Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Call me Rat Slayer

I totally came upon this by accident. I wasn't doing my semi-annual "what's my web footprint?" google snoop. I share a name with a sanitarian? I bet he makes more money than me.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Arson is Tradition

I was tickled by this. Though Swedish, apparently it's a tradition that even Americans can get into. 51-year old American tourists even. It's been burned down 22 times since 1966; sometimes it is smashed, sometimes it is burned before it is even completed. In 2004: "Two men were seen running from the blaze, one of whom was disguised as Father Christmas."

Perhaps this is the natural outcome of constant darkness and constant inebriation?

Here, you can check to see if the goat is still there.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

A Defense of Pure Creativity


Yanase and Maya Maxx
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Japanese artist Maya Maxx gave a 1-hour "live painting" demonstration tonight, leaving behind one wall-sized mural depicting a pair of monkeys and the cryptically open-ended legend "everytime, everywhere, everybody." Inclusiveness aside (a concession to the throng of grade-school children in the front row scribbling with crayons?), her mission and method carried an inspiring message of anti-pragmatism: she does what she does because it is fun. Having attained considerable success in Japan, she's planning to move to NYC in 2008 to 'reset' her career and start from zero. It's as if her artistic production cannot grow and develop without an attendant transformation in herself.

Maya does not consider herself an artist who needs to self-consciously expound or theorize. She speaks of artistic process rather than artistic significance, and she exhibits a purity of purpose unsullied by pragmatism. She has no idea (or interest in?) what critics in the U.S. say about her. Her art is thus disarmingly artless, and, accustomed to being filmed on the Japanese 1-hour television format, her technique is adaptable, efficient, and rowdy with speed. She begins by outlining the eyes with pencil lines (crushed into the paper with forceful conviction), then sketching the form with brush and black ink, and finally smearing color in left-right arcs with her fingers ("the fastest way to get color onto the paper"). "To draw a male or a female, you just need to imagine in your mind a male or female, and then draw." Wonderfully unaffected.

I couldn't help thinking that her example should serve as an inspiration for anyone faced with the bewitching lure of compromise.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Grimace




I've been fixing my jaw in a frown for so long that my teeth themselves have developed a dull ache and my jowls have grown minute creases. I've witnessed the cycle of birth and death over the course of these months, the ending of a great many things, and the transformations of aging; my face has grown ever so slightly more similar to my father's. I've become ever so slightly more familiar with the ineffable operations of the cosmos. . . which to Sisyphus might be conceived as nothing more than a singular enduring grimace. Yet:
"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
I am one step closer to the finish line, and yes, jaw set, I am happy.


I'm still attempting to mentally unpack some movies I've seen recently:The Rules of Attraction, Volver and Babel. It's hard to discern any thematic commonalities between them, yet, in separate modalities, each of them has been on my mind.


Wednesday, October 11, 2006

In Dark Trees


In Dark Trees
Originally uploaded by benkei242.
I spent the weekend under a canopy of shadows, grilling meat over a fire and avoiding showers. I came back, and my iBook underwent a logic board failure. This seems to be endemic with this particular model (and the one before it, and the one after), and now it only functions with a C-clamp pressing it into my desk.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Tick-tock

I thought seriously about discontinuing the blog. There's so much more important writing to be done, and very little time. I'm not sure how much more I'll be updating it. But nevertheless. . .

My mortality clock slides forward, ka-chunk as it reaches the next notch. Book 395 was Vox by Nicholson Baker. And again, ka-chunk. Novel 394 was Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Why did I wait until I was finished with 394 to mention 395? It's long been a policy of mine not to mention sex on this blog, and Vox concerns nothing that is not infused with sex. So, you'll find no comment here about it.

But I don't intend to comment seriously on Cryptonomicon either. My response to the book over the past several weeks have already been sufficiently interwoven into my thoughts that it seems simply tedious to isolate out commentary. But one thing that I noticed was that this work, along with Empire of the Sun both employ Chinese and Japanese characters, but only imbue the Japanese characters with any interior dialogue or subjectivity. There seems to be a Western proclivity to read Japanese modernity back into time, perhaps allowing convivial feelings toward a fellow post-industrial society and coldwar ally to color historical memory. It really does seem that although the 1940s American media tended to demonize the 'Japs' as brainwashed, bloodthirsty and 'unfunny' (<-actual terms used by Life Magazine), contemporary Anglo-American writers find the Japanese mind a relatively comfortable place to situate their imaginations.

Two questions:
1. How 'accurate' can these imaginings be? (Are we just inventing and projecting?)
2. What would it take for us to be able to extend this appreciation of human subjectivity to all humans?

Tick-tock. OK. Time for bed.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Ignoring the elephant in the living room

There's something for selective amnesia or strategic episodes of blindness. Life, and modern society could not, would not function without the ability to ignore the basest, most hideous implications of our lifestyle and social system.
Perhaps this is what Gus Van Sant had visualized when he made Elephant?

Monday, August 14, 2006

The ivory tower


jiyugaoka-watchtower
Originally uploaded by benkei242.
The world is constituted by text and numbers. By text, I mean interpretations and representations; numbers on the other hand signify standards and measurements. I've spent the last 10 years focused almost exclusively on the former, but I think it's about time I turned my attention toward the latter.

Another thought: misunderstandings principally occur not because our answers contradict, but rather because we are intent on confronting different questions. I can't help thinking this is somehow fundamental to the problems between China and Japan; one side may ask how horrible Japan's war conduct was, while the other may be concerned with the question of whether Japan was worse than the imperialist powers, or even the Chinese Communist Party. Of course that's all unspoken, but it operates as a subtext to all the meandering discussions over numbers killed, numbers raped, numbers subjected to experimentation. It's funny how those arguments also reduce to an objectivity-subjectivity dilemma; more irreconcilable text and numbers.
---
A metaphor for the banality of nationalism that just hit me: This is my flag. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Monday, July 24, 2006

Private battles, private triumphs

I considered long and hard whether or not to post up a presentation I recently gave at a family reunion, because it's intensely personal, and at times neither logical or methodologically rigorous. It's a product of my private mental battle with the field of Japanese history, and my own family. But personal as it is, this is where I stand on Japan, China and History.

I've been running. Recently, I shelled out for a pair of new running shoes, not the 'heavy man's running shoes' that have been weighing my feet down like squishy anchors. These are the new Asics DS-XI which seem to approximate a beloved pair of trainers I had in Japan, but which seem to have been discontinued.
I'm a shadow that haunts these idyllic streets. When I run, I trace the same paths as every other suburb-dweller, but only when they're asleep or away at work. Nobody sees me, and I see nobody. Today, I clocked a mile at 5:31, my fastest time in 14 years. And nobody saw :P

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Burgeoning on the bough


Backyard pear tree
Originally uploaded by benkei242.
Summer deepens in NJ; cucumbers are ready, and seem to grow an inch a day. Meanwhile, pears are languidly plumping themselves up on the bough. I can scarcely wait until September.

Novel 396 was intended to be Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, but I was forced to abort after only the first, "The Good Anna." I was much more interested in Truman Capote's dazzlingly wicked Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys. There's a half century between these two female character studies, and also a certain gender and orientation gap between Capote and Stein. Not surprisingly, there's not much to see in common between the two. In one sense, the stern, German scolding Anna, would be quite the match for the bewitching, impetuous, and ultimately damaged Holiday Golightly. Why do I feel like I've met various versions of Holly somewhere? And why does it seem like Murakami Haruki's various female characters tend to bear much in common with her? There's a silky dose of Sputnik Sweetheart in there. And perhaps Wild Sheep Chase as well. What is it with male authors and their fixation with call-girls? (I'm not fishing for a response actually, I know the answer instinctively.)

Stein on the other hand, is a bully with prose. The originator of the slightly deranged "a rose is a rose is a rose," she makes it her mission to bring the world back into our language, which has become so comfortably empty that we no longer see or smell the "rose" anymore. Her three lives thus are filled with the air of everyday real life, with all its cumbersome verisimillitude.

One more comparison before I sleep. Park Chan-wook's Old Boy is a pale shadow next to Lady Vengeance. Same auteur, same obsession with revenge, same arty cinematography. Yet, "The Monster" and Geumja are such completely different creatures. I won't reiterate my feelings about Lady Vengeance except to say that it has heart, humor and pathos despite its viciousness. I couldn't help thinking of Old Boy as lying within the precincts of the Hollywood "thriller" genre where an elaborate 'game' mysteriously unfolds between two competing males intent on bettering each other. As a 'game', it seemed emotionally thin despite its bewildering complexity, including wave upon wave of deception, (overly)dramatic revelation and the plot's strange reliance on hypnotism and suggestion. Silly and nightmarish at the same time.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Snuff Film (Horror of Modernity)

Ok, to continue the haunted musings from my last post, I want to talk about animal babies. Cute, miniature versions of our furry friends, just re-proportioned in the perfect way to elicit even more of our cuteness reflex. Over the past few days I've started noticing how many babies there are around this NJ suburb. From my window I just saw a fat rabbit diffidently heading my way, hop by tentative hop. When it arrived within 5 feet of me (behind a reflective glass window, naturally), I noticed its objective; barely visible within a clump of grass was an oblong lump of brown fur with ears protruding from the anterior end. Yes, it was creeping up to check on a 'lil baby rabbit, still so young that it could only manage awkward, stumbling hops.

Yesterday, before the torrential downpour, I noticed a mockingbird fluttering within the rhododendron bush a few scant feet from my desk and computer. I was mid-thought about how the hell it got caught in there, when I noticed its rhythmic pecking motion; it was feeding a wee little birdy version of itself, itself perched on a lower branch. Oddly, there was no nest there, just a baby. Maybe they had been evicted by a deranged spouse; perhaps the bush was only a way-station on a long, lonely Exodus beyond cruel central NJ (more on that below).

Canadian Geese, those plump, brown-feathered avians with curving ebony necks, begin life just like chickens: covered in yellow fluff. Reminds me that "nature's first green is gold." A few years ago I was jogging beside the canal when I was cut off by a parent goose leading a column of goslings across the path. I jogged in place for about a minute to give them the space to dive into the water on the other side. A cyclist coming my way heeded these diminuative pedestrians and patiently waited as well.

But, our modern world isn't always that forgiving. Last week on the left-most lane on the NJ Turnpike (the HOV lane) I swerved off to the shoulder to dodge a similar line of downy goslings following Mother Goose. I was traveling with traffic, at about 65 miles an hour. In my rear-view mirror I saw an SUV behind me swerve slightly as well; I have no idea if it avoided an almost certain smushing. They had three lanes to cross before they would reach (polluted NJ) marshland. How on earth did they get to the middle divider of the Turnpike? How many made it?

Seen in a sardonic light, I was an unwitting participant in Frogger. In a less humorous light, I was party to one of the myriad ways we've contrived to kill nature. Our industrialized world is full of sharp surfaces, engines that crush and smash, poisons that kill over time. But we're mad because we think it's a proper trade-off for all the goods and services that we can now consume as a result.

D' (riding shot-gun) remarked that the (cute) row of geese reminded him of a Chinese movie about a fetching young duck-herding orphan, and her tribulations in a small village in Inner Mongolia. Yes, but that was a heart-warming domestic drama about human kindness winning over a selfish mother-in-law. This was a snuff film.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Memento Mori <- the reason I count down.

Novel 397 was Concrete Island, again by J. G. Ballard. The count-down continues.

Immediate points of comparison:

Woman in the Dunes

Robinson Crusoe

Empire of the Sun

Oh right, the third one is also by Ballard, so of course there are grounds for comparison. But what's intriguing is how their commonalities shine through all their obvious contrasts: how can a description of civilian detention centers in Shanghai during WWII be so thematically similar to a tale set in 1970s London? Concrete Island describes a man's ludicrous but meticulously contrived confinement on a wasteland 'island' hemmed in between newly constructed highways. Here, Ballard's prose reveals the same obsessive/self-destructive attachment to the place of confinement, in London as in Shanghai; vividly he describes the convoluted psychology that selects its own punishment, and stubbornly clings to it. You see a similar twisted obsession with one's bodily deterioration, and a mad yearning for death.

I believe that Ballard is in a sense repackaging the visceral insights of his wartime experience into a modern allegory.

The accident that throws him onto the island, the tribulations that obstruct his early attempts to escape, his ultimate fatalistic attachment to it, are first and last self-inflicted. On one level, they result from his indiscretion (driving too fast so that his car plummets onto the island in the first place), but on another, are a result of a wider culpability. This is a tragedy that oozes out of the modern life we have consented to living, the devices we have chosen to surrounded ourselves with, and the cold embrace of the city around us.

The novel ends on an eerie note, but therein perhaps we can draw some amount of comfort; all of this before our eyes is as fleeting as a dream on a spring night, teetering on the edge of collapse, and even in the most advanced city in the world the jungle is never far away. Perhaps it is only in the state of nature that we can clearly see what is truly necessary, and what is truly valuable.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Through a Glass Darkly


waffles
Originally uploaded by benkei242.
The waffled ceilings of Lourie-Love Hall will stand for another year, I have learned, as the university debates whether to allow students the freedom to customize the rooms there for its final school year. Of course I did my own customizations back in 1992-1994. Who can forget the Skinny Puppy poster that leered over campus? The relentless Ministry beats that came from my window (and that once attracted a crowd of like-minded outsiders)?

Of course I know that I am a different person today, and my vision of the world then was but a pale refracted shadow, the imperfect knowledge of an imperfect and not-fully grown man. But when I looked up as I fell asleep I would gaze at these waffled ceilings, even as, inches away, the chill breeze darted in and tickled my cheek (in my memories, Princeton is always a chilly late-September. I will miss Lourie-Love Hall).

Finished novel 398, now looking for 397.

Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard, is the (semi-autobiographical) story of Jim, a British boy born of global capitalism, raised in Paris of the East, Shanghai. The narrative follows the "terrible city" as it stumbles forward in its old habits (costume balls, nights at the clubs, etc) even as war unfolds around its hapless British and Americans residents. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, they find themselves turned overnight into enemy citizens in occupied Shanghai, and are summarily rounded up.

I won't bother to re-narrate how the proud British, the wiley Americans, the vengeful Eurasians, all slowly starved to death covered in flies, ravaged by disease and mosquitoes, unmourned, in the civilian camps outside Shanghai. What is striking is how Jim, a child, becomes acclimatized to the conditions at the camp, to the state of war, to the disingenuous and hopeless optimism the adults were compelled to express to them. What horrified the adults most was that Jim was beginning to enjoy the war and the life in the camps; that he resented the American air raids that threatened to end the war, that he was afraid to ever leave the camp.

The work is therefore an exemplary bildungsroman, a coming of age tale refracted through a particular lens. Therein, its narrative illuminates a social order teetering on the precipice, and the way a young mind can naturalize death's constant companionship. I could certainly never write a work of such power from behind the windows of Lourie-Love Hall. What possible inspiration could I draw from waffled ceilings?

One final comment about war and subjectivity, two of my pet terms for 2006.
The novel chronicles 1941-1945, ostensibly the years of the "Pacific War." Yet, the conditions that brought the killing (and dying) to Shanghai (and China) began long before "the war," and continued uninterrupted beyond its much ballyhooed closure. Ballard prophetically responds to the announcement of the "end of the war," with an exclamation that he was thus witness to "the start of World War III."

And all through it, the Chinese, as coolies, amahs, chauffeurs, thugs, pickpockets, and most commonly of all, corpses, retain their impenetrable silence. Their subjectivity is silence; they are executed, they are abused, they watch, all without a shred of interior dialogue. It is as if the narrator is incapable of imagining, much less, writing their emotions. Save for one final quip, Chinese death is part of the natural landscape (Jim feels more affect for the bayonetted Japanese pilots). But here I will quote that one exceptional moment of empathy (at length):
Provoked by their curious but silent audience, the sailors began to jeer at the Chinese. At a signal from an older sailor, the men unbuttoned their bell-bottomed trousers and urinated down the steps. Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs of urine formed a foaming stream that ran down to the street. When it reached the pavement the Chinese stepped back, their faces expressionless. Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies and peasant women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would punish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge.

Written in 1984, Ballard would not have been able to ignore China's rising role in world affairs. In our own context, his statement has two ominous dimensions, even as his prophecy's credibility becomes substantiated day by day by world events.
1. The crime that would be repaid upon the rest of the world is none other than the erasure of Chinese subjectivity. The fact that Chinese death meant little to either the Japanese or the foreign contingent implied that they failed to register as human deaths. They could not be imagined as humans, in much the way you might identify with a protagonist in a novel. (That is what I mean by subjectivity.)
2. That frightening debt can only be repaid with none other than an equivalent dehumanization of the rest of the world, this time by the Chinese.

In that sense, Jim's final moment of empathy, insufficient and futile perhaps, is not only a warning but an epiphany as well. We are made to realize the pain and anger in each of those silent Chinese deaths scarcely mentioned in Jim's narrative, hinting at an alternative/obverse narrative shadowing the entire novel. From a Chinese perspective, that is. Is Ballard not saying that if the rest of the world cannot overcome this subjective gulf, then it deserves the revenge that surely is coming?

Monday, June 05, 2006

400 Books, 398 to go

Kanehara Hitomi's Snakes and Earrings was number 399.
I've been a bit obsessed with time, mortality and limits lately. Calculating based on my average over the past two years of 9 novels a year, for the 45 or so years I have left I should be able to read 405 books. I've rounded that off to 400, just to give me some extra rest in my later years, but that's pretty much the aggregate sum. All this means is that I don't have time for crappy books anymore, even though I just read one.

Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize in 2004 along with Wataya Risa. At the time, they were 21 and 20, respectively. There have been pointed criticisms of the selection of both of these excessively photogenic young writers, on the grounds that the Prize was trying too damn hard to drum up interest among the under-25 crowd, who are notoriously more concerned with comics, TV, and games. I can detect however, a minor parallel with the hot-selling novelists of the early '80s, namely the oddly-paired Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu who rode the economic wave (and materialism?) of their times. Critics were equally merciless to them, on basically the same grounds. One critic even remarked that Murakami's Norwegian Wood, published as a red & green two-volume set in the fall, sold more for its Xmas-time marketability than for its content. (My response? ridiculous). But really, focusing too much on the economic structure of the publishing industry is condescending to authors, and perhaps not too useful to readers either.

Kanehara's Snakes and Earrings is going to sell. I'm nearly certain of that. It's brutal, it's lurid, it portrays an underworld that we can be titillated by as well as moralize over. But it's also empty. It reminds me of Murakami Ryu's Almost Transparent Blue (the 1977 Akutagawa Prize-winner), which also reveled in the confused, nihilistic youth-culture of the '60s. And, in fact, Kanehara names Murakami Ryu as a primary influence, and somewhat nepotistically, Ryu was on the Akutagawa Prize selection committee. What bothers me most however, is how old-fashioned this call to action sounds, how often we hear that "the kids today are out of control," how "society's moral frabric" is in jeopardy.

Which is why I find Wataya Risa (and Haruki as well) so much more compelling; their stories are about characters who, bemused, self-deprecating, do find some shred of meaning. They can tell a story about people who are lost, with humor and a measured sense of wonder at how we put up with such absurdity. Really, the social message is muted, if present at all; but in comparison with all the overwrought hand-wringing about today's youth out there, isn't that in itself a political statement? Their likeable eccentrics seem to call out not for radical solutions, but for a greater tolerance for eccentricity.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Going Back to Nassau Hall

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Princeton reunions are driven by a mythology of timelessness, the eternity of traditions, and the (preposterous) notion that your Princeton years were the best years of your life. We come back to Old Nassau, wax nostalgic, and sip beer in plastic cups under tents spread in the middle of campus. Every year the myth gains concreteness, just as the our actual memories shred and tear like a business card accidentally put through a washing machine.
I arrived on campus on friday evening, and was greeted by the eternal Princeton: the smell of damp grass, the slip and scrape of the soles of your shoes on the slate paving stones, the rain-darkened stone of the gothic archways. But this year, the spell is broken; my old dormitory is scheduled to be razed this year, and my old eating club recently went bankrupt. The past, it seems, will be truncated at 2006. Then the deluge began, and the battering rain sent us scurrying, birthed great muddy torrents running down Nassau street, a great flood to wash everything away. Ten years ago, I graduated a scientist, but in the intervening years, graduate school in the humanities (constructivism, relativism, subjectivism) has succeeded in erasing much of that previous self. It can be called growth, sure, but on the other hand I've yet to decipher the meaning of everything that I thought, and felt. Is that previous self still hidden somewhere inside, and do those old freshman-year debates about God and rationality still inform my ideas today? Or rather, does the past only exist to obliterate the present and future? More concretely, doesn't the past conclusively show us that nothing is permanent, that everything changes, that everything falls apart, that people disappear forever? And if we realize this, can the past not empower us to plot the future fearlessly, to reinvent ourselves fearlessly, because it teaches us that that which has passed is both irredeemable and irretreivable? To rephrase it in a concise axiom: historicity is the opposite of nostalgia?
Or, more bluntly, "If there's been a way to build it, there'll be a way to destroy it."

Thursday, May 25, 2006

1,000,000 bats


1,000,000 bats
Originally uploaded by benkei242.
Austin is home to "the world's largest urban bat population," and as you can easily see, they take to the air en masse. Responding to a bat signal at dusk unperceivable by humans, they launch from their roosts within the 16" channels cut into the concrete underbelly of the bridge. It's a nightly event; people bring their kids, picnic blankets, lawn chairs.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Midnight's Child

Driving east from Austin the air turned stickier and the sky steel-grey, and after certain turns the road stretched momentarily, empty and inviting, to the horizon. I arrived in 'Houston' to visit relatives both young and old, but the 'city' was not recognizable as anything but giant houses hidden among wooded lanes, and giant highways flanked by chain stores, the names of which should be recognized coast-to-coast. Dead racoons decorated the streets. Other roadkill were decomposed to clumps of moist-looking dirt, identifiable only by scaly bits, or denuded feathers. As formless as Houston.

I had lunch at the world's dirtiest Pizza Hut, which was infested with flies as assiduous as the wait-staff was indifferent.

After midnight, I walked to the Dennys next to the hotel and sat down with Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a weighty worrying work describing the 31 year history (and 31 year prehistory!) of one Saleem Sinai. Saleem, the unreliable fatalistic narrator, believes his own phantasmagorical fate is tied to that of the nation of India (a community wild, fissiparious, and imagined). At 31 he believes his end (and India's?) is near, and openly declares that he is 'cracking' and falling apart. He and the other children of midnight (born at the midnight moment where India was born from colonial British rule), gifted with strange and wondrous powers, represented the diverse potentials, the mystical chaos, the superstitions and traditions of that populace which would be disciplined into a modern nation. His hopelessness, and the ultimate destruction of the children (during the 1975-1977 state of Emergency called by Indira Gandhi where hundreds of thousands were put in jail, or worse.) seems to speak of the tragedies and contradictions of modernization, development, and political power. (My immediate interpretation: why is it necessary for post-colonial regimes to repeat the brutal legacies of their former colonial masters? Why repeat the massacres perpetrated by the British, in the name of the nation?)
The work is surprisingly consistent for all its flabby interior monologue, its interjections by Padma (his erstwhile lover and audience throughout), its indulgent forays into dream and suppposition. Oblique references uttered early prove to be omens, that if remembered correctly by befuddled readers reveal their significance in later chapters. The puzzling complexity of the work must have been a gargantuan task to keep straight; I can imagine stacks and stacks of notecards.
One lesson from Saleem Sinai (Rushdie) straight to me:
All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in ths game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent. . .

Friday, May 19, 2006

Numb in Austin

Modern transportation is time travel. The mind struggles to keep up with speed that blurs landscape and launches you into a different season. I left NJ in May one day, and within hours arrived in August's sweaty embrace. Temperatures in the 90s, faded blue sky. It takes time for consciousness to adjust.
The birds are different here; black as ravens, long tails, needle beaks, strutting tall on legs in time with thrusts of the head (clumsily like all birds, trying to keep balance), chirps like lilting questions ("eep? eep?").
The air, rainless. The 'city' is a series of strip-malls, wooded parks, miniature apartment houses. Where the city recedes, the elevated interleaved highways lead you out into the surrounding suburbia with its expansive hills of brown brush dotted with small green shrubs.
Far away from Tokyo, which is now the past and not dissimilar to a dream.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Cherry blossoms, a circle of light, an unoccupied bench, and the epicenter of an atomic blast


unoccupied bench
Originally uploaded by benkei242.
I couldn't help being drawn to the quiet dignity of this simple photographic subject. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom on a chilly March evening at Nagasaki's Peace Park (Heiwa kôen). Fifty meters from the epicenter of the second (and last) atomic bomb ever dropped, it was said that the land would remain barren for 75 years. History has clearly falsified that hypothesis, and suggests as well that though there are few certainties in the passage of time, over the long span nature endures. The only question is whether we will be there to witness it . . . or will the bench be empty instead?

'Peace' is too simple a message to take from the atomic bombings, or at least too easily disguised for narrower and more convoluted advocacies. My own perspective can be summarized (and oversimplified) as the contradictory venn diagram of 'Chinese', 'American' and 'Japanese' positions. And yet, I realize that there is no such compromise ('intersubjective') position yet. And until there is, someone will always be able to manufacture from history's swirling paradoxes the justification to repeat the tragedies of the past.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Osaka

[I'm on a little trip right now, trying against all good sense to make it from Tokyo down to Nagasaki and back only on local trains. First stop, Kobe and Osaka.]

My nightmares often seem to arise first as comedy.

Stepping off the JR train at Osaka station, I followed a thin stream of people out onto the platform between burgeoning crowds waiting to board. The middle-aged woman in front of me stumbled, and I instinctively glanced down on the ground for obstructions. Her foot was being snared by a white sneaker . . . connected to a 12 year old boy who was apparently determined to trip her. No words were spoken. She caught her balance, and pushed forward, glaring back at the child over and over. Nobody said anything. I’d never seen anything like it in Japan, and I wonder if it’s somehow related to a particularly Osaka-inflected sense of humor.
Nevertheless, this comedy brought home how fragile society would be if this sort of anti-social activity were more prevalent. As it is, people barely avoid each other (and certain tragedy) on the streets as they hurry along on bicycles and trucks. People gingerly negotiate their way among crowds on subway platforms, even as trains come storming into the station. All it takes is a minor error, a careless fraction of a second, and there would be a fatal impact; how much worse would it be if there were a deliberate intention to injure or maim.

The first nightmare I can recall having is similarly equal parts laughter and horror. In it, I’m back in the house of my birth, haunted by a ghost. Of course, it’s no ordinary ghost; it's more like a Peanuts gang Halloween special ghost, a standardized image of a white sheet thrown over a child, with oval eye holes snipped out. This ‘ghost’ was haunting my bedroom, or rather, was following me around. And yet there was one small difference, and one that separates nightmare from comedy: below the hem of the sheet were visible not human feet, but scaly chicken feet deftly stepping forward toward me.

This nightmare image suddenly came back to me vividly via another nightmare two weeks ago. That night I struggled awake at 4am, rising out of a dream full of screams to the silence of the suburbs. Before I opened my eyes, I was watching a muddy street from the top of a 20 story building, in a city full of sunlight and stained architecture. In the churning mud below were two large buses, much like New York City MTA buses, one determinedly slamming into the other. They seemed bovine, stubborn and dim, as they collided, and I couldn't help laughing. "'Moo' you idiots," I thought. But then I noticed the riders inside, through the windows, and started to hear their screams. There was after all no place to run, no refuge for those trapped inside. They were tossed about, cut by broken glass and sheared metal, as the other bus deliberately rammed it over and over. The lead bus struggled forward in the liquid mud, caught and lost traction, and skidded to the left, its wheels evidently trapped. The rear bus then scored a direct hit in its midside, and slowly, viciously, proceeded to tear it in half; and as the metal skin of the beached whale burst, the screams of the passengers rang out. Interminable, terrible, helpless. I woke with my hands over my ears . . . surrounded by the ringing 4am silence. And by some completely mysterious mechanism, it unlocked memories of my first nightmare.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Nightmares

The past few days I've been beset by nightmares. . . many of them seemingly reccurring ones from my childhood. I'll post up a little more tomorrow, but I'm trying to get to the bottom of where they're coming from, and why now.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Conclusion: Sharing History between the “Good People” of China and Japan

So my piece was not selected for an essay contest, and that is disappointing, but second best of course is being featured on my own private soap-box. This is the conclusion to the piece, where I attempt to weave together miscellaneous musings on history, subjectivity, and Sino-Japanese relations.

Niki Fumiko articulates the point that the Japanese perpetrators of the massacre of Chinese after the Great Kantô Earthquake were after all, “good people.” This is not in any way intended to justify their actions. Her point is that under ordinary circumstances they probably considered themselves to be good and ordinary folk, just like you and I. Yet they were capable of picking up bamboo spears and perpetrating these atrocities under extraordinary circumstances. By framing the issue in this manner, she turns the question of responsibility for the massacre back onto ourselves; instead of simply indicting “the Japanese,” Niki is pulling us out of our complacency to reflect on whether that could have been us.

My own discussion of the aftermath of the Kantô Earthquake illuminates the presence of people who at even the darkest of times stood up to the frenzy of ethnic hatred and through their actions undermined the simple categories of Chinese victim and Japanese perpetrator. More than the “good people” who perpetrated the massacres, the story of these unnamed Japanese who defended and harbored Chinese students and laborers compels us to question the way we have constructed Sino-Japanese relations in terms of ‘us versus them’. They force us to reflect on the hegemonic power of national identity, and how it can compel us to forget our other forms of identity -- as human being, brother, or sister. Only when we recuperate that consciousness can we approach an understanding of how humans who fundamentally share so much in common, can paradoxically deem themselves so starkly divided.

In searching for a way forward, I have chosen to discuss historical method for three important reasons: First, the Sino-Japanese conflict revolves around unresolved issues of historical interpretation. Second, the national history paradigm demarcates boundaries between people at the sites of their culture and identity. And finally, the theoretical critique of objectivity in recent decades lies at the heart of the movement to revise Japanese textbooks. Because historical practice is so tightly interwoven with the problem, it may hold the key to its resolution. Recent debates over historiography suggest that history is not a source of transcendental, universal knowledge, but rather a human enterprise, attempting to bridge the gaps between individuals and subjectivities. Thus, when we conceive of history as a transnational consensus-building project, we are not only producing a reliable, pragmatic body of knowledge. By promoting dialogue across national borders this very practice can draw Chinese and Japanese interpretations of war responsibility closer together, and undermine the importance of national subjectivity in our views of each other.

It is no easy task for history to bear the complexity of emotion and subjectivity. The public debate over history and textbooks in the spring of 2005 served as an inter-subjective flashpoint, but failed to generate significant consensus between China and Japan. Worse, it reemphasized the gap in consciousness that exists between people of the two countries, and thus produced a context in which fewer, rather than more people in Japan and China are willing to see each other as people with similar values. Nevertheless, I see this as an empirical failure of consensus-building, rather than a failure of method. Participation in a shared historical project can enable a more global historical consciousness, and hence a cultural milieu ever slightly more conducive to recognizing each other, regardless of nationality, as fellow humans.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

good movies, bad movies

It's been a while since I last felt moved to update this blog. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since having a busy offline life is nothing to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, it sometimes disturbs me to think that I have little to express verbally (or at least to the wider net), because it seems to suggest a certain failure to process what I am experiencing. But that's enough self-referential blogging.

I just finished watching two dislocated and plot-challenged movies, one of which was willfully wondrous, and one that somehow turned out on the contrary to be a horrendously pretentious cinematic exercise in superfluity. Oddly enough both movies feature the well-nigh ubiquitous Asano Tadanobu. As a quick aside, I had no idea that Asano is married to Chara, and is part native-American. I truly adored Last Life in the Universe, but his mere presence in a movie is no guarantee of artistic merit. As I have always said, it's silly to make assumptions about the value of a movie based on its actors; it makes far more sense to judge a movie by its director.

Cha no aji (Taste of Tea) by Ishii Katsuhiko (who by the way directed the animated sequences in Kill Bill vol. 1) was the spur to my sudden desire to blog again. It's a movie with too many characters, and too little plot, yet sustains itself with a gentle sense of human connectedness. It's comparable with the open-ended and gently inscrutable early writing of Murakami Haruki, especially his first novel Hear the Wind Sing. The story in Cha no aji follows a slightly off-kilter family living among the rice paddies of Ibaraki Prefecture as they individually try to find love through playing go, escape the haunting of a gigantic dopplegaenger, produce an anime short film, and (re)mix a manga tribute song. How does all this fit together? It doesn't. It really doesn't cohere into a trenchant message like Lily Chou-Chou though both films share a certain penchant for lingering over rice paddies. But it's no simple celebration of rural life either, as it shows how deeply otaku culture can permeate into Japanese society through the interconnecting power of the media. Ultimately, its a reflection on the magical realism of quotidien life, and a rejection of the movie temporality which collapses eternity into "The End" and vertical scrolling credits. There's no closure for the movie, and you may as well pause the film for tea breaks without really interrupting its aesthetic message. You are left with the sense that life probably goes on just as before even after the credits roll, that is, full of magic, inanity and quiet beauty. (Much like Cafe Lumiere, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien).

Bright Future (Akarui mirai) by Kurosawa Kiyoshi on the other hand was a terrible waste of time and cinematic seriousness. I really did feel cheated after wading through its 2 hour, unpredictably paced, running time. Here, dispensing with standard plot development yields a disagreeably tedious and pretentious film. More stunning was how poorly Kurosawa develops his characters, mostly notably the roles played Odagiri Joe and Asano Tadanobu. Overloaded with obscure metaphor and imagery, the story seems to suggest very little. If there is any message on the surface, it is intensely negative; it's hard to see any redeeming value in teenage rebellion when there is no comprehensible motive. I'm half convinced that the director was too lazy to work any causality into the plot. . . (also inexplicable is the use of Gas Panic Yokohama as the setting for several scenes).

One interesting juxtaposition posed by these two films is their conflicting approaches to youth and family in contemporary Japan. The sense of crisis in Bright Future is shrill and unmistakeable. What it lacks of course is any concrete answer, or even question(!), regarding that crisis. The families are fractured, and the children live in a Charlie Brown world where the adults all seem to be speaking a language they don't comprehend. The only way out seems to be suggested by magical role played by hordes of poisonous red jellyfish, mystically thriving in Tokyo's river and sewer system. The Japanese countryside seems to be much better adjusted to modern life, where the joys of playing go (and the naive elation of sharing an umbrella on a rainy day) seem to coexist with acting out super-hero anime on the train (a dinky two-car rattler that only seems to run twice a day). Whatever. They're both fiction. But I'm getting tired of hearing of the evocation of crisis among the Japanese young. It's there to be sure, but the unilateral message seems to be aimed at producing a reactionary solution, suggesting that Japanese society is in decay and in need of a return to tradition. I've taught young Japanese (in the countryside, naturally), and my experience mirrors the playful oddity of Taste of Tea far more closely than anything in Kurosawa's piece.