palindrome

Child's Play

2008-09-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

I've been reading John Dower's "Embracing Defeat" and there's a fascinating section on how Japanese children's games changed during the post-war period and were in many ways a mirror of adult society. There were certainly no toys to be had in such dismal economic times and playing war vanished in the wake of the defeat. Here are a few examples of the new types of games that came into play:

Yamiichi-gokko: holding a mock black-market.
Panppan asobi: prostitution play. Panpan was a euphemism for prostitutes catering specifically to GIs. Little boys created GI style hats out of newspaper and little girls pretended to be the panpans.
Demo asobi: recreating left-wing political demonstrations. Children would run around waving red paper flags.
Train games: children used the teacher's platform (still found in classrooms today) as their mock train. "Repatriate train" involved pretending be returning soldiers, trembling and afraid, on their way home. "Special train" - an allusion to the Occupation personnel-only train cars - allowed only "pretty people" to ride. In "ordinary train" children crammed together, pushing and shoving, barely fitting on teacher's platform. Eventually a conductor stopped the "train," saying it was broken down, and ordered everyone off.
Other later inventions included runpen-gokko (pretending to be homeless vagrants), "catch a thief" and "pretending handcuffs" (mirroring the lawlessness of the times), lottery games reflecting the desire for material wealth, and kaidashi-gokko (pretending to leave home in search of food).

As Dower notes a good portion of their play seemed to find pleasure in being colonized, as well as "playing at utter confusion."

Lifestyle

2008-09-17T20:00:00.001-07:00

I've been spending a lot of time looking over Bruce Mau's "Lifestyle" recently and have noticed a lot of references to Japan that I didn't necessarily notice 6 years ago when I first read it:

In the opening spread of images there are 2 references to Japan - the "design-driven destination" of Tokyo's Ski Dome and the ubiquitous Colonel Sanders statues found at Japanese KFC franchises.
There's at least one reference to Kurosawa, in relation to Chris Marker's homage to the Japanese director AK. Marker also made the film Sans Soleil, a fictional sort of documentary travelogue the deals heavily with memory and the Japan of a few decades past. Sans Soleil is not mentioned specifically but BMD's translation of Marker's La Jetee into book form is mentioned.
In a spread from BMD's image essay ReMembering the Body there is the mention of an anonymous Mr. S, age 43, who died of a sudden heart abnormality while on the job. No mention of Japan is explicitly made - just the abstracted background image of a subway car and the single word karoshi - "death by overwork" in Japanese.
In an unconventional 1999 job ad, BMD developed a quiz. Some of the questions included: What is the difference between nigiri and sashimi? Who designed the Asahi Beer Hall in Tokyo? What style of hat was a runaway success at the Nagano Winter Olympics?
For an exhibtion dealing with "The Culture of Energy" this information is included regarding Japan ("a country without energy resources"):
Because Japan must import 85% of all its energy, it has become one of the most energy-efficient countries in the world.
A family in Japan uses one-third less the amount of energy than a family in Canada.
Only 5 percent of Japanese homes have central heating; in the USA the figure is over 80 percent. Japanese use only 40 percent as much heat per unit of floor area. Only 55 percent of Japan's total domestic travel is by car. In the US this figure is closer to 85 percent. Japanese homes on average have only 27 square meters of space per person, vs. over 50 square meters per person in the US.
Japan's manufacturing productivity increased 102% between 1970 and 1980, while that of Germany grew 59.9% and in the US only 28%. Yet Japan used 30% less energy per unit of manufacturing output than the US.
An exhibit about Japan would be incomplete without a look at its traditional and popular cultures. This would include karaoke, the tea ceremony, pachinko parlours, Shonen Jump (a comic book which sells 4 million copies a week), sumo, flower arrangement, sexual pleasure, calligraphy, martial arts, university entrance exams, baseball tournaments, Mito Komon (a popular TV show), the Flower Festival and video games.

Every foreigner living in Japan bemoans the lack of central heating and the lack of insulation (an example of Japan's energy inefficiency). In the office I worked in for 2 years there was no A/C in the brutal summers and in the winter we used a gas space heater (gas leaks were a common occurance).

I wish I had had this book with me in Japan. In the summer of 2007 I had to put together a short presentation for a group of students going to study in Germany. Part of their time would be spent attending lectures on energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy. I was asked to give them my presentation on America's concerns with renewable energy sources before they left; I suppose to get them in the mood. This info from BMD would have come in handy, if anything it would have been interesting considering the exhibit was comissioned by German utility company EMR (ENERGIEKULTUR was the actual title of the exhibtion).

When the students returned from their trip I was handed a cassette tape containing a lecture on global energy policies from a German professor - in heavily accented English. It was my task to transcribe it, as his accent had proven indecipherable to even the keenest of Japanese ears. So I spent a week sitting out in the hallway with a pair of headphones, typing up a transcript - it was too loud in the office and the recording of the lecture not loud enough. I didn't mind though - it was much cooler in the hallway, as opposed to a tiny office full of computers and 13 people, with no A/C.

They ended up installing A/C in the office a couple weeks before I left the job.

Notes on Richard Lloyd Parry's "Smilingly Excluded"

2008-09-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

Richard Lloyd Parry's critique of Donald Richie and the general dearth of lasting literary works produced by expatriates in Japan came up in conversation last week and I was prompted to re-read it. A great essay.

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents...

The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture...

When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

Why then – outside Japan, at least – should [Donald Richie] be so little known?

Only his 1971 travelogue, The Inland Sea, and some of his film criticism, are read except by those with a specialist interest in Japan.

Wounded partisanship of this type leads one to suspect a straightforward explanation for his unsuccess: that Richie simply isn’t much of a writer. But is there more to it than this: a reflection of the times he has lived through; something inhospitable in the intellectual atmosphere of Tokyo itself?

There is another lucky side effect for many expatriates: personal alienation, the inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is cancelled out, or at least rendered invisible, by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin.

To be blunter, Richie and a seemingly disproportionate number of his friends and contemporaries – the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual.

Richie’s Journals make explicit what is only suggested in his other writing: that, whatever the delights of Japan’s culture and the fascinating perspectives available to the writer in exile, it is sex – or Richie’s particular version of it – that has kept him tethered here for so long.

Only much later, when Japan had changed beyond recognition, did he begin to understand the political pulses which charge the relationship between the victor and the defeated.

Never once does he indulge in the favourite gaijin pastime: whingeing about Japan and the Japanese. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that when expatriates in Japan get together they always do this – find fault?’ he asks. ‘Do they do this in other countries? “Oh these Luxembourgians, these people!”’ Later, he is reproached by his old friend, the literary translator and scholar of Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker: ‘You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.’ He replies that Seidensticker ‘really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing’.

The Inland Sea, a learned, beautifully paced elegy for one of ‘the last places on earth where men rise with the sun and where streets are dark and silent by nine at night’, is the only full-length work of Richie’s that will be remembered a generation from now. His various collections of newspaper articles and magazine essays are patchy and poorly organised, and I couldn’t get through the long-out-of-print early novels, Where Are the Victors? (1956) and Companions of the Holiday (1968), well-meaning and empathetic attempts at social observation which, even as period pieces, hold scant interest today.

In a life of prolific underachievement, The Japan Journals are the masterpiece.

He escorted them, helped them to find boys and girls, then wrote acute little sketches of them, a chronicle of the naivety, arrogance and insensitivity which overcomes so many otherwise intelligent people in Japan.

These were tumultuous times, but despite Richie’s avant-garde leanings, the violent left-wing demonstrations make no appearance in the diaries. A ‘chronic non-joiner’, he actively resisted participation in anything that sniffed of politics, especially sexual politics.

A decade of Japanese recession later, it is easy to forget how ominous all this seemed at the time, and how many people in both countries came to regard the other as an enemy. ‘Japan is an unguided missile,’ Richie writes in a rare disquisition on current affairs.

The shock of this change is the realisation, which Richie is too honest not to register, that the gaijin’s special status is unearned, a simple function of economics. In the way of these things, though, money provides its own solution to his frustrations, or at least an alternative. The bubble attracts immigrant workers – Pakistanis, Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese and Iranians – drawn to Tokyo by the mighty yen. And among them, Richie finds erotic opportunities which the natives no longer provide. ‘You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World,’ a friend tells him. ‘It was not I that deserted Japan,’ he writes, ‘but Japan that deserted the Third World . . . It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator.’

By almost any other standard, the young in Japan today are exemplary: a little glazed and indifferent from the outside, but politer, calmer and more law abiding than their contemporaries anywhere in the world. Richie may find it harder to seduce them as he circumambulates the park, but he is not going to be beaten up, robbed or murdered by them either.

Greater Tokyo contains thirty million people; it is far and away the largest city that has ever existed. And yet to the Westerner with intellectual aspirations it is a small pond. The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil. In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature. Perhaps Donald Richie shows us why.

Mystery Solved!

2008-09-06T21:05:00.002-07:00

I've had this woodblock print for over a year now, since picking it up at a temple (Sugimotodera) in Kamakura, Japan, and its meaning has always been a bit of a mystery. This weekend however I finally figured it all out. I was helping Bruce Rutledge with the Chin Music Press table at the ENMA Aki Matsuri and it just so happened we were right next to a table manned by two monks from a local temple. I noticed a tenugui on their table that looked surprisingly familiar and quickly realized it contained the same exact imagery as my print. The only difference was their version had hiragana accompanying each image. I found out from one of the monks that its actually a pictographic representation of the Buddhist Heart Sutra - Maka Hannyaharamita Shingyō in Japanese. As it turns out, in Edo period Japan kanji was perhaps not as well understand by the average Joe (Taro?). Thus in order to disseminate knowledge of the Heart Sutra among "illiterate" farmers and such, there was this genius idea to create a pictograph version of the Heart Sutra, accompanied by hiragana (which my version lacks). Basically, the way it works is the farmer, tired and dirty from a day in the field comes home and wants to chant the Heart Sutra. So he looks at the pictographs, says out loud the name of each object (all of which would have been familiar to any Edo period farmer) in the order its shown (top to bottom, right to left) and when he's done he's chanted the Heart Sutra in its entirety! Pure genius!

For example, the first vertical column from the right uses six pictographs to indicate the title, which would be "Heart Sutra" or Maka Hannyaharamita Shingyō. The first picture is of a kettle which is kama in Japanese. This kettle, however, is upside down - a clever way to indicate it should be read backwards as maka. Second we have a well-known mask from Noh theater called a hannya. Third we have a man's belly, which is hara in Japanese. Followed by a winnow (farming implement?) - mi, a rice field - ta, and a Shinto mirror - shingyo. Put them all together and what do you have? Maka Hannyaharamita Shingyō or "Heart Sutra." The chant then proceeds from right to left. Its important to note that the choice of objects has nothing to do with the meaning of the sutra, simply as an aid to pronounce it.

Now that I knew what I was looking for I could find a little more info on the internet and its been suggested that these pictographs were created more as a playful novelty than as a real tool for spreading the good word to the illiterate masses.

Notes from Stuart Barnett's interview with Donald Richie

2008-07-30T18:45:00.000-07:00

then what you could say is that the Japanese film is in the same sense about atmosphere, about the social extensions and physical extensions that define a person, the idea of an environment being responsible for the character and the action which is created, the idea of something social or natural, or something supra-human, which is shown on the film.

If the Japanese are ignored, it's probably for two reasons. One, the Americans have this been-there-done-that attitude.

That is what I meant. Japan tends to control everything. It controls nature and calls it a garden; it controls flower arrangement and calls it ikebana--"living flowers," even though they're already dead. Everything is controlled to a point that is noticeable to a culture that makes a fetish out of apparently leaving things to chance, or apparently letting everyone have his voice.

And all the Shinto ritual pollution came too late, because the kids know nothing about it.

Yet, traveling around Japan, it's easy to be shocked at the paving over of the countryside, the haphazard urban and suburban topography, the lack of any notion of zoning.

I think the attitude towards nature in Japan has been always the same, before and now. I think what has changed has been the agenda. For example, before the attitude toward nature was appropriation in a more benign way because they didn't have the tools to do anything else. So a daimyo, or a samurai, or a rich merchant could improve his social ambitions, or his image in the neighborhood, by doing a classical garden. By forming nature in some particular way that announced that it was his own. That's one agenda. Now we've got all sort of machines and lots more money than we ever did before. It's very easy for politicians and financiers to make their mark...aestheticism has not been included in the agenda. Efficiency has.

It gets highly complicated when prefectures have to spend budgets because otherwise they won't get that much next year. So you have many hungry construction companies backed by the yakuza that have to be satisfied and have to be assured that they'll make money. There is no more nature in Japan. All the picturesqueness you see on the way to Takayama is on mountainsides that are probably too difficult and expensive to get at. That's why it's still there.

But your idea--or anyone's idea--of what is Japanese isn't anything a Japanese would share...But I'm thinking more of the urban fabric--or the lack of any fabric. It all seems a jumble.

I think that's what the Japanese quite willingly accept as Japanese. It lacks order; it's very postmodern.

See, what we see of an ordered Japanese style is the product of a social class that doesn't exist any more. Official Japan--the people who gave us the tea ceremony, the Noh, Mizoguchi, Ozu--doesn't exist any more.

you have to point out that English as used in Japan is not a subdivision of English. It's a subdivision of Japanese. And it works perfectly well...It's there only for its ostensible purpose, which is to indicate that I am cool, I am smart, I know the ways of the world. All these submessages are subsumed into this English and that's its true function. Being grammatical is beside the point.

So English is a purely postmodern language in Japan? It's pure surface?

In Shibuya they would wear high, elevated sandals. They dye their hair or sun tan. They accentuate their eyes. These are fake foreigners. Not that they are wannabes. They are the avant-gardes of appropriation, which is working its way through everything. Everything has to be taken.

I'm fortunate in that I'm not an academic. I may be a scholar, but I'm not an academic. So I don't have to go through all the nonsense they have to. So I can have my freedom to be a dilettante and a flaneur. I can do all things I couldn't do if I were respectable.

In one sense, Japanese aesthetics points at the limitedness of Western aesthetics, which focuses for the most part on the autonomous work of art. The Japanese aesthetic seems more linked with movements like William Morris's arts and crafts movement or Bauhaus. Hence the emphasis on design and utility.

You hear Westerners say: this isn't the real me. In other words, it isn't the real me you've just been talking to. The Japanese don't believe in soul. They don't believe in God. There's no superstructure that can support the integrity of a work of art. So, with William Morris, you're right on. It’s all crafts. There wasn't any word for art until one was made up in 1858. The only term for it meant both art and craft.

With Japan it's very hands-on crafts. Nowadays they've learned that the West puts people's names on as labels and they do this too, but I don't think it means that much. I think everything is through group effort in the true medieval sense.

Indeed, the success of the iMac and the Chrysler PT Cruiser were triumphs of design. So these things that are filling our day-to-day lives are becoming sleeker and more elegant. RICHIE: Right. The Eames chairs turn out to have been a harbinger. Bauhaus turns out to have been a harbinger. Of course, Bauhaus comes from Japan. Here art does not exist except as commodification. It doesn't exist except as a way of making money.

I think over the years, Japan has gotten used to not having a God; they're so used to it, nobody remarks about this. If you've got a country where you dunk the kid in Shinto when he's born and you dunk him in Buddhism when he's dead, and you dabble with a Christian wedding in between, this doesn't argue for a strong feeling of religion. I think the only Japanese religion is being Japanese. This has the same amount of awe connected with it, the amount of the unspeakable. One of the strongest reprimands a Japanese can give another Japanese is "that's not like a Japanese." It's treated with a degree of respect and awe that we reserve for religious things.

Before Americans were frightened of the people making automobiles and now they're amusing us to death with Pokemon.

Just as religion has to have a devil in order to create a God--God doesn't know who he is unless he looks at the devil and says that's who I'm not--the Japanese need somebody else...But nevertheless the idea is that there's someone out there who's absolutely and utterly not us. And is used quite consciously to tell us who we are. This is racism. This is xenophobia. Xenophobia is always based upon this, I believe--the idea that you must always have somebody else to define.

But why are they so polite to the gaijin? That's what I don't get. RICHIE: They can afford to be. I think a lot of people quite understand this. BARNETT: It's a very gracious culture. RICHIE: Yes. As long as their Japaneseness is not threatened. On the other hand, you'll find many, many people who would happily give it up for a day or a month--or a year. They go abroad and do all sorts of things in very unJapanese ways. But you often find this parabola that drags them back to the country. This happened to Tanizaki; this happened to Mishima. Mishima went about as far as you can go and came back and did the most conventional thing you can think of. No, it's not like living with Texan rednecks. It's really not. But it's like living with extremely cultured, cultivated Texan rednecks.

We do not exist alone. No one has successfully adopted a true castaway, a Robinson Crusoe.

When they do occur, the Japanese have no idea what to do with them. They have no idea what to do with their atrocities in the war. They literally have no idea. They sweep them under the carpet.

But it makes the place endlessly fascinating. I think it's the most interesting place in the world. It's convoluted; it's complicated. Every day is a wonderful brain scramble. Coupled with an emotional nature, which I like very, very much.

BARNETT: Looking at Japanese pop culture, especially TV, I get the sense that there's almost an affective modernization going on. That a lot of these weird shows, which seem aimed at the youth, emphasize hysterical exuberance. Are the Japanese youth entering a different psychological, affective space than is traditionally Japanese? RICHIE: I don’t know. But you could say that the very fact that they are so extraordinarily hysterical indicates the degree of regimentation, which demands-- BARNETT: a Mardi Gras. RICHIE: Right. Exactly. Every day there's Saturnalia on the tube. But constraint at home. That's always been true. The same thing went on in eighteenth-century Edo. The eijanaika phenomenon at the end of the Tokugowa period. Sheer Dionysius erupting. I would consider that to be--maybe perhaps more extended now--but nonetheless one of the givens of Japanese history. Under the repression, there's the explosion. BARNETT: It's a safety valve. RICHIE: Indeed, it's a safety valve. Yet it's one thing to have an eijanaika and it's another to be on a talk show and pull your hair. The loss of quality has been considerable. In actuality, youth is so constrained now; they can barely talk to one another. They can only talk through the cell phone. You'll see a couple on a date, and they'll each be on the phone with someone else.

2008-07-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

"The Japanese don't preserve old things. They preserve traditions and art forms, but not objects.

Surface things change fast, but deeper things like morals, ethics, and manners don't. For example, the Japanese are a law - abiding, very moral people, and this has remained unchanged for over 100 years. There has been corruption, of course, but basically it is a conventional, fundamentally conservative society despite all the tremendous surface change."

- Edward Seidenstecker

Notes on Alex Kerr's "Lost Japan"

2008-07-24T16:05:00.007-07:00

Japanese Studies at the time revolved almost wholly around economic development, post-Meiji government, "theories of Japaneseness " (known as Nihonjinron), and so on...

The Japanese have always treated foreigners like creatures from another universe. As Japan has become more internationalized, the attitude toward foreigners has grown more, rather than less, complicated. But in those days, outside the big cities, there was only tremendous curiosity...

Roads were few, and the mountains were heavily blanketed with old-growth forest. Mist boiled up out of the valleys as if by magic...

With its abundant "rainforest" vegetation, volcanic mountains and the delicte leafage of its native flora, Japna was perhaps one of the most beautiful countries in the world. During the ensuing twenty-odd years, the country's natural environment has changed completely. The old-growth forests have been logged and replanted with neat rows of cedar trees, and within these cedar groves it is deathly silent...roads have been carved deep into the mountains, and the hillsides have been covered in erosion-control concrete...

But nature in Japan used to be far more mysterious and fantastic, a sacred area that seemed surely inhabited by gods. In Shinto, there is a tradition of Kami no Yo, the "age of the Gods," when man was pure and the gods dwelled in hills and trees.

Usually the housed of a Japanese village huddle together in a group on the flatlands, either in a valley or at the foot of a hill, surrounded by an expanse of rice paddies. People do not live up in the mountains, which in ancient times were the domain of gods and considered taboo. Even today, the mountains of Japan are almost completely uninhabited.

These days, all of rural Japan gives the impression of becoming one enormous senior citizens' home.

Western visitors to Japan, appalled at the disregard for city heritage and the environment, always ask, "Why can't the Japanese preserve whaht is valuable at the same time as they modernize?" For Japan as a nation, the old world has become irrelevent...In the West, contemporary clothing, architecture and so on hahve developed naturally out of European culture, so there are fewer discrepancies between modern culture and ancient culture. The industrial revolution in Europe advanced gradually, taking place during the course of hundreds of years...In contrast to Europe, however, change came to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia in a truly precipitous fashihon. What's more, these changes were introduced from a completely alien culture....modern clothing and architecture...have nothing to do with traditional Asian culture. Although the Japanese may admire the ancient cities of Kyoto and Nara, and consider them beautiful, deep in their hearts they know that these places have no connection to their own modern lives. To put it bluntly, these places have become cities of illusion, hitorical theme parks. In East Asia, there are no equivalents of Paris or Rome - Kyoto, Beijing and Bangkok have been turned into concrete jungles. Meanwhile, the countryside has been filled to overflowing with billboards, power lines and aluminum houses.

These things are so far removed from what the Japanese use today, that they could almost come from a different planet.

Noh stages, Shinto shrines, Zen temples and the houses of Iya all date from a pre-tatami age. The psychological difference between the wooden floors and tatami is great. The wooden floors can be traced back to the houses of Southeast Asia, which stood on stilts in forests from the "Age of the Gods." Tatami, with their neat black borders, came into vogue in a later era of precise etiquette, tea ceremony, and samurai ritual....Rather than replace the old with the new, Japan simply lays the new on top of the old.

Nothing can ever be accomplished without time-consuming discussion. the discussion may apparently have little to do with the matter at hand, but it is absolutely indispensable, and many an impatient foreign businessman has met his doom by disregarding this Law.

The military took over, moving the capital from Kyoto to Kamakura and establishing the Shogunate which ruled Japan for the next 600 years. One consequence of this military rule is the rigidity we see today.

Tanizaki makes the point that Japan's traditional art arose from the darkness in which people lived. For example, gold screens, which look garish in modern interiors, were designed to pick up the last struggling rays of light making their way into the dim interior of a Japanese house.

It was the constant pressure of this darkness which drove the Japanese to create cities of neon and fluorescent lights. Brightness is a fundamental desire in modern Japan, as can be seen in its uniformly lit hotel lobbies and flashing pachinko parlors.

So visitors to Japan are unprepared for the complete and utter victory of fluorescent lighting, whose flat bluish glare has penetrated homes, museums, hotels, everywhere.

It is said that of Japan's 30,000 rivers and streams, only 3 remain undammed, and even these have had their streambeds and banks encased in concrete. Concrete blocks now account for over 30% of the several thousand kilometers of the country's coastline.

And then the electric wires! Japan is the only advanced nation in the world which does not bury electric lines in its towns and cities, and this is a prime factor in the squalid visual impression of its urban areas.

Unfortunately, in the case of landscape, the same ability allows the Japanese to concentrate on a pretty green rice paddy without noticing the industrial estate surrounding it.

Internal travel is declining, while foreign travel is at an all-time high, reflecting the millions of people who are traveling abroad to escape the domestic ugliness.

So, in the 1980s, Iya pioneered a novel scheme to bring in brides from the Philippines, which generated nationwide controversy. It was a success and has since been copied by other remote villages.

There had to be more than this zestless, ritualized Kyoto, with every tree pruned, every gesture a formula.

This sideways glance, called nagashime (literally "flowing eyes"), was a hallmark of beautiful women in old Japan, and is found in countless woodblock prints of courtesans and onnagata.

On the one hand, there is Japan's free-wheeling sexuality, out of which was born theh riotous ukiyo (floating world) of Edo: courtesans, colorful woodblock prints, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, "naked festivals," brilliantly decorated kimonos, etc. This is a remnant of ancient Southeast Asian influence...At the same time there is a tendency in Japan towards over-decoration, towards cheap sensuality too overt to be art. Recognizing this, the Japanese turn against the sensual. They polish, refine, slow down, trying to reduce art and life to its pure essentials. From this reaction were born the rituals of tea ceremony, Noh drama and Zen...In the late Muromachi period, gorgeous gold screen were in the ascendant; along came the tea masters, and suddenly the aesthetic was misshapen brown tea bowls. By late Edo the emphasis had swung back to courtesans and the pleasure quarters. Today, this war goes on. There are garish pachinko parlors and late-night pornographic TV, and there is a reaction against all that, which I call the "process of sterilization": the tendency to fill every garden with raked sand and every modern structure with flat concrete and granite.

At the risk of oversimplification, I would say it was because Japan is a country where the exterior is more often valued over the interior. One may see the negative effects of this in many aspects of modern Japanese life. For instance, the fruits and vegetables in a Japanese supermarket are all flawless in color and shape as if made from wax, but they are flavorless. The importance of the exterior may be seen in the conflict between tatemae and honne...

...the overall design of a building and its aesthetic relation to street and skyline are ignored; the result is careless, disjointed, ugly. The sorry state of the highway system is also the result of renga thinking: there is no master plan, just a stringing together of annual budgets to build highways piecemeal.

For anyone expecting dramatic unity, Kabuki seems weak. My friends who value logic invariably dislike Kabuki.

There is hardly a single object on the Kabuki stage recognizable to young people today.

True friendship is not easy here. Long-term foreign residents complain that after ten or twenty years in the country they are lucky to know one Japanese they consider to be a true friend. Yet the problem goes deeper than the culture gap between foreigners and Japanese. The Japanese often tell me that they can't make friends with each other; they say, "There are the people you knew in high school who remain bosom buddies for life. Everyone you meet after that cannot be trusted."

Traditionally, most houses in Japan of any size or wealth had a kura built alongside. These storehouses were necessary because of the "empty room" ethos. Furniture, paintings, screens, trays and tables appeared in a Japanese house only when needed, and varied by season and by occassion.

As Japan is an island country, rules could be imposed with a thoroughness impossible in a large continental nation like China. As a result, Japan's pyramidal structures, which you can find everywhere from companies to tea ceremony, really do determine patterns of behavior. In my experience, a Japanese is much less likely to say or do the unexpected than a Chinese; whatever he may think, he is more likely to do what the rules tell him to do.

Surely no other country in the world has such an extensive literature in praise of itself.

But once they get into college, the pressure suddenly relaxes and the next four years are spent almost completely at play. Companies place little stress on what new employees know before they are hired; the real education begins on the job.

In Oxford, however, old objects surround you, living on as a normal part of everyday life.

However, as is evident from China's very name - Chung Kuo (the Middle Kingdom) - the Chinese are firmly convinced that their country lies at the center of the earth. Until very recently, China bestowed its culture on neighbors such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan...the only thing which ever went from Japan to China was the folding fan.

Japan, in contrast, was always on the receiving end of cultural imports from other countries, and deep in their hearts, the Japanese are haunted by a sense of insecurity about their cultural identity. What can you call truly "Japanese" when almost everything worthwhile, from Zen to the writing system, came from China or Korea?

Naturally, Japan must stand at the top of the pyramid, and this is what has given birth to the aggressive theories of Japaneseness.

Lovers of China are thinkers; lovers of Japan, sensuous. People drawn to China are restless, adventurous types, with critical minds. They have to be, because Chinese society is capricious, changing from one instant ot the next...China will never allow you to sit back and thihnk, "All is perfect." Japan, on the other hand, with its social patterns designed to cocoon everyone and everything from harsh reality, is a much more comfortable country to live in. Well-established rhythms and politenesses shield you from most unpleasantness. Japan can be a kind of "lotus land" where on floats blissfully away on the placid surface of things.

Since WWII, Japan has had fifty years of uninterrupted peace, during which time the concrete of its social systems has set hard and fast. It has become the land of social stasis, and the foreigners drawn to Japan tend to be those who find comfort in this. Japan's peaceful and secure society is one of its major achievements.

At the same time, the serious social problems that do exist, such as discrimination against the burakumin and Koreans, are carefully hidden. Speaking out against the system is discouraged, with the result that advocacy groups for women, the ecology, legal issues or consumers are pitifully weak.

The curious sense of isolation from the rest of the world which you get when living in Japan has its roots in the harmonious social systems which make Japan seem even more peaceful than it really is....From here, these things look like other people's problems, and foreigners living in this lotus land can easily get caught up in the minutiae of office life, or the aesthetics of tea ceremony, and forget that there are larger issues.

People think they need to approach Japan with a worshipful attitude in order to gain access to its society and culture...Somtimes I think "Japanese Studies" would be more accurately described as "Japan Worship."

But at present, China's traditional culture is still weak, just staggering to its feet after receiving a massive blow to the head. As a result, scholars from abroad tend to look on traditional Chinese culture not as a living force, but as a dead relic.

One can scour the history of Japan, however, without finding much in the way of articulated philosophy; to put if strongly, Japan is not a country of thinkers. As a result, before coming to Oomoto, both David and I had felt far greater respect for China than for Japan. But at the seminar I discovered that Japan does have its own philosphy, every bit as complex and profound as China's. Rather than beign expressed in words, it flows within the traditional arts - although Japan had no Confucius, Mencius or Chu Hsi, it did have the poet Teika, Zeami, the creator of Noh drama, and the founder of tea, Sen no Rikyu. They were Japan's philosophers.

It has often been pointed out that the Japanese educational system aims to produce a high average level of achievement for all, rather than excellence for a few. Students in school are not encouraged to stand out or ask questions, with the result that the Japanese become conditioned to a life of the average. Being average and boring here is the very essence of society, the factor which keeps the wheel of all those rigid social systems turning so smoothly....but in Japan people are conditioned to be satisfied with the average, so they can't fail but be happy with their lots.

As an island off the Asian mainland, it was able to absorb cultural influences from China and Southeast Asia while at the same time preserving near total isolation as a society. It became a sort of cultural pressure cooker into which many ingredients went, but form which none came out.

Japan has always been a design country, perhaps because of its love for the surface of things.

"You know, Westerners with their full-blown personalities are infinite in interest as human beings. But Western culture is so limited in depth. The Japanese, on the other hand, so restricte dby their society, are limited as human beings. But their culture is infinitely deep."

It was possible...to walk all the way through town back to Tenmangu wearing kiomono and hakama. To do so today would be so divorced from modern Japanese surroundings as to seem wholly ridiculous.

According to the old Chinese calendar, theh yuear is divided into 24 mini-seasons, with names like "Clear and Bright," "White Dew," "Great Heat," "Little Cold," and "Squirming Insects." Each has its own flavor.

For example, in most cities it is standard practice in autumn to cut off the branches of trees lining the streets, in order to prevent falling leaves. To modern Japanese, falling leaves are not a thing of beauty; they are messy and to be avoided.

This lack of color is especially true of Japan, where all lighting is fluorescent, and most household items are made from aluminum and synthetic materials...It is a striking constrast to the ash-gray color of life in Tokyo.

...but I am only following the typical Japanese religious pattern: not wanting to be bound to a single religion, I subscribe to them all...

There are very few places in Japan where you can escape from the constraints of this society. It is nearly impossible to drop out and live a hippie life in the countryside: the stranglehold of complex rules and relations is at its most severe in the rice-growing countryside. On the other hand, in the big cities life is so expensive that it is all one can do to just pay the rent.

In the eyes of city administration, rows of old wooden houses look "poor," they are an embarassment, and should be removed quickly.

Sumitomo had precise criteria for establishing mortgage rates or determining collateral for loans, but they had absolutely no method of evaluating the aggregate merit of a new real-estate venture. They had never needed one. For forty years since the war, land and rents in Japan had risen uninterruptedly. If one just had enough money to acquire land, everything else would go smoothly. Large banks like Sumitomo Trust, protected and coddled by a financial system which stifled both domestic and foreign competition, had had a particularly easy time of it.

The fact that the bank did not understand IRR should have been a danger sign to us; from that alone we could perhaps have predicted the impending crash.

There was euphoria in the air, and the Japanese were convinced that they were about to take over the world; words like "a billion dollars" and "ten billion dollars" rolled off people's tongues, and Japanese investment in US real estate appeared to be growing without limit.

This was my introduction to Japan's controlled press. In every field, whether it is business or crime, Japan's reporters belong to "press clubs," where they depend on news handouts from government bureaucrats or the Police Agency. As a result of these cozy relationships, newspapers like the Nikkei verge on being a kind of government propaganda organ.

The universal attitude was..."This is Japan. Land and stock prices only go up."

Mrs. Chida and I racked our brains to figure out what it was that gave us that 'foreign look,' and we could think of only one possible reason: the lack of clutter. For some reason, Japanese businesses cannot get the hang of managing office space.

Anyone who has spent time in a Japanese home or office knows that they are usually flooded with objects. From the old farmhouses of Iya to the apartments of modern Tokyo, living in a pile of unorganized things is a typical pattern of Japanese life. In my view, this is what led to the creation of the teahouse. In the Muromachi period, tea masters grew weary of a life crowded with junk, and created the tearoom: one pure space with absolutely nothing in it.

Cozy non-public bidding...cozy press clubs and other such systems are endemic in Japan....meanwhile rigidity set in: rocked in the cradle of its closed domestic systems, Japan failed to learn.

The only way to move forward is to dismantle these closed systems, but large businesses are too dependent on them, and so Japan is paralyzed.

The Council of Fashion Designers was not open to foreigners, nor to new faces in Japan, and certainly not to the up-and-coming Asian designers. It was too comfortable and predictable, so international fashion editors lost interest.

The movie industry is dominated by two giant production companies, Shochiku and Toho, which also own most of the movie theaters. This means that the films of smaller independent producers have very little chance of being seen.

One of modern Japan's great mysteries, which almost every foreign observer puzzles over, is how can the citizens of the world's riches country have such a poor lifestyle? The Japanese live in houses a quarter the size of the French or the English. (cheap flimsy building materials, little variety of produce, only 8 TV channels)

And through every possible means, the impact of the outside world was kept to a minimum: foreigners were not allowed to run companies here, to design of construct buildings here, to make movies here, etc. It worked all too well. Because of the high wall of regulation and the cozy systems which exclude them, foreign firms are now giving Japan a miss as they move into the rest of Asia.

Military dictatorship, Emperor worship, dominance by agrarian landlords - the entire edifice of the Meiji state was in turn discarded in favor of a bureaucratic industrial complex: "Japan Inc."

No one is seriously trying to open Japan's markets anymore. No one outside of Japan cares that Shochiku and Toho don't make good movies. Nor will they object if the Construction Ministry covers the whole country with concrete. There will be no Perry or MacArthur: the Japanese will have to do it themselves. Trammell once told me, "Success comes when you realize that no one is going to help you." But Japan has trained its citizens for fifty years to be obedient and docile, to quietly await the bureaucrats' bidding. The revolution will not come easily.

Taxes used to be levied according to frontage, so the old houses of Kyoto tend to have narrow street entrances, and stretch far back into the interior of the block.

Poverty-stricken kuge nobles and middle-class shopkeepers used wabi as a weapon to establish their cultural superiority. It was a form of deceit, carried to the level of art. A crudely fashioned brown tea bowl was held up as superior to the most elaborately decorated Imari platter, and nobody ever dared ask why.

Wabi was Kyoto's unique achievement: a rug, a bamboo hanging, a meal of "one bite and a half" - all were manipulated to create an effect superior to the gold-leafed halls of feudal lords.

But the people of Kyoto can not bear the fact that Kyoto is not Tokyo. They are trying with all their migh tto catch up with Tokyo, but they will never come close...the people of Kyoto never forgave Edo for usurping its place as capital. When the Emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868, that was teh final blow to Kyoto's self esteem.

The intense refinement and detailed conventions of Kyoto life become oppressive. Of course, no one ever goes so far as to voice the word; most people are not even conscious of the feeling, but its presence shows clearly in the glazed look of their eyes.

Vermilion is the color of magic. It was the color of Chinese Taoism, and since the Shang dynasty thousands of years ago it has been revered as being sacred to the gods.

It is interesting to compare Fushimi with the Grand Shrine of Ise; with its pale wood and simple angular designs, Ise is often held up as Shinto at its purest. Unpainted and unadorned, the brute strength of its buildings conjures up a sense of awe, as if you are in the presence of a great divine power.

But pure Japanese style in art and architecture has always involved the staggered, even higgledy-piggledy, placement of things. Apart from Kyoto and Nara, which were modeled after Chinese capitals, no Japanese city shows and ordered plan...

The palace precinct in Edo, however, was an amorphous blob, surrounded by a zig-zag of moats and ramparts, with no grand avenue, and no order to the gates or interior buildings.

The ultimate luxury - complete functionlessness - is absent. Zen, in particular, is a serious affair: mu (nothingness) is a virtue, but muyo (functionlessness) is a sin.

Byodoin is one of the few places in Japan that breathes the air of freedom.

Inside [Hannya-ji] is a garden of the type found only in Nara: a tangle of wildflowers, mostly cosmos, growing in profusion alongside the paths and on the base of the temple's tall stone pagoda.

The bird analogy recalls Byodoin and Hannyaji, and this is because all three buildings were built under the influence of Sung and Yuan China.

Indigenous Japanese roof styles mingled with those imported from the mainland and the islands of the South Seas to create the widest range of styles found in any nation in East Asia.

In general, however, Japanese architects have almost completely failed to integrate their own traditions into contemporary urban life. The only reason why interesting roofs survive in the suburbs is because residential architecture is considered a secondary area in Japan and has been ignored.

The modernism which swept the West in the 50s and 60s is still clung to with almost religious fervor in Japan. In this, one can see Japan's conservative habit of clinging to outside influences long after they have been discarded in their country of origin. For example, high school students in Japan still wear black military uniforms with high collars and brass buttons, a style imported from Prussia in the 19th century.

Japan is fascinated by secrets...In museums, the finer an artwork, the less it will be shown to the public - which is why you will often find that the National Treasure you traveled so far to view is actually just a copy. The real piece stays in storage, and is shown only to a chosen few curators.

At Izumo, Japan's oldest Shinto shrine, the object has been hidden from view for so long that its identity has been forgotten; it is referred to merely as "the Object." At the Grand Shrine of Ise, the object is known to be a mirror, but no one has laid eyes on it for at least a thousand years.

...the outer mountains of Nara are among those least accessible to the public, and are more distant psychologically than even the so-called "Three Hidden Regions."

The temples of Koya make up a small town; this in itself was no surprise, but it was the sort of town you see everywhere in Japan. The "dust" had penetrated even here.

Our first stop is Akishino Temple. Its statue of Gigeiten (the god of art) is one of the finest masterpieces of Japanese sculpture.

I too have a secret temple...my temple is called Seisen-an. The drive there is very pleasant, and the road winds past famous temples such as Hase-dera and Muro-ji.

A particular favorite of mine is the inner sanctuary of Muro-ji, and if there is time I always try to take friends there.

If you ask someone, "What are you favorite spots in Nara?" and they answer "Yoshino" or "the Yamanobe Road," that is fine. But if they say "Muro-ji," then you can tell they truly know Nara.

Until the 1880s Mt. Koya was completely closed to women, but Muro-ji welcomed them. It became known as "Mt. Koya of Women," and is the center of its own mandala, balancing Koya's yang with Muro-ji's yin.

This is a magai-butsu (cliff Buddha) a common sight in China but rare in Japan.

One of Japan's greatest achievements is its relative lack of crime, and this is one of the invisible factors which makes life here very comfortable. The low crime rate is the result of those smoothly running social systems, and is the envy of many a nation - this is the good sid eof having trained the population to be bland and obedient. The difference in Osaka is only one of degree; the streets are basically safe. What you see in Shinsekai is more a form of misbehavior, rather than serious crime. People do not act decorously: they shout, cry, scream and jostle one another; in well-behaved modern Japan, this is shocking.

Tokyo is the home of trends...Kyoto people are afraid to do anything that might make them stand out...but Osaka is a riot of ill-matched color, tastless footwear and startling hairdos. Satoshi puts it this way: "In Tokyo people want to wear what everyone else is wearing. In Osaka, people want to shock."

Pachinko verges on sensory deprivation. It is the ultimate mental numbing, the final victory of the education system.

The samurai despised the merchants as belonging at the bottom of the social totem pole, but at the same time, the merchants had the freedom to enjoy themselves. The brilliant realm of the floating world - Kabuki, the pleasure quarters, colorful kimonos, woodblock prints, novels, dance - belonged to the old downtowns. But today, people from these neighborhoods are different from ordinary Japanese.

In Tokyo there was the shogun, in Kyoto there was the emperor; but in Osaka there was nobody on top, except a skeleton staff of the Shogun's officials holed up in Osaka castle, pitifully unprepared to join in the battle of wits with wily Osaka merchants. The ratio of samurai to population was so low that people could go their whole lives without meeting one. In Edo, the Shogunate built bridges; in Osaka, private businessman built them. In other words, in Osaka, the people ran their own lives.

...as a result, Tokyo's dominance is near total, and Kansai is slowly falling off the map. There could be no better indication of this than the incredibly slow response of the central government to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe.

...the recently completed Kansai Int'l. Airport is so expensive and over regulated that most international airlines shun it.

In like manner, Japan coats all culture from abroad, transforming it into a Japanese style pearl.

Guidebooks describe [Kobe's ijinkan] as an example of Kobe's internationalism, but the houses actually represent a failed community.

But even so, Manpukuji never abandoned its Chinese identity; it is the single most successful and long-lasting venture initiated by foreigners in Japanese history.

Literati are rarely great academics, because their curiosity leads them into odd byways that tend to disqualify them from serious scholarship. Likewise, they may not be the greatest of artists or writers, because they rarely have the ambition to build reputations in society or establish themselves commercially. In short they are amateurs, whom the Chinese called hogai (outside the system).

Soon there were hundreds and thousands of literati doing nothing the length and breadth of Japan. Doing nothing is only one step away from subversion.

"Showing something in its native state is not art. Artifice piled on artifice, giving you the illusion of the natural - that's art.

But in fact there is a purpose to these buildings, which is to assuage the conscience of civic administrators who feel they should be doing something, but don't know what to do. "Dogs and horses" - that is the quiet, invisible part of city planning - would be to establish zoning, regulate signs, bury telephone wires and restore the ecosystems of lakes and rivers. But instead, vast sums are squandered on "demons and fascinating things": museums and halls designed by famous architects for which there is no use, but which symbolize culture.

Nor do they have the same sort of freedom which Tamasaburo, Kawase, and Issey had, since the lives of young people today are so dominated by bureaucracies and systems which had not yet solidified in the 60s and 70s.

Notes on Douglas McGray's "Japan's Gross National Cool (2001)"

2008-07-13T20:25:00.003-07:00

Sometimes, like an Issey Miyake gown, the Japan that travels is authentic. Sometimes, like cream cheese–and–salmon sushi, it is not. But cultural accuracy is not the point. What matters is the whiff of Japanese cool.

In the 1980s, Japan pioneered a new kind of superpower. Tokyo had no army to speak of, no puppet regimes to prop up, and no proxy wars to mind. Just an economy.

Yet Japan is reinventing superpower again. Instead of collapsing beneath its political and economic misfortunes, Japan’s global cultural influence has only grown. In fact, from pop music to consumer electronics, architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in the 1980s, when it was an economic superpower.

Contemporary Japanese culture outside Japan can seem shallow by comparison. Or it can reflect the contradictory values of a nation in flux, a superficiality that prompted the Japanese art magazine BT to equate contemporary Japanese culture with “Super Flat” art, “devoid of perspective and devoid of hierarchy, all existing equally and simultaneously.” “We don’t have any religion,” painter Takashi Murakami told the magazine, a bit more cynically. “We just need the big power of entertainment.”

They tended to think very little about foreign audiences. What they talked about instead was foreign inspiration. At times, it seems almost a strange point of pride, a kind of one-downsmanship, to argue just how little Japan there is in modern Japan. Ironically, that may be a key to the spread of Japanese cool.
“I can’t always distinguish elements of traditional Japanese culture from Japanese culture invented for tourists,” confessed Toshiya Ueno.

In other words, Japan was postmodern before postmodernism was trendy, fusing elements of other national cultures into one almost-coherent whole. It makes sense: Japan’s history is filled with examples of foreign inspiration and cultural fusion, from its kanji character system to its ramen noodles.

The dance didn’t seem uniquely Japanese. It didn’t seem at all Japanese. But then, what should one expect, geishas grooving on a Shinto arch?

Maybe there is not much traditionally Japanese about any of it. But if that is a requirement for national branding, American pop culture is hardly more respectful of traditional Americana—unless you count when Madonna wears a cowboy hat.

You can buy individually wrapped Hello Kitty prunes. You can buy a toaster that burns Hello Kitty’s face into a piece of bread. You can buy a Hello Kitty vibrator. “We don’t have such strict regulations,” the spokesman said. “Hard alcohol, maybe that would not be appropriate.”

“When Kitty-chan was born, in those days it was very rare for Japanese people to go abroad,” she said. “So people yearned for products with English associations. There was an idea that if Kitty-chan spoke English, she would be very fashionable.”

Hello Kitty is Western, so she will sell in Japan. She is Japanese, so she will sell in the West. It is a marketing boomerang that firms like Sanrio, Sony, and Nintendo manage effortlessly. And it is part of the genius behind Japanese cultural strength in a global era that has many countries nervous about cultural erosion.

Imagine for a moment if modern Japan were more like France, less culturally plastic and more anxious that globalization might erode its unique national character. Its cultural reach might look something like that of Japanese sumo—popular at home but stubbornly closed to foreign influence, and as a result, largely invisible outside Japan.

Perversely, recession may have boosted Japan’s national cool, discrediting Japan’s rigid social hierarchy and empowering young entrepreneurs. It may also have loosened the grip a big-business career track had over so much of Japan’s workforce, who now face fewer social stigmas for experimenting with art, music, or any number of similar, risky endeavors. “There’s a new creativeness here because there’s less money,” said Tokyo-based architect Mark Dytham

There exists a Japan for Japanese and a Japan for the rest of the world. Often, in the case of youth fads, for instance, there is a good deal of overlap. Sometimes, in the case of sumo or the layout of a typical suburban house or the variety shows that proliferate across Japanese television networks, there is none.

National cool ought to help Japan infuse its universities, research labs, companies, and arts with foreign talent. But in a vast public opinion study conducted throughout Asia in the late 1990s, respondents who admired Japanese culture and Japanese consumer products thought little of the idea of studying or working in Japan, even less of moving there for good. And as open as Japanese culture is to foreign influences, there is neither political nor public support in Japan for immigration, or for immigrants.

Neomarxisme rebuttal:

Lately, the idea floating around Tokyo bureaus of major Western publications is, hey Japan's economy has totally bottomed-out, but they can start exporting cool! one shouldn't expect too much cutting-edge thought from foreign journalism on Japan (or maybe, from domestic journalism either), but for some reason, people who should know better are starting to seriously discuss the "gross national cool" (GNC) idea.

The essential idea of the GNC argument is correct: Japan is no longer an imitator, but an authentic source of world popular culture. however, the proponents of the theory have evidently not spent time on the streets of Tokyo lately, because the creativity they believe can be used to reverse the trade balance is evaporating.

JETRO thinks that economic insecurity breeds creativity, but in Japan's case, those artists with Western acclaim all came to age in the superrich Bubble economy. also, the "freeter" of the recession era have not been able to surpass their big brothers at all. everyone who is selling now was crowned during a time of relative prosperity.

no one in the US will ever listen to orange range or 175R. as these genres dominate more and more of the market, you can scratch music from our GNC list.

so, before i am convinced that the GNC is a real, valid theory and not just a catchy, but ultimately anachronistic piece of copy, i need to see examples of innovators in the current 2004 market.

So the logic is not “recession shifted resources and attention away from economic pursuits,” but “the economic boom of the 1980s created the infrastructure and human inputs required for the 1990s creative boom.” There was a value shift, but the creators who best represented this shift began operating within an anti-Bubble aesthetic before the Bubble even ended. Consumers may have found their message more compelling in a recessionary environment, but the artists themselves did not choose “creativity” over “white-collar career stability” because of the economic downturn.

Notes on Kawakami Sumie's "Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage, and the Modern Japanese Woman"

2008-06-22T14:43:00.005-07:00

I think my interest in this book stemmed from two things. One being an instance, only having been in Japan for a couple months, when I was eating dinner with a co-worker, a Japanese woman in her fifties who commented that often her husband would not come home at night and that she did not know where he spent those evenings. She said it rather matter of factly and as if it was not necessarily an odd thing. The second reason involves a Japanese friend of mine who I have known since I was a child. I remember on one of his visits to the U.S. he brought his girlfriend with him. They were in their very early twenties and acted as a young couple should act, enthusiastic and interested in one another. Years later when I would visit their home in Osaka, the now husband and wife seemed a totally different couple. They had of course aged and put on weight, but he treated her in a gruff, distant manner and she seemed to function not as his wife but simply as caretaker of the house and mother to the children. When it was only the two of us he would on occassion comment on his infidelities. I once asked him why he ever decided to get married. His reply, offered quickly and honestly, "I wanted children."

You don't have to travel deep into the inner sanctum of Japan's red light districts to find these places. The sex shops are often integral parts of their communities. Schoolchildren in Japan's urban centers commute through narrow streets lined with these clubs. There is not attempt to hide these establishments from view.

...I often heard wives say they would forgive their husbands for cheating on them with a "professional" because that would be just about having sex, not becoming emotionally attached.

However, a striking paradox emerged in my research of this book: while the sex industry maintains a high profile in Japan, the nation doesn't seem to be having much actual sex.

...the number of "sexless couples" has increased over the years, with more than one-third of all married people in Japan classed as being "sexless."

It hurt me when I heard them say, "What do you know about my unhappiness? You are one of the lucky ones who are blessed with professional skills, while most of us don't have that luxury." This may have been a legitimate claim, given Japan's struggling economy back then. The employment situation for women is better nowadays, but women often lose a lot financially after a divorce...

She wouldn't say this to just anyone, but it was hard even to think of being like the mothers in the neighborhood, pumping the pedals of their bicycles, their kids strapped into the extra seat, the big daikon radish sticking out of the grocery bag in the front basket, the disheveled hair...

The term "seku hara" short for sexual harassment, started being widely used in Japan in the late 1980s. In the 1990s, however, women in sales jobs still were expeced to use their sexuality and charm to their advantage, and sexual harassment was far from fading away. Emi's company had done a good job of eliminating sexual harassment from the office setting, but once she took one step out the door, it was very much a man's world.

It is still fairly common for men to marry into a woman's family in Japan, takign the wife's name as his own, especially when family business concerns are involved.

However, in those days, it was said that a woman who was still single at age twenty-five was like a Christmas cake that hadn't been sold by Christmas. The single women over 25 - the unsold Christmas cakes - were often talked about behind their backs: "She's a leftover."

"Tokyo is great for having fun, but I don't want to live there. The air is unclean and the water tastes horrible." She enrolled in a school closer to home. "When you walk around Tokyo, the insides of your nose turn black and your nose hairs grow longer," Sae used to say.

Misa was very suspicious, but she also believed that "cheating is not cheating until it's discovered." Everybody experiences moments of weakness.

Simply put, it's a form of fortune-telling. One faction of masters descends from the days of the Heian Court and preserves the art to this day. Most of them are well-connected to political VIPs, entertainers, and financiers.

Modern Japanese all know what year of the zodiac cycle they were born in and use it to understand their fortune and who they are compatible with. On the New Year, they send postcards with that year's zodiac sign, and they make a payment when they enter a critical year, known as a yakudoshi.

In Japan, there is a saying that goes, "It's still fortune-telling whether it hits or misses." Many Japanese turn to fortune tellers at turning points in their lives. Japan's fortune-tellers are akin to counselors or therapists in the West. They hold a respected position in society. When people have worries, they first turn to a fortune-teller or perhaps to a Shinto purification ritual. If you say you are going to counseling, it sounds to the Japanese as if you have a mental problem.

Couples who don't have sex for five, ten years are not uncommon in Japan...once the wife has given birth to a child or two, the men lose interest in having sex.

...the so-called dekichatta kekkon [a marriage when the woman is already pregnant] phenomenon accounts for 25% of all Japanese marriages.

"The problem is that once a couple gets married and has a child or two, the husband loses sexual interest in his wife. He starts treating her like his mother," Mr. Kim says. He attributes this to what he calls "the immature male psychology" predominant among Japanese men. "Mature men are hard to find in Japan. They can't let go of their image of mother as the ideal woman. For them, women are either mothers or lovers, and many say making love to their wives feels like incest," Mr. Kim says.

...they are emotionally frail and afraid of getting hurt, but at home, when the colleagues are gone, they are good at manipulating their wives and making the lack of sex the wife's problem.

Sociologists have coined a phrase for this term: The Winter Sonata Phenomenon. They say Japanese women experiencing mid-life crises or stuck in loveless marriges have turned to these young Korean stars for solace.

She just wants to bond with women who share the same interest: young, handsome Korean stars who exude openness, purity and warmth - attributes Japanese men are all but lacking these days, she says.

In fact, he embraced many Asian philosophical concepts such as karma and reincarnation - concepts Asians tend to naturally believe in.

Women, generally paid less, weren't pushed out as quickly, but still, it was clear to Mitsuko that the age of lifetime employment had come and gone, and her job at the trading firm may go someday, too.

At some point in the past, she transformed from being my lover to my family member, and my love for her is similar to my love for my sister or my mother.

She had heard of sexless marriages, of men who say they love their wives like sisters or mothers but can no longer see them as objects of sexual desire.

Before she was married, the most she could say about the difference between Shinto and Buddhism was that shrines belonged to the Shinto faith and temples were Buddhist. She didn't have a clue about the proper offerings at a shrine, what sort of events were held or how a shrine made money.

...even in the 21st century, the prevailing image of shrine families is that they had lots of children.

For Toshiko, a woman wasn't really a woman until she had given birth.

In Tokyo, people say that I'm only twenty-four, but in Fukui, that is marrying age. When I got to Tokyo and heard everyone talk about how they didn't want to get married, I was kind of shocked.

Notes on "Kuhaku"

2008-06-21T15:16:00.002-07:00

With Kuhaku, for example, I often got the feeling that foreign writers would come to Japan and tell stories that wrapped everything up nice and neat, explaining Japan for the outside world. So we went for the opposite approach, telling stories that contradicted each other or that had murky endings or that showed Japan in a mundane light.

Adult Japanese generally have more money in their savings accounts than do the people of any other advanced nation, largely because Japanese consider it shameful to be in debt. Money in the bank - or in secure, low-intereset post office accounts - is crucial to one's social status and peace of mind.

Young Japanese finally seem frustrated at having to comply, yet afraid of the elemental loneliness that is the punishment for straying too far on one's own.

I think younger people in Japan are beginning to understand the virtues of independence, but it's not easy to be independent. It's very lonely, actually. It's very hard to be an individual.

Right-wing zealots still argue that Japan's colonial aggression before WWII was singularly heroic, a way of "saving" weaker Eastern dcountries form Western imperialism, however disastrous the global consequences.

I think it has everything to do with a Japanese love of the system, any system. Garbage, like much else in Japan, is about following the rules and making sure everyone else does too. It's about keeping an eye on each other, but pretending not to.

Neurotics can not help themselves from over-analyzing. Otherwise, it feels like escapism. "Nothing changes because I keep running away from it" or "All this is my fault."

I know 99% of girls these days might look like hookers, but they're mostly harmless - typically, they're content with a "proper job" somewhere or other, drinking too much on weekends while dating a succession of similar-looking guys in suits until a bell goes off in their heads and they marry one of them. Then, its time to pack it all in for a life of sitting at home, shopping, and making dinner.

From the seven channels of carefully targeted garbage, I settle on something vacuous about European lifestyles and let images of rolling fields and big, happpy families wash over me. Within a few minutes I hit the mute button to silence the moronic female tarento showing us round Switzerland.

It is not that people are not friendly; rather, there is something Confucianist going on. It is viewed as rude to break up wa, or harmony, in Japan. In the West, people tend to try and forge relationships with others. Here, it is assumed that harmonious relationships already exist. The aim is not to break or damage them. And the easiest way to go about this is to keep quiet and avoid contact.

And just as people here, generally speaking, seem to like having systematic lives, my life became more neatly arranged the longer I lived here. I spent a lot of time at work and felt that I had little time for friends. In this sense, I had adapted well...

"Oh, it must be hard for you," some people have said to me. "You have to talk to your dog in Japanese because you are in Japan."

One elderly woman erupted in laughter, in fact, when she called her golden retriever, Bob, and I answered. "You have a dog's name!" she cackled. This is similar to the chuckle you get when you tell Japanese people that there are 7-Eleven and Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in America as well. For some reason they seem to think that these things are Japanese in origin.

To them, Boss and I were clearly rejects. We represented American entertainment interests - Boss couldn't do jack, but he could be spontaneous and funny. For this, I found him clever. To the Japanese, he was a total failure. The Japanese expect precision in public performances.

...it was met by a shrug, which meant either "I didn't know about it!" or "Who the hell cares?" Japanese body language consists mainly of looking expressionless, so you lose your ability to read signs.

I'm not too frumpy for my age. I show some assertiveness in my choice of pants, wearing ones from The Gap rather than Uniqlo.

"Didn't we think that children were just fine as long as they got good grades at school or they got a job at a so-called good company? I have to say our generation was at fault...After all, it's how you raise a child that is important, " she says.

If you are still in your thirties, you are more likely to get a good marriage offer. But if you are in your forties or fifties, it's too late to be able to have a happy life," Mie says as she rolls her eyes.

It was sad that they couldn't reconcile their dietary differences, but such is the banal reality of what is called "culture shock." Usually, its not culture that shocks us, its people, most often those we believe we know most intimately.

Sitting just behind Martin and forced to listen to his pickup routine, I felt almost nauseated - all the more so as it was clear that the object of his desire was in a perfect swoon over him.

This was what I wanted those phony bastards to realize: Some of us live here, and that means something, even though it doesn't sound exotic or esoteric. All your talk about "Japan" and the "Japanese," about "Zen this" and "satori that" - you don't know a thing about it, you pretentious pricks.

Visitors to Japan often find rajio taiso an amusing affirmation of their stereotypes of the country. But the show's little secret is that it's actually American.

A good idea for a Japan book with a picaresque edge would be to start a trip in southern Kyushu and follow the cherry blossoms north, partying all the way.

In his note, Fujimura passionately refuted the idea that modern Western science and rationalization, just then getting a firm foothold in Japan, could explain away all of life's mystery.

Notes on Donald Richie's "The Inland Sea"

2008-06-18T21:58:00.003-07:00

...a deeply Japanese freedom from cynicism and openness to wonder...

...how Japan has "found means to call a truce; if not halt, to the great war between aspirations and actuality" and how, not unrelatedly, in Japan "you can change your mood as you can change your mind."

...there’s something in the mizu-shobai, or water-trade (as the Japanese call their night world), that seems to touch the core of him.

So the people are indeed backward, if this means a people living eternally in the present, a people for whom becoming means little and being everything.

I find less fault with Japan than with the century that is destroying this country along with all the others.

And I wondered what depths of humanity the Japanese must contain that, even now, despite everything, they remain civil to each other, remain fond of each other.

It was silent. I heard the cicadas the moment they ceased.

In the East, however, the river is more a symbol for life, our earthly span, the ukiyo, than it is for time itself.

At first he is self-conscious. He has never before spoken to a foreigner. In this he is, or course, like the majoirty of Japanese. I am inured to this particular kind of self-consciousness. I also think it is stupid. Reserve, yes; but a kind of bashfulness in adults, no. To him I must seem a different species. Foreigners in Japan are annoyed when treated like idiot children, or when they are spoken to in baby-Japanese.

The Japanese keep up appearances. Even the poorer are relatively well dressed.

And it is also true that Japan has seldom appealed to the exceptional Western mind. It is perhaps too comfortable a land for that, given to few of the extremes with which greatness is associated.

that the Japanese have spiritual inclinations is not to be doubted. I doubt very much, however, that such inclinations have ever come to anything.

The Japanese does not become an addict because he is not ready to trade actuality for the artificial reality of continual inebriation.

Thus Ruth Benedict’s conclusion that they have an abundance of social shame but not a shred of private guilt is probably true.

Whatever the sociological reasons, physically the Japanese are short only because their legs are short.

There is another aesthetic, however, that of the traditional Japanese, which finds short thighs and slightly bowed legs attractive.

The departing relatives also laughed and smiled as do most Japanese when disappointed, embarrassed, or in serious trouble.

The city was almost completely destroyed during the war, and when it was rebuilt, for once someone sat down and thought about how best to do it.

At the mention of something known, however, of something belonging to their own country, the boys lose interest.

The white man who goes native in Samoa or Marrakech, the Japanese who goes native in New York or Paris - this is possible, but it is, I think, impossible for anyone but a Japanese to go Japanese. Perhaps I am too impressed by this people’s ideas about themselves, by their real need to find themselves enigmatic.

he will eventually realize...that one can not love or hate an entire country; that one’s experience is not large enough for this.

That is because they are all so young. The reason they are so young is that they have no conscience, maybe, certainly that there is no cynicism and no corollary of disillusion. No one ever taught them to expect more of life than life can in fact offer.

Such a feeling was certainly behind General MacArthur’s patronizing and ill-judged remark that the Japanese are a nation of twelve-year-olds. Actually, of course, they are a nation of eighteen-year-olds, that excellent age when innocence and experience are as nicely balanced as they ever will be.

This is because of what we feel in Japan - the promise, the lure of the place, the mirage of pleasure, the distant vista of - uh - happiness.

The youth of Japan always go around with friends of friends.

[The new religions] are about power, about the herding instinct. Which is very Japanese. I know of no people lacking the religious sense more than they...the spirituality behind these concrete manifestations, it does not exist for them.

The Japanese choose to believe in the surface of things and do not welcome the probing or the hopefully profound. They live on the surface of life and rarely seem to feel the need for deeper meaning.

...the Japanese are also, and typically, superstitious.

...immune to religion and hence to the guilty vagaries of that imagined conscience that has been so long fostered in the West.

...the Japanese celebrate equally anonymous samurai who happened to slit open their own stomachs particularly well, saved no one, and only killed themselves.

That it is also surrounded by four walls and covered with a roof makes it Japanese. These people are mole-people. They like to feel snug, were until recently rarely seen sitting eating in public for all the world to watch. Coffee shops are ideal Japanese habitats: small, cozy, dark.

There is no bargaining. This is no mediterranean country, though it looks like one. The price is stated and that is the only price.

Japan, unlike the West, has no horror legend about the gentle octopus. In Japanese folklore the octopus is always playful, no matter how large.

And the parallel suggestion of the fading of all earthly concerns...autumn, transience, evanescence, - very Japanese qualities all.

Dozens of others sit in the near scalding water, faces bright red, like sinners in purgatory.

In the west, the very young and the very old enjoy little freedom. In Japan, however, this deprivation occurs between the ages of fifteen and fifty five. Before and after comes freedom.
Here among these proud sometimes suspicious islanders, tradition lingers, but not in the cities, where it has been swallowed by comparison, insecurity, fear.

To be anonymous is, in Japan, to be nothing. Only after your name, occupation, family, history are known do you become real.

Here I thought is a glimpse into the real Japan. This is the way the Japanese mind works. Appearances are reality without a doubt, and if the reality is not sufficient, then change the appearances. This I decided was what Shusako Endo meant when he said he found Japan sinister, a swamp that sucked life from everything in it, that drained the insect dry and left only a brittle husk. Such an extreme example of osmosis as this need not, however, be merely sinister, I continued. It might in its way be agreeable, creative. It was in this manner that whatever Japan digested reappeared in new, marvelous, and very Japanese form - just as alive but transmuted.

As an exericse in premeditated wastefulness, Nikko is most edifying - as, indeed, it was intended to be.

Levying contributions for these mausolea of Ieyasu was one way of keeping the daimyo poor and hence harmless.

Another difference is that Nikko exists in one of the most beautiful forests in the world, a forest of cryptomeria reaching to the sky. Among these, like toadstools among giant cedars, sit its cunning seventeenth century buildings, looking like pastry houses in German fairy tales, like jewel boxes hidden in the moss.

When kitsch becomes this grand, it becomes art.

In this country where the deer roam tame, and white foxes, giant sea turtles, and large poisonous vipers are known to the very children, exotic beasts must come from far away.

It is absurd, beautiful, very Japanese.

Was it me she resented, I wonder - or perhaps my speaking Japanese at all? Some Japanese resent foreigners speaking their language, and all resent it if you speak too well. Or perhaps it was the Tokyo accent - with her stuck all her sleepy life in Setoda.

Travel hopefully broadens those who travel. It usually narrows those who have to deal with the travelers.

"No one knows, I dare say. Just a deity of some sort." Just a deity of some sort - ah, this is Japan.

The way to the shrine is through a grove, along a walk, through nature itself, nature intensified. Through these trees, over this moss, one wanders to shrines. This religion, Shinto, is the only one that neither teaches nor attempts to convert. It simply exists, and if the pious come, that is good, and if they do not, then that too is good, for this is a natural religion and nature is profoundly indifferent.

I also often mentioned that if she were Japanese she would be content with the home, the name, perhaps a child, and I could gallivant as I pleased upon my quixotic quest. But she wasn’t Japanese, nor was I, and it was equally probable that the complacent Japanese lady I had in mind did not exist.

This elicited no reply but the woman stopped an aquaintance shortly, and Louise heard her say: "Did you hear that? That foreigner said good morning to me."

And both of us liked these small travel adventures for their own sake; I think they meant the same to both of us. But Louise believed that if she were with me,they would be doubled. And I believed that if she were with me, they would be halved.

We returned to the hotel and the smiling, knowing faces of the maids. This was the way it should be, each with his own kind they seemed to say.

Or perhaps it is that Japanese like their religion humanized, as they like their nature domesticated. Oyamazumi is too rigorous, too near the gods.

The foreigner is chosen precisely because telling him makes no difference. He won’t, can’t do anything about it. Foreigners occasionally learn a lot being chosen for confidences no other japanese would hear.

That is what the skin is like, the skin of children. Faintly translucent, which is why the Japanese get red when they drink; lightly perfumed, the odor of rice, because of the diet; and smooth...

It is quite after the fact, they say, and point to respectable Meiji as having been the period when all manner of nonsense was made up and called legend. Momotaro, they will tell you, is a Meiji invention. So is about half of Kobo Daishi. So, certainly, are those fleeing Heike women.

...Japan suddenly discovered that it had no history that accorded to any known Western standard...The West had descended upon their land...It was from Meiji onward that Japan became schizoid, the common reaction to two irreconcilable forces at work within the same body...

To take something nearly finished and finish it, to find an original work and go over it hunting for errors, to take an edition of something and smother it in annotations - this is the Japanese way.

Japan is not small. It is a full-sized country with more variety than most. Japan is thought to be small mainly because the Japanese want it to be thought small, just as they themselves want to be known as a small people. They feel that it is gross to be large. Actually, Japan does not feel large or small. It feels just right. It is the ideal size for human habitation.

The thought of a foreigner coping with the Japanese toilet is a happy one, and to be thus informed in advance seemed to double their enjoyment.

It is strange that a people who have without a murmur relinquished their own architecture in favor of plastics and prefabs, who have cheerfully cut down their forests, leveled their hills, and dirtied their seas...that these same people should with such stubborn tenacity cling to such a medieval, even barbaric, device.

As someone has remarked, the Japanese have fifty-three words for "prostitute" and yet do not distinguish between "lock" and "key" - which must be a commentary of some sort upon the importance they assign to things.

...Henry Adam, who on an early trip to Japan, said that for an exhibition of mechanical childishness he had never seen anything to equal the geisha party.

After some consultation they put a hole in the wall to accomodate the branch. It is still there...a small and unthinking reminder of a way of thinking, a way of living , that is right.

Japan had this gift of surrender [to nature]. In backward sections of the land, it has it still.

[Kure] is not a pleasant place - though, of course, being in Japan, not nearly so unpleasant as the two places it most resembles, Norfolk and Galveston.

The three initial questions asked foreigners are, in order: What do you think of Japan? Are you married? How old are you?

The millions of inhabitants of this great metropolis are systematically and nightly deprived of public transportation. The implications are plain. They should be at home, asleep...thousands, indeed, are not...Nonetheless, says custom and mores, they should be.

The difference between East and West is that, in the latter strain the impetus toward purity, having been early inculcated, rises from the inside and may or may not be seen on the outside; in the former, the impetus comes form the outside - society - and may or may not reach whatever dwells within. when such a code is trasgressed the Westerner feels a private guilt, the Easterner a social, or public, shame.

He looks at the painting then back at me, face blank - the expression of a polite Japanese disagreeing.

The majority here is convinced that these neighboring peoples [China and Korea] are hopelessly inferior. To be sure, so in a way, is everyone else in the rest of the world, but these two are more so.

Those who maintain that the Japanese themselves are victims of what they call an inferiority complex are themselves victims of an elaborately sustained illusion. Actually, like the Germans and the Americans, the Japanese suffer from a very advanced superiority complex. This being so, anything not Japanese is so different that it may, in various ways, be discounted.

Europe, America - these lands are also inferior, but their ideas and products may be put to good use if they are first run through the Japanese mill and emerge unrecognizable and therefore very Japanese.

I am not actually myself - not to the taxi driver, nor even to aquaintances who should know better. I am, instead, a typical representative of my land and my people. No matter my protesting that indeed if i were, I would still be there among my own kind; still I am forced in to first explaining and then defending "my" country. Since the Japanese do not truly believe themselves to be individuals, they refuse to allow anyone else to be.

This must be one of the reasons why travelers the world over are known for their attempts to pick other people up. It is not that they want sex so much as it is that they want something to fill the emptiness that their very freedom has created.

The ostensible is the truth. There is no crack between the mask and the face because the mask is the only face anyone ever has - that crack, which contains irony and wit as well as cynicism, does not exist.

...displaying that polite, disinterested, unseeing air that Japanese cultivate in the face of embarassment.

The Japanese is all Japanese and he must be seen in his own context because his mountains, his forests, his seas are also him. It is not that he does not have indiviuality, for he does. It is that he has more than individuality, he has context - and he has never been taught to foster a strong personality, has never been told that each and every person must be, somehow, different, unique, only himself. He has never found that necessary because his strength comes from his land and his people. This is why Japanese are most themselves among others of their own kind.

[Shrines] are made made for humans and so they are humanized, but they are only for those who have gone through something - the mountains climb, the ocean voyage. Only then may one see them as they are.

Every year all of the deities make the grand pilgrimage, if so it may be called, to the Izumo Shrine in Shimane, near the Japan Sea coast. Everyone goes, the grandest (from Ise, I suppose) and the most humble (little household deities, all grimed with soot from the household fires of farmers' huts in far Tohoku), because they are, after all, Japanese, and so everyone must do everything together.

But then I remembered that I had met an old man who had much pleased me by beginning at once in his native tongue, taking quite for granted that naturally, being here, I spoke. I was grateful to be spared the usual hesitancy, so often prolonged to the point where one begins to believe that they are seriously considering whether you can even think, much less speak.

'That was where it all began, in Kyushu. You like old stories, and you'll find so many of them in Kyushu that you won't know where to put htem. that was where Japan was first made, you know; and that is where the giant monster cat of Nabeshima lives, and where the ghosts twitter like swallows.'

It was like shouting the truth down a well, or like confessing to a mirror - native customs both.

Notes on Chris Marker's film "Sans Soleil"

2008-06-15T15:59:00.006-07:00

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories.

He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats. I wish I could convey to you the simplicity—the lack of affectation—of this couple who had come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken.

He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads. Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead.

I paid for a round in a bar in Namidabashi. It's the kind of place that allows people to stare at each other with equality; the threshold below which every man is as good as any other—and knows it.

This is a state of survival that the rich countries have forgotten, with one exception: UN Japan. My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.

He spoke to me of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako at the beginning of the 11th century, in the Heian period. Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor's court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of 'elegant things,' 'distressing things,' or even of 'things not worth doing.' One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work—Japanese style—like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.'

He described me his reunion with Tokyo: like a cat who has come home from vacation in his basket immediately starts to inspect familiar places. He ran off to see if everything was where it should be: the Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive, the temple of the fox at the top of the Mitsukoshi department store, which he found invaded by little girls and rock singers. He was told that it was now little girls who made and unmade stars; the producers shuddered before them. He was told that a disfigured woman took off her mask in front of passers-by and scratched them if they did not find her beautiful. Everything interested him. He who didn't give a damn if the Dodgers won the pennant or about the results of the Daily Double asked feverishly how Chiyonofuji had done in the last sumo tournament. He asked for news of the imperial family, of the crown prince, of the oldest mobster in Tokyo who appears regularly on television to teach goodness to children. These simple joys he had never felt: of returning to a country, a house, a family home. But twelve million anonymous inhabitants could supply him with them.

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.

At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

Later he told me he had eaten at the restaurant in Nishi-nippori where Mr. Yamada practices the difficult art of 'action cooking.' He said that by watching carefully Mr. Yamada's gestures and his way of mixing the ingredients one could meditate usefully on certain fundamental concepts common to painting, philosophy, and karate. He claimed that Mr. Yamada possessed in his humble way the essence of style, and consequently that it was up to him to use his invisible brush to write upon this first day in Tokyo the words 'the end.'

I've spent the day in front of my TV set—that memory box. I was in Nara with the sacred deers. I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written: "The willow sees the heron's image... upside down."

The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure. For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke Japanese, but it was a cultural program onNHK about Gérard de Nerval.
In Apocalypse Now, Brando said a few definitive and incommunicable sentences: "Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror." To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face. Japanese horror movies have the cunning beauty of certain corpses. Sometimes one is stunned by so much cruelty. One seeks its sources in the Asian peoples long familiarity with suffering, that requires that even pain be ornate. And then comes the reward: the monsters are laid out, Natsume Masako arises; absolute beauty also has a name and a face.

But the more you watch Japanese television... the more you feel it's watching you. Even television newscast bears witness to the fact that the magical function of the eye is at the center of all things. It's election time: the winning candidates black out the empty eye of Daruma—the spirit of luck—while losing candidates—sad but dignified—carry off their one-eyed Daruma.

Poetry is born of insecurity: wandering Jews, quaking Japanese; by living on a rug that jesting nature is ever ready to pull out from under them they've got into the habit of moving about in a world of appearances: fragile, fleeting, revocable, of trains that fly from planet to planet, of samurai fighting in an immutable past. That's called 'the impermanence of things.'

So when will the third floor of Macy's harbor an exhibition of Japanese sacred signs such as can be seen at Josen-kai on the island of Hokkaido? At first one smiles at this place which combines a museum, a chapel, and a sex shop. As always in Japan, one admires the fact that the walls between the realms are so thin that one can in the same breath contemplate a statue, buy an inflatable doll, and give the goddess of fertility the small offering that always accompanies her displays. Displays whose frankness would make the stratagems of the television incomprehensible, if it did not at the same time say that a sex is visible only on condition of being severed from a body.

The second part of the museum—with its couples of stuffed animals—would then be the earthly paradise as we have always dreamed it. Not so sure... animal innocence may be a trick for getting around censorship, but perhaps also the mirror of an impossible reconciliation. And even without original sin this earthly paradise may be a paradise lost. In the glossy splendour of the gentle animals of Josen-kai I read the fundamental rift of Japanese society, the rift that separates men from women. In life it seems to show itself in two ways only: violent slaughter, or a discreet melancholy—resembling Sei Shonagon's—which the Japanese express in a single untranslatable word. So this bringing down of man to the level of the beasts—against which the fathers of the church invade—becomes here the challenge of the beasts to the poignancy of things, to a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: "Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied."

He wrote me that the Japanese secret—what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things—implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment. It was normal that in their turn they should be like us: perishable and immortal.

He wrote me: animism is a familiar notion in Africa, it is less often applied in Japan. What then shall we call this diffuse belief, according to which every fragment of creation has its invisible counterpart? When they build a factory or a skyscraper, they begin with a ceremony to appease the god who owns the land. There is a ceremony for brushes, for abacuses, and even for rusty needles. There's one on the 25th of September for the repose of the soul of broken dolls. The dolls are piled up in the temple of Kiyomitsu consecrated to Kannon—the goddess of compassion—and are burned in public.

He told me the story of the dog Hachiko. A dog waited every day for his master at the station. The master died, and the dog didn't know it, and he continued to wait all his life. People were moved and brought him food. After his death a statue was erected in his honor, in front of which sushi and rice cakes are still placed so that the faithful soul of Hachiko will never go hungry. Tokyo is full of these tiny legends, and of mediating animals. The Mitsukoshi lion stands guard on the frontiers of what was once the empire of Mr. Okada—a great collector of French paintings, the man who hired the Château of Versailles to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his department stores.

Like an old votive turtle stationed in the corner of a field, every day he saw Mr. Akao—the president of the Japanese Patriotic Party—trumpeting from the heights of his rolling balcony against the international communist plot. He wrote me: the automobiles of the extreme right with their flags and megaphones are part of Tokyo's landscape—Mr. Akao is their focal point. I think he'll have his statue like the dog Hachiko, at this crossroads from which he departs only to go and prophesy on the battlefields. He was at Narita in the sixties. Peasants fighting against the building of an airport on their land, and Mr. Akao denouncing the hand of Moscow behind everything that moved.

Yurakucho is the political space of Tokyo. Once upon a time I saw bonzes pray for peace in Vietnam there. Today young right-wing activists protest against the annexation of the Northern Islands by the Russians. Sometimes they are answered that the commercial relations of Japan with the abominable occupier of the North are a thousand times better than with the American ally who is always whining about economic aggression. Ah, nothing is simple.

I went back to Narita for the birthday of one of the victims of the struggle. The demo was unreal. I had the impression of acting in Brigadoon, of waking up ten years later in the midst of the same players, with the same blue lobsters of police, the same helmeted adolescents, the same banners and the same slogan: "Down with the airport." Only one thing has been added: the airport precisely. But with its single runway and the barbed wire that chokes it, it looks more besieged than victorious.

My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the present don't change, then change the images of the past. He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.
I met peasants there who had come to know themselves through the struggle. Concretely it had failed. At the same time, all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle.

The youth who get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know that they are not on a launching pad toward real life; but they are life, to be eaten on the spot like fresh doughnuts.
It's a very simple secret. The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it. The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building after having tied her hands, because she'd spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet. Parents who demand an increase in the number of special telephone lines devoted to the prevention of children's suicides find out a little late that they have kept it all too well. Rock is an international language for spreading the secret. Another is peculiar to Tokyo.

For the takenoko, twenty is the age of retirement. They are baby Martians. I go to see them dance every Sunday in the park at Yoyogi. They want people to look at them, but they don't seem to notice that people do. They live in a parallel time sphere: a kind of invisible aquarium wall separates them from the crowd they attract, and I can spend a whole afternoon contemplating the little takenoko girl who is learning—no doubt for the first time—the customs of her planet.

One day he writes to me: description of a dream. More and more my dreams find their settings in the department stores of Tokyo, the subterranean tunnels that extend them and run parallel to the city. A face appears, disappears... a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before. I begin to wonder if those dreams are really mine, or if they are part of a totality, of a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection. It might suffice to pick up any one of the telephones that are lying around to hear a familiar voice, or the beating of a heart, Sei Shonagon's for example.

All the galleries lead to stations; the same companies own the stores and the railroads that bear their name. Keio, Odakyu—all those names of ports. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them—the ultimate film. The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.

He told me about the January light on the station stairways. He told me that this city ought to be deciphered like a musical score; one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details. And that created the cheapest image of Tokyo: overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there: rhythms, clusters of faces caught sight of in passing—as different and precise as groups of instruments. Sometimes the musical comparison coincided with plain reality; the Sony stairway in the Ginza was itself an instrument, each step a note. All of it fit together like the voices of a somewhat complicated fugue, but it was enough to take hold of one of them and hang on to it.

The television screens for example; all by themselves they created an itinerary that sometimes wound up in unexpected curves. It was sumo season, and the fans who came to watch the fights in the very chic showrooms on the Ginza were the poorest of the Tokyo poors. So poor that they didn't even have a TV set. He saw them come, the dead souls of Namida-bashi he had drunk saké with one sunny dawn—how many seasons ago was that now?

He wrote me: even in the stalls where they sell electronic spare parts—that some hipsters use for jewelry—there is in the score that is Tokyo a particular staff, whose rarity in Europe condemns me to a real acoustic exile. I mean the music of video games. They are fitted into tables. You can drink, you can lunch, and go on playing. They open onto the street. By listening to them you can play from memory.

I saw these games born in Japan. I later met up with them again all over the world, but one detail was different. At the beginning the game was familiar: a kind of anti-ecological beating where the idea was to kill off—as soon as they showed the white of their eyes—creatures that were either prairie dogs or baby seals, I can't be sure which. Now here's the Japanese variation. Instead of the critters, there's some vaguely human heads identified by a label: at the top the chairman of the board, in front of him the vice president and the directors, in the front row the section heads and the personnel manager. The guy I filmed—who was smashing up the hierarchy with an enviable energy—confided in me that for him the game was not at all allegorical, that he was thinking very precisely of his superiors. No doubt that's why the puppet representing the personnel manager has been clubbed so often and so hard that it's out of commission, and why it had to be replaced again by a baby seal.

Hayao Yamaneko invents video games with his machine. To please me he puts in my best beloved animals: the cat and the owl. He claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory, and imagination. Mizoguchi's Arsène Lupin for example, or the no less imaginary burakumin. How one claim to show a category of Japanese who do not exist? Yes they're there; I saw them in Osaka hiring themselves out by the day, sleeping on the ground. Ever since the middle ages they've been doomed to grubby and back-breaking jobs. But since the Meiji era, officially nothing sets them apart, and their real name—eta—is a taboo word, not to be pronounced. They are non-persons. How can they be shown, except as non-images?

He was pleased that the same chrysanthemums appeared in funerals for men and for animals. He described to me the ceremony held at the zoo in Ueno in memory of animals that had died during the year. For two years in a row this day of mourning has had a pall cast over it by the death of a panda, more irreparable—according to the newspapers—than the death of the prime minister that took place at the same time. Last year people really cried. Now they seem to be getting used to it, accepting that each year death takes a panda as dragons do young girls in fairy tales.

I've heard this sentence: "The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner." What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.

On May 15, 1945, at seven o'clock in the morning, the three hundred and eighty second US infantry regiment attacked a hill in Okinawa they had renamed 'Dick Hill.' I suppose the Americans themselves believed that they were conquering Japanese soil, and that they knew nothing about the Ryukyu civilization. Neither did I, apart from the fact that the faces of the market ladies at Itoman spoke to me more of Gauguin than of Utamaro. For centuries of dreamy vassalage time had not moved in the archipelago. Then came the break. Is it a property of islands to make their women into the guardians of their memory?

The Japanese defended their position inch by inch. At the end of the day the two half platoons formed from the remnants of L Company had got only halfway up the hill, a hill like the one where I followed a group of villagers on their way to the purification ceremony.

At dawn the Americans withdrew. Fighting went on for over a month before the island surrendered, and toppled into the modern world. Twenty-seven years of American occupation, the re-establishment of a controversial Japanese sovereignty: two miles from the bowling alleys and the gas stations the noro continues her dialogue with the gods. When she is gone the dialogue will end. Brothers will no longer know that their dead sister is watching over them. When filming this ceremony I knew I was present at the end of something. Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them. This one will leave none; the break in history has been too violent.

I touched that break at the summit of the hill, as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945 rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans. People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch. Across from it souvenir lighters are sold shaped like grenades.

On Hayao's machine war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a frame of fire. The code name for Pearl Harbor was Tora, Tora, Tora, the name of the cat the couple in Gotokuji was praying for. So all of this will have begun with the name of a cat pronounced three times.

Off Okinawa kamikaze dived on the American fleet; they would become a legend. They were likelier material for it obviously than the special units who exposed their prisoners to the bitter frost of Manchuria and then to hot water so as to see how fast flesh separates from the bone.

One would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze weren't all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai. Before drinking his last cup of saké Ryoji Uebara had written: "I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganized thoughts. I'm leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me."

Out there, eleven thousand miles away, a single shadow remains immobile in the midst of the long moving shadows that the January light throws over the ground of Tokyo: the shadow of the Asakusa bonze.

For also in Japan the year of the dog is beginning. Temples are filled with visitors who come to toss down their coins and to pray—Japanese style—a prayer which slips into life without interrupting it.

At the end of memory's path, the ideograms of the Island of France are no less enigmatic than the kanji of Tokyo in the miraculous light of the new year. It's Indian winter, as if the air were the first element to emerge purified from the countless ceremonies by which the Japanese wash off one year to enter the next one. A full month is just enough for them to fulfill all the duties that courtesy owes to time, the most interesting unquestionably being the acquisition at the temple of Tenjin of the uso bird, who according to one tradition eats all your lies of the year to come, and according to another turns them into truths.

But what gives the street its color in January, what makes it suddenly different is the appearance of kimono. In the street, in stores, in offices, even at the stock exchange on opening day, the girls take out their fur collared winter kimono. At that moment of the year other Japanese may well invent extra flat TV sets, commit suicide with a chain saw, or capture two thirds of the world market for semiconductors. Good for them; all you see are the girls.

The fifteenth of January is coming of age day: an obligatory celebration in the life of a young Japanese woman. The city governments distribute small bags filled with gifts, datebooks, advice: how to be a good citizen, a good mother, a good wife. On that day every twenty-year-old girl can phone her family for free, no matter where in Japan. Flag, home, and country: this is the anteroom of adulthood. The world of the takenoko and of rock singers speeds away like a rocket. Speakers explain what society expects of them. How long will it take to forget the secret?
And when all the celebrations are over it remains only to pick up all the ornaments—all the accessories of the celebration—and by burning them, make a celebration.

This is dondo-yaki, a Shinto blessing of the debris that have a right to immortality—like the dolls at Ueno. The last state—before their disappearance—of the poignancy of things. Daruma—the one eyed spirit—reigns supreme at the summit of the bonfire. Abandonment must be a feast; laceration must be a feast. And the farewell to all that one has lost, broken, used, must be ennobled by a ceremony. It's Japan that could fulfill the wish of that French writer who wanted divorce to be made a sacrament.

The only baffling part of this ritual was the circle of children striking the ground with their long poles. I only got one explanation, a singular one—although for me it might take the form of a small intimate service—it was to chase away the moles.

So, it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of time. I saw what had been my window again. I saw emerge familiar roofs and balconies, the landmarks of the walks I took through town every day, down to the cliff where I had met the children. The cat with white socks that Haroun had been considerate enough to film for me naturally found its place. And I thought, of all the prayers to time that had studded this trip the kindest was the one spoken by the woman of Gotokuji, who said simply to her cat Tora, "Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you."

When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters.

I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid. I walked alongside the little stalls of clothing dealers. I heard in the distance Mr. Akao's voice reverberating from the loudspeakers... a half tone higher.

2007-07-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

This here web log was created to keep track of mostly my travel experiences (and whatever else caught my eye) while living in Japan. I'm not leaving Japan for over a week, but seeing as in one day I'll be homeless, I don't foresee a whole lot of blogging action going down. So with the end of my time here in Japan, comes the end of this blog. Thanks to anybody who took the time to read it.

Palindrome R.I.P. Dec. 2005 - July 2007

Taketomi-jima/Ishigaki-jima

2007-07-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

Iriomote-jima

2007-07-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

Yonaguni-jima

2007-07-21T22:22:00.000-07:00

2007-07-09T22:37:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow I'm heading to the Yaeyama-shoto in western Okinawa, just next to Taiwan. Below is the typhoon that is also heading there.

Octopus Invasion: Part Deux

2007-06-24T16:38:00.000-07:00

*Emergency outbreak! Emergency outbreak!*

(In a robot voice)

Alice: "Again??"

Bob: "Yes!!! They've come to attack us again! But don't worry Alice! I've studied hard about you this time."

Alice: "Really? If you did so, I'm - I'm …"

Octopus: "HA HA HA! WHAT? Do you want to know why I have returned?? Ok, Ok! Its because I have become stronger than the last time. HA HA HA!"

Alice: "Oh my GOD! They have become stronger!! I feel horrible."

Bob: "But you like octopus, so you shouldn't feel horrible!"

Alice: "YOU DIDN'T LEARN ANYTHING!!!!!"

Bob: "Well……But I DID!! By the way why should I learn about you? Why don't you learn about me? I won't stand for this!!"

Alice: "Let's ask the octopus about this!"

Octopus: "I think you should learn about ME!!! I came to invade!!!"

As it turns out, everyone is self-centered...

2007-06-17T19:23:00.000-07:00

I asked my students to write their own story for the above picture and one student's story in particular cracked me up. I edited it for clarity and grammar, but the humor is all hers.

*Emergency! Emergency!*
(in robot voice)

Bob: What? what IS THIS!!
Alice: OH MY GOD! They're OCTOPUSES!!
Octopus: We are octopuses!
Bob: Yes, we know that.
Alice: Bob!! Don't interrupt them.
Bob: Sorry, Alice.
Octopus: Ummm...so...we came to invade Japan.
Alice: Look! There's a red octopus!! It looks delicious. I want to eat it!! Oh! I want…I like octopus very much!
Bob: I thought you hated octopus?
Alice: No way!! I love it. But I hate cuttlefish. Their eyes irritate me.
Bob: Oh, its cuttlefish that you don't like...sorry.
Alice: You should really get to know me better!!
Bob: Yeah, you're right...
Octopus: People are terrible!! I...I...I am...who am I???

The octopus lost his confidence and went home with Bob and Alice....

2007-06-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

鮎は魚だよ！ The ayu is a small Japanese river fish.

According to "Looking for the Lost," the following joke is well known among Japanese students of English:

One student of English says to another student of English, "Are you a fish?" The second student either replies, "No, I am not a fish," or some variant of this, or looks at his interlocutor as though he were a fruitcake. Whereupon, the first student says, "No, no, ayu" (are you) "wa" (a) - subject particle - "sakana da yo" (is certainly a fish), and the second student's face clouds over with embarassment or lights up with mirth as he realizes that he has been treated to a pun. That is a fairly typical example of Japanese humor...

That's right, Japanese people love puns. The pun, hardly even considered funny by Western standards and often met with groaning sounds and the rolling of eyes, gets quite a different response in Japan. Last year I mentioned a pun written by one of my students. This love of the pun, known as share 洒落 in Japanese, most likely stems from the limited variety of sounds found in the Japanese language. This limited variety results in a multitude of words that sound similar as they are constructed from the same syllables, just in a different order, making it quite difficult to memorize vocabulary (and if you're slightly dyslexic, you might as well give up entirely). More importantly however, at least in terms of pun creation, are the multitude of words that sound nearly identical, aside from intonation (doonigigo 同音異義語 or homonym), but have entirely different meanings.

Here's another example, in that sense:

A: 鎌倉の大仏はいつたったか知っている？
B: たしか、13世紀だったかな。
C: 違うよ！大仏はずっと座っているよ。

Described in "Looking for the Lost":

One man says to another man, "When was the Great Buddha of Kamakura erected?" (The Great Buddha of Kamakura is an 11.4 - meter - high bronze statue of Amida seated in meditation). The second man replies something along the lines of, "Oh, round about the middle of the thirteenth century, wasn't it?" Whereupon the first man says, "No, no, it is still sitting down." This joke, also a pun (the staple of Japanese verbal humor), depends on the fact that the verb tatsu can mean either "to put up" [建つ] or "to stand up" [立つ]. Get it?

2007-06-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

Jarvis Cocker gets funky with some Japanese.

I lost all the music on my Ipod last year and recently one of my co-workers has been loaning me CDs. Yesterday, it was Pulp's "Different Class." There are a few Japan-only tracks as well as some materials and instructions for making your own Pulp handomeddo bajji (handmade badge) which includes this hilarious photo of Mr. Cocker warning his Japanese fans not to burn themselves when making their bajji. That Jarvis, always a stickler for safety.

2007-06-10T04:54:00.000-07:00

The great "Potato-Octopus Battle" of the Meiji period. Some more info at No-Sword and this blog.

An interesting artist by the name of Itadani Ryu, who I came across in the gift shop of the New National Art Center, Tokyo. Particularly like the following piece called "Things That I Like, Hope You Like it Too."

A few of the things I even have in my apartment at the moment:

There's a new website called hitotoki (in English "a single moment") thats described as "a narrative map of Tokyo." Haven't looked at it much yet, but it seems interesting. Lots of personal stories concerning moments tied to specific places in Tokyo.

Seoul

2007-06-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

In honor of Stephen Colbert's "Black Friend" photograph, I decided to take my own version with the first Korean friend I made. His less-than-enthused expression makes the photo that much better.

Seodaemun Prison created by the Japanese to hold Korean activists fighting for independence during the Japanese occupation.

Street markets are much more prevalent than here in Japan. Each morning the main street near Ji's house was bustling with people selling food on the sidewalks. We also walked through some crazy markets, one near Namdaemun, selling anything imaginable. You can see street stalls and such during festivals in Japan and perhaps there's places with famous markets such as Takayama in Gifu-ken, but it seemed very common in Korea.

Counterfeit goods are readily available on the streets. I like this North Face knock-off.

On our way to an open air folk village museum, we were lucky enough to catch some traditional music and tightrope walking. The music was really interesting, it seemed way more lively and almost Indian in sound.

The tightrope walking was impressive, especially when he started bouncing up into the air and landing with the rope between his legs.

We walked up to the top of a hill in the center of the city, atop of which sits Seoul Tower, an eyesore similar to Kyoto Tower. The view of the Han river and its many bridges at night was impressive.

The Han river and the Seoul skyline during the day.

The Koreans seem to have a great love for paper lanterns, which I could definitely appreciate.

On the last day, Ji was incredibly kind and took us in her father's car about an hour outside of Seoul to an island famous for defensive forts. We also visited a very atmospheric temple.

An ancient burial tomb on the same island. Apparently Korea has the largest amount of such stone structures in the world.

Some very strong and bitter medicinal tea we drank on the temple grounds.

We ate at a nice place on my last night that seemed more like someone's home than a restaurant. There was a lot of artwork all over the walls made by the owner's friends. These photos are good examples of a typical Korean meal consisting of numerous small dishes.

Just a few observations and highlights from South Korea, based on only 5 days in the city of Seoul:

People are more casual; don’t dress up as much or seem as fashion conscious as the Japanese.

People don’t seem as eager to practice their English with you.

People looked directly at me when they spoke to me, as opposed to speaking to me indirectly through a third person.

Korea seems more raw and gritty than Japan. While seemingly just as safe as Japan, it had a dirtiness/grittiness that I haven't felt since being in a U.S. city.

People seem more outgoing and less shy. People were even smart-asses at times. Also, didn’t seem as polite as the Japanese. Touching was more common as well. I had people push me out of the way when they were in a rush. One thing that really shocked me was, during a cab ride, we were talking about something (I forget what it was) but we said something about a monkey. The cab driver recognized the word monkey, pointed at Mike's hairy legs, and said, "Monkey! Monkey!" Then he even went as far as to touch Mike's legs. I could be wrong, but I could never imagine something like that occuring in Japan.

The obvious bad blood between Japan and Korea and all the horrendous things Japan did during the war were quite out in the open. We visited a prison where Korean activists for indepence were kept and tortured. Also, since most older people can speak some Japanese, once when exiting a taxi I said "thank you" to the old driver in Japanese and he got somewhat angry (though he may have been slightly joking around).

The numerous times I saw the phrase "our patriotic ancestors" used in this Confucian country.

I met some Ethiopians, who both were extremely warm and friendly. At one point it was interesting to see a Korean man directly thank Woson for the Ethiopian troops who were sent to fight in the Korean War. Also, while touring the displays on torture in the Japanese prison, Woson kept commenting on how similar things were happening to activists in present-day Ethiopia (he himself was tortured before escaping to Korea).

The Western English-teaching crowd was hard to stomach. Had a guy tell me I was "gay." When I responded, "Are you kidding me? Are we in high school?" He then said, "Sorry man, I’m drunk." Makes me real excited to go back to America.

Very cheap. When you order a meal you get complimentary dishes, called sabisu in both Korean and Japanese (loan word from the English "service"). Usually its at least 6 or 7 small dishes, that you can get refills for if you ask.

I never ride in a taxi in Japan but in Korea it was the cheapest way to go if you had 3 or 4 people, though not so environmentally friendly.

Had a girl tell me I had "twinkle eyes."

Nobody sleeps in Seoul.

Seemed like there was a more international community (not just Westerners), but that could simply be because we spent some time in the main foreign neighborhood in Seoul where Eric lives.

White guys in Korea seem even more awkward than in Japan.

We met a Colombian who came to Korea with no English or Korean ability, simply because it was one of the few places you can go to from Colombia without the proper papers. The only English word he spoke was "Spectacular!"

Eric's neighbor, a Nigerian who works his ass off in a factory all day, was celebrating his birthday and gave us a 6 pack of beer for free. We were making Korean paper lanterns, so in return Mike made him a lantern using the colors of the Nigerian flag.

Everywhere you look on the skyline you can seen a bright red neon cross. I had no idea Christianity was so prevalent in Korea.

Many Koreans have "English names" because they say its difficult for foreigners to understand their names when they introduce themselves. I have to admit Korean pronunciation was incredibly hard.

The grand opening of a store, which was celebrating with an old woman dressed in a creepy clown costume singing Korean pop songs from decades ago. Old men were taken back to their youth as they danced suggestively with her.

One morning while sleeping at Ji's place (she lives in a neighborhood built on a very steep hill) we woke to the unbelievably loud sound of ripping and twisting metal. Just as unbelievable was the fact that we immediately fell back to sleep. Later we found out that an SUV which had been parked on the street just outside her house the night before, had somehow began rolling backwards and plummeted down a concrete stairway taking out the balcony of someone's home (Ironically, the previous day the man had been doing cement work on that very same balcony). Also, when entering Ji's house the night before I had noticed the SUV and thought to myself, "I hope that guy put his emergency brake on." Luckily it happened at like 5 am so no one was using the stairway at the time.

When I'm around Mike I can not communicate in my normal voice.

I discovered a new love for the word "parameter."

Malapropisms

2007-06-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

Its been a while, but here is some more of my students' writing...

Godzilla is my friend! Godzilla is my hero!!!!!!!

When I was cutting cabbage, I found a slug moving slowly. I gave a scream and ran away.

I want to be a teacher of swimming and bring up many children to good swimmers.

My father works in the bank and he usually spend holidays by playing golf. I think he is a golf maniac. And he likes baseball very much. He is a fan of Hanshin Tigers. When the team win a game, he becomes very happy. But when the team lose a game, he becomes very sad and he goes in his room so as to sleep. My parents are quite characters. For example, when they go shopping, they beat down every thing. They even beat down the house in which we have lived.

His name is Chacha and he is a rabbit. He constantly escapes from his house. So his many droppings are around our house! My families are all funny. But I love my families.

Movies are wonderful, I think. They can move. I wanna watch Spiderman 3, and 300 now, but I have no time to watch now. SON OF A BITCH!!! Excuse me...

I like eating. At lunch time I look happy. I especially like fried chicken.

I was born in Yorkshire England. There were many sheeps and I used to play with them. I think that is why I love sheeps now.

My first name, Takuya, means to be preeminent. But I think I haven’t lived so that. And I think it is difficult to be preeminent.

I belong to the rugby club. It is gentlemen sports. My special skill is incomplete left-handed. Will you think it is wonderful? I have many strange hobbies. For example, gazing a world map, reading some strange books, betting in horse racing, exciting by F1, and so on. My dream in the future is to become a lawyer. However, when I was three years old, I wanted to become a frog seriously. My favorite food is a club and my hated food is green peas. Oh, you got to know me too much! You are my stalker!!

My younger brother is 7 years old and very cute. But recently, he is involved in Pokemon. When I get home, he often speak to me about it, following around me.

I like playing tennis. But I don’t play tennis well. I like Math. I go to school by train. I always tired. I live in Kasukabe. My house is small. My favorite food is sweets. It is very good. I want a new bike. My bike was broken. I’m going to study very hard!

What is your dream? And why do you study Japanese? If it is offenseless, please tell me!

2007-05-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

Way back in the beginning of May, I was lucky enough to spend Golden Week with my friends Jason and Tammy, who made the long flight over the Pacific to visit me. It was a great time and I was completely exhausted after the week was over. We spent the first three days traveling to every corner of Tokyo. They were also kind enough to visit one of my classes and then we spent some time in both Hakone and Kamakura. I was amazed by how easygoing they were and how much energy they had. I especially enjoyed Jason's willingness to eat anything and everything and to embarass himself practicing Japanese.

After wandering around Shiodome and Hama-rikyu garden we walked to Ginza, passing by the Nakagin capsule tower - a 1970s foray into modular, prefabricated living. It was probably my first and last glimpse, as soon the entire structure is going to be demolished.

The robot from the film "Laputa" stands quietly on the roof of the Ghibli Museum.

We went to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, which is a fantastic neighborhood in the outskirts of Tokyo where I would definitely consider living. Though it was my second time to the museum, I was again blown away by the creativity of Studio Ghibili and the museum itself. The short film was an added bonus.

One of Jason's co-workers, who had lived in Japan before, recommended a fantastic restaurant by the name of Ukai-toriyama. Situated at the bottom of Takao-san, this is by far the best dining experience I've had in Japan. The grounds of the restaurant itself are fantastic, private dining rooms (separate buildings in and of themselves) are scattered throughout ponds, gardens, and streams - with torch light adding a nice effect after dusk. Course after course of delicious food was brought by kimono-clad waitresses throughout the evening. I strongly recommend this place.

Hakone was fun, though we were unable to see Fuji-san. I had to find my way to the YH in Hakone with nothing more than a vague map. I asked an old man at the bus stop how to get there and he pointed towards a road heading up into the hills. I asked if it was close and he assured me it was. About 35 minutes later as we were still trudging up the hill. I walked into a swanky hot spring resort hotel and asked if I was anywhere near the YH. He told me it was still another 3 kilometers or so up the hill. He then offered to phone the YH and have the owner come pick us up. Less than 10 minutes later he arrived in a beat up car, hopped out and began apologizing profusely to the staff of the swanky onsen resort. I in turn apologized profusely to him. Once we were inside the car he assured me it was not a problem, he just felt embarassed and uncomfortable in such a fancy place. From Hakone we headed to Kamakura. In those three days I think we used nearly every means of transportation imaginable. As this was my eighth time to Kamakura, it was the small details that caught my eyes most (like this broom and the fabric below). I swear I'm going to live in that town one day. The best part was renting bicycles and cycling around the less crowded eastern part of the town.

Straight ballin' in front of the Dior shop in Ginza.

Jason and Tammy sitting along side the Eno-den railway, as we made our way to the Kamakura Hase Youth Hostel.

One of the highlights of the trip was meeting two kids - Mako and Eri - who were staying at the youth hostel. Mako (6 years old) made this portrait of Jason and Eri (age 8) made a fantastic drawing of the Daibutsu last summer when she stayed at the hostel. The owner then turned it into a stamp to advertise his hostel, which you can see on the left in the photo below. She redrew it and gave the picture to me. Later, we met up again at Hase-dera before saying goodbye.

Its nice talking to little kids in Japanese because they don’t patronize you and they just talk to you like you're a normal person, not a creature from another planet. I wish I could have more conversations with eight year olds. I was getting really frustrated with people in Kamakura. Probably since its such a touristy area, everyone assumes that all foreigners are fresh off the boat and can’t speak any Japanese. This results in two things when you speak to them in Japanese: the patronizing laugh or the refusal to respond to your Japanese question with a Japanese answer (even if they can’t speak English). I can’t even count the number of times myself, Jason, or Tammy said "hello" or "excuse me" in Japanese and received nothing but a condescending laugh in return. Everyone was so amused at the foreigners attempting to speak Japanese.

At one point at Kamakura station I had to ask the same question to three different people before I could get a proper response. We were looking for lockers to put our backpacks in and they were completely full. I walked into the police box next door and asked the man, "Are there any other coin lockers?" Of course the fact that I was speaking Japanese didn’t mesh with his image of "foreigner" and he just stared at me and said, "Huh?" though he knew full well what I had just said. I repeated the question again, enunciating each word, "Are...there...any...other...lockers?" He sat there, like a deer in headlights, repeating, "Umm...uhhh...ummm" trying to think of an English response. Realizing his English was failing him he simply threw up his arms and said, "Full!" in Japanese. I wasn’t even given a complete sentence. I shook my head and walked out. Next I thought I would ask the guy at the ticket gate. "Excuse me, are there any lockers inside the station?" He didn’t even turn to face me, and gave me another incomplete sentence of an answer. "There’s only the one’s over there?" I asked. He chuckled to himself and mocked what I had just said. And that was the end of that conversation. Finally I found a woman who decided I was worthy of speaking to in complete sentences and in 5 seconds I was able to find out that the bicycle rental shop next door would watch our bags for a small fee. Amazing how smoothly a conversation goes when people speak to you like you’re a normal person and not an alien.

The youth hostel had an amazing rooftop, from which you can get great views of the Pacific to the south and the hills in every other direction.

2007-05-10T03:38:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a bit about food recently. For one, I live in Japan so its pretty hard for me not to think about food - as that's a large part of living in a foreign country. I've become quite a big fan of the food produced in this here island nation. Its one of the things that brings me great joy on a day-to-day basis and especially when I travel around. Its one of the things I'll miss most and one of the things I'll try my best to compensate for back in America. Perhaps I'll stare at this blog from time to time and reminisce about all the Japanese food I used to be able to eat. It was created by a husband and wife team of graphic designers-cum-pudding makers who gave up big city life in Tokyo and headed for the sticks of Hokkaido. It makes me hungry and it also makes me nostalgic for Hokkaido, memories of which seem to be flooding my head recently as the temperatures rise and I remember my summer trip there last year. If (when?) I live in Japan again, I'll really want to live in Hokkaido or Okinawa's Yaeyama islands, but in reality I'll probably end up in Tokyo. Or maybe I'll compromise with my other favorite (but not quite so remote) place in Japan - Kamakura.

As someone who has always preferred local eateries (my college town of Harrisonburg had quite a few good ones) to big chain restaurants, I like that in Japan one could easily limit their restaurant going experiences to locally owned shops (coffee shops are a different story). Even better, when I travel and stay at youth hostels, ryokan, or minshuku, I often eat more or less the equivalent of homecooked meals. I've also been lucky enough to come across great vegetarian restaurants in Tokyo and Saitama like this one, this one, and this one.

Also, as someone who has never been one to cook (I always relied on microwave/packaged foods) my time here has made me realize that I really should learn how to cook a decent meal from scratch. Not that I've come anywhere near reaching that point, but at least I can say the simple act of chopping fresh vegetables and tofu everyday alone does wonders for my well-being. And sometimes I pretend the gardens next to my apartment building are my own.

Anyways, I want to be able to cook good, healthy food. I want to buy local produce and not pay for stuff thats been wastefully shipped across the country. I want to make up for living a block from a farmer's market for a year and never even shopping there. I want to live to be 100 like Okinawans and Cretans. I want to hear more from people like Michael Pollan. I want to spend time cooking food and lead a slow life.

As an abrupt counter to the idealism of this post, I should add that the bracken shown in the first photo is known to be carcinogenic and a possible cause of the high rate of stomach cancer in Japan. Also, the koi sashimi (raw Japanese carp) pictured two photos up was probably the worst sashimi I've ever had. Really bad texture and aren't bottom feeding fish generally not supposed to have a good flavor? But the presentation was nice!

In addition, just today I came across an article in Newsweek about slow travel, which could be considered another aspect of the whole LOHAS, slow life, slow food movement. The idea is that one should forsake the fast paced, "cram as much activities and cover as many desinations as you can in each day" approach to travel for a more local, slow paced, "live in the moment" approach. For many people, the 10 cities in 10 days approach holds little appeal. It also involves giving up fuel-wasting means of transport such as air travel for more environmentally friendly means of transport such as train, boat, bicycle, kayak, and even foot.

With my coming trip to Korea on Friday and my plan to again drive across the U.S. come August, it doesn't seem I'm doing such a good job adhering to this philosophy. At the same time, living in Japan, I never travel by car - bike and train are my primary means of getting around. I love that I can travel by bicycle to work or to the grocery store each and every day. I have traveled by plane twice since I've been here and will of course be flying back to California in a few months. Though I can say that when I went to Hokkaido last summer we traveled by boat. A 17 hour boat ride as opposed to a 2 hour flight may seem like self-imposed torture to some, but watching the western coast of Honshu slowly trail by as I sat and read Murakami in the boat's lounge was part of the whole experience. When you travel by boat it seems the cliche of "the journey is as important as the destination" really does hold true.

I plan on taking a trip to Okinawa again in July and would like to travel by boat, though I believe it takes 24 hours to reach Okinawa from Tokyo, so it may be tricky to find the time to make that happen. One thing I really like about traveling to small islands in Japan is that slow travel becomes the norm. So even if you do have to fly there, once you get to the islands you can travel by boat from one island to the next. When on the islands themselves you can easily explore by foot, bicycle, or kayak if you like. Just being on small islands alone forces you to slow down, experience a single place for longer amounts of time, and not feel the need to cover so many kilometers during your vacation.

During my winter trip to Yakushima, the most enjoyable day by far was when I just rented a bike and cycled up the coast with no agenda whatsoever. I walked around a small fruit garden with an 80 year old woman, then sat, slowly eating fresh fruit and satsuma imo ice cream. I cycled through the rock paved streets of a small village and walked up a hill to a secluded shrine. I spent 30 minutes observing a troop of yakuzaru monkeys on the side of the road. I walked up a hill with no idea where it would take me and then got a ride back down with a truck driver, catching otherwise unseen views of the sea from the height of his truck. I drank my favorite Okinawan beer on the beach. I sat soaking with the locals in a beach side thermal pool. The entire time I traveled by foot and bicycle alone (aside from the 10 minutes in the truck) and covered probably no more than 30 kilometers, yet it was the best day of my trip. It isn't the checklist of sightseeing spots that stand out in my mind most, but rather what I experienced along that 20 kilometer stretch of coastline.

I think that staying at youth hostels in Japan, generally quieter and more intimate, also contributes to the slow travel ideal. Recently at a YH I met a girl who cycled from Kanagawa-ken to Kansai, then folded up her collapseable bike and took the train back home. The late Alan Booth is also an inspiration with his long distance walking throughout Japan. His writing and Bryan's Appalachian Trail notes have inspired me from a slow travel point of view. Living a slower life overall is an ideal of mine at the moment and one that seems possible of following through on, considering that come August I have no job, no home, and no responsibilities other than paying off my student loans each month. Luckily I've saved some money in the last two years and I can enjoy this strange, yet liberating feeling for some time. Unless of course I move to Brooklyn, where I'll probably spend all my savings in a matter of several months.

2007-05-09T05:23:00.000-07:00

If you can handle sitting through a few minutes of j-rock you'll catch some glimpses of my school in this video for the Mr.Children song ひびき. The shots of the school are at 1:10 ~ 1:20 and 2:11 ~ 2:43. They filmed parts of the video at my school a few weeks ago on a Sunday.

And if you dig James Brown and/or drunk people you'll get a kick out this video of the hardest working (drinking?) man in show business. Here's another one just for fun. Thanks to Team Leta-Lippman for bringing them to my attention.

For more yuks check out this set of videos on how to annoy the hell out of people in Japanese. I don't think an understanding of Japanese is necessary to enjoy them, but it probably helps if you've lived in Japan. A weird sense of humor is probably essential as well.

2007-05-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

Picked up this 3.5 foot long woodblock print at Sugimoto-dera in Kamakura for a measly 400 yen.

2007-05-08T20:56:00.000-07:00

A few Fridays ago, my school had its annual "field trip" where the first year students are forced to hike up a mountain and then spend the night together in order to develop some sort of group cohesion, the second year students spend a thrilling day traveling to Haneda airport so that they don't screw it up when it really counts on the day of the big trip to Okinawa held each November, and the third year students are let loose to run around Yokohama and stuff their faces with Chinese food in one last chance to experience freedom before their entrance examination hell begins. In typical fashion, I was given no information about the field trip or invited to participate. Then on the day before the trip, nearly every teacher asked me which place I was going tomorrow on the field trip and I repeatedly had to answer, "Well, since nobody told me about it or invited me..." One teacher even laughed and said, "Nobody invited you!" It was all well and good as I took the opportunity to play hookie and spend some time alone, wandering around Tokyo.

I decided to catch the last day of a photo exhibtion in Ebisu, showing old photos from Meiji period Japan. I quite enjoyed the photos, showing everything from traveling tofu salesman to the original Shinbashi station (terminus of Japan's first train line from Yokohama to Tokyo) surrounded by nothing but flat fields (this area is now surrounded by the massive skyscrapers of Shiodome). At the museum I just so happened to bump into one of the science teachers from my school, who was kind enough to take me out to lunch and talk to me in Japanese as if I were a normal person and not a child.

I then walked from Ebisu to Meguro, where I visited the small and unusual Meguro Parasitological Museum (great place for a date), containing, among other things, an 8-meter long tapeworm and a photo of a man with testicles so enlarged they dragged on the ground. After visiting a small temple I began my walk along the "river." My timing was a bit off, as a little more than a month ago it would have been shrouded in cherry blossoms.

Some nice graffiti along the Meguro river. A pink elephant with pink cherry blossom petals floating on the water.

At Cow Books in Naka-meguro I nearly soiled my pants when I saw TJ's book on display with other Brooklyn based artists' books published by Evil Twin. I figured even though TJ wasn't able to visit me here in Japan, at least his art did.

The following are some random photos taken within the past year or so:

The east side of Shinjuku station.

Tokyo Bay, centuries ago.

Tokyo Bay, now.

A very wrinkled Hokusai gets busy in his studio.

Gujo-Hachiman

2007-04-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

The castle illuminated at night, taken from the window of the youth hostel.

The spontaneity and travel during spring break came at a very necessary time, as all the down-time at work was, well, dragging me down. The first weekend was spent with Mike, who only 24 hours after making the decision to come to Japan from Korea, arrived in Tokyo. For less than 48 hours we spent time in both Kamakura and Shibuya, before he flew out again Sunday afternoon. Besides helping to rejuvenate my excitement about Japan by seeing it through his eyes, he also helped me to rekindle my love for Mr. Donut.

The day after he flew back I left on the shinkansen, heading towards Nagoya for 5 days of travel in Gifu-ken, not far from Nagano where I spent last year’s spring break. The problem I’ve always had with being basically in the same situation and having the same schedule two years in a row is that you inevitably compare what you do this year with what you did last year. I of course was hoping to experience again the same excitement I experienced in Nagano, but as could have been expected, this didn’t happen.

A contemporary Japanese town is unmistakeable, especially from above.

The first stop was Gujo-Hachiman, a town I had read about a year earlier and was really excited to see. In addition, the writer Alan Booth had spoken very highly of it, so that built up my anticipation even more. In his writing, Booth was usually quite cynical and negative about a lot of aspects of Japan, so I was quite surprised by how impressed he was with Gujo Hachiman. Because of that I was even more surprised by how much I was not impressed. At the same time, I think I was preventing myself from enjoying it as I was allowing myself to be distracted by other things going on in my life at the time.

Anyways, here’s how Booth describes the town:

"What there is to see here is what almost every Westerner who comes to Japan in the first flush of oriental infatuation thinks he will find at every turn and grows bitter over when he realizes he won’t. It is a town of low, dark, wood-and-plaster buildings, paved lanes, and running water. The windows of the buildings are narrow and slatted. The lanes, too, are narrow, steeply walled, and end in dimly lanterned eating places or in small stone bridges that arch over splashing streams. It was like an Edo-era stage set..."

And here’s how he described one of the town’s sightseeing spots:

"Actually, ‘fountain of youth’ is a fanciful translation of sogisui; the word means something more like ‘water belonging to the local god,’ but I suppose a local reference would appear too parochial to an urban council bent on encouraging non-locals - especially youthful non-locals - to treat the town as a cross between a theme park and a palais de dance [referring to the town’s famous summer dance festival]."

And another quote, not relating particularly to Gujo-Hachiman, but illustrating quite well one of the reasons I appreciate Booth so much:

"[The owner of the inn] asked me if I would prefer coffee or tea as an offering of welcome. ‘I would prefer beer,’ I told her."

Taken through one of the turrets in the walls of the reconstructed castle.

Mention Gujo-Hachiman to anyone in Japan and certainly the first thing that will spring to their mind is water. The town, situated in a valley, is reknowned for the pristine water that flows through it, fed by two separate rivers. I certainly appreciated all the flowing water, especially the small canals, filled with Japanese carp, that ran through parts of the town. Otherwise, I seemed to be expecting to stumble upon some atmospheric part of the town that I never came across. The place did somewhat transform at night, under the light of the full moon, with the castle illuminated on the hill above, the sound of running water everywhere, and the dimly lit streets.

From one of the castle windows its easy to see how the town resembles the shape of a fish, its tail on the right hand side.

The restaurant we ate at had a lot of character and I enjoyed a nice meal using miso (fermented soy bean paste, which I was to eat a lot of in Gifu). Actually, food was the one aspect of the trip that was never disappointing. After dinner we headed back to the youth hostel, connected to a temple, grabbed our towels and walked down the maze-like, dimly lit streets to the local bath house located along the river. There were separate entrances for men and women and before entering we said, "See you later," expecting not to meet again until after we finished bathing. We entered our respective doors and a second later we were once again staring at each other, except with the proprietress of the bathhouse sitting at a raised seat in between us. I cheerfully joked, "Hey! Long time no see!" And she answered back the same. The woman ignored us, continuing to stare at the TV in front of her. Eventually she mumbled the price under her breath. We handed over the tickets we received from the youth hostel and then made our way to the changing room, really just part of the same room with a makeshift wall dividing men from women. The owner, perched on her pedestal, had clear view of both of us as we undressed. It felt a bit strange to undress with an old woman several yards away, but her TV show was much more interesting than a stripping foreigner, and I imagine I was easily ignored. I then made my way in to the bath room, also visible to the old woman as it was sectioned off with a large, glass wall. I scrubbed myself and then wandered over to the baths. I peered at the green water in one tub and then over at the normal, clear water of the other. A sign above the green tub said something to the effect of "Today’s Japanese Bath is: Yomogi." Yomogi is a kind of grass, hence the green color. Grass-water seemed much to adventurous to me, so I opted for the normal bath, which was scalding hot. I soaked for a few minutes and then exited. I redressed and as I passed by the old woman, I cheerfully said thank you. She gave a barely noticeable nod of her head, not taking her eyes off the television. Then I spent a few relaxing minutes waiting outside in the moonlight next to the river.

A small panarama of the town, showing the castle and some of the low mountains that create the valley where Gujo-Hachiman is located.

Shirakawa-go

2007-04-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

The classic shot of Ogimachi from the observation point above the village. From this vantage the private homes can't be distinguished from the souvenir shops and museums and if you ignore the busy road, it all takes on the quaint feel thats intended. I couldn't help but wish I had come about a month and a half later when all those barren rice fields would be a blazing green color.

Caught an early bus from Gujo-Hachiman to the World Heritage Site of Shirakawa-go, riding past massive snow-covered mountains and giant dams (which all the Chinese tourists couldn’t seem to get enough photos of). Beck was playing on my headphones in anticipation of seeing him live a few days later (Did you know he's a Scientologist? A fact I'm glad I found out after the show). The area of Shirakawa-go used to be an extremely harsh and remote place to live (described in one folk song, "Today there is no more living at ease, we suffer hardships none can imagine") and was where the Taira clan escaped after their defeat in the Genpei War centuries ago. Now its a fairly touristy attempt at preserving traditional, rural Japanese culture. The draw to the valley is the local form of architecture known as gassho-zukuri ("made in the shape of praying hands"), which still exists thanks to local preservation efforts in the three villages of Ogimachi, Suganuma, and Ainokura.

A team of workers rethatching the roof of a museum. Definitely not as impressive as yui, when the local community bands together in a mass of 200 people to rethatch the privately owned homes. Each home is rethatched once every three decades or so at a cost of 20 million yen.

Ogimachi is the largest and easiest to reach of the three villages and certainly the most fake as well. As even my guidebook acknowledges, the place is very contrived and Alan Booth takes it a step further by saying he felt like he "had wandered not into a village but a theme park." He then notes that he does not possess "the willing suspension of critical appraisal upon which theme parks rely." At the same time it is a real, functioning town with locals working the rice fields and living in privately owned gassho-zukuri.

Two gassho-style buildings sit picturesquely in the outdoor Folklore Park, which is like a little ghost town version of the real village. Horrible "folk songs" blast out of loudspeakers every hour.

The steep slope of the homes, the reason for the praying hand reference, was used to prevent damage from the massive snow falls in winter. Most are five stories and housed huge, extended families (upwards of 40 or so people), as there was not enough flat, arable land in the area to build separate, smaller homes. Only the ground floor was inhabited, with the upper reaches of the house used for storage and silk worm cultivation. Large hearths known as irori were used for warmth and cooking and since there were no chimneys the smoke just drifted up into the high reaches of the house until escaping through the thatch, coating everything and thus preserving it.

I'm not sure if this man felt his village was a theme park as he struggled alone on the top of his home, in wind and drizzle, attempting to repair something. He seemed rather helpless, crouched down as the wind whipped around him, as if he had just realized he tackled something he couldn't really handle. Early the next morning he was up there again.

Hakusan, one of Japan's three most sacred mountains, on the horizon with two gassho-zukuri in the lower left corner.

After dinner I wandered back up the hill to the observation point again (luckily the moon was full or I would not have been able to climb the hill in the dark) hoping the village would be a nice sight, lit up at night as I'd seen it in pictures before. Apparently those pictures were taken on special evenings when the homes are illuminated with giant floodlights, because it was quite dark on that particular night. Nonetheless I did get some close up night shots.

Including this one taken outside of the gassho-zukuri minshuku we stayed overnight in.

In the valley public transportation is infrequent and without your own car its quite hard to get around. I was able to make it to the next village north - Suganuma - but couldn't keep going to the last village - Ainokura - or else I would have been unable to make the bus down to Takayama where I had a room booked for that night. I was disappointed, as Ainokura is supposedly the nicest of the three. Suganuma was not really worth visiting, but much smaller and less crowded. At the shop where we ate lunch the owner told us how during the Edo-period the town secretly produced gunpowder underground and when the authorities showed up they simply claimed the white substance was salt. Or at least thats what I gathered with my less than proficient Japanese listening skills.

I'll give Alan Booth the last word: "I tramped out of picturesque Ogimachi unable to make up my mind for certain whether Japan's signposted fossil culture disappointed and infuriated me or whether I should simply be grateful that...gasshozukuri villages had not vanished altogether. Was it better for an art to die and be decently buried or to die and be pickled in formaldehyde?"

Furukawa

2007-04-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

Takayama

2007-04-12T18:15:00.000-07:00

Food

2007-04-12T18:12:00.001-07:00

2007-04-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

An illustration for a cover of the Virginia Quarterly Review (if you click on it, its large enough to read).

In not his first collaboration with This American Life, Chris Ware teams up with an animator to produce a short segment for the new TAL television show. You can watch a clip here.

2007-03-26T04:24:00.000-07:00

"I was skinny and given to tics - my neck was always stiff and bobbing and I nodded it in little spasms that were so noticeable that I hated to sit in front of anyone at the movies." - from Edmund White's "My Hustlers" in McSweeneys #18.

The past couple of weeks I've been in a bit of a funk and a bit stressed, the increase in the stiffness of my neck and shoulders and the number of my bodily tics being a nice little indicator of this change in my disposition. Spring, however, has seemed to arrive and with some traveling to the mountainous, less-industrialized interior of Japan just around the corner, things are looking up. While yesterday it was rainy, it was noticeably warmer, and that combined with a free concert by Tokumaru Shugo at the delightful Combine cafe in Nakameguro and the first glimpse of cherry blossoms this year along the Meguro river made things a bit better (the cheap, draught beer helped too). Another thing thats pulled me out of the funk, however briefly, on numerous occasions during the last few days has been this song and video by Lullatone (who were glimpsed at the Combine show yesterday - I guess its not hard to notice the only other white guy in a crowded room).

2007-03-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

Its a shame more people don't renovate old homes in Japan, as opposed to building new ones. At the same time, I do like the design of your average modern Japanese home, usually pretty crisp and minimal. Here's a tour of one courtesy of the band Lullatone. The bath is pretty darn cool.

2007-03-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

Do you have a mind-numbingly boring job where you are forced to sit at a desk all day with absolutely nothing to do? Probably not, but I do. And I just found out a great way to pass the time while adding a little bit of mental stimulation to an otherwise soul crushing existence. The Wholphin DVD of Unseen Films (from McSweeney's) website is chock full of short films for your viewing pleasure. My favorite thus far is Wearing Che, from the writers of The Daily Show. Click on the link above the Howard Dean action figure to watch it.

2007-03-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

A good photo blog from an Australian living in Tokyo.

2007-03-07T00:39:00.000-08:00

Two giants.

A massive statue of Gulliver at a now abandoned amusement park near Mt. Fuji. More photos of abandoned buildings in Japan can be found here.

2007-02-18T06:26:00.000-08:00

A film adaptation of Murakami Haruki's short story "All God's Children Can Dance" will debut at this year's Cannes Film Festival. You can check out a trailer for the film here.

Videos

2007-02-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

Kiiiiiii is rad. In their own words, "When we met each other for the first time, we were 12 years old. Since then,we have been special friends like DJ & KIMMY in 'FULL HOUSE' !" 4 Little Joeys.

Sumo is way more interesting than you might think. These videos are of Asashoryu, a grand champion of Mongolian origin, both winning and losing. He has quite the belly smack. He also supposedly pays people to lose matches. This apparently happens from time to time in the sumo world, but according to Freakonomics its given little attention unless a foreigner does it.

Check out Juan Valdez spreading his essence in Shibuya. There's also a super special secret video on this page, but i won't say what it is.

This is a short film about a convenience store clerk in Japan. Being slightly OCD myself, I particularly enjoyed it. This won director Kosai Sekine the Best Short Film award at the Cannes 2006.

2007-02-05T20:47:00.000-08:00

The sumo stadium at Ryogoku, Tokyo.

After a year and a half in Japan I finally saw sumo in person (not an official tournament, but rather a special exhibition). I honestly wasn't even that excited about it, but it turned out to be much more interesting than I had anticipated. I've never been one to enjoy sporting events of any kind (for me, sitting through a baseball game is somewhat akin to torture) but somehow I lasted through 5 hours of sumo.

As you can see in the photo above, at the center of the stadium is a clay platform (with a sand covering on top), over which is suspended a large recreation of a Shinto shrine structure.

Larger than life portraits of the top rikishi (sumo wrestlers) line the walls of the stadium.

Before a match begins all the players march onto the platform and stand in a circular formation, an impressive sight.

Here we have the ol' throwing of the salt. Sumo is steeped in Shinto ritual and ceremony, one of which is the purification of the ring using salt (if you look closely you can see it in the air). Like many things in Japan, sumo is about 90% preparation, ritual, and ceremony and only a small fraction of it is the actual activity (in this case the actual "wrestling").

The players face off several different times before actually commencing with the wrestling, breaking apart and returning to the edge of the ring each time (in order to psyche themselves up and psyche out their opponent). At one point they do a sort of sychronized clap which is pretty neat. The stadium had a good sound system set up so you can hear everything, even way up in the cheap seats. This includes hearing the sound of a player slapping his stomach (which some players do with great bravado and flair).

The high leg stretch is the best.

I like this pose. Each player squaring off against each other, fists touching the ground. Even the referee looks cool.

They have tassles that hang down from their waist strap. During this pose they push the tassles back over their legs, causing them to flare out, which looks pretty cool.

And then the action. I had no idea that slapping was allowed in sumo, but apparently it is (often in the form of a rapid-fire flurry of slaps). There is something extremely comical about two very large men slapping each other. You're also allowed to lift up your opponent by his belt strap and sort of lift him out of the ring, which is pretty funny looking too. Another thing I had not idea about was the complete absence of weight classes, so its not rare to see a smaller rikishi going up against a much larger one.

The object is to cause your opponent to touch any part of his body, other than the soles of his feet, to the ground or push him out of the ring. You can see a dark border of brushed sand around the ring, which allows judges to see any footprints that would serve as evidence of stepping out of the ring. Sometimes people are literally thrown out of the ring and tumble off the edge and into the crowd, which is pretty darn exciting if you ask me. Other times a wrestler will balance on the slightly raised white ring, using every ounce of strength in his legs and hips to keep himself from stepping out. Its a pretty impressive and dramatic sight, full of anticipation. Its tough to come back from this point though and most people just end up softly stepping out, which ends up being rather anticlimatic.

Most often, matches last no more than a few seconds.

The "half-time show" was pretty ridiculous. About 20 or so half-naked, scrawny, foreign kids marched out and had their chance at taking on one of the rikishi. The best part was how all the kids screamed in high pitched voices as they attacked.

I like how this kid is puffing out his chest as he takes on Kotooshu, a Bulgarian wreslter who has risen to nearly the top of the ranks and is quite popular at the moment.

Sadly, this child was eventually eaten. A small price to pay to carry on this country's glorious national sport.

Some pretty sweet posturing by the top ranked player Asashoryu (from Mongolia), during the special entrance ceremony reserved for this top rank.

2007-01-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

Sam Beam and his sister Sarah, with part of Calexico.

Highlights of the Evening:
Seeing Sam Beam's beard up close in all its glory as I stood next to him waiting for the elevator. Tokumaru Shugo playing "Such a Color" on a tiny ukulele. Two members of Calexico making a surprise appearance for a couple songs. Iron & Wine ending their set with the 9-minute long "The Trapeze Swinger." During a song, some drunk guy in the back of the room yelling, "Hey! I know you!" to somebody else and watching Sam Beam fighting his laughter while trying to get through the song.

Not So Highlights of the Evening:
The previously mentioned drunk guy making out with his girlfriend for the entire 9-minute long "The Trapeze Swinger." The previously mentioned drunk guy's girlfriend asking, "What did he say?" when Tokumaru Shugo was talking.

Now I Tell You To Listen To Tokumaru Shugo:
You should listen to Tokumaru Shugo. First go to his myspace page and listen to the sample songs. Then be amazed. Then go buy his CD. His music has been described as "bizarre folk pop" and he himself has been described as "the Japanese Sufjan Stevens" if that means anything to you (I'm talking to you, hirsute friend who lives in Brooklyn).

Tako-yaki!

2007-01-25T05:35:00.000-08:00

Not only did the Aizuno Youth Hostel have free breakfast, but we also got free takoyaki both nights. Takoyaki is a kind of baked dumpling with a piece of octopus inside. Originating in the Kansai region, it can be found pretty much all over Japan. Its quite a tasty treat and even better when you make it yourself, which I had the chance to do at the youth hostel. Soooo...let's making tako-yaki!

First you break out the cast iron takoyaki pan, hook up the gas, and turn it on. Then batter gets pored into each circle.

Next, in goes the octopus!

Then a mixture of tempura scraps and possibly bits of pickled ginger, konnyaku, and green onions are added.

More batter please.

Then you take a needle shaped tool and carve out a cross section of squares.

Everything in each carved out square gets carefully scraped into its respective hole. You let it cook for a bit, then take your needle, stick it in the hole, and give it a spinning motion. If your spinning technique is unstoppable then the whole thing flips right over, exposing the browned underside of the ball and allowing the uncooked top part its turn at the heat.

Finally you can pop out your perfectly formed tako-yaki balls, and put them on a plate...

add okonomiyaki sauce...

and katsuobushi (fish shavings), which is the only part of the mix which I'm not a fan of. You'll have to wait a bit so you don't burn your mouth on the scalding gooey insides, but that will give you plenty of time to answer the question, "Can you eat octopus???"

And finally a close up:

2007-01-25T05:13:00.000-08:00

Some old signs I came across in Kitakata. I feel like this kind of stuff is hard to come by in Japan. There's a kind of impermanence in this country, where even if something is only slightly out of date, its quickly replaced. The next three are for katorisenkou (a kind of mosquito repellant).

And this next two I took in Matsumoto, Nagano-ken in April of last year but never got around to posting them.

Aizu-Wakamatsu

2007-01-25T05:12:00.000-08:00

The town of Aizu-Wakamatsu is famous mainly for its castle Tsurugajo and Iimori-yama, a hill where 16 teenage boys commited a mass suicide. The castle, seen above, is a post-war concrete reconstruction (the original was destroyed by the new Imperial government after the Meiji restoration in the 19th century, as it was seen as a reminder of all the once powerful clans which had threatened the unification of Japan). I think its great that the town wanted to rebuild its castle, but why they had to do it in concrete is beyond me.

Two kitsune (fox) statues in front of a shrine on the castle grounds. A hat and red clothing has been added for winter. The little one seems pretty comical to me.

The pole and rope structures are used to keep snow from piling up on the trees.

At one point while I was at the castle, standing in front of an information sign, I noticed an old Japanese couple in my peripheral vision. They were scowling at me and dramatically waving there arms for me to move. They considered me, standing on a pathway where everyone walks, reading a sign which was put there presumably so people would stand in front of it and read it, to be blocking their photo of the massive castle behind me. Now, I'm a reasonable guy. While there was no way I was even blocking their photo, had they simply been polite and given me a simple, "Excuse me, would you mind stepping aside for a moment," I would have been happy to oblige. But apparently I wasn't even worth speaking to (obviously because I'm a foreigner and surely wouldn't have been able to understand them). And apparently my standing there was so despicable that it warranted the old evil eye from grandma and grandpa, as well as the kind of "get the hell out of here" gesture you'd normally reserve for chasing away wild animals that are rooting through your garbage. I was certainly used to this kind of treatment from old customers at all my previous part time jobs in America, and it was comforting to find that impolite, bitter, old people know no national and racial boundaries. They really got under my skin and put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day. I hope they slipped on the snow and broke a hip or two.

All over this area I saw piles of cabbage stacked in rows.

Sazae-do

Iimori-yama is a famous site in Japan, where 16 teenaged boys fighting in one of the many civil wars leading up to Japan's unification under an imperial government, commited ritual disembowelment. They thought they were seeing their beloved castle in flames and thus gave up all hope in typical samurai style, but it turns out it was just a a building in front of the castle that was actually on fire (nothing quite like a suicide in vain). Nowadays, this event is revered as an example of heroic and honorable behavior and every year local high school boys reenact the event. Sounds pretty creepy to me.

On Iimori-yama there's a very interesting temple named Sazae-do (its named after a sea shell with a similar shape). The temple's architecture is completely unique, you enter and then immediately begin walking up a ramp that spirals around and around all the way to the top. Along the way you pass 100 different statues of kannon. When you finally reach the top you head down a completely different spiraling ramp, so that you never retrace your steps. There's a cut away illustration above.

In downtown Aizu-wakamatsu, there's this kura style building, its exterior reflecting the warm glow of the sunset.

On a map, I noticed this illustration of one of the Byakkotai (the group of boys who killed themselves on Iimoriyama). The smiling cartoon face seems a bit out of place considering the context and I can't help but notice that his right arm is in a perfect position for performing hara-kiri. "Let's commiting mass suicide!"

Kitakata

2007-01-25T05:11:00.000-08:00

Two days after returning from Yakushima I traveled by bus to Fukushima, where Chie was working at the Aizuno Youth Hostel. The first day I went to a small town named Kitakata, which sounded a hell of a lot more interesting than it actually was. Its famous both for its ramen and its kura (which are fireproof storehouses with mud walls, popular forms of architecture a few centuries back, which typically served as breweries). Maybe I picked a bad ramen restaurant, but I wasn't impressed. In addition, the run down, sprawling town is not saved by the few remaining kura that still stand (which themselves are also a bit run down). From what I read I was expecting the streets to be lined with kura, but there were only a few scattered here and there. There's a town thirty minutes away from my apartment that has more interesting kura than this place. The best place to visit is the sake brewery pictured above (I liked the stone sidewalks and small canal flowing in front).

Sake casks stacked and covered in snow.

After the sake is brewed and then put into barrels for storage, a large ball made from cedar fronds is hung outside (I think sometime in spring). When it finally turns brown (sometime towards the end of fall maybe) then you know its time to get crunk on some sake.

Kaki (persimmons) hung out to dry.

A view of one of the kura, with the ugliness of the surrounding town cropped out.

Snow covered graves.

Volcanoes, lots and lots of volcanoes

2007-01-25T04:19:00.000-08:00

I spent my first night of the Kyushu trip in the city of Kagoshima, a fairly interesting little city with a streetcar transporation system and a history closely linked with the Meiji restoration, the historical figure Saigo-san, and the samurai rebellion of the Satsuma clan. This is the view of Sakurajima from the top of Kagoshima's Shiroyama (a large hill).

Sakurajima in the morning haze, as I boarded the boat for Yakushima.

Kaimon-dake, a dormant volcano (also known as Satsuma-fuji for its similarity to Fuji-san in shape, though its less than a third of its size). I had planned on climbing this volcano and checking out the suna buro (hot sand baths) at nearby Ibusuki, but the strong winds which postponed my departure from Yakushima prevented that. I had to do with the views from the boat (and the airplane as well, which were amazing).

On the flight back to Tokyo I was lucky enough to see Fuji-san from above. It was pretty strange to think that I had stook on the top of that mountain 5 months before. You can also see the snow-capped southern Japan Alps in the background and Izu Peninsula in the foreground.

Sakurajima

2007-01-25T04:18:00.000-08:00

Only a 20 minute or so ferry ride from the city of Kagoshima is the volcanic island of Sakurajima (its not technically an island anymore, as a 20th century eruption ended up connecting it with the mainland). My impressions of the island were so-so, but they may have been tainted by the disappointing youth hostel I stayed at. There's a bus tour of the island as well, which I didn't go on, so I can't say that I really saw that much of the island. While the youth hostel was unfriendly and drab, it did have its own onsen which is a rarity. The water is a brown color from its mineral content and was by far the hottest onsen I've ever experienced. I could only stay in the water for a couple minutes.

The above two photos are of Furosato Onsen. I hopped on a free shuttle bus which took me to the Furosato Hotel. I paid my money, received my yukata (a kind of robe), and headed out back to the cliff-side rotenburo. This was one of the most interesting onsen experiences I've had (along with Hirauchi Kaichu onsen in Yakushima). The onsen doubles as a shrine, so out of respect you have to stay clothed in the yukata, even while you bathe. You can see the shrine in the above photo, as well as the large camphor tree. You can wade under its roots, where there's a little cave with some statues. The views of the bay, coastline, and Kaimon-dake (a symmetrical volcano similar in shape to Mt. Fuji) are spectacular.

Next to the bath was this large wooden structure. I think that it was probably lit as a bonfire as a part of the New Year celebrations, but thats only a guess. You can just make out Kaimon-dake in the lower left.

Sakurajima is reknowned for its incredibly fertile soil, which produces giant radishes like the one seen above. This girl's pretty stoked about it.

2007-01-24T21:50:00.000-08:00

Some of the more unique food I enjoyed inYakushima. The above photo is a kind of mochi (perhaps kusa mochi, I forget the name that was used). This is made from rice and the green color comes from adding in a kind of grass called yomogi. The leaves aren't eaten.

Tobiuo sashimi (raw flying fish).

I visited Yakushima Fruit Garden, took a tour of the grounds where they grow all kinds of tropical fruit and then give you some samples to try. The above are passion fruit, papaya, star fruit, guava, banana, tangerine, and pineapple.

Satsuma-imo ice cream with papaya and pineapple. Satsuma-imo is a sweet potato that was introduced from China by way of Okinawa. Its heavily cultivated in the Kagoshima (Satsuma) area of Kyushu, but is popular throughout Japan and is used in a variety of interesting ways, including the ice cream seen above, as well as alcohol.

Yaku-sugi Land

2007-01-23T21:44:00.000-08:00

Toro oki no taki, which empties into the sea.

On what was supposed to be my last day on the island one of the other guests at the youth hostel (a music teacher who kept hoping aloud for bad weather to come and postpone his having to return to his wife) invited me and another guest (one of the oddest women I've met in Japan) to rent a car with him and check out Yaku-sugi Land. Its not as bad as the name implies (no singing, animatronic trees) but not all that impressive after having already seen the rest of the island's highlights. It has a few well-maintained walking courses that allow people to see yaku-sugi without too much effort so its quite a popular place. Afterwards we went to a nice sushi place for lunch and then visited the island's new museum. Strong winds prevented me from leaving the island as scheduled (I had to stay an extra night) and I got a room at the other youth hostel at the northern end of the island.

West of Hirauchi (towards Oko-no-taki)

2007-01-23T18:52:00.000-08:00

My fourth day on the island saw the best weather of the entire trip. I rented a bike from the youth hostel and pedaled my way west along the coast towards the waterfall of Oko no taki. This day I saw no yaku-sugi and nothing particularly famous (aside from the waterfall) but it was without a doubt my favorite day of the trip. Being off on my own, no time constraints, coasting along the hills next to the sea, beautiful weather the entire day - it was perfectly relaxing. One of the highlights was the small village of Nakame, full of cobblestone streets, traditional homes, stacked rock walls, the twisted mazes of banyan trees, and beautiful views of both the mountains and sea.

Oko-no-taki. Click here for a fantastic view of these falls at night.

Further past the waterfall, there was a complete absence of man-made structures other than the road itself, which passed through a heavily forested part of the island. At one point along the road a troop of monkeys had sort of claimed the area as their territory. They paid little attention to me other than scattering if I came too near. These animals haven't yet been corrupted into seeing humans as a food source. One monkey, however (who was the obvious elder of the group), did seem to take some offense to my presence. He got a bit aggressive at times and would follow me down the road, both curious and wary of me at the same time. Having never been around wild monkeys before I came to Japan, I'm fascinated by them and their human traits. Each one seemed to have a face and personality distinguishable from the others'.

I bought one of my favorite beers (Okinawa's Orion) at this convenience store and drank it on the beach, secretly hoping to myself that the name of this store was a knowing reference to the Evil Dead film trilogy. "Shop smart, shop S-mart."

The last stop of the day was Hirauchi Kaichu onsen, a sea side rotenburo (open-air hot spring bath) thats only accessible for an hour or so on either side of low tide. I arrived a bit early so the water was still a little cool. At first it was just me and the old man pictured above. He paid no attention to me, and just simply sat there staring up at the sky and clouds with almost the same sort of wide-eyed curiosity that a newborn baby has. A Swiss man and his Japanese wife showed up a little later and throughout the course of the next hour or so around 20 people ended up joining us. There are several different bath "tubs" and nearly 8 or so of us squeezed into the hottest one, which was way too many. It was quite an experience though, having the waves crashing nearby and watching the sunset. This was my first experience with mixed bathing (as in men and women together) as well. The older women had no problem getting naked but the young ladies kept it modest with a towel. When I left, the same old man was still sitting in his bath, staring up at the sky.

Shiratani-unsuikyo

2007-01-21T20:56:00.000-08:00

These stones were set in place more than two centuries ago in the Edo period.

On my third day in Yakushima (and the only full day of rain) I once again went on an overpriced, guided tour, this time at Shiratani Unsuikyo. Again my expectations of the place and what I actually found were quite different - there was a kiosk where you had to pay an entrance fee and the first part of the hike was a concrete path.

Mononoke Hime no Mori (Princess Mononoke's Forest). The inspiration for Miyazaki's animated film and possibly the most beautiful and magical area on Yakushima. A much better photo can be found here.

As we finished the hike the sky cleared up and we had some extra time, so the guide took us Senpire no taki, a waterfall that spills over exposed rock. I felt justified in paying for the guide as otherwise I wouldn't have seen this waterfall or the amazing double rainbow (you can see part of it in the photo below) that connected both mountains and sea at either end of its arch.

Jomon-sugi Hike

2007-01-21T20:49:00.000-08:00

The forests of Yakushima, on the 9.5 hour long Jomon-sugi hike.

I haven't been able to find the motivation to write in depth about my time in Yakushima. There's just too much to say and its already been nearly a month since I went. For the handful of people who may read this I'll offer a few captions.

The Wilson Kabu (stump). The tree was around 3000 years old at the time it was felled during the Edo period (200 or more years ago).

The inside of the stump was large enough to comfortably fit at least a dozen people, a small stream ran through it, and there was a small Shinto shrine dedicated to the god of the tree. Revealing my geekiness, it reminded me of Yoda's home in The Empire Strikes Back.

Looking out of the stump. Thats our friendly, yet overpriced guide. I was under the impression that a guide was necessary and that this hike was difficult and somewhat akin to a backcountry excursion. It was anything but that. Very long of course, but not what I would call particularly strenuous or dangerous. There was little chance of getting lost, as the majority of it followed a logging railroad, was well signposted, and much of the trail was along wooden steps and walkways. The difficult part is getting to the trailhead if you don't have your own transportation. Thus, I paid a ton of money basically for transporation and a guided explanation (in Japanese!).

A size comparison of your average Yaku-sugi (a yaku-sugi is a Yakushima cedar tree thats been around for over 1000 years; those trees under 1000 years of age are referred to as ko-sugi, or "small cedars").

Myself and Otsu, the other member of our three person tour.

The Jomon-sugi in all its glory. Certainly the most famous (and deservingly so) of all the trees on the island. Only discovered in 1968, its estimated at between 2000-7000 years of age (a ridiculously large margin of error). Some scientific testing done in the past put it at 2-3000 years old. While size estimates put it at 6-7000 years old. This is wishful thinking if you ask me. The oldest trees in the world, the Bristlecone pines which I saw in the American Southwest, clock in at around 4-5000 years old. I seriously doubt this tree is 2000 years older than those. Regardless of its true age, the impression you get when you see this tree, shrouded in mist, after a 5 hour hike, is unparalleled. The sheer mass of its trunk and its gnarled, bulbous hide is quite a sight to behold. Its not difficult to believe in animism when you gaze upon this tree.

Yakushima

2006-12-18T05:00:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I will travel to Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island. For 4 out of 7 days I'll be in Yakushima, a small island covered in subtropical rainforest, some 60 km south off Kyushu. It receives an annual rainfall of 4 meters (8-10 meters up in the mountainous interior). On the island are the famous Yaku-sugi cedar trees, at the least one thousand years old. The highlight will be hiking to see the Jomon-sugi, estimated at 5-7,000 years old. Only discovered in 1968, its a 5 hour hike from the nearest road on the north face of Miyanoura-dake, the highest of Yakushima's seven peaks and the tallest mountain in Kyushu.

The forests of Yakushima served as inspiration for Miyazaki's animated film "Mononoke Hime," though I knew nothing of the island when I first saw the film four years ago. Here are a few stills from the film, real photos to follow in a few weeks:

2006-12-10T16:46:00.000-08:00

I bought this tenugui 手拭 (a traditional cloth hand towel that almost always comes in a variety of beautiful patterns) yesterday. This one is most likely marketed towards foreigners, the usual pattern replaced by images and text (although I guess Japanese may enjoy the idea of having their traditional culture filtered through romaji and reinterpreted back to them in a more exotic way, as if it were some foreign culture). I bought it because I really like the simplicity of the design - clean, contour drawings and old-fashioned, all-caps, sans serif type.

2006-12-04T20:21:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went to Nikko and Oku-Nikko in Tochigi-ken. It was my fifth time to the area. A couple weeks before I found the top photo of Chuzenji-ko (a large lake in Oku-Nikko) taken most likely at least a century ago. I thought I recognized the area of the lake it was taken from and when I visited again I took a shot of the place. Upon comparing the two photos it turns out they're the same indeed. Wooden boats and rafts have been replaced by swan boats.

North of Chuzenji-ko is another, much smaller lake known as Yu-no-ko (how water lake). Nearby is Yu-no-daira - a small marshland where sulphurous water bubbles up from the ground. There's an adjacent temple known as Onsen-ji where you can enjoy an onsen bath (a public bath which is fed by a hot spring). In the above photo you can see Yu-no-daira, Onsen-ji, and the peaks of Oku-shirane-san.

Some rickety, wooden boardwalks have been laid into place and you can walk among the small, steaming pools of water - a kind of milky white and slightly blue color - that smell of sulphur. Wooden structures have been placed over some of the larger pools. Its not exactly Yellowstone but still interesting and worth checking out if you're in the area.

One of the larger pools, inside its small "shack."

A cluster of hotels and ryokan are situated around Yu-no-daira, capitalizing on the hot water. There's even a free ashi-yu or hot spring bath for your feet only. A nice way to relax on a freezing day.

A view of Yu-no-ko from its north shore with Nantai-san in the background.

From here we walked around the west shore of Yu-no-ko and down to the foot of Yu-no-taki - "hot water waterfall" (neither the lake nor waterfall are actually hot). Enjoyed some delicious tendon with a kind of mushroom I've never tried before. Then its a two hour hike through the forest, along the riverside, and moor area of the Senjo-ga-hara. The hike finishes at Ryuzu-no-taki (a famous waterfall, but not all that interesting in winter).

A view of Nantai-san from the Senjo-ga-hara hike.

This is Kegon-no-taki, which spills out of Chuzenji-ko and is probably one of the most famous waterfalls in Japan.

At the hotel there was this statue of Rat Fink. I have no idea why this was here. The hotel was trying hard to conjure up the feel of a rustic, old lodge and had lots of old photos and memorabilia on display. So I don't know where this statue came from or why they thought it would somehow fit in with their hotel. Anyways, its somewhat ironic for a statue of a character created in contempt for Mickey Mouse to appear in a country that has such love for Disney.

A view of Nantai-san from the lake side. I climbed this mountain more than a year ago.

Also visited were the much-hyped "World Heritage temples and shrines of Nikko" as they're often referred to. This was my third time to visit here, yet my first to see the place without rain falling from the sky (another irony, considering Nikko means "sun light"). The main Tosho-gu, a shrine to the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu reknowned for its ostentatious decoration, has given birth to the saying "See Nikko and say 'enough.' "

Myojin-ga-take

2006-12-04T06:09:00.000-08:00

A few weekends ago, just as the autumn leaves were at their height, I went hiking in Kanagawa-ken, quite close to the onsen resort of Hakone. From Shin-Matsuda station I took a bus to the start of the hike at the temple of Saijo-dera (founded in 1394). I thought this was just a small, unknown temple but then I noticed the 4 or 5 tour buses in the parking lot and realized it was obviously quite the opposite. On my way to the temple I passed by a small structure with a jizo statue, stopping for a moment to look inside. The monk at the entrance came out and struck up a conversation with me, something I've never had happen before. We talked for a bit then he had me light a candle and some incense and wished me well on the hike.

A long path of stone steps leads to the main entrance gate. 500-year-old Japanese cedars (cryptomeria) line the walk and in front of the entrance was a ginkgo tree - its leaves a brilliant yellow.

Just outside the main temple buildings were a cluster of maple trees.

One of the massive cedars on the temple grounds. I like the way this tree seems to just rest on top of the raked gravel, as if its roots aren't even penetrating the ground, only its weight holding it in place.

The mythological, bird-like tengu, often associated with mountain temples and shrines, was well-represented at Saijo-dera. The large crests (seen above) are associated with the tengu (most likely its magical fan), as well as the dozens of geta (wooden sandals), which are its preferred footwear. I think that the cluster of geta (which can often be found at shrines or temples, sometimes as much as six feet tall in height) is very interesting visually, but for some reason they're always made of cast iron, which rusts and is generally not very appealing looking.

All in all, the beauty of the temple was a complete surprise. I had expected fall colors of course, but even they were beyond expectation. This all made up for the lousy weather - it rained off and on and there was zero visibility at the peak, preventing me from seeing Fuji-san to the southwest. Also there were apparently two approaches to the peak of Myojin-ga-take leading from the temple grounds and I took the one that wasn't detailed in my hiking book. I realized it about 30 minutes into the hike and wasn't about to turn around. I was on the other side of a small valley from the path described in the book and eventually they would both connect at the top, so it wasn't a big deal; though I missed out on a few springs and a shrine along the other path, while my route wasn't particularly interesting. At the peak there was nothing visible except a group of old folks. I ate my lunch and tried to ignore the bad weather.

From the peak its a rather easy walk (there were surprisingly still a lot of wild flowers along the path which was nice) towards the second peak of Myojo-ga-take and the site of the annual Daimonji fire festival (an off-shoot of the original near Kyoto's Ginkakuji). Below the peak a large area is cleared of brush in the shape of 大 (the kanji character for "big"). Its hard to make out the shape when you're standing in the middle of it all, so if you didn't know about it beforehand perhaps you wouldn't even realize it. There's other evidence of the festival, such as charred bamboo (seen above) scattered about the site. The bamboo is aranged in clusters, kind of like small bonfires and placed one next to the other to form the general shape of 大 (108m wide and 162m high). Then on the night of August 16th each year, they're all lit on fire to be viewed from the town below and more importantly to send the spirits of the dead back to heaven after the o-bon holidays (much like the floating lanterns I mentioned in the Hatsu-yume post). In the next photo you can see how the Kyoto Daimonji appears.

Once I ended up in the town below (Miyagino) I located the Daimonji site and with the light fading was just able to make out the clearing and the shape. Its impossible to see in the photo below unless you can zoom in so I highlighted it in red to show what it would look like during the festival. I had hoped to take a bath at the local onsen but didn't have time. Instead I hiked uphill along the road to the nearby town of Gora (which I had been to back in March when I visited Hakone) and caught the train back to Tokyo. On the train, the rain jacket that I had been so lucky to bring with me (which saved me from the surprise rain showers), was unluckily left behind. Now I have to shell out money for a new one, as in a few weeks I'm heading to Yakushima - a rainforest covered island known for having rain 35 days a month.

2006-11-30T20:26:00.000-08:00

Kinkaku-ji, then and now. The two buildings are different structures as the Golden Pavilion was rebuilt in 1950. It also seems like its surface is quite different - the new structure seem to have more gold leaf applied. The small mountain in the background of the old photo is just barely visible in the new photo, as the trees have grown considerably. The large rocks along the shore, however, are exactly the same.

Hatsu-yume

2006-11-23T19:23:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday I went to see Bill Viola's Hatsu-yume (First Dream), which I mentioned a few posts back, at the NTT Intercommunication Center in Tokyo Opera City Tower. The hour long film, nearly silent aside from background noise, was screened in a very tiny room which, with roughly 35 people, was completely full. I was very excited and had high hopes for this film because its always interesting for me to see other people's impressions of Japan. In addition, these were the impressions of not only an artist, but an artist who lived in Japan for a year and a half, so I was doubly excited. In the end of course it didn't quite live up to my expectations. The film, made 26 years ago, came across as a bit dated and the fact that it was shot in video made it somewhat less appealing. Now, I think the look of video has come to connotate low budget, without the rich light and color of film. I guess I also, unjustifiably, was hoping to see a more straightforward depiction of Japan, rather than an artsy metaphorical work about life and death.

I don't know a whole lot about Bill Viola, but from what I have seen of his work he seems fascinated with light (natural and artificial) and water, both of which played main roles in Hatsu-yume. Its very interesting to see what someone chooses to represent Japan. Here's a list of what Viola chose (in order):

light 光
ocean/waves 海/波
mountains 山
old-growth forest 原生林
rice fields 田圃
bamboo grove at Hokoku-ji 報国寺の竹林
temple 寺
volcanic landscape 地獄谷, 火山地帯
Jizo-sama statues 地蔵
Tsukiji seafood market 築地の魚河岸
squid fishing boat 漁火船
floating lanterns 灯篭流し
Tokyo streets 東京の道
Japanese carp 鯉

Its also interesting to consider what was not included. There were no shots of Kyoto, no shots of Fuji-san, no full-on shots of the Tokyo cityscape. The initial shot is of a strong light on top of what appears to be a mountain range, slightly reminiscent of the rising sun over the horizon (perhaps a direct reference to 日本 itself), but more likely an artificial light being shined from far away, directly into the camera lens creating a disorienting effect. Then we see crashing waves and mountain vistas - which is essentially what Japan is at its most basic level: an extremely mountainous land surrounded by the sea. The next shot is of an old-growth forest (a rarity in Japan, where usually you see carefully planted timber forests where each tree is identical to the next), followed by a shot of a rice field, followed by a shot of a bamboo grove. In these last three shots, the camera is set at a fixed point and then rotated slowly in a 360 degree circle - complete simplicity. The next shot - of a boulder covered in rock piles (the kind you often see along hiking trails) - is a fixed shot that never moves. It starts out in high speed, the clouds moving rapidly and the light and shadows changing dramatically, and then very soon it goes to the other extreme with slow motion. Eventually people begin to enter and exit the shot at times, moving in slow motion, and we realize that this is not at the peak of some tall mountain, but rather some sort of easily-reached tourist destination. The people also disappear from the shot (while the background remains unaltered) through the use of special effects which at the time were probably very advanced. The scale of the rock is also unknown (it appears to be massive at first) until finally someone walks right next to it and we see that it barely comes to their waist. After this we see shots of the sulphurous landscape, a nearby temple, and the tourist crowds.

Later in the film, the simple, light-filled, fixed shots are replaced by more abstract, dream-like imagery. Night shots begin to appear more frequently. The lights of commercial squid-fishing boats shine through waves crashing on the shore (the lights are used to attract the squid, a practice that has been around for nearly 1000 years since the Heian period, when actual fire was used. The phrase isaribi 漁火 is somewhat poetic and conjures up the image of a lone boat floating on the distant horizon, its fires illuminating the pitch-black night), a fisherman lights a cigarette on the deck of the boat, lights reflect in the water below, translucent squid lie dying on the boat's deck. In another scene, light and water are again combined with images of the paper lanterns which are floated down rivers to send the spirits of the deceased on their way at the closing of O-bon お盆 (the summer festival when the spirits of the deceased return to earth for a short time). We also travel through Tokyo streets in a car or taxi, full of neon, rainy windshields, strangers on the street, matches illuminating the surrounding darkness. Finally, we see extremely close-up shots of carp swimming in a pond. Its very abstract, with the light and bubbles on the surface of the water, the actual fish only hinted at by their vague shape and movement. The film becomes all light, dark, water, land, life, death.

Viola wrote about the film, "I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite -- darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water -- it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish -- darkness is the death of man."

2006-11-22T05:48:00.000-08:00

2006-11-22T05:31:00.000-08:00

Matsushima, then and now.

2006-11-22T00:04:00.000-08:00

Thanks to No-sword 無刀 I found this website which offers some fascinating comparisons of ukiyo-e prints alongside photographs of the same locations. The prints and their photographic counterparts are from roughly the same time frame, give or take a few decades. This website not only gives an insight into how the ukiyo-e artists interpreted their surroundings but the photographs on their own are an amazing look into a Japan that has changed drastically in the last 150 years. The links that lead specifically to ukiyo-e/photo comparisons are directly under the green writing at the bottom of the page.

Similarly, a while back I posted a comparison of Hiroshige's Hakone with the modern day version here. And I still want to make it to Senso-ji this winter to see it in the snow, just as Hiroshige famously depicted it.

2006-11-21T20:09:00.000-08:00

Paul - I tried the email you left but it got sent back to me. Can you tell me your email again?

2006-11-21T02:41:00.000-08:00

Everywhere I've visited in Japan since August 1, 2005.

Chichibu (Mitsumine-san)

2006-11-19T20:12:00.000-08:00

The beginning of the Mitsumine-san hike in Chichibu.

Last Monday I went hiking in the mountains of Chichibu in the western most part of Saitama. Still in my prefecture, yet it took me three hours to get there. It was a beautifully clear day and the fall colors were supposed to be at their peak. I wasn’t sure how far I would end up hiking, but knew I would at least climb to the top of Mitsumine-san (1090 m), which takes about 1.5 hours. From the last train station on the Chichibu line I had to take a short bus ride to the trail head. We drove past monkeys on the side of the road as well as a beautiful river cutting its way through the rock. The banks of this river were completely natural and untouched by concrete, a rare sight in Japan. The bus was full of older hikers, but only one other person got off when I did. We both headed across the street to check the bus schedule to get back to the station later and he told me that it was a rarity for foreigners to come here. I really don’t think that’s true, especially since plenty of foreigners live in Chichibu, but he was pretty adamant about.

From the bus stop it was a short walk across the river and then past the cable car entrance (which wasn’t even running that morning) to the beginning of the hike. The hike was pleasant, not too strenuous, and very quiet (there was only me and three other people). The fall colors weren’t as amazing as I’d hoped but every now and then there would be some spectacular yellows and reds. Towards the beginning of the ascent, the trail passes a nice waterfall and some small shrines.

2006-11-19T06:37:00.000-08:00

At the top you’re greeted by a decent lookout point, but the rest of the area doesn’t offer much in the way of good views, which was a shame as it was such a clear day. To make up for this there’s the wooded shrine complex of Mitsumine-jinja (founded 2000 years ago), with towering cedar trees and the beautifully painted, intricately carved main shrine building. Its obviously a very new building, but I’d rather have a beautiful, well-kept, and new shrine to look at, than an old one in a state of disrepair.

I had thought about continuing on to the next peak, but it turned out this area was so pleasant and there was enough to occupy me that I just decided to hang around for the rest of the afternoon. I wandered around the shrine area and then made my way over to the small group of souvenir shops and restaurants. It turned out there was a large parking area - I had no idea that there were roads leading up here, but apparently that’s how most everyone gets to the top, especially when the cable car isn’t running. There were a few new buildings, tastefully designed and built out of wood. I appreciated the fact that somebody was actually considering the aesthetics of the place. There were some nice views of the surrounding mountains from this area, which I could enjoy from one of the two restaurants as I ate shiitake udon for lunch. The woman asked me if yuzu (a kind of citrus fruit) was ok. I couldn’t figure out why she asked me this, until I looked closer at my meal and saw tiny flecks of the green fruit. It was kind of a strange taste to have the yuzu mixed in with the noodles and mushrooms, but it was nice to try something different.

After lunch I wandered around for a bit more and then finally made my way to the onsen, which was part of the hotel that sat right next to the shrine (its really not as touristy as it sounds, at least not by Japanese standards). It was 500 yen to take a bath and I ended up having the place all to my self. This was the first time for me to combine hiking with onsen and what a great combination it is. It would have been even better if the hike had been more strenuous. I soaked for awhile and then headed back out feeling refreshed and began the descent back down the mountain. I reached the bus stop just as dusk set in and it started getting chilly. Some construction workers were really friendly (and genuinely surprised to see a foreigner, so maybe the guy wasn't lying about few foreigners making it out here) and talked with me briefly before the bus came and I headed back to the train station. The station attendant was also a bit unsure about how to interact with foreigners, as even though I told him where I wanted to go and asked how much the ticket was in Japanese, he felt the need to answer my question by typing the price into his calculator and showing it to me.

Higashi-Shinjuku

2006-11-19T01:08:00.000-08:00

The Golden Gai in East Shinjuku. "For a ghetto time, make it Suntory time."

The same evening I went to see Hatsu-yume I also wandered around Higashi-Shinjuku, one of the better places to experience neon Tokyo and the inspiration for Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Here you can find the red-light district of Kabuki-cho (where African dudes on every corner try to lure you into strip clubs with their hip hop influenced English), yakuza gangsters, and the Golden Gai drinking quarter (where you can find artists, communists, transvestites, and all manner of people who contrast with the homogeneity of Tokyo). Its the antithesis to Nishi-Shinjuku's skyscrapers and professional, business-like atmosphere. I wanted to see Hanazono-jinja, a shrine thats supposed to be nice to visit at night, however the whole place was covered in scaffolding and undergoing some sort of reconstruction or cleaning. Just next to the shrine is the Golden Gai, a fascinating block of alleyways and tiny bars - each the size of a large closet, only big enough to hold around 6 or 7 people at any one time. The doors are all un-welcomingly shut tight, some with only tiny square windows giving you a glimpse into the bars. Its a fascinating place, definitely worth visiting.

This giant crab attached to a side of a building had moving, animatronic arms.

2006-11-18T07:04:00.000-08:00

Some podcasts I've been listening to:

Real Time with Bill Maher
He may come across as pompous and his opening monologue doesn't provide too many laughs, but the rest of the show is very well done. Maher, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert form my triumvirate for funny and smart political commentary.

"When they say, 'Cut and Run' or 'Defeat-ocrat,' you say, 'Bush lost the war. Period.' All this nonsense - this nonsense about 'the violence is getting worse over there because they're trying to influence the election'; no, it's getting worse because you drew up the postwar plans on the back of a cocktail napkin at Applebee's."

This American Life.
Hosted by Ira Glass, this look into the lives and stories of everyday Americans is not to be missed. Plus, David Sedaris often contributes (Logo by Chris Ware).

The Ricky Gervais Show.
This one costs money and comes in the form of an audiobook (so I guess its technically not a podcast), though there are three free podcasts offered through Guardian Unlimited. Two words as to why this is worth listening to: Karl and Pilkington.

Sean Talley
An hour long mixtape of really good music that I've mostly never heard of. Volume 2 has some great songs by Tom Tom Club, Hot Chip, and Smoosh. His blog - upbeat and positive - as well as the rest of his website are worth checking out as well.

Hatsu-yume

2006-11-14T01:01:00.000-08:00

Looking out to the east, Tsukuba-san (which I climbed a few weeks ago) was visible on the horizon.

This past Sunday I headed to Roppongi Hills to see an exhibition of Bill Viola's work at the Mori Art Museum - one of the best places to see contemporary art in Tokyo. With my old college ID its only 1000 yen to get in, which includes admission to the 360 degree Tokyo City View, which is the best view of the city I've come across so far. I had seen some of Viola's artwork (he's a video artist) a few years ago at the Tate in London and was impressed. This exhibtion is titled Bill Viola: Hatsu-yume (First Dream) ビル・ヴィオラ：はつゆめ. A retrospective of his work, it contains 16 video installations spanning 25 years. Viola lived and worked in Japan for a year and a half in the 1980's, exposing himself to Zen and Noh theater, as well as experimenting with the most advanced video technology at the time. He produced a nearly hour long video on Japan (titled Hatsu-yume) which explores Japanese culture and landscape. This video is being screened at a separate venue and I hope to catch it before it ends.

Hatsu-yume refers to the first dream that one has in the new year. The contents of one's first dream are important and there are three generally accepted themes that can be interpreted as good fortune for the year to come: 1) dreaming of Fuji-san 一富士, 2) dreaming of a hawk 二鷹, and my favorite 3) dreaming of eggplant 三茄子 (which is pronounced nasu, as is the verb for carrying out one's plans 成す, which would explain this seemingly random choice). I learned about this from a co-worker, but according to the Wikipedia entry the list continues to include 4) a fan, 5) tobacco, and 6) a blind masseuse 座頭 (pronounced zatō, as in everyone's favorite blind swordsman Zatōichi).

My favorites of Viola's works were his "The Passions" series, in particular Catherine's Room - a polyptych of flat screen LCD panels, each one resembling an early Renaissance era painting and showing the progression of one woman's day, confined to her minimally decorated room, each panel taking place in a different season, the scenery outside as seen through a tiny rectangular window indicating the passage of time. They appear to be paintings from afar until you get close enough to see that they are moving videos. The entire series of "The Passions," all seemingly modeled after Renaissance portraiture, appear to be still photos of people, until after you stare long enough you finally catch their eyes blinking in extreme slow motion or drawn out, almost imperceptible changes in their expressions over time.

I wasn't actually planning on seeing the exhibition on this particular day, but that morning when I looked outside and realized the sky was crystal clear, I knew the views from the top of Mori Tower would be amazing so I decided to take advantage of it. I timed my visit with the sunset and enjoyed views of Fuji-san with a deep orange backdrop as well as the change from dusk to night, with all the lights of Tokyo slowly sparking into a full glow.

The road leads directly to the glowing lights of Shibuya.

Kurama-dera & Kibune

2006-11-14T00:49:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, Chie and I went to the town of Kurama, in the hills north of Kyoto, about an hour from the city center. Its famous for its hot springs and the temple of Kurama-dera, which can be reached by about an hour's walk up a mountain to the top, where the main temple building is situated on a terrace overlooking the forested hills. To be honest, it wasn't that interesting, the photo above was the only memorable view aside from all the massive cedar trees.

After Kurama-dera, however, things started to get more interesting. From the temple you can hike for about an hour down the other side of the mountain to the small town of Kibune. Along the hike you pass by several shrines, as well as a grove of giant cedars (pictured above), their roots sprawling out in every direction across the forest floor. Finally you descend down into Kibune, a small, quiet town nestled beside a river. I really enjoyed the atmosphere here, as well as the the shrine Kibune-jinja, so named after the old practice of bringing one's horses here as a gift to the gods.

The one road through the town is lined with inns and restaurants, where during the warmer months you can enjoy your lunch on a platform laid out over the river (known as kawadoko). One restaurant had an aquarium out front filled with turtles, trout, and for some reason daikon (a giant Japanese radish, seen just above my camera's flash). For lunch we found the cheapest looking restaurant. An old man was sitting down out front and we asked what the prices were like. He then yelled at the top of his lungs into the restaurant, telling the woman inside that we had no money and needed some cheap food.

The stone steps leading to Kibune-jinja are lined with red lanterns. The shrine also has a miniature wooden terrace overlooking the main street and river below. All Shinto shrines offer omikuji - tiny slips of paper that tell your fortune, which are what you always see tied to trees or fencing in any shrine (if they happen to be bad fortunes that is). At Kibune-jinja they have a special kind of omikuji - the fortune of which is revealed only after you drop it into water.

The spring which trickles down from the hills above.

Everywhere in Kyoto chrysanthemum (or kiku, the Japanese imperial flower) were in bloom.

The entrance to an inn at dusk. The owner, an old woman, came out when I was taking the photo as she thought we were potential customers. Chie apologized and said we were just enjoying the sights. To this the woman gave no response, she just looked off into the distance and ignored us. The residents of Kyoto have a reputation among the rest of Japan for being rather cold and aloof (tsumetai in Japanese, which also means cool, as in the temperature of a liquid).

2006-11-14T00:45:00.000-08:00

The above photo is of the Gojunoto (five story pagoda) belonging to To-ji temple. Not a great photo, as it was taken from the train, but I think this is one of my favorite views in Kyoto and perhaps all of Japan. There's something about the view that commands my attention, the largest pagoda in Japan rising up from the ugly sprawl of Kyoto city. It perfectly illustrates that cliche of refined, ancient beauty intermixed with ugly urbanism that so characterizes Japan. Speaking of which, the next photo shows possibly one of my least favorite views in Japan (only a few blocks from To-ji) the giant, phallic monstrosity of Kyoto Tower that seems to say screw you to the elegance that Kyoto is supposed to embody. Its what greets you as soon as you exit Kyoto Station (a monstrosity in its own right).

A bit hard to tell from this photo, but this was taken from the upper most reaches of Kyoto Station, after scaling the lengthiest set of escalators I have ever seen. This train station is unbelievably ostentatious and worth seeing. If you click on this photo and blow it up maybe you can make out the ground floor way down below.

And finally we have a shopping building in Osaka, near the massive train station complex formed by the Osaka and Umeda train stations. This six or seven story building is entirely red - including the red ferris wheel mounted to its roof and the two red whales that hang in the atrium, reaching from the first to the fifth floor. Perhaps its in celebration of Japan's world renowned whaling practices.

On a side note, if you loved playing Super Mario Kart as much as I did in high school and were somehow looking for a way to experience the "rainbow road" in reality, try driving on the expressway that runs through the neon of downtown Osaka. I'm sure Tokyo is the same way, but I've never driven through Tokyo. You can also see Osaka Castle from the expressway, which is another kind of surreal experience, as it completely contrasts with the rest of the city.

Saiho-ji

2006-11-14T00:37:00.000-08:00

From Arashiyama we walked for about 40 minutes southeast, through pleasant neighborhoods, towards the temple of Saiho-ji, also known as Koke-dera (moss temple). This is not an easy place to visit. First of all, you have to make a reservation several weeks in advance. This is done through the mail, in Japanese only. After the temple receives and approves your application, they send you a notification with a specific day and time that you can visit. On top of this, it costs 3000 yen to visit. This of course ensures that Saiho-ji is probably one of the least visited temples in Kyoto. Thanks to Yuki for taking care of the reservation.

Finally, once you actually get to the temple, before you can even enter the garden, you have to attend a Zen service. Yous sit seiza (folding your legs underneath you, a very difficult position to sit in for long periods of time if you did not grow up sitting this way), chant a sutra, and then trace the kanji of this sutra in sumi-e ink. For Japanese (and foreigners who happen to be experienced in writing kanji) this takes perhaps 30 - 40 minutes. For people with no experience writing kanji or using an ink brush this can take well over an hour (the temple has decided that foreigners only have to trace half the kanji). You then write your name, address, and a kind of wish or prayer, before placing it in front of the altar. I kept it simple and just wrote the two kanji for peace 平和. Coincidentally, later that day, back in central Kyoto we saw a peace demonstration protesting the possible change in the Japanese constitution which would enable military action - they were waving banners with the same kanji on them.

After all this, we could finally wander around the garden, which was much smaller than I had anticipated. I had been wanting to visit this place for quite some time and I have to admit, with all the suspense and anticipation, I was slightly disappointed in the end. But only slightly - when I look at my photos of the garden, I immediately want to return there. It would have been even more amazing after the summer rains or with fall colors. But, like climbing Fuji-san, I think this is a one time only event.

The garden's layout dates from 1338, but fires, flooding, and periods of neglect altered the grounds and destroyed any structures that were built, so that by the 18th century it was in ruins. What makes the moss so amazing is that it was probably caused by accident - as the gardens reverted back to woodland.

Arashiyama

2006-11-14T00:09:00.000-08:00

Togetsu-kyo, a bridge that spans the Hozu-gawa in Arashiyama.

I had a three day weekend on November 3-5, so I traveled by night bus to Kansai to visit Yuki, Chie, and Takeshi. On Friday morning I met Yuki (who I hadn't seen since April) in Osaka and we headed to western Kyoto and the suburb of Arashiyama which sits next to the Hozu river.

From the bridge we passed by Tenryu-ji and headed through the bamboo grove and on to Okochi Sanso - once the home of a famous 1920's silent film star.

The leaves were just beginning to change.

A moss garden covers part of the villa.

There are views of both the Hozu gorge and Kyoto (pictured above). Surprisingly, I could spot both Kyoto Tower and To-ji's pagoda from this hillside.