Hashimoto Toru (7): Exasperation

OSAKA Mayor Hashimoto Toru might be Japan’s Most Exasperating Person, if such a title existed. As often as he says or does something that makes the advocates of small and sensible government feel like firing confetti from cannons, he just as often says or does something that gets people thinking about dressing him in tar and feathers. Here are two examples of each.

Culture

One of the many candidates for Exhibit A in the trial against public sector profligacy is the redistribution of other people’s money to buy art. Some people seem to believe cultural activity would cease to exist, or not exist at all, unless The State writes the checks.

When serving as Osaka Prefecture governor, Mr. Hashimoto ended the annual JPY 450 million handout to the Osaka Century Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was established in 1989 and operated by a foundation with a 2005 budget of JPY 700 million. Solvency was a problem despite the largesse, and people began discussing the possibility of merging the four Osaka area orchestras to save money. The governor started paring in 2008 and eliminated the subsidy last year.

Despite the savings, the response from some quarters was that the philistine Hashimoto was hindering the promotion of culture.

Frédéric Bastiat had an answer for that — and many other things besides — in an 1850 pamphlet titled The Law. It has never been bettered:

“Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

Some people make the excuse that the civilized Europeans, those pillars of fiscal sanity, have state-supported culture, and that we too will become just as civilized if we allow government to pay for it all.

Roger Kimball, the editor of the New Criterion, a magazine of culture/arts/politics criticism, had an answer for that — and many other things besides:

“Have you taken a look a Europe and its state-supported culture recently? Really, this objection is almost too embarrassing to answer. What makes you think that state involvement of culture leads to anything other than the growth of the state and its insinuation into areas of life they have no business being in? Take your time.”

Mr. Hashimoto was less elegant in his rebuttal, but no less accurate. During the debate conducted over orchestra funding in 2009 at a business planning meeting for the prefecture, one conscientious objector said that the government should recognize its responsibility. Rebutting logic of that sort doesn’t require elegance, so Mr. Hashimoto said:

“If you want to keep the orchestra, your employees should join a fan club.”

The orchestra survived, though there were no reports on whether a fan club was formed. It’s now called the Japan Century City Orchestra. The Kinki Sangyo Credit Union in Osaka announced they’ll pick up JPY 200 million of their tab.

Now Mr. Hashimoto has to do it again as Mayor of Osaka. The Osaka Philharmonic receives a JPY 110 million subsidy from the city government, and the city’s project team looking into government expenditures is recommending a 25% cut. They’re also thinking of eliminating entirely the subsidy to The Osaka Municipal Symphonic Band, which operates an outdoor concert venue near Osaka Castle. The municipal band, formed in 1923, is the oldest orchestra in Japan and the only one affiliated with a local government.

The welfare queens started moaning en chorale. The choirmaster is composer/songwriter Miyagawa Akira, who organized a concert to support the band with 40 other musicians. Said Mr. Miyagawa:

“It would be reckless if the city decides to simply end the subsidy with no concern for its image.”

But even he understands that carte blanche no longer applies. He allowed that the municipal band needed to change “partially” to get public support.

As Mr. Hashimoto tweeted after the philharmonic found a sponsor, ”Culture will also have to do its share.”

They’ve already started. The municipal band holds four Friday evening concerts every July, which attract 20,000 people during the month. They’re now soliciting money in exchange for naming rights.

Japan’s Communist Party charges that Mr. Hashimoto is opposed to cultural funding because it doesn’t turn a profit. But we should consider the source, which never considers the possibility that anything should exist outside of the public sector. They also never consider the possibility that profitability is an excellent indicator of popular support.

At the end of April, I attended a concert presented by the symphony orchestra of the local university, which was augmented by area amateurs. The program included Beethoven’s 7th and a piece by Saint-Saëns. The hall was 75-80% full on a fine Sunday afternoon, and we were treated to an excellent performance. Culture worthy of the name is strong enough to survive on its own. Confiscating the assets of private citizens in support of a dubious proposition leads to “the growth of the state and its insinuation into areas of life they have no business being in”.

Human rights

Mayor Hashimoto is not calling into question the public funding of the Osaka Human Rights Museum, AKA Liberty Osaka, but rather the nature of its activities. That is unfortunate; the name alone suggests that the museum’s objective is to violate the human rights of the majority by promoting privileges for selected minorities.

While still governor, he told the foundation that some changes would have to be made. He has a voice in the institution’s management because both Osaka Prefecture and the city subsidize the foundation.

Said the mayor:

“When I was governor, I instructed the museum to change some of its exhibits because they were terrible. I spent quite a lot of time discussing the concept of the changes with the museum authorities. I wanted an educational institution that thought about what had to be done to enable children to think about their own future and to make their dreams and wishes come true.”

Some museum visitors were unhappy about the changes the museum made and complained about it. He returned with Osaka Gov. Matsuo Ichiro for another look, and they weren’t happy about the changes either. Mr. Hashimoto described it as “the usual parade of discrimination and human rights” themes.

As the mayor described the “dreams of the future” section, there was something hanging on the museum wall…Do you want to be a carpenter? Apply to the want ads from building contractors. Do you want to become a baseball player? Be selected in the draft. Do you want to become a teacher? Pass the certification test for teachers and get appointed by the Board of Education. He tweeted:

“What part of this is an educational facility that thinks about the future? This is grotesque.”

A cybertrip to the museum’s Japanese language website (no English) reveals the grotesqueries right away. The museum says its mission is to raise consciousness about those people suffering from discrimination, such as the burakumin, Koreans resident in Japan, Uchinaanchu, the Ainu, the disabled, women, lepers, people with HIV/AIDS, sexual minorities, the homeless, and “others”.

To break that down:

Burakumin: It has been widely reported that Mr. Hashimoto’s father and his family were burakumin, a social (not ethnic) minority that has been subject to discrimination. He and his mother deny it, his uncle affirms it, and almost no one in Japan cares. Attendant to legitimate anti-discrimination activities, burakumin rights advocates run hustles of the sort people in the States have long been familiar with. (Books have been written about it.) A publicly funded museum in Osaka promoting burakumin rights is roughly equivalent to insisting that the U.S. needs to maintain affirmative action programs with Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office.

Korean residents in Japan: There are about 610,000 Japan-born and –bred ethnic Koreans who voluntarily choose Korean citizenship, some of whom have never set foot on the Korean Peninsula. Some people think their choice of national loyalties should not prevent them from having voting rights in Japan, as championed in the fine print of the ruling Democrati Party’s manifesto. Those with South Korean citizenship can vote in South Korea. Those with North Korean citizenship are represented by Chongryun, whose chairman and five other officials are members of the Supreme People’s Assembly in Pyeongyang.

Chongryun also operates schools for ethnic Koreans, with pictures of Kim I, II, and (presumably) III on the walls, and implements a curriculum that promotes the juche philosophy. Some people think it is discriminatory that these schools do not receive the same Japanese government financial assistance as Japanese schools.

Uchinaanchu: That’s what some Okinawans call themselves in the Okinawan dialect/language. Everyone else in Japan calls them “Okinawans” when a distinction is necessary. The museum’s choice of that term suggests they might support a separatist movement. Most Okinawans don’t. In fact, the younger they are, the less likely they are to be separatists. The museum’s choice of the term also suggests an eagerness to be me-too multiculturalists. Can’t miss that progressive bus!

I watch Okinawan Japanese interacting with non-Okinawan Japanese all the time. I have never seen or heard non-Okinawan Japanese discriminating against Okinawan Japanese. Or even make jokes about them. Doesn’t happen.

The Ainu: Perhaps some of this ethnic minority are still discriminated against, if anyone could find any of them. There aren’t that many left, their numbers are dwindling, and the government is already paying people to be Ainu for a living.

Women: With his new Cabinet evenly split 50-50 between men and women, French President François Hollande has shown he thinks gender is a more important qualification for high-level personnel appointments than competence. Some Japanese think it is discrimination to not behave as M. Hollande. That opinion even extends to the personnel choices of  private sector companies, which are nobody’s business but the companies.

Then again, if the Cabinet ministers in France are anything like those in Japan, competence is not one of the criteria for their selection to begin with.

Sexual minorities: Some Japanese men have become fabulously well-to-do by queening it up on national television for decades. (I can think of six off the top of my head, and I almost never watch television.) This week, Tokyo Disney Resort — yes, Tokyo Disneyland — said two lesbians can have a wedding ceremony at a hotel on the site.

As the AFP news agency puts it:

“Homosexuality in Japan is widely accepted but not openly discussed.”

What’s to discuss? You either do it or you don’t. If you don’t believe the AFP, by the way, hit the link to the Beautiful Way of the Samurai on the right sidebar.

John McKeller, the leader of HOPE (Homosexuals Opposed to Pride Extremism, has an answer for that — and many other things besides:

“(E)ven as a young, radical college student, I had no time for the clubby, leftist lemmings who comprised the early gay activists. They were dull, they were depressing, they always looked and acted as if they were born to be offended and victimized, they could never discourse for more than 5 minutes without hitting some tiresome barrier of resentment or ideology…

…In 1967, Pierre Trudeau supposedly liberated us when he said “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”. Subsequently, matters of privacy and discrimination were laudably and necessarily dealt with in the early 1970′s. But today, the bedrooms of the nation are in everybody’s faces. Today, it’s all about benefits, privileges, social engineering, nihilism and redefining normalcy. Today, it’s all about blurring every distinction between personal and political issues and vigorously stifling any attempts at discussion or debate.”

Ignore the false front of idealism and look at the reality: the objective of the museum and the similar activities of NGOs and GOs the world over is not “equality”, but power. Fertilize it with public money and it will reward the behavior of such grifters as Harvard professor and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. Or even this guy.

The inspiration is not positive, but punitive. Among the fellow travelers on the same road are those whose taste in intellectual fashion favors the jackboot. Here’s an impressive display of semi-literacy and word manipulation from a woman in Britain, who concludes that it’s all very sweet. Read it all the way through and see if you don’t feel like throwing a satsuma at her.

Some elements of the ruling DPJ are at the forefront of the Japanese vanguard of rights hucksterism. They slipped into the election manifesto of 2009 the establishment of a “human rights committee” as a wing of the Justice Ministry. Prime Minister Noda (further to the left than is generally recognized) thought it was so important, he wanted to submit a bill creating that committee to the Diet this year. He didn’t explain why it was important, but explanations are not his forte. Justice Minister Ogawa Toshio also thinks “it is essential to establish a human rights committee that can respond appropriately to human rights violations.”

It was stymied not by the opposition parties, but by opposition within the ruling party. Enough people in the DPJ thought the whole business was a violation of free speech and Article 21 of the Constitution. Finally the bureaucrats stepped in and said “it was too early” because there has been no debate among the people. If a debate eventually does occur, it would be helpful to translate Mark Steyn into Japanese:

“I regard (human rights commissions) as an abomination. All the key protections of common law, the presumption of innocence, truth as a defence, the right to due process, the right to confront your accuser in open court, all these things go by the board under a human rights commission system, which is essentially a hierarchy of fashionable victim groups…essentially if someone feels offended by you, you are guilty…because we have elevated the human right not to be offended into a bedrock human right. I think particularly in multicultural societies that governments are very comfortable with this because they regard themselves as the sole legitimate arbiter of acceptable public discourse between different social groups.”

Alas, Mr. Hashimoto drops the ball in the end. He wants to have museums of modern history that present both sides of historical arguments. Just call the whole thing off. Historical arguments are as hardy as cultural activities, and have no trouble surviving on their own.

Money

Amamiya Masayoshi, the Bank of Japan’s Executive Director of Monetary Affairs and Financial Markets, was recently appointed the head of the bank’s Osaka branch. The Osaka office serves as the primary cash backup for the Tokyo office. (It took three hours to transfer stewardship of the funds when Mr. Amamiya assumed his duties.). The appointment caught even some inside the BOJ by surprise. Most speculation has it that the bank wanted someone in Osaka capable of explaining the economic facts of life to Mr. Hashimoto.

One of the Osaka mayor’s primary advisors is former Finance Ministry official Takahashi Yoichi, so it does seem odd that he would need additional tutoring. Then again, Mr. Hashimoto has some odd ideas that he got from somewhere. For example, he wants to amend the Bank of Japan law to permit the government to establish price targets.

Godfrey Daniel!

Prices are established by all of us acting alone together in our best legal interests. It’s called the Invisible Hand. The Visible Ham-Hand of the public sector is incapable of establishing prices that are legitimate. If it were, the Soviet bloc would still exist.

But that’s not all. The mayor also thinks the BOJ is too independent and the government should also set monetary policy targets.

Mother of Pearl!

If that happens, we should get the government to provide everyone with free yoga lessons. All the better to kiss our backsides goodbye. Society’s weak will need a Head Start on the physical training.

If anything is sure to screw things even further up than the financial bureaucracy has already screwed things up, it would be to allow the human airbag ventilating system in Nagata-cho/Washington/Brussels/Anywhere Else to determine prices and monetary policy.

Spit on a stick!

The man whispering these sour nothings into the Osaka mayor’s ear is likely the aforementioned Takahashi Yoichi, who also advises Your Party. One thing all these people have in common is an admirable understanding of the problems and an execrable understanding of the solutions. It is all the more puzzling because Mr. Takahashi was closely involved with the Japan Post privatization of Koizumi Jun’ichiro.

The first thing Mr. Amamiya of the BOJ should whisper in Mr. Hashimoto’s ear when they meet is that the government is no more capable of handling the market for money than it is for cars, cabbages, or medical care.

Most people thought Frederich Hayek was whacked when he called for the denationalization of money. But read what he wrote:

“Since the function of government in issuing money is no longer one of merely certifying the weight and fineness of a certain piece of metal, but involves a deliberate determination of the quantity of money to be issued, governments have become wholly inadequate for the task and, it can be said without qualifications, have incessantly and everywhere abused their trust to defraud the people.”

And:

“The government monopoly of the issue of money was bad enough so long as metallic money predominated. But it became an unrelieved calamity since paper money (or other token money), which can provide the best and the worst money, came under political control. A money deliberately controlled in supply by an agency whose self-interest forced it to satisfy the wishes of the users might be the best. A money regulated to satisfy the demands of group interests is bound to be the worst possible.”

Now those are ideas whose time has come. While few people expect a legitimate free market in money to emerge any time soon (underground markets are a different story), it should be now clear to most people that a government which regulates money or monetary policy will always do so to satisfy the demands of group interests. (That includes businesses too big to fail.) It should be especially clear to the people who operate human rights museums. They’re working the same street corner, after all.

Darkness

Mr. Hashimoto can be fairly charged with populism for his anti-nuclear power stance justified solely by emotional harangues, without offering an alternative of any sort. But that’s not the worst part. Here’s the mayor as quoted by the 14 May Yomiuri Shimbun on the question of restarting the Oi nuclear power plant in the Kansai area:

“There will never be a situation such as this again. The next generation must fully experience what it will be like to live under government decree to restrict energy usage.”

Jesus Menstruating Goldfishes! What tar pit of the soul did that bubble up from?

Emotional distortions projected in public have nothing to do with logic, but since this is a policy question, let’s apply it as logic — ”The next generation must fully experience what it will be like to live under government decree to restrict bandage and antiseptic usage and apply buffalo dung poultices instead.”

Even in the event that he one day becomes prime minister, his own supporters wouldn’t let him get away with that. In fact, his closest political ally, Osaka Gov. Matsui Ichiro, already has objected:

“Last year’s rolling blackouts had a major impact on the economy. There’s no reason to so facilely accept restricted energy usage.”

And if you use too much energy? Mr. Hashimoto didn’t come up with a solution for that, but the Energy Strategy Conference of the city and prefecture of Osaka did. According to the 15 May Osaka edition of the Mainichi Shimbun, they suggest creating an Energy Conservation Notification Center to which citizens could report offices and shops that they think are too bright.

Sorry. All out of colorful oaths.

The standards these neighborhood informants would use to determine whether the illumination of the establishments was too bright were not specified. Human nature being what it is, however, one of the standards will surely become, “That guy/company/shop clerk is a creep.”

They also suggest shutting down government offices during the hotter hours of the day in summer, which is not a bad idea in theory. I’m self-employed and work at home, and I often take a siesta or read at those times. But I can work at night, on weekends, and whenever I feel like it, deadlines permitting. What would employees do with two or three hours of free time at a job site far from their home? (Stop that snickering!) Returning home is not possible for most people. Will they be made to stay late at night to catch up?

Rather than the idea of government restriction of energy usage, they should be focusing on deregulation that permits increased energy supply and distribution. A system will go into effect this July in which the existing utilities will be forced to pay roughly twice the cost of nuclear-generated power to enterprises generating energy from alternative sources. Of course the people really paying for it will be the consumers.

See what happens when the government sets price targets?

But since the government. or a government monopoly, is as incapable of dealing with the power market as it is with anything else, the plan should be to borrow the idea of that crazy guy Hayek and denationalize/deregulate supply as well as production (and prices), create smart grids, and throw the market open to everyone.

That brings us to the most puzzling and exasperating aspect of all. Those people who, like Hashimoto Toru, talk about privatizing the public sector and operating the government on businesslike principles, are usually the same people who immediately understand the problems with culture subsidies and human rights scams. They are seldom the people who think government control of prices and money is a good idea. They are almost never the people who talk about the need to experience life with government restrictions on power. (That’s what these people do.)

I would have thought it impossible for these ideas to coexist. Hashimoto The Exasperating has achieved the impossible.

Afterwords:

These are serious questions about the role of government in society, but the story in the English-language media about Hashimoto Toru this week was his prohibition of tattoos for Osaka city employees. Such is the media’s four-panel comic strip approach to the world. While they noted that most public establishments, including public baths, and several large private companies have the same prohibitions due to the association with yakuza, they missed one of the key parts of the story. More than half of the 110 or so city employees with tattoos are employed at the Environmental Division, which is a euphemism for garbage collectors. There are unlikely to be many gangsters on the garbage trucks. In Osaka, those trucks are much more likely to be manned by burakumin.

*****

In a demonstration of non-government funded cultural diversity, Kevin Kmetz plays a Bach prelude on the shamisen in Tokyo.

 

Ichigen koji (77)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

From tonight’s Shoten television program

Utamaru (the moderator of the panel of rakugo comedians, explaining the premise for the weekly joke contest): You’ve been out drinking with people from work and had too much, and now you want to go home early. I’ll play the part of a supervisor you don’t like. You say to me, “I’ve got to be going now because XXX”. I’ll try to dissuade you and say, “No, let’s go to one more place!” You continue the conversation from there.

Enraku (one of the comedians on the panel): Prime Minister, I can’t drink any more. I just can’t drink any more, so let’s call it a night.

Utamaru: No, let’s go to one more place!

Enraku: But we’ve done nothing but drink (i.e., swallow) all the American demands so far!

When one of the comedians comes up with a joke or routine that is particularly funny or clever, the moderator awards the comedian with a zabuton, or cushion for seating on the floor.

Enraku was awarded a zabuton for this joke.

Utamaru is in the pale green kimono at the far left, and Enraku is in the lavender kimono third from the right.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Ichigen koji (69)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

I have no past and no future. The only value is in today, and whether I will be able to make one more film.

- Actor Otaki Hideji, 86, on his selection as a person of cultural merit

Here he is in a brief television commercial for a bug spray. The man on the left says the spray can be recommended because it doesn’t foul the air, so it’s safe for infants and pets. Mr. Otaki retorts that he has no infants or pets — there’s only the two of them — and concludes by grumbling about his boorishness.

Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Yahoo Buzz | Newsvine

Arty or crafty?

THE traditional Japanese paper known as washi is used to make all sorts of things in addition to ordinary sheets of paper. They include clothes, household goods, toys, ritual objects used in Shinto, furniture, the paper used in shoji sliding doors, loudspeaker cones, umbrellas, Japanese banknotes…

…6.8-meter-high statues of the tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur…

Gao!

The accompanying photo is proof that the paper dinosaur exists, placed outdoors in Katsuyama, Fukui, near — where else? — the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum. It was built with a frame of bamboo struts covered with chicken wire. That was overlaid with Echizen washi, one of the region’s traditional handicrafts. It was deliberately left colorless to preserve the washi appearance, and it was waterproofed to keep it from falling apart in the rain. The folks in Fukui put it up now for paper dinosaur fans because it contrasts with the surrounding greenery. They’ll keep it up until December, when it begins to snow. The idea, of course, is to attract tourists.

Hey, I’d go see it if I were within easy distance of Fukui — and admit it, so would you!

‘Tis the season for Koshiens

THE summer edition of the national high school baseball championship got underway at Hanshin Koshien Stadium in Hyogo this weekend. That is a very big deal in Japan: NHK broadcasts every game of the tournament live, nationwide, without commercials. One of the classic scenes of daily life is the family get-together during the mid-August O-bon holidays with the eating, the drinking, and the attention of the males alternating between the people in the room and the games on television. The format of an elimination tournament adds an element of spice to the drama — the losers go home, while the championship team will have been undefeated, starting with the first game of the local prefectural round.

All the games are played at Hanshin Koshien Stadium in Hyogo. The park was built in 1924 specifically to serve as the venue for the summer tournament, which dates from 1915, and the smaller spring invitational tournament, which debuted the year the stadium opened. So closely is the park associated with the championship that the event is referred to simply as Koshien. Ask someone whether their high school has ever been to Koshien, and they’ll know immediately what you mean.

In fact, the term Koshien is now applied to other summertime high school competitions, including events that have nothing to do with sports. One of these is the Calligraphy Performance Koshien, staged on 31 July in Shikokuchuo, Ehime. Though it is based on calligraphy, it was conceived in the 21st century — this year’s competition was only the fourth. Teams of 10 calligraphers use brushes and ink on sheets of paper four meters high by six meters wide to render artistic and/or philosophical messages as they dance to music that accompanies their performance.

Representatives from 15 high schools around the country participated in the finals, and the squad from Oita High School in Oita City, Oita, won for the second straight year. This year, most of the participating schools created works based on the theme of earthquake/tsunami recovery. In addition to the normal criteria used to evaluate calligraphy, the teams were judged on the degree of completion of their work, the movements of the team members as they brushed on the characters, and their dance routines.

The creation of the Oita High champs was based on the theme of compassion (思いやり) and they used the form of a mid-summer greeting card (shochu o-mimai) as their motif. Said the team captain:

We can thank the people around us for our consecutive victories. We wondered what we could do to help the people in the area, and decided to encourage them with our calligraphy.

The students of the calligraphy club at Mishima High School in Shikokuchuo came up with the idea as an event to attract people to the local shopping district. Their inspirational spark fired everyone’s imagination, they were invited to appear on television, and then the rest of the country got into the act.

See you in the funny papers!

You don’t even have to ask — of course there’s a Manga Koshien for high school students. That’s the term commonly used to refer to the annual High School Manga Competition, which was held this past weekend in Kochi. This year’s event was the 20th, and the winning team came from Tochigi Girls High School, which inked it out with 24 other schools in the final round.

In this competition, the teams are given the same topic and have to create a comic on that topic immediately. They do this twice — the topics for the Saturday preliminaries and the Sunday finals are different.

The topic for the final round this year was “The 100th Manga Koshien”. The Tochigi girls came up with a comic depicting the 100th anniversary event, which in their imagination offered a prize of JPY one million (100 man en in Japanese), had 100 judges, but very few schools participating because of the population decline due to the low birth rate.

The head of the judge’s panel, Makino Keiichi, said:

Some (judges) thought that was a negative concept, but it is (in the spirit of) manga to depict things honestly.

Said Oki Ayano, one member of the winning team:

It was a good idea to deal straightforwardly with a social issue. I’m really happy.

The cartooning champs said they’ll donate their JPY 300,000 award to the Tohoku relief effort.

Consider what these two events have to say about the health and cultural dynamism of the Japanese. Who else would have thought to combine the elegance of the centuries-old art and discipline of calligraphy with pop music dance routines and turn it into an extra-curricular activity for high school students? Consider also that the winning Manga Koshien high school team was aware of a contemporary social issue, had the wit to come up with an idea based on that issue on the spur of the moment, incorporated it into the general outline presented to them, and had the guts to put it on paper as their entry in the championship round.

Now consider how seriously to take those people who enjoy talking and writing about the malaise in Japan.

*****
Here’s the Oita High School team strutting their stuff in the paint at the first Calligraphy Performance Koshien four years ago. Notice the touch of placing the seal on the lower left-hand corner of their work at the end. Baby love!

Dang, I got to find a way to get me to Ehime next summer!

Matsuri da! (115): Rebirth

LIFESTYLE Luddites sporadically surface with the lament that globalization is holding a knife to the throat of indigenous cultures. Because cultures are less fragile and more resilient than they understand, however, this posture is really just a stalking horse for an unwillingness to allow the people of a particular place access to the same choices that globalization has allowed them. When the folk shed their colorful traditional garb for Western dress and develop a taste for musical styles other than those that rocked the world of their grandparents, it spoils the experience of enjoying them from afar, away from all the flies and the dysentery.

A look at the Japanese and their simultaneous embrace of their own traditions and the latest in global fashionability should be enough to improve anyone’s posture. The urban youth are just as likely as their fellows anywhere else to wear ugly untucked t-shirts, eat gloop, and listen to the unlistenable, but they are also just as likely to time slip without warning several centuries into the past to savor the celebrations of the ancients.

Earlier this month, for example, the Chokaisan Omonoimi Shinto shrine in the Fukura district of Yuza-machi, Yamagata — which dates from 871 at the latest — held its annual festival in supplication for a bountiful harvest. The event has several elements, including parades with three different mikoshi, or portable shrines. One of the mikoshi is for children, and another is in the shape of a ship that the carriers toss about to depict a sea voyage. The primary attraction, however, is the Hanagasa dance, or Fukura dengaku, a pre-planting rite. The dancers don headdresses with red decorations representing rice blossoms that rival anything worn by Carmen Miranda at the peak of her Hollywood career. Suspended from the brim are strips of paper called shide that represent the rain. Instead of castinets they provide clatter with an instrument called a sasara that for some reason is said to symbolize the croaking of frogs. At the end of their performance, the dancers toss the hats into the audience, and snatching one is supposed to guarantee good luck in the coming year. Anyone who’s been in the midst of a crowd in Japan during similar events knows the wisest course of action is to dive right in and grab one of your own. That’s beats being shoved roughly out of the way with an elbow to the ribs by somebody’s grandmother.

Though the festival dates from sometime in the Muromachi period, which ran from 1338 to 1573, and was designated an intangible prefectural cultural treasure in 1993, a look at this YouTube video featuring all the highlights is enough to see this isn’t a museum piece frozen in the aspic of the past.

In October 2007, the Yamagatans went on the road to Seoul to perform with other Japanese and Korean groups in the Japan-South Korea Exchange Festival, which you can see and read about here.

Teramachi Ichiza

Another of the benefits of globalization in Japan is the unexpected delights that result from all the mixing and mingling. One of the earliest manifestations of that was the chin-don bands, in which musicians dress in fanciful clothing to perform as a living jukebox stacked with global pop music on instruments both Japanese and Western, usually to advertise local shops. There are several excellent examples on-site that can be accessed at the tag below, but here’s another — Teramachi Ichiza from Iwate. The group, which usually works the Tohoku area, has won awards at national chin-don competitions for its performances. The members live in the mountainous part of the prefecture away from the coast, so they weren’t affected by the earthquake/tsunami, but they decided to suspend their activities after the disaster anyway in the spirit of self-restraint.

In the spirit of rebirth, however, they resumed performing in the Iwate city of Ofunato in the coastal area known as Goishi Kaigan at an event designed to buck up everyone’s spirits. (Enka megastar Sen Masao, an Iwate native, also sang.) The members of Teramachi Ichiza decided to bring their axes and blow because it had been 49 days after the earthquake. The 49-day Buddhist period of mourning originates in the Tibetan concept of bardo, the transitional period between one’s previous life and the consciousness’s entry into the life to come. Doesn’t that joyful noise contain an echo of the second line parade of brass bands in New Orleans switching from a dirge to jazz once they depart the cemetery after a funeral?

The chin-don band’s performance at Ofunato doesn’t seem to have been recorded, but their performance at the Miyako Horsehair Crab Festival in Iwate this February was.

This is what happened to Miyako one month later:

But destruction is not a permanent end. Doubters need only look to a small story at a park in a community center in the Kaminiida district of Yonezawa, Yamagata. A 300-year-old cherry tree on the center grounds collapsed last winter in the heavy snows. Before the deadwood could be cleared away in the spring, however, center director Nagaoka Takao spied shoots sprouting from the old trunk. He watered them with a PET bottle for the next two months. When cherry season arrived in the Tohoku region, so did the blossoms on the fallen tree.

Cultures included, we are all less fragile and more resilient than we sometimes think.

*****
The song, the scene, and the band’s name — they get it, too.

Why does the world like Japanese manga?

Fighting evil by moonlight,
Winning love by daylight,
Never running from a real fight,
She is the one named Sailor Moon.
- The first verse of the Sailor Moon theme song in English

JAPAN was once known as the land of the rising sun, but it might be more appropriate to say that more people know it today as the land of manga and animations. Here’s yet another example: An annual exhibition titled the Manga Day Commemorative Four-Panel Cartoon Awards is underway until 20 February at the Yokoyama Memorial Manga Museum (English-language website) in Kochi City, Kochi. It will run until 20 February.

The museum established the awards to recognize contributions to the development of manga culture, and this is the sixth exhibit. In October, judges at the museum selected 15 works from among the 1,197 four-panel strips submitted by 878 artists in 42 prefectures and the United States. The current exhibition presents the prize winners and the 139 works that made it past the first round of judging. There’s also an exhibit of 430 manga created by children of primary school age or younger that have been deemed to have promise.

The exhibit just began, so I’m not sure about the connection with Manga Day, which is 3 November in Japan. The museum was built to honor Kochi native Yokoyama Ryuichi, a famous manga artist who in 1961 created Japan’s first televised cartoon show, Instant History. He is also the first manga artist to have been named a Person of Cultural Merit.

*****
Why have Japanese manga captured the imagination of young people around the world? Makino Keiichi, head of the Faculty of Manga at Kyoto Seika University, thinks their popularity originates in two aspects of Japanese culture: kanji and Yaoyorozu no Kamigami. The latter expression is literally “eight million kami” (divinity, divine essence), but what that eight million really means is “a heck of a lot”. In other words, the divine essence resides in all things.

Mr. Makino uses the kanji 重 as an example of the first aspect. He says that depending on the context, Japanese will immediately determine its meanings from among the possibilities of “overlapping”, “heavy”, “-fold” (as in three-fold), or “piled up”, and its reading from among the possibilities of kasanaru, omoi, e, ju, or cho.

He explains:

“Manga are the same as kanji. When the readers see one panel of a comic, they immediately understand the meaning and freely interpret the image. That culture is the backdrop for manga, so Japanese manga artists don’t draw anything into the background that isn’t necessary. They only include the content necessary to convey the information. That results in creations with communicative power which can be understood at a glance by foreigners and children.”

As for the second aspect, he explains that the Japanese believe the divine essence resides in everything, and this sense of spirituality underlies the rich story content of Japanese manga.

“It’s different from the monotheism that forbids idolatry. In Japan, the divinities and spiritual creatures take a multiplicity of forms and become anthropomorphic. I suspect that openness is what enables the free expression of stories and characters.”

Mr. Makino adds that in the West, the Devil is a frightening creature, but that demons and Tengu in Japan are depicted with human characteristics.

“Even that which is frightening is not rejected, but made into an engaging character.”

As demonstrated by the worship of the eight million divinities, a characteristic of Japanese culture is its acceptance of and openness to things foreign, which he cites as one reason for the diversity of storylines.

“Before they’re aware of what’s happening, people throughout the world become captivated by the spiritual culture of Japan.”

Now you know how the Sailor Moon girls got their magical powers!

*****
Makino Keiichi has his own Japanese-language website that’s still under construction, but you can see some of his unusual creations on one part of it. Kyoto Seika University and the city of Kyoto operate the Kyoto International Manga Museum, which has the world’s largest collection of comics.

*****
It’s not just the visual art or the stories, either. Listen to where this music from the Seek the Full Moon animation takes you in 80 seconds.

One final note: If you think Mr. Makino is off base with his Yaoyorozu no Kamigami idea, consider that today at the Museum of Art, Kochi–in the same city as the manga exhibition–a pop art exhibit opened showing the works of Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, among others. Kochi City has a population of about 340,000 and is somewhat isolated on the island of Shikoku, where it is one of the primary cities.

Tenori-onanism

The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.
- Plato, The Republic (4.424c)

DURING THE INITIAL ASSAULT of the rock revolution of the 1960s, founder/leader Roger McGuinn of The Byrds told the author of the liner notes for the group’s first album that the sound of music was as critical as its style or lyrical content. That sound, he said, was an expression of the technology of the time. The brass-and-reeds of the Big Band era were the sound of music in an age of propeller-driven aircraft. The long-haired 60s was the age of both space travel and widespread commercial travel on jet aircraft, and that was manifested in the musical thunder of the beat groups.

The process in which the sound of music changes in tandem with the technological environment is a never-ending evolution. Since McGuinn’s day in the sun the sound of music has changed with the development and use of synthesizers, samplers, and personal computers. Music in 1985, twenty years after McGuinn brought forth electric folk rock in 1965, was as different from the sound of The Byrds as theirs differed from the sounds of Count Basie. That year was roughly the high point for popular music created using the early synthesizers and the Fairlight, the first commercial digital sampling instrument that digitized sounds from an external source instead of mathematical wave data. The Fairlight made it possible to record a dog barking, for example, and use that sound to create a melody. Among the musicial pioneers of that era were the Japanese group YMO and its individual members, as well as such fellow travelers as Tachibana Hajime and Suzuki Saeko.

But the Fairlight was very expensive, and it had six keyboards. Using one required both access to a studio that could afford it as well as traditional keyboard skills. One constant of technology, however, is its relentless thrust to make tools smaller, cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful, and musical instruments are no exception. Creations called “music workstations” arrived in the late 80s with the Korg M1 and its subsequent improvements that made the Fairlight obsolete. Nevertheless, these were still keyboard instruments geared toward studio musicians and composers. An offshoot of the music workstations was the groovebox, which is portable and produced for the musician performing live, usually for dancers. Some of these don’t have keyboards at all, and create sounds in way unlike any traditional musical instruments.

Not until recently had there been a musical instrument for the digital age that is relatively affordable, easy for non-musicians to use, portable, and equally capable of handling everything from Mary Had a Little Lamb and Neko Funjatta to Bach and futuristic electronica.

Then, in 2005, twenty years after the age of the synthesizer and Fairlight, Iwai Toshi invented the Tenori-on with the assistance of Nishibori Yu of the Yamaha Center for Advanced Sound Technology. Tenori is not a commonly used word in Japanese, but it is easily understood. It most frequently appears in the name of a type of Javanese sparrow that will perch on the hand of its master. On means sound, and is the root of the word for music. The tenori-on neither looks nor functions like anything remotely resembling what most of us would conceive as a musical instrument, but that’s exactly what it is.

And here’s the part that takes the instrument into a new dimension entirely: It also creates moving light patterns simultaneously in synch with the music.

Iwai is the designer of Electroplankton, an interactive music game for the Nintendo DS, and that influence is apparent in his creation. The tenori-on itself is a hand-held magnesium screen containing a 16 x 16 grid of LED switches. Performers activate these in several ways to create a combination of music and light. It has two sides that look identical. One is played by the performer, while the other provides the light show.

There are two built-in speakers on the top of frame, and five control buttons on the left and right that control such functions as changing octaves, adjusting the playback pitch in semitone increments, switching among the instrument’s “layers”, and modifying the beats per second. There are also two more buttons at the bottom and one at the top. The instrument has a MIDI connector, headphones, and memory card. It can be connected to play in concert with other tenori-on, or to send and receive music between them.

As the Yamaha manual describes it:

The TENORI-ON 16 x 16 LED button matrix is simultaneously a performance input controller and display. By operating and interacting with the LED buttons and the light they produce you gain access to the TENORI-ON’s numerous performance capabilities.

It doesn’t generate its own sound, which makes it something of a combination of a synthesizer and sequencer. It comes with 256 built-in sounds, but those can be augmented with a memory card. That means it can also sound like a harpsichord–or a barking dog, if that’s to your taste.

Iwai took the original on the road for demonstrations in front of an audience. One of these was at Futuresonic in Manchester, England, and the positive response helped convince the company to sell it commercially. He explains his objective:

In days gone by, a musical instrument had to have a beauty of shape as well as of sound, and had to fit the player almost organically…Modern electronic instruments don’t have this inevitable relationship between the shape, the sound, and the player. What I have done is to try to bring back these…elements and build them in to a true musical instrument for the digital age.

The best way to understand is to watch and hear one in performance, so here’s a YouTube video of an original composition, Dreaming, by Gianni Proietti. What you’ll see is an instrument that is nothing less than the equivalent of a hand-held orchestra or band.

The tenori-on has six performing modes that can be used together in any combination.

One is the Score Mode, with score in this sense being like a musical score. Players input notes by pressing one of the hot spots. Pressing for a longer time creates sustain, and pressing a playing note turns it off.

The tenori-on grid is perceived as a matrix. The horizontal axis is for time, and the vertical axis is for pitch. Intervals or chords are created by inputting notes simultaneously on the same vertical line. The time axis moves from left to right, and when the right edge is reached, it loops back to the left. This is similar to the sequencer function of musical workstations.

Another is the Random Mode, which is the combination of Score Mode and an arpeggiator. Instead of scrolling the sequence from left to right, the player activates notes at different points on the grid. A light travels between the dots to create sound.

There’s also the Bounce Mode. Players input notes that are repeated at different intervals depending on how high on a vertical scale a note is placed. That creates the effect of a visual bouncing ball, and the note plays when the ball hits the bottom.

Performers don’t even have to press the surface in the Draw Mode—they can just pass their hands over the instrument in a pattern to draw lines or curves, and the tenori-on will play them. It will also repeat the sounds, so compositions can be created in real-time by building up the number of passes and patterns to interact with each other. That sounds as if the player could easily create counterpoint. Speaking of which, here’s a Bach composition performed on a table top in broad daylight.

The instrument has an Interior Mode that enables it to be used as a musical alarm clock. It can be programmed as a clock—with the numerals shown on the screen—that can play a specified piece of music at a specified time. Now how many other instruments are capable of functioning as an ornament in the home and a timepiece when not being otherwise used?

Here’s another feature that wouldn’t have occurred to Bach but did to a man accustomed to video games: The Advance Mode. That allows players to customize the modes. Holding two of the function keys unlocks this mode and different, previously unexplained features in the Layer menu are presented. There are also rumors of other hidden features.

The instrument’s 16 layers, by the way, are another aspect of the instrument that Yamaha describes as “performance parts” or “recording tracks.” Performers can input different musical sequences to each layer using all of the six modes, and the layers can be played together.

It sounds complicated, but people who have tried the tenori-on say that it’s easy to pick up and do simple things with right away, even for people who know nothing about music.

Says Yamaha spokesman Peter Peck:

I can create sequences that I’d never be able to with software. I don’t need to know anything about music, I’m just pressing lights and buttons. Anyone can walk up to it and make something happen, and be inspired. With a guitar you don’t get that instant reward. But after that initial bit of inspiration, there’s also a huge curve of musical development to learn on the tenori-on if you really want to get the most out of it.

For a demonstration of that aspect, here’s a YouTube clip from the Paul O’Grady television show in Britain in 2008. Three young women calling themselves the Tenorions (or three young and attractive models that Yamaha hired for PR and trained) perform a dance number and then proceed to teach the host and the guests how to play Hello Dolly.

If you’re interested in learning more, here’s the introductory manual at the Yamaha website (pdf). And here’s a YouTube video with the inventor Mr. Iwai giving a demonstration in English (though the mike doesn’t work well for the first minute).

Yamaha decided to debut the instrument in England, and did so on 4 September 2007. They didn’t give a reason for choosing that country, but perhaps it’s because the British pop music market seems to be more open than those in the U.S. or Japan to self-contained groups of one or two people performing their own compositions with electronically generated music. It sold for £599, which was $US 1,200 at that time, or a skoche more than JPY 81,000. That price might not be suitable for a gift to children on their birthday, but it’s reasonable enough to make it affordable for even the interested teenager.

Whether or not the tenori-on itself will become popular isn’t so much the point. Rather, it’s a new approach to the idea of what a musical instrument is. It aggregates technological developments into a complete and portable package that could well change how people think about creating and performing music—and visual art, for that matter. Surely Yamaha and others are working on improvements to enhance and expand its musical and visual potential.

How long will it be before some talented people start composing music to create specific visual designs for presentation in an integrated performance art event, for example? It’s not possible to even conceive of the “advanced modes” the tenori-on could unlock for art in the future.

I bet Bach would have loved it!

Thanks to PB for most of the links and the title idea.

Idollatry

HAS THERE EVER been a time when little girls didn’t play with dolls? In Japan, little girls have been playing with paper dolls since at least the Heian period, which began more than 1200 years ago.

Somewhere along the way, that diversion was combined with an old Chinese purifactory rite held along rivers in the third lunar month. People exorcised their impurities by transferring them to paper images and casting them on the waters. Those paper images were called katashiro in Japan.

Early in the Edo period, which began more than 400 years ago, people started displaying three-dimensional versions of these dolls in the home. As the custom became more widespread, the dolls and the displays grew more elaborate, and it became traditional to place a full set of figures consisting of an emperor, empress, attendants, and musicians on several tiers for Girls’ Day, which is 3 March.

That custom eventually became a part of every girl’s life. Parents gave a set to girls when they were born, or on their first birthday, and the girls took them to their new home when they got married.

Little girls and big girls both still play with the dolls. Here’s a look at this year’s Hina events from several perspectives.

Biggu

The Tomisaki Shinto shrine in Katsuura, Chiba puts on a really biggu show every year for its Biggu Hina Matsuri, and it gives everyone a preview by displaying 1,200 dolls on a 60-tiered platform for the 60 stone steps leading to the shrine torii. Katsuura seems to have become something of a Hina Central. There’s a Shinto ceremony to pray for the success of the festival, and the miko, or shrine maidens, perform dances. Students at the International Budo (Martial Arts) University—an accredited school—gave a naginata demonstration.

The city’s main Hina Matsuri, or doll festival, was held from 26 February to 6 March and featured 25,000 dolls in nine locations. One local primary school had an exhibit of 1,366 folk dolls from 84 countries. The city also exhibited Japan’s biggu-est hina doll, which is a towering 120 centimeters tall, or just a skoche shy of four feet. It should be no surprise that the festival is a biggu deal for the city’s merchants—it attracts more than 150,000 people every year.

Those stone steps are 15 meters high and two meters wide, by the way. It took 20 people 90 minutes to set up the display, and boy that was fast work.

Crafts

The hina season is the peak period for Kuroda Hiroshi and his wife Katsumi of Koshigaya, Saitama, who work together to make traditional crafts. Mr. and Mrs. Kuroda make full sets of hina dolls by hand. One set costs from JPY 150,000 to JPY 230,000 (about $US 2,540). That’s expensive, but customers are paying for handmade craftsmanship and a unique product. Said Mr. Kuroda, “I’ve been doing this with my wife ever since we got married. If one of us were lacking, we couldn’t make good products.” He says the most popular sets now are the smaller ones with dolls from 15 to 20 centimeters high (just shy of eight inches), perhaps as a result of the economic downturn.

Arts

Arita-cho in Saga has been one of Japan’s leading porcelain and ceramics centers since the late 16th century. They’ve had plenty of experience creating elaborate and elegant works of porcelain art, particularly during the 18th century, when European nobility went into a continent-wide collectors’ frenzy and spent enormous sums on their products. It stands to reason they’ve got their fingers in this pie too.

The Arita Hina Ceramics festival began last month, and the big draw was the display of porcelain hina dolls from kilns in three countries at the municipal offices on the 28th. The kilns represented were the heavy hitters in the world’s porcelain industry. From left to right: Lladro of Spain, Kakiemon of Arita-cho, and Meissen of Germany. That’s Arita’s chief municipal officer giving the glad eye to the Spanish team. Porcelain folk were particularly intrigued by comparisons of the three companies’ distinctive use of color.

The Kakiemon and Meissen kilns have been around for centuries, but Lladro is a relative baby doll, established in 1950. It didn’t take them long to become the world’s leading porcelain doll manufacturer, however. Aficionados cite their use of color and curves as the factors that set them apart. Their price sets them apart as well. A set of two dolls sells for JPY 1.05 million, or roughly $US 11,590.

Some people sigh at their beauty. Others sigh at the price.

Living dolls

Boys generally aren’t interested in this sort of thing—it is Girl’s Day, after all—and besides, guys are more likely to sigh over living dolls than the porcelain variety.

That’s why the favorite doll event for manly men was in Higashiomi, Shiga, last week, when three young women from the Tankai Calligraphy Culture Vocational School dressed up as Hina doll attendants. They even served visitors shirozake (white sake, made with rice malt and sake), a beverage traditionally consumed at these celebrations, and posed for photos. I’ve never had shirozake, but if they want to pour, I’ve got a cup to bring.

The event was called the Human Hina Festival, and it was the centerpiece of a larger local festival that will last until the 28th. This year’s festival is the 13th. The students appeared as living dolls two days running, for two hours each. Said 20-year-old Kato Mako, one of the human hinas, “It was difficult because my feet went numb, but a lot of people took my picture, so it was a good experience.”

Being a doll must be harder work than it looks!

I mentioned last week that some Japanese still believe inanimate objects have spirits, and that also applies to the hina. It just doesn’t feel right to dump them in the trash if they’re no longer wanted or needed. It’s worth clicking the link to find out the solution some people have devised.

And yes, the Tankai Calligraphy Culture Vocational School has a website, though it’s in Japanese only. You don’t have to read Japanese to appreciate their calligraphy gallery, however.

The studliness of grass-eating men

“GRASS-EATING MEN” is an expression used to describe the allegedly limp and wimpy young Japanese man of today. It became a catchphrase of sorts last year, and was soon glommed by those elements of the Anglosphere mass media who scarf up this type of story quicker than a free hamburger and beer. From their perspective, it also dovetailed nicely with their other stories of bra- and makeup-wearing Japanese men.

There are other perspectives, however. One of them was presented by the prolific author Hashimoto Osamu in the February issue of Chuo Koron as part of a rumination on the Tiger Woods affairs. Here it is in English.

*****
The phrase “grass eating men” appeared in the 2009 Buzzwords of the Year contest, and some people are saying that today’s young men are not aggressive in pursuing affairs of the heart.

While that may well be true, it is not a recent development. The idea that studly Japanese men do not make aggressive moves on women is a sort of aesthetic value that became established during the Edo period (1603-1868), so it will not be shaken that easily.

The kabuki and joruri puppet dramas of the Edo period have determined the disposition of the Japanese in profound ways. The “studly men” (ikemen) who appear in these dramas do not readily assert themselves with women. They are approached by women even when they do not assert themselves. The greatest pickup line for Japanese is when a Japanese woman approaches a man, snuggles up to him, and says, “ne~”. With this one word, a romance that is going to happen will happen. All a man has to do is be a grass-eating animal who pokes his head into a feeding trough that has approached him.

That’s why the highest standard for judging a Japanese man’s eroticism is his attractiveness to women. Japanese men unconsciously believe it is not possible to think of how to make oneself attractive to women; the Japanese man who is attractive to women has been allotted that role by fate.

And that’s why the studly Japanese man does not have to be aggressive when pursuing romance. They will come to him even if he doesn’t do anything. That is stoicism on the face of it, and it also allows him to be self-indulgent in these matters. Japanese men were not at all criticized for this in bygone times; even today, women infatuated with studly men will seldom criticize them for this.

In Edo period dramas, it is the men who are aggressive in affairs of the heart that women do not find attractive. Women see them as unappealing, so they have no choice but to be aggressive. These men are not suave in manner. Therefore, when those men who are not attractive to women are sexually aggressive, women will dismiss them with the complaint that they are offensive. (Note: “Iyarashii“; this has sexual connotations.)

That’s why the men who aren’t fancied by women but who are sexually aggressive are suited only for the role of cheap heavies. That can’t be helped—that’s what they are.

In fact, as the Japanese “grass-eating men” trend shows, the longer that periods of social calm prevail, everything somehow seems to take on the air of the Edo period.

Afterwords:

Here’s the list of top 10 buzzwords in 2009 for those who can read Japanese. “Grass-eating men” made the cut.

Once upon a time in America, a woman who found a man’s advances unpleasant would have dismissed them with the word, “Fresh!” That’s probably the best translation for iyarashii, but it’s not contemporary.

A rainbow bridge between Japan and Korea

A SPLENDID PLACE to start when looking for an exemplary case of international cultural exchange would be the program conducted by Tohoku University of Art and Design in Yamagata City, Yamagata, and the Korea National University of the Arts in Seoul, that country’s only national arts university.

The Japanese university explains its motivation for signing an exchange agreement on 23 February 2008:

This school is attempting to use culture and the arts to create a new philosophy and sense of values in Yamagata and the Tohoku region. We conduct education and research with the objective of clarifying Tohoku’s place in Japan and Asia…We also think the people “living in Asia” must interact and create an identity, which is the starting point for building a peaceful world in this age of globalization. (My quotes)

No, that’s not a justification for a 21st century cultural version of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They explain in the next sentence that the Korean university shares the same sentiments, and those shared sentiments became the basis for their relationship. The Japanese school refers to their interaction as a “Rainbow Bridge”.

In addition to talking the talk, both schools are walking the walk.

For most of March 2009, the Buyeo National Museum in Buyeo-gun, Chungcheongnam-do, sponsored an exhibit of Nihonga, or traditional Japanese painting using techniques, materials, and conventions more than a millennium old. The works displayed were rendered by teachers and six graduates of the Tohoku school. Each of the six graduates is now affiliated with Japanese museums that have a strong background in the traditional arts.

Korean court music in Yamagata

The name of the exhibit in Japanese was マウムと心展. The first word is the Japanese katakana spelling of the Korean word maum, which means heart or spirit. The Japanese equivalent is kokoro, which is the first word in the kanji at the end (心展). In other words, it was a bilingual expression of a “Heart to Heart (or Spirit to Spirit) Exhibit.”

Two other aspects of that exhibit are worth noting. First, the Japanese artists make of point of emphasizing their use of traditional techniques to create original works that are not a slavish imitation of the past. We’ll hear an echo of that idea in just a bit.

Second, Buyeo was the name of an ancient Korean kingdom located in what is now Manchuria. Of the three latter-day Korean kingdoms, both Goguryeo and Baekje considered themselves to be its successor. The museum introduces itself on its website by saying that it specializes in Baekje culture.

The Baekje kingdom had close ties with the evolving Japanese state, and the two entities eventually formed a military alliance to help the former survive in the struggle for supremacy on the Korean Peninsula. That ended when Silla, the third kingdom, conquered Baekje in the 7th century. Some of the nobility on the losing side fled to Japan. The 25th Baekje king was born in Japan, and one woman of the royal house married into the Japanese imperial line, as the current Tenno (emperor) freely admits.

On the 13th of last month, the Koreans returned the favor of the art exhibit with a concert by a group of 23 teachers and students from the Korea National University of the Arts. They presented a program of traditional music and dance and—here’s the echo—“newly composed music”, or recent compositions performed in the traditional style with traditional instruments.

The conductors included Kim Hae-suk, former director of the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, Kwak Tae-gyu (郭泰規; feel free to correct my reading), the former artistic director of the center’s group for newly composed traditional music, and Bak Yong-ho, the former head of the KBS orchestra. They performed eight pieces of orchestral music, percussion music, and court music, including Sujecheon, a popular piece in the classical repertoire.

The reviewer for the Yamagata newspaper singled out the piece Chungsungguk as having a “clear, beautiful flow” musically. It was used as the setting for a student performance of a traditional crane dance, a symbol that was likely to appeal to the Japanese. The reviewer said the audience was “enthralled by a world of mystery”.

Here’s a YouTube clip of Sujecheon. The similarity with gagaku, Japanese court music that originated primarily in China and to a lesser extent on the Korean Peninsula, will be apparent to those familiar with the latter.

Here’s some gagaku for comparison:

The exchange between the two schools are yet another demonstration of several aspects of international relations in Northeast Asia that I keep banging on about. First, the ties between Japanese and Koreans are quite good on a non-official level, contrary to what some people might have you think. Countless numbers of people in the arts, sciences, academia, business, and finance get along just copacetic and enjoy each other’s company through programs such as these. Some financially prosper in commercial ventures, if not become gloriously rich. There’s also a constant two-way traffic of students and everyday folks going sightseeing, playing golf, splashing around in hot springs, or shopping till they drop. (A case in point: Two of my wife’s nieces, both in their early 20s, already have a room reserved at the Lotte Hotel in Busan for a trip later this month.)

Second, governments always are, always have been, and always will be the last to get it. People have no trouble working things out for themselves when left to their own devices. They don’t need to hear vapid platitudes; what they do need is to have the politicos put a minimal regulatory system in place that facilitates rather than hinders the interaction and then get out of the way. Bottom-up is always better than top-down.

Finally, this story is just a small part of a larger, ongoing process that began in antiquity. The reason it’s a big deal is that it’s not really a big deal at all. It happens every day.

Afterwords: The Tohoku university people wrote “living in Asia”, and not “Asians”. Did they not choose those words on purpose?

The bogus and the bona fide (2)

ONLY MAD DOGS and Englishmen venture into India’s noonday sun, it was once said, and the same could apply to Japan in August. Though neither a mad dog nor an Englishman, I was walking on the sunny side of Saga City’s main street early one Saturday afternoon in August 2007 when I heard the echoes of loud and frenzied drumming come thundering down the block.

The Ushikko

Encountering the unexpected is one of the delights of life in Japan, but the time, the place, and the combination of Japanese taiko and African rhythms meant that whatever was going on was not a matter of daily tea and rice, as they say here.

In the middle of that block is a plaza built into an open area occupying the space of about three or four shops. There’s a small stage at the rear, faced by a few benches and surrounded by some trees and shrubbery. On the stage that day were about 10 teenaged girls dressed in matching black t-shirts and shorts and performing synchronized dances while whaling away at the drums.

And boy, did they have rhythm.

Their audience numbered only a few more people than were in the group itself, and their performance ended about 15 minutes after I arrived. Still full of energy, the girls bounced off the stage, toweled off the sweat, and began packing up their gear. After striking up a conversation with one of them and an accompanying adult, I discovered they were part of an informal group from Ushizu High School in Ogi, Saga, that called themselves the Ushikko (牛っ娘, or cowgirls). In addition to the Japanese taiko, they were also playing the djembe from Guinea.

Saga City is a No-Shinkansen Sticksville of 180,000 in Kyushu, Ogi is a town in the outer suburbs that doesn’t even have express train service, and Ushizu is on the outskirts of Ogi. But someone else’s preconceived notions about life in the provinces didn’t stop a few local teenaged girls from creating a Japanese-Guinean drum fusion and giving free performances in a near-deserted downtown street on a hot summer Saturday.

The club was founded informally by a group of friends in 2003, and their dedication and novelty made them a popular attraction at local events. They’ve appeared during halftime of a soccer match on the home ground of Sagan Tosu, a second division J League team, and performed at the national presentation and concert of the New Life Adventure organization.

The Ushikko were recognized as an official school club in 2008, and it now has 31 members. Since I saw them in 2007, they’ve deemphasized the taiko rhythms to focus on Guinean drumming. They’ve also learned some of the language of that West African country to use as vocalizations and shouts of encouragement as they perform.

What inspires them? Outgoing group leader Ogata Kana told the Nishinippon Shimbun:

“I get carried away by the rhythms, and I feel refreshed in spirit when the performance is over.”

Said school faculty advisor Uematsu Atsuko:

“The students are passionate and practice with great enthusiasm. I’ve never seen students enjoy their club activities so much.”

Even with the greatest of passion and enthusiasm, it still would be difficult for small town girls to overcome the obstacles to learning and mastering a cultural tradition from a country on the other side of the world. They don’t have proper teachers, for a start. Their only instruction comes from clerks at a Kumamoto music shop that sells djembe, who visit three times a year to give lessons.

It’s difficult…but not impossible. The girls caught a break when they were filmed for a segment of a Kyushu regional television program profiling people and events of interest. Oyama Nobuo, the chief municipal officer of Mishima-mura in Kagoshima, caught the program by chance at home.

The story of Mishima-mura is as fascinating as that of the Ushikko. Classified as a village for administrative purposes, it actually consists of three small islands with a combined population of 4,000 in the East China Sea 100 kilometers from Kagoshima Prefecture. The name Mishima literally means “three islands”, which in this case are Kuroshima, Takeshima (no, not that one), and Iojima (or Iwojima, and no, not that one either).

Jamming with the Mishimanians

Despite their size and remote location, the islands are the place to go in Northeast Asia to learn about the djembe. Famed Guinean performer Mamady Keita visited about 15 years ago, which inspired the locals to start drumming themselves. They enjoyed it so much they started the first djembe school in Asia. It’s operated by Tokuda Ken’ichiro, whom Keita personally authorized as a teacher. He makes the trip from Guinea about once a year to help with their drumming and have a high old time with the Mishimanians.

Mr. Oyama was so moved by what he saw on the TV program that he mailed the Ushikko some instructional DVDs produced by the Mishima-mura school. In appreciation, the girls sent him a video letter with scenes from their practice. That prompted both him and Mr. Tokuda to visit the girls in Ogi for some hands-on instruction and a jam session.

Said Mr. Oyama:

“They have fun when they’re playing. The animated expressions on their faces are wonderful.”

That became the starting point for the Ogi-Mishima djembe exchange. The mayor invited the Ushikko to the islands and take lessons at the school. The national government helped with their travel expenses, the village provided the food and lodging, and the girls sailed off for five days of drumming and island fun when the fall term at school ended a month ago.

The officials at Ushizu High School agreed to let the girls make the trip on the condition that they practice as much as possible. That’s why the girls put in five hours of work a day, which impressed Mr. Oyama even further—hands get swollen after five hours of drumming.

At least they didn’t have to worry about finding a way to stay warm in mid-December!

*****
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and finally you do it for money.
- Molière

The criticism seems to be getting to Lisa Katayama. She sat right down and wrote herself a letter, and made believe it was addressed to you.

Ms. Katayama has made a name for herself, such as it is, by further cluttering the pop kultursmog with articles about the weirdness of Japan and the Japanese. Her pieces run in the outlets that pander to the tastes of those who swallow whole every eccentric aspect of Japan the infotainment media can dish up. Her audience consists of the sort of people who would find an excuse to convince themselves that half-chewed bubble gum in a museum vitrine is the ultimate in hip, postmodern irony. Indeed, the first paragraph of this letter to herself contains a favorable reference to a “beautiful” book about “fetish restaurants”.

She’s also developed an anti-audience of people who know a thing or two about the real Japan and wonder why she would purposely hold up the country she calls her “motherland” to the ridicule of the English-speaking world.

The letter Ms. Katayama wrote to herself was given the title, Why It’s Time to Lighten Up about “Weird” Japan. Why does she do what she does? Why is she so anxious to defend herself by ordering the rest of us to lighten up?

To make a short story even shorter, it’s because she, like Molière and the prostitutes, makes money out of it.

Oh, that’s not what she says. Oh, no. Heavens to Betsy. That’s not her intention at all. In fact, she would have us believe it’s “deeply personal” when someone criticizes Japan or her view of it. (More of the latter than the former, I suspect.)

“It’s most important to remember that it’s all in good fun. The way I see it, Japanese popular culture is like abstract art.”

The comparison to abstract art provides her with a cheap excuse for getting away with anything she wants. It has the added advantage of appealing to the soi-disant cultural elitists who pretend they really understand and appreciate abstract art.

“Both involve many components that can be interpreted in many ways. If you ask the artist what it means, he might say, ‘What do you think it means?’”

That provides two more cheap avenues of escape. One rescues the artist from having to do any heavy lifting to find the Deep Meaning himself. The other allows him to play it coy without offering an explanation that the cultural critics would gum to death and the rest of us would laugh at.

“And whatever meaning you attach to it is more a reflection of who you are than the composition of the art itself.”

How convenient for her: If you don’t like what she does, that’s your problem.

She even goes so far as to say:

“…none of this is meant to be taken seriously.”

Enough of the crap. She’s not fooling anyone but herself, and I doubt she’s even accomplished that. It’s obvious she takes it very seriously, for pecuniary reasons, if nothing else. She gets paid for providing product on order tailored to outlets such as Boing-Boing, where this lame lament appeared, knowing exactly why they ordered it. One look at the name of that publication and everybody knows what’s going down.

But when she’s called out by people who know as much—if not more—about this country than she does, she mounts the high horse and claims that she “strives to tell each story objectively without condescension or sensationalism.”

The mere fact that she goes out of her way to write and sell these stories is intrinsic condescension and sensationalism.

“I get hundreds of racially-charged comments from readers, long ranting responses from defenders of Japanese culture, and dozens of emails from people at big media outlets who want to find out more about these ‘strange’ phenomena.”

How novel to find someone who still thinks that big media outlets, the smokestack industry of the information age, set the standard for worthwhile journalism.

She also gets more than racially charged comments and long ranting responses. She got this previous post from me when she wrote about one man’s silly seduction techniques for Wired magazine. It was neither racially charged nor a rant. Instead, I pointed out that the article displayed the typical myopia of the anti-Nipponistic basher/mockers. This cool clique exaggerates some strange behavior in this country while overlooking the same strange behavior in their own backyard. Most of the time, that behavior is much more extreme than that of the Japanese.

In this case, Ms. Katayama found a man (with “beady eyes”) who peddles his techniques in Japan, yet she ignores–or is ignorant of–the fact that sales of seduction techniques is now a big business in America. There the “techniques” are even more unusual, such as the use of so-called neuro-linguistic programming, black fingernail polish, and their own insider jargon. Boing!

The reason she knew my post wasn’t a racially charged comment or a rant was because she wrote in to protest that she didn’t really mean to present the story as weird, honest, it was just those anonymous meanies who wrote the headlines at Wired.

Her self-justification continues:

“I went back home, honed my story-finding skills, and launched my own blog…”

All that’s required to hone one’s story-finding skills for this type of story is to go slumming at the trashy end of the convenience store magazine racks and to watch more daytime television.

“I got major Japan-related assignments from magazines, consulting gigs from print and radio outlets, and a book deal. It was really strange for me, because all I thought I was doing was telling people about the place I came from.”

Funny, isn’t it, that so many people in Japan don’t recognize this “place you come from”. Why is it that her work generates such a negative reaction? Is it because her gig is making a buck by pleasing one of the lesser common denominators? Is it because she indulges a narrative that she pretends is about this thing of the Western imagination called “Japan”, but is really about a few cherry-picked subcultures and misfits in the larger cities?

“One thing was clear: Weird Japan sells. “

One more thing was clear: She’s not the first to realize there’s good money to be made by selling out. People with real talent have been doing it long before she stumbled over the idea.

Is she old enough to recognize the name of Werner Klemperer? He was the son of conductor Otto Klemperer and soprano Johanna Geisler. Klemperer was both a violinist and a concert pianist, and he performed as an operatic baritone and a singer in Broadway musicals. He appeared in the Hitchcock movie Wrong Man and was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the 1987 Broadway revival of Cabaret. His 1981 role as Prince Orlofsky in Seattle Opera’s production of Die Fledermaus was well received by critics and the public alike. He was the narrator on a recording by the Boston Symphony of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, which won a Grammy. He also served as the director and president of the nonprofit Young Musicians Foundation of Los Angeles, and was a vice president of Actors Equity.

Most people wouldn’t recognize him from that career synopsis. They know him only from his role as the bumbling Nazi prison camp commandant Col. Klink in the American TV series Hogan’s Heroes.

Klemperer, who was Jewish, eased his conscience by insisting that his character be portrayed as a fool in every episode. Lisa Katayama eases hers by making believe she’s doing serious journalism about her homeland that isn’t condescending or sensationalist.

She concludes with this oddly worded sentence:

“I think we’d all understand Japan a little better if we made a commitment to roll with it.”

I think we’d all understand Japan a little better if Lisa Katayama found something else to write about.

*****
Shortly after Ms. Katayama’ s Boing-Boing whinge appeared, she wrote a blog post for the same publication that makes me wonder if calling her to account is like getting upset at a child who wets his pants on a long car trip. This time the post wasn’t about Japan:

“I went on a trip to northern India to see the Dalai Lama. I traveled with a lawyer, a politician, a publicist, and a translator. While we were there, we met a bunch of kids who lived with no electricity but told us that, when they grew up, they all wanted to be computer scientists. So we whipped out our cameras and iPods — the closest things we had on hand to real computers — and showed them how technology works….Later, I found out that one of my travel mates thought what we had done was cruel. We had seduced these poor kids with luxuries they will probably never be able to afford, and sullied their pure, technology-free lives with the temptation of electronics.”

Her travel mates were a lawyer, a politician, a publicist, and a translator. I’d bet cash money the one who cried cruelty and thought being electronica-free equaled purity was one of the first three. They’re the ones in that group who can make a handsome living on hot air without having to worry about being real.

“So who’s right? Did we ruin these kids for life or give them hopes for a better future? Does it not matter? Is there even a right answer to this question?”

Where are the snows of yesteryear? And what is reality? So many questions that Lisa Katayama can’t answer.

Of course there’s a right answer to this question, which needn’t be asked to begin with.

Of course you show them the iPods. You show them every iPod function you can possibly think of. You let them handle the iPods themselves for as long as time permits. It’s never cruel to inspire a child. That’s exactly how adults are supposed to interact with children.

Asking these questions is like asking if it would be cruel to show a book to illiterates who want to learn how to read.

How odd that these city folk could be so provincial. How strange that the sophisticated white collar professionals could be so small-minded and elitist. How inexcusable, considering that Ms. Katayama grew up in Japan, where people often talk about the importance of “giving dreams” to children.

Children everywhere, and especially in the Third World, need all the inspiration they can get. I’m sure the teenaged Ushikko could have answered her questions correctly without a moment’s hesitation.

Meanwhile, the world will somehow manage to muddle through without yet another article about the Dalai Lama.

Hiding the iPods from those children would be like telling the Ushikko or the handful of villagers on three remote and tiny Asian islands not to bother learning to play the djembe. It’s unlikely they’ll ever be as skillful as Mamady Keita.

Then again, Mamady Keita doesn’t think it’s cruel to come halfway around the world once a year for 15 years to teach and have fun with the folks in Mishima-mura.

If answering those questions presents a dilemma for her, if she thinks it might have “ruined these children for life”, one wonders just how much of life she’s missing—and why she thinks she’s doing anyone any favors by writing about Japan for the English-speaking world.

Meanwhile the Ushikko and the Mishimanians are having a grand time playing the drums and learning a lot about themselves, the world, and life in the bargain.

Do you think this article is cruel and unfair?

Make a commitment to roll with it.

Afterwords:

There are no YouTube presentations of the Ushikko—I’m going to have to call their school advisor—but there was a seven-minute film of a small group in Mishima-mura having a ton of fun combining a performance with a children’s art project. Here it is:

Here’s another video showing part of the Mishima-mura djembe school graduation ceremony. The first part consists of traditional Japanese music and dance, which should give you an idea why learning the djembe wouldn’t be so strange for them at all. Though the islands are officially part of Kagoshima, the whistling is very Okinawan. (You may want to stop halfway through when the speeches start.)

While we’re at it, check out the New Life Adventure website, which is worth a quick glance even if you don’t understand Japanese. It’s a part of Japan that Lisa Katayama, the Boing-Boing culture mavens, and the FCCJ barflies don’t know about. I doubt they’d be interested even if they did.

And Mishima-mura has its own website, also in Japanese only.

Banned in Busan

COUNT ON the political class to be the last to take a stand on principled common sense, if ever. Their livelihoods depend on creating and hounding hobgoblins to keep the public aroused, as H.L. Mencken put it. In other words, they don’t want to get it because they believe it’s in their interest not to get it.

One who does get it is South Korean Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism Yu In-ch’on. In an interview with the Chosun Ilbo, he discussed his government’s continuing ban on terrestrial TV broadcasts of Japanese programs. Here’s what Mr. Yu had to say, as reported by Japan’s Kyodo news agency. (Keep in mind this is going from Korean to Japanese to English)

“Japan and China broadcast South Korean programs (on terrestrial TV), so why can’t Japanese programs be shown on South Korean terrestrial TV?…Instead of this compulsion, we must allow equal access (for this programming).”

After the period of Japanese colonization/annexation ended in 1945, the South Koreans prohibited the dissemination of Japanese popular culture in the country, including TV programs, movies, and music. Some watched and listened anyway, first through smuggled materials, and later by intercepting satellite broadcasts. Reader Aceface, who is employed in the Japanese broadcast media, pointed out that Koreans in the television industry used to take periodic trips to Busan in the southern part of the peninsula, where those broadcasts might be more easily picked up. In fact, as this previous post reports, there has long been an “underground Japan wave” of Japanese culture aficionados in South Korea. To cite one example, Japanese fiction outsold Korean fiction in the South Korean market in 2007 by a significant margin.

Yu In-ch'on

After the late Kim Dae-jung was elected president in 1998, he implemented a policy of lifting the ban in stages with the objective of improving bilateral relations. The prohibitions were rescinded in three steps and were supposed to have been removed entirely by the joint World Cup in 2002. In a too-typical burst of childish presumption, however, the government stopped the process in July 2001 to protest the content of Japanese history textbooks (used at that time by about 0.6% of the school population).

As conditions stand today, South Koreans can legally watch Japanese TV programming on cable and satellite TV, but not on terrestrial broadcasts. There is a sizable audience for this programming; last year’s screening of the Japanese program Hana yori Danshi (Men Rather than Flowers) was quite popular and garnered an audience share of more than 30%. The only dramas permitted on land-based TV, however, are Korean remakes of popular Japanese programs and joint productions.

Some still choose to downplay the popularity of Japanese entertainment. Kyodo quoted an unidentified South Korean TV executive:

“(Yu’s) statement was probably made with an awareness of relations with Japan, but I don’t think that programs in which all the actors are Japanese will be accepted by the viewers.”

That example of a non sequitur is good enough for a textbook. He seems to be saying that a unilateral law banning television programs from a single country—in other words, censorship—should stand because people won’t watch the programs even if the law were to be repealed. Except a lot of them already do, on cable.

Though it’s a good example of a non sequitur, it’s a poor example of how a country goes about inculcating respect for its laws. Kyodo also quotes a 32-year-old male public employee:

“I download Japanese programs from the Internet and watch them every day to study Japanese. The ban on terrestrial broadcasts is divorced from reality, and I hope they rescind it quickly.”

Of course it’s divorced from reality. People throughout the world can now download most of the programs, movies, or music they want from the Internet and either enjoy them from their computer or burn their own DVDs or CDs. If the authorities had their wits about them, they would realize that removing the ban would make money for Korean broadcasters through advertising revenue. As it stands now, they get nothing and the people watch the programs anyway.

The Japanese media is always restrained in its treatment of South Korea, and the Kyodo article attributes the Korean ban only to the continued reaction to the Japanese period of colonization/annexation. Were they inclined to discuss the subject more openly, they might also have cited the isolationist tendencies that seem endemic to the peninsula, both in the north and south. One reason for North Korea’s problems is their stubborn insistence that they alone are the torchbearers of Joseon cultural purity. Flashpoint South Korean mob hysteria over such issues as American beef imports is another illustrative example.

The isolationist tinge means this really isn’t just a Japanese-Korean issue—it extends to American movies as well. The South Korean show business industry led widely publicized demonstrations against the free trade agreement with the United States because the Americans demanded a reduction in the legal requirement for movie theaters to screen local product a specified number of days per year. That requirement was as high as 40%, or 146 days, from 1985 to 2006. A compromise was reached to reduce the total to 73 days a year, or about 20%, where it stands now.

As this English-language article from Yonhap shows, actors, directors, and movie execs were livid, calling the compromise a “crime against history”. Rather than recognizing that the agreement was a step toward cultural openness that would benefit everyone without a vested interest, they chose to describe the situation as a “cultural turf war”. If anyone used their common sense and protested that the quota limits the opportunities of Koreans to visit theaters to watch the movies they prefer and are willing to pay for, and the theater owners from making a reasonable profit by giving the customers what they want, Yonhap didn’t write about it.

Speaking of cultural turf wars, the part of the Yonhap article I liked best is the second photograph showing the banner under which the demonstrators spoke. The larger print on the left says “screen quota” transliterated directly from English into written Korean without translating it into the Korean language. The demonstrators had no problem with polluting the purity of the Korean language, but no one better dare mess with the guaranteed jobs of the filmmaking proletariat. (The following word, sasu, means to defend to the death; it’s shishu, or 死守, in Japanese.)

Those who support the quota throw up the usual protectionist arguments that would be dismissed in any university economics classroom in a matter of minutes, i.e., Hollywood would swallow the South Korean film industry whole. The same students in that economics classroom would have been able to predict that only 13 out of 112 Korean films made money in 2007–fewer than 12%–according to a K-pop site with a busted link. Local studios know they have a captive market, so they wind up filming lunchmeat to meet the screen quota.

In that sort of climate, Mr. Yu should be commended for speaking out. The Koreans have no compunction about savaging apostates; either the minister must believe his position is secure, or he’s become affluent enough that losing it wouldn’t bother him.

Much has been made of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio’s vague dream of an East Asian entity, as well as the “friendlier” attitude of his government toward South Korea. If he’s serious about improving governmental ties (the grassroots ties are already there), removing South Korea’s ban on terrestrial TV broadcasts of Japanese programs should be near the top of the list on his bilateral agenda.

The website of South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism boasts this slogan: A culture of sharing for a beautiful world.

The period of Japanese colonization/annexation lasted 35 years and ended 65 years ago. It’s time for the ministry to demonstrate that it really believes what it says.

Afterwords:

* It’s only speculation, and the Korean-American Wiki-warriors won’t talk about it, but perhaps one reason Kim Dae-jung started removing the restrictions on importing Japanese culture is that he may have felt some gratitude toward the Japanese for helping save his life. Kim was a long-time political dissident, and the South Korean government once kidnapped him from a Tokyo hotel with the intent of killing him. Both the Americans and the Japanese interceded on his behalf. The pretend reference sources on the Web, written by anyone who can operate a computer keyboard, give credit only to the Americans. Why do they bother? Even the Korea Times had no problem admitting the truth.

* The use of textbook content to suspend the process of lifting the ban in 2001 might have been just a convenient pretext. Before then, Japanese governments had generally adopted a peace-at-any-price policy in bilateral negotiations on a wide range of issues with Seoul. They gave in when the Koreans inevitably brought up historical circumstances and claimed, “You owe us.” The Koizumi administration, which took office just a few months before the South Koreans took the step, ended all that.

The bogus and the bona fide

I have a sense of mission; that is to serve as a medium in the transient space between life and death conveying the ideas of our ancestors to the people of the future.
- Kitahara Kanako

DURING HER FIRST WEEK at Waseda University, Kitahara Kanako wandered around campus in search of an extracurricular club that she might like to join. A natural performer, she gravitated toward groups devoted to the arts, particularly music, dance, and drama. On one of her scouting expeditions, she was intrigued by the sounds coming from the assembly room for the traditional Japanese music group. After she spent a few minutes listening and watching, the club members encouraged her to try the Satsuma biwa, a stringed instrument related to the Middle Eastern barbat (the ancestor of the oud) by way of the Chinese pipa.

The biwa arrived in Japan during the eighth century. One of several varieties, the Satsuma biwa has four or five strings and frets raised four centimeters from the neck to allow the bending of notes. It was popularized in the late 16th century by the family of the feudal lords of the Satsuma domain, which is now Kagoshima. The musicians perform while seated and hold the instrument vertically, resting on the lap. They sound the strings with a large, triangular plectrum that has a curved end for grasping. Traditional Satsuma biwa performers were minstrels who used the instruments to accompany their singing.

As Kanako later told me, the first time she touched plectrum to strings, she felt a jolt go through her body (zotto shita). She sometimes wonders if she was a biwa performer in a previous life. The Waseda University biwa group she joined receives instruction from graduates still in the Tokyo area, rather than from formal teachers. They are as open to different types of expression as university students everywhere; in addition to the classical repertoire, Kanako also performed with rock bands in clubs. (She also was involved with modern dance and once performed in white body paint.)

During her last year at Waseda, Kanako arranged for employment with a publishing house after graduation. But she changed her mind when she gave a benefit performance at a home for the elderly and was stunned to see tears streaming down the faces of the audience. That inspired her to give up a career in publishing and devote her life to the performance of music.

In 2004, she began studying with biwa master Tanaka Yukio of the Tsuruta school, whom she visits once a month in Tokyo for lessons. Just two years later, in 2006, she won the grand prize at the Kumamoto National Contest for Traditional Japanese Music, as well as the Incentive Award of the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. That same year, she passed the audition for performing traditional music on NHK, Japan’s quasi-public television and radio network. (NHK is famously strict about the musicians it permits to perform on their network, though their pop music standards have been relaxed in recent years to allow rock groups to appear on their year-end musical TV special.) Since passing the audition, she has performed on NHK-TV and NHK-FM.

The following year, she accompanied her teacher to Italy for three concerts to perform both traditional and modern works. Among the latter was Nuove Musiche per Biwa by Carlo Forlivesi, a composer/performer interested in both early European music and traditional Japanese music. This piece includes sections written for two biwas. According to the publicity blurb from ALM Records:

“(It) presents a radical departure from the compositional languages usually employed for such an instrument. Also thanks to the possibility of relying on a level of virtuosity never before attempted in this specific repertory, the composer has sought the renewal of the acoustic and æsthetic profile of the biwa, bringing out the huge potential in the sound material: attacks and resonance, tempo (conceived not only in the chronometrical but also deliberately empathetical sense), chords, balance and dialogue…dynamics and colour.”

*****
On 3 October last year I was passing through the atrium of a shopping mall here in Saga City on my way home when a woman approached me from behind and began tugging on my sleeve. It was Kanako’s aunt; Kanako was about to perform, she told me, so wouldn’t I stay a bit longer and watch? Of course I would.

Making a living as a freelance translator is a solitary profession. Most of my working time is spent in a second floor office at home in front of a computer. I communicate with clients in other parts of the country by e-mail or telephone. Both to keep in direct contact with the human race and for a change of pace, I teach two classes in the spring at the local university, and help out one or two hours a week at the English school that brought me to Japan in 1984. That’s how I met Kanako; I was one of her teachers during her high school years. She was an excellent student: cheerful, intelligent, ready to try anything, and already capable of a dead-on impersonation of comedian Shimura Ken.

As it turned out, the show in the shopping mall wasn’t a solo performance of traditional music, which I had seen her do before. This was a 30-minute group performance that might best be described as either avant-garde or experimental. The main performer was improvisational dancer Iwashita Toru, but it was a collaborative effort that also included Kanako and two other local people: artist Ogushi Ryohei, and percussionist Sekine Shinichiro. In addition to conventional percussion instruments, Mr. Sekine’s kit that day included kitchen utensils and plastic buckets. I learned later that his usual gig is playing the vibes and marimba in jazz bands.

Mr. Iwashita is well known in artistic circles in Japan as an improvisational dancer and an instructor at the renowned Sankai Juku, a dance troupe that has performed in more than 40 countries. A native of Tokyo, he has been working as a solo artist since 1983. He’s also been involved since 1988 in working with the psychiatric staff at a Shiga hospital to offer the patients dance therapy, and he serves as an advisor to the Japan Dance Therapy Association.

Their performance was filmed, and the organizers have edited the film for a 10-minute YouTube presentation, which you can see here. The event itself was titled Haizai to Dansu, or Debris and the Dance. On the right side of that page are links to two more videos showing a similar, but not identical, performance in the lobby of the JR Saga Station. Click on the link to see what can happen in a shopping mall in a small Japanese town on any given Saturday. You might be surprised when you see the costumes and set decorations.

Some people will find the performance stimulating, some will find it mildly interesting, and others won’t care for it very much. The point for me, however, is not the content of the performance itself, but that the performance occurred at all. An improvisational dancer with a national reputation, an artist, and two musicians—one of whom is a national award winner—created an opportunity to stretch the boundaries of their respective disciplines and gave a series of free performances in a public space. In this instance, the public space was a suburban shopping mall in a semi-rural municipality of 180,000 that is 35 minutes from the nearest urban megacenter by limited express train. To use the phrase of reader and frequent commenter Mac, it is a “No-Shinkansen Sticksville”.

The point is that this is yet another aspect of the face of everyday Japan, and not some outré self-indulgence conducted in a dingy loft in a down-at-the-heels district of a big city where only the hipsters and great pretenders congregate.

The point is that this is yet another aspect of the country that the overseas mess media choose to ignore while peddling a narrative of Japan as the Goofball Kingdom of East Asia, populated with xenophobic losers obsessed with vicarious sex, otaku, and those so inept at social interaction they have to rent friends.

*****
Someone writing under the name of New Year’s Resolution sent in a comment this week about the recent contributions from the flunkeys who’ve put their integrity in a blind trust, all the better to make a buck by feeding the media machine. One was that seat-warmer at the FCCJ bar, The Guardian’s Justin McCurry, who once described his frothy story about an overhyped and already forgotten “rent-a-friend” trend as “lighthearted”. He might have a point; it was the sort of piece that could be considered lighthearted if your default attitude is that of Spitball Artist and you have what the Japanese would call a twisted navel.

The other was Richard Lloyd Parry, to whom the Times of London has given the assignment of filing stories about this part of the world. One of his blog posts on the Times site a few years ago seems typical of his approach. That day–the last day I visited the site–Parry thought the most important information he could convey to his readers about Japan was the observation that former Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo resembled the cartoon character Homer Simpson. (One wonders if the perceived likeness was the high rounded forehead, the eyes, or Homer Simpson’s skin color.) Perhaps lightness of heart is as contagious as lightness of intellect.

Something else might be contagious too, or somebody switched on the media echo chamber again. Late last year, within a month of each other, both of these journalistic stalwarts chose to inform the people of Britain about the phenomenon of what they described as herbivorous girly men in these parts, long after their brethren in the Japanese mess media had moved on to their next contrived sensation. Opinions on whether there’s any meat to that story or whether it’s a PR ploy dreamed up by one of the marketing consultants pushing it will likely depend on how much time one spends interacting with real people.

(In passing, it’s interesting to note that the type of journalists who once loved to mock the Japanese for all their home-grown theories about Japanese uniqueness, known as Nihonjin-ron, now love to scarf up the other cultural flotsam and jetsam as long as they can peddle it to the hometown papers for their News of the Weird section.)

One wonders how often McCurry reads the newspaper he writes for:

Sakurai’s generation reached adulthood as the economic edifice started to crumble, and unemployment and contract work replaced jobs for life and twice-yearly bonuses.

Japan’s official unemployment rate is at about 5%. If that crumbling economic edifice is causing the lads to wear bras and twirl their pinkies as they sip their afternoon tea, I’m glad to be living in this country; at their official unemployment rates, Britain and the United States are about to see their streets overrun by battalions of Boy Georges.

Then again, one wonders what country Parry is living in:

The last few years have seen a range of products to cater to a broadening of tastes among Japanese men. Japanese brewers have introduced weaker beers as sales of conventional alcoholic beverages have declined.

There’s an ordinary supermarket a 10-minute walk from my house. In addition to the ersatz brews, its shelves contain at least a half-dozen brands of beer (and now stout!) that would pass German purity standards and have an alcoholic content of 5% or more. Only one of those brands existed 25 years ago, and most of the rest were created within the past five years. It’s also not unusual to see stronger local microbrews on supermarket shelves. And even Times readers know that sales of “conventional alcoholic beverages”—stronger spirits, I assume—have fallen worldwide over that time.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall seeing any men in this town wearing bras. One would think the straps in the back would be as visible as those worn by women. Perhaps that’s the disadvantage of living in a No-Shinkansen Sticksville.

But boys will be ambitious, and these two might be angling for their own feature column, perhaps like the one the New York Times gave Roger Cohen. Cohen paid a brief visit to Japan and decided it was the perfect opening either for social commentary on a grand scale or something to fill column space on a deadline about a month ago. He saw some digitized images while working out on a treadmill in a spa—probably in his downtown Tokyo hotel—and extrapolated that into a description of a country of 127 million people as bored, gloomy, straight-jacketed otaku plunged into post-modern despair. He concluded by saying that all you need is love, as John Lennon put it, and then added that we all need some of Hatoyama Yukio’s yuai, too.

Some people drop names to have us believe that they’re well connected; others drop phrases from languages they don’t understand to have us believe they’re sophisticated multi-culti internationalists. By this time next year, when Mr. Hatoyama is no longer prime minister, the yuai concept will be as forgotten as the concept of grass-eating girly men, but by this time next year, the biens pensants will have moved on to another equally irrelevant faux insight.

Cohen, by the way, went so far as to describe the digital image of sushi on his treadmill as “unctuous”.

Yes, the New York Times is a publication written by pretentious asses to be read by pretentious asses, but one would think their gloomy circulation figures should have plunged them into such post-modern despair they might have considered incorporating diversity into their hiring practices. But they haven’t, and they won’t.

*****
Some people can distinguish the bogus from the bona fide at a glance. The real recognizes the real immediately; after all, they are fellow travelers, to borrow a phrase from another context. It also isn’t a coincidence that the children in the shopping mall audience were the ones to have most enjoyed the collaborative improvisational performance. They’re too young to have learned how to cop a pose.

Some people wouldn’t recognize the bona fide if it walked up and bit them on the ass.

Some people enjoy deliberately rejecting the bona fide to glorify the bogus as a lifestyle choice. They’re the same sort of people who think the best way to take advantage of a university education is to attend courses in “popular culture”, if they don’t oversleep. Well, you pay your money, or the money the government fronts you, and you take your choice.

Some people are bottom feeders. They might be capable of making distinctions, but their choice is to take a fistful of dollars instead to feed a morally bankrupt media machine and pander to the acolytes of chewing gum culture by holding up the people of a country as an object of ridicule around the world.

And you can bet that every one of those bottom feeders believes to their soul that they’re ever so clever and classless and free, as John Lennon again put it.

But as Lennon also put it, “they’re still f*cking peasants, as far as I can see”.

Except with them, one doesn’t have to look very far or very hard to see it.

*****
Are you surprised to find people like Kitahara Kanako and Iwashita Toru in this malaise-ridden nation of otaku? I’m not. I run into people like them all the time. All it takes to meet them is a bit of normal circulation in society instead of cracking wise about the natives with the ex-pats at the other end of the bar.

But you’re unlikely to meet them, or the millions of other creative, brilliant, and engaging people in Japan, in the pages of the overseas English-language media.

That’s another reason why, if your knowledge of Japan is based on what you read in that media, everything you know is wrong.

Cover art on the road

THE TOKAIDO, Japan’s busiest transportation corridor, links Tokyo and Yokohama, the country’s two largest cities, to Osaka (#3) via Nagoya (#4) and Kyoto (#7)–every one with more than a million people. Those who want to hit the road have their choice of JR’s Tokaido main railway line, the Tokaido Shinkansen, and the Tomei and Meishin expressways.

Hiroshige scene of Shirasuka

The Japanese have been hitting this road for a very long time. Records show that government officials used parts of it in the ninth century. But it wasn’t until Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns, ordered the construction of 53 post stations along the road in 1601 that it became a key part of the national infrastructure. In those days, the Tokaido (which means East Sea Road) connected Tokyo, then called Edo, where the Shogun held court, with Kyoto, the home of the Imperial Court.

The Shogun also ordered the country’s feudal lords to alternate their residence between their home fiefdoms and Edo once a year, all the better to keep an eye on them. (Those who lived in less accessible places had to show up only once every three years.) In short order, the road became a pageant of Japanese humanity–the pomp and circumstance of daimyo processions with the lords carried in palanquins suspended from poles shouldered by retainers, while everyone else, including monks, samurai, and just plain folks, traveled by horseback and on foot. Small businesses catering to the travelers thrived along the roadside and in the post station towns. And what better scenery for a trip could there be than the views of the sea to the east and Mt. Fuji to the west?

It was inevitable that the Tokaido would grow larger than life in the popular imagination, and it came to be used as the subject of many works of art and literature. Perhaps the most famous of these is Hiroshige’s woodblock prints of The Fifty-Three Stations of Tokaido dating from 1832.

The road also inspired the creation of a new folk art form in the town of Otsu in what is now Shiga, when artists began producing inexpensive prints in quantity to be sold as souvenirs to the people passing through. Called otsu-e, or Otsu pictures, the form is still used by contemporary artists. Meanwhile, the centuries-old originals, originally meant to be quick one-offs for a quick buck, are exhibited in art museums in Japan and overseas.

With all those travelers doing all that traveling, a cottage industry of travel guides was sure to follow. In a brilliant stroke, Jippensha Ikku combined one such guide describing the sites and scenes along the route with picaresque tales of the adventures and misadventures of two Edo men on a pilgrimage to the Ise Shrine. The collected stories were called Tokaidochu Hizakurige, translated as The Shank’s Mare, and it is still available in English today. Hiroshige contributed some artistic synergy by carving woodblock prints illustrating scenes from the book.

The days of palanquin-borne feudal lords, samurai, and a pair of rascals surreptitiously sliding into the futon of women slumbering in roadside inns are long gone, but fascination with the Tokaido still remains.

Count among the fascinated Tsujino Fumiyo, a 70-year-old resident of a Mie town that was one of the 53 post stations on the Tokaido. Four years ago, Ms. Tsujino started taking art classes in her home town, which seems to have developed her powers of observation in addition to her artistic sensibilities. She noticed that new manhole covers on the neighborhood roads featured a decorative design. She then learned that the 53 municipalities which were once post towns also had manhole cover art depicting scenes of local interest.

That inspired her to take rubbings of all 53 manhole cover varieties. She dragooned her husband into driving her to the sites, after first asking municipal officials where to look for the objets trouvé. It took her about 30 minutes to do each rubbing, including the preliminary washing, and four years to collect them all.

In keeping with the spirit of the famous Miyazawa Kenji poem Ame ni mo Makezu (Undeterred by Rain), she stuck with her mission regardless of the weather. It isn’t hard to picture in the mind’s eye her husband patiently holding an umbrella while she focused on bringing the grimy industrial art of the streets to a wider audience.

Mission accomplished! She colored and mounted all 53 rubbings, and recently displayed them at the Tokaido Manhole Cover Design Exhibit in Kusatsu, Shiga. Admission to the exhibit was free.

The lucky visitors were treated to scenes that included a kimono-clad beauty borne across the Oi river in Shimada, Shizuoka, a mythical dolphin-like creature called the shachihoko from Nagoya, and the Otsu Festival in the aforementioned city of Otsu.

Now I ask you—doesn’t it speak well about a place when it turns the street entrances to its sewers into something that can be hung on a museum wall without a hint of irony?

Afterwords:

Do not fail to unfurl this interactive map of the 53 stations of the Tokaido. Clicking on any of the stations brings up the Hiroshige prints of that particular site. The only advantage a real museum has over this virtual one is that you can accidentally on purpose strike up casual conversations with nearby women that strike your fancy.

And don’t overlook this previous post on otsu-e.