RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

growing environmental movement, which began with Rachel Carson‘s 1962 publication
of Silent Spring (Sale).
Like the scorn Achille incurs for his commitment to the old ways, Snyder‘s home
situation was also an impetus to ship out. The U.S. prevalence of Orientalism during the
Cold War was severe enough in the 1950s that even Snyder‘s close friend Lew Welch
said that his study of Asian languages at Berkeley was making him ―slant-eyed‖ (Welch
107). According to Timothy Gray, Kerouac and Welch wrote a series of ―yellowface‖
portraits about the young poet and his Oriental posture (157). Jack Kerouac‘s literary
persona of Snyder, Japhy Ryder, has eyes that twinkle like the ―eyes of old giggling sages
of China‖ (Dharma Bums 11), and at the end of the novel, after Japhy has shipped out to
Japan, Ray wonders if Japhy will ―just disappear and we‘ll never see him again, and he‘ll
be the Han Shan ghost of the Orient mountains and even the Chinese will be afraid of
him he‘ll be so raggedy and beat‖ (208). Contrary to suspicious friends, Snyder was not
in metaphorical danger of becoming Han Shan of Cold Mountain and losing his racial
identity. He simply went on from New York and Mexico City ―far, far, west‖ (Back
Country 19), performing the nomadic role of bioregional scholar that Scott Russell
Sanders admires in the ―purposeful wanderings of the Australian Aborigines‖ (―Settling
Down‖ 85). Like the westward-flowing equatorial currents from California, Snyder
followed the natural paths of his environment in order to arrive at experiential knowledge
of the Pacific Rim.
When he arrived in Kyoto, the country‘s capital was then in early stages of
recovery from the horrors of the Second World War. Compounded with bleak economic
prospects, the Japanese people suffered intense depression, referred to as the kyodatsu
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