Where Is Hoji?

I Have Never Seen One

"Hoji nashi." (No hoji.)
"Hoji ne na." (You have got no hoji.)
"Go to Ioya and buy some hoji."
"I went to Ioya, but they were out of hoji."
"I dropped my hoji."

Live in Kakunodate and you will hear the word hoji several times a year. I have been hearing it since I was a warashi (a child, in the Akita dialect). And to this day, I have never seen one.

You are told to go and buy it. You are told the shop was out of it. People complain that they dropped it. Bought, sold out, dropped. However you listen to it, hoji is a thing. And if it is a thing, it must be somewhere.

People have lost it. People have picked it up. But I have never once heard of one being handed in at the police box.

The Complicated Explanation

In Akita, hoji is said to mean something along the lines of sanity, one's true mind, a firm grip on your senses.

If you want the complicated version, the word is supposed to come from a Buddhist term, honji, meaning the original form of a buddha or bodhisattva. Supposed to, I write, because I know nothing about Buddhist terminology. If I started explaining it here, someone who does know would be angry by the first line.

Still, if it is true, it is quite a word. "Hoji nashi" would mean "without your original form." Which means that for generations, in the living rooms of Kakunodate, wives have been throwing Buddhist philosophy at husbands who came home drunk. A blessing, really. Not one character of it ever reached the man himself.

The Simple Explanation

I am not a man who thinks in complicated ways, so I understand it like this.

Hoji is the state of being normal.

That is all. It is not some special condition of wisdom. Being decent, being sane, kept somewhere ordinary and within reach. Which is exactly why nobody notices that they have hoji.

You notice only once you have lost it.

When I was young I drank until I was soaked in it. Blind drunk, no memory of the night, no idea which way was up. That, in short, is a man who has lost his hoji. The next morning you retrace yesterday's route with your head in your hands, and you almost never find it. You cannot even remember where you dropped it, so of course you do not.

What is interesting is that the word works in the other direction too.

"His hoji has stuck to him now."
"He picked up some hoji somewhere."

So hoji, it seems, may be picked up off the ground. Second hand is fine. Nobody cares whose hoji it used to be. Whatever I am running on these days, I have no idea where it came from.

Why Ioya

Whenever hoji comes up in Kakunodate, the name Ioya comes with it. To anyone from outside, this makes no sense at all.

A while back, that shop was a one-stop shop. One visit, and everything you needed was there. So "go and buy some hoji" points automatically at Ioya. In this town, if you wanted the shop that sold everything, that was it.

I write "was" for a reason. Home centres, discount stores and supermarkets opened up around it. That is the whole of it. If none of them had been built, I think it would still be the shop where you can go and find anything.

Put another way, it is a shop for a town where people shop on foot. You could even call it a shop for a city. It simply does not suit a life that needs somewhere to park a car. The contents of the shop did not get worse. Perhaps it is the town, not the shop, that stopped matching.

If anything, I think that shop looks after the customers who walk there. That is precisely why it kept the things those people needed. That is what a one-stop shop actually means. Not boasting about the size of the range, but making sure that whoever walks in does not go home having been told "we do not have it."

About ten years ago, I bought a Shinetsu Kogyo craft PP band at that shop. Craft PP band itself is carried just about everywhere these days. But the Shinetsu Kogyo one is not something every shop keeps on the shelf. And there it was, on a shelf in a shop I could walk to.

About Being Unfriendly

You come across reviews saying the owner is unfriendly.

I do not think so. Or rather, I think it is the other way round.

It looks that way because the customer walked in to size the owner up. Nobody who is being tested smiles. Go in as someone genuinely searching for something and stuck, and you get a response that takes in what you actually need. That is how I have always received it.

Crossing a shop's threshold with no business there, purely to appraise the place, is nothing but a nuisance. This is not about Ioya. It is the same in any shop.

Conclusion

And the ones who go in to size people up are usually the ones who have dropped their hoji.

So by rights, those are exactly the people who ought to go to Ioya and buy some hoji.

Unfortunately, Ioya does not sell hoji.

If it did, this town would have cleared the shelf long ago.

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(Akita dialect used in this piece)
hoji = sanity, one's true mind, a firm grip on your senses
hoji ne = to have no hoji
warashi = a child