road to nowhere

False dichotomies

2007-05-13T09:10:00.001-04:00

Two boys riding bicycles arrive at the foot of a steep hill and begin their ascent. One boy, inspired by the human capacity to overcome adversity, leaves his bike in the lowest gear. The other, delighting in the empirical validation of mechanical advantage, switches to the highest gear. For one, the joy is in the numinous power of mortal transcendence, for the other it is in the luminous principles of science, but both reach the summit equally gratified.

During my months of silence, I've read a few more books:

#393 The Life of Pi, Yann Martel
A meta-narrative on story-telling, this book makes the incredible fabulously credible. But I couldn't help thinking that the work was designed for post-college reading circles, with "study questions" in the back, and a plot strewn with obvious symbolism and life-affirming messages.

#392 Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
A massive, flowing cultural history of the United States as an immigrant nation, but also a statement on gender, national, cultural ambiguity. Jeffrey Eugenides' prose is somehow both excessively exuberant and precise in metaphor, characterization, and insight.

Call me Rat Slayer

2006-12-05T16:17:00.000-05:00

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.

Arson is Tradition

2006-12-04T12:32:00.000-05:00

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.

A Defense of Pure Creativity

2006-12-03T01:41:00.000-05:00

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.

Grimace

2006-11-30T00:52:00.000-05:00

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.

In Dark Trees

2006-10-11T00:43:00.000-04:00

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.

Tick-tock

2006-09-30T00:18:00.000-04:00

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.

Ignoring the elephant in the living room

2006-09-16T19:42:00.000-04:00

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?

The ivory tower

2006-08-14T16:59:00.000-04:00

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.

Private battles, private triumphs

2006-07-24T19:06:00.000-04:00

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

Burgeoning on the bough

2006-07-23T00:22:00.000-04:00

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.

Snuff Film (Horror of Modernity)

2006-07-13T20:26:00.000-04:00

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.

Memento Mori <- the reason I count down.

2006-07-10T22:15:00.000-04:00

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.

Through a Glass Darkly

2006-06-28T01:19:00.000-04:00

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?

400 Books, 398 to go

2006-06-05T16:29:00.000-04:00

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.

Going Back to Nassau Hall

2006-06-04T20:02:00.000-04:00

"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."

1,000,000 bats

2006-05-25T12:16:00.000-04:00

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.

Midnight's Child

2006-05-23T17:31:00.000-04:00

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. . .

Numb in Austin

2006-05-19T17:56:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2006-04-03T01:14:00.000-04:00

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.

Osaka

2006-03-26T07:03:00.000-05:00

[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.

Nightmares

2006-03-07T12:40:00.000-05:00

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.

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

2006-02-27T06:21:00.000-05:00

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.

good movies, bad movies

2006-02-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

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.

This house is on fire

2005-11-26T21:37:00.000-05:00

castle-on-fire
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Natural phenomena in Japan tend to be hyped like movie-stars, attracting feverish crowds in a way inconceivable in the States. I'm in Kyoto at the moment, ostensibly conducting my research, but serendipitously coinciding with the autumn colors season and the massive crowds that they bring. JR Kyoto station feels like rush-hour at all times of day, and riding the buses makes you feel like you're packt like sardines in a crushed tin box. All the same, incidental views of brilliantly yellow fluttering leaves on the way to the station, all the more striking for their suddenness, can shake you from everyday thoughts. A piercing light, a shiver, and you can momentarily forget where you were heading.
-> One hour north of Kyoto, far from the crowds, I found myself at Genkyu Garden within the walls of Hikone Castle. For 2 weeks in autumn they illuminate the garden grounds and permit visitors to enter as late as 8:00pm. Ineffable. Visitors whispered their way along the paths, a long collective sigh.

Why is this person standing over the tracks?

2005-11-23T07:02:00.000-05:00

Why is this person standing over the tracks?
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

I'm currently away from Tokyo, where many things have been going awry. Still, meeting with some budding Buddhologists here in Kyoto has been somewhat calming. I've been reminded that the cosmos is far greater than any of my individual problems. And far more morbid it seems. Today while the rest of Japan was visiting Kyoto for its autumn colors, I took the train into Shiga Prefecture to gaze at the crumbling remains of Oda Nobunaga's erstwhile fortress-capital Azuchi Castle. Nothing remains save several orderly foundation stones. But the real story is elsewhere. While biking through dry-cut rice paddies a farmer stopped me, and asked if I could make out a figure in a red jacket standing over a train tunnel. Through my viewfinder, I couldn't make out the figure too clearly, but there was in fact someone standing above the train tracks. "I wonder if he's going to jump" he said in a thick guttural Kansai accent.
A train passed, Kyoto-bound. Another passed traveling the opposite direction toward Maibara. I doubled back on my bicycle to check on the figure in red and khaki. He or she was gone, but both trains seemed to have passed without incident.

Cemetry Gates

2005-10-18T12:29:00.000-04:00

memorial to the dead
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Standing in Zoshigaya Cemetery under the staccato rain, I couldn't help noticing the oddly tombstone-like shape of the Sunshine60 Building. Is it a memorial to the war criminals who were incarcerated at Sugamo Prison on that very site? And are the thousands of shoppers and office workers who pass through its vast halls and arcades paying tribute to their ghostly traces?

I shivered as a breeze brought a surge of water off the trees above me.

Big Fish

2005-10-14T11:40:00.000-04:00

Tonight, there was an advance screening of Darwin's Nightmare, a documentary directed by Hubert Sauper, concerning the painful assimilation of Tanzania and the Lake Victoria region into the global economy. Haupert spent 4 years filming the devastating effect of the fishery industry in Lake Victoria; in his words:
"The logic of global capitalism is more visual where the capital is created." The implication is that where the capital is controlled (i.e. Wall Street) all you would be able to see are a bunch of computer screens. Indeed, his film captures the starkness of a society in crisis, under the roaring Illyusha cargo jets, and on the shore of a lake on the verge of ecological catastrophe. Hupert argues that this is not simply about Africa and its fish exports to Europe and Japan; this is a structural issue that can seen in a number of local situations: for Japan, perhaps the most pertinent example would be tuna and paper pulp imports from Indonesia, a place where the fishing communities are too poor to eat the tuna they catch.

On art: the work is not simply 'reality' though the audience seemed to respond to it in that way. They constantly thanked the director for showing the 'truth' about Tanzania and economic globalization. Yet, it's telling that Hupert himself prefers to discuss the film as 'art', and as nothing more than an expression of his limited subjective experiences in Tanzania. Perhaps overlooked is the intricate editing of the film, working Duchamp-like with found objects, catching serendipitous moments like a discussion of war in Africa interrupted by a sudden thunderous squall, to an air traffic controller in a cramped tower filled with broken radio equipment frantically swatting bees. There is a touching lyricism to the film's imagery, which is perhaps reason enough for the film's prize-winning entry at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

But when the director talks of the political effectiveness of this 'art', I am immediately dubious. He wants to express the gap between our own societies and one where justice is conspicuously absent. He wants to generate anger, fear, indignation. And yet, when he criticizes the imagery in the news that has numbed us to the reality they represent, I cannot help feel that, while he has experienced Tanzania first-hand, his audience cannot help but appreciate his documentary in the same way as any other form of entertainment. Is this not, to borrow Guy Debord's terminology, merely spectacle? Can we not be satisfied with our artistic appreciation so that we forget our indignation? Can we fully believe the images we see without being directly implicated in their circumstances?

I am reminded immediately of a dramatic report commemorating the 20th anniversary of the crash of a JAL airliner this summer. While methodically providing evidence that the government and Boeing did not delve into the cause deeply enough, the bulk of the programming covered individuals and their families. And stepping from investigative reporting into the realm of melodrama, the programs included lachrymose reenactments of the victims, and how their families dealt with the disaster. While there is potential for serious public reevaluation of the case, and creation of political action to force a deeper investigation by the government, the Japanese friends I spoke to did not believe any of this would take place. (In fact, the issue quickly faded from the media after the commemoration.) Thus, what was the point? Emotional catharsis? And how different is this from Saupert's work? Is it merely full of sound and fury? And how do we develop from this medium a politically effective awareness?

And to take this thought experiment further, I can't help noticing the connections between these types of reenactments and the Japanese traditional theatrical form 'Noh'. In Noh, the actors are seen to channel the residual emotions of restless spirits, a practice derived from shamanistic Shinto rites like kagura. The actors 'become' the spirits, whose anger or grief is quieted by a priest on stage. Thus, the ultimate aim is neither change or political action, but exorcism. The melodrama of the reenactment on Japanese TV today seems to provide a similar outlet for the audience's emotion; we share in the grief, and are thus satisfying ourselves and our need to reassure ourselves that the dead have not been forgotten.

I believe in magic

2005-10-10T10:24:00.000-04:00

A vastly capacious hotel room built on top of a pavillion in Yokohama's Chinatown is part of the Yokohama Trieniale contemporary art exhibition. Defiantly superfluous and flippant, it even comes with its own brochure full of marketing-speek. It's an extravagant bit of nonsense, but one illuminatingly in the wrong context; because of that minor distinction (the 'significant' world of contemporary art vs. the travel agent's brochure stand) it seems to draw our attention to the vast abundance of nonsense all around us. . .

The artist, Nishino Taro, describes his artistic mission as "creativity will save the world," arguing that artworks that scream out 'stop the war' in the end have the opposite effect because they deaden our creative sensibilities. But isn't saying that creativity is going to stop mankind from making war pretty much the same thing as saying you believe in magic?

But while confronting this piece I had a sudden flash of empathy. Today Chinatown was overrun by ROC flags because of the National Day holiday (Oct. 10th). On the other hand, certain shops refused to fly the ROC flag, and the PRC-backed associations were shuttered, somber, silent while the firecrackers snapped and popped around town. In the midst of this I began to wonder if there is any hope in resolving the entangled dilemma of Yokohama Chinatown within the framework of PRC-ROC political identities. More broadly speaking, thinking about China and Japan, I have my doubts over the efficacy of treating national categories as natural descriptive words around which reality should conform. Certainly as political and legal boundaries, they have a certain inescapable influence on our reality. But what I wish we could share is the creativity to see that nations can be unnecessary for the compartmentalization of our cultural and social lives. If we could imagine our communities in a different way, couldn't we rearrange the game such that we could actually win? What type of magic would that take?

Goodbye Kyoto

2005-10-09T10:48:00.000-04:00

at Kodaiji
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

It rained for most of the day, and I started seeing things in monochrome (with the help of a few smart setting on my Minolta S414).
I spent the last few hours in eFish Cafe gazing out at the Kamogawa (river) and dreading the overnight bus ride to come. I was thinking of the soft light of the setting sun screened by layer after layer of gossamer water vapor. I was going back to Tokyo, but I was wondering how much longer I would even stay there.

Who's your Danka?

2005-10-09T10:35:00.000-04:00

danka-and-me
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

So, I was enjoying a Red Stripe beer at a reggae bar called 'Rub-a-Dub' in Kyoto (yes, there are bars for every persuasion here) when a woman walks in wearing a formal black kimono. This is very unusual for the t-shirt, Teva sandals expat crowd. But she's swaying to the dub, and sipping a cocktail now, with a client in tow.
Am I stupid? I'm striking up a conversation with her, even though her client is probably paying $250 an hour for her company. Her name is 'Danka' (nearly like 'thank you' in German) and her website is here. Apparently, she had just finished a shamisen performance.

Why reggae? She explained that 20 years ago, when she was still in highschool she used to frequent this bar. It was her decision to drag her client there, under the wan light and crude graffiti. Guess she had something of the bad girl in her back then. And even now, still?

Everything's changing

2005-10-09T10:21:00.000-04:00

kobe-harbor
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Early evening at Kobe's commercial port, and the wind is blowing cool down from the cloudless sky. I planted myself on a mooring post and started to sketch the harbor scene in front of me. This was not art for the sake of art; I was only doing it to train my eyes to see again. Sitting in one place for a long time teaches you to that you are not the only one in motion, that the world around you is actually subtlely evolving and shifting in aspect.

After about twenty minutes of painstaking visualization and sketching, an elderly lady in a white polka-dot purple blouse, somehow reminiscent of the Japanese farmland, approached and asked if I was drawing something. I looked into her sun-weathered face, no longer young and with wrinkles radiated outward from her puckered lips. She told me in a heavy kansai accent that she used to oil-paint when she was young. . . she used to love to paint. . . Now her son, who works in the harbor adminstration office, is too busy for such things, and so is she. She pointed to a broad white building, gleaming in the setting sunlight.
"I work there, at the Oriental Hotel, for 800 yen an hour. It's tough. I'm too busy to paint anymore. When we moved, we had to throw away all my painting supplies. . . "

The sky was turning from the color of faded jeans back to its original deep indigo hue.

"My husband's now retired, but he worked five years past the usual retirement age, and even now he still gets back in the truck to make deliveries a few times a week. It doesn't bring in much money, but we need it."

"I used to paint. I miss it." She's now back on topic. It's almost too dark to continue drawing.

"Let's meet again." She turned away as she finished her story. I imagine she must not have had anyone to listen to her all day, while she toiled for 800 yen an hour. She didn't care that I was a foreigner, that I spoke with an accent; she never made a single comment about that.

I looked down at my drawing. The scene in front of me was thoroughly transformed. The derricks were facing 180 degrees away, the lights were on and shadows were stretching over the contours I had already traced. Nothing matched.

Spider Fight

2005-10-05T10:52:00.000-04:00

Hikone in the Dark
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Hikone is a strange, quiet city along the shore of Lake Biwa. At night, reluctant to board the train directly, I turned back toward the castle and park. The sky was black as pitch, and the chilly breeze was full of the heavy silence of the Japanese countryside. Cars would intermittantly roar past, but the silence would remain. Students strolled by me in groups of three or four, wearing the unadorned and charmless uniforms of at least 30 years ago (for the boys, perhaps not 100 years ago). Nobody had dyed hair. I didn't notice a single pair of loose socks. Some were smiling as they strolled, chatting, joking. Others held their silence behind troubled frowns, the depths of which no one else would ever know. Theirs is an unassuming town, where the stores close at 6:00PM, and nights are most often spent in warmly lit homes. I was envious, nostalgic.

One lap around the park, and angry thoughts entered my head. Around and around they went, (as tends to happen these days). Then as I passed a lamp-post, I noticed a tangle of spiderwebs where two spindly spiders were frantically struggling under the wan light, stabbing each other with their needle-like legs. Faintly bouncing on sticky silken strands, theirs was surely a poisonous, victorless struggle. The perfect visual metaphor.

early morning light

2005-10-02T04:48:00.000-04:00

early morning light
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

The light at 6:30AM is somehow different in quality than the hazy late-afternoon sun. At times like this, even the drab colors of Kyoto's plaster and wood homes seem to gleam with an unexpected richness.

Kyoto in the morning

2005-09-29T06:30:00.000-04:00

Riding the overnight buses in Japan is an experience you would do well to avoid. I boarded the bus in a spacious underground parking lot in Shinjuku, and then floated off into the night city. It was like drifting above the city, because all the Tokyo-area expressways are elevated, and your line of sight weaves across the sea of lighted windows at somewhere near the 10th floor level. Our first stop: Tokyo Disneyland. That was where several more passengers were waiting for us at 11:30PM. I have no idea if they went all the way to Chiba Disneyland to wait for the bus, or if they just stayed inside the park until (well after) closing time.

It was crowded. I was wedged between the cabin wall and a sweaty fellow who never once opened his mouth. There was no room to stretch out my legs, and angular metal protrusions jabbed into my knees as they pressed into the seat in front. Then, we stopped every two hours between 11:30PM and 6:00AM. It was cold, but the air was clear and I could see Orion in the sky. People huddled together with lit cigarettes at each stop. I managed to finish Kafka on the Shore during these intervals. Even though it was cold, I was sweating.

It was slightly before 6:00AM when the bus slid into a very silent Kyoto station.

Changer

2005-09-21T14:03:00.000-04:00

Been staying up to 3AM these days for no reason, other than insomnia tinged with a slight fever.
Been waiting for the big one to hit. I religiously check the US Gov's earthquake site. I keep imagining how that big tower in Komazawa Park is going to go all jenga when it comes. I sometimes wonder how I'll be able to escape the subway tunnels when they fill with seawater.

Been reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ) and it provides some slight succor. I'm no longer locked into the idea that literature can provide a 'message' or an 'answer'. Yet, I am still in some way inspired, consoled, and reassured by the litany of beautiful things that I've found in the book: libraries, solitude,meticulously sharpened pencils, gazing at the sea. It's a relief in a way because his world is removed from my own, which is inundated (mediated) by an opposite set of values: success, ambition, money, fame, power, pride.

These are powerful things, and are certainly external engines of influence and change (but they don't make the world go round. the world just conserves its angular momentum). What I sense in Murakami's writing is a concern instead for internal transformation, ephiphany, growth (whichever term works for you).

And his faith in transformation and change despite our quotidien and bureaucratized lives is one spiritual conviction I can share. My logic is strong, but I know that I am not strong enough to plot my escape from my own frame of mind. After all, can you choose to forget something, someone? In that sense, perhaps it should be reassuring to know that nothing can remain the same, just like that tower can not remain standing forever.

Ok. Stole this one from BurnedOutEyes

2005-09-19T04:38:00.000-04:00

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.

Existentialist

75%

Modernist

69%

Postmodernist

69%

Materialist

69%

Idealist

56%

Cultural Creative

56%

Romanticist

38%

Fundamentalist

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

Jiyugaoka wildlife

2005-09-18T12:54:00.000-04:00

gecko-s
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

This is something that crawled into my life yesterday afternoon. I believe it's a gecko, though I have no idea how it made its way through all the screen windows.

In other news, I just finished watching Kore'eda Hirokazu's haunting Nobody Knows, as well as the cloying Korean drama-turned-movie Windstruck. Consumed together, they're quite a contrast. I would recommend watching them in the above order, to save your sanity.

Devilman reflection

2005-09-16T10:41:00.000-04:00

Just finished watching the wonkily earnest DevilMan, and am still trying to digest its complex melange of poor-acting/melodrama and its half-revealed social concerns. It's a story (based on a comic by Nagai Go) about a war between humans and 'demons' which turns the world into a barren, blasted wasteland. The protagonists are highschool friends who straddle the boundary between human and non-human, and must choose between sides. . . as the movie site queries: "Is this the existence necessary to save humanity"?

But behind the standard genre devices like highschool friendships, male-male bonding, childhood flashbacks, there is something dark and unnerving straining for expression. The violence begins with school bullying and domestic abuse ("barbarism begins at home") and the more bizarre elements almost appear to be metaphorical manifestations of this fundamental cruelty. Then when humans turn on one another, with lynch mobs and fascistic police squads summarily executing humans suspected of being/becoming demons, the story moves into more universalistic territory by dismantling the intial dualism of the conflict. It's quite a cliche actually, but somehow representative of an earlier era of idealism. There's no simple enemy, and there's no simple hero. . . simple judgments are disrupted by the presence of a third term. The interstitial role of the human-demon hybrids shows the cruelty of humanity, layered on top of the more obvious villainous role played by the demons.

And in a sense, my own research is a never-ending search for such third terms, a position to judge the limitations of comparisons. A position that allows me to criticize both America and Japan; rather than being trapped in "you can't say that, your country did worse". What I'm trying to say is that most of our judgements are constructed on the assumption of a simple linguistic comparative: "it's small" = "it's smaller than this (presumed?) standard". Zhuangzi (of the famous butterfly dream) made the same argument. If you define "big" from the perspective of something very very small, then of the myriad things, there is none that is not 'big".

Another example, given to me with far too much vitriol by someone I know:
"American men can cook"
"I see. I don't think most American women think so, because mac-and-cheese don't count."
"No, what I meant was that compared to Japanese men, American men can cook."

The addition of the third term of "American women" immediately changes the equation. The complex positionality of the speakers is revealed, and the processes whereby we make judgements is rendered transparent.

Breathing the air of tomorrow

2005-09-07T09:21:00.000-04:00

September 7th 2005 10:00PM

Breathing the air of tomorrow:
Typhoon 14 made landfall over Hokkaido a few hours ago
and like a giant pinwheel twisting the atmosphere
pushes autumn air down to Tokyo
like twirling the hand of a giant clock forward
and I breathe the air of tomorrow
gurgling like rivers of ink through the trees of Komazawa Park.

Inhaling the scent of yesterday:
Enveloping myself in a jacket (pulled from deep inside my closet)
against the unexpected chill I smell the fragrance
of a fabric softener I used up long ago.
I transect the jogging course from south to north
and sit by a silent fountain in the dark.
Anytime but now.
Please let it be.

Summer Comic Market, 2005

2005-08-14T10:17:00.000-04:00

helpme!-s
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

On this sweltering day, I squeezed into Tokyo Big Sight with a multitude of other sweaty people to. . . mingle through warehouse-sized rooms of dojinshi (fan-drawn comic books) booths. What can I say? I got to rub shoulders with real-live cosplayers, including (unfortunately unphotographed) Queen Amidala of Naboo and her entourage.
But it's been years since I've tried to follow this particular subculture, and I didn't recognize most of the characters being so lovingly reproduced by the fans. Four hours was enough, but click on the photo to see more pics.

By the way, the sign was a 'Comikke' exclusive for the first-aid station, offering the kind-hearted advice to get enough sleep, and try not to collapse (from the heat?).

Otaku, sweaty but always polite.

On another less humorous note, I just finished watching a documentary on Yasukuni Shrine on NHK. It's fascinating that the 'problem' of the shrine developed smoothly out of a post-war contradiction about two things:
1. state intervention in 'religion'
2. the state's official stance on the Tokyo War Crimes Trial.

I divide the issue into two frames: 1) the specific problems of the Yasukuni Shrine, including its enshrinement of 'class-A war criminals'. 2) the general problem of war commemoration, and state responsibility. The documentary lays out details for the first issue very clearly; three days after sovereignty returned to Japan (the end of the US-led occupation, 1952), the government determined that all war criminals would not be considered criminals under domestic law, and their families should be compensated with state money. In the international arena, however, they would accept the legitimacy of the court's judgement. From this legal basis, (and the Japanese government is a very legal-minded entity) developed the argument that they should thus be enshrined as national heroes just like all others who have died at war. Or at least, there should be no legal reason to block their enshrinement, since they are not considered criminals under domestic law.
The second, wider issue of a government's responsibility for its past, and how it commemorates its military. I have little to add to this discussion (as an American, we've done plenty of celebrating our military history), except to mention that Japan's post-war constitution maintains a separation of religion and state. So why the official visits to a Shinto shrine where Buddhists and Christians object to being enshrined?

Let's do this, like Buddhists

2005-08-10T12:33:00.000-04:00

. . .

OMG! 60 year anniversary

2005-07-26T11:41:00.000-04:00

This is so 1337 it's st00pid. But since it's the 60th anniversary of the ending of WWII, and I'm a historian (well, almost), I couldn't help giggling. Yes. I go giggle at times. ROFL.

Stinky fish

2005-05-30T08:48:00.000-04:00

Just got back home from Ueno, where I spent the evening sitting at a grimy stall, barely sheltered from the rain by a leaking roof, eating the most revolting food imaginable. . . over beer. I finally had a taste of horse (smoked like ham, though deep red, almost purple even), and it was quite good. At least in comparison to what should best be known as rotten, dried fish (called kusayahoshimono or くさや干物). It smells almost like that rotten tofu the Taiwanese adore. But it's fish, and it's revolting. It smells like sh*t (all the other customers tried to shuffle away as far as possible when they brought out the dish), and as you chew it up in your mouth, it in fact feels, tastes, smells, like you have a mouth full of it. Worst 400 yen I've ever spent. I tried to get the taste out of my mouth with the stewed organ meats that we also ordered. The two tastes rather complemented, to my chagrin.

That sh*t better not make me sick.

Sky-high in Shibuya

2005-05-29T10:39:00.000-04:00

I can fly. . .

Zooming out of a mid-day DJ event near Yoyogi Park. No wires, and no post-production.

Surgery in Japan

2005-05-29T09:51:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I went into the hospital here for a pre-surgery meeting with the anaesthesia department. There were about 15 of us, in a posh lounge/waiting area outside of the doctor's office. They told us to wait until 9:30am, whereupon someone dimmed the lights and started the powerpoint presentation. It was on anaesthesia and what to expect surgery to be like in their hospital (rather like the explanatory video in Battle Royale). Far too much information. I suppose the purpose is to generate a sense of participation, of being in control, for the patient. But I also felt a weird stress and sense of responsibility, lest I get some of the details wrong.

I mean, I don't even remember which of the white and blue cannisters is the oxygen, and which is the general anaesthetic. . . and then somehow, sometime they're supposed to administer a general anaesthetic via intravenous drip. I just don't remember how all that's going to take place, but I feel as if I should.

My trip, in five points

2005-05-24T17:47:00.000-04:00

1. Aggression (J train) and Zen (A train) on the NY subway
a. New York is a strange place, and nowhere is it stranger than in the subway where bizarre extremes coexist in the dank smelly tunnels. One day I was witness to a screaminng confrontation in front of the ticket booth of the J train East Broadway station. A Chinese guy was screaming "come out! motherf****r!" To which the ticket attendant, wielding a metal pole, would go sQUaWKsqUAWkSquAWk! from inside the booth. Since the thin spectacled hispanic ticket attendant wouldn't leave the booth, they remained at a high-pitched impasse. Even as I passed through the turnstile, I could hear them echoing down to the platform. (come to think of it, I saw many many fights/arguments when I was in NYC)
b. With all my bags, on my way to JFK on the A train, a middle-aged white guy plops down next to me; he immediately begins talking to me about Japan, how he's 48 years old, how his adopted father was a 'teacher' at the University of Tokyo, and about how he was taught to respect peace and his elders. He mutters on and on about how he learned martial arts early on because his father was a monk (is there a direct link between these two matters?), and about how much mental discipline he has. Next he relates how he stopped a thug from harassing a Japanese woman on the subway once. Leaving the train, he tells me to think of him if I visit the 'temple of the cat', raising his left hand in cat-like paw. I suppose he means maneki neko, but I'm not sure exactly what temple he's talking about since most restaurants feature such a cat. There's plenty about his story that sounds dubious, especially since he didn't actually say anything about Japan, or Zen that was not common knowledge ('what is the sound of one hand clapping'), and his weird confusion over the naming of the Japanese isles. Then there's the deeper question of whether one really needs to tell someone about their inner peace. What is there to tell, if your soul is completely tranquil? Is there any more need to assert your ego, or rather, is there not instead just enduring silence?

2. Little Boy at Japan Society
Murakami Takashi has 'curated' (more like assembled) an exhibition at the Japan Society entitled 'Little Boy - the exploding arts of Japan's subculture' (featuring a floating image of a Ikari Shinji on the cover of the exhibition catalogue). I find the production of the exhibition interesting, because its contents are for the most part things that are commonplace elements of daily life in Japan, and not per se art. But when you pull together 60 or so local government mascots and line them all up, it's hard not to consider them a social phenomenon. The same goes for the hello kitty display. And the room-sized Zaku head that greets you when you enter.
Another thing about the exhibition is Murakami's deliberately political take on Japanese subculture, at once as infantile, as dominated by American cultural/political/economic imperialism, as subversive, as a response to capitalism. One section of the exhibition featured a wall-sized reproduction of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, where Japan (is forced by the Americans??) to renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation. Next to it is a set of Godzilla dolls. . .

3. Mexican food shack
There was this old worn-down shack along Route 1 near my house when I was growing up. Apparently, they sold Mexican food in there, and my father would often, jokingly, say he wanted to eat there. Well, I finally went there, after learning that it's still open after these 20 something years. Inside, the floor is covered by worn orange carpeting. The seating area, nothing but several picnic tables and benches. The food arrives on styrofoam plates, but it wasn't bad at all . . .

4. Skullsplitter. . . in NYC!
Ah, I never thought I'd see this stuff stateside, but this was the thickest, murkiest beer I've ever had. Here is a link to the export label. Notice the placid demeanor of ol' Thorfinn the Mighty, AKA 'skullsplitter'. On the domestic (orkneys) label, Thorfinn is swinging his axe straight at your face, for even daring to open the bottle.

5. Smells of NYC
(my narrating ability is breaking down. this post is getting too long)
Sharp, but at times musty, as opposed to the heaviness of Tokyo air. Blue skies above NYC, bracing winds and clean air. But inside the deep brown buildings,scratched paint, creaking elevators and the dust of ages.

pensive jetlag

2005-05-12T09:28:00.000-04:00

I can't help feeling a warm glow in my heart when I see a New York coffee stand advertising: "bagel with egg and cheese - $1.50". So tasty. So cheap.

But that's what jetlag does to you; it drags you out of bed early, throws you out into the street with the early dawn, and nourishes you with a moment of morning calm while the rest of the city struggles to revive itself. And it makes you pensive at a time of day when you normally have neither time nor energy for thinking.

Being back is wonderful.

All is full of love

2005-04-27T09:16:00.000-04:00

Or so I would like to think. Robots making love could teach us a thing or two.

But the truth is that I'm deeply troubled these days, and find my own thoughts obscuring the real world around me. It's like a thick veil between the world and my consciousness. I may have to change my research topic.

The past few weeks have been pretty traumatic for people caught in-between the China-Japan historical/diplomatic/macho battle. Watching both sides is enough to destroy my confidence that history or ethics can ever be rescued and respected again. Friends in China tell me how disgusted they are with the dogmatism there. I also feel ready to retch whenever I see the Japanese scandal sheets threatening military retribution against 'Japan-hating-countries' (from Japan's Weekly Playboy), to a rumor that the Chinese are circulating an 'assassination list' of Japanese politicians and citizens. This is pride, but only the blindly macho type.

[the truth is, the Japanese media is as much a 'national' institution as the Chinese state-run media. their give-and-take relationship with their audience may be different, but they each have a role in whipping up nationalist fury, and assuaging national pride. the media here made a big deal about the 'results' of a DNA test done on the 'remains' of a Japanese abducted by North Korea. they said that the remains came from several different people, none of whom were her. however, an article in the British nature magazine Nature cast doubt on the result claimed by the government. Read about it at a Korean site, because no Japanese media outlets are covering the story. they just shut up about the whole issue, and instead are focusing on China. There is a good, though lengthy writeup of the article by an Australian scholar here.]

But back to my project; at one point I wanted to look at the birth of a multi-ethnic identity in Yokohama, and its manifold possibilities as 'Chinese' and 'Japanese' refashioned a social network that was local as well as global. It seemed to me that the categories imposed on human interaction by nationalism were being undermined, and that flexible identities were emerging that would bridge people living in Japan and China by ironically, not engaging national institutions at all.

My counterpoint would be Yokohama in the 1920s-1940s, where national categories were enforced through police surveillance of 'enemy nationals', and the activities of Chinese government-sponsored associations. My idea was to sketch out the constraints imposed by these institutions on individuals in Yokohama at the time, and how they were be absorbed, inevitably, irrevocably into national bodies.

Well, the contrast just fell apart. The more I look into the historical documents, the closer the present seems to recapitulate the past. The same language 'han'nichi' (anti-Japanese) was used back in the 1930s to describe the textbooks and leaflets published by Chinese nationalists all over the world. The description today of the May 4th (1919) movement as simply 'anti-Japanese' is interesting as well because it seems to follow the same thinking that dominated Japan at the time. While to the Chinese, May 4th was a cultural and literary movement to reinvent the Chinese nation (the boycotts of Japanese goods began much earlier), to the Japanese it was merely resistance to their imperial designs.

Context. Does anyone even remember that May 4th was supposed to start on May 7th? That was the date on which Japan delivered the '21 demands' to China back in 1915. However, to avoid suppression by Chinese authorities, the students had to spring the movement a few days early. But today, the Japanese press just labels it an 'anti-Japanese' movement, without any explanation of its context. Similarly, Chinese nationalist activities in the 1930s were also labeled 'anti-Japanese' sentiment (and regarding Chinese in America, the added comment that they should have been helping their fellow Asians rather than criticizing them), without even an explanation that the Kwantung Army had just seized Manchuria. So little context, then or now.

Ok, but that's jumping ahead a little bit. Evaluating the situation, I'd have to say that we're not quite back in the 1930s yet, but more like the 1920s. So, I guess that means less than 20 more years before another major world war.

When you ASSUME

2005-04-19T08:49:00.000-04:00

. . . you make an ass out of David Hume, who as we all know, thoroughly attacked the common-sense understanding of cause and effect. Ok, enough (pseudo)philosophy.

A few comments on life over the past few days.
1. Demonstrations in China: I still don't have a clear opinion on this, and the obvious reason is my ambiguous position here in Japan as an ethnic Chinese (who has been in China for less than a year total). But that statement's a deadend, because I don't claim to represent people in my position, or even know of any others like me. So, you'll have to take my opinion (and ambiguity) as the statement of an individual. Much as people absolutely hate to do that.
A proposition: the protests are emotionally and morally justified, but simultaneously a disturbing expression of conformity and narrow-minded thinking among the Chinese public.
What I'm getting at here is that I emotionally agree with the desire to give voice to anger over war and massacre, and the circumstances under which the Japanese Government has not had to take full responsbility for its actions. This is especially the case here, where the Cold War (I'm talking about you, America) has made it so difficult to bring any sense of closure, and where the Japanese (do I have to remind you, the aggressors) also bear a strong victim consciousness. Nevertheless, the mob thinking that prevails in these demonstrations is a disturbing indication of a certain failure to democratize the historical consciousness of the Chinese people, and an environment where a diversity of opinion is not accepted. Here, I am foremost concerned with the direction China's society seems to be taking.

Another proposition: should we not compare Chinese 'demonstrations' with the nearly constant (over the past few decades) loud-speaker activities of Japan's right-wing? A friend mentioned that they're parked out in front of Japanese government buildings nearly every day, blasting war marches and haranguing the public. Another friend mentioned that they also come by dormitories primarily occupied by visiting Chinese dignitaries and give speeches in (poorly pronounced) Chinese, criticizing Mao Zedong, etc. She and the other Chinese exchange students would gather to hear the right-wingers whenever they came by. Apparently, they found them quite amusing.

ODA?

2005-04-13T02:35:00.000-04:00

Japan's ODA to 'developing countries' can now be parsed as 'Overseas Distribution of Anime'. According to an Asahi article, ODA money can now be disbursed to buy airtime for Japanese anime such as Pokemon. As if consumerism weren't a strong enough engine pushing for it as well. In fact, after an exhaustive (and no doubt expensive) study, they conclude that a large percentage of foreign students of Japanese first developed their interest in Japan through anime. Well, duh, I could have told them that, and provided numbers to back it up too (from a study I conducted on my 2 classes at Illinois. . . )

Big boom in jobs for anime subtitlers/translators in the works?

(note: the article does note that Spanish and French-speaking areas of Latin America and Africa will be the primary targets of this 'anime foreign policy'. The US does not receive any ODA from Japan. It stands for 'Overseas Development Assistance'.)
(update: oh, there's an English version of the article as well.

Ride into the Sun

2005-04-10T11:21:00.000-04:00

I actually have a spare moment tonight, since 1. it's Sunday, and 2. I actually accomplished everything I intended to do today. The former condition occurs far more frequently than the latter. Last week was an especially bad case, but that leads to the main story of this blog entry.

I lost two days last week to doctor visits, and while I am continually impressed with the economy and efficiency of the Japanese healthcare system (no need for appointments! never wait more than 10 minutes! two weeks of medicine for under $20!), I also lamented my inability to get any work done. But making the most of a bad situation, I decided to tour around Western Tokyo on my bike since the clinic was in an unfamiliar corner of my district.
Here we have a classic case of an accident waiting to happen. I first headed south toward Tamagawa (the river dividing Tokyo from Kanagawa Prefecture), and was treated to this spectacle in the lee side of a tree-covered hill.

Looks like someone lost at Tetris. I guess this is supposed to stop erosion, but at what cost. This is the above-mentioned Tamagawa, home also to a bunch of squatters who probably do Bo and Luke Duke proud by straddling the prefectural line to avoid prosecution. Note: squatters not pictured.

Getting tired. Rode up the slope to Asama-jinja near Tamagawa Station, and took a breather to watch the commuters on the Toyoko Line. In a way I was glad not to be crowded in there with them. But then again, they didn't have to bike 6 more kilometers back home.

Substance (abuse)

2005-04-10T04:47:00.000-04:00

The weather is warm again, and though I'm pretty much living in a basement (where temperatures still linger in February), the dusty wind outside announces that spring is here. Yesterday was a blizzard of activity, in my otherwise quiet existence, and I managed a hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) party out in Komazawa Olympic Park (commonly filmed in dramas and music videos, including Shiina Ringo's 'kofuku ron') . Here are two pictures to show you what it was like:

blue tarp on hard ground
no respite for acheing legs
hanami season

a swarm of petals
lands quietly in my beer
color but no taste

Unknown Pleasures

2005-04-06T08:17:00.000-04:00

One thing I've come to truly enjoy, and perhaps this is my childish, sneaky side showing through, is discovering documents marked 'secret'. Especially if they date from 1944. . .

Small pleasures make academics bearable, somehow.

New New Order

2005-04-05T08:47:00.000-04:00

Strange, I thought as I was browsing through various skin-care products at a local drug store. The store was broadcasting a poppy guitar track which included a very familiar sounding bass line. But not too familiar, and I was sure I had never heard it before. Then it hit me; was there a new New Order single?

Sure enough, they have a new album out, called 'Waiting for the Siren's Call', and you can watch a dizzying video from it here. See if you can't identify Peter Hook's bass-work, in an otherwise rather plain song.

first-sakura

2005-04-04T01:33:00.000-04:00

first-sakura
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

It's cherry blossom season again. . . sort of. I caught this lone tree on the way to the station a few days ago. It jumped the gun apparently, since none of its compatriots were in bloom yet.
This year the cherry blossoms are late. People who made early plans for cherry-blossom-viewing parties are stuck sitting under nude trees, forlornly drinking their beer.
By the way, I got a Flickr account, so I'll be posting pictures from there. There's an iPhoto plug-in that makes it ridiculously convenient to upload photos (and comments intact), so you'll probably see more of these in the future. . .

[A]

2005-03-25T11:46:00.000-05:00

I haven't exactly been feeling well these past few weeks (weaks!), so most of my time has been spent visiting doctors and pharmacies in search of that magic pill that'll make everything better. But all this down-time has offered me an opportunity to catch up on some Japanese cinema:

1. First, the insignificant: Samurai Champloo is an exercise in gleeful anachronism. Where it pretends to be an Edo-period genre piece (specifically, 'chambara'), it's determining leitmotiv is urban hip-hop flavor. That's pretty far-fetched, but it carries it off with suitably self-referential goofiness all the same, freely adapting plotlines from all over (Zatoichi, Yakuza movies, etc.) This one is ridiculous, but amusing in its playful misuse of historical locale, event, and personae (and for the disciminating eye, there is plenty in there for parody). Now shut up and enjoy the show.

2. Second most insignificant: Shimotsuma Monogatari. In case you're wondering, Shimotsuma is a little town out in Ibaraki Prefecture, and the story naturally is about this town, and how it's not Daikanyama, Tokyo. Actually, it's about two girls who live in that town and how their styles and identities are produced by the media images they consume. Sort of. One embodies the 'white lolita' style only purchasable in Tokyo, while the other brandishes the country-side biker gang trappings readily available at Jusco (similar to Walmart). The movie itself is cut to pieces in a gaudy version of Tarantino's backwards-first method, and just as easily jumps from genre to genre (including anime segments, ala Kill Bill). But the intent is to merely tickle the audience, and not necessary to skewer them; the jolting shifts and odd twists are comic suggestions of our own media-saturated lives.

3. Last, and speaking of media, I rented Mori Tatsuya's documentary on Aum/Aleph/(or just as appropriately, Araki Hiroshi, the embattled young spokesman for the cult) entitled simply 'A'. Mori is ultimately fairly sympathetic to the cult (which was named Aum when it's members released the nerve toxin Sarin in Tokyo's subway network), and it is amazing to see how much access he has to its inner workings. The documentary picks up after the atrocity with the newly appointed spokesman Araki Hiroshi, boyish and bewildered, and tasked with explaining his faith to a shocked and hostile Japan. The documentary doesn't dwell on the details of the gas attack, or the trial of it perpetrators. That element definitely needs to be kept in mind however, since the context for the widespread social abuse of the cult cannot be understood without it. For audiences in Japan, overwrought news reporting has already brought the message home, but people outside will need to refresh their memories.

What is most powerful about this piece however is its depiction of the extreme, vindictive, and narrow-minded response by the media, the police, and average citizens to the cult. I don't believe it can really apologize for what Aum has done, nor does it really lead to a conclusive judgement of the cult as evil or not, since even its spokesman can not reconcile his own simple faith in Aum and the blatant deeds of its leaders. Cornered by journalists over the issue of whether the 'new' Aum would adopt new teachings, seeming to simultaneously claim both that the teachings were not wrong, and that there were some misunderstandings under the old leaders, Araki testily remarks that 'you don't seem to understand how religions work'. And he might be right. After all, all the denunciations and arguments against Aum seem ex post facto; the public has already judged it an evil cult, so people don't feel the need to be careful in their arguments, especially whether their criticisms can also be applied to other mainstream religions as well. Witnessing the police bullying of average cult members demonstrates an extension of this logic; since nobody is going to sympathize with them (they're guilty of being a cult member), does it really matter how far you mistreat them? Does atrocity make us less willing as a society to demand justice over vengeance?

But that's probably an overreading of the movie, according to my own perspective as an American. Mori's point might be simpler: looking at how Japanese society treats Aum cult members (who were not involved in the attack) only shows us why cults like Aum arise in the first place. People feel a need to escape. . .

Asian, American?

2005-03-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

It's a question, if properly punctuated.

People do ask whether it's liberal to push for an 'Asian-American' identity; whether it makes historical sense to group together Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos etc; whether it's any better (or different) than white chauvinism; whether it's not in fact harmful to the cohesiveness of us 'Americans' as a people (and a democratic constituency).

At the risk of being annoyingly academic, I consider 'Asian-American' a set of issues, a set of questions, rather than simply an identity. And I argue that people have the freedom, in fact should have the freedom, to interpret their own identity as they see fit. That's not a terribly unreasonable position to take, especially since 'assimilation' itself is not inherently good or bad. Two-direction cultural assimilation in the United States is one version, forced one-way 'assimilation' of Koreans into the Japanese Empire (1910-1945), quite a different one. The degree of forcefulness, and the power dynamic is more related to whether or not it's a progressive or oppressive practice.

Recently, I've heard the ostensibly reasonable argument that we're all 'Americans' and we shouldn't have 'Asian-Americans' 'African-Americans' 'Hispanic-Americans' etc. I can't help thinking there's something odd about this argument because it's always directed at these minorities. What that suggests to me is a certain logical blindspot despite the apparent airtightness of the argument. What I want to contribute here is not an outright denial of the validity of this concept of Americanness. Specifically, it's necessary to understand that 'American' is a specific political, but vague cultural category. Furthermore, it's precisely the regressive form of assimilation that only calls upon the minority to become similar to the majority. Hence, before we can dissolve 'Asian-American' into just 'American', we need to also broaden the definition of what it means to be an 'American' in the first place. And that requires educating everyone, not just minorities, to accept a wider range of cultural practices as part of an inclusive 'Americanness'.

End of diatribe.

This is a hijacking

2005-03-01T06:39:00.000-05:00

This was going to be a post about Asian-America. But screw that. I just finished watching Casshern(2004), and it's hijacking this blog space. By force.

But speaking of hijacking, Casshern does just that as well, taking a generic '70s superhero anime and compression molding it into a visually composited moral collage on the universalism of hatred and war. Plus a theme song by the director's wife (Utada Hikaru).

For a clear exposition of the plot, see this review from Midnight Eye. Also be aware that sometime in 2005, the studios are planning on unleashing this monstrosity of a movie on American (and other) audiences. Don't say you weren't warned. Why monstrous? Too much Beethoven in the soundtrack. Too many layers and filters to abstract the footage. Garish theatrical sets employing heavy-handed historical symbolism. Too little irony, and too many overwrought soliloquies. And . . . the cliche'd use of retro-future aesthetics (but it's still kinda cool to see people dialing from antique rotary phones and connecting to sleek 3G-style clamshell phones).

I'm being obscure here, of course, but what makes this movie so hard to ignore and write-off, despite being an unmitigated mess, is the fact that it is entirely serious when it visually links THE WAR ON TERROR(sic) and the JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF CHINA. Battle Royale II tried to do something similar, but only ended up jumping on the Anti-American bandwagon and focusing on Japanese historical victimhood. Both films do in fact inject real-world footage of war and death into their fantasy milieus, but while BR2 has the propagandist tendency to eliminate any ambiguity in the roles of 'victim' and 'oppressor', Casshern boomerangs right back onto itself. Not surprisingly, its ending also discards all the technological explanations and moral arguments that come before it. It's simply not possible to guess how it'll end from only the clues in the plot. And much as the movie cannot propose any solution to the cycle of war and vengeance, it dispenses with explanation and ends on an elegy.

But as I just mentioned, the most powerful aspect of this movie is its historical consciousness. Now, there have been plenty of movies positing a different post-war for Japan. This one begins with the assumption that Japan has conquered 'Eurasia' and become a superstate filled with Cyrillic and Chinese iconography. But even with victory, they face an unending insurgency on a continent filled with 'terrorists', especially 'Zone 7' which appears to be the Chinese countryside. The dingy concrete tanks from which the 'neo-sapiens' arise look eerily similar to the photographs of Unit 731's research facilities in Northern China. The grainy black-and-white segments showing the systematic slaughter of civilians focus on women dressed in what appear to be Chinese traditional gowns. Add elements of medical horror, soldiers in gasmasks, and a brief flash of a mushroom cloud, and the film's imagery is surprisingly complete in terms of war in the 20th century.

But objectively speaking, this movie is ponderous. The dialogue is stifling. The female characters spend most of the movie looking begrieved, but saying little. Character development is on the level of a paper puppet play. The plot is equally incredulous, having to make compromises to fit the original plot of the anime series. Example: the 'villains' need an army of robots to threaten humankind. So, they find them.

However, as other reviewers have written, what makes the movie difficult to simply laugh off is it's intermittent flashes of brilliance. As a 2+ hour long aesthetic enterprise it is incomparable. As a definitive statement on ‘war = human nature’, it is foolhardy and over-ambitious. What makes it worthwhile is its intricately constructed and self-reflexive question to the Japanese: Would the world be a better place if Japan had won the war? And to the Americans: What are you going to do now that you've 'won'?

Preoccupied with Occupation

2005-02-25T08:43:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I updated this blog, so rough as it is, I'm giving it the old college try.

For those of you who have seen 'Love Hina' (bareta!) the scene on campus today would have been deja vu. But not quite. Today after all was the day entrance exams are conducted for the incoming 2005 class, and for that very important reason, campus was locked down pretty securely. The big red gate 'Aka-mon' was shut, except for a slim little door to the left, where staff with official armbands checked IDs. So much to be won or lost on this day . . . But oddly enough the students (some still in their highschool uniforms) I came across seemed in rather high spirits, chatting and flirting.

Also kind of reminds me of Maison Ikkoku, which by the way is being resurrected from its original 1980s run by its publisher for one more reprint. Just in time, I'd say, for the 'PURE LOVE' boom. That term, jun'ai, has achieved vortextual status now on the heels of such sentimental dramas as 'Winter Sonata', 'Sekai no chushin de ai wo sakebu' and 'Ai ni Yukimasu'. Does the term denote a new aspect of Japanese society, or just a new way to talk about Japanese society? Here, I defer to Kaori Shoji of the Japan Times who does a remarkable job explaining the 'phenomenon' with a straight face. And yet, through her obsessive use of quotation marks for all the 'so-called' 'phrases' 'Japanese' people employ, I can't help detecting an ironic smirk behind the earnestness. Surely she must think it's silly; the quotation marks seem to put plenty of distance between what she herself thinks, and 'what people say'.

So 'pure' love is back. And so are the 1980s. Though they gave love. . . a bad name (bad name).

In other news, I'm doing some heavy-duty translating for my advisor here, who has somehow amassed a large cache of WWII Japanese propaganda. It's rather sad, and unnerving work, but at times hilarious. Makes you wonder if our own occupation of Iraq is really drawing on the correct historical metaphors. Instead of the 'successful' occupations of Germany and Japan, maybe we should contemplate the short-lived Japanese occupations of Manchuria and China as well. By the way, I've been helped a great deal by a new dictionary on the palmpilot: Plecodict. It's the only portable solution I've found that lets you enter traditional hanzi (characters) by the pen/stylus, and get pinyin romanizations (and definitions) out of it. Needless to say, that thoroughly streamlines using my big fat Xian dai han yu ci dian paper dictionary. Finally, the tools that I need. . .

You’re asking for it. . .

2005-02-16T06:59:00.000-05:00

In the information age, you can not only give someone a knuckle sandwich [the old stand-by], you can also give’em a spam sandwich.

So, you better shut up now, or you're really asking for it. Right where it counts.

It was a '3' here

2005-02-15T15:02:00.000-05:00

There was just an earthquake here. The floor started to jerkily shift around on me, the foundations started creaking, dogs started barking. . . and it was only a '3', though it lasted for more than 10 seconds. Apparently, someplace up north in Ibaraki experienced a 5.4, which should be more than 100 times worse than what I experienced. That's insane. And when the big one hits (on the order of 7 or so, as they predict), 30,000 people are forecasted to die in Tokyo. This is the second earthquake I've felt here in 2 weeks. I hope that's not a sign of things to come.

I want my stone back.

2005-02-15T12:38:00.000-05:00

I just registered my first shareware since 1997. Seriously, I just paid for some software that nobody would think of paying for. That's the thing with shareware; nobody seems to pay for it. If you just distribute your software, no matter how much you limit it's functionality, people rarely bother to pay you for it. This time, I just had to do it. I registered an Apple II emulator called 'Virtual ]['. It cost me $19, but the feature that pushed me over the top (into becoming a paying customer) was the emulated disk drive noises he put into it. It just didn't feel like a real Apple ][ until then. Now, I can play Infocom's Wishbringer again, and relive those magical moments I spent with that game in the chilly basement of my home (before my parents moved. now there's no basement). But the best part of that game was the packaging; it came with a white glow-in-the-dark molded plastic trinket, the 'Wishbringer' stone from the game itself. Now, that was classy.

A long time ago, I think it was 1989, I gave that glow-in-the-dark stone, plus my signature, to a friend named Sue. I'm not in touch with her, but I hear she's a successful lawyer now. I guess the stone paid off, but hell, that also means she doesn't really need it anymore. So, Sue, if you're listening, I want my stone back.

Japan as a metaphor

2005-02-11T07:40:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to grapple with my own (previous) fixation with Japan, and as I look out the window of the Tokyu express train to Shibuya, considering the grey sky and tightly packed buildings, I realize that I have always looked at Japan as a particularly vivid expression of human dignity/desperation. These moments come to me especially when I've got my music with me, when the shifting cityscape in front of me serendipitously harmonizes with the beat. Those are special moments to me . . . :P

At a risk of sounding obscure, I worry if I am somehow decorporealizing my Japan to a set of hazy metaphors. But at the same time, I also realize that Japan can not possibly be 'meaningful' without some romantic notions on my part. Japan used to be a fantasy-land for me, but now less and less so. And in the process, the metaphor loses meaning as well.

Vehicular Destruction/Vehicular Construction

2005-02-06T08:04:00.000-05:00

Vehicles; they transport us, they kill us.

Last week, I noticed that my train was late twice. When that happens, and normally it isn't a common occurrence at all, the conductor announces his apologies and gives some official excuse. Both times last week (two different lines), the cause was a 'jinshin jiko'. Translated literally, the term denotes an 'accident involving a human body'. What it suggests is suicide. When people here think of trains and suicides, they immediately think of the Chuo-line, the 'suicide train', apparently because its express trains rush right up against the platform at a sufficient speed to make things quick.

But vehicles here are also a source of fanciful expression. The 'new' way to get to Odaiba is aboard the 'suijo basu' (water bus) Himiko. I took two photos of it: one two. Himiko (named after the mythical female ruler of the ancient 'Wa' kingdom, apparently one of the early civilizations in the Japanese archipelago) was designed by none other than Matsumoto Reiji, famed animator of Galaxy Express 999, and more recently, Interstella5555. By the way, you can buy figurines of the Interstella crew for a mere 55.55 euros. Anyway, suijo basu Himiko runs from Asakusa to Odaiba for double the normal price of a ferry, around 1,700 yen.

In other news, I went all the way to the top of Mori Tower, in Roppongi Hills. That thing casts a loooong shadow.

Someone asked me to post some pictures of fruit, and well, I don't have much, but this should show you what an Okayama pear is like. The large wrapped thing on the right is the pear, while on the left is a largish Okayama apple.

The saddest little song in the world

2005-01-16T08:41:00.000-05:00

Done dropping LL off at Narita Airport, I am a loss for what to do next. I choose the Keisei line to go home, which is the absolute cheapest option (@ 1,300 yen compared to 3,000 yen for the Narita Express), and because I am in absolutely no hurry. In any case, I have Michael Chabon's 636 page The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay with me.
At the bottom of the escalator, sliding into the subterranean cavern that is the train platform, dimly lit and all dingy tiles and chrome, I find, improbably and inexplicably, synthesized bird songs chirping from a miniature speaker mounted on the wall.
I wonder how it's supposed to make travelers feel. Is it intended to remind people of how far removed they are from nature? From their childhood? From sunlight? The Keisei limited express pulls in, all sweaty with its windows steamed over, and I can't help feeling its sadness.

Great Big Fruit of Okayama - redux

2005-01-07T01:49:00.000-05:00

We finally ate the last of the Okayama fruit, and it was delicious. Last to go was a giant shiny red apple that somehow lingered on for weeks and weeks after we had devoured all the mandarin oranges, pears, and persimmons.
For some reason, I hesitated to touch that last apple, sitting so sweetly in it's Okayama-labeled carton, as if eating it (without my roommate's permission) might somehow lead to my being cast out of this luxurious apartment. But I gave into temptation.

'69'

2005-01-05T09:13:00.000-05:00

'69' Anybody else seen the film adaptation of Murakami Ryu's novel '69'? I had no idea that the Kyushu dialect played such a large part in both the atmosphere and plot of the work, since I read it translation. In the movie, the protagonist's friends constantly comment on how he reverts to 'textbook Japanese' whenever he starts getting serious about some topic. I also seem to have forgotten how much humor there was in it. Then again, the fact that Murakami Haruki (no relation) seems to have a fairly low opinion of such levity in the student movement has left a much deeper impression on me. In short, I understood about 45.7% of the movie because of the dialect, but I was (ambivalently to be sure) swept up in the exuberance of (Japan's) 1960's nostalgia.

Ame Agaru This was another film I saw recently, and despite the fact that it was full of Edo period dialogue, I still managed to catch more of it than that pesky Kyushu dialect. As a 'humanist' period piece, its lineage as an unfinished Kurosawa Akira project is fairly obvious. It does seem to be from a different era. Compared to the irony and (strangely defensive) emphasis on heroism in recent period works, this one focuses on the nobility of the common people and the moral bankruptcy of the elites. Very post-war. Quite heart-warming.

Ghost Squad Um. This one isn't a movie, but a video game. LL and I spent some time and money on this one today in Shibuya, and our wrists are still quivering from the experience. It features two full-size sub-machines with which to smack-down the baddies. We were terrible at rescuing hostages. Much more effective in shredding up the scenery. I might have to go back and play some more soon.
On a side-note: we spent more money on that game than one and a half hours (plus two drinks) at Karaoke.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, Karaoke is cheap during the day. The above cost only 800 yen for both of us.

Hatsuyuki, Hatsumode

2005-01-01T01:54:00.000-05:00

It's 2005 in Japan.
Otaku: I've been called an Akiba-kei [Akihabara-type] otaku before , but I was still stunned into silence at the Christmas Eve Maywa Denki show [buy their stuff here!]. A quorum of Tokyo otaku (mostly female even!) were there, and they made me feel decidedly 'normal'. Who are Maywa Denki? Well, their X'mas eve performance theme was 'folk', and they had their robotic musicians behind them strumming acoustic guitars. But this was Maywa Denki, akiba-kei folk, with songs about Tsukuba engineers, remote controls, and Rubik's cubes . . . (refrain: shikakuii~~, shikakuii~~ = 'it's square, square, with an audience member standing in front, doing the 'air rubik's cube' )
wow. out-otaku'ed.
(n.b. the usage of the Japanese term 'otaku' is not the same as stateside, where it 'simply' denotes an anime fan/freak. In Japan, otaku refers to anyone who obsesses over something, cars, computers, even anime, to an anti-social level.)

Benkei in the House: The new NHK 'Taiga' drama series for 2005 is going to based on Yoshitsune. Yes, the same Yoshitsune from Heike Monogatari. And that of course means that his trusty sidekick Benkei [acted by Matsudaira Ken] will be on TV's all over Japan in the coming months. I full expect to see hundreds of Benkei imposters online when the Benkei-boom sweeps Japan.

Also, I can link to pictures now that I have massive storage on YahooBB.

First snow in Jiyugaoka. Someone forgot to take in their laundry.

Hatsumode at a nearby shrine. The buddhist temple next door.

“Pearl Habor” (sic)

2004-12-07T09:45:00.000-05:00

Dec. 7th, 1941: I was curious about some of the details of the Japanese surprise attack of December 7th 1941, so I did a google search. I misspelled it. Even so, I got all the information I wanted, and more. Ah, the wonder of infinity, and monkeys on typewriters (keyboards); without them the internet wouldn’t be quite as useful.

Job Interview: Went on a job interview today, and decided to wear a tie. I can’t say what company it is, and I’m far from certain to get the job, but it looks like a good opportunity to do something new. Like marketing. Which, by the way, is something I ordinarily despise. But I wonder if I could be good at it? The tough part I guess is maintaining a proper and ironic distance from it.

“I’m Home” on NHK: this is yet another manga-turned-drama, and it’s airing on NHK now. I first noticed the manga back in 2000, when it won a prize at the annual Tokyo New Media Awards. It’s got a creepy visual tool of portraying an amnesiac man’s family as faceless, by having them wear blank plastic masks. The idea is, I suppose, that he can’t remember them. But behind this visual gimmick is a story of a man forgetting and and thus able to refashion himself in order to do some things over again, and possibly do them right.

Comparison Shopping

2004-12-06T08:33:00.000-05:00

Stopping in Shibuya to drop off a forgotten cellphone, I stopped by Sakuraya to pick up some blank CDs and other consumer electronics related goods. I noticed one thing: though most things are slightly higher in price than in America, those are mostly the big ticket items. Lenses and filters for digital cameras were a reasonable 1200 yen, while I spent more than $30 back at B&H Camera in NYC for the same thing. There’s always a question about the comparative quality of the items, but hey, I was looking for the cheapest, most basic filter to replace my lens cap. I also picked up a mini tripod, which was also about 1100 yen. It’s pretty sturdy, so I’m happy with it despite the fact that I could have bought an even cheaper one for 600 yen. Damn it looked flimsy though.

Tokyo University also has several small stores on its campus, including a coop where they happen to be selling Sharp electronic dictionaries for an amazing 8000 yen. I think they're slightly outdated, but probably better than the one I currently rely on. Anybody need one? Seriously, they're worth more than 20,000 yen ordinarily.

Great Big Fruit

2004-12-04T07:32:00.000-05:00

I’m forgetting why I liked Japan in the first place. That’s a big big problem, but it’s not new. I’ve been losing track of many many things in the past few years. I don’t remember what it was that attracted me to anime, or even Murakami’s novels. At least, my excitement is not as immediate, and is in fact tinged by a nostalgia, which suggests that perhaps I love the memory of loving those things. . . But that’s something endemic to our present form of modernity; we are overly nostalgic about our own modernity, and that impulse seems to inform most of our consumer media.

Appleseed. So, let’s take it back to ’79. Or at least ’89, when I remember being vaguely happy.
Appleseed, by Masamune Shirow was a epochal comic book for me. There just wasn’t anything like it on the American market, and it predated my obsession with Nausicaa, though that’s a separate story. It read like a technical manual with obscure references and details hidden in tiny footnotes; it was ‘hard’ sci-fi full of all the big questions and implications that can make sci-fi so vital. It was about mechanical as well as social engineering, and a society trying to escape a war-like past. In its most powerful and moving segment (oddly occurring early in volume 1) the protagonists face down a rogue group of their own cohorts who, fed up with the illusions and cage-like existence of a robotic but peaceful society and “taking arms against a sea of troubles,” aim to destroy the computer at the center of it all. The bloodshed that ensues was one of the most tragic, and simultaneously, philosophically engaging episodes I have ever encountered in a comic book.
Well, they finally gave Appleseed the movie treatment and while I had a difficult time with the language (does anyone know what “makasareta” in the final lines of dialogue actually means?), there were moments of cinematic violence that I have never seen the likes of before. It was that amazing. Especially at the end, when the city-destroyers march on the central computer, I have never seen such a breath-taking action sequence. But there are also problems with the full-CG approach. While it lets you take camera angles that traditional animation would find impossible (and uneconomical) to reproduce, the character animation was at times jerky and a bit too puppet-like. At times, it looked like a bad computer game (where the boundary is between games, movies, tv-news, etc is constantly being redrawn though). The people kind of shambled around like zombies about to be smacked down by Jill Valentine.
So, to summarize, ’89 was back, but it wasn’t. It was like Murakami once wrote, like the tracing paper had slipped off the original ever so slightly.

Big Fruit. So let’s get back to great big fruit. 3 days ago, this box arrives with an Okayama stamp on it. When my roommate opens it, we discover it’s filled with mikan, nashi, ringo, and kaki. All autumn fruit from Okayama. And all the while the room is filled with that faintly fermented odor of ripe ripe fruit. I couldn’t believe the size of that nashi. It was supposed to be a pear, but it was larger than a grapefruit; it was world-class. And I think, back to ’96, or ’99 at the latest, Okayama was a wonderful place. Peaches in the summer, mikan (mandarin oranges) in the fall, kaki (persimmons) in the winter. Giant cherry blossoms in the spring, and that summer festival at Ako Jinja. Tai and I cut apart that giant pear, and start eating. It’s too much for one day, so we have to keep it in the fridge for a second. Here’s to Okayama and her prize-winning fruit.

Keeping it Real Yakitori. OK, so the real name of this place is something else, but I’ll just record it as ‘Keeping it Real” or KIR. There were rubber boots out front, where the construction workers had left them. The drink of choice was ‘hoppii’, a quickly and cheaply intoxicating mix of beer of shochuu. And finally, the crowd were all regulars, popping in for drinks after a hard days work. I know I stick out, but I still dig hanging out at places like this, and keeping it real.

Japanese Letters. Writing Japanese letters requires a thick how-to book. For Japanese. For people like me, it takes a thick book, lots of practice, and just plain luck. There’s no easy way to do it, though there is some consolation in the fact that nobody expects me to be able to write a perfect letter by hand. However, and this is crucial, hand-written letters get the job done. One day after I sent the letter, I got a reply by email. I’m meeting the professor on December 17th. I guess it was worth it to spend a full day writing that letter . . .

Sangenjaya. I’ve never really heard of Sangenjaya before I arrived here this time, but now I think it’s the funkiest place on earth. I went there with two new friends, Goro and Fujii-san. Pretty funky people as well. Anyway, we spent about 20 minutes wandering around trying to find this one izakaya, among about a hundred others in these narrow lanes full of drinking establishments. We passed by the “pink monster” club several times. Each time, I think, we made some stupid comment about what the pink monster might be. Anyway, the place we ended up in was great: unlimited refills of this cabbage salad, good shochuu, and good yakitori. Funky wait-staff too. Anyway, it is real in Sangenjaya. There are more than three tea-houses there too, so don’t be put off by the name.

Long Nights, the Slow Boat. It gets dark by about 4:30-5:00pm here. Seriously, the nights are really long, and it seems like midnight by the time you get to 9:00pm. The yakitori place had run out of chicken by 7:00pm when I got there, and the streets were emptying out. Did I also mention that it’s getting cold out now? I’m facing down a long, cold winter night, with brief moments of sunshine at 24 hour intervals.
That may be bad, but the slow boat is even slower. It took 46 days for my surface-mail packages to arrive. I’m not sure if that’s normal or not. Maybe I should take a survey to see what the average is.

Craigslist, in Tokyo?

2004-11-28T08:51:00.000-05:00

Well, looks like it just launched because there are few posts on it, but Craigslist now has a Tokyo branch. But, things don't exactly look promising, because it's already starting to fill up with mildly threatening job offers (for 'escorts' and 'modeling' for 'asian ladies'). And there's only one couch for sale. But hey, maybe in the future it'll be a good outlet for getting rid of all my furniture. . .

My days are starting to fill up, though I'm nowhere near productive yet. I went to a conference yesterday at Hosei Daigaku on the Overseas Chinese studies. It was expensive. They charged me 4000 yen for their in-house journal (the first issue! might be worth something someday). The previous day, I went to an informal coffee session with the other new fulbright grantees. Well, that was pretty perfunctory, but not that useful. I still don't feel like I have much direction.

Simply recounting the days events doesn't seem to be that meaningful. I guess I'm trying to figure out why nothing that happens here means that much to me. I wish I were young again, and living as irresponsibly as I was back in 1996. That was a different age, and a different me of course. But why is it so little fun to stay up all night now?

I'm tired of love. I need a pet.

2004-11-24T02:52:00.000-05:00

So I'm sitting in Manbo, a cramped internet cafe with kind of grimey cubicles, at the tail end of another wasted day. I had to come in here, you see, because I needed to print some documents. Well, it costs 500 yen an hour, so I'm making use of that, but ultimately, you know, wasting even more of my day.

I picked up the first issue of 'kimi wa petto', and frankly it's pretty bizarre. I caught some episodes of the drama on TV, but didn't realize that it was based on a manga. Perhaps I should have known. It's about a career woman caring for a younger, pretty-boy type like he's her pet dog. It's not really as kinky as that (and quite different from that Stooges song 'I wanna be your dog'), but actually a weirdly touching commentary on our urban lifestyles, and the fact that we no longer have time for love anymore. Or something like that. I think though, that I still wanna be your/her dog.

Bleh. So I spent most of the day looking for an internet cafe to print my file, but I also got a haircut. It cost all of 800 yen. No, I didn't misplace a zero. It was quick too. Next time, when I actually have an idea of what hairstyle I want, maybe I'll pay more for my stylist. This time it was fine.

Oh, and the landlord stopped by. Apparently he's back from Paris for a week or two. Nice guy. Dropped off some wafers and some Italian coffee. Whoohoo. But other than that, I wasted my day.

Nov. 21 2004 Jiyugaoka

2004-11-22T07:03:00.000-05:00

The jury (MY jury) is still out about this town. The old-fashioned shopping street near my home is quite nice, with some mom-and-pop grocery stores and bakeries, but the main cluster of stores and restaurants around Jiyugaoka station is a mess. I mean, it seems to be fashionable enough to be well-known around Tokyo, but doesn’t have the polish and gleam of the shopping arcades of Kobe, or even Okayama. The fact is, you can hardly walk on the streets of Jiyugaoka, because they’re filled with pedestrians, bicycles (going either direction, on either side of the street), parked cars, and moving cars. It’s really impossible to walk without constantly looking over your shoulder for passing cars, because you have to step into the middle of the street every few feet to avoid people, signs, bikes, cars, etc. It’s really kind of a zoo. I’m actually kind of amazed that people try to drive their cars through it all the time (including taxis, who must do it on a daily basis) without learning their lesson. I’m also surprised that people don’t get hit on every street corner. But maybe that’s because I lack spider-sense.

Nov. 16th 2004

2004-11-22T07:01:00.000-05:00

Finally got a bank account here, which wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. I guess I was holding back because of the perceived trouble it would entail. The folks at Tokyo Mitsubishi were ultra friendly, but in a way that absolutely prevents any form of personal interaction. I mean, ‘robotic and professional’ when I say ‘friendly’ perhaps. But they made it easy to get my bank book in a matter of 5 minutes.

Dinner today, since I’m watching my budget was fried eggs and tomatoes, a starving student standby. But considering that fruits and vegetables are much more expensive now in Japan than I have ever seen. With tomatoes costing about $1 each, this dish wasn’t really that cheap after all.

On TV, I somehow found myself watching some new anime called ‘Yakitate! Ja-PAN’
A fitting translation might be: “Freshly baked! Japanese BREAD!” But that neatly avoids a very bad pun: ‘pan’ means ‘bread’ in Japanese (it’s a loan word from Dutch). I guess it sticks to the genre of battle food anime.

Another show just taught me the right way to eat nigiri sushi. V6 were the guests on “Manner Cats” and they all failed in the eyes of three very severe looking judges. The most egregious infraction? Dipping the rice into soy sauce. (C’mon, I knew that already.)

'Self-inflicted gun-shot wound'

2004-11-13T04:38:00.000-05:00

I am dedicating this column today to the late Iris Chang, who was found dead in her car on the 11th of November, off of a California freeway. The CNN obit is here. Most of your may know her from her controversial book 'The Rape of Nanking'.

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I believe I can safely say that I've reached the point in my life when I'm starting to see the endings. I met Iris in the fall of 1998 when a couple of undergrads and grad students at the University of Illinois were organizing a conference on Japanese war atrocities in WWII. Iris was to be the guest of honor, garnering a sizeable honorarium for a lecture at UIUC's Foellinger Auditorium. The lecture itself was well-attended, and enthusiastically applauded. Iris was full of fire and conviction, freely quoting facts from her book, and denouncing a historical coverup of massive proportions. In the end, she received a standing ovation.

The actual conference was a bit more contentious. A few professors were on hand to offer their own appraisal of her book, and the situation clearly did not favor Iris. The problems with Iris's book were significant, if not critical. Iris had relied on others' translations and interpretations for the most part, and her treatment of the Japanese people as a whole was scandalously close to demonization. Nevertheless, there was a whiff of academic jealousy behind the attacks, since her work had garnered far more media attention than any of those of her critics. History was defending its turf, so to speak, and Iris left feeling betrayed. I distinctly recall her complaining to Mark, the undergrad who headed the organizing body why they had invited her there if they were just going to criticize her.

My own feelings about her and her work were and still are ambivalent. She represented all that I thought was wrong with academics: she was a media darling, confident to a fault, and beautiful. To me, she seemed to be flash over substance, and that's why I appreciated her message, but worried over the way she conveyed it. If her arguments were too clumsy, wouldn't they just give ammunition to the war atrocity deniers on the other side?

I considered the 'story' of my encounter with Iris provisionally closed a few weeks later, when I received a card from the Chang family thanking me for my time and effort.

But now she's gone, and I strangely feel a sense of responsibility, at least for misjudging her demeanor, her air of stubbornness and invincibility. My conflicted feelings toward your work notwithstanding, Iris, but I will never forget you.

Sick. sic.

2004-11-12T01:05:00.000-05:00

Ok. National health insurance is a good thing. I just went over to the neighborhood doc (Dr. Kawasaki), and got a consultation and 5 meds for Y1543. That's about $15.00. I think the co-pay on Columbia's insurance for every prescription is about $20. Think about that. Dr. Kawasaki also speaks pretty good English, and we reminisced a bit about Kurashiki.

But happy as I feel about the clinic, I am still sick. Even writing this is making me kind of dizzy. And that's a shame since it's friday, and the rest of the world is going out tonight to celebrate the end of another cycle of capitalist exploitation, and here I am, my own body's machinery being exploited by tiny viruses . . .

In other news, I now have a table, a small couch, and a bike. All of which are kind of diminuitive by American standards. But hey, living small ain't so bad, even when you're used to living large.

Tomorrow: an anthropology conference at Waseda. Not sure if I can attend yet. It all depends on my body.

Nov. 5th – 6th – 7th, 2004

2004-11-08T08:03:00.000-05:00

There are plenty of reasons to be discouraged and disappointed. It doesn’t seem like Tokyo University will allow me to connect to their network with my computer. The paperwork looks prohibitively annoying. The sofabed didn’t fit up our narrow staircase, so we’re out the shipping fee and had to cancel it. I still don’t have a bike, and Yahoo BB ADSL won’t be here for another ten days. And I’m still not speaking much Japanese.

Focus on the positive:
Maguro Ichiba – this restaurant chain is now my favorite form of fastfood in the world. It’s laid out like a Yoshinoya, with a U-shaped counter over which the staff hands your food. But that’s where the similarities end. Their specialty is not beef or pork over rice, but fish. Their version of ‘oyakodon’: salmon roe (ikura) and grilled salmon over seaweed and rice. With miso, Y750.
Tokyo Univ. cafeteria – Despite the fact that it’s underground and looks like a nuclear bomb shelter, this is a seriously good place to save money. I had a HUGE dinner set for Y600, including soup, grilled fish, and a bowl of chirashi-zushi. Free tea, and being surrounded by nerdy Todai students (almost all male at this cafeteria?) a definite plus.

Borrowing privileges at Tokyo University library – Whoot! I can take out 3 books! I was told that getting borrowing privileges would be difficult, so this is a pleasant surprise. Besides, the library has a room for watching CNN and CCTV (keeping an eye on the enemy I guess?).

Muji coffee maker, and Kinokuniya coffee – I have a picture of the coffee maker. No further comment needed.

Kinokuniya cranberry bread! A loaf for only 300 yen. (no picture, cuz I ate it) – Kinokuniya is a way-up-scale grocery store around the corner. I had to jostle for room in the aisles with elderly women dressed in fine kimonos.

Komazawa Kôen (park) – This was one of the sites for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and is still a cool place to go to work out. I especially like the 2.2 km running course, and the fact that it’s only 2min 30secs from my house (jogging) makes me quite happy.

Don Quixote – Ok, so Tai says that this chain is being sued for unfair business practices, but ever since I visited the Shinjuku location, I have to admit that other stores have a reason to be scared. They sell just about everything, from the downright weird (cosplay outfits?) to the practical (I got a nice 2.1 speaker system for under Y4000.) Love my new subwoofer, but the neighbors probably hate it. Love this store cuz’ it’s open 24 hours and is CHEAP, but its competitors probably hate it.

Finally, on the 8th, my phone line is here - So give me a call whenever you feel like it.

As for my pictures, I put some under the jiyugaoka folder at:
http://photos.yahoo.com/gd1303

Nov. 4th, 2004 Tokyo, Japan

2004-11-08T08:02:00.000-05:00

. . .Home. . .
It’s day four in Japan.
Liberty Hill is how the more fashionable stores in the area translate Jiyûgaoka, and that’s where I live now. A place where modish couples browse for $1000 dinner tables, and pet shops seem to outnumber restaurants. Around the corner, I see a porsche parked in a garage every time I walk to the train station. Speaking of the train, I’m close to 20 minutes away on foot. Not a perfect situation, but out here, you almost never hear any traffic (just the squabbling of cats and dogs *not a metaphor*).

Must be a record somehow. In four days, I now have a cellphone, national insurance, an apartment, library card, student ID. . . and I’ve applied for my foreign resident card, DSL, a land line. . . and ordered a bicycle, a bed, washing machine, desk, chair, sofa bed. . . I’m productive at last, busy trying to build something, if only a workable life here. But I ran into a wall today, when I no longer had anything to special order, apply for, or office to hurry to. On the way back from Tokyo University, having just checked out the library, I realized how little I had thought out my day after all the errands were done.

I sat down on the Hanzomon subway line, and just let myself miss my stop. Past Shibuya, to some place called Sangenjaya. Just got off to see what there was to see. A busy street, and lots of cafes and bars. Ok. Bought a can coffee, and hit the subway again, back to Shibuya, transfer to Toritsudaigaku. Off the train, and wandering the streets. Found a yakitori restaurant, a cool internet cafe (not sleazy at all), and then happened upon the Yagumo Chuo library and community center. It has a gym, which costs 200 yen per visit, but works out to be much cheaper than a private gym if I only go about twice a week. The library was amazing though; a vast glass and reinforced concrete structure, it must have been built during the bubble years, because it’s hard to imagine this town having the funds to construct it now. Compared to the Fukasawa library, the district where I live now, it was at least much better lit . . . Anyway, I can see myself jogging out to this place several times a week.

Carmel, Stromness, Sapporo

2004-10-13T22:07:00.000-04:00

It’s now the final weeks before my departure, so I made a brief trip to the East Asian Studies department building. Among the concise kernels of advice offered by my professor, “make sure you go out drinking in Tokyo.” In the bathroom, on the floor and stamped with grime in the jagged pattern of a shoe sole, the following business card: “Dolphin Inn, Carmel CA.” I wonder sometimes if everything is somehow connected, and whether something is calling to me, and whether I need to respond.

Inadvertent Irony

2004-10-03T07:31:00.000-04:00

Spraypainted onto the track at a nearby highschool: "School SUCK!!!" (sic)
So ironic, and yet so demonstrably TRUE.
--
It's yet another early morning, and I can't seem to sleep past 5:30AM anymore. But as long as there's lost sleep, there's brit-pop to keep me company. A friend recently lent me some Travis, and I have to admit, Travis > Muse > Starsailor. Hmm.
--
I was browsing the web for references to my future home in Japan: Jiyugaoka (自由が丘). At the Jiyugaoka 'official guide web' site, I found just what I was looking for: REVOLUTION! Apparently, on 10/10 - 10/11, they're holding their megami matsuri or Goddess Festival. "New everytime, always fun: JIYUGAOKGA REVOLUTION." Cool. I'll be there. With red flags.

China, 2004

2004-09-26T15:00:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a grueling trip to China. Grueling that is, for a vacation, and one in which we stayed at 4 star hotels. But the main part of the vacation was treking by bus through Xinjiang and western China, where the roads are so bad that by the time the bus hit 60kph I felt like I was being constantly bludgeoned in the head by my seat cushion.

By the way, blogspot was not accessible behind the great firewall of china. Nevertheless, there were internet cafes every stop of the way, full of Chinese gamers smoking, h@ck1ng, and 0wning.

Guess who's thirty years old?

2004-08-22T01:19:00.000-04:00

Dungeons and Dragons. No lie, I share the same year of birth as D&D, somewhat prophetically perhaps. More D&D reminiscing from a more famous person than I here . Save versus death ray, or lose one point of intelligence. Or charisma, your choice (you superficial creep).

I love movies about New Jersey

2004-08-09T03:06:00.000-04:00

jet-lagged

2004-07-15T06:49:00.000-04:00

Hey there. I'm really jetlagged; it's not like I ordinarily get up at 5:30AM to start typing on my computer. Then again, there were those times in college, but I kind of wish I had those hours back now. Nothing like some sober reflection on one's own past. I mean, if we had no capacity for self-criticism, we would be no better than animals.

A few small comments on my last few days in Japan.
1. I witnessed a fight in Shinjuku's "notorious" kabuki-cho. The district really isn't that dangerous to me, and I've been there several times. Sitting down on a metal fence (ha, sitting on a fence is a good metaphor for that night), I spent about 20 minutes or so with Fisch watching the people stroll by. Lots of young couples. Giggling college girls. Young guys on dates. Then a tangled snarl of fighting Japanese from my left. About 15 feet away, two large guys were face to face muttering, mumbling. There was some punching. There was some out and out bullying as the guy in blue tried to back down. It was brutal, and so stupid I felt angry about it. After the guy in blue went down, the other chunky guy in black, joined by a shorter fellow in the exact same outfit, strolled down the street. He played possum, and his wife was screaming into her cellphone for an ambulance. What followed was a melodramatic farce as police started asking questions, and the guy kept playing hurt, groaning and holding his left side. He was evenntually helped onto a stretcher and taken off by paramedics. I don't think he was hurt. He just needed to appear hurt to protect his pride. Who would want everyone to know they took a fall on purpose? Like I said, I was angry at the stupidness and viciousness of the world, but who knows what really happened? I'm glad Fisch was there in fact, because that immediately set me apart as a foreigner (or at least, in the company of a foreigner). Better that then being drawn into the situation, or being asked questions by the police.
2. Dubliner's Pub in Shinjuku is the worst irish pub in the world. Too crowded (amazingly), and they water down their drinks. I spent about an hour at an FOJ and NBK mixer there, and met some nice, earnest people about to begin their studies at Columbia. Some, that is. Others were kind of obnoxious in that know-it-all sort of way. Petpeeve: people who live 1-3 years overseas, know something of the language (and get praised on it all the time), and therefore think it's their duty to teach you about the place (foreigners in Japan and China are especially like this). Yuck. Anyway, it makes you think how naive they are, but then again the world doesn't necessarily reward those who are right; being wrong but persuasive seems to be a formula for success for a lot of people . . .
3. Saw the Roppongi Hills mega-complex. Disorientingly constructed, but magnificent at night when it's all lit up. It features a 24-hour movie theater for the Roppongi crowds who miss the last train, and it's buoyed up flagging land prices in the area (damaged of course by gaijin of ill-repute around the bars in the district).
--
I'm tired, but not tired enough to whine at www.tired.com.

the road home

2004-07-09T20:58:00.000-04:00

I'm at narita airport now, waiting for my virgin atlantic flight back home. It'll be rather circuitous, as it stops in heathrow for a few hours before continuing on to jfk. I'm pretty exhausted, but happy to be going "home". It's kind of an illusion that anywhere will feel like home ever again though. . .
Japan was still the same mix of excitement and disappointment that it has been for me these past few years. I've been talking to more people, and meeting up with old friends for the past few weeks, so my blog posts have dropped off somewhat. Anyway, I'll see if I can muster up the necessary motivation to continue the blog once I'm back in new jersey ("home").

back on the net. sort of.

2004-07-07T10:56:00.000-04:00

So I'm staying with fisch for the time being, and he finally got yahoo broadband installed here in japan. Specifically, he's near a small train station called Higashi Koganei, about 30 minutes from downtown tokyo. Not a bad place to be, and the internet makes it even better.
I'm not feeling well, so I'm glad my trip is almost over. On the whole, it was a bit too long in fact. But well, the odd coincidences keep occurring.
I was at the internet (and manga) cafe Bagus in Kichijoji (that's 'Joji' to you), just minding my own biz and uploading some pictures when I couldn't help overhearing a heated argument in the cubicle next door. An american was fuming about how the staff there wasn't helping him recover an email from an apparently frozen internet explorer. I sat there for about 5 minutes listening to it before getting up and asking what the hell was the problem. Well, there wasn't really much of problem, except that the Japanese staff wasn't making clear what they were doing. A quick explanation in english (copy-paste, then saving to a floppy, and opening it on another computer), and the situation was more or less defused. What was really odd was that the elderly gent said that he's a columbia grad from many decades ago, and that he studied international affairs. His name is Cliff, and he didn't recognize the acronym SIPA, but it was clear that he was in that same building.
Some mediated apologies later, all seemed to be well. At the end of my visit, in fact, the staff there offered to nix my bill. I'd like to go on record that JUST THIS ONCE a good deed actually went rewarded.
The heat here was terrible, but I ended the evening having dinner and coffee with a former student, Fukutake Miwa. It's amazing how people can grow up, and she's doing quite well as a teacher herself now.

2004-07-07T02:48:00.000-04:00

7/5/2004 8:50PM, at a starbucks near the Nagasaki ferry terminal. Nagasaki has overall been a disappointment, but from the ashes of that disappointment a pleasant surprise as well. With the sun bearing down on my head at 11am, the 32 degree heat felt incredibly oppressive. I don’t think I enjoyed any of the traditional tourist sites under those conditions, the Tojin yashiki (original Chinese settlement) included. But after a recuperative nap at the minshuku (and the aircon set to 23 degrees) I discovered that at twilight the sea breezes bring a marvelous coolness to the city. The harbor walk along fishing boats, cargo ships, tugs, and ferries was well maintained and pleasantly lit. Families were fishing, kids were launching fireworks, and I followed the bay until I reached a convenience store. 700 yen bought me a salad, a small bento, and Calpis Water®. If I were staying here longer, I would run the harbor walk every evening.
--
Did a strenuous walking loop today that hit Suwa Jinja, Kofukuji, Sofukuji, Megane bashi (eyeglass bridge), the remains of the tojin yashiki, a lovely Kyushu style ramen restaurant, and the partially reconstructed Dutch trading “factory” of Dejima. I have to say, most of Nagasaki is not really ready to go primetime. Construction obstructs proper views of meganebashi, many of the shrines and temples, especially in the tojinyashiki, are unkempt and deserted, and the streets are too narrow for sightseers and taxis to comfortably share. There were some historical signs that would require considerable time for even Japanese to read, but were placed right on a busy thoroughfare where there weren’t even any sidewalks. Between passing cars, I tried to take a picture of them so I could analyze them later. Like I said earlier, very disappointing.
--
Two chance encounters today: a snake at Sofukuji, and a self-proclaimed “opinionated” American named Tom who teaches at Ryukyu University. (oh wait, one more! I walked into kofukuji and they were in the middle of inducting a new abbot. quite a fortuitous window into the workings of a zen temple.)
Chinatown is rather small here, and is not actually situated on the site of the old tojinyashiki. Instead, it’s located on the “shinchi” (new district) warehouse zone that was built some time in the 18th century, and some 50 years after the original tojinyashiki was built. Likewise, the so-called “dutch slope” (oranda zaka) is rather far from the original trading settlement of dejima. The dutch slope in fact was the site of the later, post-1859 trading community, but was probably confused in the minds of local residents. It’s all rather confusing to me, but perhaps that’s one of the particular characteristics of Nagasaki. I’m drawn to the hypothesis that the local people were never that clear about the specifics of their foreign visitors, just like Japanese tourists today pay little attention to the specifics of Nagasaki’s cosmopolitan past. The “international” aspects of Nagasaki’s past draw tourists in, but not as specific historical consciousness, but rather as a vague exoticism.
--
Kyushu express trains are fabulous. I arrived from Hakata/Fukuoka on the “kamome” limited express, which was about as wide and spacious as a shinkansen, had polished wood floorboards, and plush black leather (synthetic perhaps?) seats. I’ll be leaving on it tomorrow morning as well, at 9:50AM. The other trains heading for different destinations were all unique in color and shape. I’ll try to get some pictures of them tomorrow. Reminds me of the rather cute purple “super yakumo” express that departs from Okayama bound for the sea of Japan.
--
what’s the speed record for doing one lap of Honshu by shinkansen?

2004-07-07T02:47:00.000-04:00

7/4/2004 First time in Kyushu, first time in Nagasaki. I’m getting in the bath pretty soon at the Minshuku Fumi. It kind of reminds me of staying with my friend Hide; a 6-tatami room, with the bathroom next door. Not a bad deal at 3500 yen a night, especially since its about 2 minutes from the JR station. I was hoping to go down to Kagoshima as well, since there were signs proclaiming a “kyushu shinkansen” that links Nagasaki with Kagoshima in around 2 hours. Not so apparently. Such a rail line is at least two years away it seems.
A typhoon just passed through here, and the air is thick with drizzle, but surprisingly mild compared with Kyoto. I took a stroll as the sky was growing dark, and promptly got lost. I don’t consider that a particularly tragic occurrence, since for the most part I’m here to lose myself anyway.

assorted thoughts from the past few days

2004-07-03T22:07:00.000-04:00

6/27/2004 kaminari - the distant sound of thunder. today’s outlook: kumori, tokidoki ame.
Okayama is still here, but almost everyone I knew has gone. I passed by my old apartment (Nakasho Haitsu 103) but the light was off. My mind’s eye still sees it as it was, only now with a thin layer of dust over it all. But time marches on, and leaves nothing in its wake. Enough cliches. I know now that this is probably the last time that I’ll be able to do the backpacker circuit. It’s tiring, and I’m too old for this nonsense. It’s time to show your cards and commit to one thing or other, career or something else. The next time I come here, I’ll be a visiting scholar, and things will be different. Obvious though it is, I don’t have a lot of tourism to do in Japan. I’ve seen a lot of it already. What’s left is pure business.
Had dinner at “taiyo no jidai” a monja restaurant. Monja is a strange thing. You cook it yourself at a griddle, and it’s a mass of vegetables and meat, with some sort of sauce. It never really hardens into a pancake (like okonomiyaki) but stays kind of liquid. Like I said, rather mysterious food. The owner, Ohashi Yasutami came over and had a beer with us (Yoshimoto-sensi, Youko, and I). It seems he knows a jazz saxophonist in NYC (harlem, in fact) named Masa. A woman in her forties. When I go back, I’ll ask around. Okayama is like this I guess. The only thing that brings me back are the people I know, and every year it seems they get fewer and fewer.
--
6/30/2004 7:15PM Kyoto, at K’s Hostel. I’m like an old-timer now. The first time I came to this town was 1996, eight years ago. I no longer feel like a tourist, which feels like a loss of innocence, both good and bad.
lunch with an Irish couple at Sukiya – serves PORK bowl now, not beef bowl after the outbreak of BSE in the states shut them down in february. The same fate for Yoshinoya?
jogging along the gurgling Kamo River in the midday sun. turtles ducking of the way as I approach. long necked cranes followed me with their eyes. an odd sight: an abandoned wheelchair by the river’s edge.
Some aesthetic observations about Japan, the ambiguous, and myself:
1. Entering the bath after Satoko’s sister; the water spilling over the edge and running down the drain is the difference in the size of our bodies. (edit: there was a lot of water down the drain, she's not a very big girl.)
2. I love the rice patties of early summer because they reflect the sky and mountains, between a green grid of precisely laid sprouts.
Later that night, an evening of ‘Japanese’ experiences: participated (fortuitously) in the Minazuki shinto ritual at Ichihime jinja. Saw a group of maiko (geisha) strolling along Shijo dori carrying shopping bags. One yawned as they waited for the pedestrian signal to change. A rare display of humanity from so ghostly a figure.
--
7/1/2004 Minazuki (“the month without water”) is over and now it’s Fumizuki. In poetry, it has autumn resonances, but it’s still extremely muggy here.

brief, live update

2004-06-26T04:47:00.000-04:00

5:51PM OST (Okayama Standard Time)
So, here I am chilling at an internet cafe in Okayama's omotecho shopping arcade. It's new. It certainly wasn't here while I was a teacher.
Today's project is kind of along those lines though: cataloging those things that are the same, and those things that are gone.
Hunters: gone
Desperado: Still there (not sure if it's in business though)
Belgian waffle place: gone
Maruzen bookstore: still the same
Bukkake Udon (um. seriously, it's food): gone
Radio Momo: can't seem to find it. will look around again

The shopping arcade itself is now prodigiously decorated in preparation for 7/7 day (Tanabata).
cloth banners are hanging from the ceiling, and paper strip 'wishes' are knotted on tree branches.
For some reason, I don't remember Tanabata being such a big deal while I was here.
But the most important difference I guess is the fact that most of the people I knew here are gone.
Hide is in India I hear, and his mom doesn't have his address. Most other people have made their way up to Osaka or Tokyo to live out their natural lives. . .
And Okayama feels. . . quiet.
--
But my last night in Sanya was quite interesting. During the day I popped into Tokyo (not difficult since Sanya-Minami Senju is on the hibiya line, and goes direct to ebisu and roppongi)
and met some former students: Naoko and Hiroko. Pretty funny girls. We spent some time calling up other former students, but no one picked up. Oh well. I may run into some more if I keep wandering the streets.
Then met up with a former colleague now working in Tokyo for food and drinks in Ebisu. Shibuya is starting to feel a bit young for me . . . Later ended up at a 'gaijin bar' where the brits were still angry at their euro2004 loss.
Back at Sanya, I closed out the local bar talking with the manager Nakamura Yuji about Murakami Haruki and Takahashi Gen'ichiro. Pretty cool chap. I think I learned a few things.
One of which was that 'Bison brand vodka' actually exists (freely drunk in the Chinese film 'Suzhou River'). Yuji claims its quite popular.
--
update updated
Hunters is still there. I was just on the wrong block, but that old sign needs a good wipe-down with a damp cloth
Radio Momo is definitely gone. Or at least not where it used to be located. The overpowering Okayama FM (located in the imposing NTT CREDO building) must have sent them to the ropes.
Free wireless internet in the lobby of the Okayama International Center rules, though I'm not sure how much longer they'll let me sit here. Looks about closing time (OST 7:48PM now)

searching for a home

2004-06-24T09:37:00.001-04:00

6/24/2004 Hongo, in central Tokyo. I’m now sitting in another starbucks. In fact, I’ve already been here once in the morning when I was sorting out my thoughts before meeting with Prof. Yoshimi. Ok, it’s kind of excessive, and I’ll have to find some coffee houses with more character. But later. Now it’s good enough to escape the heat and humidity. I’m soaked, just like I was in Scotland, when I had to march around in the rain. But this time, it’s sweat, and think I’m getting dehydrated. Tokyo University is cool. Most of the students there are intimidatingly sharp, and I feel kind of autistic. You know? I can barely speak, but then come out with some crazy shit about nationalism, or cultural studies. Out of the blue. Like stutter, stutter, mumble, mumble, then zap, a moment of intelligence. Idiot Savant.

Prof. Yoshimi is pretty cool, and his seminars are quite unlike what I expected. He really tries to draw his students into a discussion, then gives his take on the material. The latter is in fact quite refreshing since most of the profs back in the states are kind of reticent about their own opinions. Today’s topic was ‘Bakhtin on Marxism and linguistics.” No, I didn’t get most of it.

Some random thoughts on Yoshimi and academics. I think there are two very important trends in the world of thought today: reducing the world to language, and reducing it to the operation of power. Bakhtin seems to combine these two by linking language and marxism. . . What I’m trying to figure out is a place for ethics. Tai and I had a long conversation about human rights and law, which made me realize how amoral history is as a discipline. We can say that it happened. We can even guess at why. But there’s also a strangely balanced view that nothing is ever unique. For example, Yoshimi has argued that American hegemony (economic, military) over East Asia is equivalent to Japanese hegemony over the same area before WWII. In terms of power, and the efforts of those in control to maintain their power, perhaps he’s right. The tendency is to ignore the justifications used by America and Japan, in particular, the differences between those justifications. The pervasive, and blasé attitude is that people will say anything to accomplish their aims, that for example, we should perceive the acceptance of the 1960s civil rights movement in terms of its propaganda benefits for the U.S. in the third world. The argument goes that the USSR and China were gaining too much propaganda mileage out of US segregation, and that US interests in Africa were being harmed by it. Disturbing thought isn’t it? Think also of democracy in Taiwan. If the PRC were not across the border, and if the PRC were not (ostensibly) communist, how much incentive would Taiwan have for introducing free elections? Basically, the trend is to regard these “advances” in the human spirit, not as universal, but as strategic actions, intended for particular interests.

> back to the amorality of history <

Japanese hegemony = American hegemony. (agree or disagree?)

If the power (hegemony) cannot be differentiated, and judged on a moral basis, what do we judge? I feel like we’re intellectually left with little option but to judge the specific application of force and coercion in that hegemony. This is where Tai’s perspective was interesting because he’s studying human rights law. Perhaps it’s the degree of coercion and domination, rather than the truth and moral value of ideologies like “The American Way” or (for the case of Japan) “The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” that we should judge. So, we return to our disillusionment with ideas. . . perhaps we need to accept that someone will be hegemon and get on with it. And on that point, I wish the American record of violence and coercion in East Asia were better (Noh Gun Ri, My Lai), to distinguish it from the Japanese (rape of Nanjing, genocide in Korea).

--

Bass Ale in Sanya? Yup. I’m back at a bar in Sanya where they have bass and internet access too. Weird how gentrification creeps into places like this. I mean, this place is clearly set up for a different socio-economic set than the traditional Sanya resident. But, can’t complain. Mark, an englishman staying at a nearby hotel (Shin Koyo, if you’re interested) was just in here badmouthing Americans. As if the English have any right. . . but then again I badmouth America from time to time too. It’s kind of like badmouthing yourself; it can be therapeutic at times.

salt of the earth

2004-06-24T09:37:00.000-04:00

6/23/2004 Sanya, Tokyo. I shouldn’t be here. I really shouldn’t. Maybe the name doesn’t mean anything to you, but most Japanese would recognize it. I really didn’t realize where the hotel was located when I made the reservation. An American scholar (Edward Fowler) wrote a book about this place a few years ago called ‘Sanya Blues’, because it was such a notorious place. This is where of Tokyo’s day-laborers ‘live’, either on the street or in ‘silkworm shelves’ meaning crowded bunks. It’s recently been trying to reinvent itself as a place for backpackers to stay, since these flophouses are CHEAP, but the homeless are still here, and the poverty is still wafting in the air. In fact, the place where I’m staying is only 2 blocks away from the “Iroha” shopping arcade where Fowler almost got into a fist fight with some off duty workers (for taking pictures. don’t expect any photos from me). The ‘bars’ in the area aren’t called ‘snack’ or ‘bar’ (in Japanese that is); they’re labeled differently than drinking establishments elsewhere in Tokyo. Here, they’re called 大衆酒場 basically meaning an alcohol dispensing place for the ‘masses’. That includes me, for now.

2004-06-23T06:18:00.001-04:00

6/21/2004

Tired old Japan (Narita Express, grey payphones look worn, Landmark tower needs a good scrubbing) – everything looked so shiny when I first came in 1996. It really looks like a lot of the stuff I saw then hasn’t been replaced or refurbished.

100 yen stores are now called “One Coin Store”

difficulties with Japanese professor. not much to say about this, except that I’ll be working at Tokyo University next year instead of Japan Women’s University.

pointy shoes and the trashy look are in. Those shoes always look sadly ill-fitting. I wonder if they’re really made for human feet. I miss the clunky shoes and chucks.

Typhoon no. 6 passed through and made the day rather dramatic. I had to duck into Takashimaya in Shinjuku for most of the day. That’s fine, since I spent some time listening to Cds at HMV. Franz Ferdinand’s album sounds ok, but I was pleasantly surprised by Morrissey’s latest. Tim Booth (of James fame) had a CD out, but it kind of stunk. Sonic Youth’s disk wasn’t anything unexpected, but had a nice satisfying buzz to it. The Pixies best-of was there, and I spent a few minutes reliving memories with it. . .

6/22/2004 1:52PM Sitting in the starbucks under Landmark Tower. I passed through here twice a day for a year between 1999 and 2000. Some bitter memories, some sweet. Japan to me is a layered mess now. Not entirely exotic, but not home either. I want to be here, and I don’t. I’m alone, but I’m not. Just came back from the Ramen Museum near Shin-Yokohama Station. Bought some ramen (mysteriously and consistently transliterated as ‘raumen’ throughout the museum) for Satoko and her family, since I’m staying at their place. A few observations: the reconstructed ramen town in the two basement levels is kind of amazing. There weren’t that many people there today, but there are signs telling you things like “the wait for sumire ramen from this point is 60 minutes.” Some serious crowds must attack that place on weekends. I didn’t get in line for Sumire ramen (an old standby from hokkaido), but chose a bowl of Hachiya Ramen (from asahikawa, in hokkaido. I passed through there!) and then a mini-bowl at Shinasobaya (from Kanagawa). Amazing difference in noodle shape, and soup flavor. Another observation: many of the original Japanese ramen restaurants were founded in the late 1800s and early 1900s by Chinese immigrants. But the place isn’t just about ramen; it’s about nostalgia. They were selling cigarettes, candies, etc, in 1950s packaging, and the town itself was filled with memorabilia. There were old Kurosawa movie posters, fake subway signs, an old ramen-selling cart. . .

2004-06-23T06:18:00.000-04:00

6/20/2004 Japan, again. The air is humid, and heavy with memories. Long flight on Virgin Atlantic via Siberia. I’m adjusting my opinion of them. Good service, amazingly functional linux-driven entertainment system (yes, I saw it reboot twice and go through its startup sequence). I saw three movies (Starsky & Hutch – not really that funny; The Sea is Watching – serene Japanese period piece; American Splendor – made me want to kill myself, but was inspiring all the same). But the tradeoff was a big metal box under each seat that occupied part of my foot space.

Back to the sweaty present. It’s the smell of Japan that brings a vague wistful smile to my lips. Japan is surely the future, as the Matrix, Solaris (by Tarkovsky), and the Morning Musume remind us. For me though, it’s starting to feel like the past, because my life, my past emotions, and my friendships that have been so important to me feel so irretrievable now. But I also know that it’s time for a change. I’m almost 30. I’m at the transition from taking classes to teaching classes. I’m irredeemably irrevocably committed now to academics.

I never knew that traveling would be this tiring. I almost yearn for the quiet life, you know, no alarms and no surprises. Please. And when you travel alone you start talking to yourself. Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me. Sometimes I give myself the creeps. And sometimes I feel the unbearable unexpressibility of human experience. Can I even describe what I’m doing and seeing? And if I can’t, doesn’t it almost seem like none of this EVER HAPPENED?

2004-06-23T06:17:00.000-04:00

6/18/2004 Friday. 5:35PM at a starbucks near Picadilly Circus. No elephants or acrobats here. Just broadway theater-style musicals all around, and a kind of Chinatown spill-over crowd. Lots of fashion-conscious brits lounging about. I don’t exactly fit in, with my pragmatically selected 5-day wardrobe. Froze my ass off visiting Stonehenge without my jacket. I took some pictures though, and I guess that makes the trip worth it. My eyes are still gummy and sticky from my allergic reaction to England. But one look at Stonehenge and I realize how much more elaborate it is than the standing stones up in the Orkneys. The audio-guide bored me though, with its constant evocation of Stonehenge’s ‘mysteriousness’. In fact, I’m pretty satisfied with the existing hypotheses of the monument’s origins.

Salisbury Cathedral, the highest spire in England is still a bustling, functioning church, with hourly prayers and enthusiastic elderly volunteer guides. Saw another copy of the magna carta. Interesting thing about the spire is that the original building was not designed to support its weight. The pillars inside are buckling, and additional supports were constructed.

Last night in London. I’ll be back in Japan soon.

2004-06-23T06:16:00.002-04:00

6/16/2004 Sightseeing day around London, under a fabulously clear sky.

Tower of London, Tower Bridge, St. Andrews wharf, the Thames, Tate Modern, Big Ben, House of Commons, Chinatown (only one association sign visible above the restaurants and stores), watching Euro2004 (spain ties greece) at a pub and chatting with a Bangladesh MBA student, watching the white swans in Hyde Park.

I guess the highlight was the Tate Modern, and Jan Svankmajer’s video piece “Punch and Judy: The Coffin Factory” – lovely, macabre and sardonic. Puppet theater. Negotiations for the sale of a guinea pig (yup, no lie) dissolve into violence and the ultimate death of both protagonists (including a Kill Bill 2 – style ‘Texas burial’). Too damn funny. Also Yves Tanguy’s painting “Les Transparents”.

I must be allergic to London. My allergies are worse here than anywhere else in the world. My eyes are tearing up.

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6/17/2004 Thursday. I now have four different allergy medications because I’m tired of having it ruin my days. I’ve got phenylephedrine, loratadine, oxymetazoline, and that stuff that’s in benedryl. I’m ready for anything.

3:45PM The Fog of War at the Prince Charles Theater in Leicester Square (rhymes with ‘chester’ and ‘molester’). Amazing film. Surprising number of people in the theater are like me, alone. At 3 pounds, it’s a good deal. At 5:00, the Switzerland-England Euro2004 match starts, and pubs are gearing up for it. One advertises 1 pound ‘stubbies’ until England scores. ‘Stubby’ = 1/2 pint? This place is like a college town at homecoming or something. It lives and breathes on the fortunes of its team.

No pictures today. I’m tired of sightseeing. Just wandering the streets like a ghost, not a tourist. I don’t really belong here, so there’s little to actually ‘do’. But it’s not so different that I feel like snapping pictures of everything. I’m l’etranger (or simply etrange). I just draw out trite generalizations from otherwise sensitive, thoughtful people about the differences between fairly equivalent cultures. I think I’ve had the same conversation a hundred times over.

Sat down in Trafalgar Square for the live broadcast of the Royal Ballet’s performance of Onegin. Kind offunny to be appreciating that while the rest of the town is running around drunk celebrating England’s victory.

2004-06-23T06:16:00.001-04:00

6/15/2004 7:55AM at Aberdeen station. This is going to be a long rail-day from the top of Scotland to the heart of England. Direct service to London King’s X (‘cross’). But I’m stopping off at York, “the most haunted city in England.” Paris has been quietly discarded from my itinerary.

Last night: had a fried slice of haggis for the first time. Described as a stuffed sheep’s stomach, it sounds kind of nasty. But it didn’t taste that bad; I’d say it’s like a spicy sausage, but soft and crumbly when you stick it with a fork. If it were not covered in batter and deep-fried, it would have fallen apart. . . Ah British comfort food: everything here is kind of greasy. As the McCain’s chips commercial says, “chin up.” Considering the weather they have here, that’s the sort of food that’s called for. Chips, bacon, sausages. . .

Last night, rode with Liz and Colin to the ferry port, 2 PhD’s up in the Orkneys for research who were also staying at the hostel. Didn’t get much sleep on the ferry, since the only place dark enough was the cinema lounge. Wasn’t much different from sleeping on a plane. Disembarking, and finally greeting the sun here in aberdeen. 2.5 weeks down, and 3.5 to go. Can’t believe how tired I feel.

11:00AM leaning back in the train and watching the sky, while listening to radiohead (like a cracked polystyrene man). I think it was about 10 years ago that Miyazaki’s films taught me to look at the sky again. I don’t think it’s a normal thing for a college student to (re)discover, since we tend to get caught up in all sorts of other things at school (academics, drinking, partying, relationships. Because of Nausicaa and Totoro I spent a lot of time looking at trees. . . because of Laputa and Porco Rosso, I stare at the sky. Of course I think I always had this sort of tendency. As a kid, I remember people remarking that I don’t talk much in cars, but instead tend to stare out the window. And at Chinese camp years and years ago, I only took pictures of clouds, not the people.

6:45PM on the express train from York to London, finally full circle. The sun is out, spreading its crisp light on the gaudy shopping streets. Besides the viking museum, Yorkminster (cathedral), and the ghost hunt tours, York is just a big set of tourist shops. Picturesque in its antique sort of way, but still buzzing with shoppers and cash. But I was buoyed up by the warm sunlight, the cool breeze, and the sudden realization that I was close to accomplishing my mission. So this is England? Bring it on. Four days until I board the plane to Tokyo. Yorkminster was grand beyond words (see pics). Winners and losers in history are clear to see. Consider in comparison with the Cathedral at Elgin. Anglican church versus Catholicism. 275 claustrophobic steps (and odor of sweat) to the top. Oddly, I was struck by the three nuclear power plants that are visible from the top along the horizon.

‘The shambles’ – an old shopping district with a compelling name, but ultimately a disappointment .

Didn’t know this, but an ‘iconoclast’ during the English reformation meant a smasher of catholic images.

‘Lunch’ was a sausage sandwich (2 pounds) with stuffing and ‘brown’ sauce. Strangely, the brits describe their sauces by color. ‘Red’ sauce is pretty much just ketchup. ‘Brown’ is like worcester sauce. ‘Dinner’ at Marks & Spencer – 2 pre-packaged salads plus a drink = 5 pounds.

Arriving at Kings Cross at 8:40PM, walking to Warren St. tube stop to meet Tai.

2004-06-23T06:16:00.000-04:00

6/14/2004 2:50PM in Trenabies Café. Last few hours in the Orkneys, since I’m catching the Northlink Ferry back to Aberdeen at 11:45PM (arrives at 7:00AM!). Cute mulletted girl had mentioned this cafe as the only place in Kirkwall to get coffee ‘like starbucks’. Yeah, well, everywhere else it’s instant coffee. She actually likes that stuff, especially ‘Kenco’. The scone with ‘clotted cream’ was actually quite good, and it’s good to finally sit down in a warm place. The wind-blown drizzle outside stings the face, though the sky is now marginally brighter than before. I can’t really afford to ‘take tea’ like this, but there’s not a lot to do in Kirkwall on a day like this. Last thing to try in Scotland: haggis.

* The many smells of Orkney: the briney odor of sea spray, the heavy reek of cow manure, the nostalgic acridness of fireplaces, and the spicy muddy (‘laphroigh’) smoke of peat fires. Today, the dominant flavor is cow dung.

* Only in Scotland: Safeway brand generic SINGLE MALT whiskey. About 15 pounds per bottle, which isn’t that cheap. Nothing really is here. On sale, the local distillery’s ‘Highland Park’ single malt goes for 20 pounds a bottle. (brings to mind a certain town in central jersey)

* Frustration in ‘paradise’: Kirkwall is a ‘friendly’ city, but also home to a quiet ambivalence and desperation. This is most visible in its garbage littering youth (AC/DC shirts are really popular here), and the heavy drinking. Residents apparently knocked down many of the standing stones at the Ring of Brodgar, and someone intentionally let their sheep into the fenced-off lot where the Stones of Stenness are. I consider it vandalism, or worse, sabotage.