money, go into business. Do not model yourself after Western medical doctors. My teacher gave me these needles with that admonition, and I am now giving them to you in the hope you will use them for the good of the people--to cured their maladies. Then I hope you will give them to your successor."

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Certificate of Completion of Acupuncture Training from City of Montreal


After learning acupuncture, I decided to move to Toronto, take a steady job that would provide me a degree of security, then go treat my friends on the reservation with my newly honed skills.

But when I arrived in Toronto, I had no idea how to set up my life there. While I still had some of the Canada Council grant left, living in the city was quite a different matter from living on the reservation as far as the cost of living went. Perhaps I had grown too accustomed to a life of hunting and fishing when the need arose, as I found myself craving wild game for some time after arriving to Toronto

13 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

Getting back to Jacques. He studied and worked with the old man for five years. But unfortunately, only licensed Western doctores were allowed to practice acupuncture in France. So Jacques decided to make a new start in Quebec, where many people of French descent live. But no matter how fresh the ground, Quebec, with its 200-year history, was in many respects 18th century France tansplanted. There didn't seem to be the slightest interest in acupuncture.

Jacques took a job as a day laborer at the James Bay dam project being carried out by the provincial government. The 10-year mega-project employed more than 50,000 workers at its peak.

The harsh working conditions, in which temperatures sometimes dropped to minus 70 degrees, created all sorts of physical problems among the workers. That's where Jacques put his acupuncture skills to work. During his eight years there, he cured thousands of workers who found no relief from medical presriptions. Perhaps his track record spoke for itself--afterwards he was approved by the government to practice acupuncture.

12 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

Having been reared in this environment, it was not the least bit strange for me to be able to communicated at will with Jacques on our first meeting. I was a high school junior and Jacques a 25-year-old Frenchman. He was born and raised in New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific. Most of the island youths usually set out in search of work in France,as the island economy lacked natural resources and offered few job prospects. He, too, had headed for France and stopped in Japan along the way. Having lost his father, he was travelingwith his mother and elder sister. Jacques was of mixed parentage, his mother being an ethnic Indian and father French. As his father was one of the senior colonial administrators of the island, the family had led a luxurious life--at least until the beginning of World War II. After that, their lives went from heaven to hell, he said.

Jacques had intended to spend only a few days in Japan, but as it turned out, he didn't leave for six months. During that period, we saw each other virtually every day. For some reason we were as close as brothers. He left Japan pledging we would meet again someday. I later received a few letters from him reporting of his visit to Hong Kong and his marriage, but communication petered out after a while.

In the interim, Jacques had tried his hand at various jobs in France but couldn't find anything to satisfy himself. During a family vacation to Nice, however, he met an old man who was practicing acupuncture and realized that was what he had been searching for. He moved to Nice to study acupuncture.

His teacher was a 93-year-old Frenchman who had lived for 30 years in French-occupied Vietnam and studied traditional Chinese acupuncture there. After returning to France, he set about popularizing acupuncture, which was relatively little known, and opened an acupuncture clinic in his town.

While acupuncture was not widely practiced, its history in France nevertheless predates that in other European countries. Around the period of French colonization of Vietnam, Western medicine was being introduced into China, forcing the practitioners of traditional acupuncture into Vietnam and what is now Taiwan.

11 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

I first met Jaques while I was still a student. At the time, the Honmoku area of Yokohama was the virtual domain of the U.S. occupation forces. My house in Hongo-cho was surrounded on three sides by foreign families. Looking back, there were probably more foreigners than Japanese there. Perhaps that explains why my mother, a war widow, decided a second language would come in handy in my future and enrolled me as a sixth grader in St. Joseph's College in Yamate, Yokohama (presently non existance).

Having entered the English-language school without any advance preparation, I was at a total loss, not understanding a word. It was as though I had arrived on another planet. St. Joseph's was a Catholic boys' school where many foreigners living in and around Yokohama sent their children. Most of them were from well-to-do families of diplopats or trading company's executives, but there were also a few students from the U.S. milityary base, mostly the children of high-ranking officers. While it's not clear why a widow's son would enter such an institution, I nevertheless spent five years commuting to Yamate, known as "the foreign enclave on Yokohama bluff."

It's incredible how quickly a child can pick up a foreign language. I was surprised myself. Within a year I could make myself understood. Perhaps because I was brought up in this type of environment, I don't feel the least bit out of place among foreigners.

The fact that I didn't go to Japanese junior or senior high school presented some unexpected stumbling blocks as I grew older, though. I began to fear I couldn't read, write or speak Japanese like a Japanese and felt that remaining there would turn me into a misfit and force me to leave Japan. These worries prompted me to take my leave of Yokohama's foreign enclave in my sixth year there.

Since I hadn't been educated in the Japanese school system, it was impossibe to simply switch to a regular Japanese high school. So I went to night school, where I underwent experiences tough enough to give me migraines. Only then could I finally enroll in a regular Japanese high school.

The period when I went to night school left a very deep impression on me. I couldn't have been happier, though, at finally becoming a regular Japanese student. It's hard on a youngster to be unable to fit into Japanese society even though he is Japanese.

10 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

The Indains were not only subjected to discrimination and forced into poverty,but were also exposed to serious health problems stemming from a source of pollution beyond their control. I had attempted to document these injustices through my photos and sometimes in essays. But I could do absolutely nothing to help the old man standing there before me. The importance of improving the Indians' lives by easing their ailments became painfully clear to me at that point.

I became thoroughly dejected about my powerlessness. I was confronted with the question of whether I could acquire a new skill or job at my age that would better serve my Indian friends. After all, I was already 35. It would probably be impossible to learn something new. Such thoughts absorbed me for days on end and made me neurotic. I began to think it was a waste of time simply to fidget about my situation. But these thoughts simply added to my sense of unease.

Just around that time, I got a long-distance call at the reservation office from Montreal, the capital of Quebec.

"Hiro, is that you? It's me, Jacques Baily. Remember me? We met 17 years ago in Yokohama while you were still a student. I'm that skinny Frenchman."

"Aah, Jacquies! The fellow who stopped by Japan with your mother and sister on the way from New Caledonia to France!"

"Right! I moved to Canada 12 years ago. I'm making my living doing acupuncture."

"You mean Oriental acupuncture?"

"Yeah. I studied it after I went to France."

My whole body started quivering the minute I heard that word. It was exactly what I had been searching for. The very next day I flew to Montreal and for the next five years I studied acupuncture while traveling back and forth between Montreal and the reservation.

9 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

Learning of the Futility of Documentation



Most journalists seem to dig up the most distressing facts they can find and convey this message to the public. Countless times jounalists have told me they were transmitting the "message of the people." I empathized with this viewpoint, so whenever the opportunity presented itself, I would try to sharpen my senses and determine the best way to delve into the people and relate what they were trying to say.



But eventurally, I had to ask myself whether it was sufficient simply to convey a message. I had recognized to a certain extent the difficulties of fully documenting the truth. But I began to question how much therse records actually helped improve the condition of the people documented in my photos.



My life on the rservation thrust these problems painfully before me. I had used my camera as a documentary tool. While my photos were obviously useful when the Indians appealed to the provincial government to improve their living conditions, they didn't seem to have any concrete relation to their daily lives.



One day during my stay on the reservatioin, a village elder came to my residence, the room in the church where the village priest changed into his cleric's robes, and asked if I could cure the numbness in his hand. For some reason he seemed certain that I could relieve his pain since I was Japanese.



I didn't know what to say. I could only hang my head in shame and tell him I couldn't help him. The Indians on the reservation were all exposed to mercury poisoning from the Wabigoon River which ran nearby the severation. The mercury came from effluent from the Dryden Pulp Factory upstream and poisoned the river fish, which formed an important source of nutrition in the Indians' diet. The effects of mercury poisoning were not unlike those found in the Minamata victimes in Japan.

Poison Stronger Than Love

8 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

The Canadian government subsidized my stay in my third year. I shall always consider this program one of the most wonderful aspects about Canada. Canada had a patronage program fo fields ranging from painting and photography to poetry, literature and the film making. The Canadian Council, a federal agency, had an annual budget of tens of millions of tax dollars pooled for the purpose of encouraging artistic work. Incredibly, foreigners living in Canada could also apply for these subsidies.

"O Canada"

In the spring of my third year in Canada, a photographer friend suggested I submit the photos I had taken on the rservation to the Canadian Council and apply for the subsidy. Although I meekily did as I was told, inwardly I thought a foreign photographer had no chance of winning the grant. Much to my surprise, however, I was given a 12,000-dollar grant. Two years later, I reapplied and was again awarded 12,000 dollars.

Say a foeigner came to Japan to do photojournalism on the Ainu of Hokkaido. What are the chances of the Japanese government subsidizing that person? None, particularly if the photos took a critical view of government policy toward the Ainu. But that is exactly what I was doing in Canada, finding fault and in some way inovating the Canadian policy toward the Indians through my photos.

I am not making an issues of the money per se, but the manner in which people are given the right to live as individuals. It could be said that Canada's historical tradition as a land of immigrants made it more receptive to foreigners. Be that as it may, thanks to those subsidies, I was able to have the valuable experience of living on the reservation without mooching off the Indians' negligible assets.

Once the subsidy ran out in my sixth year, I decided to move to Toronto with a specific motive in mind. I am but a humble journalist, but for a long time I have considered myself a messenger of sorts. That is, I have striven to convey the message of certain people through photographic records.

7 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

Chapter One

Learning Acupuncture in Toronto

I first met the Indian fellow in August 1981, just after I moved to Toronto after spending six years living on the Grassy Narrows Reservation photographing the effects of mercury pollution on the Indians.

I consider Toronto one of the most beautiful cities in North America. Like most other metropolitan centers, however, the city is split up into various ethnic blocks, where small pockets of Italians, Jews and other ethnic groups have set up separate communities. Blacks from the West Indies, for example, generally congregate in high rises exclusively for blacks, perhaps to escape racial predudice. Toronto has its Chinatown, naturally, and the British like in the upscale parts of town. Ethnic Japanese, however, are different, perhaps because there are so few. No other ethnic group seems to be as scattered around the city as the Japanese.

photo from Toronto Wikipedia

To be truthful, economic consideration forced me to move to Toronto. My savings had scraped bottom after six years on the Indian reservation. But I did not take single penny from the Indians during my stay there. The first year I managed to get along with the money I had brought from Japan. The second year I sold all my photography equipment save one camera and lens. At that time, such equipment was highly prized in Canada, so I was able to manage without any problem from the proceeds of those sales.

Now as for how I managed during my third year there...

6 Start Your Day with a Glass of Urine

Why did I begin to drink urine? Please read on. I take up my move from the Indian reservation to Toronto and how I first encountered urin therapy. It is necessary to go into my life at that time. Unfortunately there is not space to go into my long experience at the reservation. I hope interested individuals will refer to my book(1) on the things I witnessed at the Indian reseration. Certainly my thinking and way of looking at things were largely influenced by my stay there. But I will now take up what I learned in Toronto, my experiences, and how it improved my health.

(1) Indian kyoruchi de mita koto (What I Witnessed at the Indian Reservatioins) Published by Soshisha in 1983.

to be continued to Chapter One (Thank you for reading the part of my autobiography. Please injoy yourself and be healthy without any cost)