Tightrope Japan

Golden Gate

2005-05-18T11:52:00.000+09:00

Golden Gate
Originally uploaded by the ghostis.

culture shock?

2005-05-07T12:23:00.000+09:00

The things that I notice about home:

1. Going to the bank is so much easier.
2. The checkers at the grocery store are not very friendly.
3. Everyone wants to hear about Japan.
4. All the clothes are so big (which makes it difficult to find a new pair of jeans).
5. I feel so much smaller.
6. I can eat real cheese again.
7. The air smells different.
8. No one looks at me like I am an extra terrestrial.

Osaka in the morning

2005-05-05T17:00:00.000+09:00

My last morning in Japan, I rose early and took the train to Namba station where I had planned to spend the day photographing the colorful, urban population. Soon after arriving at an empty subway station, I realized that nothing opened until at least 10 am and that the streets were as empty as the station. Only a few people on their way somwhere populated the sidewalk. I stopped at the only coffeeshop I could find on the wide thoroughfare that I found myself walking along. Then I walked on my already tired feet in search of something to photograph. But only a few souls were present.

trainboy

pink

mirrorball

breakdance

in costume

the last few days

2005-05-02T22:27:00.000+09:00

My last Sunday in Japan, I went festival hopping in Kagawa Prefecture getting a sense of the local culture before departing for good. A neighborhood in Takase town held their annual furusato (home-ground) tea festival to celebrate the cutting of the first new leaves. The air was dripping and humid which highlighted the green of the terraced tea fields. Festival goers could pick their own tea, learn how to cure it for use, and then take home their harvest. There was also a small bamboo forest in which people were digging takenoko (bamboo shoots) which look like small larval creatures covered in soft fur when dug from the ground but taste wonderful in a variety of dishes. After drinking a few paper cups full of green tea that the local elementary school students offered to us, we went to try on the kasuri, a special cotton kimono worn in old times while working in the tea fields. The fabric is traditionally navy blue with a white square pattern and worn over a bright red under-skirt with a matching red obi. When we had donned the costumes, we headed out to the tea ceremony where we drank matcha and a traditional Japanese sweet.

After leaving the tea festival, we headed over to a strawberry festival where we sampled berries from a private greenhouse and bought unusual flavors of ice cream in a souvenir shop. I sampled takenoko flavor, but regretted not having the stomach to sample honey, udon, and sesame flavored ice cream as well.

At the end of the day, I was tired, and not prepared to pack for my journey home. Packing is such a lonely activity. It is difficult to do when saying goodbye to friends and experiencing a last glimpse of Japan seems so much more important. Today, in the sprit of procrastination, I went zorbing in the verdant hills of Tokushima prefecture. Somehow, a company in rural Japan thought that importing this unusual tourist/extreme sport style activity from New Zealand was a good idea. Fortunately rolling down a hill inside a rubber ball lubricated with warm soapy water is considerably cheaper in Japan than in the extreme sport Mecca of Queenstown, New Zealand. The activity itself only lasted about 30 seconds but provided a brief glimpse into life in the womb. On the way home, we managed to capture photographs of a robotic highway worker cautioning traffic.

I love jesus

2005-05-01T09:12:00.000+09:00

I love jesus

The young pseudo-hipsters of Japan linger around Kochi station waiting for a ride to somewhere. This yought buddhist man loves Jesus. His girlfriend is trying to maintain her complexion and makes sure to wear a very warm fuzzy black hat on this very hot day.

my holiday has no soundtrack

2005-04-29T21:55:00.000+09:00

This was quite an extensite post that I lost while trying to place pictures on it and was unable to recover it. It may re-appear, but it may not.

The Nature of Japan

2005-04-25T22:44:00.000+09:00

Japan is a country with plentiful suggestion of a cultural past intimately connected to nature. Despite its industrial facade, and the mainly urban-centered lives that Japanese people live, the culture has a certain connection to nature that directly hints at this past. Many people are named after forests and rivers, trees and snow. Towns are named for prominent natural landmarks, or the ecosystems in which they are set, though it is now often difficult to point out the features for which the cities are named. Japanese people still have the tradition of viewing spring blossoms and the turning of autumn leaves. It is a national past-time. Though Americans are proud of their nature in the form of national parks, and important mountains, rivers, or pieces of nature with a more personal importance, American nature doesn't inspire the same sort of cultural nationalism that I witness in Japan. Despite these strong Japanese ties to the natural world, I feel as if I miss 'nature' on a daily basis. I walk along the beach that is ironically strewn with trash, and sometimes I experience that same feeling of beautiful solitude that I experience when walking along a beach at home. I listen for the insects in the road-site bushes and dodge wasps when I step out my door, but I often feel like I am in the midst of a more urban plague of insects than experiencing the wonders of nature. I still try to see this as nature, because my understanding of the natural world is marred by the idea that nature is anything that is not a part of human society, and that they should remain separate. Nature is not just a refuge or vacation-spot. It is outside my door in the form of the cliff that extends far above my apartment and the wasp-nests and the flies and the herons fishing in the river. It is on the beach that is strewn with seemingly unnatural trash.

Somehow, I feel as if I never get enough 'outdoors'. Yesterday evening I experienced my first beach-bonfire of the season. Fires always carry memories, and this one certainly brough past memories back to the surface and built new ones on top of the old. The beach was silent at night and we roasted marshmallows and ate popcorn around the fire's edges after stocking it with dried bamboo and odd pieces of driftwood that we scavenged from the weeds. I felt as if I was camping, but I did not have a sleeping bag to crawl into from which I could peer up at the stars on my way off to sleep. Camping in Japan would certainly provide a different experience of this country. It is unfortunate that it will not be among one of my experiences. Now I have the memory of a campfire that was almost like camping to add to my memories of Areake beach. Perhaps it also gave me one more experience of nature that I was craving.

trailing transvestite

2005-04-24T10:33:00.000+09:00

The first moment I saw him, I assumed that he was one of the middle aged women who go walking through the park in the mornings. But, I noticed something strange about her form. And she was running up the beach and behind a small sand-dune, which seemed quite odd. A few minutes later I noticed a man walking behind me in an odd sort of spandex swimsuit. When I turned around, he walked up the beach to the path the women use for their morning walks. I felt as if he was following me, but I did not give the incident much thought. I continued my morning run along the busy road that leads to and from the beach. About halfway back to my apartment, I noticed a black car pull along the small road that runs parallel to the main thoroughfair and the same man who dissappeared into the sand dunes stepped out of the car which I recognized turning onto a street a while back. He was certainly following. This time, I got a better glimpse, and he was in fact, wearing a very small spandex skirt and low-heeled cream colored pumps and with chin-length gray hair. I was being followed by a transvestite. He said something to me as I jogged past, but I could not understand. I only heard the word "watashi" (I). As I ran along, the car pulled out onto the road, and fortunately, I did not get a glimpse of it again. There are very few transvestites in rural Japan, but somehow I happened to be followed by one today.

The moon

2005-04-23T21:30:00.000+09:00

Today I read that "full moons mark beginnings, eras when change begins and one must pay close attention to portent" (Daniel Mason, 'The Piano Tuner') and these words prompted me to remember how the moon shone through my window last night and caused sleep to come, perhaps, later than expected. I never notice the moon until its light begs me to glance up at it through my window, or as I walk home at night. It is easy to be too busy to notice the moon. But somehow, when we do notice it, there seems to be some sort of magic in it, an everyday, ordinary, natural magic that is present in all those things that we only notice sometimes.

I am not sure if I noticed that simple phrase in the book that I happened to be reading today because I noticed the moon last night, or that I read the phrase, and suddenly was forced to remember the light of the moon, and the last time that I looked into its face. I do know that I noticed the sentence because this is a time of change, or an ending and a beginning. Somehow, I am not looking at this moment in time as an ending, but as more of a beginning. It is easy to leave something behind that seems easy to let go of. It is easy to want the future when it has been brewing in your mind for a year, waiting to be let out. Of course, I did not put life on pause until I was ready for a future, the future has been occuring from moment to moment, but it was more difficult to see things that way when I seemed to be on hiatus from real life. Real life happens most forcefully in these situations none-the-less.

So in this time of change, I am noticing the moon more intently though I am not even completely cognizant of its particular phase. I could have been positive that it was waxing yesterday evening, but then again, it may be waning. Which marks more of a beginning or an ending when it is a repeating cycle that will continue on?

2005-04-19T23:12:00.000+09:00

It is time for a bit of reflection. Not that I am an unreflective person or this year has been unreflective, as I have had more time alone, to think than in most other periods of my life, but it is always easier to reflect when things are beginning or ending. My time in Japan is drawing rapidly to a close. I thought the weeks would go more slowly than this. Only last week, I was counting the days until I leave. Now I worry that I do not have enough time in which to prepare to leave. It takes some preparation when leaving a place after inhabiting it for nine months. I don't want to draw any parallels to wombs, pregnancy, or childbirth, but it is a tempting metaphor.

During my stay in Japan, despite my resistance, and my chosen refusal of customary social behavior, I have not resisted everything. I do hope that many things did sink in, and that I will come to realize those things more and more in the coming weeks. There were many things that were too simple to resist. It is impossible to resist the slow changes in daily habits that occur when one moves to a drastically different location, takes on a drastically different set of jobs and roles and expectations. I was unable to resist the experience of the seasons. I was unable to resist noticing the land around me, and so many of the differences between this culture and the one in which I grew up. Some of these differences are challenging to understand on more than just a superficial level, but I know that I have felt some of these differences on a level nearing understanding. I was unable to resist the process of reflection that began the moment I set foot on this land during the humidity of summer. I have witnessed typhoons that I was drawn to compare to the tumult of my emotions during that season. I have spent hours alone with and without books, and while riding trains, and these hours have been etched in me like a story, or a finely carved image that will only be revealed at a later date.

This is reflection for you.

One other thing that I need to say is that leaving one's home country for another is not always about escaping. It is mostly about finding. I could say that it is about searching, but that is cliché. But a search inevetably takes place if something is to be found. I was not really intending to escape anything when I left the place I was before, but I was trying to find a certain center that I seemed to have lost. I am not sure that I can say that I have completely found that core, but I have begun to build it up into the beginnings of something that sits in myself, that is myself.

Sometimes I need to remind myself that I have not lost the capacity to contemplate, and analyze and evaluate, and finally to articulate. Perhaps my vocabulary has shifted from what it once was. It is simpler now, but that may also make my words a bit easier to understand, and ultimately, a bit more real. I have not closed myself off from the world, only opened my eyes onto a new part of it. My world is now larger, even if some people will never be able to see that larger world in me. I have had many moments of silence, and many moments when creativity seemed like something I left in another life, but I do not believe that I lost a success in keeping silent, or in having few words. Even if the vocabulary that I gained can not be articulated in a language, I understand that I did gain something of a new vocabulary. This vocabulary is not Japanese, nor is it English, but rather a vocabulary of spirit. It is the self, that I have been building, and will continue to build as I step in and out of countries and communities, homes, friendships, and associations.

In the mean time, I will continue to muse. I encourage anyone who happens to come across this to do the same.

On Insects

2005-04-15T22:44:00.000+09:00

The coming of spring marks the return of the insects. Until I came to Japan, I never thought much about insects. Mosquitoes were my occasional tormentors when I traveled to tropical climes, but I never gave much thought to cockroaches or giant wasps or strange flies that seem to breed in mysterious places in my living quarters and strange insects that I am convinced chew holes in my clothes and prevent me from touching any article of clothing that has not been recently washed or stored in a very safe place. I have yet to see the insect hordes return to my apartment, but I woke the other morning to find a very large wasp outside my window. I know the cockroaches will return soon. Japan seems to be plagued with cockroaches, the likes of which I have never seen before. They come with the heavy heat of summer, I presume.

on being alone

2005-04-15T22:05:00.000+09:00

The loneliness hasn’t hit me in a while. I can only assume that this is because I am going home soon and it is customary for people to place the kind of hope in the future that they are never able to harbor in the present. And I like waking up in the morning to the sun coming in through my windows and knowing that I can wake, shower, and lie in a pool of sunlight on my tatami with a book and a hot mug of tea without having to worry about the existence of any other human being or the fact that it is not as early as I would like it to be. It is easy to pretend that the day is newer than it really is without anyone else around to remind you of the time.

Mine is a self-centered life because there are very few other people in it at the moment. Sometimes I would rather that my life could be populated with others, but that is just not how it is at the moment. In the mornings I am never lonely until the day draws toward noon. After I have had my cup of tea and read a short story or a fragment of a novel, and showered and perhaps gone for a run or a walk and started to cook lunch, I begin to itch for something else to do, but then of course, there is the prospect of going to work in the afternoon where I do more of the same. I read. I eat snacks to pass the time while my thighs grow more and more robust. I try to tolerate children who cannot understand a word that I utter. I try to tolerate the endless conversations about the weather with the adults. In the summer we talk about the humidity and the coming of the typhoons. “I hear this summer is the hottest in years.” “I hear there hasn’t been a typhoon this big in your lifetime.” In the autumn we talk of the falling leaves. “Yes, leaves change colors in the autumn in America too.” In the winter conversation is about the cold. In the spring, we speak of blossoms. “I went to hanami on Sunday, they say.” “There are beautiful blossoms in Nara prefecture. I would like to go there someday.” It is when I hear these sorts of conversations that I know I am bored. I tried to read a book about this sort of boredom, the kind that kills all inspiration and drives a person to laziness. The book was too disturbing at the time. I thought it would drive me into the same state of intellectual stagnation that the protagonist faced. I stopped reading the book, but I still think about it sometimes when I cannot think of anything that could possibly please me.

When I come home at night, I know that there are important things that I must do. I must write to magazine editors and inform them that I would make a good candidate for an internship. I must fill out tax forms and design the cover of a zine. I must plan the vacation that I aim to take during the week before I return home. But I enter my apartment at 9:30 pm and it is inexplicably lonely. The dishes from lunch lie unwashed in the sink. There is no pool of light warming the tatami. I am tired of reading trashy novels in bed to pass the time. I know that I will not have any new email as all my friends in Washington or California, or Colorado (or wherever they may be) have been asleep for hours now and I checked my email before I went to work. I find that I want to eat another snack to fill the emptiness. I want cereal with milk, or canned peaches and yogurt, or cheese and crackers, or perhaps just another cup of tea, but I am unable to decide. Eating is not a substitute for companionship. Perhaps if I eat enough chocolate . . .but I know that will not change how I feel. In the morning I will feel different, just as long as the sunlight remains on my tatami and I can sit on a blanket with a book while my hair dries leaving faint scent-traces of shampoo in the air. In the morning I can read something about vampires and it won’t have the ability to induce strange dreams. In the morning I can plan my vacation and write to magazine-men and wash the dishes from today’s lunch. In the morning I can eat peaches and yogurt or cereal and milk and drink a fresh cup of tea. In the morning I can dream more of my future. Tonight, I will take my chick-lit novel to my bed and read until I am bored enough to sleep. Or perhaps I’ll leave that until tomorrow as well.

cherry blossoms

2005-04-11T12:13:00.000+09:00

Every year in Japan, winter dies with the birth of Sakura, cherry blossoms. And when the blooms erupt all over hillsides, and in parks, looking almost snow-like, people emerge from their homes en-masse to picnic beneath the trees. Cherry blossoms are so popular that they have become cliché. People in the past composed glorious haiku about them pop stars today sing songs about them, and parents name their little girls after them. I would think adults would grow cynical and tired of the tradition of hanami, the cherry blossom viewing party, but neither young now old seem to grow weary of this seasonal occurrence. The blossoms are only around for a few weeks and everyone wants to take advantage of the change in the weather, not to mention, an excuse to party. People grill lunch on portable barbeques while gazing at the volume of pink overhead, the wind comes, the floating petals look like snow, and the scene is just, oh so Japanese.

Sunday Cherry Blossoms

The cherry blossoms are in full bloom all across Japan. Everyone is spending the few Sundays that are graced by the blooms outside under the trees.

matsuyamacastle

2005-04-09T12:07:00.000+09:00

Matsuyama Castle

blossoms in hiroshima

2005-04-09T12:06:00.000+09:00

abombdome
Originally uploaded by the ghostis.

The atom bomb dome is a ghost of a terrible past set in the midst of a modern city that almost wants to forget its phantoms. The dome is preserved as a memory, a terrible memory. But blossoms emerge in the spring-time even in front of this terrible ediface that begs a memory of something so unlike flowers.

superlovers

2005-04-09T11:59:00.000+09:00

superlovers
Originally uploaded by the ghostis.

Are you a superlover? Do you wear your hair like Elvis? Do you sport aviator shades and dangle a cigarette from your lips? Do you have it written on the back of your plaid flannel shirt?

a cash based economy

2005-03-31T21:37:00.000+09:00

Before I came to Japan, I heard that most people who live here rely primarily on cash. This means that people do not frequently use credit cards and that stores that actually take credit cards are relatively rare. This invariably makes certain things a bit difficult, like ordering things on the internet and buying plane tickets from travel agents in other cities. But the Japanese have managed to get around all this. There are bank transfers for things like buying plane tickets, and COD for ordering English language books off the internet. For everyday shopping, there is good old fashioned paper money.

Because I have been living in Japan for the good part of a year I now know that it is common for people to carry the equivalent of a few hundred dollars in cash around with them in their wallets when not intending on actually using the cash to make a hefty purchase. But I have never, until last night, witnessed anyone whip out a very large sum of money in public and proceed to arrange it in plain view of anyone who might happen to be looking. The train heading east from Matsuyama was not particularly crowded after it emptied out at Imabari. An older man stepped onto the train at Iyo-Saijo who looked like the usual old-men train passenger. He was wearing rather non-descript old wool pants, a jacket with a chest-pocket and carrying an Adidas draw-string tote bag that some people might use to carry athletic shoes. After taking a seat, he proceeded to open the bag, and take out a wad of 5 10,000 yen notes which he displayed in such a way that allowed me to count them before he rolled them up and zipped them into the pocket of his jacket. After an interval of a few seconds, he reached into his bag again and pulled out another stack of 10,000 yen bills. He did the same with these. Just when I thought he was done, he repeated this procedure again. After zipping the three rolls of money into his pocket, he patted it down to evaluate his arrangement. After deciding that it was not sufficient, he pulled all three rolls of cash out of his pocket, stacked them into one large wad, rolled them one last time, and put them back into the pocket. There were no less than 10 10,000 yen notes in the roll. And he didn't seem to be at all concerned that he had pulled out this sum of money in public and I had seen him complete the entire procedure. I began to wonder if he had been betting on the races and happened to be very lucky that day.

Now I understand the nature of Japan's cash based economy a bit better.

This country

2005-03-29T10:09:00.000+09:00

My goodbye was a tear that flashed against a window for a moment
As a plane rose into the air.

My welcome was the thick, wet of summer
and the violent hum of the cicadas
that threatened to drown my ears.
The air was comparable to the center of a tear.

On the train,
I cried
Summoning every filiment of moisture
That had settled in me over the years
Decorating the underside of my skin
In ornate twinings
And multitudes of sea matter
That the dull, wet country
Would exorcise.

My experience
was a vast blank
Gray
In my eyes,
Ironically zen.

It was hard to imagine any place less voluptuous
Despite the heat of summer
With the incessant chirp of lewd insects
Scraping at the heated earth,
With the constant scuttling of cockroaches that
Haunted every dwelling like small, dark, metallic ghosts.

It was difficult to imagine anything but a closing of my spirit in this country
When I was seeking something more akin to an unfurling.

My goodbye will be an expectant tentacle reaching
For the beginning of a summer
Filled with the odor of the sun sucking at ripe grapes and drying grasses.

festival umbrellas

2005-03-27T18:16:00.000+09:00

festival umbrellas

It is supposed to be spring but it is raining. It is raining on a festival day and the only thing one can hope to do is huddle under a plastic umbrella on the sea wall eating tako-yaki and ice cream waiting for the rain to pass.

Chosa

2005-03-27T16:00:00.000+09:00

Kanonji residents are extraordinarily proud of their chosas-large, ornate pallanquin-like portable shrines bedecked in gold-braid and elaborate upholstery that the city's men pull through the streets in the annual autimn harvest festival. They are so proud of this ancient rite, in fact, that they hauled out all of the city's chosas to host the ancestral festival on overdrive in celebration of Kanonji's 50th anniversary. Weeks before the festival-day, all the neighborhood men gathered to asseble the chosas and make them ready for the day. On the Suday of the festival, the chosa-barers dressed in a uniform of workers' garments and a traditional hapi jacket emblazoned with neghborhood names. Upwards of 100 men pulled each three-ton chosa to the parking lot of Areake beach where the festivities were to take place.

Thousands of people had gathered to watch the different neighborhoods compete against each other in chosa lifting contest and carrying races. Some people came from as far away as Osaka to join in the festivities. Unfortunately, it was drizzling on this particular Sunday, and by mid afternoon, it had begun to rain. Many of the chosas were covered in transparent plastic to keep off the rain, but the contests were still raging. Men hefting chosas to the sound of encouraging words and whistles blended together to form the cacauphony that marks this unusual ritual. Neaby vendors had set up to keep the crowds appeased with tako-yaki and beer, crepes and soda, and chocolate covered bananas. Girls in mini skirts and high heeled boots chatted underneath umbrellas. Boys with Elvis hair and plit-toed construction-workers' boots waited their turn to join in the competition. Small childred were licking ice cream cones. Men were drinking been. Everyone was celebrating in the rain on a day that was supposed ot have fallen into spring.

chosa

Osaka on the Weekend

2005-03-23T09:52:00.000+09:00

The midget sat on the faded plush train seat, her feet dangling in the air several inches from the floor. She was accustomed to other people’s stares. The mountain climber, though he was getting on in years, was taking advantage of the coming of spring. That morning he donned his red hat and vest packed his backpack and headed off to catch the train. He had not anticipated sitting next to the midget. The spring equinox is a national holiday in Japan so the trains were bustling on this particular Sunday. When we all exited the train at Sakaide Station, I lost sight of the midget and the mountain climber.

In Okayama, students dressed to graduate were ordering coffee at Starbucks, taking care not to spill the hot beverages onto their immaculate kimono. On the train platform, everyone seemed headed for Osaka. People were already lined up a half hour before the train was set to arrive. One young woman who seemed to have repressed gothic fantasies by the look of her hairstyle, and her purse, was walking back and forth on the platform with her mother trying to find the best place in the line. Neither wanted to be seen near the woman with the joke-shop worthy buckteeth.

The train arrived to the sounds of “I’ve been working on the railroad” right on time and the throngs rushed for the doors anxious to get seated. I managed to squeeze into a seat across from the pseudo-goth woman who promptly put her large, gray and black purse in her lap and fell asleep with her mouth open. When the train finally stopped at Umeda Station in Osaka, everyone streamed out of the train-cars into the mass of people thronging through the station. It had been a long time since I had set foot in a large city and it was difficult to navigate through the pedestrian traffic swarming through the station.

Namba was teeming with people as well. And the people looked a bit more polished than the people on Shikoku. Their jackets were crisp and looked expensive. Or alternately, they were costumed like no one on Shikoku can ever get away with. The gothic Lolita girls swarmed through America Mura drinking in stares. A clown couple sat in the concrete plaza waiting for something. Goth shops beckoned.

By the time I headed off to Karaoke with the group of friends I had met up with earlier that evening, I was not exactly in the mood for singing. When I finally attempted a song my voice came out off-key and cracking. The internet café where we decided to spend the night was not much better, but since all the love hotels were booked, it appeared to be the only option within price range at that time of night. The plastic cubicle that guarded me was not a barrier against the sounds in the room or the smell of cigarettes that permeated every pore of the odd place. I went to sleep to the sound of phones ringing and woke up to strange rustlings at least every half hour. One hundred stories were taking place in that room, but they were all guarded from each other by the blue, plastic cubicle walls.

Gloomy Bear

2005-03-20T17:30:00.000+09:00

Gloomy and artist
Originally uploaded by the ghostis.

It is a busy afternoon in America town, Osaka’s own answer to the persistent Japanese fascination with all things American, including clothing found in American thrift stores and marked up to exorbitant prices. Gothic Lolita girls stroll the streets in pairs showing off their French-maid style dresses. Outside the Gloomy Bear shop, a plush, Gloomy mascot attacks passers by. Only a few escape without at least a slight mauling. Inside, the artist is signing merchandise. The shop sells everything from key chains and stuffed toys to giant attachable Gloomy arms in several colors to fulfill strange fetishes. After completing the signing session, the artist exits the store to pose with the Gloomy Bear outside the store. They sit on the curb together while fans snap pictures.

Gloomy advances on his prey
Originally uploaded by the ghostis.

How to leave

2005-03-15T22:47:00.000+09:00

If you exude energy that reveals your dissatisfaction, sometimes they will just ask you to leave, and give you no reason for the decision--and not even expect you to ask questions.

Tightrope Japan's days are numbered...soon, there will only be a Tightrope leading into an unknown.

why men don't get allergies

2005-03-13T10:44:00.000+09:00

"Many people have told me that they don't like spring because they get allergies"

"Are they women?" he asks.

I silently wonder it matters whether or not they are women. Allergies are not a gender related problem, or are they? You never know in Japan. "Yes, they are women," I respond because, as it happens, everyone who has mentioned to me that she hates spring because of allergies is a woman. I actually can't remember a man ever complaining about allergies in my presence. Men do have allergies, don't they? They have to get allergies sometimes. Or are allergies socially conditioned. Do men resist allergies because it is not socially acceptable to walk around all spring with a runny nose, and puffy eyes sneezing all the time. "Why did you ask if they are women?" I say. "Do men get allergies?"

"Only women get allergies," he responds.

"Why is that?" I ask, trying to keep my cool. Betraying my own opinions is not a good tactic, especially at this point in the discussion. I can provide a tirade about Western notions of feminism later if I am so inclined. But for now, I need to know why Japanese men don't get allergies.

A wry look almost begins to creep across his face as he says, "Men have the fighting power!"

The fighting power? What is the fighting power? I suppose that to him women are weak, measly waifs only suited to sit at a desk and answer the phone, or cook him dinner. And women have no immune system, now, to boot. It takes a lot of expertise to cook dinner, or take care of a house anyway. As a matter of fact, if giving birth to a child doesn't require a woman to have the fighting power, then I don't know what does (even though I have not given birth myself). He most certainly couldn't give birth to a child let alone be a housewife. It would exacerbate his shoulder pain. I certainly wouldn't want to be his wife. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't want to be a wife.

"So men don't get allergies," I confirm.

"No."

On becoming the next Diane Arbus by way of teaching English to small brats and rich housewives

2005-03-10T21:45:00.000+09:00

Young college graduates who bumble their way over to Japan just after graduation to teach English are notoriously inexperienced in the realm of teaching. They have a reputation, and this reputation is mainly that they get paid to chat with middle aged Japanese folks and don't do much by way of teaching at all. Unfortunately, outside of the few elementary school age classes that I actually seem to be imparting some information to, I very much fit into this stereotype. I don't know anything about teaching, though random fragments of high school English etymology lessons come back at odd moments and seem to make their way into a few of my lessons in between my rants about myself, and forced, petty small-talk about the weather. I thought I knew enough about the English language to teach it as a foreign language, but being able to utter, or write, an intellegent, or coherent sentence in English is very different from having an ability to teach others to do the same. Just because I aspired to write a book of poetry at age nine doesn't mean I like teaching my favorite language to other people.

I am tired of talking about the weather with middle aged women who go to the spa for a full-body treatment once a month practice ikebana and tea ceremony in their free time (when they are not cleaning house or doing whatever else Japanese homemakers do). At least I haven't "snapped" and taped a student to a desk like the teacher did in the newspaper article that is pinned to my office door at work. But, unfortunately I haven't had the motivation to improve my actual teaching skills.

When that magazine editor decides to ask me "So, what did you accomplish in your last job?" I have an inkling that I will not know how to respond. Accomplishment what? "Um...I tolerated Japanese brats and housewives for almost a year, while managing to learn almost no Japanese." "I learned that teaching is, well...not for me." And he, or she, will say something to the effect of "Describe your skills." And the only way I will be able to respond is "Understanding very basic, almost incomprehensible, English. Interpreting childeren's thoughts with whom I cannot communicate by way of language. And of course, being alone." Of course, I cannot expect these responses to get me a job, but who knows, maybe some trendy coffee shop will want to hang my photo of a girl putting on makeup while riding the train on their wall and I'll be the next Diane Arbus.

Big

2005-03-09T17:36:00.000+09:00

After I eat this box of cereal, I will not be the small girl in the back begging for a share of the goods. I'll be the big guy in front who eats everything in sight and doesn't let the little ones in on the booty.

Not a lot to say about spring viewed from behind a window

2005-03-08T23:08:00.000+09:00

It is spring, and I have not really ventured beyond the protective walls of the edifaces that I inhabit. I cannot say why. Perhaps because I have grown accustomed to staying indoors. I have watched my body grow soft all winter, not quite loathing the accumulation of flesh upon my frame as I have in the past. I have been in a hibernation of sorts and I have begun to feel quite like a soft, sleeping animal. But now it is spring, and it is time to shed the layers upon layers of clothing that I have bundled myself in all winter, and it is time to become slight and strong again. I like the feeling that my skin is stretched over the contents of myself like a tight drumskin. I like knowing that I can run without getting winded, climb a mountain if I want, and scale a tree like a small furred animal. Now, I feel slow, and stationary, and my flesh has grown to the consistency of those custard-filled pancakes in the shape of pandas that they sell out in front of the video store. It is time to begin rising before the sun has crested in the sky. It is time to move outdoors. It is time to shed the winter from my body.

Dress your children in Burberry and lace

2005-03-07T22:26:00.000+09:00

Even many wealthy American parents dress their children in so-called practical clothing. This may just be a tradition born of a no-frills Puritain past or the belief in quality and durability over proving ones status as an elite by dressing children up like Burberry dolls. In Japan, the latter holds true. When wealthy Japanese children are not wearing the ubiquitous navy blue school uniform, their parents often squeeze them into miniature designer garb--impractical clothing that will be outgrown or torn within the month. I have to confess that I have not read David Sedaris' latest, Dress Your Children in Cordouroy and Denim, but the opposite seems to follow for many Japanese. The phrase should rather read, "dress your children like porcelain dolls." It is almost intimidating to teach a class to a Burberry clad three year old, and even more so to be confronted by a thirteen year old in a knee length Burberry coat with matching Burberry trousers. While men speak of being emasculated by certain situations, I have to say that my femininity is somehow challenged by these prim, examples of doll-like girlhood.

Night Train

2005-03-06T22:00:00.000+09:00

Naoshima

2005-03-02T23:21:00.000+09:00

Every place in Japan, no matter how small it is, claims to be famous for something. Some remarkably hidden places cultivate tourist attractions as if they were rice to draw people out to the farthest reaches of the countryside. Naoshima is a small island in Kagawa Prefecture, but it happens to be located much closer to Okayama Prefecture on Honshu. Naoshima is the home of the Art House Project, and the Chechi Museum of Art. Having heard that the museum is worth the trip, I embarked on a ferry ride from Takamatsu early yesterday afternoon. The island itself, wearing its winter garb (or lack of) was bland and windswept. The leafless trees amplified the feeling that the island had been vacated. The museum is situated three-quarters of the way around the island from the ferry terminal on foot. The tourist information posted on the ferry said that the museum was about an hour's walk.

By the time I arrived at Seaside Park, I was exhausted. Everything appeared to be shut down for the winter like a ghostly summer resort. Even the palm trees on the beach looked comically out of place. I struck out walking up the very steep hill where the sign for the museum seemed to point. After walking some distance, I realized that I was never going to come to the museum and I walked back down. At the bottom of the hill I continued in the direction of Benessee House. I could see the museum in the distance nestled into the hill, a modern ediface standing in striking contrast to the small, island environment. It was growing late and I remembered that I had not checked the ferry schedule, and rather than going the last few kilometers to the museum, I opted to catch the bus back to the ferry port. I knew that the mysterious museum would remain in my mind like a lost trophy, or an unfinished race. Once back at the ferry terminal, I found that the next ferry did not come for an hour and a half, so I pulled out my book and tried not to notice that people were staring.

First Spring Blossoms

2005-03-02T23:15:00.000+09:00

The leaves of deciduous trees have not yet re-grown for spring, but a few trees have sprouted pink blossoms that stand strikingly against the drab, still-winter sky.

Pilgrims

2005-02-27T14:16:00.000+09:00

Areake Beach as a Garbage Dump

2005-02-27T13:50:00.000+09:00

The chill air whispers the possibility of spring lingering just around the corner of the next day, but despite the raucous pink blossoms set against leafless trees, it snowed yesterday. Today I walked along the beach and examined the refuse that the last high tide washed up on shore. It was interesting a few weeks ago to peek between the plastic containers and seaweed and see what I could spot strewn upon the sand. Today the trash was just sad. The mish-mash of plastic and aluminum and the occasional onion, raddish, or orange reminds me more of a garbage-dump than beach treasure. I spotted a sodden, wet cow toy on a bed of sand, and though I did not think of it at the moment, I almost wish I would have performed its funeral. Even the shells, small white leavings of the sea upon the sand, were obscured by the volume of trash on the beach. This was nature in its least wild, most spoiled state.

Yesterday I was reading people's accounts of encounters with nature, and they were beautiful. None of them prominently featured trash, but one talked about finding treasure on a hidden beach in Baja, Mexico. This treasure was the refuse of far off places-but it was distilled, and shaped by the sea. It was sea-borne treasure in the form of glass orbs that served to bouy Japanese fishing nets of the past. I cannot imagine finding something this other-worldly on the Japanese beach that I walk on Sundays. I only find plastic bottles that once contained green tea, beer cans, fragments of nylon fishing-nets, boxes of oranges that someone dropped into the sea, and sometimes dead starfish. Today, there were no starfish corpses to remind me of the life the exists under the muddy water of the Seito Inland Sea. The articles that were strewn over the beach are not reminders of life, but of waste, and that which will never dacay and make way for new life to fill its place.

Pondering the concept of home in the rain

2005-02-24T21:48:00.000+09:00

There is something comforting about the cold drenching rains that come in winter. They are so unlike the fierce hot tears of summer typhoons. Winter rains remind me of childhood. They remind me of home. When home seems so far away, even familiarity in the form of weather patterns can seem comforting. It is at times like these when I know that every idealist, every self-professed independent sprit is drawn back to memories of home and begins to wonder if there is a reason why some families inhabit the same plot of ground for generations, for centuries. I have always believed that those who stay home lack ambition, in other words, I have always thought them to be weaklings. In my mind, I needed to move on and to find my own plot of ground to claim. I needed to play pioneer for a time and find the place that screams home to me. Perhaps I will never have my 160 acres and perhaps I will never feel the urge to farm, but there is a reason why I played pioneer for all those years as a child. It sunk in. I still want to be the pioneer. Ironically, I found myself traveling west towards the land that my people have always labeled “East.” I found it hard, just like pioneering families found their westward migration trying—only my migration has certainly caused me considerably less hardship than that suffered by those who I have always termed pioneers. Of course, I had to come this far to remember that home isn’t such a terrible place. But, each person can have many homes. Home is simply a place that is laced with far more memories than other locations. Home is an idea more than a place at all, though this idea rests on the physical terrain of a given place. This is why returning home is often a disappointment. The memories are often richer than the place seems to be when returning after a long absence. I know that my homecoming will be filled with as many disappointments as it is with promises. Perhaps this is because I cannot precisely locate home. I am still pioneering, but the homestead has not yet slipped over the horizon. In the mean time, I can watch the rain, and be reminded of home while I am building new memories of this still foreign terrain populated with gray houses, and trees trimmed into unusual shapes.

Makeup

2005-02-24T12:08:00.000+09:00

Waiting For The Train

2005-02-24T12:07:00.000+09:00

Japanese Fashion DIY style

2005-02-24T09:19:00.000+09:00

Mainstream Japanese youth fashion is fond of the indie rock do-it-yourself aesthetic seen on American streets from New York to San Francisco, and everywhere in between. Yet again, the Japanese have taken a facet of American culture up a notch just as they have appropriated and improved countless other American inventions. Walking the streets of Tokyo, Osaka, and even smaller cities in rural areas, one is bound to see countless numbers of Japanese youth clad in the most peculiar renditions of the classic American rocker, goth, or emo kid.

Some refer to a segment of these fashionable Japanese youths as “The Mushroom Heads” because of their fondness for wearing large, baggy hats. Buttons, bows, fake pearls, and other accessories are frequently seen adorning anything from jackets, purses or hanging from belt-loops. Of course, one can never forget to mention the ubiquitous leg-warmers that Japanese girls wear, more to spice up their wardrobe than to actually keep their legs warm. Another subculture of fashionable Japanese youth are the Goths, or as they are sometimes referred to, Gothic Lolita girls. Though it is possible to purchase prefabricated, gothic attire in many Japanese shopping malls, Japanese goth magazines such as The Gothic Lolita Bible, and Rococo encourage DIY style by providing patterns and DIY fashion suggestions in each issue.

Japanese youth style, whether the wearer buys his or her wardrobe, in its entirety, at a popular chain store, or fashions new creations out of second hand goods is very DIY friendly. It is surprising how many of the clothes in Japan that are targeted at youth have a DIY look to them even though they are mass produced. This factor makes it relatively simple to appropriate some of the more unique stylistic aspects of the Japanese youth with a few cast-off items, thrift store purchases, scissors, needles, thread, and some whimsical touches of your own.

Layers: Don’t be afraid to layer to get that authentic Japanese look. Mix solid colors with underlying stripes. Wear halter tops under long sleeved T-shirts and top it off with a baggy, button down cardigan from your grandfather’s closet.

Ruffles: Whip out your needle and thread and sew a few ruffles and add a few tucks to a men’s dress shirt, or even an old blazer or military jacket. If you are feeling especially creative, add a few bobbles and fine chains to the pocket, collar, or cuffs.

Silk Screen Prints: Bold, punky designs printed on T-shirts, men’s dress shirts, and skirts augmented with a few baubles sewn to the fabric. When a silk screen is not available, a brush and some fabric paint works almost just as well.

Asymmetrical skirts: cut up that almost-perfect thrift store find to give it that Japanese indie flavor you are craving. Try your hand at constructing a skirt from an old men’s dress shirt of one of those plaid flannels that has been a favorite among farmers and back-woodsmen for generations.

Cut-off trousers: Classic men’s trousers cut off just below or above the knee make for ultimate layering. Don’t be afraid to don a pair of suspenders to compliment this look along with some complicated sock arrangement.

Leg Wear: The Japanese are fond of socks. Stripes, bright colors, layering, and of course, leg warmers make for the ultimate effect. Make leg-warmers from old sweaters, tights, and old knee socks.

Foot Wear: If you have an old pair of converse, this is all you need. If you want to get a bit fancier, a pair of 80s style thrift store high heels worn with plenty of socks and at least one pair of hot pink leg warmers will do the trick.

Head Wear: Fedoras and golfer hats are fabulous accents to any outfit.

Accessories: loosely fitted belts, buttons, bows, extra zippers, patches and furry purses complete the look.

To get the complete Japanese indie look, odd combinations and excessive layering are necessary.

Kazahana

2005-02-18T21:23:00.000+09:00

The word kazahana in Japanese comes from the words for wind (kaze) and flower (Hana) and refers to the natural phenomenon of snow falling from a clear, blue sky. This can only happen when the weather is very cold and the wind is blowing in a certain manner. Very few people who live on Shikoku have seen this many times, but in Japanese, it has its own word. When I read about this phenomenon, I thought of the old wives-tale that says Inuit have one hundred words for snow because snow it such a large aspect of their world. Maybe the Inuit do not have as many words for snow as someone poetically asserted, but the Japanese call the kind of snow that falls under a blue sky, wind-flower. I think it beautiful, but many Japanese, especially the philosophically inclined, associate this with sadness. According to Yasuko, one woman I spoke with about kazahana, snow is often associated with sadness in Japan. When anything happens to warrant tears in a Japanese TV drama, it begins to snow. According to Mikiko Miyakawa of the Daily Yomiuri (one of Japan's English newspapers) kazahana specifically "[stirs] vague feelings of sadness and pain with its suggestion of something fickle." Where I tend to enjoy the few snowfalls I experience in a winter because the is so fleeting, zen philosophy imbues the infrequent snowfall with a darker mood because it will not last. It snowed one day this winter in Kanonji and I walked to work smiling under the flakes that fell onto my hat and cooled my toes until they felt like ice themselves because I knew it might be the only ten minutes that I would witness any snow upon the ground this year. Saburo Teshigawara, a Japanese dancer and choreographer premiered a performance entitled Kazahana last year in France. This winter, his company is performing the dance, which is imbued with Teshigawara's zen influenced philosophical beliefs, in Tokyo. Teshigawara believes kazahana to be a sort of transcendent moment that is connected chain-like to a set of other moments when someone witnessed the snow falling and a blue sky at the very same time. Perhaps someone passed on their experience to a friend, or a child, or a passing acquaintance at one point and that transmission of information carried on a tradition. Kazahana can only be remembered when there is a word to describe it as such. We have no word in English, as far as I know, and I do not believe I have paid much attention to the moments when I witnessed snow falling from a clear blue sky. I know I have because I can almost recall watching light flakes land upon my nose and cheeks as I gazed up past the pine-bows separating myself from the blue of the sky, but I cannot place the moment in any one day, or month, or even year.

On Wasabi (not wabisabi)

2005-02-18T21:21:00.000+09:00

I cannot say that there is anything particularly zen about consuming five heaping tablespoonfuls of wasabi and barely flinching, but I do have to say that Dylan looked like a zen master as he consumed each spoonful. Of course no one but a foreigner would suggest that a wasabi eating contest is a enjoyable pastime. The sole Japanese national who consented to eat the hot garnish seemed to fare the worst. By the third spoonful he had broken out in a sweat. After four spoonfuls two of the three contestants admitted defeat. Dylan ate a fifth spoonful to show off his masculine prowess in the form of an ability to eat an abominable amount of spice. By the end of the evening, all three contestants had burning pains in their stomachs.

On the Precise Art of Tea

2005-02-18T21:19:00.000+09:00

There is something about the precise nature of traditional Japanese arts that prompts some slight sense of aversion in myself and a simultaneous sense of awe. Last month I attended my first true Japanese tea ceremony. It was sparse, simple, and everything was in perfect order. I learned that the guests sit in order of rank and that there is a necessary protocol when taking the tea that is served by neatly kimono-clad women. Of course, there was a lot of bowing involved. When the tea practitioner serves tea, the receiver must bow. Then she must take up the tea bowl and carefully turn it some amount of times that I have since forgotten in a direction that is most likely clockwise. Before setting the bowl back down, it is necessary to turn the bowl again. I was informed that slurping is perfectly acceptable, though sitting in seiza position is a necessity when tea is served in a tatami room. As a foreigner, I was given a special seat to lift my weight off my feet. There were three kinds of tea served at the ceremony. Of course, they all had different names. The only one I remember was matcha, only because it is the powdered green tea that is used to make green tea ice cream. One of the teas contained an umeboshi (salty pickled plum) and a bit of konbu seaweed. The meal they served was traditional Japanese food, and took a zen master to consume without considering the strangeness of the texture. I am no zen master and could not eat the strangest portions of the meal. After one bowl of sake, I took to refusing the libation that seemed to like to find its way to the tatami mat more than my lips, and I blatantly left my fish eggs and anything with eyes in the precisely arranged position I found it on the tray. I did not seem to take any valuable lessons in the art of tea away with me that afternoon, though I know that those lessons are couched somewhere in my brain between the word for flower and rabbit in Japanese. The stark nature of the ceremony still perplexes completely in some ways, and in others it seems perfectly clear. Most of my lack of knowledge of the inner workings of the tea ceremony, I blame on my inability to comprehend the Japanese language. I do know that the guest of honor that day won a gardening competition and that tea ceremonies do not only involve brewing tea with precision but a coming-together of several traditional arts infused with zen philosophy including ikebana, and calligraphy.

Night Walk

2005-02-17T21:45:00.000+09:00

I walk home in the dark, ghosts of houses revealing themselves in the light of the half moon, topiary trees silhouetted against their upturned eves. The air breathes the first signs of spring though it is not yet humming with new, insect life. A cat scuttles away from my steps into the dark recesses of a driveway. I imagine people crawling onto clean futons, turning out lights, pulling on warm pajamas after a hot bath. My bag slaps against my back, its clasps making a dull clacking sound in the almost silence of the night as I cross the bridge and imagine all the herons standing upon one leg, heads tucked under wing, in the shallows of the river below. I look up at the sky before I pass under the sheltered gaze of the mountain that marks my destination: home. The moon reveals only half its face and I read it as a sign, like the faces of coins tossed in divination.

my photo on venus

2005-02-17T10:29:00.000+09:00

venus { women in music, art, film, fashion, d.i.y. culture }

A photo that I took at a punky club in Tokyo is on the venuszine website. You may have to reload a few times to get my image (Sheltered Image). They got the name wrong somehow. It is supposed to be called "Sheltered" and I have no idea how the word 'image' got tacked on the end.

The Tantrum

2005-02-15T22:48:00.000+09:00

Teachers cannot throw tantrums. At least, this is what most people hold to be true. When I was a child, I threw frequent, quite embarrassing tantrums at school. As a teacher, I usually need to restrain myself from doing the same, though sometimes I worry that my fury will emerge and I will exit my workplace forever. These are the sorts of between-class daydreams that cross teachers' minds, especially when these people know that teaching is not their calling. The moments when I considered throwing a tantrum today have passed, but rather than writing about the natural phenomenon known as kazahana, in Japanese, I seem to be rambling about those things I think about when I am most dissatisfied with my place (not including food).

Many people who come to Japan as English teachers write a blog as a way to vent their everyday emotions that so often become pent up unlike they would in our home countries. I try and steer clear of this emotional dumptster style blogging because I know that it resembles countless numbers of bad English blogs produced every day around this country. The single comment that I received on my blog (which gives me reason to believe that only one person has ever read it) was written precisely because the writer wants to encourage a different sort of blogging about the Japan experience. I am not a seasoned veteran of Japan, nor am I the bubbling, excited first year JET still thrilled with the newness of the place. I understand that keeping the newness in an experience can be necessary for that experience not to stagnate, but from the outset, I experienced newness perhaps with more resistance than i should. I knew something was wrong when I made the decision to come here, so I arrived slightly more embittered (for no apparent reason) than the average JET newbee (though I am not a JET). I came to Japan knowing that young, cosmopolitan, advenurers do things like this. I came knowing that it would be the last time in my life when I would back up and move to another country with a week's notice. I came because I did not know what else to do. It was new. I remember what it felt like to be new in this country in the middle of summer. I remember the smell, and the thick-humming of the cicadas. Everything was damp and still, and sometimes, when the typhoons came, things were stirred up in the frenzy of rain and wind. It was summer. Everything was so new, and things seemingly happened so quickly that there was no time to reflect.

Now, with the slowness of winter upon us, there is ample time for reflection. It is cold outside, and I feel like I have gone into a sort of hibernation. Things happen outside my window, under the roof-tops that I gaze over when I wake up every morning, but I am not a part of them. I never really would be a part of them, as I cannot speak the language that everyone around me is speaking. This is a sort of retreat from the world rather than an entry into it. Sometimes I wonder what the world will look like when I finally emerge and understand what everyone is saying.

Princess Ai: Courtney Love as a Manga Princess

2005-02-13T17:29:00.000+09:00

If Courtney Love was a manga princess from an unknown planet who found herself working in a hostess bar in Tokyo, she would be princess Ai. Since we are not all pop culture icons like Courtney, so we are not all able to get manga artists like DJ Milky and Misaho Kujiradou to collaborate with us to create a comic with a heroine that remarkably resembles a fantasy version of ourselves. This collaborative effort, while somewhat unsuccessfully straining to highlight the feminist elements it pushes within the manga world, is an interesting experiment in the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures and certainly makes a decent attempt to depict an evolving Japan.

We meet the gothic Lolita hard-rocker Ai when she finds herself on a Tokyo street unable to remember where she came from or why she is in Tokyo in the first place. All she has is her name, a mysterious heart-shaped box, and her scanty, revealing clothing. Soon after her arrival, Ai meets Kent who works at the Shinjuku University library where she begins to uncover her mysterious past. Her relationship with Kent evolves into the beginnings of a romance and Ai soon finds herself forced to choose between him, or a seemingly more viable protector in the Tokyo underworld where she has found a temporary place working as a hostess and emerging rock star.

The story us somewhat formulaic, involving the mysterious heroine who is forced to choose between love and protection while both looking for herself and escaping mystery demons from her past. This shojo manga’s target audience is teenage girls and its reliance on traditional themes is decorated with just enough feminine assertiveness and heroic independence to make budding feminists happy. While the story may appeal to proponents of “girl-power,” the illustrations fail to move beyond the traditional female stereotypes found in manga comics. Princess Ai reveals herself to have a habit of shredding her clothing until it is more rag than wear and she always manages to show more than just a little thigh and cause a ruckus whenever the spirit moves her. In essence, she is the manga version of Ms. Love herself, and no matter how much innocence Ai feigns, she is blatantly asking for attention, and for a man to save her from the evil, female, furies following in her tracks.

The Land of Long-Necked Birds

2005-02-13T10:31:00.000+09:00

Children birthed in this land
Grow
Dreaming of long-necked birds
That fly across the sky in pairs toward the sea.
They dabble in rivers where these slender creatures
Stand unmoving
Like great philosophers
In shallow water.

Children grow into artists
And move across the sea
To join the ranks of the creative
Like birds migrating towards the warmth of summer.
Birds lie couched in their minds
Like seldom-heard-from muses
Until they emerge on canvass
Fragmented and vibrant
Rendered in the colors of a dream
Left brewing in the soul for years.
The birds of youth have conversations
Amongst themselves on canvas.

Children grow old
And homecoming is a rite of passage
That comes with the slowing of the spirit.
Their island awaits in a far-off sea
Where long-necked birds catch fish
In the shallows of the river
And take flight at sunset to be silhouetted
Against the sky in the search for home.

After years in other parts,
Home is foreign,
A stark country populated with gray houses
Arranged in not-so-perfect lines.
The birds are the color of the sky in winter,
Not the violet of brightly-hued dream-birds
Rendered in acrylic with a broad brush.
Artists hang paintings of long-necked birds
On the walls of galleries and museums
Hoping to sell a colored dream
To the non-dreamer’s black and white world.

The Marugame Museum of Contemporary Art

2005-02-11T21:20:00.000+09:00

Genichiro Inokuma--Expression in Figures

The Marugame Museum of Contemporary Art stands opposite the train station, a modern edifice that pays tribute to the life and work of Genichiro Inokuma. Three works of sculpture by Inokuma stand in the courtyard that serves as the museum’s entry-way, and the white, front wall of the building itself is adorned with images of animals rendered the style of primitive cave-paintings. This contrast between the hyper-modern and the primitive carries through on the inside of the museum as well. Unadorned cement walls serve as the palette that Inokuma’s paintings are displayed upon. The paintings themselves hold the stylistic elements of the Fauves, cubists, and the evolution of these two style-influences in the artist’s later work.

The first gallery that the visitor comes upon after walking up the museum stairs features some of Inokuma’s later works: bright cubist tableaux and the renderings of a seasoned hand imitating the work of a kindergarten art class. His use of angular shapes, outlined in black, set upon white backgrounds seem at home in the stark, modern space. Some of the works, such as “Two paintings living in the painting” and “a conversation of portraits” approximate visual metafiction broadening the scope of the artist’s work beyond cubism and fauvism.

The artist’s obsession with long-necked, long-legged birds and round Picassoesque faces becomes even more apparent in the second gallery. Inokuma paints two-dimensional images on two-dimensional canvasses, but does so with craft, and whimsy, often suggesting that his work is part of a larger conversation that occurs both inside and outside of the paintings themselves. Matisse’s influences are strongly apparent in some of his portraiture, especially in works such as “Portrait of Mr. K” and “Man playing the cello”. Some of his later works rely on multiple, simple, two dimensional images, especially faces, set in grids that serve to separate the elements in a painting just as much as they serve to connect them to one another. Inokuma’s work harbors very little apparent Japanese influence, but is located within a Twentieth Century European tradition. The paintings in MIMOCA would be just as at home in a sparsely decorated urban apartment as they are in the carefully designed museum building.

Kenji's Stare

2005-02-06T23:23:00.000+09:00

Until last night I believed Japanese men to be rather unobtrusive even when drunk. Of course, I have experienced The Stare from those incapable of exercising their modesty in the presence of a foreigner. Most of the time, it is only the very old and the very young who stare so unabashedly. I met Kenji last night in an Izakaya. He was out with his friends drinking cho chu and eating rice soup when Tim interrupted their party out of drunken joviality. Eventually my diminished group merged with this drinking party of young Japanese men stuck in a rural town and I had the great good fortune to sit beside Kenji's blood-shot stare. I may have locked eyes with him for a second completely on accident, but for the full duration of the half hour I was sitting at the table, he conintually edged closer to me and muttered drunkenly in both English and Japanese that I was "pretty." I understood very little of his few other attempts to strike up a conversation so I sat there, silently, embarrassed at my inability to communicate and stared into my glass. When I left in search of my own warm bed, kenjis bleary eyes betrayed his disappointment at my parting.

Loneliness

2005-02-06T18:02:00.000+09:00

Sometimes there is no other word to desribe one's mood except 'lonely'. Lonely is often more of a state of mind than a state of being, and it is sometimes more positive than negative. But at the times when loneliness takes hold, it magnifies the world out there as supremely other and one's place in the world as a single individual relatively unattached to anyone, or anything else. But loneliness can be a boon. It is the position of the protagonist of the American myth. It is a vantagepoint as much as it is a bubble of protection from the outside world.

This afternoon I went walking along the beach. Unlike last Sunday, the beach was populated with families of clam diggers, and solitary old men armed with buckets, shovels and rubber boots. The tide was out and the shallow water along the shore sparkled in the sunlight. Much of the trash from last week had been washed out to sea and the beach was strewn with shells. The lifeless bodies of orange starfish were mingled with the shells and weeds. As I walked, I imagined various descriptions for these creatures, but craved only that I could record my walk as something simple. It was not a long walk, and I did relatively little thinking in comparison to last week. Perhaps I mused over the previous evening, but most likely I thought about the future. The future lurks in my mind more than the present these days. It is a phantom image of the future filled with imaginary delights and imaginary fears. It is a future filled with the fear of failure as much as it is a future filled with the fear of stagnation. I usually consider this present to be a time of stagnation, but I seem to be unwilling to move within the confines I have set for myself.

This evening I put music on, filled my heater with kerosene and brewed up a potato soup that turned purple from the greens that I added to it.

2005-02-06T17:40:00.000+09:00

A Conversation

2005-02-01T23:34:00.000+09:00

Preface: I told my boss, as I was photocopying a page from a text book that I was going to talk about the differences between British and American English in my next class.

My Boss: I have a friend who is British. He is a homosexual.

Me: (Silence)

My Boss: It is very bad. He should be in jail.

Me: (Silence)

My Boss: He goes to South East Asia sometimes. . .

(he trailed off and then returned to the topic of british english by saying something about the pronunciation being different in each country.)

Me: (Silence)

Teenage Stereotypes

2005-01-31T23:10:00.000+09:00

I discovered today when talking to three Japanese teenagers that japanese girls can basically be lumped into three categories. I wonder where the rest of Japanese girls fit in because this certainly doesn't seem to be all-encompasing, and they predominantly are based on physical characteristics...but here they are:

Cute Girls

-bubbley personality
-short
-short hair
-big eyes
-ditsy
-sweet smile
-high pitched voice

Beautiful Girls

Tall
Long Hair
Smart
Mysterious
A little quiet
White skin
Slim

Very Quiet Girls (maybe nerdy girls)

-very long black hair worn in a low ponytail
-glasses
-big eyebrows
-weak voice
-read a lot of books

Then there are the girls who wear a lot of makeup which partially fit into a category of their own.

There are also teen male stereotypes though they are seemingly less fixed--I gleaned that boys can be roughly gouped into the bad-boys (or tough guys), the cool guys, and the misfits.

After High Tide

2005-01-30T21:46:00.000+09:00

In the parkinglot at Areake Beach, there was a kite flying convention. An old man made announcements through a loudspeaker while a bevy of adults and chidren displayed the colors of their handmade kites. Some of the kites reached such great heights that they were barely visible against the blue of the sky.

The beach was littered with the debris of a succession of high tides that bore witness to countless lives on both sides of the Seito Inland Sea. Th containters of every imaginable beverage lay on beds of broken weeds amidst the corpses of discarded childrens' toys. I walked along the beach hoping to spot some hidden treasure that was carried ashore by the waves. All I found are the sad remnants of somebody's trash can, and an occasional shell. I was the sole visitor at the beach today and the only other visible life took the form of a few small gray birds flitted in the shallow surf. In January, the beach can seem like the desolate graveyard for unwanted objects and discarded containers. The wind was cold against my face as I walked, and I pulled my hood up over mey ears to protect them from the cold. I thought simple thoughts, the kinds that pour into my head while walking, and I tried to see the pictures the rubble made lying against the tawny sand. When I returned to the parking lot, the kite-flyers were packing up their kites and piling into their cars.

Upon leaving the beach, I passed a park and there was an old man and his monkey on a leash sitting on one of the swings. The man set the monkey on the swing each time he attempted to jump off the precarious, moving ledge, and a little girl in a plaid skirt was hopping around saying "sugoi" (cool). Then the man sat down on the swing with the monkey in his lap. After a bit, the monkey became angry and did not want to be on the swing, stared at by the crowd of people who had gathered around in the mean time. The monkey jumped off the swing and bared his teeth frantically. Then he started biting his own arm furiously and angrily like he was trapped in a body in which he did not want to belong. He would bite his arm, then extend it forcefully, the palm of his hand cupped and facing upwards. It was a rude gesture of his own creation to express his displeasure in regard to the whole situation. It was at that moment that I could see an emotion in the monkey that I have felt myself. I saw humanity in the monkey when he became angry because he was forced to sit on a swing to entertain his keeper and the children in the park. When the monkey became angry, the man began to talk to him like he would an unhappy young son. The monkey calmed down rather quickly and the man set him on a post and stroked his head. I continued on my way soon afterwards.

Tightrope Japan Site

2005-01-29T23:29:00.000+09:00

Tightrope

I finally think I posted a working site. !!! Check it out.

The list of unimportant things in my head

2005-01-27T22:12:00.000+09:00

*plus a few other thoughts

Moods:
-anti-social
-urban but stuck in a rural world
-determining the hierarchy of my identity

Music:
-Love Psychedelico
-The Softies
-Of course Belle & Sebastian--they're good every day.

Fashion statements I want to cultivate:
1. Smock-shirts and faux edwardian high necked blouses (embellished with silk screens, lace etc.).
2. edwardian men's wear clothes for modern girls.
3. I forgot to be a goth girl in high school.

Stories to write:
1. Something about trains (I have to say I am obsessed by the perfection of the story that transpires over the course of a train ride.
2. All those zine articles
3. The stories that I collect from the minutes that make up each day.

Serious Stuff:
-Japanese subculture has very little beneath the image on the surface. Japanese subculture may in fact be the image.
-How much can you say while talking about the weather? What do we really mean when we can't think of anything else to talk about with someone? Is it something other than the fact that we have nothing to say to each other? I have had more conversations about the weather in the last six months than I had in my entire life before.
-There is something powerful about a story that transpires on a train. It is the perfect setting and it has an inevitable ending.

A much elongated account of the zine design meeting on January 26, at which Rose and Greg were present, including much paraphrased dialogue.

2005-01-26T23:24:00.000+09:00

The meeting began when Greg entered Starbucks just as I was starting on the last quarter of my latte and scrawling something about the apparent emptiness and image-focus of Japanese subculture. I hoped that our meeting would amount more than the sharing of words over bowls of noodles. As we exited Starbucks and made our way to an Udon shop, I mentioned something to Greg about the apparent lack of genuine Japanese subculture, at least on the surface. I talked about how I perceive the difference between goth culture in Japan and goth culture in North America, neither of which I know very much about—but he understood what I was trying to say, and seemed to agree in a few words. He tells me that one of his high school friends had a case in the shape of a coffin after I mention that I saw a girl in the Takamatsu art museum carrying a small, black goth case that somehow fascinated me. Or maybe it was her bright orange hair that fascinated me. Somehow our two disparate thoughts seemed to connect at the time.

After sitting down with our bowls of noodles, I pulled various publications from the depths of my bag that had been growing heavier throughout the day, not so much because I was adding to the contents, but because I had been carrying it for many hours by the time we sat down for dinner. I pulled out my latest issue of Venus Zine , and a copy of Readymade both of which I hoped to gain some inspiration for the design of our own zine. After a few moments, I pulled out a copy of Ripples, a California hippie zine with average, amateur layout and filled with articles all in a very similar, curious, writing style. My ideas for design did not have much depth as they seemed to be encapsulated in my repetition of the fact that we needed to decide upon the number of pages we wanted to work with, a unified font-set, a color scheme, and then to divide the zine into distinct sections. He agreed, as the ideas were pretty basic and dealt very little with the actual design principles we were to put into use. Later, Greg would suggest a more concrete idea for the design of the publication. In the mean time, I seemed more interested in relating my most recent ideas with regard to editorial content.
“I’m thinking of reviewing blogs written by foreigners in Japan,” I said. “It might not actually be that interesting,” I ventured, as I know many of these blogs are mostly avenues to vent negative emotions.
“That sounds good,” Greg offers rather laconically.
“I also want to do an article about queer Japan but there isn’t much information on the subject. There seems to be only one book written on the subject in English and I ordered it online two months ago. It still hasn’t arrived. There are three websites listed in my Japan guidebook, but two of them don’t exist anymore. The third seems rather outdated, and the only forum postings seem to be by the same three guys. Most of the postings are links to San Francisco Chronicle articles.”
“I think there is a gay bar in Takamatsu.” Greg mentions.
I think of going in search of the club. I have never been to a gay bar before, but I don’t mention this fact. I am sure that there would only be men at the club. Most gay bars are like that as far as I have been concerned. The gay bars that aren’t filled with men are the ones that intimidate me. I remember reading in my guidebook in the Tokyo club section that the gay club they listed prohibited women from entering on weekends. I mention this to Greg.
He says “I’ve seen some lesbians. School girls hold hands and everything, but I know these weren’t those kind of girls. These were lesbians. My gaydar is pretty good.:”
I have often attempted to evaluate if my gaydar is anywhere near pretty good, but most of the time I try not to have any. For a while I didn’t even believe in gaydar, for philosophical reasons. Sexuality shouldn’t always have to matter, and it never seems to interfere unless someone assumes you are gay. I don’t want someone evaluating me according to my sexuality upon first catching a glimpse of my person, so why should I evaluate people according to the sexual orientation that I may believe them to have just because of the clothes they are wearing or the haircut that they have. I have to admit that sometimes I do conjecture. “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t make any mention of the girl I saw while I was shopping earlier in the day who I would have assumed to be your average short-haired skater-punk if I had seen her on the streets of Portland, Seattle, or even Tokyo. But in rural Japan where girls either wear layers of colorful clothing or short skirts and spike-heeled boots I had to wonder. I think I might have inadvertently done a double-take when I saw her walk into the store, and I think she noticed, but we both immediately went back to doing our separate business, of which mine (trying on a hat) was far less important. There are not many short-haired indie rocker girls in Japan, or at least I haven’t encountered many in Kagawa prefecture.. “I have seen some girls who appear to be rather androgenous, but they may just ascribe to the 80s high top nikes, non-descript jeans and short haircut style.” I mention instead.
“The mushroom heads!” Greg announces, referring to a group of young, trendy Japanese who wear many layers of brightly colored clothing, converse shoes, leg warmers, and sometimes rather large, billowing knit hats.
Here, the conversation turns to the mushroom heads, and their stylistic opposites, the “hos.”
“There needs to be a mushroom head/ho face off in the zine.”
“That would be funny,” I say, because it isn’t a bad idea, and the image the idea provokes in my mind is rather humorous.

Greg offers up a few more ideas, one of which involves taking pictures of people, writing fake obituaries for them and then re-drawing the images we photograph to include in the zine. I don’t have much to say regarding this idea, except that it is fun to make up pretend lives for people you see on the street.

The man working in the udon shop approaches us to say that they close at six. I look at my watch and notice that it is already ten after. I throw all the printed material on the table into the orifice that is my messenger bag, and we walk out the door. A minute later we walk down a skinny set of stairs into “Roughhouse,” a bar that sells very overpriced beer, and which, according to Greg, is much brighter inside than usual. I find the place to have rather dim lighting none the less. We order beers and babble on about the use of normal fonts for the zine. After he mentions the only novel idea of the night: to make the zine look low tech while using the most high tech means to create it, we just spend the rest of the time trading music. His idea conjures images of found magazine in my head. I like it, but it means that he will have to buy a scanner. After swapping tunes for a while and discovering that we have remarkably similar music collections, we decide to meet as soon as possible, and I say I will do some page mock-ups to play with fonts and colors. He has another, more important meeting to get to, and I have a train to catch. On my way back to the station, I realize that I feel more like myself than I have in months. I like this self, not the self that worries about getting high profile jobs and does nothing to try and get one, sleeps until 11 AM, or complains constantly. I think about the zine, and listen to some new music on the way back home. By the time I get to the bike parking at Kanonji Station, I discover that I have lost the key to my bike lock, or misplaced it in some dark corner of my bag. I walk home and decide to postpone thinking about how I will unlock the bike without a key later.

The Great Swan Boat Race

2005-01-23T23:18:00.000+09:00

Okayama, Japan. At approximately four PM, earlier today, a posse of gaijin, some of whom were attired as animals, was spotted paddling swan boats in the moat that surrounds the Okayama City castle. They appeared to be engaged in some form of race, though the purpose of which cannot be determined. This group of unruly foreigners troubled some of the Japanese nationals who were trying to enjoy their romantic Sunday excursions in Okayama by quietly paddling their boats around the moat. "We noticed that some of them were wearing costumes such as those who engage in cos-play might attire themselves. Many of them were armed with cameras," said Yuki, twenty two, who was spending the afternoon regarding the castle while rowing quietly through the moat with her boyfriend. Mr. Miyawaki who rented the boats to the rambunctious group of eight was thoroughly perplexed. "They were extremely loud, and I was obliged to take a group photo before they paid the rental fee for the two boats," he remarked. After about thirty minutes of paddling the swan-shaped boats around in the moat, the curious group departed as quickly as they came and with no less noise. Members of the press are still unsure of the group's intentions as they left the scene before the press could conduct interviews.

i ching

2005-01-22T13:04:00.000+09:00

I have always been skeptical of devices of divination, but at one point, I realized that they can be collective activities performed among friends that increase friendship and prompt positive affirmation. A few years ago I started throwing the I Ching. It was a time when friends and I could drink tea, read a passage from an i ching made easy style book after tossing the coins. Then we would spend a large portion of the evening just talking about life and the world. When I moved to Japan, my friend gave me her precious i ching book that I know that she used more than I ever would. During my time here, I have not thrown the coins enough to warrant keeping the book, but when I do open its pages, it always says something pleasantly comforting, and surprisingly apt for the moment. So when the winter is at its coldest in Japan and my spirits seem to be at their lowest, I can turn on the heater, full blast, brew a cup of tea, throw the i ching, and muse over it for a while. Of course I don't have the friends right here...

Cold

2005-01-21T12:53:00.000+09:00

The day arrived
Like an ice-memory
From some other winter
When the air breathed colder
Against my face
And I would not straddle my bicycle
For fear of falling
On the ice that rode out into the distance
Like a second pavement.

In the morning
I discovered that my heater belched black smoke
That coated my nostirls
With soot reminiscent of a coal mine
And I chose a blanket from my bed
And turned off the heat.

At lunchtime,
I discovered that my vegetables
Stowed away safely in the refrigerator
Were warmer against my skin than
The air in my kitchen.

In the evening, everyone whispered warnings of the cold
But I knew
It was not yet cold enough
To snow.

Night

2005-01-21T12:44:00.000+09:00

I heard the night train coming
From a distance
The sound of my feet being the only other noise
Audible in the thick dark.

Slicing through the winter-cold air
Like a blade
The steel, mobilized by yet more steel
Struck a dissonant chord in the night
Cutting across my vision
A blur of silver, studded with the blue and red
Warning of speed
Drowning my footsteps in the sound of metal.
When distance swallowed the machine
And left the dully thudding sounds of my feet
To resonate softly against pavement
The silence made my breath audible.

A whoosh from below
Where street and rice field
Meet in water
Brought my steps to a halt.
I faltered for a moment in the inky air
As a great gray-white form rose from the water,
An egret brough from slumber to wakefulness,
Not by the train,
But by my footfall
Coming too near its resting place.

The egret, now gone,
After the fashion of the train,
I resumed my stepping toward home through the unlit streets
To be surprised again
By a calico cat crouched on the narrow sidewalk
Observing a tuft of grass
In search of mice.

Closed

2005-01-20T12:31:00.000+09:00

After pulling myself out of bed late in the morning, my head filled with the feeling of winter, I peddled the twenty minutes to the train station and boarded a train headed for Marugame. My mission was to see some art. The train was sitting silently in the station when I arrived about fifteen minutes before departure time, so rather than waiting on the platform, I boarded the empty train pulled my iPod out of my bag. located Belle & Sebastian amid the musical choices that appeared on the screen and hit play. Every time I have the sensation that I am small and lost and feeling profoundly uncreative and I turn on Belle & Sebastian, it makes me feel alive again. Each character that my favorite Scottish band melodically weaves into one of their song-stories is small and lost and seems to be up against a world that is more against than with them. These fallible characters, oftentimes friendless characters, are my friends when I don't seem to have any within a 10,000 mile radius (How many miles is it from Japan to the West Coast again?).

Train rides beg for the perfect soundtrack, and yesterday, I found mine as I settled into the empty train hoping that old men with alchohol on their breath would not board the vehicle and accost me with their stares. A few more people boarded the train before departure, but as I sunk into the sounds of the music in my headphones and the thoughts that both the music and the action of riding a train prompted. As the train made its way from Kanonji to Marugame, I began to understand, as I seem to do on every other train ride I take, why writers are inclined to write stories that occur on trains. Not only do trains provide a setting that has a distinct beginning and end due to the fact that train rides occur in a limited space of time, but the people who ride trains can be fascinating. As I ride a train, I inevitable wonder about the other passengers' lives. Why are they on the train? Where are they going? What is home, for them?

At Marugame station, I left the train to move on its way toward Takamatsu and gave my used ticket to man working in the ticket booth. I exited to the left and found myself facing a section of town that did not appear as if it would house a museum. Someone had told me that it was across the street from the station, so I knew that I had left the station on the wrong side. The other exit proved to be more promising. Just to my write, as I walked through the door of the station, was a large building with a courtyard featuring large pieces of sculpture. One was made of red pipes and quite typical of a sculpture that one would find in front of a small museum of contemporary art. The next sculpture that my eyes were drawn to was a large, bronze shell. The shell was certainly the most interesting of the two, but its more sombre color caused me to notice it later than I did the glossy, red pipe structure. Across the front wall of the museum, a set of primitivistic paintings of animals leaped. Strangely enough everything in the vicinity seemed quite dead. The museum had no apparent entry and the only people on the streets were school children on their way home. Walking around the building to find the entry, I began to suspect that the museum was closed. After circling the perimeter, I noticed a sign at the front for the next show, and a smaller sign that seemed to signify that the museum is closed until this weekend when the new show will open. Looking to my left, across the street, I noticed an art gallery with gates drawn down over its facade. Closed, Wednesdays, the sign on the door read. All art in Marugame was seemingly inaccessible on this particular Wednesday.

I made my way back to the train platform. The sun was just beginning to glow like it does before it sets and the faces of all the school-children, in their navy blue uniforms, were awash with the orange glow of the sun. I decided to continue my journey on the train as my day had seemingly just begun. Boarding the train bound in the opposite direction of home, I hit play on my iPod and sat down, noticing that everyone was still awash in the glow of the late-afternoon sun beaming through the windows of the train.

Japanese Pottery

2005-01-18T11:59:00.000+09:00

Combatting the Ghostis

2005-01-17T23:15:00.000+09:00

We all know what the ghostis feels like, but most likely, up until now, you have been unable to pinpoint its presense unless you have beel blessed with foreknowledge of this mysterious force. To define it most simply, the ghostis is that presence most often felt during the early months of the year when the weather is at its coldest in the northern hemisphere. Sometimes the ghostis induces what less artistically inclined people are wont to call depression. When the ghostis is around in full force, this feeling can run rampant, but if this energy is tamed and cultivated, it can become the basis of art. The ghostis may have inspired the likes of Dostoyevsky himself, but it most certainly inspired the short amateur film "The Dostoyevsky Room" (2002). If you are having trouble combatting the ghostis, you might first want to brew yourself a strong cup of tea (I recommend rich, fruit-flavored black tea brewed from leaves, or yerba mate boiled, or steeped until it reaches a deep green color). Then, you might wan tto head off to the nearest gallery or museum for a dose of art. If that has not worked, grab a coffee and find a place where you can create something yourself. And finally, do your dishes, your laundry, and pick up the messes that are accumulating in your house or apartment if you have the good part of a day. Then turn up the head and pick up a good book and a few oranges. Make sure to throw the i ching if you have access, just in case you need that bit of uplifting advice.

10 things to do when feeling disgruntled in Japan

2005-01-17T23:04:00.000+09:00

1. Find a bottle of ink, a brush, a clean piece of paper, and scrawl a face.
2. Walk, run, or bike to the nearest shrine or temple with a journal in hand, and jot a few notes while sitting on a stone step.
3. Snap some purikura with funky backgrounds and decorate them with cutsy icons.
4. Try your hand at haiku in any language.
5. Distribute art cards in the shotengai.
6. Take your cos-play outfits outside for a romp through the nearest city where you don't know anyone.
7. Make up new recipes involving seaweed.
8. Take a trip to the department store and take pictures of the strangest fashion trends you spot. (You might find yourself a good pair of ankle scarves if you are lucky.)
9. Order a book online and hope it comes within the next month.
10. Start an art movement.

Lunch Menu

2005-01-17T10:48:00.000+09:00

1 very small bowl of soup with oyster
2 bites of rice with Japanese red beans
2 small silver fish, whole
1 2X3X3 cm block of egg and eel
1 3X3 cm cube of fish flavored tofu, garnished with silver
1 very small bowl of shredded daikon radish garnished with fish eggs
1 small piece of fish, raw
1 small portion of fish wrapped in daikon radish
3 black beans on pine needle skewer
2 small balls of fried shrimp

Community and Culture in Japan

2005-01-15T11:41:00.000+09:00

In the 1980s, during the height of Japan’s economic boom, teaching English in Japan became popular among young, native English speakers as both an economically lucrative venture and an unforgettable cultural experience. Many English speakers from around the globe still move to Japan every year as English teachers to gain the valuable experience of living abroad. After graduating from college last spring, I followed in the footsteps of the many keen adventurers who preceded me and moved to Japan to teach English.

I made this move to a foreign country with the hope that I would gain a new kind of knowledge that cannot be found between the walls of a college classroom. This was not to be my first experience spending time abroad, but it would be my first time in an Asian country, and my longest stint away from the US to date. When I boarded the airplane last July, bound for Japan, I still knew very little about the country, the culture, or the teaching position that I had accepted at a private language school on the Island of Shikoku in a rural prefecture.

In the six months that I have been in Japan, I have learned a great deal about what it means to live abroad, and some first hand knowledge about Japanese culture that I could never be gleaned from the pages of a book. As an idealistic, young American I arrived with many ideas, and questions about Japanese culture, not to mention a multitude of preconceived notions gleaned from pop culture that I did not even know I harbored. In all honesty, I cannot say that these notions have been overthrown by a real, prolonged encounter with the culture, but I have gained a broader understanding that allows me to understand why certain stereotypes do exist.

Japanese culture has always greatly valued community. The particular concept of community that most Japanese understand proves to be rather foreign to an American raised on the idea that it is a set of individuals who make up the community. In Japan, the community makes the individual. The individual always comes second. This is a difficult concept to grasp, and an even more difficult to stomach. I often laud the concept of a community, but I am an individualist at heart.

When it comes to the individual’s relationship with the community, the key to success in Japan, is the inverse of that in America. To achieve success as an American, one needs to maintain a keen sense of individualism even while one is contributing to a group or community. For the Japanese, success is a group effort. Those who are most successful are the most committed to the betterment of the whole group or society and are willing to give up a certain amount of individuality for the sake of the group. This idea is most simply encapsulated in the Japanese word ‘Wa’ which is often translated as ‘community’.

It is this notion of community that is at the heart of my experience of Japan. My position as a foreigner and as someone who is away from the place that I consider home, community is something that never strays far from my thoughts. As a foreigner, I am not a member of the Japanese community, but as someone who is spending time physically away from my own country, I do not feel like a full participant in my own community either. I participate in the community that I inhabit in Japan as a sort of link between two cultures. If I may borrow a few words from the author Jeanette Winterson, I hope that I can serve as an individual walking a tightrope between two worlds, bearing knowledge of my language and my culture to those in Japan and sharing knowledge of Japanese culture that I am gaining through my experiences in Japan to those back home.

Complicated banking problems of this generation

2005-01-12T17:44:00.000+09:00

Coming soon...

The Strange world of Vacation

2005-01-11T22:48:00.000+09:00

Caught up in the idea of a vacation and hesitant to enter an internet cafe that would serve to break my connection to the idea of vacationing as getting away from everything that is normal in daily life, I failed to record my journeys beyond the night before leaving Bangkok headed for the chaotic youth spot that is Koh Phangan. Right now, almost a week after returning to Japan from Thailand, I could ramble on about the conflicts that always accompany travelling, and that always accompany the idea of tourism in general. Vacations are a means for escape. Vacations are a time when the vacationer can do things never socially condoned under normal circumstances. Vacations often take place in tourist meccas, and in the case of Thailand, this tourist mecca seems to have more tourists than authentic inhabitants. And when the real inhabitants, the people who are living their real lives, are constantly bombarded with and required to serve people who are specifically trying to escape from their daily routine, a strange world is born. This world never sleeps, or rather it is always in a daze induced by drugs, alchohol, too much sun, rampant prostitution and the heady notion that this is escape, this is paradise. Paradise can be beautiful. But paradise can also be a hell, especially when hit by a catastrophic tsunami that washes all of the sleep-walking beachgoers out to see. This paradise has a dark side because escape is always driven by the desire to get away, and getting away is not always easy. Getting away requires more than just jumping on a plane. It requires letting go. It requires manipulating others to suit your own needs...to take away the dull throb of normalcy and give you the sort of high that is escape itself. I like the idea of escape embodied in a vacation, but it doesn't always sit that easily. It is accompanied by an equal measure of guilt. Vacation means letting something go, and that letting go is difficult. Perhaps people are not meant to forget the order of the world like that. We remember our place, yet we also feel the guilt of infringing on others' places in this world. The Thai economy is bolstered by its tourism industry, but I feel bad for those who are bombarded with a constant stream of inebriated, overfed, over-sunned tourists. I experience a pang of guilt when I see the woman who dozes behind the cash register at four AM purely to sell tourists, who should be asleep anyway, potato chips and bottled water. I want to go on vacation, but I loath that other people have to provide that vacation for me in that manner. After spending ten days on an island, I wonder if I should have spent the time sightseeing up north. Perhaps temple-viewing would have been a more worthwhile pastime. But the vacation is now over. I only have the photographs and the tan-lines on my shoulders to show for it. Of course, I my have a few stories as well.

I am a tourist

2004-12-25T23:14:00.000+09:00

Last week, in preparation for my grand winter vacation in Thailand, I pulled
an outdated English text book off the shelf and thumbed through it until I
found a unit devoted to traveling. I came across a page devoted to an
interview with a famous travel writer and began to read. The expert
traveller, who may have been the likes of Paul Theroux, declared that there
are two types of travellers: vacationers and explorers. I promptly affirmed
the fact that I belong in this first category of traveler. I am not
adventurous enough to brave uncharted territory, but instead, hop on a plane
bound for a destination that is perhaps foreign to myself, but certainly not
completely foreign in its own right. I join the masses of tourists armed with
my own camera and make my pilgrimage from monument to monument, snapping
photos, only so I can prove that I did in fact travel to a foreign country.

I arrived at the Bangkok airport after a harrowing flight sitting at the back
of the plane experiencing barrage of male eyes and unwanted attention from
other passengers. As my travelling companions and I rode a taxi through the
streets of Bangkok at midnight, I realized that the city was almost precisely
what I had expected. It was large, crowded, bright, and no more or less dirty
than I had been informed by numerous guide books and friends. It actually
struck me as a bit less seedy than some of my friends had informed me.
Bangkok is a city of wandering bodies, making there way through this country,
through this life, through this world.

Aside from its temples, which I did not see enough of, Bankok is a place
filled with numerous shopping, eating and drinking opportunities. My first
morning in the city, I headed over to enter into the throngs of tourists
making their way through the Grand Palace. I gazed at scenes from the
Ramayana, painted onto the walls of long galleries, marvelled at giant golden
stupahs, and tried to imagine what it would be like to say a prayer--to
indulge in the metaphysical, to remember the sacred. But I did none of these
things. I gazed, marvelled, and moved on to the shopping chaos of Khao San
Road.

My second day in Bangkok started with Christmas brunch at a hidden french
crepe shop highlighted by all the tourist maps and guide books. The fare was
pricey, but worth every bhat spent. As we jumped onto the sky train, headed
for the famed weekend market, dodging Christmas carollers and pushing through
the masses, it almost felt like Christmas. The market itself was more of a
mass than a bustle, and the throngs made it impossible to shop with a clear
head. With acres and acres of stalls, it is almost impossible to leave
without purchasing a bag of goods.

After two days in Bangkok, it is time to move on to more aqueous climes and
seek adventures amidst the anticipated chaos of the islands, famed for their
throngs of partiers seeking a rave. I have joined the millions of tourists on
my own unashamed tour of this country.

--------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through Whitman College Webmail 3.1

Westward for Christmas

2004-12-21T23:05:00.000+09:00

The late train train squealed into the night, stirring the winter air to a fast-paced breath in my face as I peddled home laden down with pre-vacation baggage. It is almost Christmas; my first Christmas where homing instincts have not drawn me back to the place I choose to call home. Instead of heading East, back to a place that I have always called West, I am heading ever westward, in the direction that Thoreau and all his equals pointed us to a place where Christmas may seem less like Christmas, and more like July. This is my first Christmas season in a country that is predominantly Buddhist, and I am traveling to yet another Buddhist country where I will spend the 25th. As I made my last trip of the year home from work just a short time ago, I paused at the crossing guard, contemplated the train that passed in a flurry of lights and sounds and words flooded my mind to the tempo of the train's metal wheels sliding against a metal track. It is rare that unhindered words enter my mind like that these days. In two day's time, I will have just landed in Bangkok. Just as I knew very little about what I would encounter when I landed in Japan, I know very little about what to expect when I land in Thailand. I have read the guidebooks, glanced at a few pictures, contemplated what I might find, but I understand that there is no way to anticipate what I will come across in a country where I have never set foot.

My meanderings, ever westward continue. In order to find the perfect Western, we must encounter the East. Of course, West is a relative direction and a relative idea. The perfect Western may be couched deep in something previously considered the epitome of all encapsulated in East.

The un-guide book

2004-12-06T11:42:00.000+09:00

While electronics, useless (yet cute) gadgets and Tokyo street fashion may be the first few things a young, hip, American envisions about contemporary Japan, very few can imagine a world outside the teeming metropolises of Tokyo and Osaka. Your most recent issue of Readymade or even the Wall Street Journal may highlight the newest trends hitting the streets of Tokyo but it glances over the fact that Tokyo is not the whole of Japan. There is an entire world outside of that glittering megapolis, and it is this other world that the majority of people who live in Japan experience every day.

You probably saw Sofia Coppola’s film, Lost in Translation. If you somehow missed that piece of celluloid genius, you should know that it paints a fantastic picture of what it is like to suddenly find yourself in Japan, where everything that you experience is just a little unexpected and everything that you do is lot more difficult than you are accustomed. When I moved to Japan six months ago, I only had an inkling that this film would paint such an accurate picture of my experience in this country. In my case, I only spent a weekend in the visually enticing city of Tokyo where the film takes place. The rest of the time, I have been living in a rural area on the island of Shikoku, a place that is still rumored to harbor plentiful remnants of old Japan.

As an outpost of an older version of this country, Shikoku boasts plenty of rice paddies, small villages, the occasional kitschy, traditional art exhibit, and 88 famed Buddhist temples accompanied by a profligate amount of omiage (souvenir) shops where visitors can buy sweets and Hello Kitty (Kitty-Chan as she is known in Japan) charms dressed in locally appropriate attire.

Catch Glimpses of the Past:

It just wouldn’t be right to visit Japan without experiencing traditional Japanese culture in some form, whether it is enjoying a tea ceremony in Kyoto, perusing a kimono shop, entering a Buddhist temple, or catching a rare Kabuki performance in Kotohira. Since traditional culture is rather impossible to miss, even amidst the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, you are in very little danger of seeing only the other, modern, industrial electronic-gadget laden, side of Japan. Every city of town on Shikoku has its hidden, and not-so-hidden temples and shrines. Of course, if you do not speak Japanese, more things than you would expect seem rather hidden. Endeavoring to spend your time on Shikoku as one of the Onri-san and undertake a pilgrimage to each of the island’s 88 temples that were built by the famed Kobu Daishi may be too daunting a task. If you have made it as far as Shikoku, you have already undertaken a pilgrimage of sorts. But visiting several of the temples on the pilgrimage route is not a difficult undertaking, as you have 88 of them to choose from, and many of them are in rather close proximity to one another. Perhaps, while walking up a long set of stone steps to a temple, or underneath the red, tori gate of a shrine you will have an epiphany of sorts. Whether you are inclined to metaphysical musings or not, don’t forget to equip yourself with that ubiquitous piece of modern technology that all Japanese tourists carry: a camera.

Join the School Girls at the Purikura shop:

After getting your fill of temples and tea ceremonies shed that kimono, don a school girl’s sailor suit, and head in search of the local youth scene. Your first stop should be the local purikura (print club) shop where you can get oodles of small, picture stickers for just a few dollars. If you cannot spot a shop dedicated solely to the delightful activity of taking and decorating these small photos, purikura booths are sure to be located in every game center and even some 100 yen shops. Strike a few poses in a purikura booth, then doodle to your hearts delight to produce a sheet of bedazzled photographs that your friends back home will most certainly be jealous of. Make sure to turn your ear to the nearest speaker where you can catch the most popular J-Pop tunes of the moment. When your ear is turned to the sounds of Soul’d Out, Hamasaki Ayumi, or Utada Hikaru, focus your eyes on the activities transpiring around you. Smiling school-girls still in their uniforms flock to these booths after school and on weekends to engage in an image-conscious social activity that is the essence of modern youth culture in Japan.

Explore unusual night-spots:
If you are not lucky enough to spot a flier for a drag show at Mikayla as you are strolling through Takamatsu, do not fret. There are plenty of small clubs to discover that may not be as hopping, but will certainly provide you with ample stories write home with. Check for fliers at the nearest Lawson’s Station (or other convenience store) or peruse a local monthly events magazine such as TJ Kagawa to gather some info on where to go after the temples and purikura shops close. While stopping in for a late-night onigiri (rice ball) at a Lawson’s early last Fall I happened across the flier for an event at Club Bacchus, the town of Kanonji’s one and only dance club. Even though the club was not bouncing as much as it should on a night when the event is entitled “Bounce,” it wasn’t a night to miss at Bacchus. DJ Burning Shot’s three greatest fans had a dance number to perform in this slender, hole-in-a wall club down a back alley. They had been practicing their shimmies and turned out clad in carefully chosen attire in which to perform them. If you can find a small club infrequented by foreigners the authentic small town experience is worth the 1000 yen cover charge.

Count your yen (before venturing into a 100 yen shop):

After a night out on the town, what else is better than to spend a lazy day wandering through a shotengai (shopping arcade), evaluating the latest trends, snapping a few photos for your zine, and visiting one (or many) 100 yen shops. It is nearly impossible to miss these shops as they are located even in many very small Japanese towns. But be careful, t with almost nothing priced at over 100 yen, these places, filled with cheap goods and colorful trinkets can be dangerous. If you are lucky you may even find a few of the rarer items such as one-time-use inflatable breasts. It isn’t difficult to buy a decent collection of stationary, leg warmers, fish net stockings, Japanese style dishes, and as many pairs of chopsticks that you could ever wish for in just one visit to a 100 yen store.

Take a self-guided vending machine tour:

Before checking back into your hostel, ryokan (traditional guest house), or drab business hotel for the evening, take a walk to check out the local vending machines. Once again, don’t forget your camera. You may find something unexpected. Walk several meters and you are sure to come across a machine selling green tea, canned coffee, and sodas. If you find yourself needing a beverage, try a bottle of milk tea. But if you venture a little farther, you may come across a vending machine selling something a little more obscure, and I am not just talking about rice or eggs.

Club Bacchus

2004-11-30T12:01:00.000+09:00

Kanonji is a town that goes to sleep at nine o’clock when all respectable people should be tucked cozily into their houses sipping tea or taking their nightly bath. Those who are a bit more restless and youthful than the average inhabitant go to the convenience stores, which conveniently enough contain a plethora of racy (and not so racy) reading material—and as much junk-food as anyone could ever wish for. Those who want to stray even further from the norm go to club Bacchus, Kanonji’s one and only dance club. Bacchus, formerly a room in a house, now contains an abnormally low bar, and an abnormally large TV. Bacchus is just waiting for the likes of DJ Burning Shot and his dance posse to cross its threshold.

Every youthful club-goer and Burning Shot fan, dressed for the reggae experience, begins piling into Bacchus at around 10 PM to participate in its weekend events. As Kanonji is rather vacant after dark, and rather devoid of raucous, young energy, the small club was still rather vacant when a few of my friends and I arrived on a particular Saturday night in late September. The woman at the door gave each of us a fluorescent plastic lighter after we paid the 1000 yen cover charge. We all remarked at the dearth of people on the miniscule dance floor then took two steps to the bar. The printing on our glaring lighters informed us that this Saturday’s event was entitled “Bounce,” but no one seemed to be bouncing at all. Perhaps a few people were bobbing their carefully coifed heads.

Burning Shot was spinning his collection of reggae and hip hop beats, but the few people in the club were certainly not celebrating any sort of Bacchinal. They sipped their beers with great care and jangled their heads to the beat between sips. As the club began to fill, a few more people began to bob to the tunes blaring over the speakers. We started dancing. Someone had to. Then DJ Burning Shot’s posse arrived, prepared to dance, animated by the very hand of Burning Shot himself.
“Watch out. The dance posse is here. You better get out of the way,” Annabelle warned.
After a few moments, I realized that they meant business. These three girls were prepared to shimmy and raise fire. They were prepared to follow the DJ’s dance instructions. These three girls were prepared to get Burning Shot’s attention. I moved out of the way.
The dance posse danced irregularly to Burning Shot’s beats, trying to imitate each other’s pre-meditated moves. Each girl was always a half-beat behind the last. The DJ caught on that his groupies had made their glorious entrance and shouted “Rightaaa!” With that, every person in the audience raised his or her cigarette lighter into the air and ignited the flame. We all feared for the safety of our hair and clothing, but the regulars in the house did not seem to fear for theirs. Burning Shot yelled “Wudda, Wudda, Wudda!” and the three girls did a sort of shimmy. The DJ put his arm into the air, and the girls did the same. It was if they were hypnotized. We made our escape from this abode of Saturday-night beatless boppers, smoke coating our hair and lungs, and permeating our clothing. We couldn’t compete with these followers of Kanonji’s finest DJ without first having practiced our shimmies in the privacy of our own apartments.

Experimental Words

2004-11-19T13:02:00.000+09:00

Since arriving in Japan, I have intended on starting a blog, but thus far, I have been stubborn due to the fact that I would rather have full design control over my site. But since that never happened, I am augmenting my site with a blog that uses a bit of help from professionals. So welcome to my blog, and check back for periodic updates.

Konpirasan

2004-11-05T10:00:00.000+09:00

Riding the train to Kotohira was like riding any Japanese local train. Even though it was a holiday, the was not overly crowded, perhaps because at mid-afternoon everyone else who had left their houses in search of cultural activities for the day was eating lunch at that hour. The seats of the train smelled of being sat upon for days on end. The air smelled of people. It wasn’t an unpleasant odor, as this is the scent of trains and I am beginning to build memories of travel based upon this smell. I got off the train in Kotohira with three friends in search of holiday diversion, intending on climbing the 786 steps to the top of Konpirasan, the most famous Shinto shrine in Kagawa Prefecture. Kotohira already looked like a Japanese tourist town when we exited the station and began walking in the direction of the shrine. It is a small town that probably boasts half as many omige, or souvenir, shops, as it does inhabitants.

Before beginning our ascent, we found an udon shop where we could slurp down a lunch of noodles in hot, salty soup. Before we entered the dark, wood-toned restaurant, I glanced through the window, conveniently placed to watch people making the udon. Two men in white uniforms were rolling out circles of dough into long sheets. I did not pause for long enough to follow the entire process. The host seated us at the back of the shop where we glanced over the menu. Not being able to read much, as even the prices were written in kanji, I ordered the one dish on the menu which happened to be something I had not yet tasted. After gorging ourselves on the long noodles we began to climb konpirasan’s 786 steps. The omiage shops that lined the stone stairway drew attention away from the site’s sacred origins. There were more udon shops, placed to buy over-priced, tattered kimono, wooden statues and knick-knacks of every sort. Traditional Japanese sandals were ubiquitous. Half-way up the stairs, the omiage shops vanished, and the entrances of a few shrines became visible. There was a rest-stop where the dehydrated can purchase refreshment from a vending machine and rest in a bus-stop like shelter before continuing on to the top. We lost one member of our group to stomach cramps before reaching the summit. She headed back for the train station having eaten too much lunch before making the ascent.

The rest of us continued on to the top where hordes of tourists milled about in the attempt to find culture in honor of culture day. Even before crowning the last set of steps, we could hear the shrill music of a Japanese flute. Curious about the music’s origin, I walked more quickly up the last few steps. In the shrine above me, there was a ceremony taking place. Someone, who I never could see, was playing the flute and three shrine maidens, dressed in elaborate white costume were processing through the shrine. I stood mesmerized for a second, then walked closer to get a better view. There was a soft, pastel pattern painted onto the girl’s costumes, and they were walking slowly, as only one walks during a ceremony of great solemnity. When they exited the shrine and traversed the covered walkway to its right, I couldn’t imagine a more traditional Japanese scene. Framed within the confines of a photograph, I could imagine the image to represent Japanese aesthetics. We plowed our way through the other tourists hovering over the omiage stand next to the shrine to get a glimpse of the valley below. On a clear day, it is possible to see one of the bridges that crosses the Seito inland sea and connects Shikoku to the larger island of Honshu. A distant haze obscured the view on culture day, but the green, pointed mountains that jutted out of the very flat, sparsely settled valley made for a magnificent view none-the-less. After a short time, we descended the stairs in search of soy sauce ice cream and a train home.

Typhoon Morning

2004-10-20T16:57:00.000+09:00

The wind beat against my window rhythmically. Somehow the glass kept the wind out as it is intended to do, but a cold draft made its way through the vent near the ceiling. I did not allow myself to think about landslides, but concentrated on the lullaby created by the wind and rain. At 6 AM, my alarm woke me and I stared out into the inky blackness of the autumn morning, made even darker by the heavy clouds. The typhoon was coming. It looked as if it had already arrived. I would not be traveling the hour by train into Takamatsu to go to my Japanese language class. Watching the lights of the town stretching out below my apartment in the darkness of the early-morning, or after the sun has risen when the ground is still covered in a low-lying mist, is somehow thrilling, maybe because I see the town like that so infrequently. My eyes had barely grown accustomed to the sight when I sank back into my warm bed and drifted back to sleep accompanied by the sound of the wind. The rain was still thrapping against my window with a steady percussion each time I drifted out of a morning-dream, but I always sank back into a lethargic sleep.

The sound of unintelligible voices amplified through loudspeakers the engines of heavy vehicles broke my late slumber. It was still raining. I couldn’t understand the language that was being pumped out of the fire-engine driving up the road, but I knew it was an evacuation warning. My phone started ringing. Groggily pulling myself from my bed, I ran to answer my phone while thoughts of what to gather from my apartment before evacuating flooded into my head. I hoped the steep, denuded mountain slope in back of the apartments was not crumbling into the buildings.
“Hello.” My voice creaked still full of sleep.
“I think we are being evacuated” Annabelle announced at the other end of the line.
“I think so too,” I managed to eek out of my sandy vocal cords.
“There is a fire truck driving through the apartment complex and they are saying something about the second floor. There is a lot of water pouring off the mountain. Have you looked outside?”
“Not yet.”
“I think we should leave. I’ll meet you outside in ten minutes.”
I pulled on a pair of jeans that were hiding on my clothes rack knowing that I should not be particular about the things I was gathering but not wanting to forget anything vital. I was trying to get out of the way of the impending landslide. Sliding my arms into the sleeves of my rain jacket, jamming a toothbrush into my mouth and gathering extra socks, articles of clothing, and extra cash, I ran to answer Annabelle’s knock on the door.
“I’m coming.” I turned the lock, then the door knob and stuck my head outside while rummaging in the basket by my door for my keys.

Our clothes were soaked by the time we arrived at work, rain dripping off our noses and onto our lips as we unlocked the door. This was my day off and I was about to spend it sitting on a rotating chair staring at a frosted glass window, my elbows resting on a formica desk. After peeling off my slick, wet jeans and slithering into a dry skirt, I curled up on the couch in the school’s waiting room with a half-finished book. I let the words soak into my mind as if they were sunlight after rain. They were warm words about lives in Southwestern deserts. As I read, I began to crave the smell of the wind off sagebrush land. The rice paddies were filling with water outside. The world smelled soggy. Despite having changed clothes, I still felt damp. My soul felt a bit damp. Even a lunch of udon noodles slurped between sips of hot green tea did not warm me. The walk down the street to the restaurant only served to dampen my dry change of clothes, and my noodles became cold after the third bite. I sipped green tea and prayed for the typhoon to subside, envying the billowing plastic rain ponchos and crisp, new rain pants worn by the other customers. I was wet. They were dry. Only my tea was warm. The wind-speed outside was building, and the rain, slanting down from the sky in sheets, was seemingly growing teeth. Every newsflash on the TV suspended above the bussing station at the udon shop was an image of rain striking concrete, of people battling umbrellas, of waves beating at a shoreline, or of passengers stranded at train stations waiting for trains that will never come. Every few minutes a map of Japan with a large red circle blocking out a large portion of the country appeared on the screen. It was charting the movement of the typhoon. It appeared as if we were in the center of it, but Annabelle continually repeated,
“It hasn’t even reached Kochi yet.” Kochi is a city far south of where we live on Shikoku. My mind was filled with images of landslides though none appeared on the television set.

The weather grows in magnitude as the afternoon draws on. Wind whips against the windows pushing rain through any spaces at the edges. Everything outside is blowing and gray. The sleeves of my jacket, where they meet my wrists, are damp. I finished reading stories set in the warmth of the Arizona desert. Now I am fully in Japan in the midst of a typhoon. I think my apartment is still standing.

Ringing the Peace Bell

2004-10-20T11:45:00.000+09:00

Once a war has begun, it is difficult for it to end. Wars are not conclusive like some would like to believe. They remain, not only living in stories, but also beyond the stories, in the land on which they were fought, and in the minds of all those who are affected by them over time. It is easier to forget about all those wars that sit in our conscience because we were involved, because our country was involved, because our family members died, or simply because we carry some of the weight of what came before us. Sometimes it seems necessary to revisit the horrors and bear a piece of the collective burden that is a part of being a citizen. Looking back into history is perhaps the tamest method of coming to understand those things that we don’t want to stare in the face. It is difficult to look at history, however, because history is something spun and re-spun in the mind in order to make sense of the past. History is a collection stories, and stories cannot be seen in the traditional sense. Stories are even difficult to hear above the clatter of the present that begs us, more often than not, to look rather than to listen. Catching a glimpse of history crouched in the present moment is astonishing, because, even if the shards of the past are everywhere, it takes something gargantuan, or gargantuanly horrifying to make us pay attention.

Last weekend, I went to Hiroshima with a group of fellow English teachers. I thought of it as a sort of pilgrimage, a pilgrimage belonging to the secular religion of nationalism rather than to the metaphysical world of spirituality. Just the prospect of witnessing the ghosts of the horrible moment in history when the atomic bomb was used in war made me feel weak. Upon my arrival, I could not imagine what it would feel like to spend a weekend in a city that had once been razed to the ground by a single explosion. I did not know how to prepare myself for what I would see, because I knew that I would view everything around me through the lenses of that cataclysm. The city I would see would be a phoenix city ever marred by its ashes. The city I would see would be a city of heavy ghosts hanging underneath its gray, modern, and sometimes glossy façade. Later, it would worry me that the city’s call for peace is festering in a lone corner of the world while the world’s most powerful entities play at war as if they are playing a massive game of chess in which we are all pawns.

We arrived in Hiroshima just before noon, and it was raining lightly. One of the city’s many tram cars brought us to the central shopping area just to the east of the Peace Park. Before making the final few steps into the park on foot, we ate a fragrant and flavorful curry lunch at an Indian restaurant. Something about passing through a shopping arcade before witnessing the ghosts of nuclear warfare was unsettling. Young people were walking around in their finest fall attire, perusing the shops, and tourists like ourselves were bumbling around in the crowd. But maybe it was exactly this juxtaposition of the city that Hiroshima is now with the heavy memory of its history that sits in the heart of the urban metropolis that makes the experience more powerful. The city itself is not a war memorial, but because the war memorial is in the city, the juxtaposition draws attention to the passage of time itself.

Wars do end, even if the people do remember them. But the events that take place during war leave permanent scars. Sometimes the scars are pricked open, again and again, because people want to remember the wounds so that perhaps, the injuries will not be inflicted again elsewhere. The building now known as the atom bomb dome is a testament to the horror of atomic warfare. It is more ghostly than I even expected. Somehow I imagined something more futuristic, because that is how the part of me that does not want to acknowledge the reality of war wants to imagine the bomb. Sometimes it is easier to imagine the past as science fiction than as a real piece of history. The crumbling edifice that I saw in the Hiroshima Peace Park was not science fiction. It was real, even if this preservation of dilapidation looked other-worldly. The pale-red of its bricks and the striking skeleton of its dome stood out against the rainy-day sky. The only thing I could think was ‘my country did this’ and they are things each day that are not altogether different from what they did to this city. I do not want to be a member of that piece of my country that did this to the world, but I very much want to be a part of my country. I want to be able to return to familiar terrain when I decide to return home. I want there to be a place that will always have the familiar scent of home. And that is what the thousands upon thousands of people who were affected by the bomb could not do.

Citizenship is an interesting predicament, and nationalism is even more so. It is difficult not to be attached to your own country. It is the place that you have lived, and home is a powerful concept. We all want to have a home, and we are drawn back to a home, or at least a memory of home throughout our lives. Countries and nations are modern conceptions of both the physical and ideological idea of home. Nationalist jargon is laden with references to the homeland. Individuals, though deeply attached to a homeland like perpetual children clinging to a mother, often come into contact with the fact that the homeland is not only a place, or a collection of places, but also a powerful idea. The people who perpetuate the idea also destroy in the name of the home. The spokespersons of my homeland brought this park in Hiroshima into being by destroying what was here before. Now monuments to those who were lost dot the area that the bomb was released above. The thousands of paper cranes that people leave in the park each day look like the atomic doppelgangers of autumn leaves. Against a gray sky, they are even more vibrant. Gnarled phoenix trees are the reminders that life can re-emerge from a place that was destroyed, but also that the homeland that this city was before the bomb will never the same after ever inch of ground has been pummeled with atomic fire. Each time the peace bell tolled, I wanted to cry, not only for what happened in August 1945 right at this location, but for what happens every day.

Many who visit the park ring the peace bell to call upon the gods of peace, just like the devout ring the bell at a Shinto shrine to draw the spirits to attention. As I rang the bell myself, gazing at the continents etched into the surface of the bell, gazing at the electron orbitals signifying that this bell is a call to stop the creation and use of nuclear weaponry around the globe, I could not help but wonder if the gods of peace are dead. We only half-heartedly believe in the concept anyway. The other half wants the power and the money of the war-makers themselves who perpetuate the wars, not for personal or even national security, but only to gain more power. They already have money, they do not need any more. Money is the symbol of power, and power is not one of the necessities of life, but somehow, everyone always wants more. Being in the company of destruction, even if the destruction occurred long ago, is a humbling experience, but also an experience that highlights the powerlessness of the individual. Walking through the park, looking upon the monuments and remnants of destruction with sad eyes made me want to believe in the concept. But what is peace? It seems like more of an absence than a presence. It is a concept laden with passivity—the sort of passivity that plants or mountains embody, not the kind of passivity that humans would be willing to accept.

Walking through the peace museum was like visiting the caverns of someone else’s nightmare, but it was worse, because it is the record of history, our history, and not the record of fiction. Now it belongs to all of us whether or not we are citizens of the United States. The museum reveals, even if we are unable to accept that this horror is everyone’s legacy, that warfare, specifically atomic warfare, is more terrifying than the remnants of children’s tattered clothing, fingernails, skin, and charred lunch boxes housed in the museum. The artifacts are just remnants of the horror. The cataclysm itself was far worse, and the museum can only provide us with the story, told in words and pictures.

For the most part, people are too busy worrying about their own patch of ground to realize that the world is too small to do this anymore. Of course, to develop a sense of belonging, one has to develop a connection to a place, but we are digging ourselves into the earth because we do not want to look outside. Those who do look outside are learning the same lesson that the man who found the exit learned in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Stepping outside what is accepted, or what is understood, takes more courage than we know. Perhaps we do not even consider it because we know somehow that it takes more courage than we have. We are only able to step outside the small boxes traditionally set around us that have in fact already been breached. To step outside the larger ones may be to step off the face of the earth itself.

Walking back through the shopping arcade, I felt as if I had stepped into a different realm where past, present, and future meet, then re-entered the everyday world where people are shopping and eating and preparing for a night filled with hedonism. It was almost too difficult to contemplate the crude juxtaposition of reverence and sadness that I experienced in the park and the fast, modern world immediately outside. They were separate worlds in my mind. I tried hard to see them separately, and then to see them together to make sense of this place, this world, this circumstance. I found that I could not. It was almost too large to comprehend. This was just another place to visit, but at the same time, it was different. I was somehow implicated in this past that the park and the museum recognized, and in this present as well where I was ordering coffee and waiting to meet up with a group of people for dinner.

An Observation

2004-10-16T22:54:00.000+09:00

Morning

When I woke this morning, a vaporous mist was rising off of the town. The mountains made the atmosphere look even more like a scene from a fairy tale. Sometimes it is difficult to believe that this is not all a fairy tale, somehow gone awry, where there are no fairy princesses or princes on white horses. Last night was the first cold night of Autumn, but the sun seemed to be making headway through the cold air because my tatami was warm in places from the sunlight. Stepping into the patches of warmth, I felt like a cat lazily emerging from a long nap. It was just another Friday. There was nothing special to look forward to. I looked at the other-worldly scenery outside of my window and mused over it for a few seconds, because the Japanese landscape still astonishes me sometimes, then I decided to go back to bed. I do this frequently. The world does not amaze me enough to drag me out of sleep, then I awake, groggy and grumpy very late in the morning. It is still morning here. I am officially awake, and many of the stores have not yet opened. The sun is warming the night-cool air to greater heights, and all of the early-morning mist has disappeared from the valley.

Evening

I am just about to make my way home from work. The air is as cold outside as it was last night. I have not checked a thermometer, but the air feels colder than I have felt it in a long time. I am not yet able to see my breath when I step outside, but I know that day is coming. Today I contemplated peace more than I contemplated war. The air felt peaceful this morning. It was crisp, and the sun warmed it slowly until mid-afternoon. Yesterday was a bit harsher. There was a wind that I would call biting if I didn’t know better. After the slow, dense air of summer, the wind seemed almost biting. I woke up in a state of war. I dreamed about war, and I was waging a psychological battle in my head. Today I contemplated images and tried to remember what the peace bell sounded like as it was tolling in the Hiroshima Peace park. Its sound was shocking in contrast to the silence in the park. It almost seemed irreverent to pull the rope and let its ring resound, but that is what made it more powerful. This morning I read a public journal entry by Terry Tempest Williams about the “open space of democracy,” stemming from her most recent book. It was more hopeful than anything that I have read in a long time, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that it acknowledged the fear permeating the heart of today’s world. I hope that I fall asleep tonight and dream about hope rather than war.

The Euro Cafes of Tokyo

2004-09-04T11:48:00.000+09:00

The Japanese are obsessed with all things French. Cute, canvass bags with odd French phrases that sometimes read like Haiku gone wrong are piled up in department stores and trinket shops. French bakeries proliferate. When asked to give an explanation as to why the French language is ubiquitous on menus and hand-mirrors, a Japanese person might respond that it is fun or cute. One young man told me that English is considered to be serious, so it can be intimidating to the Japanese person, but French is more fun. He connected the French culture to an idea of Love or romance. So they build the idea of France into their trends, upon a foundation of cuteness. They write it into the signs on their pastry shops and menus of their restaurants. Tokyo is teeming with small, faux-French cafes, their atmospheres ranging from French, country kitsch to European intelligentsia.

A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend in Tokyo with a Japanese friend who had lived in the city and knew the area. We found ourselves, eating in these Euro cafes rather than in traditional Japanese restaurants. In part, it was a result of my quest for vegetarian food, which is virtually non-existent in Japan. But on another level, I, like the Japanese, am fascinated by all things Euro.

The first café I went to in Tokyo was called Café 8, located near the Nezu Institute of Fine Arts. It was housed in a three storey building above a trendy décor shop called Style and Time. Perhaps this café was the least Euro of them all, as the menu was written in Japanese and they served a sort of cosmopolitan veggie cuisine and boasted a selection of organic wines. The décor was simple, targeted at the classy hipster—the kind of person who finds it stylish to drink organic wine and sample bean soup with three kinds of freshly made bread. There were plenty of large books on art to peruse while waiting for the meal to arrive. Mostly, these books featured the big name modern and contemporary artists —the likes of Andy Warhol and Keith Harring. In essence, this café made me feel as if I needed no other place but this corner of Tokyo.

That same evening, we were growing ravenous from our day of walking around the city, and after meeting Mio’s friend Ben, an Australian who has lived in Japan for upwards of ten years, we set out in quest for a restaurant. He knew of this hidden, yet extremely trendy, Izakaya where he hoped we could eat, but upon following a throng up to the door of the restaurant, we realized that there was no hope of getting a table that night. So, we began to meander through the back-streets of Shibuya in search of sustenance. Unfortunately none was found, so we headed over to Ebisu, where there was a seeming dearth of restaurants. Fortunately, after walking for some time, we happened upon a restaurant by the name of Tooth Tooth. It instantly caught my attention. Ben wondered if it was too classy for me, and I caught myself wondering if he was referring to the prices, or to my seeming lack of class. Aside from having running shoes on my feet, I thought I was relatively dressed up—well as dressed up as one can be while living out of a backpack. In the end, we walked down the stairs, into a dimly lit, red and black restaurant. I was instantly fascinated, and I loved the name. As might be expected, the menu was in French and Japanese, with a bit of Italian thrown in every once and a while. But, the French (or Italian) names of dishes did not always match the Japanese descriptions. I ordered Spaghetti Carbonara which happened to be pasta with a cream sauce containing hijiki seaweed, mushrooms, and beans. There may have been minute quantities of bacon thrown in as well, but it was scarce enough for me to consider the dish vegetarian enough for consumption. I was utterly entranced by the red and black décor, and apparent lack of diners that I barely even noticed the quality of the food. After leaving Tooth Tooth, I began to wonder if I have been living in the country for too long.

Café Neuf in the Ebisu district of Tokyo was a bit less classy, a bit more French, and with quite a bit more Euro flare than Café 8, and much more laid back than Tooth Tooth The laconic waiter wore high boots, pulled up over his jeans, and a long, black apron, and thick earrings in both ears. Periodically he would change the record on the turn table, choosing from a large collection of vinyl. The menu was in French and Japanese, and prominently featured varieties of croque monsieur. I ordered a mushroom omlette and a variety of English tea and prepared to soak up the early to mid twentieth century atmosphere of the café. I almost felt as if I should be reading Dostoevsky in solitude over a cup of thick, black coffee, or studying feverishly for an English exam. But instead, I was babbling incessantly about photography, and writing over a mushroom omlette to a friend who has most likely moved beyond the age where hobbies appear to be dreams. Of course, we had to get our dose of the variety of art books haphazardly stacked up on a shelf in the corner. What is a lunch without a desert of Andy Warhol prints?

Before leaving Tokyo I ate dinner at one more euro café. Café Mille Feuilles was tucked neatly into the basement of a building in the Shimokitazawa district and looked more like a European tearoom than a hipster hangout. The food was similar to the other places I had eaten at that weekend, and there was the expected selection of fashion magazines and art books on a shelf. Before heading off to see some local indie rock bands at Shelter, we decided to eat some mushroom spaghetti and drink café au lait out of small, white cups.

Perhaps I did not discover the native cuisine of this country while visiting Tokyo, but I did sample the food of a globalized world filtered through the eyes of a stylish Japan. Not only did the food provide me with sustenance, but the atmosphere provided me with inspiration. No wonder I babbled about my far fetched dreams over tea and coffee, spaghetti and omlettes. I even got a peek into the pop art lodged in the pages of the books on the shelves of the cafes to fuel my imagination lest my chatter about photography fizzle.

Bonseki

2004-08-30T11:03:00.000+09:00

Yasuko, one of my students, invited me to an exhibition of traditional Bonseki sand painting that was held near Kotohiki Park in a small hotel. Her aunt has been a traditional Bonseki artist for many years and was one of the major participants in the exhibition. Bonseki artists use white sand on black, lacquer plates to depict traditional natural scenes, always including either water or mountains, two very important aspects of the Japanese landscape. The sun and moon are also important in Bonseki, and cast the mood of the piece. Bonseki artists arrange the sand on the plate with white feathers, special brushes, and spoons. They place carefully chosen rocks on the plate to signify mountains, and for effect, sometimes even include more non-traditional elements such as small models of houses, people, or even cars. Some of them are quite striking as they manage an incredible amount of shading working with the sand. But there is also an element of kitsch about the whole art-form. It is art for patient, old women. It is precise, and beautiful but juxtaposed with the beauty and precision are plastic model cars or pieces of shell and coral. Bonseki is both a consumer of time and a social hobby for these old women. They travel around, hosting exhibitions, attend classes, and it is also a topic of conversation outside of the studio as well. It is something to talk about while sipping tea with acquaintances or mingling at parties. It is also a cause for travel. Last year, a group of Bonseki artists, including Yasuko’s aunt, visited Iceland for an exhibition.
Bonseki is not just a hobby or a petty craft. It is an ancient art form that despite projecting a slightly kitschy appearance to some is founded upon philosophical principles and persists as a part of a long-standing tradition. As with many other Japanese art forms,the practitioners of Bonseki are arranged in a heriarchy. There is always one head teacher who governs the art form. All of the other teachers and practitioners fall under her leadership and guidance. To become a teacher, one has to undergo a certification process.
Not all Bonseki sand paintings are strictly traditional. Some depict modern scenes using traditional Japanese symbols—water, mountains, seasons. One piece in the exhibition depicted a scene based upon a popular film. Some depicted foreign scenes—a desert done in tan sand, green stones, and beige crystals. Another depicted the Himalayas. The most striking Bonseki used the simplest materials, only white sand, and a few black rocks.

It's hard to find yourself in Hep 5

2004-08-23T11:46:00.000+09:00

The shotengai stretched beyond my field of vision, promising colorful surprises, and curious sights. It was a veritable temple of consumer culture on overdrive, extending out from Osaka’s central train station, connecting up with large department stores that promised floors of designer clothing for those unafraid to spend. I had read in my guidebook that Osaka was a city of extremes, and the perfect place to unleash the latent hedonism that was unable to surface during a quiet stroll between temples in Nara or Nikko. I came to Osaka to shop. I was lonely, and I wanted to lose myself in a crowd while gazing at interesting colors and the latest trends. I didn’t want to think, and a day of shopping promised a day full of empty musings about fashion rather than the soul-searching ponderings that long train rides seemed to prompt.

After a restful night in a clean hostel, I headed right back to the train station to go in search of the Hep 5 mall. Despite the fact that it sounded a lot like a new, terrible strain of hepatitis, I heard that it was the tennie bopper’s dream come true; and even if I have been trying my hardest not to be a teenie bopper for at least the past twelve years, it sounded like the ideal destination for my shopping excursion. I arrived, after a bit of confused meandering around the immediate vicinity of Osaka station, at about 10:30, ready to spend a quiet half hour experiencing the fruits of globalization in a Starbucks before entering the mall. Unfortunately, the mall did not open until 11, and there were no coffee shops in sight. The sign that promised a Starbucks within the depths of Hep 5 didn’t even prove useful after the mall opened, as it never manifested itself and I never found my way to the home of the coveted Maccha Frappuccino. Instead, I wound my way back into the labyrinth of the train station and I found a bakery where I engulfed a few sugary pastries and a coffee before my long day of mall-going.

The Hep 5 mall was seemingly like any other Japanese mall, but it was housed, vertically, in a building rather than stretched out in an endless shopping arcade, or shotengai. It was full of shops, all promising to turn me into a wearer of Japanese fashion. There were colorful shirts in various patterns and styles, interesting accessories, and oodles of high heeled shoes. I confirmed my suspicion that Japanese fashion is more 80s than the 80s itself. Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s would have a field day in this country. As a matter of fact, so would I, though it wouldn’t necessarily be a financially sound field day. I would be better off purchasing a new digital camera and running around the country snapping pictures. I would see more, and possibly even save a little money in the process, though I doubt it considering that one night in a youth hostel costs the equivalent of 40 American dollars.

After perusing the mall for a while, every store began to resemble every other store. They all sold trendy, cheaply-made jeans, long dangling necklaces, multi-layered shirts, and odd sunglasses. What at first had seemed novel, began to seem dull. It was all just more clothing. At Falpaille, a store with a seemingly unpronounceable name, I discovered a few pairs of short pants that resembled no others. In a fit of shopping frenzy, I bought four different pairs. Then I found a few shirts that suited my fancy, and guiltily headed back to my hostel across town laden down with an embarrassing number of packages. I came to the conclusion that pop cultural analysis can be done without participating in consumer culture. Unfortunately I did not learn my lesson, as I made the same mistake in Seoul, Korea.