Yokohama Days

Giving Back

2006-09-23T09:11:00.000+09:00

Good heavy metal has demands like no other genre: uncompromising skill and uncompromising attitude. Here are a few pieces of good news for its appreciators:

The Colony Spreads! Power Metal Infects Mainstream Rock:
Lately the press has made some comment about how critically respected adult rock acts are confessing their admiration for contemporary metal bands like Mastadon. That trend is still alive:
Some of you may remember the band Muse from my earlier entry with links to free music on the web. Muse was the band that has made a career out of mimicking the music Radiohead was making circa their sophomore album, The Bends. Most of Muse's newest release, Black Holes and Revelations, still sounds like it was made by a Radiohead cover band. The last song, though, sounds very close to European power metal bands like Gamma Ray and Edguy. Can't be a coincidence.

Despite the continued languishing of all genres in China that aren't syrupy corporate pop, I've found a couple of very good up-and-coming Mainland metal bands to recommend: Hei Zuanshi 黑钻石 ("Black Diamond") and Chunqiu 春秋 ("Spring and Autumn"). Hei Zuanshi shows clear influences of European melodic metal, while Chunqiu moves back and forth intriguingly between folkish acoustic and electified metal.

Squeezed by the Financial Empires

2006-09-12T05:39:00.000+09:00

Visa and Mastercard themselves now charge an extra 1% on all purchases made to merchants outside the US. The companies who actually retail to the cards - MBNA, Citibank, whatever - pass on that cost to us consumers, adding on an additional 2% fee of their own just to punish us for giving money to people on the other side of the Wall.

I'm out of the country a lot. Money must be spent on those occasions, or I starve and (worse) the materials I need remain out of my possession.
So last year I switched credit cards after being assure that the new one had no Foreign Exchange charge. But a year later after I took the bait, the company (MBNA) switched the terms of my card's contract. They have - twitching with patriotic fervour, one guesses - added a 3% charge after all, hoping to hide it in fine print.

I had trouble finding a card without a Foreign Ex fee, finally choosing one from Capital One. Capital One seems the only company that doesn't yet screw its customers in the above-described manner, so I suggest it to the rest of you who need to buy unAmerican sometimes. A number of columns on the web explain clearly that it doesn't actually cost the credit card company any extra to process charges made abroad; they add the fee simply because they can get away with it.

Obligatory movie attack

2006-08-02T03:17:00.000+09:00

Japanese cinemas continue their quest to screen the worst movie ever made. Having treated packed houses to A Sound of Thunder (hailed by many American film critics as the worst Hollywood film in recent memory), they now mount a colossal advertising campaign in support of this Korean effort, Guemar, about a monster that crawls out of a river and. . . well, you see the photo. The Japanese text next to the red arrow says, helpfully, "That's Guemar!"

Let's hear it for ice!

2006-08-01T10:23:00.000+09:00

For some years now, Slate.com has been carrying on a campaign to discredit media reports about the dangers of methamphetamines. This War-on-the-War-on-Meth (War for Meth?) has often seemed to me an odd brand of quixoticism.
But their latest salvo, this past week, gets in some very good shots. They skewer the laws passed in an increasing number of states requiring convicted meth dealers to have their names and addresses listed on a Government-run online database.
Slate points out: whose bright idea was it to make it easier for drug addicts to find dealers?
The State protests: But the information on the web sites may well not be accurate, because they don't double-check it.

Let's hear it for the Government.

[Sympathy for] Lady Vengeance

2006-07-28T06:36:00.000+09:00

I finally saw this movie. Like Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (the first 2 films in the trilogy), it's a tale of convoluted revenge for past injury.
The Plot: our herione, Geum-ja, has just been let out of jail after 13 years for the kidnapping and murder of a child. 13 years sounds kind of short. But Geum-ja was only nineteen at the time, and confessed her guilt right away. More importantly, she was a model prisoner, always going to bible study and doing nice things for the other inmates.

But as we learn very early in the movie, the "angel" image that Geum-ja projected in prison was only an act. She's been planning revenge for every moment of those 13 years. Learning why a confessed killer would want complicated revenge, and on whom, is the unfolding mystery of the movie.
Overall the movie is pretty good. I'm proud to say that the other young men renting this house found it "very disturbing." But it's not great, and not even as good as the first two in the trilogy. The problem is that it eventually delivers a real villian, and with it a tidy and satisfying Hollywood ending. Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance let us understand the motives behind their revenge stories without making us cheer for their executors. So in that respect, Lady Vengeance is a bit of a sellout.
But it is atmospheric, and so I've been enjoying the soundtrack.

Talking to Strangers

2006-07-26T12:37:00.000+09:00

One often hears white visitors to China grumbling that strangers often call out "Hallo! Hallooooo!" to them on the street. These days, residents of Beijing and Shanghai see too many white faces to give them special attention. But there are still plenty of people in or from the countryside who are jubiliant at a chance to use the one word of English they know.
"No one would be so crass in America," the complaint goes.
So today I was walking down the street in Princeton, NJ. It's a wealthy town where, as in much of America, most of the real work is done by immigrants from Latin America. They're not hidden - I see them every day. So I'm walking down the street, and out of a sandwich shop a short distance ahead of me step two dark-haired men, conversing in Spanish. Walking right in front of me are two girls with blondish hair
who look to be college students; they're talking in English. Catching sight of the two men, one of them calls out "Hola!" The men look embarrassed, and one of them mutters "hola" in response. Both groups continue in opposite directions.
I think the girl was doing exactly what so many American visitors to China complain about. For one thing, the vowels of her "Hola" were the flat American variety. For another, the two men didn't show any of the reponse one naturally gives when greeted by an attractive young acquaintance. They acted like people who are being harassed.
Something to keep in mind for the next time you hear complaints about China.

Songs for Working

2006-07-18T05:37:00.000+09:00

A prize, for those among you who (like me) are connoisseurs of background music. The entire soundtrack to Lady Vengeance is available in high-quality MP3s on the film's official website.
Lady Vengeance is film #3 of the Korean "Revenge Trilogy" that began with Oldboy, the revenge movie that I reviewed in January. Oldboy has a richly complex plot, shockingly cruel violence, and a lot of moral confusion. Yet its soundtrack is a mix of blandly mournful music, with Vivaldi, waltzes, and Minimalist tracks that remind me of Philip Glass. The film itself rates no better than "Good," but the score calls up pleasantly conflicting emotions thanks to the conflict between the feeling of the music and the feeling of the film.
The Lady Vengeance soundtrack is less varied than Oldboy; it seems to be all selections of classical and baroque music. So the music can be enjoyed simply as something nice to listen to. I won't listen to it all the way through until I have a chance to watch the film, and pick up some emotional baggage to enrich my experience of the soundtrack.

Also: A stirringly anti-jingoistic performance of the Star Spangled Banner can be dowloaded here. Those of you who appreciate politically aware indie music should pick it up before the link goes bad.

The Road to Damascus

2006-07-17T03:58:00.000+09:00

True Story: One of the people living in my summer home here, Scott, had a dog, a yellow lab. His family had owned it since Scott was a boy and the dog a puppy. Now Scott is working here in Jersey, so he doesn't see much of the dog or his family.
Yesterday he took a walk through town. Along the way he saw an old yellow lab that looked exactly like his. The dog turned its head to look straight at him, and he felt an eerie premonition. Arriving back at the house here, he called his parents and said, "Molly died, didn't she?" It was true; his mother confirmed that their 14-year-old dog had just passed away.

I've been reading a lot of ancient Chinese tales of the supernatural lately, and they have the exact same structure of what happened here yesterday. So it's a thrill to think that yesterday I had the kind of ambigous experience that I imagine must be the way many of those stories got started.

Kung Fu and Censorship

2006-06-26T04:03:00.000+09:00

On my way through Beijing I picked up a copy of the Korean movie Muyeonggeom 무영검 ("Shadowless Sword" in English; Chinese: 无影剑), which came out last year but hasn't been released in Japan. I got two copies, actually, in case one proved faulty (as one did).
Q: Didn't you say movies with swords are never any good? Why did you buy this one?
A: It's the only movie ever set in the mysterious kingdom of Parhae. Mysterious yes, imaginary no. The country was definitely there from the years 700 to 900 or so, "there" being an area that's mostly become northeast China, though it continues into North Korea and Russia. It was pretty lively back in the day. Now it's a great place to go if you want to see a part of China without many people or much economic development.
I bought the movie because people from Parhae were still pretty active in the era I'm researching, though the country itself had long ceased to be. The things people write about Parhae are all fairly dull, so I wanted to see what a more entertaining treatment of it would look like. Maybe something I could show my students.
"Parhae" is the Korean pronounciation of the country's name (渤海). Koreans (South Koreans at least) are the only ones who know or care about its history, so I use their world for it. It gets a chapter in all the Korean history books, as a Korean country that was eventually, tragically taken over by China. The Chinese pronounciation is "Bohai," which is also the name of a sea off the coast of northeast China. Not one of my non-academic Chinese friends has ever heard of the country, and only some have heard of the sea. My Korean friends have at least vague memories of having learned about it in high school. The Chinese government has the official position that everything controlled by China now is part of China's mult-ethnic, pluralistic society, and that includes "Bohai." But they don't care enough to include it in history class. The Chinese position draws frequent protests from the Korean side, who want to make sure the history of "the Korean People" doesn't have any competing narratives. (The two articles linked from the previous sentence use the new offical romanization "Balhae," but the way it's said in Korean is really closer to the old spelling, so that's what I use here.
So now we have this movie about Parhae, made entirely by Koreans with Korean dialogue, but filmed in China. It's one of those visually beautiful martial arts films without any depth, so not my kind of thing I have yet to watch it all the way through. The DVD I got has Chinese subtitles and both Korean and Chinese audio tracks. I was stunned to discover that the Chinese version simply washes away the entire historical setting. Where the Korean dialogue refers to "Parhae," the Chinese translation (both dubbing and subtitles) substitutes the imaginary name "Dongyu (东馀)." The wicked soldiers and assassins should be translated as "Qidan (契丹)," which was an ethnic group that some Chinese identify with and others still think of as an ancient enemy. Either way, a Chinese audience would recognize "Qidan" from their history classes. Instead, the Chinese translation uses the imaginary name "Zhenliu (真留)."
Why? It's not that the plot gives a revisionist version of historical events. I suspect the reason is that a Korean film about Parhae is in itself an implicit claim that Parhae was Korean. Someone on the Chinese side was uncomfortable about that, but keeping a high-profile, big-budget Korean film out of China would have political and economic costs. So a compromise was made: the film was released, but place names were changed. Reviewers and bloggers in China seem to think that "Donyu" and "Zhenliu" are place-names from Korean history. A couple of people managed to match the imaginary words up with the real Chinese words that should have been used, but no one has commented on the switch itself on any web page (including Japanese and, as far as I can tell, Korean). I think it's because no one knows the history very well, and so they assume there's some historical reason why these words are being used.
There isn't.

The Rare Korean SF

2006-05-28T23:40:00.000+09:00

Several months ago I read that Korean filmmakers were under pressure - from the government, I think - to start making science fiction movies. The Competition (Hollywood and Japan) had sci-fi movies, so Korean Pride demanded a domestic substitute.
So when Natural City became the first Korean SF movie I noticed in the video store, I was curious.
Verdict: If you were going to watch sci-fi anyway this is probably better than whatever you had in mind.
Why? Because it's centered around a convincing love story, which SF (aimed as it normally is at young boys who don't date) almost never offers.
Natural City draws heavily and openly from other SF films. The most obvious is Blade Runner, from which even the sets appear to have been re-used. But I won't fault the director for that. Korean SF films are still in their infancy, and everyone knows that the best method for becoming good at something is to begin by imitating people who are already successful, and then go on to develop your own style. Plus, Natural City isn't just in imitation. It definitely improves on its predecessors.
Harrison Ford's character in Blade Runner is a police detective in pursuit of a dangerous artifical man, while falling in love with an artificial woman. Being factory-made, both the villain and the love interest have very limited lifespans. This makes for a bittersweet ending: the villain reaches the end of his shelf life and spontaneously expires, but Harrison knows that his girlfriend is doomed as well.
Natural City is based around some cruel modifications to Blade Runner. The screenwriters must have asked: what if BR began with the girlfriend already nearing end-of-warranty, and the villian not looking to die anytime soon? The love story is between the police officer protagonist (named R) and the female android (named Ria), but one suspends disbelief enough to accept that she's an artificially created human, it's done quite convincingly. It helps that the process of their meeting and falling in love is part of the backstory - that's always the hardest part of a romantic story to pull off.
Not only is Ria breaking down, but she gets moody and depressed like a real person. As R turns to increasingly desperate measures to keep his girl alive and happy, the relationship them resembles more and more that between a crack addict and the drug. He's on a police SWAT team that eliminates renegade androids, but R himself tries to keep the team's targets as undamaged as possible so he can salvage their parts for Ria. This has serious consequences, as R's delicacy toward the enemy gets a number of other police officers messily killed. He goes even so far as to kidnap a real girl in the hope of implanting Ria's mind into her.
R is another of those morally ambiguous characters who confuse and frustrate American reviewers of Korean films. He never relents, but starts taking his job seriously only on realizing there's really no hope of saving Ria. In the Hollywood formula, a character might make sacrifices for a loved one, but things inevitably turns out for the best. Not in Natural City. The reward is an action-movie wrap-up that still reflects fate's moral neutrality. That, and in the end we finally learn what Ria's been thinking the whole time.

Quote of the Week

2006-05-25T20:40:00.000+09:00

From NYT article on the growing trendiness of "North Korean" restaurants in South Korea:

"We had to rack our brains," Mr. Hong said. "We all know they just eat cornmeal over there. Well, we just don't know what they're eating over there. So we mixed and matched."

No Smirking

2006-05-23T16:58:00.000+09:00

Lately this blog has had little to offer my faithful readers besides smug remarks about geek culture in Japan. I had sworn to change to more refined, respectable topics. . . but then today Power Rangers ("Five Rangers" in Japan) was being filmed right in front of the language school. And there was no ignoring it -- look at the photo taken with my cell phone. No commentary here. Just some trivia:

the stunt doubles (in fight scenes) for all of the Rangers are male, even for characters who are played by actresses in other scenes
but, some of the villians are actually stuntwomen in masculine Storm Trooper-esque rubber suits
fight scenes are shot in segments of about 5 seconds per take
no live pyrotechnics, but the acrobatics are pretty respectable.

The things I do in real life are pretty different from what ends up on this page. Here's some of what I've been up to over the past couple weeks:

Japanese class every day. Highlight this week was a discussion Monday about how Fascism in 1930s Japan differed from that in Europe. Also the role of the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria: those who controlled the Japanese government in the 1930s wanted to keep Japan itself traditional and conservative. So they set up Manchuria as a segregated locus where modernization and urbanization could happen so that the Japanese homeland could enjoy the economic benefits without undergoing social change that might undermine "traditional values."
Graduate seminars in Tokyo on Chinese history, at least once a week. This one I have two: bureaucratic history (dull, but it's education) and social history (highlight of my week)
Taken to a college concert where the highlight was Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony.
Was going to join a Japanese-Korean team of runners in a 20-km relay race (an "ekiden") this coming Saturday, but one of our people decided she wasn't in good enough shape, so the team is waiting for a later race.
Helped test the spoken English of employees at the luxury hotel next to the language school. Massage therapists were surprisingly good, waiters surprisingly bad. I was neither fed nor massaged, but paid in discount coupons for a few nights. Good reason to visit Yokohama again after I leave. . .
Etc.

The Most Expensive Korean Film So Far

2006-05-15T18:02:00.000+09:00

Maybe no movie where swords appear will contain a convincing human story. American reviewers searching for excuses to value such a film inevitably praise the "visuals" or "cinematography," coded apologetic for the absence of plot and fully realized characters.
The Korean film Musa ("Warriors") is one of these. It's Korea's first acclaimed offering in the international martial arts genre. The fact that it gets stuck as a "martial arts" film is wholly the result of regional stereotyping, though -- this is more like Braveheart than any Chinese or Japanese movie I've seen. How like Braveheart? The characters are for the most part sturdy men with one or two personality characteristics each, with exactly one princess to add a little color. The princess is played by Zhang Ziyi, apparently trying to take as many acting jobs as possible before she starts showing some age. Here she keeps the haughty personality from Crouching Tiger, though without having to do any fighting. She appears to have treated this film as a paid vacation, recycling the lines and expressions from earlier jobs. The fight scenes are not the fanciful wire-assisted acrobatics of the Chinese tradition. Instead, the grim hacking of characters at one another is lifted from Braveheart or Gladiator.
Most unforgiveable, though, is that this movie just isn't any fun to watch. Its plot has the characters trek though the desert to the seashore, and then hole up in an old fortress until the final battle with their Mongol pursuers. Structurally, you can already see the problem: this film has a lot of trudging and waiting around. It's monotonous. Not recommended.

Action

2006-05-13T09:52:00.000+09:00

It's sometimes claimed that in Japan, cartoons and comic books (dignified with the exotic names "anime" and "manga") are regarded as mature art forms, not geeky diversions as in the US.
This is false. They're geeky in Japan as well. It's just that a higher level of geekiness is tolerated in mainstream society.
Consider this picture: a free plastic action figure that came in the box of replacement blades for my razor. In the US, anyone old enough for a razor is too old for plastic action figures. Someone who needs the former and still desires the latter is seen as socially maladjusted.
Q: Who am I to call anyone geeky, having bought the razor cartridges with the free prize?
A: I'm staving off corporate hegemony. This is the only Japanese (i.e. non-American) brand of multi-blade razor on the market here.

Kimchi control

2006-05-06T22:09:00.000+09:00

For those lacking the patience to wait for their kimchi to attain the tartness appropriate for kimchi stew or fried rice, it is (I'm told) OK to take it out of the refrigerator to speed the process. Three days at room temperature should be enough. Once it's sour enough, you can put it back in the refrigerator and it'll remain stable for "a long time."
Again, Japanese kimchi doesn't get sour. It just goes bad.
The hot pepper for which kimchi is famous is a relatively new addition; the original kimchi (still abundant today) is just pickled vegetables. As is well known, all hot peppers originated in Central America and stayed there until the Spanish Conquest. They were brough to Japan by the Portuguese in the 1500s, and from there spread to Korea, where they were called "Japanese mustard" (in modern Japanese it's called "Chinese mustard.") The first known mention of them in a Korean text reads, "The Japanese mustard is very poisonous; many have died from eating it."
But hot peppers quickly became widely used. Scholars have suggested it was intended to ward off ghosts. Korea had just been catastrophically invaded by the Japanese (bearing the hot peppers) and Chinese, and subsequently been swept by epidemic disease. The ghosts of such multitudes dying before their time might be kept at bay by eating food strongly tinted with the atropopaic color red. I think this explanation is based on broad generalizations about Sino-Korean beliefs rather than direct evidence, but it makes a good story.

TV Party Tonight

2006-05-02T20:58:00.000+09:00

As I noted earlier, good Japanese film is nearly impossible to find these days.

Surprisingly, TV dramas are better.

Exhibit A: Densha Otoko ("The Guy on the Train," or "Train Man"). The narrative goes like this:
A computer nerd meets the girl of his dreams on the commuter train. Having no romantic experience, he asks for dating advice on an internet bulletin board. Thanks to ongoing tips and encouragement from anonymous helpers, he gets the girl.

What's the difference between film and TV? Take the title character (photos above). On TV, he fills the romantic emptiness of his nerd life with cartoon girls and plastic action figures, his self-disgust drivin him to the brink of suicide. The audience sympathizes with him, but understands why women who catch him with his guard down are repulsed. In the movie, though, all darker aspects of the protagonist are gone; he is a naif just waiting for the right girl.
Basically, then, the TV show is edgier and takes more risks. It's more complex and more compelling. Cultured Americans can abandon what little interest they retain in Japanese film and embrace television without guilt.

More Free Music

2006-05-01T10:11:00.000+09:00

Neil Young's web page is now playing the songs from his upcoming anti-war album.

What Muscles?

2006-04-27T23:07:00.000+09:00

The theater for the nationally famous Muscle Musical has long tantalized me. The building is a ten-minute walk from our school in Minatomirai, but the tickets are at Broadway prices, so I'd despaired of ever seeing it.

Finally the school provided free tickets; normally their students prefer to watch noh or bunraku, and show little interest in something this plebian. But this year's group are particularly anti-intellectual, with me naturally among the worst. I was excited.

But my anticipation was in vain. The "Muscle Musical" is a dance-and-acrobatics performance, emphasizing feats of strength and agility. But it's just not that good. In terms of challenging and dazzling acrobatics, I think every professional performance I've seen anywhere was more impressive, whether in the US or in China. I've seen more talent and creativity out of New York street performers.

For example: In one segment, everything is upside down. Some baseball players are standing around on their hands, and some more walk past on their hands. And that's all! No upside-down baseball game. In another segment, construction workers play musical notes by banging their hardhats (heads included) into metal girders. If this were the Blue Man Group, they'd have played an entire song, and with perfect timing. But this bunch quits after a couple of scales.

Maybe it was just this particular show, called "Dogs," where the performers were clothed in costumes modeled on Broadway's "Cats" (currently running in Tokyo). I believe the cast of Cats probably could have put on this show without much extra practice. Their Christmas Extravaganza had more PR -- maybe more effort went into it.

Vampire movie

2006-04-27T20:53:00.000+09:00

With the help of my associates I've been to sneak previews of a couple of the Japanese movies slated for release this summer. This week it was Taiyoh no Uta (A Song to the Sun).

I was a little pessimistic at first when I heard it would be a love story involving a terminally ill young woman. In recent years a plague of soap operas featuring young women dying of leukemia has swept from Korea and Taiwan through the rest of East Asia, and I wasn't looking forward to more of that.

But I became intrigued on learning that this time, the tragic illness is xeroderma pigmentosum, the disorder for whose victims exposure to sunlight is fatal. (In Taiyoh no Uta it's always referred to as XP, rather than its Japanese name of "shokusoteki kampishoh" -- a direct translation of the English name, but without the ambiguity of Greek morphemes.)

An illness where everything's OK as long you only go out at night. Sleep all day. No school. Most teenagers would think it's such a bad deal. But not having experienced the ennui of ordinary daytime life, the heroine Kaoru (played by the 17-year-old singer-songwriter Yui) feels trapped and depressed.

My associates and I had guessed that the film would end with her giving in and walking out into the sunlight Blacula-style. But no, she gets caught by the sun about halfway through, during a Cinderella-esque race back home from her first date ever. The date itself was almost worth the result -- Kaoru's new boyfriend shows her a fabulous time in my own beloved Yokohama, including the particularly dear Minatomirai area.

As many people probably did, I looked for more info about the "XP" disease after seeing the film. It's 10 times more prevalent per capita in Japan than the US, making it a little gimmicky as a plot element here. Some forms of it cause the victim's flesh to rot away after exposure to sunlight. In Taiyo no Uta, though, Yui's character simply starts to lose coordination and then appears in a coffin before we have time to get really worried. The genre demands that -- this is a light movie to entertain teenagers during the brief Japanese summer vacation, and to make them buy Yui's associated album. As such, it's played very safe. Although the boyfriend's favorite pastime is surfing, the logical scene in which he takes Kaoru surfing with him never appears. After all, it would be improper to suggest to the young audience that anyone, even the terminally ill, might do something as Unsafe as surfing at night.

Free Music!

2006-04-24T19:58:00.001+09:00

Some of the bands I like these days allow their music to be heard endlessly for free on the web. A good thing if you're in the small, select group of people with tastes like mine.

Muse: No originality -- their sound is direct mimicry of Radiohead's early albums "Pablo Honey" and "The Bends." But Radiohead is a fantastic band, and so their imitators still sound pretty good. Besides, Radiohead has stopped putting albums out.

Kings of Convenience: Mellow, feel-good acoustic pop. For mental hygience purposes, I force myself to listen to it instead of the usual metal and rap. But they do have a pleasant sound and respectable lyrics. Perfect background music for working.

The Offpring: Pop-punk, i.e. too melodic for punk fans and too loud for everyone else. Their average fan is a 14-year old male, meaning this music does unhealthy things to one's brain. But after I've spend too many months listening to mature, respectable music, my neighbors are bound to feel the walls shuddering to "The Kids Aren't Alright" or "Hit That" at maximum volume.

Iron and Wine: This has been a link on my blog for a while, despite the fact that it doesn't offer many of his songs. Peaceful, uplifting folk-pop.

Arctic Monkeys: Currently the most talked-about rock band in Great Britain. Hailed as the next British Invasion. Not an accidental comparison -- they sound exactly like the Rolling Stones and some of the more straightforward rock songs on the Beatles' "white album." But their songwriting is better than the Stones.

Suggestions welcome.

Splinter Group Festival

2006-04-22T14:00:00.000+09:00

I've been under pressure to add pictures of the Shotokai 70th anniversary celebration, so here are a few of them. It took place in March, on the artificial island of Odaiba at the east edge of Tokyo.

Like many karate organizations in Japan, this "Shotokai" is a splinter group that seceded from the dominant "Shotokan" association; that's the 70th anniversary that's being mentioned here. Its members claim that their way of doing things is closer to the "original" karate as it was taught in the early 20th century.

For group photos the attendees were split up into 4 groups, so you can get a sense of how many people were present by mentally quadrupling this picture.

Here we see part of the "Kozono Group" preparing for their demonstration. The Group practices in the depths of Landmark Tower, an intriguing structure I'll write about before long. This particular club is overwhelmingly made up of female corporate executives.

Not having members fight each other is one of the distinguishing characteristics of this organization. It's in response to the fact that all of the dominant karate organizations are focused almost exclusively on preparing for tournaments. Since this organization doesn't have competitions, demonstrations like this one are held instead. It's taking place in a large gym full of people, but the bulk of the observers are sitting outside the frame of this photo.

Hey?? award of the week

2006-04-08T09:31:00.000+09:00

There's a Japanese TV show where celebrities sit around a table and watch film clips about surprising facts. Maybe a species of fish that always swims upside down, or a champion athlete who wears women's perfume to confuse his opponents. Each celebrity has a button in front of him/her, and every press of the botton registers a "Hey??" (the Japanese exclamation of surprise, pronounced exactly as I've spelled it). Whichever film clip receives the most total Hey's is the winner for the night.

This week two items earned outstanding scores on my "Hey??" scale:

1. The long-missing Gospel of Judas was publicized (presently the NYT #1 most-emailed article).

2. The following paragraph, lifted from a chain email:

> I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

Oh Yeah!

2006-04-05T22:36:00.000+09:00

This software would have no use whatsoever in your life, but it's going to change mine. My field of vision will look like this for the next four years or so.

It only comes once a year

2006-04-03T18:25:00.000+09:00

One of the Japanese customs you often hear about is going out to view cherry blossoms, which appear for a week or two every spring. I'd assumed that, like the viewing of autumn leaves in the fall, this part of "Japanese culture" belonged only to elderly women.

I was wrong. Middle-aged men in white-collar jobs are the biggest flower-viewing enthusiasts. Co-workers go out to a park after work, or on the weekend. They spread out a blue tarpaulin and get drunk and noisy together under the cherry trees.

This photo is from the elementary school near my house. It was early in the morning, so no one was around. I don't think anyone did typical flower-viewing there even in the evenings, but it's not impossible. Self-deception regarding the ubiquity of alcohol isn't as strong here as in America. Beer is sold in vending machines.

Disguises that never come off

2006-04-02T19:36:00.000+09:00

A few weeks back I noted that at least one of the insignia from "Transformers" came from an ancient Chinese bronze piece in the Tokyo National Museum. The Transformers have by no means faded into pop culture history. A new Transformers movie, live action with live actors, is planned for release sometime before 2010.
I hoped that some effort would be made to produce a movie with some depth to it. This is not to say that I'd want it to be true to the original material; back in the day, the comic books and the TV cartoons were embarassingly juvenile even in the eyes of my embarassingly juvenile seven-year-old self. But some of us with fond memories of the original plastic toys may end up watching the film for nostalgia's sake. In that event, we'll feel more warmly about our childhoods if the movie isn't. . . well, embarassingly juvenile.
But optimism would be wasted. The director is Michael Bay, whose resume contains a string of films universally panned by critics: Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Island, and Bad Boys I and II.

Abandoned Cats

2006-04-01T13:49:00.000+09:00

Stray cats are the most prevalent wild animal in Yokohama. The pitiful sight of so many no-longer-wanted domestic animals calls to mind certain memories.
When I lived in Astoria, one of the prominent neighborhood characters was an animal-rights activist who appeared on busy sidewalks when the weather was good. Her appearance was one not uncommon among my fellows on the Far Left: pale, emaciated, humourless, with steely gray hair cropped to a few centimeters.
In the beginning it was just her standing on the sidewalk, repeating the phrase "Animal Rights!" every few seconds. People avoided her. At a later date I saw her on a different sidewalk, this time with a small table. Attached to the table was a sign -- black marker on white paper -- reading "ABANDONED CATS." She stood by the table, repeating "Stop animal abuse!" The flood of people on the sidewalk (mostly Hispanic families doing their weekend shopping) kept a wary distance from her, and she was beginning to sound frustrated.
I stayed clear as well. Ever since, though, I've regretted not offering some advice. For the benefit of any of you who are street preachers for animal rights, or are thinking of becoming one, here is what I would have said:
"Most people like animals, especially cuddly ones like cats. Your average person doesn't want cats to be cruelly abandoned or abused. But you're giving off a very confrontational image without enough clues about what you're really trying to do. People have to guess what exactly you want from them. We don't even know what your message is about the Abandoned Cats. From your expression and tone, I feel like drawing your attention would make you attack me in some way. I'd be lectured, or faced with demands to give money or adopt a dozen strays. Who would willingly subject themselves to that, and on a busy sidewalk? Putting some cute pictures of cats on your sign would do a lot to attract passerby. Your spoken message would frighten people less if it contained more of the message you want to convey. Maybe, "Adopt a kitten!" or "Do you have a cat you can't keep?" If your main goal is to make people feel bad about their animal-abusing lifestyles, I suggest changing the goal. Most people won't voluntarily submit to being made to feel like bad human beings."

OK, now I can stop regretting not having spoken up. Time to get on with my life.
Epilogue: Animal-rights activists set off two bombs at a meat-packing plant in Astoria while I was living there, though I didn't learn that until I'd moved away. Both of the people who claimed responsibility were male, so the person I saw wasn't directly involved. But if she was part of such a group, maybe she would have considered cute cat pictures insufficiently serious.

Comfort Painting

2006-03-27T17:32:00.000+09:00

Most of the art for sale in the Ginza galleries, at least in the galleries easiest to find, falls into a single category: vaguely Impressionist paintings of flowers. Intended to provide decorative colour to domestic spaces without any unsettling hints of originality.
The messianic purveyor of "tribal" art offers something very different with the loot he buys by the suitcaseful from shady sources. He showed us the suitcases, and takes pride in the shadiness of his foreign contacts.
Another gallery we found is closer to the domestic decoration pole, but with a little more personality. I particularly appreciated the owner's willingness to say something about each of the artists. One turned out to be Pablo Picasso. But the Picasso they had on display was just one of 52 prints of an etching - signed and numbered by the big P himself, but still at the same price as everything else in the gallery: 1,000,000 yen, or 10,000 USD (Chinese-derived counting systems divide the zeroes in large numbers into groups of four).
The picture above is from that gallery. The helpful gallery owner told us that the artist, Kataoka Tamako 片岡玉子, is now a hundred years old.
"Really? When did she paint this?"
"About three years ago."
"Is she still painting now?"
"She's in the hospital these days. She wasn't feeling well."
More questioning revealed that Ms. Kataoka has been painting since she was a young elementary school teacher, but only gained recognition in her sixties (i.e. the 1960s).
Her most popular paintings are "Red Mt. Fuji" paintings like this one. As you can see, she turns the mountain into a friendly frosted jello-mold.

Secrets of Korean Cooking

2006-03-24T12:49:00.000+09:00

Lately, some meals and conversations with some of my Korean associates have provided me feedback on orthodox cooking methods.

Pajon:
The center of the pancake kept ending up more raw than I wanted. They tell me this is normally solved by pressing down on it while it's cooking. I assume Koreans use a spatula; in a fully equipped American kitchen you might also use a waffle iron, sandwich press, or George Foreman Grill.

Kimchi jigae:
When I first made this stew in February, I hadn't ever seen the real thing. Having now sampled two versions of it cooked by real Koreans, I known a little more about how it's normally done.
First of all, the primary flavor should be SOUR. Common practice is to use kimchi that's a couple of months old and has begun to go the way of saurkraut. Japanese kimchi doesn't get sour with age and so will never give you the right flavor.
At least at home, most people don't add much seasoning beside the kimchi. The stew is just meat, kimchi, onions, tofu, and a little salt and sesame oil. But everyone agrees that adding water without first browning the meat would be Unorthodox.

A case of Tribal Fever in Ginza

2006-03-23T22:25:00.000+09:00

Ginza is an area in Tokyo usually known for high-class shopping - spacious, immaculate stores each devoted to one brand of European apparel. Having little reason to go there, I didn't know the area well. But in the course of tracking down art exhibitions across Tokyo, I discovered that there are countless little galleries scattered around Ginza. Today I went out with one of my people to see what's in them.
What left the deepest impression on me was cluttered gallery smaller than my cramped bedroom in Yokohama. Along only two of its four walls was a low shelf. The shelf along the longer edge of the rectangular room was taking up mostly with Neolithic ceramics. Most were from Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, a largish but very poor city in China I'd seen a couple of years ago. The discovery of artifacts from a Neolithic civilization is the only advantage that Chifeng has. Neolithic artifacts are news because "Neolithic" means a society with agriculture and permanent settlements -- "civilization" -- and having such a society arise 6000 years ago in Inner Mongolia changes our understanding of ancient "China." Today Chifeng area still relies on the meagre income from nonmechanized farming in its semi-arid climate. The local government is going its best to attract tourism, but the area remains unnoticed. It's not surprising that the locals would be happy to sell anything they could get out of the ground.
The mask in the photo above is not from the Inner Mongolia of 6000 years ago; instead it's from Japan of about 700 years ago. It doesn't look "Japanese," and definitely not like the Japanese art of 700 years ago that most people are aware of. It looks, in the words of the gallery owner, "tribal." "Tribal" art, religion, etc. are an obsession about which he talked to us at great length, his favorite topics being the liveliness and interconnected of "tribal" cultures around the world and the dismal failure of Japanese art-buyers to appreciate the vitality of tribal artifacts. He has the belief, shared uncritically by a number of scholars, that Japanese native religious practices (now classified under "Shinto religion") date back to prehistoric times. The mask above, he thinks, is a relic of the dynamic "tribal" days of Japanese society, before the modern Japanese concern with mere form and appearance ruined everything.
Over the rest of the day we saw some indications that mainstream Japan isn't as dismissive of Tribal art as the gallery owner insists. Still, his enthusiasm for it would be unique anywhere.

파잔: The Epic of Korean Cuisine continues

2006-03-16T22:21:00.000+09:00

Here's another of the most well-known Korean dishes. It's called pajan in Korean, though for obscure reasons they call it chijimi in Japan. It's very simple - really just a pancake. You mix flour + water + salt + an egg, then add in some solid objects and grill the result. Like a pancake. The "distinctive Korean" quality is lent by the solid objects that are added. Typically this means lots of green onions, chopped molluscs and arthropods, and sometimes kimchi also.
I made a simple kind with just leeks and shrimp, where flipping it over midway through cooking was the only moment of drama, providing no challenge to someone of my skill. When it's made with scallions instead of leeks, an enormous number of the things are used, and their rigidity makes the structure too thick, threatening the evenness of its cooking and presenting a danger of gooey insides. The textbook solution is to add the batter to the frying pan in a series of complicated steps. This being my first time, I wanted to keep down the number of factors I was juggling. But the advanced version is on the horizon; this was too easy.

Another perfectly good idea

2006-03-12T22:24:00.000+09:00

Koreans are taught that their system of writing was invented by, or at the direction of, King Sejong in 1446, essentially out of thin air. For a while I've thought it must have been derived from one of the two writing systems used by the Khitans, who lived right next to Korea from the 900s onward. I'm not the only person who thinks so; there are a pack of scholars in Japan led by Nishida Tatsuo who have been arguing the same thing. The other alternative (besides the spontaneous invention theory) is championed by Kawano Rokuro. Kawano argues that the Korean writing system probably came from Phagspa, the alphabet invented by a Tibetan monk for the Mongols to use in writing Mongolian. The Mongols took over Korea in the 1200s, so we assume the Koreans might well have run into the Mongolian alphabet.

I haven't yet read either Kawano's or Nishida's work, having just learned about them last night. My theory of a connection to the Khitan writing system came from the fact that they're both written in the same pattern. Chinese, Japanese, Phagspa, and of course English, are all written by stringing pre-defined units into a straight line and reading along the line. Khitan and Korean are the only two writing systems I know of where you group the pre-defined units into squarish blocks, and then read it by sounding out all the parts of one block and then move on to the next one. For example, Korean looks like this: 실망합니다. The picture at the top of this post is of Khitan writing, with the little squiggles being letters and the increasingly large agglomerations being words.

But as I learned from a presentation today, if Khitan writing is a precursor to Korean, it's a very rough one. While Korean has about as many letters as the Roman alphabet, Khitan has hundreds and they get pretty complicated. One "block" in Korean represents a syllable, and has at most 5 letters in it, though usually 2 or 3. Some of the blocks in Khitan have 9 letters, which isn't long compared to English but is still a lot more than Korean, meaning that each block probably stands for more than one syllable.

I should add that the total of all things written in this Khitan alphabet is: around 20 tombstones. Not a lot, is it? And no one can read more than a little bit of what's written on them, though many people have spent their entire lives trying to figure them out. Of course, there used to be all kinds of stuff written in Khitan, but the Khitan tribe was eventually broken up and so their language was lost.
The tombstones themselves are modeled in Chinese eulogies, and thus almost certainly are a lot of bragging about what wonderful people the deceased were. Beyond the intellectual challenge, I don't think much depends on their being decoded.

Belief

2006-03-06T18:56:00.000+09:00

I'm often asked, how are Japan and China different?
As one small part of the very long answer, you can look at how one says "he died before his time" in the two languages.
In Japan (as I discovered today), you call it "an unkarmic death," as in the person's karma would naturally grant a longer life. A Buddhist way of talking.
In China, you'd say "an unfated death," suggesting that the person was fated to live out his/her natural life, but it was unnaturally interrupted.
What's this show? For a very long time -- around 1000 years -- it's been customary in Japan to express life-and-death ideas in Buddhist terms. Karma, past lives, future lives, the decline of the world, life as illusion, etc.
For longer -- at least 1700 years -- people in China have mostly talked about things in terms of Fate, at least when talking about one's present life. Buddhist ideas aren't evoked much to explain things you actually see. Some people (mostly women) do pray to Buddhist deities, but "Asking for stuff" isn't really a Buddhist idea, just a human habit.

The other, important difference is that people in China still talk explicitly about Fate on a daily basis. I don't think I've heard someone express a single Buddhist-inflected thought in the nine months I've been in Japan. Memorial services are Buddhist, and there are temples everywhere kept in beautiful condition, but people don't think in Buddhist terms during everyday life. One of my people here (not Japanese) suggested that the Buddist idea of "the impermanence of all things" explains why people in Japan buy new cars every three years, but I think consumerism is the operative religion here.

Disguise

2006-02-26T12:27:00.000+09:00

Children of the 80's will remember this image from the Transformer toys and cartoons that dominated boy culture for several years, and still contine to be produced and marketed. This was the insignia of the Autobots, the good guys.
Like many toys and cartoons on the American market, the Transformers were devised and designed in Japan. I discovered this past weekend that the insignia is identical to the design on a 3000-year-old Chinese bronze artifact in the Tokyo National Museum. My apologies for not having a picture of it, but it really does look exactly the same. I'd bet money that the museum piece inspired the logo.
Another mystery solved.

Korean Invades Japan

2006-02-26T11:37:00.000+09:00

In the past few years, Korean pop culture has become huge in Japan. A typical video rental store, for instance, is divided into roughly equal sections of "National [Japanese] Movies" and "Foreign Movies." But these days, there's also a smaller section just for Korean movies and TV shows; probably the size of the Foreign Film section of the average video shop in the US.
Most of the enthusiasm, though, has been for Korean soap operas, and particularly for this actor, who has become the Korean best known to people in Japan. His name is Bae Yong-joon, but in Japan the nickname is Yon-sama, basically "His Magesty Mr. Yon" (native Japanese speakers have difficulty with the -ng sound). The glasses and scarf are his distinguishing feature (no one has ever seen him on a beach). An American article referred to him as "foppish," which is about right. There are magazines in Japan devoted just to him, and in Seoul there are shops that exist solely to purvey Yon-sama merchandise to Japanese tourists. He plays the main character in "Winter Sonata," the soap that started the "Korean Wave." I don't know much about it, but they say amnesia is a key plot device.
Yon-sama's fan base is very specific: unhappily married Japanese women, i.e. pretty much every woman in Japan over the age of 35 or so. To them the bland, sensitive character he plays in the soap opera is inexplicably soothing. Nearly everyone else is irritated by him. Particularly, women in their early-to-mid 30's are adamant about not belonging to the Yon-sama demographic.
The greatest irony is that neither he nor his soap operas are particularly popular in Korea. Except for the well-known discrimination suffered by Korean immigrants in Japan, I can't imagine why he doesn't just move here.

2006-02-22T22:35:00.000+09:00

전 백적 백패지요.

Uttering the Inedible

2006-02-21T18:32:00.000+09:00

One of my associates asked me what goｂoh is in English.
"What?"
"Gobooooh. It's a vegetable. A long, thin white root."
More questions established that this goboh was neither carrot nor potato. Nor was it a nagaimo or daikon or any of the other mushy root vegetables indigenous to Japan, which people somehow find worth the trouble of cooking.
Finally I looked it up in my electronic dictionary. "Burdock." I'd probably heard the word before but it brought no images to my mind. The explanation in my Japanese-Japanese dictionary explained that in Europe and America it isn't eaten, but is treated as a weed. Which explains my unfamiliarity with it.
The photo above may appear to be a botched carpentry project, but is actually stolen from a recipe web site and shows what one hopes will happen in the course of preparing burdock for cooking. The root was peeled two photos earlier.
They say that burdock became briefly infamous in the war crimes trials of the late 1940s. One of the charges against some Japanese officers was that they were feeding POWs on burdock root, which the Americans running the trials believed to be edible. People were probably executed on that account.
I've probably been fed it at some point while I've been in Japan, without knowing it.

My Eyeball Gym

2006-02-18T22:12:00.000+09:00

The selection of calendars available in Japan suggests that housewives dictate what goes on the country's walls. Puppies, kittens, and Korean pretty-boy actors predominate. Picture-postcard scenery from Japan and Europe is also well represented. For the bachelors there's a swimsuit calendar corner.
Unwilling to spend a year with any of these options, I searched across Tokyo. Finally I settled on this calendar; the picture you see is for Jan-Feb. An educational tool for pre-schoolers? No, it's exercise equipment.
You fix your eyes on the star in the center,
then focus on the (1),
back to the star,
back to the (1),
return to the star,
then 2-star-2-star, 3-star-3-star, etc.
It's supposed to improve your eyesight by strengthening the muscles around your eyeballs. I don't know how well it achieves that, but it does get my eyes away from the computer periodically, and I think that's a good thing.
Whatever benefit it does grant would be equally available from any good-sized wall clock, which probably provided the original inspiration. But the exercises get progressively weirder through the year. Next is one that promises to expand one's field of vision.

Mimicry LIVES

2006-02-13T20:25:00.000+09:00

Most of the "beer" you see on sale in Japan is not really beer, I learned this week. You can learn the truth by looking at the bottom front of the can, which tells what category that particular beer" falls into. Here's a representative lineup (photographed at the store). If you can read Japanese, you can click on the images to read the labels for yourself.

This is really beer.

"Biiru teistu inryoh", tr. "Beer taste beverage"

"Liqueur"

"Happoh shu", tr. "Bubbly alcohol"

"Sono hoka no zasshu", tr. "Other miscellaneous alcohols".

I had assumed the fake-beer racket was a money-saving scheme on the part of the liquor companies. My associates, though, tell me that it's really about tax evasion. Beer is subjected to particularly high taxes, which the companies evade by devising other drinks that, by some quirk of the production process, aren't technically beer but retain (or claim) to taste similar. Indeed, real beer appears to cost about 1/3 more than the imitations here. Thus continues a cat-and-mouse game, with the government trying to change tax laws to cover the new varieties of alcohol and the corporations developing new products to evade the revised laws. Why the government doesn't save everyone money and trouble by making the laws simpler is the kind of thing people get Ph.D.'s trying to explain.
Cigarettes, meanwhile, don't seem to get much government attention at all. They cost about 1/2 to 1/3 the price they'd be in New York.

Quote of the Week

2006-02-09T22:29:00.000+09:00

From Mexican film director Carlos Reygadas:
"I don't think Mexico is a very religious society, just a very ritualistic one. If there were a Martian invasion, Mexicans would convert to the Martian religion."

Ironic, no? Through its many rescensions, War of the Worlds has always assumed that in the event of a Martian invasion, God would be our side. But what if the Martians are on better terms with the Almighty?

Second Place is the First Loser

2006-02-07T21:44:00.000+09:00

From a parents' magazine, part of a section on fun things to do with the kids. One fun thing suggested is turning them into winners. Many pages are devoted to the various national competitions kids can be made to compete in, from soapbox derby to music and chess. With the description of each competition comes a picture of the kid who took number one, with his or her proud parents. This picture is representative of the spirit in which the entire section is written. These two triathlete parents have produced a junior triathlete champion, plus a younger brother who's also trying hard. The article notes with approval that the older brother (in 5th grade) runs 8 km every day, with the 2nd-grade brother doing his best at 5 km per day.
Maybe this is how future winners are made. I was reminded first of last year's NYT article on the rise of permanent injury among junior athletes; it cited a doctor's comment that if he recommended less training and competition, the kid was usually relieved and the parents usually furious. Are obsessively competitive people born or need they be made?

A protest film in a cheerful package

2006-02-06T22:13:00.000+09:00

The films of Miyazaki Hayao are probably the most popular Japanese animation in America today is probably (putting their brand-recognition level below emo but certainly above industrial music). His earliest films were cute fairy tales, and more recently he has been turning out fairy tales with an environmentalist or anti-war message. Still, no two of his films are interchangeably similar. While not a devoted fan, I consider all of his stuff to be worth watching at least once. That's not a judgment I make lightly.
Earlier this year his latest film, Howl's Flying Castle, arrived. The reviewer for the New York Times found it to be a decent but not outstanding example of Miyazaki's work, while the ads I saw in newspapers simply showed a generic comic-book character flying around. Maybe they were trying to draw in the generic comic-book audience. In any case, I dismissed it as not worth my time. Inside, I riduled those who expressed interest in seeing it.
My mind changed, though, when a young businessman standing on the train next to me was watching it on a portable DVD player. He was listening with headphones so I couldn't hear the dialogue, but it looked intriguing. The video store near my apartment was renting everything at half-price that week, so I took the opportunity to watch it for myself.
The film is set in what looks like late-19th-century Europe. The visuals remind one of Proust's France or Victorian England, with picturesque seaside villages and quaint locomotives. The protagonist is a teenage girl who a wicked witch turns suddenly into an old lady; our heroine then joins the household of a mysterious young wizard. The charmingly amusing interactions of the various characters within this household - living in the goofily rendered Moving Castle itself - form the central plot of the film. If there were nothing else to this film, it would match my initial impression as a cute cartoon.
The catch, what gives the film a satisfying complexity, is that this landscape is also charged with late-19th-century style nationalism, of the sort that had Europe's young men charging into the teeth of each other's machine guns by the 19-teens. Thus, a typically cute Miyazaki-esque scene in which the heroine and her wizard friend appreciate a meadow full of flowers is interrupted when bombers fly overhead. This is the other side of the film; while the domestic comedy goes on in the foreground, the bombs outside are falling closer every night, annihilating the country's picturesque villages one by one. Sources more congniscent of the anime scene than I tell me that the contrast between the goofy and unfunny spheres of the film was created intentionally, as indicated by the director in interviews. Well done.

2006-02-05T23:30:00.000+09:00

야는검다. 어둡지않다, 어둡다. 그러나너의노래를묻는고성를보다.

Emo - A Genre, A Style, and Its Critics

2006-02-05T21:49:00.000+09:00

This is a photo of The Wrens, an R&B group influential in the early 1950s. I've never heard them but include the image for ironic purposes: much of my background music over the past year has been supplied by the Wrens, a still-active band of white guys from New Jersey. Though I don't get much exposure to the American commercial media these days, I don't think the (current) Wrens get any airplay except perhaps on college radio. They thus lie in the submerged part of the iceberg that is the American music world. They do receive some critical attention though, and so aren't on the berg's underside.
The current Wrens are categorized as "emo", a genre in which guys which tastefully electrified guitars sing emotional songs. As a genre it's become slightly popular, allowing bands that were once totally obscure to become known by a small minority of people outside the Indie Music Scene. This has gained them the murderous envy of some segments of the incestuously small (and fratricidally jealous) world of "independent" music. Meanwhile, the singing-about-emotions aspect of emo music has drawn scoffing from the other musical community I owe allegiance to, the heavy metal scene.
The various jealousies that emo music has aroused have created an entire genre of emo-bashing short movies. For the curious, I'll put a few links to them here.

My personal favorite is >this one<, because it really shines light on the alternate reality inhabited by indie-music insiders. The best part comes when industrial music makes a comeback, and the imaginary emo band ridiculed in the video changes its name to "Machines of Hate" in an attempt to catch the wave. This amuses me beyond limits because I remember when industrial music was at the height of its "popularity" 12 years ago. I was one of 3 people in my 2400-student high school who listened to the stuff. The 3 and the 2400 are statistics, not exaggerations. We thus begin to glimpse the indie music standards for "popular", "trendy", and the like.

Here's another anti-emo videos, 1950s style

P.S. My Japanese is also getting really good.

Korean Film - 2

2006-02-05T13:35:00.000+09:00

Oldboy is a violent film, but not an action movie. Its American reviewers note its continent of origin ("Asia"), observe that fighting takes place within the film, and try to categorize it as a martial arts or action movie. The assumption is that it must be an imitation of the campily violent stuff from Hong Kong and recent Japanese. To do so is to misinterpret Oldboy entirely. In action movies, violence advances the plot when one side of the conflict wins or loses. But in Oldboy, the plot demands that no one gain by winning a fight. One reviewer described Oldboy as “Shakespearean.” He’s looking in the right direction, in that the film takes its inspiration from a time period when not revenge -- not as satisfaction, but as unending obsession -- could form the center of a story. The real similarity is to ancient Greek drama, though. Euripides’ Medea or Orestes, and of course the Oedipus cycle. Only by looking back to the Greeks do we find revenge as it's treated in Oldboy, as a lurid spectacle where satisfaction is derived from watching the characters’ obsession and cruelty play themselves out. Like Table for Four, this one follows a plot trajectory where things just steadily get worse, while the audience gradually learns why events are taking such a course.
The resemblence to Greek drama isn't accidental, I think; there are too many parallels. Anyone who has seen the film and doubts my interpretation should remember that Oedipus ends up putting his own eyes out in the old drama.

Oriental Stuff

2006-02-05T01:40:00.000+09:00

A few weeks ago it snowed for the first time since I've been here. Snowed heavily for an entire day, turning the streets to slush and unpaved areas of the city into more beautiful versions of themselves. I didn't think to take pictures until the following day. By that time much snow had been industriously cleared away, along with the charm it had conferred. Here's part of one of the small temples near my apartment.

Signs - 1 (revisited)

2006-02-05T01:00:00.000+09:00

The more loyal among my viewers will recognize this place. It's a spot along the side of the apartment next to mine, and when I arrived here in Yokohama it formed the backdrop to an aluminum sign reading, in Japanese, "Beware of Pervert(s)". As you can see, the leaves of the ivy have gained some colour in the winter air, and the sign is gone. It's been gone since November. I wondered why it vanished, just as its presence had perplexed me (I have yet to see a similar sign anywhere else in Japan). But it's difficult to find someone to ask. I would ask my landlady, but the sign wasn't in front of our building, but rather the next one. This being the city, neighbors are not on speaking terms. Naturally, "What happened to the 'Beware of Pervert' sign?" is not an advisable way to initiate conversation with a stranger. Ever dismissive of social conventions, I asked a harmless-looking old man who happened to be standing near the building. His answer was quite vague. It was clear, though, that he was quite aware of the sign's existence and evaporation. He also affirmed that the sign had been put there for a definite purpose, and removed for reasons for which he was quite aware. Something about it not being needed anymore. I feel that my original theory stands, i.e. the sign was put there because one particular creepy person was living in the apartment building. Again, not my building, where dogs are kept and stray cats entertained illegally, but nothing more serious.

Korean Film - 1

2006-01-31T17:59:00.000+09:00

Here's a poster for the Korean film Sa-inyong Shiktak; this means A Table for Four, but for unexplained reasons its English title is The Uninvited Guest. Marketed as a horror movie, but in actuality a supernatural drama much like The Sixth Sense. The main character is an unremarkable man in his 30s, scheduled to be married but afflicted with a case of Seeing Dead People. His antogonist is the woman pictured at left, played by the most-adored Korean actress there is, Jeon Jihyun. She was originally typecast as the Perky Girlfriend, with her best known movies being, My Sassy Girlfriend and Introducing My Girlfriend. Thus, Table for Four is seen as her attempt to break out of that mould. Personally, I've not found her at all appealing since she vomited noodles onto a man's head in the opening scene of My Sassy Girlfriend. Even fans more forgiving of noodle-vomiting than I may find her less enchanting after seeing this film, where she's given a character with a ponderous list of negative qualities. She's depressed, morose, narcoleptic, testifies against her friends in court, is already married, and may or may not have dropped a baby (hers) to its death from a high balcony.
That, and she Hates Cats.
More importantly for the movie's plot, she also Sees Dead People. Thus her first meeting with our protagonist leads to one of the most darkly comic moments in cinematic history. She says, listlessly, "I'd better get going so you can put your kids to bed." The man is at a loss over how to reply, but audience knows he's struggling not to say, "You mean the two dead little girls draped over chairs at the dining room table? No, those aren't mine. There's not really there either. I just saw them dead in the subway one night and since then I've been seeing them here too sometimes. I've been thinking they'll go away if I ignore them. And you're not helping." But of course, acknowledging the problem would require facing it, a problem for which solution and even comprehension remain impossible. When the situation is both horrific and not understandable, attempts to pretend that all is normal become comic.
I liked the movie. Effective atmospherics, good acting, and an un-Hollywood story. The film's plot, like that of the also-Korean Oldboy, is one in which things constantly get worse over the course of the movie. But the succession of misfortunes isn't depression-inducing in the way of Victorian novels; rather, there's a poetic matter-of-factness to its pacing.

The Food - 2

2006-01-23T19:40:00.000+09:00

A few notes on the kimchi jigae, which possesses also the spellings kimchee and chigae and chige and probably others.

I looked at a number of Japanese cookbooks claiming to teach Korean cooking. My live informants had emphasized that this dish is NOT about boiling water and throwing things in. Instead one should sautee at least the meat and kimchi, and maybe the garlic too, before adding the water. Possessed of this prejudice, I picked and chose from a couple of cookbook recipes, dismissing with scorn the many that began with a pot of boiling water. As my online reference I used this:

http://www.bjunkyard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12004

Not the recipe he found on the web, but his reconstruction of his mother's cooking.
A few variations included in my version, all sanctioned by one source or another:
Instead of a white/yellow onion, Koreans use a thick (half-inch, or 1.5cm) green onion.
Ginger
Mushrooms
Soup Stock

A project for the near future is sundubu jigae, also romanised as soon dubu jigae etc. etc. "Dubu" being tofu, freeing me from astronomical Japanese meat prices and my roommate from the smell of boiling fermented cabbage.

The Food - 1

2006-01-21T23:59:00.000+09:00

I was proud of myself. Korean cuisine had always been so mysterious and Inscrutable. But my attempt at creating the signature Korean dish, kimchi jigae, i.e. kimchi stew, succeeded far beyond my expectations. The only real mystery ingredient is kochujang, which is a Korean version of miso paste that adds cayenne pepper to the mix. In my excitement I sent photos to some of my associates, who kindly expressed support for my efforts.

The Phantom Sunblock

2006-01-21T23:31:00.000+09:00

Last year the New York Times ran a much-talked-about story about a fabulous new sunscreen ingredient that shuts out UV rays much better than anything available before. While Europeans were enjoying perpetual youth thanks to its effects, Americans continued to shrivel and wither under solar radiation due to the FDA's failure to get the new sunblock approved in the US.

In Mongolia, one of the Americans at our excavation showed up with a bottle of SPF 60 sunblock purchased in France. The magical ingredient was said to make SPF 100 a possibility. Surely such things are available in Japan, I thought, a land where skin care and looking perfect in general are taken much more seriously than in the US.

I was disappointed to find nothing higher than SPF 50 anywhere. Finally I asked one of the staff in a drugstore about it. According to her answer, it used to be that Japanese sunblocks were much stronger. Recently, though, the government passed a restriction banning anything over SPF 50.

Powerful sunblocks are illegal.

Oh.

I didn't think to ask why. I probably should and probably will. My guess, though, is that the government was worried that the large number of Japanese women for whom parasol-bearing heliophobia is one manifestation of their vanity would give themselves Vitamin D deficiency by keeping themselves coated head to toe in SPF 100.

Economy - 1

2005-12-27T11:29:00.000+09:00

Some people wonder why Americans have such a low savings rate compared to, say, Japan or China. Here is a blatantly stolen cartoon explaining the psychology behind such choices. As with all the pictures on this web site, you can click on the cartoon to enlarge it.

La Musica Dulce - 1

2005-12-25T19:01:00.000+09:00

This picture is the window for my music software, Winamp, in its latest incarnation on my computer. For the unenlightened: Winamp allows one to play music files on one's computer. Computer nerds worldwide everywhere contribute "skins", or user interfaces, for the program. You can download whichever ones you like best to determine how your Winamp program looks and functions. This particular one, by Maheshnarayan Sarasan, is my favorite thus far (after many, many years). It's in the form of a blackboard with equations on it. You have to click on particular symbols within the equation to Play, Pause, or Stop a song, to change the volume, adjust the graphic equalizer, and so on. I like it because you have to use your brain a little to use to software in this configuration, and because a blackboard where the equations control your software is something physically impossible, yet on a computer it becomes reality.

Teaching - 1

2005-12-25T14:34:00.000+09:00

The apartment across from me contains a couple who, in their real lives, teach high school in New England. A few days ago we were talking about education, ever a popular topic in Japan. The husband claims that studied have shown that testing actually keeps children from learning. Here's how he put it, close to verbatim: "Someone conducted a study to see what effects testing has on learning. They took two groups of kids and taught them both a unit of exactly the same material, with the same discussions in class. The only difference was in what they were told at the beginning of the unit. One group was told, 'We're going to learn some things and talk about them in class, and at the end we're going to have a discussion to see what you've learned.' The other group was told, 'We're going to learn some things and talk about them in class, and at the end we're going to have a test [rather than a discussion] to see what you've learned.' So the teaching process was the same, but the kids who weren't told they were going to be tested actually learned the material better, and retained it longer after their class had moved on to studying other topics."
There are a lot of problems with this story. The kids who were promised no test were actually subjected to several of them, which must have been disappointing. More than anything else, the story sounds like dialogue from Before Sunrise or Before Sunset, in which Ethan Hawke's character is always claiming to have learned something profound about human nature from this or that study, which somebody conducted somewhere. Finally, what can we do with this conclusion? Teachers can't refuse to give tests, and nor can school administrators. Should children be told every year that this time there will be no tests, for as long as their credulity holds up on the face of repeated disappointment? Does decreasing the number of tests help at all? The guy telling about the study thinks the opposite may be true: the solution is to give so many small tests that students don't worry so much about them. I can believe that.

Korea - 2

2005-12-24T10:24:00.000+09:00

Recently the biggest news about Korea has been science news. Over the summer South Korean scientists had claimed major breakthroughs in cloning research, including a dog and precursors to the cloning of human embryos. In the past month it has come out that the researchers fudged much of their data. And that the head scientists had prevailed on some of their female subordinates to donate eggs for the experiments, which wouldn't affect the validity of the results, but is considered unethical even in South Korea.
At the height of his stardom, the chief researcher explained the success of his lab as a product of Korean culture. The claim was that because Koreans are accustomed to using thin steel chopsticks to eat, they're more adept at manipulating cells in the lab than people who eat with forks or wooden chopsticks. In Seoul this past week, however, I learned that even this facetious remark is based on a false claim. Yes, the chopsticks used in Korea are steel. But in stores, chopsticks are normally sold as part of a set: two chopsticks and a matching spoon. They cheat.
(I did bring back some steel chopsticks, minus spoon, for the challenge.)

Korea - 1

2005-12-21T18:09:00.000+09:00

For the past several years I've often been asked if I me if I've even been to South Korea. The assumption being that as someone who ends up so often in China and (now) Japan, I'd naturally be drawn to other chopstick-using countries. I don't understand the logic there, though many people do in reality seem to be motivated by that sort of thinking, i.e. people interested in "Asia" as a reified unity. I know Chinese and Japanese, and those abilities set the bounds of where I can move geographically and be socially, as well as physically, present wherever I go.
Besides, the distinguishing characteristics of Korea I most often hear mentioned are:
1. Freezing cold.
2. Xenophobic. Even in comparison to other countries. They say Korea has been the most anti-foreign country in Asia for hundreds of years.
Doesn't sound like fun, does it?
So when a group of my people wanted to do some traveling outside Japan this December, I had Korea at the bottom of the list of options. Visiting Korea in the winter with no Koreans along. What could be worse? But between everyone's conflicting schedules and the need to keep costs down, I gave in and Korea was the eventual choice.
So now I've given up the anti-Korea position I've held for so many years.

Bitter cold: It's true the temperature never made it much above freezing while we were there. Lakes and ponds were walkable. But without the twin evils of winter in Beijing - fierce wind and inadequate indoor heating - it wasn't so bad. A couple of people traveling with me did find it pretty frigid, but I think they were only wearing one layer of pants. It's like not bothering to wear a coat. How can you blame the weather?
Language: Knowing zero words in a language (like me and Mongolian) really leaves you helpless. But if you're just sightseeing, being able to say a handful of things and understand simple responses increases your power exponentially. Luckily Japan has 1) a lot of people who travel to Korea, and 2) the world's biggest comic book industry. The result is a huge variety of options for someone hoping to learn simple Korean with as little pain as possible. The standard claim is that you can learn the Korean alphabet in an hour. It took me 2 or 3 hours stretched out over a few days, but I can sound out pretty much any Korean word now. Of course that's now the same as knowing what the words mean, but it made a huge difference in being able to recogize a limited set of words on maps, signs, and subways.
Xenophobia: I've met several Japanese people who told of getting very hostile treatment when they traveled in Korea, even in the airport. And it's conventional wisdom that the US military stationed there has made Americans quite unpopular. So as an American traveling with two Japanese people (and one Chinese), I was prepared to treat hostility as just part of the experience. But there wasn't one such instance. A few people were bruque with us, but the issue was always our lack of language skill. Most people knew a little Japanese and were willing to use it with us. It probably helped that our group was too mixed to be stereotyped more concretely than as ignorant tourists.

More to come.

Merry Christmas - 1

2005-12-14T17:06:00.000+09:00

In early November, Christmas decorations began going up all over the city. The managers of the Big Camera electronics store decided to brighten up the shopping district near Yokohama Station by painting veins across the entire surface of their building.
At first I was dumbfounded. Then I realized it was part of their sales campaign for the War of the Worlds DVD. Even so, Japan receives coolness points for such striking exterior decor. In the US, protests from locals, passerby, or the city government would force the store to cover up and take down the veins within a day. But people in Japan are less finicky about companies' intrusion into visual and aural space. Much more noticeable then the veins display is the 30-second audio commercial that the same store plays on endless loop, at such volume that it echoes for several blocks. Most Americans would be driven into a rage by it after a couple of minutes, but people here learn to tune such things out.
However, Japan ends up with a net loss of coolness points due to the Christmas tree in the one of the shopping malls next to our school. The tree is about 20 feet high and festooned with lights. In the evening, the mall gives hourly shows where the overhead lights are turned down and the tree lights blink ferociously to the accompaniment of the Star Wars theme. People take photos frantically using their cell phones, or gaze transfixed. During the rest of the day the tree lights blink more listlessly, but visitors to the mall can (and do) watch a video of about 2 minutes of the evening light show on a TV screen next to the tree. The Star Wars theme continues to play at lower volume so the video can be fully appreciated. And, typically, the 2-minute video and its stirring accompaniment are on endless loop. Photos of the tree continue to be taken constantly even in daytime. As this Christmas tree is a foreign cultural object, the video refers to it not by the Japanese word "ki" but by the Japonized English world "tsurii." Christmas is everywhere here - Christless, of course - but the Star Wars tree is unique.
Obligatory cinematic note: Here's my current understanding of why I liked the new WOTW movie: of the many alien invasion movies that have come out, this is the only one I know of that takes for granted that having the earth invaded by aliens would be hard for most people to deal with psychologically. It made me think less of its predecessors for not giving enough attention to that aspect.

Surrealism - 2

2005-12-03T16:30:00.000+09:00

Last night I went again to the monthly Modern Japanese History presentation at Waseda University at Tokyo. The presentation, like the previous one, was of someone's research-in-progress. I made the hour-odd trip up there because the topic concerned the formation of Japanese nationalism at the turn of the last century. Given my interest (for largely practical reasons) in both American and Chinese nationalism, I thought I might learn something useful.
The advertisement for the talk mentioned that the research was comparable to the influential 1980s book Peasants into Frenchmen, which claimed to trace the process by which the rural inhabitants within the borders of France began actively conscious of the idea that they were French. The author (who bears the misleading surname Weber) emphasized the role of mass print culture, railways, and military conscripition in getting people by 1914 to think of themselves as part of a larger, "French" identity.
The historian who presented on Japan (an English emigre now living in the US) wasn't just doing a study comparable to the French example. His research project is in fact conceived as a slavish copy of Weber's study. In this, he follows a long tradition of people who study Japan -- and people who inhabit Japan, for that matter -- trying faithfully to follow French examples in hopes of being recognized as part of the civilized world.
As some of the audience members pointed out, the way he's carrying out his study is a bit schizophrenic. Remember, his ostensible focus is the formation of national consciousness in rural Japan, specifically during the Russo-Japanese war (1903-1905). But how is one supposed to figure out what all the peasants in Japan were thinking? As a shortcut, he's reading through one guy's diary from that period. The diarist wasn't a peasant, but rather a landlord who lived maybe 20 miles north of here, in an area that's been swallowed up by suburban Tokyo. Still, the fact that he owned farmland makes him a little more representative of "rural" Japan than the urbanites who produced the overwhelming majority of written material.
Unfortunately, the diary doesn't reflect a "formation of national consciousness"; the landlord just worried about his financial situation, at least during the period when the French were supposed to be learning to be Frenchmen. The diary goes all the way through 1965, but the researcher hasn't checked to see whether it starts talking about "Japanese spirit," say, during WWII. Why not? The historian didn't even mention the possibility of doing so. That's because he's not working from the diary itself, but rather from a transcribed, published version of it that stops at 1920. The advantage of that research method is that the historian doesn't have to struggle with the diarist's handwriting. The disadvantages, as I see them, are a) he can't see what happened for the following 40 years -- rather important ones, which might provide valuable hindsight -- and b) who knows what juicy bits may have been cut out by the diarist's son, who did the transcription.
So we have this diary that doesn't conveniently contain displays of nationalism. The historian supplements it with data from commercial and government records to see how the Russo-Japanese war affected the lives of people in that village. Basically, taxes went up. People in other parts of the country complained about being drafted into the country, but we don't know how many people were conscripted from this particular village. The other people at the talk pointed out that "the economic burdens of war" is not the same issue as "nationalist consciousness." Hence criticism of the research project as schizophrenic.

After the talk, most of those who had attended it proceeded to a nearby Nepalese restaurant. We were divided into two tables, with the scholars of Japanese history at the larger table and everyone else -- me among them, of course -- at the smaller one. Sitting across from me was a professor of modern Japanese politics, tenured at a major US state university. I mention him because he gave me an eye-opening lesson on what I may turn into without careful attention.
Basically, he has my same habit of making jokes that consist of statements too outrageous to be taken seriously, often extending into tirades. As an example (his not mine), "I oppose gay marriage only because there are a lot of gays in my neighborhood. If they get married they'll adopt kids, and I hate kids, so I oppose gay marriage because I want to keep kids out of my neighborhood." I was a bit surprised by how extreme his statements got and how ready he was to make them in front of people he'd only just met. My feeling is that I would never go so far so quickly, but then I have suspicions that at times I do. But certainly, I'll be acting perfectly. . . respectable. . . by the time I'm in his position: at least 10 years older than me, and tenured. Right? So I thought. But this was a warning that respectability doesn't come upon one automatically. I hope one day not be be sitting in a restaurant telling new acquaintances, "Now I'm tenured, which means I can devote myself to screwing people over out of pure spite," as he was.
It crossed my mind that he may be unmarried and bitter. He didn't make any indication of being married, and certainly claiming to hate children seems more typical of the bitter unmarried than even the bitter married sort. It's conventional wisdom that in academics, bonding betweeen colleagues depends to a great extent on gatherings for faculty families, conversations about one's children, and having one's children participate in the same schools and activities as the offspring of one's colleagues. The Chronicle of Higher Education, in one of its many columns on the phenomenon, reported on an unmarried psychology professor who got so sick of all the family stuff in her department that she got a "Center for Singleness Studies" established at her school. In all seriousness.
So meeting this man has made me more concerned with . . . mental hygiene. Not in its usual sense, as a somewhat archaic synonym for mental health. Rather, in a narrower sense, of being attentive to one's condition so that one doesn't gradually, imperceptibly go crazy, or drift to the boundaries of social functionality. I may also have to rethink my long-held conviction that marriage before tenure is a bad long-term choice. I.e., I may start weighing the concrete limits it places on one's career options with the less-tangible considerations of "mental hygiene."

Names - 1

2005-11-24T16:37:00.000+09:00

In Japan, it's uncommon but not unheard of for a husband to take the wife's family name upon marriage. It has to do with the family graves. Looking after family graves is the reponsibility of the eldest male within a certain degree of kinship; something like the oldest grandson, I think. So a family that goes a couple of generations without any sons will have no one to take care of the graves. If it's a conservative family that won't let women do the job, they have to bring another male into the family as a legal decendant. Sometimes they "adopt" a more distant male relative, often someone who's already an adult. Other times the husband of one daughter will change his family name so that now he belongs to her family, and so can be the legal caretaker of its graves. I don't know how big a deal this is today; the Japanese people I know don't seem to spend a lot of time taking care of graves, and at least around here everyone gets (their ashes) buried in a community cemetary with hired caretakers. But my acquaintances here say they know men who changed their names on marriage, so it still happens, though probably not as much as before.
On the other hand, it's illegal for spouses to keep separate family names. The police don't show up to arrest them, but the marriage won't be officially recognized. There's some talk about changing the law. Only talk so far, though.

Akira - 2

2005-11-21T20:29:00.000+09:00

These billboards can be found all overUlan Bataar, the capital of Mongolia. What could I possibly add?

Worst Film Ever - 3

2005-11-20T13:55:00.000+09:00

For the sake of perspective, this is what I consider to be the worst film ever in absolute terms. It's not available in Japan as far as I know. But if you're lucky enough to find it, repeated viewing reveal scintillating new layers of incompetence, inconsistency, and unconvincingness. It's a film so awful that neither its actors nor director were never invited to participate in any moviemaking ever again. Its Associate Director, Richard Belding, appears to have worked with US president-to-be Ronald Reagan in the 1964 adaptation of Hemingway's The Killers. I guess the brush with Reagan and Hemingway left Belding with a taste for action cinema and manly heroics. The lead actor, Robert Resnik, was a bit flabby, hence the hand-drawn poster. You can click on it for a better appreciation of its absurdity, which still falls far short of doing justice to the film itself.

The filming itself was done in the Philippines; evidence from Sloane: The Movie suggests that it was cheaper to hire an entire tribe of man-eating pygmies there than to rent more than two cars. One keeps seeing the same two cars passing each other for the entire film, a flaw that might go unnoticed except that the hero trades in Car #1 for the much snazzier Car #2 before making his big move on the bad guys. And the tribe of cannibals charges onscreen inexplicably to devour one of the enemy.
Apparently the real-life circumstances that attended the making of Sloane were a drama that made the trevails of Apocalypse Now (also filmed in the Philippines) look like a day at the beach. Here's an infuriatingly brief note pasted from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/movies/trivia-faq/

Sloane (1984)
Action BEHIND the camera rivaled the action in front: a Guerilla army was shooting at Americans, passports were confiscated by military dictator's wife, an actress attempted to leave country with screenwriter in tryst during last week of shoot and had her passport revoked by the Americans who kidnap her at Manila airport and forced her back to the set, sabotage, the Lone Ranger (from the original radio series) saved the film, the original director of the film escaped the producer's wrath and fled to South Africa, crew members critically sunburned, weapons and drugs allegedly smuggled across international borders and crew members supporting and meeting with key figures in a forthcoming political revolution!

Akira - 1

2005-11-18T22:53:00.000+09:00

Those of you conversant with classic Japanese cinema are undoubtedly familiar with the film Akira, a postmodern fable about urban alienation which the uninformed have at times mistaken for an action movie.
Among the many visually stunning sequences in this film is one in which the anti-hero, Tetsuo, finds himself beset by hallucinatory stuffed animals. Critics have praised this as one of the most imaginative segments of the film.

After spending some time in Japan, however, I have found that the concept of onslaught by monstrous stuffed teddy bears and bunnies is in fact deeply ingrained in Japanese culture. As an illustration, consider this poster from the train station near my apartment. This is not to dismiss the work of Akira's creator, Otomo Katsuhiro, as uncreative. But we need to be aware of the resonance of Japanese cultural imagery from which his imagination draws its raw material.

How to butcher a scallop

2005-11-11T22:39:00.000+09:00

At least I think it's a scallop. The shell is about the right shape and size, but I'm accustomed to seeing eyes on a scallop and this creature doesn't seem to have any.
1. Scrape around the inside of the shell with a flat, blunt-ended knife to detach the animal. It will try to close the shell, but persist.
2. Tear away the fringe of muscle that adheres to the shell. Rub it well with salt, then rinse well with water. Eat.
3. Pull the guts away from the main muscle. Discard them. There is a way to prepare them, but it's said to be complicated.
4. Wash the muscle well with fresh water. It may be full of dangerous bacteria, but I've been assured that fresh water will kill them.
5. Slice the muscle and serve.

Worst Film Ever - 2

2005-11-03T22:28:00.000+09:00

Here's one of the candidates I'd nominate for worst Japanese film ever. As the title suggests, a house does indeed collapse. Two of them, actually. The Japanese title is Ah! Ikkenya Purores! which means Ah! A House Full of Professional Wrestlers! and is also true -- for both collapsing houses.
Unfortunately, the production values in this movie are too high for any unintentional humor. The actors are more convincing than any real pro wrestlers, and the special effects aren't particularly hokey. The intentional jokes are things like wrestlers smacking each other with live carp -- no longer enough to get a laugh out of me.
For those who are wondering, Japanese pro wrestling is the same as American pro wrestling was until the 1990s (when the American leagues put on a pretense of seriousness). Thus, everyone's a little tubby, there's a lot of playing around, and they wear the same rubber masks you see on Mexican pro wrestlers. A lot of the ritualized conventions are taken from American wrestling, including the requirement that at some point in every match, the announcer is saying, "OH MY GOD, HE'S HITTING HIM WITH A FOLDING CHAIR! WHERE'S THE REF?!" I don't watch these things, you understand. My TV doesn't work. But living in Japan one absorbs the culture.

Worst Film Ever - 1

2005-11-03T14:36:00.000+09:00

Last night I was up much too late watching what I had thought might be a candidate for worst Japanese film ever. This was Chakushin Ari, which literally means "You've got mail" but is actually the message Japanese cell phones display when you missed an incoming call. That's why most people translate it as "One missed call." I expected absolute stupidity after seeing the box for Chakushin Ari 2 -- you can see the photo on the side there. CA 2 is all over the video stores here, so it's hard to miss. I thought, "So here's a movie where people get killed by their cell phones. Pretty obvious idea, right? We already had people killed by video tapes, leaky plumbing, and the internet. Time for phones.
I don't know about Part 2, but the original Chakushin Ari took a couple of years off my life . This was despite my starting out with a skeptical attitude, and despite having seen almost the exact same movie twice before. I say I've seen it before because this movie is basically the same as Ring, which I saw in both Japanese and American versions. But Chakushin Ari gets its timing particularly well, such that knowing exactly when and how something is going to jump out just gets you frightened in advance, so that you're that much more frightened when it actually happens. Many a scene found me shouting "Don't go in there!" at the people on the screen. I think both Ring and this one are inspired ultimately by The Sixth Sense, in their realization that little kids can be creepy. They're always saying spooky things like "I see dead people." And kids are even creepier when they ARE dead people. Night of the Living Dead is scary from start to finish, but the scene with the dead little girl coming back to life is definitely one of the more nightmare-inducing.
The worst flaw in Chakushin Ari is the over-the-top scene where an unscrupulous TV producer arranges for one of the mysterious deaths to occur on his show, to boost his ratings. I think it's even the same unscrupulous TV producer who appears in Ah! House Collapses! which IS a candidate for worst Japanese movie ever and which I'll write about in the future. In Ah! House Collapses!he's still in pursuit of high ratings by any means necessary. There he lures our heroes into a house full of bloodthirsty professional wrestlers, and infects the progatonist's wife with a strange disease that turns her onto a mermaid. Did I mention that it's a bad movie? I have a hunch that this unscrupulous producer may actually be a real personality on Japanese TV, which would explain his appearing in such unconnected films as these. I'll have to ask around.

Underworld - 1

2005-10-19T14:12:00.000+09:00

The banner on the pedestrian walkway reads, "Gangs are of no use to our town. They will be driven out." Sponsored by the Kohoku District police department and the Kohoku Association for the Expusion of Gangs. People tell me that in other parts of town there are signs denouncing gangs by name, e.g. "The Yamada Gang will not be tolerated!" etc. I've never seen anything that looks at all like a gang here, but I'm probably not looking in the right places.
The building behind the banner is one of many, many gambling sites you can find anywhere in Japan, called "pachinko parlors" but basically full of various types of slot machines. Of course, gambling for money is illegal. One can only gamble for plastic chips. Then one goes next door to a used-plastic chip shop, where they buy the chips so the casino can use them again. Apparently you can get a pretty good price for your used plastic chips. Haha.
The ponies are apparently also pretty big here. I noticed right away that the bookstores have more books about equestrian events than any other sport. It took me a while to realize that it isn't that lots of people are RIDING horses.

Posters - 1

2005-10-16T22:54:00.000+09:00

These are ads for a detective agency, so the viewer is expected to imagine that the woman in the picture is saying something like, "Hi! Sereno Detective Agency, this is Miki! How can we spy for you today?" Yet she looks like she's helping you book airline tickets to Hawaii. I was amused by the juxtaposition.

Signs - 1

2005-10-16T22:28:00.000+09:00

Signs posted in Japanese can be every bit as amusing as those in English. Take, for example, this one almost adjacent to our apartment building.
It’s a warning to watch out for something. I’d never seen this combination of kanji in Japan before, but based on the Chinese meaning, I thought, “Hm, ‘Look out for befuddled people.’ Maybe there’s a nursing home around here. Or some Slow Children.” But when I tried reading the sign out loud, I realized the word written in kanji was “chikan”, which refers to people who molest women in public places. There are women-only cars on commuter trains because chikans are such a widespread problem. Everyone who's lived in Japan has heard the word. I’d just never seen it written in kanji before.
Thus, the sign says, “Beware of Perverts.” Why is it next to the building we live in? I've never seen one anywhere else, even in Japan.

Surrealism

2005-10-14T17:45:00.000+09:00

16 Sept

This evening, went to a talk on Surrealism in Japan in the 1920s and 30s, given by an American grad student who’s now studying at Waseda Univ. She was particularly concerned with how artists presented representations of China, which the Japanese army was trying to invade at the time. Apparently there was some implicit criticism of Japanese state and militarism which the enlightened eye can perceive in the symbolism in some of those surrealist images. All of this ended with total government cooptation the art world in 1939.

Sitting in the audience, I was curious to know who in Japan at the time was looking to buy Surrealist paintings with ambiguous symbols that may or may not imply criticism of Japanese foreign policy. Luckily a senior art historian in the audience asked that very question with an articulateness and delicacy I could not have managed.

The student giving the paper talked some about rich Japanese and Chinese consumers in Manchuria, but I have the impression they were mostly buying non-Surreal paintings of peaceful Chinese landscapes and happy peasants. Most of the Surrealist paintings didn’t need any market at all, since their painters tended to be independently wealthy. (Or rather the reverse; most avant-garde painters were rich because there was no market for what they produced.) After the end of the war, the National Museum of Modern Art bought some of the works. Lower-level government offices bought many of them also, since the “modern” feel of Surrealist paintings allowed them to serve as icons for the contemporary fixation on economic development.

Day one

2005-10-14T17:35:00.000+09:00

Most of what I’ve seen Americans write about their experiences in Japan has adhered to a few tired topics: ineptly written English, the odd things one sees for sale in convenience stores, the quirky combinations that arise in the food. I’ll try to say nothing on those points. Other points of interest abound.