The Korean hue in Japan

ONE of the guilty pleasures this website provides is the chance to contribute to the disappointment of those people overseas, particularly in the West, who think it is a matter of received wisdom that the Japanese hate Koreans. It would be more pleasurable to think it contributes to their enlightenment, but that would assume they’re interested in being enlightened.

Page 38 of the 1 January edition of the Nishinippon Shimbun (which runs to 40 pages, with page 40 being an advertisement) has an article about the popularity in the Kyushu region of a Busan vocal duo known as Hue. The article reports that the duo, Kim Ji-hyeon (she) and Ryu (or Yu) Mu-yong (he), will make a concerted effort to extend their popularity throughout Japan this year. They’ll start with their first solo concert in the country in Fukuoka City on 6 March.

Once members of the Busan Municipal Chorus, they formed their duo in 2005 to perform what they call popera. Their repertoire seems to consist of pop music that requires sophisticated vocal technique, as well as some opera selections.

Hue’s first Japanese appearance was in Fukuoka City at a Fukuoka City – Busan Friendship Commemorative Concert in 2009. They’ve since performed here more than 10 times, mostly in Fukuoka City. That’s easily arranged, because the city is accessible from Busan by a three-hour jetfoil ship service, or dozens of daily flights that take less than an hour.

They were encouraged to step up their activities in Japan after Yoshida Fumi (56) formed a fan club for them in Fukuoka City. Ms. Yoshida cried when she heard them perform the Japanese song Sen no Kaze ni Natte with Korean lyrics. That’s a translation of the line “I am a thousand winds that blow” from the English-language poem Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep. The song, a tear-jerker suited to a semi-operatic performance, was originally released by the Japanese composer on only 30 privately-produced CDs. It became a national phenomenon in slow motion, however, and eventually inspired a special television drama with that name.

Ms. Yoshida’s fan club, which consists mostly of junior high and high school girls, turned out for Hue’s three Fukuoka City concerts last year, as well as a performance in Busan. Hue returned the favor with an expression of thanks to the club on their newest disc, which was released last fall. They also printed all the lyrics in Japanese and recorded the song Prologue, the lyrics of which are by Ms. Yoshida’s favorite poet, Yun Dong-ju.

Poet Yun studied English literature at two Japanese universities in 1942, but was arrested as a thought criminal by Japanese police and sentenced to two years in jail in 1943. He died in prison in 1945 in — get ready for it — Fukuoka. There’s plenty of information available about him on the Japanese-language part of the Web.

The newspaper report notes that the duo is almost unknown in South Korea.

Now roll all of the above information around in your head one more time and marvel at how amazing life its own self can be.

Here’s a YouTube clip of an appearance they made on Kumamoto television promoting a concert in that city in December 2009. The interview before and after the song consists of the pleasantries you might expect; Ms. Kim (who now has red hair) says she looks forward to seeing the local tourist attractions, such as Kumamoto Castle and Aso. It’s easy to understand why they’re popular. They’re quite talented, though the style of music won’t be to everyone’s taste. But that isn’t the point, is it?

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: They sing in English.

When they’re not singing in Italian, that is:

Afterwords:

Speaking of those in the West who either can’t be bothered or are too thick to get it, BBC introduces a Roland Buerk report this way:

South Korea’s K-pop music has overtaken Japanese music as the industry’s most popular genre in the country.

Relations between the two countries have been difficult after Japan’s colonisation of Korea in the first half of the 20th century.

But with the growing popularity of Korean culture, will attitudes to people of Korean origin, who make up a large ethnic minority in Japan, soften?

Let’s see…in the first paragraph, someone writes that South Korean pop music is more popular in Japan than Japanese pop music, but in the third paragraph asks if Japanese attitudes towards the Koreans living in Japan will change. Spit out that gum before you try walking, son.

Buerk even mentions the growing popularity of Korean restaurants in Japan, but still can’t see beyond the end of his nosenetwork’s pre-packaged narrative.

Further, he fails to provide actual statistics for his claim about K-pop dominance. Taking a mass media report on faith has been a suckers’ proposition for decades. Korean music could very well be the Top of the Pops in Japan, but he has to show us the numbers to be credible.

Finally, he still can’t competently pronounce Japanese place names, despite having lived in the country three years this month. Any native English speaker can learn proper Japanese pronunciation in a matter of minutes. Buerk’s failure to do so demonstrates his level of commitment to his assignment.

If you’re interested in seeing the clip, please hit the search engine of your choice. Links around here are reserved for serious journalism.

Winter beauty

THIS POST was timed to go up at 10:00 p.m. on a Sunday night in Japan. For 22 years, from 1978 to 2000, that was the starting time for the broadcast of the 30-minute musical program, Enka no Hanamichi. Enka is a style of music popular in Northeast Asia, and in Japanese the word is usually written with the two characters that mean “to perform” and “to sing”. An excellent description is found at Barbara’s Enka Site:

A friend of mine once remarked that these were “Japanese torch singers” and that’s a fairly good description. Enka songs are 1 to 6 minutes long, and are performed standing, usually wearing formal attire. For men this can be either Japanese or Western attire, for women it is generally a kimono. (Korean and Chinese women seem to usually sing Enka in glittering gowns.) The song lyrics are tragic yet philosophical, and sometimes even amusing. Drinking songs are common, usually to help “drown my sorrows”. Songs of love, separation, death and suicide abound. The subject matter of the typical lyrics involves tragic love and sweet resignation to the comfort of cherished memories of better times. Arrangements use a unique mixture of Western and Japanese instruments, from the koto to the electric guitar. Violins are common, but surprisingly, pianos are not.

We Western music lovers might imagine it this way… Team up a songwriter who writes old-fashioned Gypsy music with a romantic lyricist of an American blues or country music background. Then translate the lyrics into poetic but old-fashioned Japanese and arrange the music for a band made of half Japanese musicians and half European classical musicians, plus a harmonica and electric guitar. Then find a Japanese woman to sing the song in full kimono, but choreograph her performance as if it were an operatic aria. That would give you something close to Enka music…

Enka no Hanamichi was an elegantly done program — the production quality was so good, the singers would use their filmed appearances as promotional videos. Japanese television makes extensive use of the stereo sound function to present movies and television programs in their original language versions, as well as the dubbed Japanese version. This program used the same function to offer just the background music, which allowed the viewers at home to use it for karaoke. (Song lyrics are commonly printed on the screen for all types of music programs here.) The elegance, exquisite sadness, and sheer amount of talent involved meant the program was a fine way to spend a half hour on a chilly autumn or winter evening, after a bath and with a glass of shochu mixed with hot water.

I was reminded of the program after reading short article from a Wakayama newspaper announcing the selection of enka singer Sakamoto Fuyumi, a native of Kamitonda-cho, to receive a local award for her contribution to culture. (The characters used to write Fuyumi are “winter” and “beauty”. It’s also her real name; names of that sort for women are not uncommon in Japan.)

Her big break came when she appeared on an NHK program for amateurs. Songwriter Inomata Kosho, one of the judges, was so impressed with her performance he took her in as a pupil. (In fact, she became his live-in housekeeper.) Her first hit came at the age of 20 in 1987 and sold more than 800,000 copies. According to a Yomiuri Shimbun article too old to be on line, that was a record at the time for first releases, though I suspect they’re referring specifically to this genre. Since then, she’s released more than 30 albums and appeared on NHK’s famed New Year’s Eve Music Program, Kohaku Uta Gassen, more than 20 times.

Part of her appeal is her combination of sweet femininity with a certain gutsiness and unfeigned naturalness. Another part is that she really is a winter beauty: She won an award in 2006 for looking good in a kimono.

Ms. Sakamoto has maintained close ties to Wakayama, and when informed of the award, said:

I will continue to devote myself to the path of song with the hope that I can please everyone in Wakayama. Thank you very much for this honor.

You can hear and see all that for yourself in this YouTube video, which is another fine way to spend a chilly Sunday evening. Note how the instrumentation is a combination of Western classicism, rock and roll, and traditional Japanese music, as Barbara the Enka Lady explained.

And for yet another example of Japanese ecumenicism, as well as Sakamoto flexibility, here she is with Hosono Haruomi of Yellow Magic Orchestra in a group called H.I.S. performing Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze with Japanese lyrics.

Stick around to the end and you’ll see her in a brief interview. She looks good in jeans, too.

We love chin-don too!

CHEESE and crackers, Laurel and Hardy, strawberry ice cream and tempura — felicitous combinations all, but none are so fine as the pairing of high school girls and chin-don!

We Love Chin-Don Girls

As long-time friends know, chin-don is that whacked-out Japanese urban street music presented by musical jesters decked out in Edo High Camp, armed with Western and Japanese and instruments, and performing a repertoire from the Western and Japanese Hit Parades stretching as far back as the turn of the century — the 20th Century, that is. Now I ask you: Could anything be sweeter than these young sweeties getting down to century-old East Asian funk in a style that makes Weird Al Yankovic and Spike Jones look as straitlaced as a Salvation Army marching band?

Those lucky enough to be at the Lunar Park amusement park in Maebashi, Gunma, last Sunday would have seen six female high school seniors from the Tatebayashi Commercial and Technical High School in Gunma’s Meiwa-machi working out in a group called We Love Chin-don.

They aren’t the only Gunma girls with a chin-don jones. Their formation was inspired by the Chin-don Girls, another group of students from the same high school who were graduated this spring. They were the first to perform at Lunar Park last year.

The new group was started by senior Kawasaki Ayumi, who saw last year’s band up close and personal and thought they were too cool for school. She rustled up five of her friends to continue the new tradition. They were tutored by the Umaya Bashi Chin-don Club of Maebashi, an amateur group who won a national championship in April at the national chin-don competition in Toyama. They also picked up tips by watching videos of the Chin-don Girls in action.

We Love Chin-don began performing in local festivals and senior citizen homes in July, and their Lunar Park performance was a joint appearance with their mentors. Said Kitahara Yuichiro, the big chikuwa of the Umaya Bashi Chin-don Club:

“Today they performed with a lot of guts, and all their practice resulted in a big success.”

Said the big chikuwa-ette Miss Kawasaki:

“The great part about chin-don is that we get excited by coming in contact with other people. We want to pass chin-don on to the younger girls in school.”

This time we’re in luck! We Love Chin-don will next appear at the 9th National Amateur Chin-don Competition in Maebashi on 5-6 November. That gives us two weeks to get ready.

Now if only they had seen fit to put videos of their performances, or those of their models in the Chin-don Girls, on YouTube or a similar site. They haven’t — yet — so we’ll just have to make do with this brief clip of their teachers in the Umaya Bashi Chin-don Club.

Exquisite music

MORE than 800 years ago, in 1196, the Buddhist priest Hozan Kengyo was sent from the Myo-on-ji Jorakuin temple in what is now Shiga to attend the opening of a new temple in today’s Hioki, Kagoshima. Hozan was proficient in the biwa, and he taught 12 pieces of religious music to the local priests. It was performed with eight instruments, including the biwa, flute, taiko drum, and shell horns.

The name of the new temple was the Nakashima Jorakuin, and the music Hozan brought with him was known as Myo-on Junigaku (myo-on means exquisite music). The Japanese biwa is derived from the lute by way of the Chinese pipa, but several different types have been developed in Japan since then. This temple is said to be the origin of the Satsuma biwa, which was used not only for performing music, but also for the mental and moral training of the local samurai. In the past, only blind priests could serve at this temple, and many of the chief priests were renowned for their musical talent.

Nakashima Jorakuin is affiliated with the Tendai sect, at one time the mainstream Buddhist sect in Japan and at its zenith when the temple was founded. Tendai was once associated with the Imperial court, and the Jodo and Nichiren sects are derived from it. A class of warrior-monks emerged from the sect after the 12th century, which applied pressure to the Imperial court and took sides in military and political disputes to defend what it considered to be temple interests. That ended when the warlord Oda Nobunaga almost completely destroyed their headquarters in 1571.

The main temple of Nakashima Jorakuin was moved to a location near the Kagoshima Castle in 1619. With the early Meiji-period anti-Buddhist movement to disestablish Buddhism and replace it with Shinto, and the damage suffered during American bombing missions in World War II, the temple was again moved, this time to Miyazaki. What remains on the original site in Hioki was the subsidiary temple, which has been reduced to one building and the graves of the chief priests. Kagoshima has designated it a prefectural historical site.

Kagoshima also designated the 12 pieces of myo-on junigaku music as an intangible cultural treasure of the prefecture in 1971. The repertoire was once performed by blind priests throughout southern Kyushu, but it is now heard only once a year and only at Nakashima Jorakuin, accompanied by readings of sutras unique to the temple.

That performance always falls on 12 October. Ten musician-priests came from Kagoshima and Miyazaki this year to play. Said a sixth-grade boy who attended:

“I think it’s amazing when I wonder how the people of the past, who couldn’t record music, were able to memorize a performance of nearly an hour.”

Here’s a two-minute YouTube clip from last year’s performance of music that has changed little, if at all, from a millennium ago.

Kiyohiko Senba and the Haniwa All-Stars Live

WATCH the video to the end and your brain will spontaneously create new synapses to transport all the delightfully perky electrons that it sends your way. The name of the “song” is Tai-ikusai, or Sports Festival. It sounds and looks like something Frank Zappa might have composed had he been Asian and had a sunnier disposition.

Haniwa, by the way, were clay and terra cotta sculptures buried in the tombs of the elites in the pre-Buddhist era.

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.

Music class

ALL THE BOYS had mixed emotions whenever we heard the sound of the upright piano rolling down the hall as the music teacher pushed it to our primary school classroom. Our initial reaction was delight because we would be spared some the rote drudgery of what passed for public school education even then. But in the back of our minds was the realization that we would be forced to sing some of the most dismal gloop ever put to music. The girls seemed to enjoy the act of singing more than we did, and they have more patience for that sort of thing, but they too must have been disappointed in the school songbooks.

Both the boys and the girls at the Yamagata Daihachi Primary School (P.S. #8) in Yamagata City appear to have more fun with their musical instruction, however. The school held a special class in traditional Japanese music for 91 sixth-graders last week. A local group of six amateur musicians performed on the shakuhachi and the so, and then divided the students into two groups for instruction.

Making a noise with a stringed instrument is easy, but they had trouble with the shakuhachi. Said 12-year-old Oka Fumika, “I play the trumpet and music for wind instruments, but the blowing techniques are different and very difficult.”

Here’s what it looked like:

The song they’re practicing is Sakura, Sakura (Cherry blossom), which all Japanese have long known by the time they reach that age. I’ve even heard some people suggest it would make a good compromise choice as national anthem to placate those Japanese republicans who dislike Kimi ga Yo. (The lyrics to the latter are a millennium old and were originally a love poem, but it’s now associated with the Imperial house.)

Here’s what Sakura, Sakura sounds like without its lyrics—performed on a chromatic harmonica!

Afterwords:

To call that stringed instrument a koto is technically incorrect, as I understand it. A koto was originally something else and is written with a different kanji. The so has moveable bridges, while the similar kin has none. The report from Yamagata called it a so and specified that reading.

And to get linguistically carried away with myself, the Japanese have a different architectural term instead of bridge for the structure of traditional instruments. They use the kanji for column or post (柱), but pronounce it ji instead of hashira or chu.

New kid on the block

EAST ASIA is already one happening place, but excitement in the neighborhood will climb to breathtaking heights tomorrow when the North Korea Workers’ Party holds its third party conference and the first since 1966 to “single-mindedly unite around the headquarters of the revolution headed by Kim Jong-il” and elect its supreme leadership body. The Rodong Sinmun promises that it “will shine as a notable event in the history of the sacred Workers’ Party.”

One of the elect few is expected to be Kim Jong-un, number three son of the world’s most powerful otaku, Kim Jong-il, as he officially begins preparing to assume the leadership role in the Kim Family Regime.

Then again, nobody outside of the ruling circle knows for sure. As this article in Britain’s Telegraph states:

So secretive are the machinations in Pyongyang that many analysts believe Kim Jong-un’s new role will not even be formally announced at the meeting.

That means veteran North Korean watchers will keep their eyes peeled for an appearance of the CNC code!

But:

Such is the level of paranoia within the ruling elite that his name has never even been officially mentioned as a potential successor. But state-sanctioned poems and songs have been released, praising without name, “the young general”, and dwelling on the importance of “footsteps” – a metaphor for the familial transfer of power.

One reason for the secrecy is that there seems to be a limit to what even the North Korean population will put up with:

(R)are signs of public discontent are emerging from North Korea over news of the likely dynastic succession. Recent defectors and exile media organizations such as Free North Korea Radio and the Daily NK describe growing dismay and alarm within the ranks of the Workers’ party and security forces as the name of Kim Jong-un has been gradually rolled out.

The reports are fuelling fears that the country and its nuclear arsenal will be engulfed by a dangerous power struggle by rival regime factions, some of whom want to introduce Chinese-style political reforms.

The question is whether the 27-year-old Kim III will be able to ride the tiger or be eaten by it. Very little is known about him, but the Telegraph does quote a few stories from friends of the Heir Presumptive when he studied at private schools in Switzerland from 1995 to 1998.

By their accounts, he seems to have been a typical teenager—he enjoyed playing computer games, following American basketball and the career of Michael Jordan, watching Jackie Chan and James Bond movies, and barking at the embassy staff for serving cold spaghetti.

Befitting a boy filled with patriotic devotion and intense loyalty to the party, his friends said one of his favorite songs was Aegukka (The Patriotic Song), the North Korean national anthem.

Now you can enjoy the song too! Here’s a stirring rendition of the anthem from North Korean television with English subtitles. Note the street scene at the 1:45 mark. The Japanese aren’t the only people in this part of the world who love cherry blossoms.

The mountain shown in the video, by the way, is Mt. Baekdu, a sacred site for all Koreans because they believe it’s the site of the tribe’s origin. The Pyeongyang propagandists also like to pretend it’s Kim Jong-il’s birthplace.

But that’s just another Joseon myth. In fact, it really belongs to China and is temporarily in the possession of one of the minor domains on the fringes of the flower in the center of the world. Besides, the Chinese have already bitten off half. How much longer before they swallow the rest?

UPDATE: The KFR decided to make it official, as Kim III was one of several people promoted to the position of general. He’s already gotten gloriously rich, as several reports indicate. If he has the perquisites of his father, he gets to shoot people who displease him (or ship them off to concentration camps), drink the world’s finest liquor, and tool around in expensive automobiles. He’s also just 27 years old.

Some people have all the luck!

Thanks to CB for the Telegraph link.

More inspired musical goofiness from Japan

POSTER 21st Century Schizoid Man uploaded some YouTube links in his comment to a previous post here of some inspired Japanese musical goofiness from the pre-war era. The first is a combination of Carmen and naniwabushi. But we all know that once you get started on YouTube, it’s hard to stop. That link led to some serendipitous discoveries.

First, here’s Zeze doing the well-known dance from Carmen on shamisen:

And that led to the discovery of a trio verson of Smoke on the Water with shamisen and percussion:

Now that we’ve had the appetizers, DO NOT MISS Kunimoto Takeharu playing shamisen and singing the blues with Buddy Guy’s band on a television program hosted by Tamori in 1995:

Mr. Kunimoto just does the blues gig in his spare time. He more often plays with an American bluegrass group called the Last Frontier:

That brings it full circle in more ways than one. Yesterday’s post also featured a fusion of bluegrass and traditional Japanese music. The first blog post I ever wrote, five years ago on another site, was a profile of Kunimoto Takeharu. I offered it as an encore presentation here soon after I started this site. But here’s fair warning–If you click on that link, you’ll also see and hear a YouTube video of Mr. Kunimoto doing naniwabushi with a rock band, and a naniwabushi fusion was how this post got started.

Earlier today on an American website, I read someone’s offhand comment about “norm-following Northeast Asians”.

Not in this part of Northeast Asia, dude.

And I didn’t even upload the video of Kunimoto and the Last Frontier doing a bluegrass version of Cream’s White Room.

Marching through Yamagata and Tokyo

ARE YOU READY for this musical mix? The Tohoku University of Art and Design in Yamagata City held a concert on Tuesday night with performances by two groups. The first was by the school’s taiko group, called Taishin (太悳), and the second featured an American bluegrass group called The Fox Hunt. Then they tried a jam session.

How’s that for hip in a regional city of 255,000?

You can hear for yourself what it sounded like in this short video. It starts with Taishin, follows with The Fox Hunt, and ends with them both. The MC is John Taylor, who’s in charge of the cultural exchange programs at the American consulate in Sapporo.

His idea was to have young people think about world peace through music. I don’t know how much of that went on, but the audience seemed to enjoy themselves, even though rain forced the event indoors.

Seeing this made me wonder if there wasn’t a Japanese music style that would make a better partner with bluegrass than taiko. You know, something like…chin-don! Besides, I was way overdue for a chin-don post.

But the Japanese were way ahead of me, as it turns out–by almost a century. In 1919, a teenager named Soeda Satsuki wrote some goofy lyrics about Tokyo that he called Painopainopai, that also became known as Tokyo-bushi. He borrowed the music to Marching Through Georgia, written by Henry Clay Work in 1865 about Gen. William Sherman’s March to the Sea at the end of the American Civil War. The tune was already popular in Japan when Soeda wrote the lyrics.

Here’s a version of Tokyo-bushi performed by Daiku Tetsuhiro—from Ishigaki on one of the smaller Okinawan islands—in chin-don style. Does it work? Is makizushi wrapped in seaweed? The scenes in the video are of Tokyo in the 1930s, including the Marunouchi, Ginza, and Asakusa districts.

Now for a comparison, here’s a video of Marching Through Georgia that combines two versions–the first by a bluegrass band, which lasts about a minute, and the second done marching style. Yeah, that’s Tokyo-bushi all right.

The singer in the second version, by the way, is Tennessee Ernie Ford. In short, a native Southerner is singing a song about the Union army burning its way through the Confederate South.

And for more on the wonderful world of chin-don, get clicky with the tag below.

Funky juche

ARE the North Koreans the funkiest folks in Northeast Asia? Before you snort, take a look at this video by jackscrew combining Pyeongyang propaganda films with disco music. It’s well done, and that’s no lie.

Tune in, turn on, and drop in

COMMUNITY RADIO STATIONS began broadcasting in Japan in 1992 on shortwave frequencies, and there are now more than 200 nationwide. They’re limited in both wattage and broadcast area, and while that keeps their potential audience down, it also allows for more relaxed formats and closer ties to their community. I spend a lot more time listening to the radio than I do watching TV, and most of that is spent tuned into NHK AM and FM with occasional detours to KBC in Busan. The fare on regular AM and FM stations is too aggressively commercial and has too much chewing gum content, making them more annoying than listenable.

But as this article in the English version of the Yomiuri explains, some community radio stations can now be accessed through the Internet at this page called Simul Radio:

Every morning I switch on my PC and access a radio service called Saimaru Rajio (Simul Radio). On the central homepage are listed around 30 such radio stations available across the nation. The service uses the word, Simul, for simultaneous, as they broadcast not only to their respective local areas, but also literally worldwide via Internet streaming.

I tried it this morning, and it works fine. The stations I visited had pleasant music, congenial and uncontrived announcers, and low-key advertising.

There are no instructions in English, alas, but the links are clearly identified.

That got me in a clicking mood, and I found this page (Japanese-language) with a comprehensive list of the websites for these stations around the country. Not all of them broadcast over the Internet, but Churajio in Okinawa does, and it’s not on the Simul Radio list.

Their playlist says they stick to Okinawan music. I’ve been listening for the past 15 minutes, and while they’re telling the truth, most of it falls in the pop-rock range rather than the hard core roots music of Kina Shokichi, the Rinken Band, or Nenez (not to mention Daiku Tetsuhiro). It’s still very listenable, though.

Ain’t the Internet grand? If you were listening in your car, you probably couldn’t pick up any of these stations outside city limits or in certain pockets in town with bad reception. Current regulations limit their broadcast range to a radius of 20 kilometers and an output of 20 watts.

I would have loved this when I was studying Japanese at university. As it is, I’m about to become a regular listener.

Overseas readers: Please send in a comment to tell us about the reception where you are. And if anyone finds a station they particularly like, be sure to let us know!

Letter bombs (6): Ignorance goes viral

For people whose job it is to describe the world, journalists often seem to have remarkable difficulty imagining life in other people’s shoes.
- Michael Kinsley

The buzzing of the flies does not turn them into bees.
- Georgian proverb

JOURNALISTS and their employers have always been dependable for providing an undependable view of events that is more agenda-driven entertainment than information. Former American President Harry Truman once sighed that he felt sorry for his fellow citizens who woke up in the morning and read the newspaper, thereby thinking they knew something of what was happening in the world.

Isesaki flag

The revolution in information technology that has occurred since Truman’s time has given us much more tech than info. Though more pixels are hurled onto more screens, and more talk is belched into the ether, its accuracy and value are in indirect proportion to its quantity. The new technology also allows anyone to participate, but as the Georgians had it, the buzzing of those flies does not turn them into bees. The cacophony they create resembles nothing so much as a conductorless orchestra of vuvuzelas on a radio with a missing volume knob. Ignorance has gone viral.

They’re even more dependably undependable regarding Japan, a subject they almost never get right. A Japanese friend still keeps a clipping from an American newspaper he saw while on a trip to that country with a map of Japan showing Yokohama where Osaka is. (Osaka is 241 miles almost due west.) But as this post will show, they really don’t want to get it right.

This edition of Letter Bombs contains three items sent in by readers, one of which has an embedded fourth item. To these I’ve added a discovery of my own. All of them demonstrate that neither the bees nor the flies care a whit about the facts. They’d rather feed on the offal of a narrative of Weird Japan, the Goofball Kingdom of East Asia, populated by losers and perverts.

The Bogus #1

Mac sent in the first article by The Guardian’s man in Japan, Justin McCurry, whose body of work suggests his ambition is to become the thinking man’s WaiWai. McCurry slid forward on his stool at the FCCJ bar and pulled out another one. There are too many fascinating stories in this country of 127 million to cover them all, but the one McCurry selected for his Guardian readers was about the municipal government of Isesaki, Gunma, a city of 209,000 people, ordering its employees to shave their facial hair.

His manner of presenting information about Japan has become so predictable it deserves to be recognized as the McCurry Method ™. This consists of blending dollops of mythomania into meaningless generalizations applied to the entire population and to entire eras with the journalistic equivalent of an industrial paint sprayer, propelled by a condescending sense of superiority.

He starts with a line straight out of the Ryan Connell WaiWai stylebook:

(B)ureaucrats in one town could find themselves sent to the bathroom, razor in hand, for sporting even the suggestion of a five o’clock shadow.

There’s a reason they don’t issue artistic licenses to the people writing for a daily paper. None of this works even as hyperbole, least of all the idea that the average Japanese man is capable of producing a five o’clock shadow. Well, some are—by five o’clock the next day.

Authorities in Isesaki, Gunma prefecture, have ordered all male employees to shave off their facial hair, and banish all thoughts of growing any, following complaints from members of the public who said they found dealing with bearded bureaucrats “unpleasant”.

Might as well use that counterfeit artistic license until it expires from overheating. Imagine an Isesaki municipal bureaucracy capable of mind control, banishing thoughts of banned beards from all those who dare enter its precincts. You can’t even look out the window and daydream of a tidy Van Dyke.

Here’s a textbook application of the McCurry Method ™:

The Isesaki ban is reminiscent of the strict rules on physical appearance enforced by conservative companies in the postwar period in the belief that Japan’s rise to economic superpower required absolute conformity.

That’s in contrast to the wild and crazy guys with beards to their sternums, ponytails to their shoulder blades, and rings in their ears, lips, and noses to the grindstones at the hip, tolerant, a-go-go American and British industrial corporations of the 50s and 60s.

Shall we hold a pool to speculate where McCurry got the idea that the Japanese corporate establishment “believed” that “absolute” conformity was the key to becoming an economic superpower? Here’s where I put my money: He pulled it out of his backside.

What’s he going to write next? The robotic Japanese are automatons and economic animals who live in rabbit hutches, dream of conquering the world economically because they couldn’t militarily, and are so xenophobic they think Wogs begin at Calais?

Whoops, sorry about that last one. That comes from McCurry’s neck of the woods.

For an illustration of the strict ban on facial hair in Japan during the postwar period, here’s a photo of the man at the top of the social ziggurat in those days:

But this was the first time that an absence of whiskers had been enforced among civil servants, the internal affairs and communications ministry said.

But this was probably not the first time McCurry rewrote something to enhance the narrative. What the ministry really said was that they had “never heard of” any municipality in the country introducing such a rule, not that it had never happened.

The ban, the first of its kind among Japanese public officials, applies to any manifestation of facial hair, from lovingly cultivated full beards to trendy goatees and designer stubble.

And we all know that the range of facial hair from lovingly cultivated full beards to trendy goatees and designer stubble constitutes the A to Z of masculine hirsuteness.

A more realistic view was offered by Nakata Hiroshi, now running for an upper house Diet seat. When he was the mayor of Yokohama, he would have been in a position to institute such a ban.

Some beards are stylish, and some are unsightly, and it’s not possible to clearly define what would or would not make other people uncomfortable. This is a service industry whose employees should be aware that they interact with the public, and that everyone is checking out everyone else’s appearance.

Here are some more things McCurry didn’t see when he wasn’t looking: Facial hair for male employees is also banned at 7-Eleven Japan (full-time employees and student part-timers alike), Oriental Land, the operators of Tokyo Disney Resort, and the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, the country’s premier sports franchise.

He also missed this site for a business consulting firm in the U.S.:

(E)mployers in the USA have a legal right to ask you to adhere to dress codes:
“A person can be fired because the company doesn’t like your shoes,” explains Robert D. Lipman, who manages the New York employment firm Lipman & Plesur, LLP …“People say ‘This is America. We should be able to do what we want.’ But I tell them that once you walk into a private employer’s workplace, your rights are limited.”

Less than a minute of research turned up this site from solicitors in Britain:

Standards of dress and personal presentation are relevant to most employers and having a policy on dress code can be important.
Where the employees meet customers and are effectively the shop window for the company, the benefits of presentable appearance are obvious. But even where the employee’s work is internal, there are less tangible benefits such as:
•creating a team atmosphere,
•engendering standards of professionalism, and
•creating a corporate image.

McCurry seems to fancy himself a successor to the tradition of British essayists, so it’s fitting to close this chapter with a quote from one of the best, William Hazlitt:

“The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.”

The Bogus #2

Aceface found an article by people who didn’t look very hard either: a group of Internet hucksters calling themselves Business Ideas International, who claim to be based in Japan. A look at their website turns up business ideas resembling the sort of suggestions that used to be advertised on matchbook covers in the United States. (Start a DJ business and rock your way to financial freedom! How to get paid to play video games!) The combination of lackwits producing junior high school prose and preening with the conceit that they know what they’re talking about makes one wonder how they succeed in business even when they really are trying, much less offer advice to others.

The title is: 5 Twisted Business Ideas (That Could Only Have Come From Japan)

Sushi, Geisha, Schoolgirls and Anime are usually among the first things that come to mind when people mention Japan. Business Ideas International is based here in Japan though – and we’ve got the inside scoop. We can tell you from first-hand experience that the quirkiness of the land of the rising sun is not just limited to these usual pop-culture icons.

Give the business mavens credit for thinking outside the box. Who else would consider sushi and geisha “pop-culture icons”?

As someone who has regularly interacted with both Japanese and American schoolgirls, by the way, I’d say the Japanese variety are considerably less quirky.

(H)ere’s just a sampling of five twisted business ideas that could only have come from Japan.
#1 Love Doll Rental
It’s weird enough that some guys settle for a “real life” doll instead of a real girlfriend. But leave it to the Japanese – the place where these dolls-as-partners were invented – to take things a step further.

The earliest recorded instances of love dolls are the “dama de viaje” or “dame de voyage”. Those are Spanish and French terms for female dolls sewn out of old clothes for use as substitutes on sailing ships during long voyages. The Japanese and German navies performed similar experiments in the 1930s, and the Germans called theirs seemannsbraut. The Japanese like the term Dutch wives.

There was a big to-do in Britain in 1982 when a company called Conegate tried to import inflatable sex dolls from West Germany, but customs seized them. They were so anatomically accurate the authorities considered them indecent. The High Court overturned the verdict of an initial hearing on appeal and allowed the sale of seemannsbraut in the UK.

You see, here in Japan, if you’re not a “one-fake-woman” kind of guy, and prefer to “work the scene” you can opt to rent a love doll by the hour.

Thus demonstrating the aptness of Henri Amiel’s epigram that cleverness is serviceable for everything and sufficient for nothing.

But there’s a reason for the rentals.

With $2 million in sales last year, (Matt) McMullen now employs 14 people at his San Marcos, Calif., company (Real Doll) and makes about six or seven dolls a week, each requiring 80 hours of labor.

The linked article says that some dolls sell for as much as $US 6,500. To get an idea of what’s available, here’s a website with immaculate English offering “realistic latex & silicon love”.

Could it be that BII is chagrined they didn’t come up with the rental idea themselves?

Business Ideas International prides itself on being a publication that is SFW, so we won’t go into too many more details. Needless to say, let your imagination wander – what ever pops into your head, yup, that’s what they do.

How would the people of Business Ideas International know what Japanese men do with sex dolls? Unless…

#2 Roadside Alcohol Vending Machines
Nothing takes the edge of (sic) the morning drive to work like an early A.M. beer-buzz right? If you agree, you’ll love Japan. Here there are literally thousands of street-side alcohol vending machines. You can just pull up to one, stick in your ID and a couple hundred yen, and out pops a can of premium beer or potent Japanese sake. Open her up and keep on driving. Gives a new meaning to “one for the road”.

Anyone who thinks the Japanese show up for work with a morning buzz because they bought some beer at a vending machine instead of pulling into a 24/7 convenience store offering a greater selection of the same product is not old enough to work for a living. Incidentally, drunk driving laws in Japan are more stringent than in the US. Any alcohol in your system at all lands you in jail. No malarkey about blood alcohol percentages.

Remember, these people claim to be based in Japan.

The vending machines selling alcohol are for walk up (or pedal up) business, not drivers, but let’s not judge Business Ideas International too harshly. Anything to do with business, ideas, or Japan seems not to be their forté.

#3 Every Invention By Dr. Nakamatsu – Ever
If you don’t live in Japan, chances are you haven’t heard of Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu.

Even if you do live in Japan, chances are you haven’t heard of Dr. Nakamatsu.

Dr. Nakamatsu’s most notable invention is one that helped change the world at the time – the floppy disk. IBM made a deal with him in the late 70’s for his floppy-disk related patents that are bound by a non-disclosure agreement, so they may take most of the credit. Although the sum paid to him has never been revealed, he has lived the life of an extremely eccentric multi-millionaire ever since. Besides the floppy disk, Dr. Nakamatsu also holds patents for the core technology behind the CD, the DVD, the digital watch and even the taxi-cab meter.

They missed the patent for the automated pachinko machine, but what the heck. BII thinks that every invention by Dr. Nakamatsu ever is twisted. However, they do note that he also sells:

Pyong-Pyong Flying Shoes, Love Jet 200 Anti-Impotence Perfume, Yummy Nutri Brain Food…

Put “eccentric inventor” into Google and you’ll get almost two million hits. Dr. Nakamatsu actually appears in a few of them, but most of them refer to the tradition of eccentric English inventors.

Either Business Ideas International is jealous that Dr. Nakamatsu has more money than they ever will, or this is some undergrad’s idea of a put-on.

#4 Maid Cafes
Cute Japanese girls dressed in French maid costumes take your order and serve you food. They also occassionally (sic) get up on stage and sing and dance for you. ‘Nuff said.

Nah, not nearly “‘nuff said”.

Let’s talk about the American-based restaurant chain Hooters. The waitresses wear orange shorts cut at crotch level, tanks tops designed to show off their superstructure—hence the name “Hooters”–pantyhose, and bras. This is taken from the company’s website:

Hooters of America, Inc. is the Atlanta-based operator and franchiser of over 455 Hooters locations in 44 states in the US, Argentina, Aruba, Austria, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, England, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Korea, Mexico, Paraguay, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Venezuela and the Virgin Islands. The privately held corporation owns 120 units.

Now there’s a Business Idea International! Hooters has yet to hit Japan, however. Maybe all that latex & silicon love is squeezing them out of the market.

The element of female sex appeal is prevalent in the restaurants, and the company believes the Hooters Girl is as socially acceptable as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, or a Radio City Rockette…Claims that Hooters exploits attractive women are as ridiculous as saying the NFL exploits men who are big and fast. Hooters Girls have the same right to use their natural female sex appeal to earn a living as do super models Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. To Hooters, the women’s rights movement is important because it guarantees women have the right to choose their own careers, be it a Supreme Court Justice or Hooters Girl…Sex appeal is legal and it sells.

They’re feminists!

Hooters does not market itself to families, but they do patronize the restaurants. Ten percent of the parties we serve have children in them. Hooters is in the hospitality business and provides the best possible service to anyone coming through the door. For this reason, the chain offers a children’s menu.

So to sum up: A children’s menu in a restaurant called Hooters wink wink nudge nudge is normal, but some Japanese men patronizing restaurants with waitresses wearing French maid outfits is twisted.

#5 Live Seafood Restaurants
While many English-speaking countries have caught the Sushi Restaurant buzz, food connoisseurs abroad are still missing out on the REAL seafood dining experience here in Japan.
Apparently for the Japanese, just serving your food raw was not good enough for them. “If we’re not going to cook it”, an enterprising restaurant owner apparently thought, “why should we even bother killing it?”…

Apparently.

…and so the live seafood restaurant was born. That’s right, in Japan, you can go to a restaurant and be served a plateful of food that’s still alive and kicking.

Putting aside the image of kicking seafood, the folks at Business Ideas International apparently have not been to China or South Korea. Not very international of them, is it? Neither do they read Britain’s Telegraph, nor visit YouTube:

Chinese diners eat live fish in YouTube video
Animal rights campaigners have criticised the Chinese over their extreme eating habits after a video of diners eating a live fish became a hit on the internet.

The article is dated November 2009. The BII piece was posted in May 2010.

The Telegraph article contains this passage:

Reports have claimed some restaurants offer monkey’s brains. Other dishes include rats, dogs, snakes, lizards and baby mice.

I’ve also heard the monkey brains story from a Japanese man who operates a small restaurant and likes Chinese food. He visited China on a special tour for people in the industry.

Yesterday, I did a search at Google Videos and YouTube: “China live food” got 2,400 and 1,780 hits respectively. “Japan live food” got 1,800 hits and 1,410 hits, and “Korea live food” got 1,140 and 911. Not all of them were about the actual consumption of live food, however.

Incidentally, unless you’re interested in getting ill, all shellfish must either be eaten live or be cooked while live. The Health Department of the State of New York has issued an official warning. Raw oyster bars have long been popular on the American East Coast and in France. They’re so common in the U.S. the dish is called shooters.

Hey, who’s up for some shooters at Hooters!

At the very least, we hope this post has made you realize that no business idea is too strange or outlandish.

It also made me realize the extent to which ignorance has gone viral.

The Bogus #3

As we saw from the previous example, there exists a type of low intelligence that’s become convinced of its cleverness without seeing through the transparency of its oafdom. An even clearer demonstration is the Adam Frucci post at Gizmodo sent in by Dokushoka. It’s the journalistic equivalent of picking one’s nose in public.

The title is: Elderly Japanese Would Rather be Tended to by Robots than Foreigners

Frucci provides no specific information on what elderly Japanese think. How can he? That’s because he pulled it out of the primary source for people who write about Japan: His own backside.

What he does is provide in this “article” is a hot link at the bottom to the BBC, which is presumably his source. The link covers the space of only three letters inside parentheses, meaning most people will miss it or not bother with it. That’s the point.

Those few who do click on the link will be directed to a BBC report by Roland Buerk. It has no text—only about 2:40 worth of video, which means even fewer will bother. That’s also the point.

I watched.

That title is: Japan MAY accept robots over immigrants. (Emphasis mine) It’s about the nursing shortage in Japan. In his own variation on the McCurry Method ™, Buerk provides no specific numbers about a national nurse shortfall, but just expects everyone to take his word for it. He does talk to one woman employed at a hospital who says it’s difficult to find staff.

Back to Frucci:

Many of the potential nurses to tend to said old people happen to be from neighboring Asian countries. Not so fast! What about robots?!

Not so fast indeed! What about reality?! Frucci eliminates a critical part of Buerk’s story, which is that nurses must pass a medical terminology test in Japanese to stay more than three years. The failure rate is 98%. Buerk calls this “an example of Japan’s barriers to immigration”.

I’d call that another example of faux journalism and cultural arrogance. How loathsome of those Japanese to spend 1,500 years developing a difficult written language just to prevent other people from moving there.

The BBC briefly interviews a Filipino nurse complaining that even Japanese people have trouble reading the test vocabulary because they’re specialized kanji.

But of course they’re specialized kanji—they’re medical terms. Most laypeople in English-speaking countries couldn’t pass a medical terminology test in their own language either. How many people do you know who could define nosocomial infection, iatrogenic illness, or lethologica without looking them up? The English-language Internet is filled with advice to students for dealing with medical terminology tests.

Had anyone involved with the story known what they were talking about or cared to discover the truth, they’d know that learning kanji is sometimes a beneficial shortcut. Before I came to Japan, I had no idea what nephritis was. When I came across it in kanji, I understood immediately: inflammation of the kidney.

Back to Frucci:

Japan is a very racially homogenous society, where immigration is frowned upon and genetic purity is seen as a good thing.

Putting aside what Frucci thinks he knows about Japanese attitudes toward “genetic purity”, here’s a link to an article published in the monthly magazine Voice—available at newsstands everywhere—almost seven years ago by six members of the now ruling Democratic Party in Japan calling for the immigration of 10 million people. Two of them are now in the Cabinet.

And with the birthrate slowed, they’re moving towards an era where (sic) a full half of the population will be over 65.

His source, Buerk at the BBC, says only that a quarter of the population is over 65 now. He says nothing about an era “where” a “full half” of the population is over 65.

See what I mean about pulling stuff out of their backsides?

Buerk’s turn:

Compared to the melting pots of London and New York, foreigners really stand out here.

On the contrary, the many Chinese and Korean foreigners here don’t stand out at all, but then some people think they all look alike. As Britain’s Prince Philip had it, they’re all “slitty-eyed”.

In passing, I’ll note this belief that the term “foreigner” belongs exclusively to them is endemic among Caucasians in Northeast Asia.

The possibility of allowing mass immigration is barely even discussed.

Buerk doesn’t seem to be big on reading Japanese either. He’s also not the first European to look the other way when the subject is the impact of mass immigration in Europe. After all, Mohammed has been the most popular name for baby boys in London and Yorkshire since 2008. Here’s a headline from a Swedish newspaper a few months ago: “Gothenburg Man Arrested over Somali Terror Plot”.

Eventually they COULD be put to work in restaurants and shops…Accepting a robotic future in Japan COULD be more popular than accepting mass immigration. (Emphasis mine)

Eventually somebody COULD do some real research about this country—it’s easy if you try—but that’s not bloody likely, is it?

The Beeb and Buerk knew enough to use the weasel word to give them plausible deniability against the charge of overt statements without a basis in fact, but that flew over Frucci’s head. He writes:

That means they’ll need one of two things to take care of that aging population: foreign nurses or robot nurses. Guess which option seems more reasonable to them?

Frucci is also a masterful prose stylist…

Yes, robotic fucking nurses.

…whose primary source after Buerk is his buttocks:

(H)ospitals are going to be shut down because of a lack of staff and people are going to be left without vital medical care.

Not even Buerk claimed people were going to be left without vital medical care.

Here’s some more glittering prose:

Sooner or later, they’re going to need to allow immigrants from neighboring Asian countries to enter the country and work in much greater numbers in order to make up from (sic) the soon-to-be greatly diminished Japanese workforce.

Soon according to Buerk was 40 years, if current demographic trends hold.

And not just to build goddamned robots.

But perhaps I misunderstand. Frucci may be deliberately adjusting the level of his writing and intellectual content for his audience. From the comments:

I just wrote a research paper on this same subject. The Japanese are very xenophobic and homogeneity is important to them. So to except about a million (yes I said a millions about 15 million to be exact) immigrants is a tough thing for them.

Here’s another:

Japan is such an odd place that I am willing to believe that they think robots are better than humans of a different ethnicity. Stay classy Japan.

Recall what President Truman said about the effects of newspaper journalism? Here’s one more:

Foreigners also prefer that robots take care of old Japanese people.

How much do you want to bet that guy fancies himself a master of wit and repartee?

The Bogus Bonus!

I ran across this article in Britain’s Telegraph by Danielle Demetriou. That it was the only article about Japan on an American site with political and social commentary demonstrates the poisonous effect journalists have on the views of their product’s consumers in the Anglosphere.

It’s a perfect fit for this post. It now contains links to an aggressively ignorant business promotion site and an aggressively ignorant tech blog sandwiched by poorly researched articles from British broadsheets of the left and the right.

Here’s the headline:

Tokyo sees rise in ‘divorce ceremonies’
As Japan’s divorce rate soars, couples in Tokyo are ending their marriages with as much care as they began them. (Emphasis mine)

It includes this sentence:

Their introduction is timely: more than 251,000 divorces took place in Japan in 2008, a figure blamed partly on the poor economic climate and the end of the salaryman-led family units which used to be the bedrock of much of Japanese life.

Comparing that with this section of the English-language website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications brings up some intriguing questions.

In Japan, divorces were on a generally upward trend from the 1960s until 2002 when they hit a peak of 290,000. Since then, both the number of divorces and the divorce rate have declined for six years straight. In 2008, the number of divorces totaled 251,000, and the divorce rate was 1.99 (per 1,000 population).

Did Demetriou access this herself, get the accurate divorce statistic, and pull the rest out of her backside to juice up the story? Or did someone access it for her first and fail to provide the full context, forcing her to pull the rest out of her backside to juice up the story?

And just what is “soaring divorces blamed on the poor economic climate and the end of salaryman-led family units” supposed to mean?

Japan’s divorce rate per 1,000 population is one of the lowest in the world and is declining. The unexplained and inexplicable reference to the “end of salaryman-led family units” is a borrowing of the McCurry Method ™. Now I’ll borrow the pretentious phrase of those thin-skinned scribes caught with their pants down pulling stuff out of their backsides: I stand by my claim that the journos are making stuff up to ridicule the Japanese and thereby sell product.

Saori Teshima had long dreamt of the moment.

How would Demetriou know?

So goes another divorce ceremony – a bizarre, but increasingly popular ritual among Japanese couples, who choose to end their marriages with the same pomp and ceremony with which they began them.

Who is Demetriou to use “bizarre”, the contemporary teenager’s default term of derision, to describe a preference for ceremonies to mark the milestones of one’s life? I was graduated from school twice in my life—once from high school and once from university. Japanese also have graduation ceremonies for those finishing kindergarten, primary school, and junior high school. They also have entrance ceremonies and ceremonies to mark the start of the school year.

Saturday night, I attended a party for a man’s kanreki—his 60th birthday. The Japanese have observed customs associated with kanreki for several hundred years.

But it’s understandable why some British would consider a divorce ceremony bizarre. Their divorce rate is roughly six times that of Japan. From the Office of National Statistics, UK:

The rate of divorce in the United Kingdom has been dropping in recent years. In 2007 the divorce rate in England and Wales was recorded at 11.9 people per every 1000 of the married population. This is the lowest divorce rate recorded since 1981.

If they started conducting divorce ceremonies, when would they ever sober up enough to go to a pub for the binge drinking required to properly enjoy a soccer match?

Britain also has the highest number of unmarried mothers in Europe. Ceremonies and commitments? Screw that for a lark.

Pioneering the trend for divorce ceremonies is Hiroki Terai, 29, an entrepreneurial former sales man from Japan’s Chiba district…

Chiba is a city and a prefecture (i.e., province or state) right next to Tokyo. Odd that The Telegraph’s Japan correspondent wouldn’t know that it isn’t a “district”.

…who dreamt up the idea after friends of his decided to separate last year. Since setting up a company devoted to divorce ceremonies in March, he has been contacted by more than 700 people and conducted 21 divorce ceremonies – costing from £44 to £700 – with a further nine booked.

In other words, this “increasingly popular ritual” is performed for 0.01% of all divorces.

Roland Kelts, a Japan culture expert and lecturer at the University of Tokyo, described how divorce ceremonies were a welcome tool for Japanese to deal with shifting family structures.
“Today’s Japanese women are well-educated and worldly,” he says. “They watch Sex and the City and wonder why their husbands are not more dynamic. And their husbands, having lost the security of lifetime employment and its perks, are wondering why their wives are so impatient. No wonder divorce has risen to a third of Japanese marriages.”

Only an academic could achieve the hat trick of pulling something from his backside, applying the McCurry Method ™, and beclowning himself in a few meaningless sentences. My favorite was the non sequitur of men losing their lifetime employment perks and then wondering why their wives were impatient.

Kelts’s “discipline” is pop culture in general and manga in particular, which might explain why he’s hit an intellectual glass ceiling here. Yes, an entire nation of Japanese women, just recently backwards and uneducated, knew nothing about sex before they married and even less afterwards, but turned on the cable to Sex and the City and found it so believable they got impatient with their limp, uninterested husbands.

And so the divorce rate has fallen for six years straight.

The Bona Fide!

It’s time for a palate cleanser after swallowing all that inedible fare. Fortunately, Mac also sent in a Youtube video of a live performance by the Shibusashirazu Orchestra, whom he says played at his local rice festival. The music is a heady blend of modern jazz and pop played with straight-ahead gusto on both Western and traditional Japanese instruments. To this they add free-form stage performers and modern and traditional Japanese dance. Their name literally translates to “not knowing tasteful sobriety”, and that’s no joke.

If they were from America or Europe, you’d know about them already. But after you watch the clip to the end, you’ll know something McCurry, BII, Frucci, Buerke, Demetriou, and their readers don’t.

Afterwords:

* Any municipality with a flag such as the one used by Isesaki has to be a cool place no matter what happens there.

* Haruyama Fumio, the chair of the human rights committee of the Gunma Bar Association, says the Isesaki facial hair ban restricts the freedom of individuals.

Count on a human rights lawyer to know nothing about human rights.

Part of the transaction between the employer and the employed is that the employed voluntarily gives up certain rights at the employer’s request. That’s why none of the staff at the elegant hotels in London’s Mayfair district wear Hawaiian shirts and beach sandals to work, for example.

If Justin McCurry wants to work out of his rabbit hutch, he has every right to wear a French maid costume, paint his face to look like Hello Kitty, and identify himself as Justine on the telephone if he chose to do so. No one would care. But his employer would surely object if he were to dress and behave that way on the rare occasions he sallies forth to interact with the Japanese public as part of his job.

Of course, if people found dress and facial hair codes to be an infringement of their rights, they’re free to refuse a job offer.

All of this should be elementary.

Handful of keys

LAST MONTH, we had a post about the innovative and potentially revolutionary Tenori-on, an electronic musical instrument with a built-in light show invented in Japan. That isn’t the only unconventional music machine produced here by any means, however. Take for example the Chromatone CT-312—a MIDI keyboard instrument using the chromatic Janko keyboard devised by the Hungarian mathematician-musican Paul von Janko in the latter part of the 19th century. The Chromatone is made (or at least promoted) by the Japanese company Tokyo Yusyo.

In musical terms, the Janko keyboard was:

(A) new form of keyboard layout, designed to allow the player to cover a wider span of notes with each hand and to make all keys equally easy to play….He used short narrow keys akin to buttons, and stacked them up to form six tiers. The notes were arranged in whole-tone intervals. The first tier, the third and the fifth play a whole-tone scale beginning from C. The second, fourth and sixth tiers play a whole-tone scale beginning from C#. The shape and fingering of a given scale or chord is the same in any key and the octave span is reduced to 5″ as opposed to 6-1/2″ on a normal piano.

For the equivalent of a full-sized, 88-key keyboard, the Janko would have 264 keys in all, though that didn’t put off people when they first saw it. Arthur Rubinstein said, “If I were to begin my career anew it would be on this keyboard,” while Franz Liszt predicted: “This invention will have replaced the present piano keyboard in fifty years’ time.”

That didn’t happen for various reasons, partly because it required users to learn a new fingering system (in the same way that Dvorak keyboards for typing required touch typists to learn a different system), and because the original Janko keyboards were cast iron and not very portable.

To see the marriage of the Janko keyboard and MIDI in the Chromatone, here’s a video of a jazz-rock number.

Or, if your taste tends toward the classics, a Bach prelude:

Because this is an electronic keyboard, it can also sound like a Hammond organ. That’s how it’s used in this brief but fascinating clip. It’s a shame they didn’t give us more of a taste.

Here’s another short explanation from a UK-based website, written by a squeamish type who says he finds the accompanying photo of a grade-school girl at the instrument with a nice smile “a bit terrifying”.

Really? I find this Japanese updating of an obscure but brilliant musical conception to be an inspiration and a superb example of the infinite potential of the human imagination.

AFTERWORDS: This isn’t about Japan, but while we’re on the subject of new keyboard instruments, here’s an article in Britain’s Guardian with an accompanying video about Geoff Brown and his invention of the acoustic “fluid piano”. Each of the notes has a separate slide control on the top that allows the player to change the tuning as he plays by sliding into different scales. It also allows tuning in microtones, which makes the instrument sound something like the hammered dulcimers of Central Asia. It’s well worth listening to, and I hope the man finds a manufacturer.

What the heck–let’s go whole hog! Here’s another video of a performance of the fluid piano. The use of the “harp” at the top is reminiscent of some classical Indian pieces for the sitar.

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.